Category Archives: Political Commentary

Cage Match

Who is the greater world leader, President Obama, or Dear Leader?

They describe Kim Jong Il as a “peerlessly great man” who is said to have the “organizing ability of leading millions of people” and is “the greatest of great men produced by heaven.” Similarly, Obama has been described in American media as “the agent of transformation in an age of revolution” and as “a lightworker — an attuned being.” CNN’s Jack Cafferty said, “It’s almost as though our president was born to do exactly what he’s doing.” Songs are written throughout North Korea to proclaim Kim Jong Il’s greatness, but there are also songs written to praise Obama, such as “Yes We Can” by will.i.am and “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode. Throughout North Korea, there are paintings of Kim so all can admire his poofy hair and leadership, and here in America there are posters of Obama and many paintings of him (often with him naked and riding a unicorn) so we can see his smile and be assured that everything will be alright. Furthermore, it appears that Kim has supernatural powers, as it is said that when he was born “frost exploded with the sound of firecrackers” and “lakes thawed with such a noise that it caused mountains to shake.” Not to be outdone, Obama said that when he was elected would be “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

So both Barack Obama and Kim Jong Il are greatly admired by their people and are possibly magical demigods who exist for no other purpose but to lead us, but who is the better of the two?

It is a tough choice.

A New Nominee For Car Czar

Iowahawk nominates himself:

As such, I realize the industry is not suffering from a lack of law professors — it is suffering from a lack of imagination. They gave us cup holders and electric seat warmers when we wanted angel fur and bubble tops. They pushed micro-clown cars and hybrids when the market was rife for chromed 8-deuce Chrysler Hemis. Well, Bucko, all that outmoded thinking is going to end during the reign of Czar Dave. Saving the American auto industry is going to be a big job, but I won’t be doing it alone. I have already appointed my own shadow Council of Automotive Advisors, a select group of successful auto manufacturers whose qualifications appear after the jump. Many are close personal friends of mine, and I can attest to their patriotism, integrity, ingenuity, and wonderful lack of law degrees.

Why not? We could do worse. And almost certainly will.

And as you can see, his advisory council is without peer. I particularly like the discreet tasteful town car to get him to important meetings in our nation’s capital.

Where The Apologies Should Have Started

Jeanne Kirkpatrick used to say that the San Francisco Democrats (who seem to have proliferated around the country, all the way into the White House) blame America first. Victor Davis Hanson says that if the president was going to throw stones, this should have been his first one:

“Today we witness a global financial meltdown — a result of a dangerous nexus between lax politicians and unethical high finance. I know this well, and wish to apologize for taking thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the now-bankrupt AIG financial firm, which sought to escape proper regulation by offering campaign contributions to politicians like myself, who unilaterally renounced the three-decade tradition of public campaign finance.”

“Smoking is a great plague on the world, killing millions each year and giving great profits to modern merchants of death. I, President Obama, as a long smoker, know that temptation well and the global health problems entailed with tobacco addiction. We all also most avoid the perils of drug usage, a plague on all our nations. I can attest that as a youth I used cocaine, not only endangering my health, but doing my small part to send profits back to drug cartels abroad that cause so much death and destruction.”

“Racism is an insidious pathology that reaches even into the pulpit; it is a human sin that no one race has a monopoly on. I am well aware of the havoc it causes the innocent — after failing to say “No! Stop!” to my own Rev. Wright as he caricatured in my church whites, Jews, Italians, and almost anyone else who does not look like himself and our congregation. Likewise, class prejudice and stereotyping are often at the heart of much of the world’s problems; I too have engaged in such hurtful condemnations when just recently I labeled, in blanket fashion, the working class of rural Pennsylvania as xenophobes, fundamentalists, and nativists.”

Unfortunately, the time to hand out opprobrium is the only time it’s not about him.

Advice For The Rich

Bill Whittle, with whom I had the pleasure of having dinner in Manhattan Beach this evening, has some:

Leave. Just go away. Retire to the Cayman Islands or Bermuda or wherever, but do it now, please, while you still have some love for this country. Close your companies, fire your employees, shutter your factories and offices, sell your property, and take all of that somewhere else… better yet: somewhere scenic but poverty-stricken. Somewhere that could use some wealth creation. Somewhere that people simply are grateful to have a job in the first place. Somewhere where you will be appreciated.

You are not welcome in America any more. Take your wealth and prosperity and inventiveness and hard work and vision and insight and bold risk-taking and joy in seeing growth and wealth creation and just go away – right now, before it’s too late. Because if you stay, Joel Berg and Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd will continue to come after you for more and more and more and they will not ever stop – not ever – until you are forced to flee. And when that day comes, you will go with not with fond remembrances and a desire to return home, but rather a black heart and hard and bitter memories.

So on behalf of those few of us who still believe in the Land of Opportunity, I beg you and implore you, in the name of our common patriot ancestors who worked so hard and sacrificed so much so that we could become so spoiled and ungrateful: take your 60% of the total income taxes and just go away.

Because if you do, then there will no longer be an Enemy for the Left to stick it to. Then, perhaps, the half of the country that pays no income tax might have to put some skin in the game. Then, perhaps, with most of the wealth generation gone we will turn to our community organizers to provide the wealth creation, and the tax dollars, and the innovation. When you have gone the President of the United States, supported by an army of little acorns like Joel Berg, will have to start calling for the rest of us to be taxed more to address the inequality gap.

No representation without taxation.

[Late evening update]

I think that the old Heinlein quote is appropriate:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”

It is also known as Atlas shrugging
.

More Motor-City Coon-Hunting Thoughts

From Thomas James:

I disagree emphatically with the BoingBoing commenter who claims that this is the result of ‘hypercapitalism having its vampiric way’ – it was capitalism which built all of these now-ruined buildings and the now-decaying wastelands of Detroit. The ruination came in degrees as Detroit’s industrial giants were increasingly hamstrung by unions and Detroit’s government increasingly fell victim to corruption and identity politics – if there were any vampires preying on “The Twentieth-Century Motor City”, they were from the union hall and the city hall.

There’s an Atlas Shrugged
comparison, too. It’s not a coincidence that the book is flying off the shelves.

Obama Fatigue

In Europe. Or at least in the UK:

Isn’t it time for him to go home yet? It is good, in theory, that the new President of the United States is taking so much time to tour Europe. He arrived in London last Tuesday, has been to Strasbourg, Prague yesterday and now he’s off to Turkey. It shows, I suppose, that he cares about the outside world and that is ‘A Good Thing’. But his long stay means that we are hearing rather a lot from him, way too much in fact.

His speeches have long under-delivered, usually leaving a faintly empty sensation in this listener even though I welcomed, moderately, his victory last year as offering the possibility of a fresh start and a boost to confidence.

Yet, we are told that he is a great orator and in one way he certainly is. He does have a preternatural calm in the spotlight and a mastery of the cadences we associate with the notable speakers in US history – such as JFK and MLK. But beyond that, am I alone in finding him increasingly to be something of a bore?

No, you’re not. You’re just very late to the party.

Arrogance

More projection from a leftist:

Just a few days ago in a meeting with American CEOs of American banks, President Obama’s tone and attitude were rife with the arrogance, dismissiveness, and derision he had just criticized in Europe. A participant in the meeting told Politico that when the CEOs tried to explain that the nature, complexities, and competition of the finance and banking industries required that they continue retention bonuses for their employees, the president became impatient. He interrupted them and said, “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

The imagery behind Obama’s threat couldn’t be more obvious: comply with my demands or I will make sure you are harassed, intimidated, and run out of town on a rail. He made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Don Corleone couldn’t have said it better.

We can not forget, however, that it was Barack Obama himself along with his fellow Democrats who agitated this mob-like frenzy about the banks, the CEOs, and the bonuses. It was Obama who said the bonuses were an “outrage” and a “violation of our fundamental values.” Democrat Barney Frank hauled AIG’s CEO in front of the House Financial Services Committee and interrogated him, demanding to know why he approved the hundreds of millions of dollars of bonuses. Conveniently, Congressman Frank failed to mention that the approval was inside the very stimulus bill Obama championed and the Democrats overwhelmingly voted for.

Funny, that.

Jim Muncy

In about half an hour, Jim Muncy of the Space Frontier Foundation will be talking about space policy issues, particularly the dreaded Gap. Look for live updates after the current break, when I get back to the computer.

[OK, speech starting]

Jim (unusually) has charts. Title: Mind The (Space) Gap. Another troublemaking project of the Space Frontier Foundation.

Back in 2005 CEV (Orion) was not aimed at ISS. No requirement for ISS, and Steidle didn’t want it to. Number of innovative architectures considered. Steidle proposed a “nontraditional crew” development effort over 2005-2008 to address if you could take the Burt Rutan SS1 approach and use the commercial market to build the reliability of human earth/orbit systems so that NASA wouldn’t have to “human rate” vehicle that would launch CEV. CEV could go up uncrewed, and meet crew on orbit. At that time, NASA forecast a four-year gap from 2010 to 2014, even with risk reduction of two CEV contractors and nontraditional effort. That was the plan.

Then came Mike. Had to get rid of the gap. Was “unseemly in the extreme” for the US (read NASA) to not have a human launch capability, maybe even a national security issue. It was no longer about getting NASA beyond earth orbit, but it became about “closing the gap” because it was just wrong for NASA not to launch humans into space. He says that it’s not Apollo on steroids, it’s Gemini on steroids. What we’d be left with after Ares 1 and Orion would be Gemini in capability, with a larger capsule.

Some doubted hysteria, and didn’t think we could afford to both close gap and achieve VSE goals, and that it wasn’t a national security threat to not be able to launch astronauts into space on NASA vehicles. But some Senators insisted (with zero evidence) that it was.

So we lost the goal of the vision, of affordable and sustainable. The brightest guys in the room, the rocket scientists, decided to pull a bait and switch. They decided to use the ISS as an excuse for developing the new vehicle to close the gap, even though they defunded the research at the station to pay for their new rocket. They thought that this was the one and only opportunity to develop a new launch vehicle. It wasn’t really designed to close the gap, it was designed to go to Mars. But that’s not how it was sold, and they rammed through a transportation system as though it was the B-52, something to be used for over half a century to do everything NASA would be doing. And the story was that it was a Shuttle-derived approach that would close the gap down to 2012. It would be Safe, Simple and Soon.

How is that working out? NASA’s current forecast is calendar year 2017. $44B to Initial Operating Capability, so gap has grown by three years from original VSE goal. Slipped five years from ESAS goals of three and a half years ago, or 1.3 years per year (new NASA metric YPYS — Year per year slip). So much for new exploration.

No way NASA gets to the moon by 2019 if it only launches Ares 1 in 2017. May not get there until 2029 (Apollo sixtieth anniversary), if ever, and it won’t be “affordable” or “sustainable” or fit under likely budget. “We are spending a lot of money in DC right now.” Do you see politicians throwing a lot of money at NASA? No. NASA is not seen as stimulating the economy, or developing technology, or relevant. Some of have noted and said this for years. Doesn’t fit the budgets as they’re likely to be, and NASA never gets back to exploring. Betrayal of a third presidential mandate in space (first was space station, second was Bush 39 SEI, also known as staff expansion initiative, and now VSE). Presidents have set goals for space, but the agency hasn’t been honoring them. And even leaving aside exploration, NASA has failed by its own metric of clsoing the gap. You don’t have to argue about the technical details, or even that it’s going to be too expensive to operate. All you have to do is point out that with this plan the gap has increased from four years to six or seven years. In the administrator’s words, this architecture is unseemly, a national security threat, disinspiring our youth.

We are now in the era of hope and change. We can fix mistakes with a new administration and congress. The fastest safest/cheapest/approach is to utilize existing/developing commercial ELVs to launch simple human-carrying spacecraft (i.e., COTS D).

SFF thinks it’s time to declare Ares 1 and ESAS a failure. NASA should use its stimulus funds to stimulate a new human ETO industry by funding multiple COTS D concepts. Launch Orion on EELV. Pursue “cheapest” medium-heavy option for exploration and intermodal demos.

When NASA claims that Ares 1 is needed for Orion they’re fudging the numbers, because the abort system for Ares 1 is heavier than it would be for an EELV, because the former cannot be shut down and the abort system has to outrun it.

Has no problem with Shuttle Z or some other cheap and dirty approach to launching fifty or sixty metric tons at a time, but have to do something so that fifty years after we landed a man on the moon we can land a man on the moon. It’s easy to fix the problem if we only mind Mike Griffin’s first suggestion, and actually mind the space gap.

In response to a question, he still professes optimism about the administration. There is someone at OSTP (Mike Kleegle ) who wants to build partnerships with private industry, and he hopes that there will be an administrator and deputy who will implement it. He was hoping for Isakowitz, but his appointment was killed by Senator Nelson. His comment about Senator Nelson’s cerebral propensity was off the record, so I won’t repeat it.

Obama Subtitled

The Grauniad, of all places, has his number:

Nick Robinson: “A question for you both, if I may. The prime minister has repeatedly blamed the United States of America for causing this crisis. France and Germany both blame Britain and America for causing this crisis. Who is right? And isn’t the debate about that at the heart of the debate about what to do now?”

Brown immediately swivels to leave Obama in pole position. There is a four-second delay before Obama starts speaking [THANKS FOR NOTHING, GORDY BABY. REMIND ME TO HANG YOU OUT TO DRY ONE DAY.] Barack Obama: “I, I, would say that, er … pause [I HAVEN’T A CLUE] … if you look at … pause [WHO IS THIS NICK ROBINSON JERK?] … the, the sources of this crisis … pause [JUST KEEP GOING, BUDDY] … the United States certainly has some accounting to do with respect to . . . pause [I’M IN WAY TOO DEEP HERE] … a regulatory system that was inadequate to the massive changes that have taken place in the global financial system … pause, close eyes [THIS IS GOING TO GO DOWN LIKE A CROCK OF SHIT BACK HOME. HELP].

People see what they want to see.