Our government at work: Georgia police shut down a girls’ lemonade stand because they lacked a business license, peddler’s permit and food permit.
And in a related note: Long, cramped road trips ahead for US astronauts.
Yesterday the House appropriations committee’s released budget numbers that included no additional funds for commercial space, limiting the subsidies to $312 million, the same number as last year and significantly less than the $850 million requested by the Obama administration.
This is what I have thought might happen since last year. The tone deaf manner in which the Obama administration has implemented the private space subsidies is leaving all funding for NASA vulnerable.
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The law is such an inconvenient thing: In a bipartisan effort, Texas lawmakers roast NASA administrator Charles Bolden for not meeting mandated Congressional deadlines for Congress’s personally designed rocket, the program-formerly-called-Constellation.
The heavy-lift rocket and capsule that Congress insists NASA build is a complete waste of money and nothing more than pork. It will never get built, mainly because Congress has given NASA less money and less time to build it than they did for Constellation under the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the reason they continue to require NASA to build it is to provide pork to their districts.
In a perfect world this funding would be cut now, especially considering the state of the federal debt.
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NASA awards a key piece of ISS management to Florida, not Houston.
The story reports that politics were not involved, but I am suspicious. Since all ISS management and operations come out of Houston, why send some of that management to Florida?
Public debt and the peril of Obamacare.
Countries with universal healthcare fall into two camps:
1. Totalitarian regimes like Cuba and North Korea, and authoritarian Third World countries in the Middle East and Africa.
2. Western nations that free-ride off of American military spending and its provision of international security, but nonetheless run unsustainable budgets with immense debts trying to pay for their social welfare states. [emphasis mine]
In other words, we had better repeal this monstrosity or we face economic collapse, probably preceded by a dictatorship.
The first rule of liberalism: Government failure always justifies more government.
If you have broken no laws, you are not required to show the police your id. Getting them to accept this legal fact is often quite difficult. It is even more difficult if you should approach them with a camera while openly carrying a gun, as this man does. Watch the video below to see he not only refuses to give them his id, he literally walks away in the end, leaving the two cops befuddled.
Some background on the video can be found here.
TSA agents pat down 6-year-old twice.
Giving more power to unelected bureaucrats: A new bill would let federal health researchers unilaterally ban certain chemicals.
The government’s war on cameras and free speech.
Obama’s stimulus bill: $7 million per house to provide seven homes internet access in Montana.
Throw these bums out! The Senate canceled its July 4th break to deal with the debt and literally did nothing.
Doesn’t this make you feel safer? A TSA agent was arrested in Florida earlier this week for stealing from passengers.
It appears that U.S. aerospace layoffs more than tripled in the first half of 2011.
The downsizing, prompted by cutbacks in defense and government contracts, jumped from 6,121 in the first six months of 2010 to 20,851 this year, based on planned layoffs announced by major employers.
Though I have always favored shutting down the government space agency and replacing it with privately-built rockets and spaceships, the manner in which this is being done now is disgraceful. George Bush declared the retirement of the shuttle seven years ago. Since then Congress, Bush, and Obama have all done an abominable job preparing the nation for that retirement.
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More science budget news: The House today proposed cutting NOAA’s $4.59 billion budget by $103 million.
There already is some squealing about this (see the link above), but note that a $4.49 billion budget for NOAA would still be half a billion dollars more than NOAA’s 2008 budget, which is hardly what I’d call a draconian cut.
Ron Paul (R-Texas) called for the abolition of the TSA yesterday.
More science budget news: The House proposes no budget increase for the National Science Foundation.
The House today proposed cutting NASA’s budget back to 2008 levels while eliminating all funds for the James Webb Space Telescope.
As much as I’d hate to see the Webb telescope die, it has cost far more than planned, is way behind schedule, and carries a gigantic risk of failure. However, if I had a choice, I’d rather they cut the $1.95 billion for Congress’s homemade heavy-lift rocket, the program-formerly-called-Constellation. There is a much better chance that Webb will get completed, launched, and work, than there is for this improvised and impossibly costly Congressionally conceived rocket.
LightSquared has raised $265 million in new capital as it awaits FCC approval despite evidence its signal interferes with GPS equipment.
New NOAA commercial fishing regulations established last year are destroying small family-owned businesses.
Texas court orders clerk to remove Pledge of Allegiance and opening prayer from the records; clerk says hell no!
This keeps happening: The new Mayor of Miami-Dade County took office on Friday and instantly demanded concessions from eight unions.
This story today from what is generally considered a Democratic newspaper, suggests that the political debate has shifted strongly in favor of the Republicans and against Obama and the Democrats. From the Los Angeles Times: Deficit battle shaping up as GOP victory
Even as the political battle mounts over federal spending, the end result for federal policy is already visible — and clearly favors Republican goals of deep spending cuts and drastically fewer government services.
President Obama entered the fray last week to insist that federal deficits can’t be reduced through spending reductions alone. Federal tax revenue also must rise as part of whatever deficit reduction package Congress approves this summer, he said.
Obama has been pushing to end a series of what he calls tax loopholes and tax breaks for the rich. But even if Obama were to gain all the tax-law changes he wants, new revenue would make up only about 15 cents of each dollar in deficit reduction in the package. An agreement by the Republicans to accept new revenue would be a political victory for Obama because “no new taxes” has been such an article of faith for the GOP.
But substantively, budget experts note, the plan would still be dominated by cuts to government programs, many of them longtime Democratic priorities, such as Medicaid and federal employee pensions.
For a liberal newspaper to recognize and describe in detail the absurdity of Obama’s position on taxes versus cuts is remarkable. Normally a liberal newspaper would ignore the fact that the President’s suggested tax-law changes will bring in practically no significant revenue, and focus instead on the so-called refusal of Republicans to compromise. That the Los Angeles Times is not willing to carry water for Obama and the Democrats shows that the Democratic position is incredibly weak politically, and is likely to collapse if the Republicans stand firm. That the newspapers is also willing to describe fairly the Republican position, something liberal newspapers have almost never done in the past two decades, also suggests that they have had enough, and have finally realized how much their creditability has suffered in recent years by their unwillingness to cover political news honestly.
If this pattern spreads, the Republicans might find themselves getting everything — and more — of what they want. And that will be something I have not seen in almost fifty years of watching political life.
A man who correctly refused to hand over his video of an arrest and then was arrested himself for his refusal has been acquitted of all charges.
And I say fire the cops who did this, as they very clearly do not understand the law they are supposed to uphold, and then abuse the power that they have been given.
