Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Huntsville Reality-Distortion Zone

26 Comments

This isn’t new, but I don’t think I linked it at the time. Eric Berger reports on the people working SLS:

May turns the cost issue around.

“My question would be, how could we afford not to do this?” May asked. “Great nations explore. Great nations push their boundaries. And this country has continued to the limits of what we know and learn for a generation, and I think we’ve got to continue to explore.”

And in the larger perspective, he argues, SLS does not cost that much. NASA spends about $1.6 billion a year building it, less than 9 percent of the space agency’s total budget, he said, which is itself less than one half of one percent of the federal budget.

“I think it’s a relatively small amount of money to set the leadership for the world in space exploration,” he says.

Count the number of logical fallacies in just those four grafs.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obama’s Amnesty Strategy

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OK, so it’s not just a partial shambles:

Obama’s pass-a-bill-or-I’ll act strategy was not just tactically dumb (alienating the very House Republicans it was designed to coerce, stoking activist expectations of an imminent executive overreach to achieve a goal that wasn’t popular enough to sustain the overreaching). It was also substantively dumb – the actual policy assumptions underlying Obama’s proposals (that amnesty doesn’t act as a magnet for further illegal immigration) were disproved by the Latin American reaction to his initial pen-and-phone moves before House Republicans had time to be coerced.

Democrats are still putting on their Goodfellas faces and pretending they have leverage. Dem Whip Steny Hoyer promises a “significant change in policy” if the House does not act in July, according Breitbart News. Senator Dick Durbin says that if Speaker Boehner doesn’t act “the President will borrow the power that is needed to solve the problems of immigration.” (I must have been sleeping in Con Law when they taught the Borrowing Clause.) Senator Robert Menendez defensively declares ”the threat of executive action is not a bluff.”

It’s a bluff. House GOPs should feel free to ignore it, at least through November.** If Obama takes any executive action before then, it will be of the most timid, face-saving variety.

Speaking of Con Law, it would have been appalling, if I weren’t used to it, to hear Xavier Becerra say on Fox News Sunday that it was OK for the president to ignore the Constitution and bypass Congress if what he was doing was popular. Those are the words of a caudillo. The Democrats seem ever-more determined to turn us into a banana republic.

Business, Economics, Health, Political Commentary

More Blows For Liberty From SCOTUS

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Shockingly to union supporters, a union can’t force someone taking care of her disabled son to pay union dues for the privilege.

And there’s another blow to ObamaCare’s attempt to run our lives:

The 5-4 decision is a significant victory for those challenging the constitutionality of the President Obama’s health care law. And it strengthens the argument that for-profit entities, like individuals and churches, have religious rights.

So you don’t lose your religious freedom because you make a profit.

Huh.

[Update mid afternoon]

The funniest thing on Twitter today, amidst all the illogic, hatred and hysteria, is the number of people who think that @SCOTUSblog is actually SCOTUS’s blog (and Twitter feed) and attacking them. The @SCOTUSblog folks are having a lot of fun with it.