Tag: policy

The new commercial space companies question NASA contracting policies

3:02 pm

The new commercial space companies are challenging NASA’s new contracting policy.

The article covers the conflict that I described in this post, whereby NASA is abandoning the more flexible contracting approach used for the commercial cargo contracts of SpaceX and Orbital Sciences and going instead with the contracting system it used for all past NASA subcontracts.

The article is errs badly when it calls the new contracting approach that NASA wants to use “non-traditional.” It is instead the way NASA has been doing things for decades, whereby the agency takes full control of everything and requires contractors to fill out so much paperwork that the costs double and triple.

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“Freedom Dies With Each Paper Cut”

7:15 pm

“Freedom dies with each paper cut.”

Recently, the USDA inspectors show up and pull our workers out of the fields for hours of questions (while we still are paying them). They inspect our houses. Several items just not up to code say these inspectors in an accusatory and snide tone. Threw a stack of regulations literally 8 inches high, small type, saying we are responsible to know and to account for each and every one.

Now we treat our workers very well, but we treat them like men, not children. The house was “messy.” My goodness, we need to hire a maid! The screen door was not exactly square with the frame by an 1/8th of an inch. Well many folks around here live in older homes that have settled. The list goes on, but no item was such that our workers thought there was a problem. The worst part is we were treated like criminals. We are awaiting our fine for our failing to memorize every federal regulation applicable to us.

My dad is 67 and told the feds that he was out of farming due to this ridiculous bureaucracy and storm trooper treatment. Their arrogant reply, “well the law lets us inspect your land and homes one year after you have left farming, so you can’t keep us off your land next year either.”

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Making hard choices

2:27 pm

A new poll shows that the congressional special election to replace Anthony Weiner in the traditionally Democratic district in Queens/Brooklyn, New York is surprisingly competitive.

The poll found [Democrat] Weprin, a state assemblyman, leading [Republican] Turner, a retired broadcasting executive, 48 percent to 42 percent in the race for the Democratic-friendly Queens and Brooklyn-area seat.

Two thoughts: First, this poll fits with another that shows for the first time a majority of adults don’t want their own Congressman reelected. If so, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Democrat appears so weak in Brooklyn/Queens, a place I lived for most of my life and a place I found to be so knee-jerk Democrat that you couldn’t admit to being Republican without risking being blacklisted from all things.

Second, despite the mess the federal government is in as well as the disgraceful scandal that caused the previously elected Democratic Congressman to resign, it is also not surprising that 48 percent of the population still wants to vote Democrat in this district. This is my biggest fear: the continuing unwillingness of too many Americans to honestly face our government’s budget problems.
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A Department of Innovation logo that can’t work

11:49 am

Department of Innovation logo

You can’t make this stuff up: Michelle Malkin points out that the logo created by Smithsonian’s Department of Innovation shows a gear arrangement that simply can’t function in the real world.

Check out the logo. 3 interlocking gears arranged in this fashion will not move in any direction. They are essentially locked in place. Which when you think about it, is a perfect analogy of today’s government!

The comments on the Department of Innovation’s own webpage are hilarious as well:

Perhaps this should be the new logo for Congress….since no motion could come from this arrangement.

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Life after the downgrade

10:30 am

Life after the downgrade.

An excellent summary of the consequences of a lower credit rating for the U.S. government.

There is a lot of anger at the moment in the US over the embarrassment of the downgrade, as well as shock. I’m most amused by the shock, to tell the truth. S&P didn’t say anything yesterday that was not common knowledge and common sense. If you had to rate a potential investment that had an income of, say, $22,000 a year but had costs of $37,000 per year, a standing debt of $143,000, and contracted future debt that exceeded $1 million, would you give that investment a gold-plated AAA rating and buy their bonds at the lowest interest rate possible, or at all? Of course not, but that’s exactly the fiscal situation of the US, at a 100,000,000:1 scale.

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Tea Partiers like “terrorists.”

6:09 pm

Leftwing civility: Joe Biden accused the tea party Republicans today of “acting like terrorists” in the negotiations over the debt limit.

And why? Because they simply refused to back down to those who want to spend us into oblivion.

Then there’s this quote from Mike Doyle (D-Pennsylvania): “We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

Impossible to spend any money? What kind of fantasy world does this idiot live in? The federal budget has doubled in the past ten years. Meanwhile, this debt ceiling bill does nothing to reduce the size of government. On the contrary, the so-called reductions in the deficit merely slow the growth of government. Under the agreed plan, in each of the next ten years the federal government’s budget will still grow, and it will do so at a rate far exceeding inflation in an dying economy choked by regulation and government interference.

How is it even possible to deal with this problem if you have to deal with people like this, who are so divorced from reality and consider anyone who disagrees with them the worst sort of monster? Sadly, it is impossible. Until we see a wholesale change in government, with most of these idiots thrown from office, we will see no change in how our government is operated.

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How the end of NASA affects national security

9:38 am

How the end of NASA affects national security.

Though I don’t agree with all of Dinerman’s points, he provides a complete and excellent analysis of the present political state of NASA. To me, the key quote is this:

NASA’s Administrator and his Deputy worked hard, along with the President’s science advisor and the rest of the White House team, to alienate a critical mass of members of Congress by ignoring their concerns, rejecting their advice and blindsiding them with critical space policy decisions. The Obama administration then wrecked the previous program on the grounds that it was underfunded and behind schedule, and replaced it with a new program that looks as if it is now underfund and behind schedule. Congressmen and women being human, and under massive pressure to cut spending, have now cut the guts out of the space agency’s proposed budget.

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10 years after concealed weapons law, the fearful claims of opponents turn out false

1:27 pm

Ten years after the passage of concealed carry laws, the fearful claims of opponents are proven false.

During the debate, opponents of the change warned of gun-toting, trigger-happy citizens loose on the streets. But violent crimes have been rare among carrying a concealed weapon license holders. Only 2% of license holders have been sanctioned for any kind of misbehavior, State Police records show.

Not that the facts matter to these anti-gun advocates:

Still, anti-gun activists say changing the law was a grave mistake. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence Web site describes state reforms like the one enacted in Michigan as “a recipe for disaster.”

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Outlines of debt ceiling deal leaked to press

9:59 am

The outlines of a possible debt ceiling deal have been leaked to the press. No tax increases, and a lot of promised cuts, some real but many that are probably likely not to happen.

If true, this deal will represent a victory for the Republicans, despite what appear to be the weak nature of the cuts. And John Podhoretz explains why in a very cogent column today, using the Cold War as an analogy.

Everyone on the Right agrees that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path that must be altered. The difference comes down to the acceptance of political realities. Just as the United States could not effect rollback in the late 1940s (or any time thereafter), so too the Right and the Republican Party cannot effect a revolutionary change of course on July 31, 2011 with the Senate and the White House in liberal Democratic hands. The strategy, like containment, must have a longer time horizon, though it has the same goal: Ending the entitlement state before it swallows up the rest of the country.

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Jaywalking mom gets probation but opts for new trial

9:17 am

The jaywalking mom whose daughter was killed by a drunk driverr, after being sentenced to one year probation, has also been given the option of a new trial.

Though I am glad for the mother, I wonder how it was possible for the judge, Katherine Tanksley, to award a new trial. First she sentenced the mother to one year of probation, then offered her the option of a new trial. If the first trial was faulty for some reason, how could she pass sentence? And if it wasn’t faulty, on what grounds could she allow another trial?

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What Democrats did wrong on the debt ceiling in 2010

10:44 pm

Analysis from a liberal at the Washington Post: What Democrats did wrong on the debt ceiling in 2010.

Raising the debt ceiling is really, really unpopular. The idea that Congress should vote itself more authority to run deficits is really, really unintuitive. Even now, after many months of coverage and the most aggressive communications campaign this White House has attempted, Americans are closely split on whether we need to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2. Whenever I try to run out the logic of Obama simply refusing to allow Republicans to take the debt ceiling hostage, I end up with us approximately where we are now, but Obama’s numbers are lower, the GOP’s numbers are higher, a number of congressional Democrats have broken ranks, and Washington elites are firmly arrayed against the White House.

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ISS partners discuss how to use the space station as a test bed for missions beyond low Earth orbit.

8:43 pm

Now why didn’t they think of this before? The ISS partners met today to discuss how to use the space station as a test bed for missions beyond low Earth orbit.

As I wrote in Leaving Earth, a space station is nothing more than a prototype interplanetary spaceship. This kind of research is really its main purpose, and I am glad that the governments running ISS are finally beginning to recognize it, even though their engineers have known it for decades. Note too that the press release above also gives a nice overview of some of the ongoing research on ISS that is directly related to learning how to survive in space for long periods.

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Over-optimism in Forecasts by Official Budget Agencies and Its Implications

10:50 am

Science discovers the obvious: Government agencies are routinely over-optimistic in their budget forecasts. From the abstract:

The paper studies forecasts of real growth rates and budget balances made by official government agencies among 33 countries. In general, the forecasts are found:

  • to have a positive average bias
  • to be more biased in booms
  • to be even more biased at the 3-year horizon than at shorter horizons.

This over-optimism in official forecasts can help explain excessive budget deficits, especially the failure to run surpluses during periods of high output: if a boom is forecasted to last indefinitely, retrenchment is treated as unnecessary. Many believe that better fiscal policy can be obtained by means of rules such as ceilings for the deficit or, better yet, the structural deficit. But we also find [that] countries subject to a budget rule, in the form of euroland’s Stability and Growth Path, make official forecasts of growth and budget deficits that are even more biased and more correlated with booms than do other countries. [emphasis mine]

In related news, it is now more than 800 days since the Democratically-controlled Senate has passed or even proposed a budget, as they are required to do by law.

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The emptiness of the Democratic debt ceiling “plans”

12:30 am

The emptiness of the Democratic debt ceiling “plans”.

On Wednesday evening, I noted the absurdity of Associated Press coverage characterizing the 5-page document with 3-1/2 whole pages of text issued by the “Gang of Six” as a “plan” — 12 times, plus in the item’s headline. Though I didn’t bring it up then, an obvious point to make about any of these items floating around Washington is that if the Congressional Budget Office can’t score it, it can’t be a plan. A month ago, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf told a congressional committee, in response to a question about President Obama’s April proposal, that “we can’t score speeches.”

And then there’s this:

Obama … claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as “the grown-up in the room.” There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president’s staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he’ll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he’s going to play Haydn’s Cello Concerto No 2, and, even though there’s no cello in sight, and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they’ve ever heard.

The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.

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Perry and other lawmakers blast Obama over shuttle retirement

8:43 pm

Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as other lawmakers from Congress, blasted Obama today over the shuttle retirement.

Bah. Perry claims to be a so-called small government conservative, yet he wants the government to spend a fortune to build and run the space program. Meanwhile, Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Kate Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) were around in Congress when President George Bush announced the shuttle’s retirement seven years ago. Their effort since then to fund pork through NASA and thus have NASA build a giant new rocket system, either Constellation or its new Congressionally-designed replacement, has been a disaster. Right now it would be better, and far cheaper, if they stopped fighting the new commercial space companies and instead get behind them, especially since the Obama administration itself has done a very poor job of selling this new industry.

A little support from Congress could go a long way to not only reinvigorating the aerospace industry, it could speed our country’s return to manned space, with multiple competing companies.

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