Tag: policy

The day fascism rushed through the door in Wisconsin

9:28 am

And I call it fascism because that is what it is, the misuse of government force by members of one political party, the Democrats, to harass and destroy the lives of citizens who happen to disagree with them about policy.

“Houses were surrounded and lit up,” O’Keefe said. “Children and spouses were home in multiple cases, and made to suffer through two-and-a-half-hour raiding parties going through all paper files and seizing computers and phones. Children in multiple cases were told they could not inform their schools why they were late.”

After investigators stormed into their homes and rooted through their possessions, the conservative targets and their families suffered the additional insult of the gag order, O’Keefe said. “So a traumatic event is imposed on entire families, and they are told to suck it up, don’t talk to your friends, relatives, ministers, colleagues,” O’Keefe said. “Don’t explain the deputies’ cars, the boxes they took from your house. Don’t allow your children to tell the truth.”

Once again, the only reason these SWAT team searches were done was because the citizens under attack happened to oppose the politics of the propsecutor who ordered them. And if he could have arrested these citizens without trial, I firmly believe he would have.

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More IRS hard drives wiped to conceal evidence

10:42 am

Looks like a pattern to me: In a different legal case separate from its harassment of conservatives, the IRS has been accused of wiping more hard drives and destroying more evidence.

In its latest court filing, NetJets claims the IRS has been concealing evidence. Its lawyers say the computers of three key IRS employees were wiped clean, including the computer of “an excise-tax policy manager and a key decision maker regarding the application of the section 4261 ticket tax to whole and fractional aircraft-management companies.”

While the harassment of conservatives was a poltical act apparently instigated by the White House, this case has more to do with IRS managers interpreting the tax code, possibly improperly, so as to squeeze as much money from an American company as possible. That it is also possible that they were also willing to destroy evidence suggests a rampant corrupt culture that needs a major house-cleaning.

We can hope the next Congress will force this house-cleaning after the November election.

Posted on the road passig through Phoenix.

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More health insurance cancellations due to Obamacare

4:24 pm

Finding out what’s in it: A new report says that 50,000 people in seven states will have their health insurance plans cancelled in the next month.

This of course is only a small sampling. The disastrous ramifications of Obamacare have only just started.

I wonder if Obama has found out about this. Usually he has to read a newspaper to find out what happens in his administration, and this story is just breaking now.

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Another court rules against Obamacare subsidies

3:07 pm

Another federal court has ruled against an IRS decision to allow Obamacare subsidies in states with federal Obamacare exchanges.

This means that anyone who gets Obamacare using the federal exchange because their state did not set up its own exchange will not be legible for subsidies.

The court was also bluntly critical of the liberal judges who had written dissents trying to defend the IRS ruling, noting that

The role of this Court is to apply the statute as it is written – even if we think some other approach might ‘accor[d] with good policy.’” [Quoting a number of other decisions:] (“This Court has no roving license, in even ordinary cases of statutory interpretation, to disregard clear language simply on the view that . . . Congress ‘must have intended’ something broader.”) (“The power of executing the laws necessarily includes both authority and responsibility to resolve some questions left open by Congress that arise during the law’s administration. But it does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice.”).

This badly written law, forced down our throats by Obama and the Democratic Party, is going to do significant harm to many people now, because they will not get subsidies for their health insurance and the law itself forces the price for that health insurance to skyrocket to prices they cannot afford.

All the more reason to vote for Democrats in November, not because they have any brains or have demonstrated even the slightest ability to write laws, but merely because they care! All that other stuff is irrelevant!

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We don’t need no intelligence briefings

9:55 am

Does this make you feel safer? President Obama routinely misses 60% of his intelligence briefings.

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014. The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.

According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” by Obama’s attempt to shift blame. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.

This data, coupled with numerous reports showing that the intelligence community was quite clear about the threat of ISIS for years, illustrates how uninformed our President has been about these matters. Worse, it once again proves how willing he is to blame someone else for his own failures.

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Australia’s climate agency admits to fudging climate data

9:44 am

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABM) has finally admitted that it alters the temperatures recorded at almost all the official weather stations in Australia.

They claim that these adjustments are necessary to make the readings more accurate.

Using a process it calls homogenization, ABM has replaced actual temperature measurements with massaged numbers. ABM claims anomalies have arisen in both the historical data and current measurements due to a wide variety of factors unrelated to climate, such as differing types of instruments used, choices of calibration or enclosure and where it was located, and the closure of some stations and opening of others. The ABM argues such factors justify homogenization of the numbers.

Yet somehow, all the adjustments make the present readings hotter and the past readings colder, thus accentuating the illusion of global warming. Nor is this surprising, as the head of ABM has publicly stated his firm belief in global warming, as noted in the article above.

So, shut up and trust their judgment! When they tell you to give up your cars and nicely heated homes, it is just because they want to save the planet.

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India: Space success vs red tape?

8:43 am

Even as India celebrates the success of its Mars orbiter Mangalyaan, its aerospace industry complains of red tape and a slow-moving bureaucracy.

Between 2007 and 2012, ISRO accomplished about half of its planned 60 missions, government data showed. The government cited “development complexity” as the reason for the delay in some missions. Between 2012 and 2017 the target is 58 missions. The agency has completed 17 missions so far, and ISRO did not say why the number remained low. Some company executives and experts do not see that changing any time soon, with the absence of heavy rocket launchers, too few launch facilities and bureaucratic delays hampering growth.

I could also say that the battle is now joined between India’s military-industrial complex and private enterprise. With a government now in power that claims to be pro-business, we shall see where this battle leads.

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New study devalues carbon dioxide again

10:58 am

The uncertainty of science: A new study now suggests that previous climate models significantly over-estimated the effect increased carbon dioxide has on the climate.

Lewis co-authored a report with science writer Marcel Crok earlier this year that found many climate models running hot and overestimating climate sensitivity by 40 to 50 percent. The paper also criticized the IPCC for trying to hide the climate’s weaker response to carbon dioxide in its 2013 report by not giving a central climate sensitivity estimate.

Judith Curry, one of the co-authors, was also very quick to note that this result is by far not the final word. “There remains considerable meta uncertainty in the determination of climate sensitivity, including how the problem is even framed.”

Of course, if you are a global warming activist and communist, none of these minor details matter. Revolution for the climate is a must!

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AG Eric Holder to resign

9:56 am

Good riddance: Attorney General Eric Holder will announce his resignation today.

Morrissey offers a lot of good analysis about why Holder might be doing this now, but I think this story might explain it best: Federal Court Denies DOJ Motion for Delay, Orders Release of Fast and Furious Documents List to Judicial Watch by October 22.

The Holder Justice Department is under legal attack from several fronts. Holder’s effort to block all investigations, from Fast and Furious to the IRS scandal, will be revealed quite soon in court, and when it does, he is going to be toast. Better he leave now then be forced to resign at a time not of his choice. As Morrissey notes,

Resigning now allows Obama to appoint a replacement soon, and Senate Democrats to schedule the hearings during the lame-duck session (and don’t forget Harry Reid’s rule change on filibusters for presidential appointments, too, which expires at the end of this session).

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Taking a close look at the political leanings of a global warming rally

9:23 am

Want to get a feel for the politics of the environmental movement? Take a gander at this detailed report, with numerous pictures, of a global warming rally that took place in San Francisco this weekend.

It was the same in New York at the People’s Climate Rally. Anyone who thinks it is the Earth these people want to save is incredibly naive. It is power they crave, and the ability to use it for their own ends.

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Russia announces plans to fund its share of ISS through 2025

8:50 am

In a somewhat unexpected development today, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin revealed today that Russia intends to spend $8.2 billion (321 billion rubles) on research and development at the International Space Station through 2025.

“The 2016-2025 draft of the target federal program provides for allocating 321 billion rubles for the ISS development and operation, including the creation of new modules for unmanned spacecraft,” Rogozin said during a visit to a cosmonaut training center. “Russia channels considerable funds into development of this area of Russian space science. We are now thinking of research projects designed to explore outer space, as well as new projects in manned cosmonautics,” Rogozin said.

Up until now the Russians have been unclear about what they intend to do at ISS. NASA had asked them to extend the partnership to 2024. Their initial response was almost hostile, with Rogozin even threatening to stop flying American astronauts to ISS on Russian Soyuz rockets/capsules. Now it appears that they have decided to up their participation with new modules and agree to the extension.

Moreover, Rogozin’s statement suggests they are going to take a more independent position when it comes to human research in space. Up until now, they have allowed NASA a veto on flying any long manned missions on ISS, which is why no yearlong expeditions prior to next year’s have taken place. NASA kept saying no. This report suggests that once we have our own methods for getting astronauts to ISS they are going to go their own way and begin flying their own long term missions to ISS. We will fly our astronauts there on our schedule, and they will fly their astronauts there on their schedule.

Should make for some interesting news stories, eh? Will Russian and American astronauts even be allowed in each other’s modules? I am reminded of stories of messy divorces where the couples still had to live in the same house.

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Forest Service clamps down on free speech

9:47 pm

The Bill of Rights is such an inconvenient thing: The U.S. Forest Service has instituted rules requiring journalists to get a permit before they can take pictures or videos on federal land.

Under rules being finalized in November, a reporter who met a biologist, wildlife advocate or whistleblower alleging neglect in any of the nation’s 100 million acres of wilderness would first need special approval to shoot photos or videos even on an iPhone. Permits cost up to $1,500, says Forest Service spokesman Larry Chambers, and reporters who don’t get a permit could face fines up to $1,000.

First Amendment advocates say the rules ignore press freedoms and are so vague they’d allow the Forest Service to grant permits only to favored reporters shooting videos for positive stories.

The fascist nature of these new rules is revealed by this quote near the end of the article:

[T]he Forest Service is giving its supervisors discretion to decide whether a news outlet’s planned video or photo shoots would meet the Wilderness Act’s goals. “If you were engaged on reporting that was in support of wilderness characteristics, that would be permitted,” [said Liz Close, the Forest Service’s acting wilderness director].

But if you are reporting on something the Forest Service disagrees with they obviously believe they have the right to deny you a permit to film or videotape.

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The IRS versus the Constitution

1:49 pm

Working for fascists: The IRS did not just harass conservatives, it also targeted groups whose only focus was to teach the Constitution.

It is now well known that the IRS targeted tea party organizations. What is less well known, but perhaps even more scandalous, is that the IRS also targeted those who would educate their fellow citizens about the United States Constitution.

According to the inspector general’s report (pp. 30 & 38), this particular IRS targeting commenced on Jan. 25, 2012 — the beginning of the election year for President Obama’s second campaign. On that date: “the BOLO [‘be on the lookout’] criteria were again updated.” The revised criteria included “political action type organizations involved in … educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.” [emphasis mine]

Note that the targeting was aimed at educational groups, not political groups, which were simply working to teach Americans about the founding documents of our country. That the Obama IRS could somehow consider this activity political or partisan and subject to increased investigation is quite disturbing. Since when is teaching about the Constitution a Democratic or Republican issue? Or has it become one, with the Democrats now hostile to the principles of freedom for which these documents were written to defend?

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Obamacare enrollment plunges

8:24 am

Finding out what’s in it: At congressional hearings yesterday health insurance experts described how the numbers of people actually enrolled and paying for Obamacare is dropping.

“They’ve deteriorated quite a bit, this was anticipated to some degree, but I think it’s exceeded expectations in some cases,” said Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For instance, state officials in Florida say their enrollments are now 220,000 lower than the administration’s count in April, going from some 983,000 to just over 762,000, a drop of more than 20 percent. A state official said some may have been duplicate enrollments because of website problems on Healthcare.gov. The others, he said, just didn’t pay their premiums and lost their coverage, a problem insurance companies are also reporting.

Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, said, “I’ve talked to a number of insurance companies around the industry and they’re indicating that they’re down as low as 70 percent of the original enrollments they had.”

We must remember that the original announced numbers were far lower than had been hoped for to begin with. Now we are finding that even those who did enroll decided at some point that the coverage imposed on them by the law wasn’t worth the money and stopped paying for it.

But the Democrats care. They want to help. So what they their efforts are at best ineffectual and at worst destructive. We’ve got to vote for them anyway!

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The People’s Climate March leaves New York a mess

7:53 am

“Their love for the Earth is so real, they couldn’t even use a trash can.”

The images of the trash left scattered on the streets of New York is striking, especially when compared to the very clean remains after the 2010 Tea Party march in DC, and provide more evidence that the loud cries of “Save the Earth” by these demonstrators were quite shallow and insincere.

Nonetheless, this apparent hypocrisy to me is less significant than the actual agenda of these fascists as stated by them, before, during, and after the march. They want to imprison their opponents and than impose their will by force on everyone else. It is far more important to note this fact than the fact that these demonstrators are sloppy hypocrites.

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Obamacare forces Alaskan doctors to close their practices.

10:37 pm

Finding out what’s in it: “It is an unsustainable system.”

“Within the last month, Fairbanks has lost three other much respected physicians for the same or similar reasons,” Dr. Wennen wrote. ”I am not the first and certainly will not be the last of the exodus of physicians from active practice because of all of this.” Dr. Wennen is far from alone in his stark opposition to the health-care law. A recent survey from the Physicians Foundation found that 46 percent of doctors in the U.S. would give Obamacare a “D” or an “F,” the Washington Examiner reported.

But the Democrats care. They want to help. They aren’t mean like those Republicans and tea party conservatives, who simply predicted that these kinds of disasters would happen if Obamacare was passed.

The disasters are happening, and the people to blame for it are the Democrats in Congress and in the White House that pushed this monstrous law through without any negotiation or discussion. Think about that when you vote in November.

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Obamacare to cut tax refunds in April

11:18 am

Finding out what’s in it: After comparing the annual income and the amount of health credits received, the IRS is expected to take the tax refunds from a significant number of Americans who it determines received an overpayment of credits.

Your solution? You have to be able to predict with complete accuracy exactly how much you will earn. This of course is impossible for people like me, who is a freelancer, or for owners of businesses that depend upon sales to determine their income. Such people haven’t the slightest idea what their income will be from year to year.

Also, if you read the article above I dare you to then tell me Obamacare hasn’t made everyone’s lives more complicated. Just trying to figure out what this whole issue is about glazes the mind. Trying to figure out how to avoid a mine buried in Obamacare itself is practically impossible.

But remember, the Democrats and Obama care. That’s all that matters, even if that caring bankrupts us all.

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Global warming advocates finally admit their focus is politics, not science

11:26 pm

In writing a propaganda piece selling a global warming protest planned for Sunday in New York, this so-called journalist noted that if the crowd exceeds 100,000 “then the ‘People’s Climate March’ will likely mark the moment when global warming transitions from being a science and policy issue into a full-fledged social movement.”

The writer goes on to rave about the diversity of the expected protesters, even while noting the following:

The People’s Climate March is backed by an unprecedented coalition of 45 major labor groups, including heavy hitters such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — a group that Henn said “doesn’t mess around” — along with prominent grassroots environmental organizations like 350.org as well as religious organizations.

In other words, it is a union/leftist coalition and isn’t diverse at all.

Regardless, after reading that first quote highlighted above, words fail me. This is an outright admission that this movement has no interest in the data and in fact doesn’t want anyone else to have interest in the data either. They want to impose a political agenda on society, and are using a made-up scientific crisis to do it. Worse, a whole generation of climate scientists have abandoned the pursuit of science in order to help them.

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Ocean surface wind speeds declining

10:35 pm

The uncertainty of science: Data now shows that surface wind speeds over the oceans have declined in the past three years, and that August 2014 has the lowest average since 1989.

The author of the article says that these low wind speeds might explain why ocean surface temperatures have recently been high, He also admits he really has no idea. And are these variations because of global warming? No one has the slightest idea. To claim otherwise is to be an advocate not a scientist. As far as we know with the available data, these variations could simply be result of natural cycles.

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Ohio teachers threaten strike because they are being switched to Obamacare

5:36 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Teachers in Reynoldsburg, Ohio have announced that they will go on strike rather than accept a school contract offer that takes them off employer health insurance and forces them onto Obamacare.

The school board says it wants to give cash payments to teachers to buy their own health insurance on the “new state insurance market.” Ohio did not set up a state exchange which means teachers would need to purchase their insurance through the federal exchange under this plan.

That federal exchange is Obamacare.

The comments at the link are entertaining, as they all recognize the irony of this story: These teachers and this union almost certainly supported Obamacare and Obama. They did it brainlessly, for partisan reasons, without considering for one second the real life consequences of the law their Democratic lords were writing and passing, consequences that conservatives desperately tried to explain to them. Now they have to live with it, and they don’t like it.

The sad part of this, however, is that you can safely rely on them to still vote Democrat in the next election. If you are brainless once, what will make you have a brain later?

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The disaster and ensuing coverup of the Obamacare website

10:48 pm

New reports reveal significant corruption in the Obama administration’s botched effort to create the Obamacare website.

The Government Office of Accountability released a report earlier this week detailing the security flaws in the site, but a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released yesterday is even more damning. Titled, “Behind the Curtain of the HealthCare.gov Rollout,” the report fingers the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversaw the development of the site, and its parent Department of Health and Human Services.

“Officials at CMS and HHS refused to admit to the public that the website was not on track to launch without significant functionality problems and substantial security risks,” the report says. “There is also evidence that the Administration, to this day, is continuing its efforts to shield ongoing problems with the website from public view.” Emphasis mine]

The evidence includes emails that show Obamacare officials more interested in keeping their problems from leaking to the press than working to fix them. To me, that demonstrates both a coverup and incompetence.

But hey, this must all be the fault of George Bush! We have got to vote Democratic so that they can do more of this for us!

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Obamacare could leave 2 million families without insurance

12:03 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Because of the way Obamacare is written, two million family members might not be able to get health insurance at affordable rates and will lose the insurance they presently have.

Essentially, the problem is this: Obamacare allows employers to offer insurance to their employees but not their families. However, because the employee has what Obamacare considers “affordable” health insurance in this situation, the employee cannot get any subsidies to pay for the cost of insurance for his or her spouse or children. Thus, the kids and spouse are left in the lurch.

But that’s okay. The Democrats and Obama care about you, even if the policies they force down our throats bankrupt us and ruin our lives. What matters is they care. And that of course means we must all blindly vote for them again and again and again until society falls apart (as it did in cities like Detroit).

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Why is Wikipedia deleting all references to Neil Tyson’s quote fabrications?

11:02 am

Link here. Key quotes:

Judging by many of the responses to the three pieces I wrote detailing Neil Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes and embellishing stories, you’d think I had defamed somebody’s god. It turns out that fanatical cultists do not appreciate being shown evidence that the object of their worship may not, in fact, be infallible.

And this:

These lovers of science don’t actually love science, because science requires you to go where the evidence takes you, even if it goes against your original hypothesis. What many of Tyson’s cultists really like is the notion that one can become more intelligent via osmosis — that you can become as smart and as credentialed as Tyson by merely clapping like a seal at whatever he says, as long as what he says fits the political worldview of your average progressive liberal.

The author, Sean Davis, provides some juicy quotes from these individuals, who all seem unable to appreciate the importance of honesty, accuracy, and reliability when it comes to science and journalism.

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Judicial Watch demands right to cross-examine IRS officials

7:05 pm

Citing the apparent IRS cover-up, Judicial Watch has asked a federal court for the right to cross-examine IRS individuals under oath.

Judicial Watch is also seeking information about missing documents from as many as eight additional IRS officials involved in targeting Tea Party and conservative groups. Judicial Watch argues that the IRS’s unwillingness to provide this and other crucial information: “information that the IRS was ordered to disclose to this Court, under oath, more than two months ago – demonstrates that the only way the information is ever likely to be provided is if discovery is allowed and Judicial Watch is permitted to cross-examine agency witnesses…”

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Neil deGrasse Tyson under attack for fabricating quotes

10:16 am

A series of recent articles have attacked Neil deGrasse Tyson for fabricating quotes and other facts in this lectures and presentations. This article provides a good summary.

The article also notes how Tyson’s behavior is quite typical for too many modern scientists, especially those who have been touting human-caused global warming these past two decades.

In related news, climate scientist Judith Curry gave a talk at the National Press Club this week in which she outlined very cogently the real scientific debate and how politics is distorting that process. Unlike Tyson, Curry does not mince words about the data, and considers the fabrication of information to be a terrible thing for scientists to do.

And then there’s this: The Lonesomest Mann in Town.

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NASA has chosen Boeing and SpaceX to build manned spacecraft to ferry crews to ISS

1:12 pm

The competition heats up: NASA has made a decision and has chosen two companies to ferry astronauts to and from ISS, and those companies are Boeing and SpaceX.

I am watching the press conference on NASA television. Some quick details from NASA here.

This is a reasonable political and economic decision. It confirms that SpaceX is ready to go and gives the company the opportunity to finish the job, while also giving Boeing the chance to show that it can compete while also giving that pork to congressional districts.

Some details: After NASA has certified that each company has successfully built its spacecraft they will have then fly anywhere from four to six missions. The certification process will be step-by-step, similar to the methods used in the cargo contracts, and will involve five milestones. They will be paid incrementally as they meet these milestones.

One milestone will be a manned flight to ISS, with one NASA astronaut on board.

One more detail. Boeing will receive $4.2 billion while SpaceX will get $2.6 billion. These awards were based on what the companies proposed and requested.

I will have more to say about this tonight on Coast to Coast, as well as on the John Batchelor show.

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