I normally consider stories that beat up on a President for his time off to be partisan hack jobs, but the situation now is becoming absolutely ridiculous.
There there’s this satire, which imagines the kind of story we all know would have been written if Romney had won the election and had been doing exactly what Obama is doing today.
Working for the Democratic Party: Required by a judge to explain in detail in 30 days the destruction of its emails, the IRS has instead provided nothing more than shallow platitudes.
The author of the article above is very confident that, based on his past history, the judge will come down very hard on the IRS for its stonewalling. I pray that he is right.
Good news: Groups from across the political spectrum are expressing their opposition to Michael Mann’s court suit against his critics.
On Monday, The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press — along with 26 other groups including The Washington Post, Bloomberg and Fox News — filed an “amici curiae,” or “friend of the court,” brief with the D.C. Court of Appeals. An amici curiae is a brief submitted to a court to raise additional points of view to sway a court’s decision.
“While Mann essentially claims that he can silence critics because he is ‘right,’ the judicial system should not be the arbiter of either scientific truth or correct public policy,” the brief states, adding that “a participant in the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of public debate should not be able to use a lawsuit like this to silence his critics, regardless of whether one agrees with Mann or defendants.”
Just as Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg said it, I will say it also: Michael Mann is a fraud. He has no idea what it means to be a scientist, and should have been fired by his university after his climategate emails were uncovered. Instead, his university’s investigation was a whitewash and as much a fraud as Mann is.
Why did ULA’s CEO step down, and did SpaceX or the Atlas 5’s dependence on Russian engines play a part?
Very worthwhile reading, as it suggests that not only is the competition from SpaceX a major factor, so was ULA’s effort to monopolize the military launch industry as well as monopolize its access to the Russian engines, denying their use by Orbital Sciences.
And to this I say, thank god for competition. It always shakes things up in a good way.
NASA’s bureaucracy marches on: The staff at NASA headquarters today voted to unionize.
“This successful vote will allow us to work with management to improve working conditions for NASA support and administrative staff here at NASA headquarters, thereby improving operations, saving money, and retaining an engaged and professional workforce,” said Tifarah Thomas, a program specialist within NASA’s Office of the Chief Health & Medical Officer. Professional support specialists at NASA headquarters include budget analysts, policy analysts, administrative specialists, secretaries, and others.
NHPA currently represents nearly 200 engineers and scientists at NASA in Washington. The combined unit, including the professional support specialists who voted today for IFPTE representation, will now represent more than 500 workers at the headquarters of America’s space agency. IFPTE also represents engineers and scientists at NASA labs and research facilities from coast-to-coast.
Anyone with the slightest objectivity knows that the working conditions for federal employees in Washington is glorious, with pay about double what everyone else in the country makes and benefits far exceeding even the best private packages. In addition, the hours are great and just slightly longer than what my generation would have called bankers’ hours. Moreover, if I can be blunt, these engineers are mostly paper pushers. They are not the one’s designing and building anything that might fly in space. Their only reason to unionize now is because they see a threat to their cushy jobs with the advent of private space and are organizing to secure their unneeded positions.
As wrong as the rioting in Ferguson might be, the militarization of the police there can do no good, and likely will make it worse.
More here: A massive SWAT team demands that peaceful protesters go home.
The second story includes details about the arrest of two reporters for reporting the events.
The bigoted religion of peace: An Christian Iraqi refugee describes how the Muslims in Mosel celebrated the arrival of ISIS and the expulsion of Christians.
An Iraqi Christian who fled for his life from Mosul says that his Muslim neighbors welcomed the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) and told him “this land belongs to Islam.”
“We left Mosul because ISIS came to the city. The (Sunni) people of Mosul embraced ISIS, and drove the Christians out of the city,” the unnamed Christian refugee, who reportedly fled from Mosul to Lebanon, told Lebanese LBC/LDC TV in a July 30 interview translated by Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
And then there’s this: A mob of Muslims on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem force the closure of that site to Jews.
Watch the video below the fold and tell me who you think is bigoted and expressing hatred. As one of the Jews notes with humor near the beginnin of the video, “Look, three Jews, how many Arabs; they are calling to G-d, they are praying to G-d because of us, it’s wonderful. You see what we did?”
Things get more and more heated, beginning around 9:00, as they begin to approach the Temple Mount itself. Note that all these guys are doing is trying to take a tour of the site.
» Read more
Delays in the construction of Orion’s European-built service module as well as cracks in the spacecraft’s heat shield are threatening the planned 2017 launch date for Orion’s first test flight, unmanned, beyond Earth orbit.
Note that this program, costing anywhere from $10 to $20 billion, is only building a handful of capsules for flying three or four test flights. Beyond that, there is no money.
I have predicted this before, and I will predict it again: SLS will never take any humans anywhere. The cost is too high, the bureaucracy too complex, and the schedule is too slow. It will vanish when the new private companies begin flying humans into space in the next three years.
It isn’t just Congress that is having trouble getting documents from the Obama administration or the bureaucracies involved in administering Obamacare.
The article describes illegal stonewalling by state Obamacare agencies in Nevada, California, Hawaii, Vermont, and New Mexico, in order to cover-up the hiring of convicted criminals within their Obamacare bureaucracy.
We’ve only just begun: Because of a typo in a family’s Obamacare healthplan, their insurance company is refusing to pay more than a million dollars in claims in connection with the premature birth of their daughter.
[T]he Review-Journal reports that the Anthem Blue Cross insurance they got through the Nevada Health Link — an ObamaCare exchange — is not paying claims. The payments are being denied, reportedly because the mother’s birth year is incorrectly listed on the insurance card. It should be 1979, but is listed as 1978. The newspaper reports the family is also struggling to get their baby daughter Kinsley added to the insurance. They are facing $1.2 million in medical bills.
They have been unable to get the bureaucracy to fix this simple little problem, which is typical of bureaucracies. Expect a lot more of this in the coming years as the government apparachiks who run Obamacare tighten their grip on our lives.
Corruption: More than twenty Obama officials have lost or destroyed emails after learning that Congress wanted to see them.
[I]n each case, the loss wasn’t disclosed to the National Archives or Congress for months or years, in violation of federal law,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-California) said of [the] lost e-mails. “It defies logic that so many senior Administration officials were found to have ignored federal record-keeping requirements only after Congress asked to see their e-mails.”
Actually, it doesn’t defy logic. It is perfectly logical. This administration is corrupt, has broken the law numerous times, and is now aggressively destroying evidence to cover-up its corruption.
Ever get a feeling of deja-vu? The official in charge of the rollout of the failed Obamacare website regularly deleted her emails and will thus not be able to comply completely with House investigation subpoenas.
First, this is a lie. Just because she deleted them on her computer does not destroy the emails. Every IT guy in the world is probably laughing his head off at the blatant dishonesty being illustrated here. Second, isn’t it interesting how these Democratic Party politicos think it is their right to ignore the law. Third, isn’t this also typical of the Obama administration itself, the supposedly most transparent administration in history that has probably produced more scandals and coverups per man hour than any administration since Emperor Nero.
