This seems to be a pretty good summary of the administration’s accomplishments to date.
Via Day By Day.
Dec 062009
Dec 062009
Laughed myself fuzzy at this one:
Dec 032009
Barack Obama Ecstasy Pills Hit Streets: Approval Ratings High
There is now a line of Ecstasy pills made in the image of the 44th president of the United States, according to Texas police who have snatched a batch off the streets.
Ecstasy is known for a sense of elation, diminished feelings of fear and anxiety, and ability to induce a sense of intimacy with others.
Well, finally. At long last, Obama’s policies are spurring one sector of the economy to innovate.
Nov 192009
OK, hands up anyone who didn’t see this coming…
But the launch came amid major worries about NASA’s future, as the agency has been told by the White House to consider cutting its 2011 budget by as much as 10 percent. Based on the agency’s proposed 2009-2010 budget of $18.7 billion, that would equal roughly $1.87 billion.
That kind of cut would end human spaceflight for at least the next decade — and likely longer — according to a presidential space panel that recommended last month a $3 billion-a-year spending increase so NASA could run a “meaningful” manned-space program.
…
On Monday, NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier told reporters that he does not expect to know what the White House will do until February. But he said the uncertainty has made it difficult for NASA as it flies out the remaining missions.
“How do we keep our workforce and ourselves focused on what we are doing and don’t get too distracted by all the ‘what if’ scenarios?” he said.
I’ve seen what budget cuts can do to operations in an aerospace firm. I’ve seen what rumors of bugest cuts can do. Back around late 2002, when things started going screwy at United Tech in California, many people could see that the company was facing troubles. And as the troubles mounted, those who could began to split. And “those who could” were, often enough, “those the company really needed to help them pull through.” So as Obama dithers on whether or not to end America’s role as a modern nation, expect to see a lot of the more qualified people at NASA decide that Now Is The Time, and either retire or go into the private sector. And this does not mean that they will simply transfer to other aerospace programs, ready and able to help the private sector take over after NASA is reduced to a shell… many of those who left United Tech went into Dot Coms, fiber optic cables, computer manufacturing, etc.
And so come 2013, if we have a new President determined to try to reverse the numerous bad decisions made by Obama, returning the United States to space might prove difficult. In the best of times you can’t simply pick up where you left off with a program that was cancelled just a few years before. And history, especially the history of science and spaceflight, is unlikely to view the Obama years as “the best of times.”
More discussion from Examiner.com:
The problem is that having spent eight hundred billion dollars on a “stimulus package” that has failed spectacularly to stimulate the economy and having been attacked without mercy for proposing to spend trillions of dollars on “health care reform” that would raise health care costs, cut services, and ration care, the Obama administration is contemplating an election year conversion to fiscal frugality.
There is as yet no confirmation that the proposed ten percent cut will take place nor how Congress might react. But should such occur, it would prove devastating to areas of the country dependent on aerospace already reeling from the impending end of the space shuttle program. It can also be suggested that cutting NASA would constitute a breaking of faith, not only with Obama campaign promises, but with the future. Yet another cancellation of human space exploration would more than ever mean that the Obama administration is just not serious about doing space. As someone once suggested, every Obama promise has an expiration date and the one for NASA may have just about come due.
Nov 142009
From the LA Times:
Gah. Whatever happened to “An American bows to no man?” Whatever happened to a polite handshake and a “Hey, how y’all doin’?”
Americans have no royalty. We threw off that tradition more than two centuries ago. The best of America involves the rejection of all that royalty stands for… caste systems, unearned political power, dictators who lord it over the “peasants.”
And yet, America has a love affair with royalty. If you look for it, it’s all around you. Look at Disney animated movies… how many of them have the “princess” as the heroine? How many products are aimed at little girls… with the notion that they are also “princesses?” Why was Michael jackson the “King of Pop,” and not the “President of Pop?” Why did much of the US go into spasms of grief when Princess Diana – who was not an American Princess, was not even an American, was not even any more in line to the throne – got mashed in a car wreck? Fortunately, we also have a vendetta agaisnt royalty: the closest we seem to come to it in the US are celebrities, who, like Jackson and whoever is the Pop Tart of the moment, get vast adoration ill-matched to their actual skills and accomplishments. But just as we liek to build up our royalty… we love even more to tear them down and see them ground into the mud. This, to my thinking, is a good thing. It means there’s hope that if anyone tries to become an *actual* King in this country… we will tear him to shreds.
From Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court:”
Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the
people! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race;
why, they were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person
born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble
and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church
and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor
king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor
the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him!
Why, dear me, _any_ kind of royalty, howsoever modified, _any_ kind
of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you
are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably
never find it out for yourself, and don’t believe it when somebody
else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race
to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones
without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people
that have always figured as its aristocracies–a company of monarchs
and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and
obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.
If other nations want to have royalty… hey, great, whatever. But Americans are not supposed to have royalty, and should not view “royals” or “nobles” with any more respect than any other foreign government official. Bowing to royalty – be that royal the emperor of Japan or the king of Arabia – shows deference and lower status. And much as I dislike the current President, his status is *not* lower than some accident of birth. Obama should at least make an attempt at having some goddamned dignity.
For
instance, those people had inherited the idea that all men without
title and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural gifts
and acquirements or hadn’t, were creatures of no more consideration
than so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the idea
that human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams
of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but
to be laughed at.…
Even down to my birth-century
that poison was still in the blood of Christendom, and the best
of English commoners was still content to see his inferiors
impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as
lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country
did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented
with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade
himself that he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn’t
anything you can’t stand, if you are only born and bred to it.
Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been
in our American blood, too–I know that; but when I left America
it had disappeared–at least to all intents and purposes. The
remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses. When
a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly
be said to be out of the system.
Nov 112009
Like many other geezers, I watched CNN with rapt attention as the Berlin Wall came down. It was the beginning of the end for Communism, though at the time many of us either didn’t realize it, or didn’t dare to dream it. Communism, and its twisted cousin Socialism, formed the most vile political/economic forms ever to disgrace human history. And thus the fall of Communism is something that should be remembered and recalled with some clarity and context.
Unless, of course, you happen to be a President who actually seems to *like* Communism. In that case, you phone in a short platitude-filled speech, but somehow seem to fail to remember just what the hell was actually going on.
As posted on the Powerline Blog:
Obama’s brief remarks are an exercise in bowdlerization, circumlocution, evasion. Omitted from the remarks, among other things, is any mention of the Soviet Union or Communism, Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul. Obama neither decries the villains nor salutes the heroes of the story. Rather, Obama celebrates himself. He is an agent of destiny. He is the fulfillment of history.
Be sure to watch the video of Obamas speech.
Obama had precisely *zero* to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet he manages to insert himself into the story. Back when I was hunting Nazis in the desert sands outside Da Nang, there was nothing more that I and my Special Forces cyborgs hated more than someone who had to inflate their own ego by trying to jam their own importance into past events that they didn’t have anything to do with.
Nov 112009
From the Telegraph:
During the election campaign, Barack Obama’s cool detachment was a winning quality, the “No Drama Obama” a welcome contrast with the “Mr Angry” John McCain, never mind the hot-headed “I’m the decider” President George W Bush.
A year into his presidency, however, Mr Obama seems a curiously bloodless president. If he experiences passion, he seldom shows it. It is often anyone’s guess as to whether an event or issue truly moves him.
…
When the television networks cut to the President, viewers listened to him spend more than two surreal minutes talking to a gathering of Native Americans about their “extraordinary” and “extremely productive” conference, pausing to give a cheery “shout out” to a man named Dr Joe Medicine Crow. Only then did he briefly and mechanically address what had happened in Texas.On Friday, when most of the basic facts were available, Mr Obama tried again. It was scarcely any better. He began by offering “an update on the tragedy that took place” – as if it was an earthquake and not a terrorist attack from an enemy within – and ended with a promise for more “updates in the coming days and weeks”.
Completely missing was the eloquence that Mr Obama employs when talking about himself. Absent too was any sense that the President empathised with the families and comrades of those murdered
Something that’s been clear for a while is that if the subject isn’t “Barack Obama,” then “Barack Obama” ain’t interested.
As for being “bloodless,” I think we all know why that is.
Nov 082009
Oh, lovely. Once again, leave it to the *non* American media to dig up the more important parts of the back-story. From the Telegraph (not, strangely, MSNBC):
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America’s Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.
He also told colleagues at America’s top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.
…
Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a “Muslim first and American second.”One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.
It’s things like this, coupled with the Obamists incessant claims that opposition to socialism is racist, that lead me more and more to the conclusion that politcal correctness and those who promote it can go directly to Niflheim. A “fear of appearing discriminatory” seems to have prevented the Army from doing what it should have, long ago… showing this dumbass the door. Had he been given a dishonorable discharge immediately after this little speech, he would not have been in the position to murder 13 of what he should have seen as his fellow Americans.
If you are in the military and someone spouts treason like this… Turn His Ass In. If you get in trouble for it… go to the press.
Now my mood of levity seems to have slipped again.
Nov 082009
Nov 062009
Yesterday Obama interrupted his busy schedule to address the nation in the aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre. But… it kinda took him a while to get to the point. He was at some event, so in the course of his address he spoke about the other people/events he was there to schmooze. Fine. But under the circumstances… shouldn’t the ass-kissing come *after* the important message? But not with this address… networks across the land broke into their programming to carry Obamas words live, and got treated to two minutes of back-slapping and ass-kissing and cheerfulness before getting to the damned point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0hiw8iXdMM
And then there’s this:
Muslim major screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ before slaughtering 13 at Ft. Hood