Walker notifies unions of layoffs, but gives Democrats 15 days to reverse move. This article is a nice summary of the present situation in Wisconsin.
Due to the budget situation, it appears that planetary scientists have scaled back their plans for future NASA missions to other planets.
We will know more on Monday, when the planetary community releases its much awaited decadal survey, outlining their recommendations for the next decade.
Freedom of speech alert: Democrat state lawmakers in Illinois want to ban photography at accident sites.
House Republicans attempt to impose a national ID card.
Read the entire article. For more reasons than one can count (with the most important of all being that the public doesn’t want it), this is a bad idea at a bad time.
Couldn’t be soon enough for me! Two senate Republicans introduced a bill on Friday to defund public radio and television.
FOIA documents show that the TSA has plans to expand its jurisdiction to searching random people on city streets. More here.
The new civility: Sheriff deputies find rounds of live ammunition outside the Wisconsin capitol building.
This is a typical union warning to those whom they dislike. When I was producing non-union movies in New York City back in the 1980s it was not unusual for me to find live rounds appearing in unexpected places on the set.
Judge gives Obama administration seven days to appeal or Obamacare is dead. And he really means it.
Cutting the federal budget — two weeks at a time.
Puncturing the myth that more roads mean more congestion Key quote:
Read enough of these studies and you get a sense that much of the induced-demand hubbub is really a sub rosa extension of the war on the suburbs: Stop highway expansion and you can make life miserable enough for the minivan-driving masses that they’ll move out of their gauche “urban-fringe developments” and back to high-density metropolitan cores, where they belong.
In reading the full essay, I was struck by how much the scientific campaign against road construction reminded me of climategate.
As the 14 Wisconsin Democrats run, meet the numerous Illinois Tea Party activists giving chase.
Repeal Obamacare already! And for fifty straight weeks, the majority in every poll has agreed.
The civility of a mainstream Democrat lawmaker: “You Are F***king Dead!”
Not all space agencies (think NASA) have budget problems: India has given its space agency ISRO a 35% hike for 2011.
I have mostly focused on the federal budget battles. However, Wisconsin highlights how the same battle is going on at the state level. Here is a round-up of the state budget efforts under several Republican administrations, put forth by a California newspaper (located in a Democrat-run state with its own budget problems).
Have the Democrats blinked? Senate Democrats have expressed support for the most recent House Republican proposal, a short-term continuing resolution that cuts $4 billion for its two week span and terminates 8 programs outright. A lot more details here, including a program-by-program breakdown of the cuts. Key quote:
Republicans have made abundantly clear that they wish to avoid a government shutdown, as have Democrats to a degree, though for the most part they [the Democrats] have spent the last few weeks preemptively blaming Republicans for a shutdown, while at the same time failing to produce a single piece of legislation that would prevent one.
The inspector general of the Department of Commerce has just issued a review of NOAA’s response to the climategate emails and has essentially given the agency a clean bill of health. You can download the full report here [pdf].
It’s. just. another. whitewash. Let me quote just one part of the report’s summary, referring to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to NOAA in June 2007 in which the agency responded by saying they had no such documents:
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The cries and squeals are now coming from all sides: A former undersecretary for Science in the Energy Department during the Bush administration, Raymond L. Orbach, has joined the chorus of scientists whining about the House’s proposed cuts. [His full editorial, available here as a pdf, can only be downloaded if you subscribe to Science.]
Like all the other squealers, he admits that “the budget deficit is serious.” Nonetheless, the idea of cutting his pet science programs remains unacceptable.
It is when I read stuff like this that feel the situation is most hopeless. Is there no one willing to accept the reality that if we don’t start gaining some control over the federal budget the country will go bankrupt and we will not be able to afford anything?
Instead, all I hear are cries of “Cut! Cut! But don’t cut my program!”
The squealing of mayors: the U.S. Conference of Mayors attack the proposed House spending cuts.
O joy. The EPA today issued revised, scaled back regulations for commercial-grade boilers and incinerators.
The right response to violent rhetoric: The Indiana attorney general has fired his deputy for suggesting that the police use “live ammunition” on the Wisconsin union protesters.
Gingrich was pressed yesterday about his extramartial affairs by a forum audience member.
Why the Democrats might be making the wrong assumptions about a government shutdown. Key quote:
In many ways, 1995 was the last year of the old media world. It was the year before the launch of FOX News and the year before the Internet exploded into American life. The three broadcast television networks and the major newspapers still had a stranglehold on political news in 1995. Shaping the public narrative would be much harder for Democrats in today’s more diffuse and more balanced media world.
Wisconsin has begun reviewing complaints over doctors who were issuing fake sick notes to union protesters.
Why have I been highlighting recent examples of liberal “incivility” and calls to violence? Ed Morrissey at hotair explains it all in this piece about a Democratic Congressman who yesterday told union supporters that they “need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody.”
It isn’t that these vicious statements are only being made by the left. I have never said that. It’s that the press is only willing to condemn the right for it, while leftwing violent rhetoric is either ignored or made light of.
Vicious and violent statements by anyone are wrong, and should never be defended or excused. Ever.
A Clinton-appointed DC judge, in ruling that Obamacare is constitutional, also declared that the commerce clause allows the federal government to regulate “mental activity”.
Is there a crack in the monolith? A play about the persecution of a scientist who expresses skepticism about global warming is running in London, with favorable reviews!
An evening pause: Thirty-one years ago, February 22, 1980, Lake Placid, New York, the winter Olympics: The USA hockey team beats the Soviet Union 4 to 3 to set up their gold medal victory.
