Tag: politics

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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A Bell for Adano

8:01 pm

An evening pause: This lovely and poignant scene from the 1945 film, A Bell for Adano, showcases the superb acting of Gene Tierney and John Hodiak. He is an American commander of Italian descent put in charge of an Italian village now under U.S. rule near the end of World War II. She is a local Italian girl longing to find her sweetheart who went off to fight for Italy and is now missing.

The movie was based on a short but profound book by John Hersey. And what I remember most from that book is this speech by the Hodiak character in trying to explain to the Italians the right way for government officials to act:
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Dow dives below 12,000

3:54 pm

The Dow today dived below 12,000, a nine-month low.

The report above tries to look past the just signed debt agreement, but I wonder if maybe it was the debt deal itself that worried investors, since the deal really did little to gain control of the federal government’s out-of-control spending.

Update: “The joint committee process is yet another promise by Congress that it will get spending under control — just not now, but rather some time in the future, always in the future.”

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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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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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John Marburger: The passing of a scientific gentleman

5:40 pm

Guest post by Phil Berardelli

John H. Marburger III, former science adviser to President George W. Bush and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, died this past week from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was 70.

Just about every news article reporting the death describes Dr. Marburger, a physicist and former head of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, as a controversial figure. This article, for instance, in The New York Times, said the following about Marburger:

In a critical editorial in April 2004, The New York Times, addressing accusations that the Bush administration had distorted or suppressed scientific information that would conflict with its policy preferences, acknowledged the respect Dr. Marburger commanded, calling him “a respected physicist and lifelong Democrat who would not seem an automatic apologist for this administration.” But it added, “The question yet to be answered is whether he is speaking from conviction when he claims that the critics are off base or is serving as a frontman for an administration whose activities in this area are sometimes hard to defend.”

Apparently, because Marburger — a Democrat and one of the longest-serving members of the administration — supported some of the positions espoused by the Bush White House, that made him controversial. But in my 40 years as a journalist and 15 years of covering science, I can’t think of a person I encountered who was more earnest and straightforward.
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Senate kills Boehner debt ceiling plan

8:49 pm

That didn’t take long: The Senate has killed the Boehner debt ceiling plan that passed the House.

What the Democrats are missing in all this is that if no debt limit extension is passed, it is their beloved programs that will be hurt the most. The Republicans have more or less always preferred limiting government, so imposing the debt ceiling will only serve their purposes.

Thus, it is the Democrats who need the debt ceiling extended more than anyone. That they seem unwilling to agree to any deal or even propose one of their own seems the height of stupidity. Talk about cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face!

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How High Would Taxes Have to Be to Close the Budget Gap This Year?

5:41 pm

How high would taxes have to be to close the budget gap this year? One blogger took a look:

I decided to look at the IRS data and calculate exactly how high would the tax rates have to be close this year’s budget gap of around $1.6 trillion (it’s $1.65 trillion according to the White House and $1.55 trillion according to the CBO). What I found was certainly not surprising but still quite disturbing.

Take a look yourself. It is very clear that increased taxes cannot solve the debt problem. It can’t even make a dent in it.

In other words, those advocating a “balanced approach” are really only avoiding the problem. In order to get the federal budget under control we have to cut spending. Nor should that be hard, considering that the federal budget has literally doubled since 1999. If we simply went back to 2000 numbers we’d almost certainly have a surplus, and no one would die nor would the world end.

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Tea Party Members ‘Bloody and Beaten,’ But Still in ‘No’ Column

9:40 am

Tea party members still in the no column.

The debt ceiling situation is really very simple. The Democrats won’t propose anything, nor will they vote for anything that cuts anything. And a large percentage of the new Republicans elected to office in November won’t vote for anything that doesn’t include real and significant cuts. The result is there simply aren’t enough votes to pass a bill. This might change, but based on what I’m reading I suspect that come next week, the federal government will have to find a way to live within its means. And I think that will be a good thing, despite the short term pain it will certainly cause to us all.

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A problem like Pelosi

9:18 am

A problem like Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi said the following about Republicans: “They don’t just want to make cuts. They want to destroy. They want to destroy food safety, clean air, clean water, the Department of Education. They want to destroy your rights.”

I want to ask you: How do you do business with someone like that? How do you do business with a party like that? “They want to destroy”? (I’ll grant that we think the Department of Education a total boondoggle.) “They want to destroy your rights”? I’m reminded of why I revolted against the Democratic party long ago: They all talked like this. They all regarded their opponents as monstrous or subhuman. And I knew it was bunk.

And in a related note: Democrats — with no bill of their own — point accusing finger at Republicans.

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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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Why the Republicans revolted against their own leader’s proposed debt ceiling plan

8:01 am

Why the Republicans revolted against their own leader’s proposed debt ceiling plan:

The $7 billion that [was described as] “a real, enforceable cut for FY2012″ represents what the Government of the United States currently borrows every 37 hours. If the CBO’s scoring is correct – that it reduces the 2012 deficit by just $1 billion – then the ”cut” represents what the United States borrows every five hours and 20 minutes. In other words, in the time it takes to photocopy and distribute Boehner’s “plan”, the savings have all been borrowed back. [emphasis mine]

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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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Downgrade could come as soon as Friday

9:58 am

The day of reckoning looms even closer: Credit rating downgrade for the U.S. government could come as soon as Friday. Key quote:

It’s not the debt ceiling that’s triggering a potential ratings change — it’s the trajectory of debt generated by the federal government.

And this:

The problem, as [the ratings agencies] see it, is not that America can’t pay its debts next month, but that America has grown its debt to such a degree that we can’t pay them in the long run without serious restructuring of the federal government — and this administration refuses to consider it:

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Conservatives bridle at trillions in ‘phony’ cuts

9:13 am

Trillions in “phony” cuts?

The devil is in the details,” says a Republican strategist closely involved in the debt fight. “When you’re talking about $1 trillion [over ten years], you’re talking about $100 billion a year, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be evenly distributed among the years.” Does that mean it might be loaded mostly at the end of the decade, when it might not even happen? “That’s where you get into the details,” the strategist says.

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