Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Deficit may be biggest threat to ObamaCare

9:32 am

Well duh! Deficit may be biggest threat to ObamaCare.

I always opposed ObamaCare because I oppose the use of government to run our lives. But putting that minor point aside, it made absolutely no sense for the government to add this entitlement to the nation’s balance sheet at a time when that balance sheet is so completely in the red. The only time these kinds of government programs can possible work (if ever) is when there is lots of spare cash in the bank, something we definitely don’t have right now.

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The Great Spending Betrayal

9:16 am

The great spending betrayal.

Over Friday and Saturday, 61% of House Republicans and 34% of Senate Republicans voted for the omnibus megabus bill. In doing so, not only did they violate their pledge pertaining to bundled (1200-page) bills and the 72-hour layover rule and agree to fund Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, Planned Parenthood, the EPA, the PLO and the UN; they actually agreed to spend almost $9 billion more than last year. Overall, budget authority will be $33 billion higher than the House budget, while appropriations for non-defense spending will be $45 billion more. One of the members who voted in the affirmative even agreed that he had voted for a “crap sandwich.”

One reason the budget is still growing is that two-thirds of the government is still controlled by the spendthrift Democratic Party. A second reason is that there are too many wimpy Republicans willing to compromise with these spendthrifts.

Which is why we have elections. 2012 should help fix this problem.

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Richard Branson talks to the Wall Street Journal

9:23 am

Richard Branson talks to the Wall Street Journal about space.

Mr. Branson is still radiating enthusiasm. “We’ve got just short of 500 people now signed up to go, which is actually more people than have been up to space in the history of space travel, and we hope to put those up in our first year of operation,” he says, predicting the first commercial flight by “about next Christmas,” although he acknowledges that there have been many delays.

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Hey, they still let us drive

9:24 pm

Frank Fleming: “Hey, they still let us drive.”

Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety. They had different equations related to human life then: We could lose 10,000 men in a single battle in a war and call it a victory.

We’re talking foolhardy people who eventually sent men to the moon strapped to a giant rocket that had less computational power than it takes to calculate the trajectory of an Angry Bird. Their kids dangled from jungle gyms over pavement. [emphasis in original]

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Obama’s Watergate

11:00 am

Obama’s Watergate.

Operation Fast and Furious was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and overseen by the Justice Department. It started under the leadership of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Fast and Furious enabled straw gun purchases from licensed dealers in Arizona, in which more than 2,000 weapons were smuggled to Mexican drug kingpins. ATF claims it was seeking to track the weapons as part of a larger crackdown on the growing violence in the Southwest. Instead, ATF effectively has armed murderous gangs. About 300 Mexicans have been killed by Fast and Furious weapons. More than 1,400 guns remain lost.

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An elementary school program which includes the singing of “Silent Night” will go on after Alabama school officials decided to ignore a complaint filed by a group that called the song “unconstitutional.”

10:34 am

Pushback: An elementary school program which includes the singing of “Silent Night” will go on after Alabama school officials decided to ignore a complaint filed by an anti-religion group that called the song “unconstitutional.”

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Budget deal cuts EPA by three percent

10:13 am

Another science budget update from Nature states that the budget deal will cut EPA by three percent.

This cut reduces EPA’s budget from its 2011 numbers by about $400 million. However, the agency’s total 2012 budget of $8.4 billion is still $1 billion more than it got in 2008, hardly what I’d call a draconian cut.

Once again, the inability of Congress to seriously face the deficit issue threatens to eventually destroy the U.S.’s ability to do any science. A bankrupt nation can’t do much but feed itself, as the scientists in the Soviet Union learned back in the 1990s.

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The Fukushima nuclear reactor has reached the state of cold shutdown

10:06 am

Good news: The Fukushima nuclear reactor has reached the state of cold shutdown.

This means that the reactor core has cooled enough that there is no need to recirculate the water to keep the fuel cool. However, because the reactor continues to leak that water recirculation is still necessary, and will be for years.

As is typical of many modern journalists, the article above is also an unstated editorial both hostile to nuclear energy as well as private enterprise, best shown by the article’s concluding paragraph:

Meanwhile, the Japanese public and many of its politicians remained deeply mistrustful of the situation at Fukushima. In this week’s issue of Nature, two members of the Japanese parliament call for nationalization of the Fukushima Plant, to allow scientists and engineers to investigate exactly what happened inside the reactors, and to reassure the public that the decommissioning will be done with their interests at heart. Regardless of whether you agree with the authors, nationalization seems almost inevitable. The lengthy decommissioning process that will follow this cold shutdown, and the enormous cost involved, make it a job for a government, not a corporation. [emphasis mine]

First, he has no idea what the Japanese public thinks of this situation. Second, there is no evidence that the government could do this job better than the company that runs the reactor. Both conclusions are mere opinion, inserted inappropriately in a news article without any supporting proofs.

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NIH and DOE in the proposed budget deal

10:45 pm

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the science office in the Department of Energy (DOE) appear to avoid serious cuts in the proposed budget deal.

Actually, NIH’s budget remains almost identical to what it got in 2012, $30.6 billion. However, this amount is $1.4 billion more than it got in 2008, and $1.7 billion more than it got in 2007. As for DOE’s Office of Science, the $4.889 billion for 2012 is still $700 million more than the office got in 2008.

In other words, considering the budget deficits the federal government faces, these 2012 budget numbers hardly seem to be a reasonable attack on the problem. Simply bringing those budget numbers back down to 2008 numbers would hardly damage the work these government agencies are doing, and it would surely do more to reduce the deficit.

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