Posting this weekend shall be very light. Today, Saturday, I was underground all day on a survey project in a cave north of Tucson. Tomorrow I will be underground again, taking a caver’s tour of the mines in Tombstone, Arizona.
Will be back full force I think on Monday, though I might end up on the road again that day for different reasons. I figure I will post for sure late Sunday.
To be fair, let’s watch a montage of the Democratic representatives and their statements during today’s House hearing of IRS commissioner John Koskinen.
Watch it, please. For those who are old enough to remember the Watergate hearings, you will be strongly reminded of the Republicans then defending Nixon. It was pitiful when the Republicans did it then, and it is pitiful when the Democrats do it now.
The IRS has admitted it wrongly harassed conservatives. It is also clearly participating in a cover-up. To make-believe these things didn’t happen and that the victim here is the IRS is beyond shameful.
The superintendent at a Connecticut school that blocked access to conservative websites while allowing access to comparable liberal sites has finally issued a response to the charge.
Superintendent Jody Goeler posted a response this morning to the school’s website, blaming the Dell SonicWall service they use. Goeler wrote, “As interest in this topic has expanded, the district has pressed Dell SonicWall for more information about how websites are assigned to categories and why there are apparent inconsistencies, as discovered by the student, in classifications particularly along conservative and liberal lines.” Goeler added, “The district is trying to determine the reason for the inconsistency and if the bias is pervasive enough to justify switching to another content filtering provider.”
Goeler concluded her letter saying, “Once we receive a statement from Dell SonicWall clarifying its process for assigning websites to categories, I will post it on our website for your review at www.ctreg14.org.
Blaming the filtering company is interesting. It is possible they are the source of the bias. I remain skeptical and wonder if the school knew and went along with it without comment — until they got caught.
SpaceX scrubbed its Falcon 9 commercial launch of six Orbcomm satellites tonight because of an issue with the rocket’s second stage.
The next launch opportunity is Saturday evening, and based on other sources it sounds like they hope to fly then.
Here’s another tidbit about Lois Lerner’s lost emails: Her hard drive crashed ten days after the chairman of the House Ways & Means committee sent a letter to the IRS asking the agency if it was engaged in targeting.
What a coincidence! She discovers that Congress is interested in what she has been doing and suddenly her hard drive crashes, destroying all the emails she has written about this very subject. Do you smell a rat?
In addition, Congress last week discovered through other subpoenaed emails that Lerner was having conversations at that time with Department of Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. The evidence thus continues to suggest strongly that the White House was intimately involved in the decision use the IRS to harass its conservative opponents.
One more post on today’s IRS House hearing: The IRS Commissioner John Koskinen smirked as he insisted that “no apology is owed” by the agency for its actions.
Watch the video. As I said earlier, the arrogance of the man is disgusting.
Update: Images from the successful cave rescue in Germany.
More revelations from today’s IRS hearings, this time indicating evidence of White House involvement.
The evidence remains circumstantial, but very damning nonetheless. The White House needs to explain exactly what happened in a meeting between the IRS chief counsel and President Obama exactly two days before that chief counsel changed IRS criteria for approving tax exempt status in a manner that increased the harassment of conservatives.
More video from IRS commissioner John Koskinen’s testimony today during House hearings.
Koskinen is so full of crap I think I could fertilize half the farm fields in the state of Iowa with it. This response from Kevin Brady (R-Texas) sums it up quite cogently.
“The IRS denied for two years targeting of Americans based on their political beliefs. That wasn’t the truth. They said it was a few rogue agents in Cincinnati. That wasn’t the truth. You said you were targeting liberal organizations. That wasn’t the truth. Then you assured us you would provide us all the emails in May and that wasn’t the truth. And today, you are telling us out of thousands of IRS computers, the one that lost the emails was a person of interest in an ongoing congressional investigation. And that is not the truth either. This is the most corrupt and deceitful IRS in history.”
Leftwing tolerance: The head of the Clinton library in Arkansas, also a donor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, has banned researchers from a conservative media outlet because it used that research to publish stories critical of Hillary.
Library dean Carolyn Henderson Allen informed editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti in a June 17 letter that the library had “officially suspended” the Free Beacon‘s research privileges. The Free Beacon published the Hillary Papers, drawn from the archive of the late Clinton confidante Diane Blair, in February. Those papers are also housed in the special collections at the University of Arkansas.
“I am writing you to direct you and the Washington Beacon Press to cease and desist your ongoing violation of the intellectual property rights of the University of Arkansas with regard to your unauthorized publication of audio recordings obtained from the Roy Reed Collection,” wrote Allen.
Not only did the library ban the researchers, it wants to squelch the results of their research so that no one can read it. How open-minded and tolerant of them!
The truth versus the leftwing media.
Read it. First the author describes what really happened. Then he describes how the press has dishonestly tried to spin it. And that spin is quite dishonest, as the facts here are very clear and include rulings by both federal and state courts that make the spin entirely unjustifiable.
“They just got rid of it. … It really looks bad and I’ve got to say it looks like a cover-up to me.”
The quote comes from a House hearing today where lawmakers blasted the head of the IRS for claiming it has lost two years worth of Lois Lerner’s emails.
Update: I think it worthwhile to include video of this exchange between Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The arrogance of Koskinen is, to use Ryan’s world, unbelievable.
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As China’s Yutu lunar rover barely continues to survive, unable to move, its scientists prepare to publish their results.
But other systems and scientific instruments — a panoramic camera, infrared and X-ray spectrometers and a ground-penetrating radar — are operating normally, says Zheng: “The rover can still carry out measurements from the fixed location and send scientific data to the ground station.” …
Yutu’s penetrator radar has detected several layers underneath its path, says Long Xiao, a planetary scientist at China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. Under the surface soil, known as regolith, it found a layer of debris from a crater-forming impact and two layers of lava flows, made of basalt.
Though the rover lost its ability to rove within days of landing on the Moon, the mission is certainly an overall success for China. When they send their next rover to the Moon this first experience will serve them very well.
Recognizing the competition: In a speech in Singapore, the head of Arianespace said that the company urgently needs to overhaul its Ariane 5 rocket in order to meet tough competition from SpaceX and Russia’s Proton rocket.
“We have a newcomer in America with SpaceX. Yes, competition is increasing, but when competition is increasing, we need to be more and more agile,” said Israel. While recognising that Arianespace was the market leader, “we have to ask ourselves one question: what should we do to remain the leader? Europe is very serious about launchers, and Europe will not give up when it comes to launchers.”
For Arianespace this speech is a very good thing, as it demonstrates again that Israel — and the company — are aware of the competitive challenge put forth by SpaceX and are not making believe it doesn’t exist.
The competition heats up? The Dnepr rocket launch of 37 satellites yesterday also included the launch of the first private Russian satellite.
TabletSat-Aurura owned by the company SPUTNIX weighs 26.2 kg and is made to operate for one year. It is intended for remote Earth sensing in the interests of a private company. The satellite was made using Russian technologies and a minimum of foreign components. Its cost is about one million US dollars.
Igor Komarov, the head of the United Rocket and Space Corporation, said “the launch of Aurora, the first Russian private satellite, is a successful example of public-private partnership in the field of space exploration as private companies clearly cannot fulfill their strategic tasks without the state. ,,, I am confident that cooperation between the state and private aerospace agencies in designing and manufacturing high-tech craft will become an important stimulus for further development of Russian competitive technologies.”
SPUTNIX Director-General Andrei Potapov said his company’s plans included “creating a cluster of small spacecraft and craft for super high-definition aerial video surveying and imaging with a resolution of down to one meter per pixel”. [emphasis mine]
Why do I have doubts about this Russian achievement? The reasons are twofold.
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A detailed look at tomorrow’s Falcon 9 commercial launch of six Orbcomm satellites.
Launch is set for 6:08 pm (Eastern). If all goes well, SpaceX will also attempt another soft vertical splashdown of the first stage in its continuing effort to make that first stage reusable.
A Russian Dnepr rocket today successfully placed in orbit the largest number of satellites, 37, ever launched on a single rocket.
This launch once again illustrates the increasing capabilities of tiny satellites. More and more, it is becoming possible to do a lot more in orbit with a lot less.
Groundbreaking — the literally blasting off of a mountaintop — took place today in Chile at the eventual site of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).
Once completed in 2024 this telescope will have a segmented mirror with a total diameter of 39 meters or 128 feet, the largest ever built.
Why the Redskins trademark ruling should terrify you.
This ruling isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a slope we’ve already slid down: bureaucrats in Washington are now empowered to make subjective decrees about what is offensive and what will be tolerated, based on pressure from a small clique of Washington insiders. Anyone who runs afoul of these decrees, anyone branded as regressive and politically incorrect, is declared outside the protection of the federal government.
And what do we call people who like to wield that kind of oppressive power? I call them fascists. They hate it when I do that, but I am actually not name-calling but applying a very accurate description to their behavior.
At hearings in the Senate Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sharply attacked the proposed Democratic proposal to amend and restrict the first amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Cruz even offered to replace the Democratic proposal, which would allow Congress to limit spending on political campaigns, with the first amendment itself. All the Democrats rejected that change, illustrating that they reject the first amendment itself.
