Tag: politics

Senate Republican leaders ready to cave to save Obamacare

11:36 am

In the mistaken belief that a court ruling against Obamacare subsidies would damage Republicans, Senate Republican leaders have written a bill that would nullify the court ruling and save Obamacare.

With several Senate Republicans facing tough reelections, and control of the chamber up for grabs, 31 senators have signed on to a bill written by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) that would restore the subsidies for current Obamacare enrollees through September 2017. But the administration would have to pay a heavy price — the bill would also repeal Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates and insurance coverage requirements. …

But even if Johnson could somehow persuade Obama and Senate Democrats to accept his plan — a herculean task — the bigger problem will be his Republican colleagues in the House. The growing divide between the two chambers leaves the GOP in an awkward spot. The court could gut Obamacare in June, handing Republicans a long-sought victory they couldn’t achieve legislatively. But without a backup plan that the whole party supports, the GOP has no way to blunt the political damage if millions of Americans lose the ability to pay for their health insurance.

The madness here is in somehow assigning any blame to the Republicans. They didn’t write this law. They aren’t at fault if it goes down. The only political damage that will occur if the Supreme Court rules against subsidies will be against the Democrats. To think the Republicans will be hurt by this is plain stupidity, which isn’t surprising coming from a Senate leadership run by Mitch McConnell with the help of John McCain.

The Republicans should be arguing that, following a court ruling against Obamacare, the best solution would be to repeal the law outright and start over. Period. That is what the public wants, and has wanted, in poll after poll now for seven years, beginning two years before the law was even passed and continuing even as the law has increasingly gone into effect.

If the Democrats refuse to agree to a repeal than they will be the ones once again causing the problem. The Republicans shouldn’t be afraid to make this clear.

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The Russian investigation into Progress failure stalled?

8:47 am

Internal disagreements appear to be hampering the investigation into the Progress launch failure in late April.

The investigation had been leaning to pinning the failure on the disintegration of the Soyuz third stage oxygen tank. Others, however, are now claiming that the disintegration itself was caused by an improper separation of Progress from the rocket. The result is that the investigation has delayed the release of its findings.

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Berlin July 1945 in color

6:01 pm

An evening pause: For Memorial Day, on which we not only honor the war dead but we are supposed to refresh our memories about why we fought in the first place. This color footage of occupied Berlin shortly after surrender shows the devastation after World War II. Though it is tragic to see, I will be honest and admit that I feel little sorrow. The Germans brought this upon themselves by plunging the world into two world wars, and in the second used it as an excuse to commit unspeakable genocide. In order to make sure they would never do it again, and would instead become a part of the civilized world, it was necessary to hit them as hard as these images show. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin all understood this. So did the entire populations of all three allies.

If only we had the courage today to do the same to the petty dictators and Islamic fanatics in the Middle East. They are as brutal, as violent, and as bigoted as the Nazis were, and will soon have atomic weapons at their disposal to use as they wish. To really bring them to heel they need to be given the same harsh lessons we gave the Germans.

I fear however we will not have the courage to do so until after they drop some nuclear bombs on a few cities.

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The state of the Republican presidential campaign

11:01 am

This political report on the annual Southern Republican Leadership Conference and its response to the speeches of a large number of the Republican presidential candidates provides a very good overview of the state of the campaign, and who is really in front.

Not surprising to me, Walker is considered the front runner, with Cruz and Paul in the second tier (best indicated by how often both were attacked by the other candidates).

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Corruption in the Russian space industry

8:52 am

A slew of stories in the Russian press today illustrate again the deeply ingrained problems that country has, both in corruption and in its ability to produce a quality product.

The last story describes the overall scale of the corruption, which is not confined just to the space sector, but can be found in many industries. The aerospace industry just happens to be the most visible outside Russia, and thus the most embarrassing. Yet,
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“If they are white kill ‘em all.”

9:30 am

Feel the leftwing love: The student who organized a demonstration last month where people were encouraged to stomp on the American flag has written a 4,700-word essay in which he enthusiastically calls for the murder of all whites.

Quoting former Nation of Islam leader and New Black Panther Party chairman, Kallid Abdul Muhammad, Sheppard wrote of whites, “we give them 24 hours to get out of town by sundown.”

“I say, if they don’t get out of town, we kill the white men, we kill the white women, we kill the white children, we kill the white babies, we kill the blind whites, we kill the crippled whites, we kill the crazy whites, we kill the faggots, we kill the lesbians, I say god dammit we kill ’em all,” Sheppard continued. “If they are white kill ‘em all.”

Some might say that this guy is merely a fanatic and that I am wrong to associate him with the left. I would simply note that his racist opinions come right out of the gender and ethnic politics the left has been pushing for the past two decades. If he isn’t leftwing, he is at least a child of that movement.

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Patriot Act renewal fails in Senate

9:37 am

A victory for freedom: Due largely to the effort of Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), the Senate failed on Friday to pass even a one day extension of the Patriot Act.

The failure was a major defeat for Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who had pushed for a full renewal that kept in place all of the government’s spying programs created under the law.

I would not be hopeful, however, that we have seen the end of this unconstitutional law. I fully expect the Senate to agree on Monday to the House bill, which puts restrictions on the spying but still keeps many of the Patriot Act’s intrusive features.

More on this political battle here.

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Japan to upgrade its ISS cargo freighter

9:15 am

The competition heats up: Japan has decided to upgrade its HTV cargo freighter to ISS by cutting its weight by 30% and reducing the cost to build it by half.

Without doubt the success of the U.S. in quickly building two private and relatively inexpensive freighters, Dragon and Cygnus, has influenced this decision. The managers in Japan have realized that the HTV is not efficient and could be streamlined, and they are trying now to do it.

Isn’t competition a wonderful thing?

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Russian executive acknowledges SpaceX is beating them

9:03 am

The competition heats up: The chief executive of one of Russia’s largest aerospace centers admitted during a television appearance on Friday that their country is losing market share to SpaceX.

“The commercial launch market has changed over the past few years. New players have emerged, for example the American company SpaceX. Few people believed that a commercial project would be able to break into the market and create a competitive product, create a carrier [rocket] that’s competitive in terms of price and quality. But this has happened and we have to reckon with it,” he said. “It’s true that we have reduced our presence in the commercial launch market in recent years.

The irony here is that all of the decisions by Putin and the Russian government since SpaceX’s arrival — most especially the decision to consolidate the entire aerospace industry into a single corporation controlled by the government — have actually worked to limit Russia’s ability to compete.

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PBS news anchor admits she is a Democratic stooge

6:08 pm

Even as PBS provided no coverage of the George Stephanopolis scandal, PBS news anchor Judy Woodruff admitted on air last Friday that she had contributed $250 to the Clinton Foundation, supposedly to provide charitable aid to Haiti.

It is unconscionable for any legitimate journalist to give any money to any organization run by a politician. If she wanted to help Haiti, there were many better charities, especially since the Clinton Foundation only gives 6% of its donations to charity, keeping the rest for Bill and Hillary. She did it to let them know whose side she was on.

Meanwhile, PBS’s reasons for not covering Stephanopolis’s own payoffs to the Clintons are downright absurd:

I asked the NewsHour’s executive producer, Sara Just, for the reasoning behind not covering the Stephanopoulos story on the air. She said: “We had an online piece but for broadcast we didn’t think it met the bar as a story for our limited on-air news hole that day.”

In other words, we can’t cover this because it exposes a fellow journalist as a Democratic Party shill, and we can’t allow the public to know that. We have to help ABC and Stephanopolis make believe they are objective journalists so that they, like us, can help Democrats get elected.

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Health insurance premiums continue to skyrocket under Obamacare

11:36 am

Finding out what’s in it: As happened last year, the premiums health insurance companies charge will go up as much as 51%, as declared in the twelve states where next year’s premiums have been proposed.

Obviously this is all the fault of the Republicans for not supporting Obamacare. The Democrats and Obama were helpless because of this opposition, forced to write the law all by themselves and then shove it down our throats.

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Fascist gays attack business for providing them services

11:13 am

Fascists: A Canadian jewelry provided polite service for a lesbian wedding, but was then threatened with boycotts and violence because he dared put up a sign stating his personal opposition to gay marriage.

Let’s understand what happened here. This Christian jeweler agreed to custom-make engagement rings for a lesbian couple, knowing that they were a couple, and treated them politely. But when they found out what he really believed about same-sex marriage, even though the man gave them polite service, and agreed to sell them what they asked for, the lesbian couple balked, and demanded their money back — and the mob threatened the business if they didn’t yield. Which, of course, he did.

You understand, of course, that this is not about getting equal treatment. The lesbian couple received that. This is about demonizing a point of view, and driving those who hold it out of the public square. Just so we’re clear about that.

The goal in all these cases has never been about guaranteeing that homosexuals get fair and equal treatment. No, the real goal, clearly revealed in this case, has been to destroy any opposition, verbal or otherwise, to the homosexual agenda.

Freedom for me but not for thee.

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Patriot Act snooping prevented no terrorism

10:40 am

Even as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) fights to save the snooping authorized under the Patriot Act, the FBI has admitted that no terrorism cases at all were solved using that information.

So, what use would the government possibly want with such private information? Could it be that it could eventually have some political uses instead, useful for squelching any grassroots opposition?

Nah, our government would never do such a thing. Why, we only have to look at the IRS as proof!

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Nature ignores the elephant in the room

8:45 am

In an article on the possibility that a section on the edge of the Antarctica icecap might be melting, the journal Nature illustrated some of the political agenda-driven science that corrupts climate science and the journalism that covers the field by never noting that the icecap is presently setting size records.

Read the article at the link. Though they never mention global warming, they hint at it repeatedly by noting the arrival of new warm ocean currents. More importantly, they fail to place the whole issue in context by never noting the record-setting growth of the icecap in recent years. For a section of the icecap fringe to suddenly accelerate its “surge to the sea five years ago” during a period when the icecap has been expanding in an unprecedented manner is hardly surprising, and is hardly an indication of global warming. Instead, it suggests the icecap is behaving exactly as one would expect, shedding excess ice as it expands.

By not mentioning the icecap’s recent growth the article allows an uneducated reader to come the incorrect conclusion: that only global warming could cause this melting. It also avoids revealing the complexity and uncertainties that surround this climate research.

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House passes revisions to space law

8:12 am

The competition heats up: The House yesterday passed a major revision to the 2004 space law in an effort to encourage commercial private development in space.

Most of the revisions were requested by the industry itself, and generally eased government interference. As usual, the opposition came from Democrats who wished to maintain as much power for government as possible.

The bill still needs to be approved by the Senate and signed by the President. The Obama administration has expressed “concerns” but has also not opposed the bill.

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Russians delay next Angara launch to replace Briz upper stage

11:24 am

The competition heats up? The Russians have delayed until late 2016 the first test flight of the heavy-lift version of their new Angara rocket so that they can fly it with its own new upper stage, rather than using the trouble-plagued Briz upper stage used on Proton.

In other words, they want to dump all the components of the Proton as soon as possible. Whether this will solve the quality control problems that seem to be systemic to their aerospace industry however remains questionable. If I was a commercial satellite company I would have as little faith in Angara, until it has proven itself through a number of launches.

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Rogozin pins Proton failure on “moral degeneration”

2:31 pm

In a speech before the State Duma, Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin blamed the “moral degeneration” of the top leaders of their county’s aerospace industry for Saturday’s Proton launch failure.

“With such degeneration in the leadership of the enterprises, there’s no surprise at such a high degree of accidents,” said Rogozin who said that “space bosses have long gone into their own space.” … The vice premier expressed those that the force of “legal gravitation will lead them [those responsible for the failure of the Progress and the Proton] to where they should be,” RIA Novosti quoted him as saying.

In other words, expect more arrests and prosecutions. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that Rogozin or Putin are doing anything to make their space industry more competitive and thus capable of generating the profits necessary to keep it afloat.

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The media’s fraud and dishonest bias documented

12:43 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: A detailed list of documented cases since 1992 where mainstream media sources were caught deliberately falsifying facts in order to slander conservatives or to promote the leftwing agenda.

None of these 48 examples are opinion pieces. In every case, false information or opinions were reported as facts, only to be found to be fabricated or completely counter to the facts as later documented. And as the author notes, the number of these faked stories has increased in recent years, partly because of the existence of alternative news sources on the web which point them out, but mostly because the mainstream media has become more blatantly partisan and dishonest in recent years.

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Celebrating the death of the mainstream media

7:41 pm

The rage builds.

[M]embers of the mainstream media are presumptively hacks, and the pain and misery they endure as their organizations convulse and die should inspire laughter and joy. Sure, there are honest reporters out there, but that’s only a fluke of statistics. There have to be some, if only because of the random vagaries of chance. They can get real jobs with the new media. But in general, MSM members’ pain is our gain.

Remember, they hate us. Hate us. They don’t merely not care about us. They don’t simply misunderstand us. They hate what we think. They hate how we live. They hate what we believe. They hate us.

And it shouldn’t come as a shock if we hate them right back. We normals have already started an unofficial, uncoordinated boycott of the mainstream media.

Read it all, and remind yourself that ABC News considers it perfectly acceptable for their lead anchor to contribute big bucks to the Democratic Party. This is also the same network that is working hand-in-glove with the communist dictatorship in Cuba to spread their propaganda.

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Update on Saturday’s Proton launch failure

10:15 am

Link here. The failure was in the third stage, which was the cause of a previous Proton failure last May.

Note that the Proton also put a commercial satellite in the wrong orbit in October when the upper stage underperformed.

Overall, the Russians are doing a very poor job in eliminating the serious quality control problems that have plagued their aerospace industry in recent years. If anything, the problems appear to be worsening.

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The rage builds, even in a posh DC suburb

9:03 am

A stealth write-in campaign defeated a long-time incumbent on the town council for Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Read it. Everything about this story — the reaction to the election by incumbents and their supporters, the reasons the challenger kept his campaign quiet, why he ran in the first place — illustrates the growing fury that ordinary Americans are feeling toward the people presently in power, even at the lowest levels of government. There is contempt for the general population by those in charge, and that general population is becoming increasingly rebellious about it.

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Stephanopoulos admits he is a Democratic stooge

9:50 am

Why I consider television news a Democratic Party cesspool: George Stephanopoulos admits that he had donated $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation, even as he conducted interviews condemning critics of that foundation, without disclosing his donations.

Meanwhile, ABC News has absolved Stephanopoulos of any wrong-doing, which is not a surprise, since from the perspective of television news Stephanopoulos didn’t do anything wrong. He supported the Clintons and the Democratic Party, both by how he reported the news and conducted his interviews, and now with money itself. This is exactly what a television news anchor is supposed to do in today’s modern television propaganda machine: Help Democrats get elected.

If you get your news information from this news source, you either are incredibly naive, or are a Democratic stooge yourself.

Update: The amount of money Stephanopoulos donated to the Clintons is actually $75K, not $50K as first reported.

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House Science Committee approves changes to space law

9:37 am

In a series of party line votes, the House Science Committee has approved a number of changes to the laws that govern the private commercial space industry.

Almost all of the changes were advocated by the industry itself, so in general they move to ease the regulatory and liability burdens that has been hampering the industry since the 2004 revisions to space law. While it is very unlikely commercial space can ever get free of strong federal regulation, these changes indicate that they can eventually get some of the worst regulations eased.

I should note also that, as expected, the Democrats opposed any easing of federal power. To them, all things must be controlled by the government, and to ease any regulations is to commit the most horrific of crimes. Note also that the Democratic lead in this opposition came mostly from Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-Maryland), who has announced her intention to run for the Barbara Mikulski’s senate seat. This mark-up hearing thus gives us an idea of the future impact of Edwards should she win.

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Sarah Brightman pulls out of her flight to ISS later this year

9:08 am

Citing family issues, Sarah Brightman has suddenly canceled her plans to fly to ISS later this year as a space tourist.

All the press announcements of this decision emphasize that she was doing quite well in the training program, but one wonders. There had been rumors of being replaced in recent weeks, and the “family issues” cited in today’s announcement could be a cover for anything.

Either way, this is unfortunate, because her flight would have been quite entertaining and would have done a great deal to promote the space tourism industry.

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