Success! A government program only wastes $4.4 billion out of a projected waste of $19.1 billion.
Chicken Little report: Aerospace defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all show better than expected profits despite sequestration.
It seems that each of these companies, finding their profits from defense pork to be relatively flat or dropping slightly, worked harder to sell their other products to other customers, and were generally successful. What a concept!
The witch hunt continues: The Detroit City Council unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday calling for the further prosecution of George Zimmerman.
It not like these leaders in Detroit don’t have their own problems that they should be dealing with, eh?
As I said yesterday, they are thugs, jack-booted thugs. If they could arrange a kangaroo court to guarantee the conviction of those they dislike or disagree with, they would. And in fact, that is what they are trying to do right now.
Working for the Democratic Party: The records of the snooping into Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s confidential tax records have mysteriously been destroyed.
The competition heats up: NASA plans to test the parachutes for the Orion capsule today.
Wednesday’s test will see an Orion prototype dropped from a plane at an altitude of 35,000 feet (10,700 meters) over the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in southwestern Arizona. Engineers will simulate a series of failures and test the parachute system’s ability to adapt and land the capsule safely. Orion has three main parachutes, and the NASA team plans to simulate the failure of one of the trio to see if the landing sequence can proceed safely with only two.
The merry-go-round: Obama’s nominee to manage contracting and budget at the Energy Department had serious problems doing the same job while she was at NASA.
A Washington Times review of NASA inspector general reports finds the space agency struggled to achieve austerity under Ms. Robinson’s financial leadership, as cost overruns grew sixfold from $50 million in 2009 to $315 million in 2012. … Audits conducted during Ms. Robinson’s tenure as CFO uncovered that NASA spent an average of $66 per person per day for light refreshments at conferences, shelled out $1.5 million to develop a video game to replicate astronauts’ experiences and reimbursed employees $1.4 million for tuition dating to 2006 for degrees unrelated to their NASA jobs.
But no matter. Her resume lists all these important past jobs, so she must be qualified!
The developmental engineering successes of the new commercially-built private spaceships, Dragon, CST-100, and Dream Chaser, appears to be winning over Congress.
The article linked above is mostly about Boeing’s effort with its CST-100 spaceship, but within it was this significant paragraph:
Last week, the House Appropriations committees approved $500 million and Senate appropriators $775 million for commercial crew development as part of NASA’s 2014 budget. The first figure is well below the Obama administration’s $821 million request, a figure NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has characterized as essential to meet the 2017 objective. Nonetheless, agency and company managers believe legislators are losing their skepticism over a program that has so far committed $1.4 billion to competing vehicle designs from SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Boeing and others. [emphasis mine]
Congress is still insisting that NASA spend far more for the Space Launch System (SLS), but they do appear to be increasingly less interested in cutting the new commercial crew program. Eventually, a light will go off in their dim brains and they will realize how much more cost effective this program is compared to SLS. I expect this to happen sometime in the next three years, It is then that SLS will die.
Note that I don’t have any problems at all with the above cuts to the commercial program. It is far better to keep these private efforts on a short leash, thereby forcing the companies to stay lean and mean, than to give them a blank check (as has been done in the past and with SLS) and thus allow them to become fat and lazy.
The competition heats up: India has set August 19 as the launch date for its home-built Geosycnchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).
Their last attempt to launch this rocket three years ago ended in spectacular failure. A success here would allow India to become a serious player in the launch market, thereby increasing the competition and thus helping to lower prices and encourage innovation.
The death of freedom: Ten things you could do in 1975 that you can’t do now.
Read the comments as well. I especially liked this: “It used to be that laws and regulations were put in place to prevent people from doing bad things to other people. Now laws and regulations are put in place to prevent good people from enjoying the fruits of their labor!”
Surprise, surprise! The defense industry has found that the cuts from sequestration have been far less painful than their lobbying had claimed.
Contractors seem pleasantly surprised that the automatic spending cuts are not hurting nearly as much as the industry’s lobbying arm warned they would in the months leading up to the sequester that took effect in March. [For example,] Lockheed Martin had predicted that sequestration would wipe out $825 million in revenue this year, but it no longer expects such a big hit. In fact, the company said, profit will be higher than initially projected. [emphasis mine]
The article specifically mentions the doomsday lobbying effort of the Aerospace Industries Association, As I noted back in December 2012, that lobbying was a lie. There is so much fat in the government that sequestration could have been three times bigger and it wouldn’t have done these contractors any serious harm. The inconsequential nature of those cuts now is illustrating the reality of this truth.
Leftwing civility works its magic: The family that George Zimmerman rescued from a car crash this week is terrified they will become targets of hate mobs if they say anything positive about him.
Thugs. The left and its minions are no different than jack-booted thugs, and the aftermath of the George Zimmerman trial has proven this quite clearly. Say or do something they don’t like, no matter whether it is legal, and they will come after you with threats of violence. And their leaders in the political world, led by President Obama, will just look the other way.
Finding out what’s in it: According to a new poll, only 11% of doctors believe that the Obamacare health exchanges will be open for business on October 1, as mandated by the law.
I found this tidbit from the article, however, far more disturbing, as it describes a detail of the Obamacare exchanges that will surely cause doctors incredible financial pain, and will likely cause them to demand all payments up front:
Jackson said that doctors who don’t have an understanding of those coverage terms could be in for a nasty surprise once the new plans go into effect. That’s because under the rules of the exchange, a patient can go up to three months without paying premiums and still not get their coverage formally dropped by an insurers—but the insurer isn’t obligated to pay claims incurred during the second and third month if that person isn’t paying their premiums for that time, Jackson said. Those rules could mean that doctors end up eating the cost of the care they have already provided, or have their receivables stay unpaid for longer stretches of time. [emphasis mine]
In other words, the law is tilted to allow patients to stiff both their doctors and their insurance companies. How precious.
An Arizona nursing student was suspended from school and called a bigot because she requested one of her classes be taught in English.
The student, Terri Bennett, 50, initially complained in April to school officials because she said the Spanish-dominated discussions in her class room were preventing her from learning, Townhall reported. The college nursing program director, David Kutzler, then allegedly called her “a bigot” and an expletive, and suspended her.
She has sued. The article also notes that the Arizona constitution requires schools to use English.
A close look at Angela Corey, the Florida prosecutor who brought charges against George Zimmerman.
And it doesn’t look good. She appears to be corrupt, vindictive, and power-hungry, all the things you do not want in a prosecutor.
A review and analysis of China’s space program.
The review’s one fault is that it ignores the military aspects of China’s effort. Nonetheless, its conclusions on China’s reasons for building this program illustrate once again why I repeatedly say, “The competition is heating up.”
More climate fraud: The routine lowering of past climate data to make today’s temperatures seem hotter.
Almost all past temperatures have been adjusted downward, compared with the temperatures that were actually recorded at the time. During the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, when many record high temperatures were recorded, the readings have been adjusted downward by, generally speaking, one to one and a half degrees. These adjustments stop abruptly in the late 1990s. The effect of the adjustments is to make the past look cooler in relation to the present.
This kind of manipulation of data, changing the historical record after the fact, is done ALL THE TIME by the climate alarmists who crank out all of the data that are reported on in the newspapers. And the adjustments are always the same: they make the past cooler, so that the present will look warmer, in order to support their power-grabbing climate hysteria agenda. Whenever you hear on the radio that a temperature reading is the “warmest ever” in a particular place, you can reasonably assume that the “warmest ever” title was conferred by falsely reporting temperature readings from past decades.
And as Hinderaker properly concludes, “This is, in my view, the biggest scandal in the history of science. I can’t think of any competitor that could even come close.”
George Zimmerman, still in hiding because of death threats, went public long enough on Thursday to help rescue a family trapped in an overturned car.
The article also notes the continuing death threats to his family.
Working for the Democratic Party: Two days before IRS White House appointee William Wilkins established the guidelines for reviewing IRS applications of conservatives, he met with Obama.
IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, met with Obama on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.
On April 25, 2012, Wilkins sent Hull and fellow Washington-based IRS official Lois Lerner “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS’ inspector general’s report.
It is quite possible that the two events are unrelated. This also could be the smoking gun linking Obama to the IRS scandal. Fortunately, the story notes that thirteen people attended this meeting, which means it should be possible to find out what actually happened there.
An illegal police raid no different than a home invasion.
He was claiming to be a police officer, but the man she had seen looked to her more like an armed thug. Her boyfriend, Dorris, was calmer, and yelled back that he wanted to see some ID. But the man just demanded they open the door. The actual words, the couple say, were, “We’re the f—— police; open the f—— door.”
And then there’s this, from the policeman:
“She sure shouldn’t be going to the press.”
Read the story and weep.
William Wilkins, the IRS chief counsel, now implicated in the IRS scandal to harass conservatives, is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire IRS.
Noonan’s review and analysis of yesterday’s testimony in the House is right on the money. The IRS scandal now points directly to the White House. Or as she notes,
It’s almost as if—my words—the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.
And this was done deliberately, by Wilkins, Obama’s political appointee, using the IRS for political purposes.
Moreover, the testimony yesterday also proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed the harassment was merely the actions of some rogue agents in Cincinnati. The obvious question then is this: Who was Lois Lerner trying to protect by these lies? The obvious answer: her bosses, in the White House.
Russia confirms that a Proton rocket failed at launch two weeks ago because three of six sensors were installed upside down.
They are going to subject the personnel involved to lie detector tests in order to find out who did what. We should then expect them to prosecute those individuals. Unlike the U.S., they won’t simply fire them.
What a half-century of Democratic Party rule gets you: Detroit today filed for bankruptcy, the largest city in U.S. history to do so.
Though I personally dislike Democratic Party policies and think they accelerated this disaster, the real problem was a willingness of voters to accept the idea of one-party rule. Not once during those fifty-one years of continuous and disastrous Democratic Party rule did Detroit voters even once consider the idea of firing these guys to give someone else a shot at running the city.
A summary of the IRS scandal testimony today before the House Oversight Committee.
With video. The key point is that the harassment of conservatives was managed and controlled in Washington, D.C., by high IRS officials including Lois Lerner and White House appointees.
The new brownshirts: The New Black Panther Party is offering a $10,000 bounty for the capture and kidnapping of George Zimmerman.
Watch the video at the link. (I was especially struck by the uniforms, which strongly reminded me of Nazi uniforms in the 1930s.) They are holding themselves above the law, with the right to kidnap and imprison anyone they happen to dislike or disagree with.
Update: A commenter has noted that this is not a new story. The Panthers offered this bounty back in March 2012, before Zimmerman was charged. I should note however that this really doesn’t change anything, as these thugs were still making themselves judge, jury, and executioners, and above the law.
The IRS scandal moves up the chain of command: Testimony today revealed that the harassment of conservatives was managed by a White House appointee in the IRS chief counsel’s office.
It appears that one of the four individuals whose tax records were illegally accessed for political reasons was Delaware senatorial Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell.
Investigators for Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, an influential Republican who serves on the Finance and Judiciary committees, have uncovered one key issue: a backdoor system in which state officials can access Americans’ private tax records in the name of investigating with little oversight or accountability. [emphasis mine]
Now isn’t that reassuring?
The law is such an inconvenient thing: A third federal court has ruled that Obama’s fake recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Broad violated the Constitution.
The worst part of this violation by Obama and his cohorts is that, even after these rulings, the illegally appointed board has continued to issue regulations, ignoring the decisions of all the courts.
Congresswoman Mary Edwards (D-Maryland) is proposing a merger of two NASA centers to save money.
The amendment would establish a Center Realignment and Closure Commission that would be given six months to evaluate “[c]onsolidating all rocket development and test activities of the Marshall Space Flight Center and Stennis Space Center in one location” and recommend a location promising the greatest cost savings. The commission would also be asked to look at “[r]elocating all operations of the Marshall Space Flight Center to both the Stennis Space Center and Johnson Space Center.”
Now this is interesting. The Marshall Space Flight Center has been looking for a reason to exist for decades, since the end of the Apollo program. Any smart private company would have shut it down long ago to save money.
But then, this is government. The article, hostile to the idea of eliminating any government facility, describes quite succinctly why NASA can’t build anything cheaply and why nothing in government ever shrinks. Our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities.
Working for the Democratic Party: The harassment of conservative groups by the IRS was planned and run by officials in Washington, D.C., according to a retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday in the House.
Retiring IRS lawyer Carter C. Hull implicated the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, headed by Obama appointee William J. Wilkins, and Lois Lerner, the embattled head of the IRS’ exempt organizations office, in the IRS targeting scandal and made clear that the targeting started in Washington, according to leaked interviews that Hull granted to the Oversight Committee in advance of Thursday’s hearing.
It appears he is naming names. Thursday’s hearing should be quite interesting.
