Another green company, backed with federal grants from both the Bush and Obama administrations, has gone bankrupt.
A dollar here, a dollar there, who cares? It’s the thought that counts!
It is now one thousand days, or three years, since the Democratically-controlled Senate has passed a a budget.
So, who are the do-nothings in Congress then? I must note that the Republican House has passed budgets each year since the 2010 election.
Taking the fifth: The chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona has refused to testify to Congress about the Obama administration’s policy of allowing guns to be illegally smuggled to Mexican drug lords.
As his attorney, Tobin Romero, wrote:
“Department of Justice officials have reported to the Committee that my client relayed inaccurate information to the Department upon which it relied in preparing its initial response to Congress. If, as you claim, Department officials have blamed my client, they have blamed him unfairly,” the letter to Issa says. Romero claims Cunningham did nothing wrong and acted in good faith, but the Department of Justice in Washington is making him the fall guy, claiming he failed to accurately provide the Oversight Committee with information on the execution of Fast and Furious.
In other words, give me immunity and I will fry Eric Holder and the Obama administration.
Several Republicans in Congress expressed concern yesterday about the Obama administration’s decision earlier this week to negotiate a space code of conduct with Europe and others.
House Republicans are trying to rescind a $100 billion European bailout fund created by the Democrats and Obama in 2009.
Makes sense to me. How can you be loaning money to others when you are in debt yourself?
Good news! Congress has just ended its least-productive year in modern history, passing only 80 bills, less than any other session since these records began being kept in 1947.
President Obama today asked Congress for additional power to consolidate six government agencies.
While this at first sounds like a very good idea, I must admit that it is difficult for me to trust this man with more power, at any time. In addition, how serious can we take his claim of desiring to save money when his administration is on a pace to increase the federal debt by more than $6 trillion, exceeding the debt accumulated by all Presidents from George Washington to Bill Clinton?
“I’d hoped for something different.”
Me too. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. And this is all the more reason to vote more conservatives into power. And to not be afraid of new faces whom we’ve never heard of. The familiar names surely aren’t doing what is necessary.
Bad news for American astronomy: The National Science Foundation has declined until 2020 to commit to any funding for either one of the two giant American-built ground-based telescopes.
For nearly a decade now, two university consortia in the United States have been in a race to build two ground-based telescopes that would be several times bigger than today’s biggest optical telescope. One group—led by the University of California—plans to build the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii. The other team—led by Carnegie Observatories, the University of Arizona, and other institutions—is developing a 28-meter behemoth named the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which would be built in Chile. Over the past few years, both teams have raised tens of millions of dollars toward the billion-dollar-plus projects in the hope that the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) would come up with the balance.
But now, it turns out, neither project has a chance of receiving any significant funding from NSF for at least another decade. In a solicitation posted by NSF last week, the agency indicated that it does not expect to fund the building of any giant segmented mirror telescopes—that is, TMT or GMT—until the beginning of the 2020s. According to the solicitation, all that NSF can provide right now is $1.25 million over 5 years for the development of a public-private partnership plan that could eventually lead to the building of a large telescope, should NSF be in a position to fund such a telescope sometime in the next decade.
I suspect the NSF’s unwillingness to fund this project at this time is directly related to the budget crisis in Washington. Though the NSF got slightly more money in 2012 than in 2011, that money is all accounted for by other projects. There is no margin for anything new that will be as expensive (in the billions) as these giant telescopes will be.
Meanwhile, in real news: The United States closed 2011 with a record $15.22 trillion debt that was officially 100.3% of GDP and only $14 billion from breaching the debt ceiling passed by Congress only five months before.
On Thursday, December 15, 2011, NASA management announced what seemed at first glance to be a very boring managerial decision. Future contracts with any aerospace company to launch astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) will follow the same contractual arrangements used by NASA and SpaceX and Orbital Sciences for supplying cargo to the space station.
As boring that sounds, this is probably the most important decision NASA managers have made since the 1960s. Not only will this contractual approach lower the cost and accelerate the speed of developing a new generation of manned spaceships, it will transfer control of space exploration from NASA — an overweight and bloated government agency — to the free and competitive open market.
To me, however, the decision illustrates a number of unexpected consequences, none of which have been noted by anyone in the discussions that followed NASA’s announcement back in mid-December.
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“At the end of 2011, America, like much of the rest of the Western world, has dug deeper into a cocoon of denial.”
Tens of millions of Americans have yet to understand that the can can no longer be kicked down the road, because we’re all out of road. The pavement ends, and there’s just a long drop into the abyss. And, even in a state-compliant car seat, you’ll land with a bump. At this stage in a critical election cycle, we ought to be arguing about how many government departments to close, how many government programs to end, how many millions of government regulations to do away with. Instead, one party remains committed to encrusting even more barnacles to America’s rusting hulk, while the other is far too wary of harshing the electorate’s mellow.
