Thou shalt have no other recourse besides the Government

I'm listening to Hugh Hewitt's radio show and he's talking about Obama's budget proposal that would reduce the deduction for charitable contributions. Hugh makes the point that this will devastate churches and other charitable institutions, weaken them, and quite possible leave people of little means with no recourse but to turn to government. This HAS TO BE part of Obama's plan. He is doing his best to drive people into the arms of government. If he succeeds, those people will find it that it is not a loving embrace, but rather a stranglehold.

George Will on global warming

George Will has recently had a couple of columns on global warming. His first one and then another where he addressed a piece in the NY Times that attacked his first column. Kudos to George Will for doing this. I also like that he is exposing Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, who is a "limits to growth" type character, a protege of Paul Ehrlich, they guy who was predicting food riots in the 1990's (gee, I don't remember those, do you?).

Karl Rove on the rhetorical vacuity of Barack Obama

In the Wall Street Journal online, Karl Rove has a great piece pointing out how Barack Obama will very often use straw man arguments in his speeches; i.e., saying that "regulations were gutted" in the Bush administration. Of course, he can't point out which regulations were gutted because THEY WEREN'T it's a LIE. Obama is one of the most bald-faced liers that I have ever seen- talking about fiscal responsibility when he is running up the largest deficit ever. Talking about improving education when his budget will end voucher programs. I just hope and pray that at some point the American public will see this guy for what he is- a poser and a dangerous one at that.

Dick Morris on Obama's State of the Union speech

Dick Morris has a good analysis/deconstruction of Obama's State of the Union speech. I like his summary:

"Oh, but he won't raise taxes until he's had a few years to stimulate the economy. How many in that 2 percent feel like one of those huge hogs in the Chicago stockyards, being fattened up to slaughter the next year?

Can all this work? Can Obama get banks to lend even as he terrorizes them? Can he get the engines of our economy back to work even as he announces that he'll be taking away more of their earnings? Can he persuade the American people to accept bureaucrats deciding their health-care choices? And can his economic stimulus survive a huge increase in the payroll tax on the most productive citizens?

Probably not; Obama likely won't succeed. This speech will be viewed as his high-water mark - the time before we came to realize how flawed is his understanding of economics and how supreme is his commitment to expanded spending. It will be seen as a sort of age of innocence before we realized what he had in mind."

The politics of science in the Obama administration

Good piece here (actually in the NY Times) about the politics vs. science of climate change and how Obama's science advisor, John Holdren (basically the guy is a neo-Luddite) has attacked those who have questioned the so-called orthodoxy of human-induced global warming.

The Good, the Dumb, and the Dumber on Meet the Press

I'm watching today's "Meet the Press" on my DVR. This is the first time I've watched the show since David Gregory took over. So first he has Bobby Jindal on and I'm practically standing on my couch yelling "hooray!". I tell you, Jindal is a superstar. He is my man for 2012. So he's "the Good". Next Gregory has Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida on. What a bonehead. Lest you forget, it was Crist's endorsement of McCain that helped McCain win the Florida primary and bury Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Thanks a lot for that Gov. Crist! Now the guy is practically giving Obama a tongue bath for the spendulus bill. Again... what a bonehead. And "the Dumber"? Well that has to be David Gregory. Can't NBC do any better than this guy to take over from the late lamented Tim Russert?

Listening to NPR: clueless commentators

I was listening to NPR this morning, as I sometimes do. They had on Juan Williams and some other guy and Williams and the topic was "gee... why is the stock market still falling?". These guys were genuinely clueless. They obviously buy 100% into Keynesian economic theory. The topic of putting forward some more tax cuts came up and they said "oh no, we learned from the Bush years that tax cuts don't work". I was out with some liberal friends last weekend and they also said that (that tax cuts don't work). OK. So maybe these people don't like Bush, but how can you so willfully ignorant of reality? From the recovery from 9/11/01 to earlier this year we had growth and close to record low unemployment and that was largely due to the Bush tax cuts. The commentator who was not Juan Williams when questioned about deficits said "oh we can't worry about deficits... FDR started to worry about deficits and the economy faltered". Good grief! These guys will spend us into oblivion!

finding alien Earths

In his cosmic log blog, Alan Boyle has an interview with Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution regarding what could be viewed as a cohmpetition between the European Corot satellite and the soon-to-be launched Kepler mission to find Earth-sized planets. Very interesting. When we finally find an Earth-sized planet in orbit around a sun-like star in an orbit that could potentially be the equivalent of the habitable zone in which Earth orbits... that will be one of the biggest discoveries in human history.

meteor strike in Texas!

Apparently a fireball caught on videotape in central Texas was not falling space junk, but instead was a meteor. The object might have been as large as a pickup truck with the density of concrete. Apparently some fragments must have survived because they started a small brush fire. I haven't seen yet whether fragments were recovered. I'd be interested to see what kind of meteorite it was.

"weird life" here on Earth?

Really interesting story here about an idea put forward by Paul Davies of Arizona State that there might be microbial life in extreme environments here on Earth that is completely separate from the "tree of life" line of descent for known terrestrial organisms. Could be... I still think we should be looking for it in the subsurface on Mars and Europa though...

Apollo astronaut Jack Schmitt speaks out against human-induced global warming

Jack Schmitt, the only geologist to walk on the Moon during the Apollo program, has spoken out against the idea of human-induced global warming.

Quoting Schmitt from the story:

"Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we’d all still be in the Ice Age," he said. "But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there’s disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming."

NRO post promoting "Gattaca" as a top conservative movie

There's a post on NRO's The Corner that promotes "Gattaca" as one of the best Conservative movies of the last 20 years. "Gattaca" is one of my all-time favorite movies. I think the poster has more of an unfortunate emphasis on the anti-science aspects of the movie. I thought it was a terrific movie because of the triumph of the human will as symbolized by Ethan Hawke's character.

Obama's press conference

Man, this guy is so profoundly dishonest. It really is quite apalling. He keeps on saying there are "no earmarks in the stimulus package"... the thing is nothing BUT earmarks. He is yakking about the deficit that we have now and how he inherited it and, yes, he did inherit a deficit, but his solution is to expand it exponentially??

Rand Simberg has a good take on all this here.

Check out the new Google Mars!!!

If you have Google Earth on your computer, I suggest you update to the latest version (5.0) and in that you can change planets and do fly-overs of parts of Mars. They even have the up-to-date (currently) traverses of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. In a word: cool! An article on it here.

Hey Barack! Apologizing is for wimps!

LOL, great column here by a British writer. There are a lot of inside the U.K. references, but I think you'll get the gist of it, that being as Byrony Gordon writes:

"I don't want the most powerful man in the world to admit that he has screwed up, and so early on. I didn't much care about this Daschle fellow, but thanks to this mea culpa my confidence in the Leader of the Free World has been severely dented. I'm sorry, but apologizing is for wimps"

I think this is something George Bush knew/knows instinctively but its apparently a foreign concept to Obama.

Iran launches its own satellite

Iran has been able to put a satellite into orbit. A rocket that can put a satellite into orbit could also be put into an intercontinental trajectory and deliver a similar sized weapons payload from Iran to America. Barack Obama, are you paying attention?

more signs of "global warming" (not): England hit by largest snowfall in decades

Well, here is another sign of the dreaded global warming problem (not). England has been hit by their largest snowfall in decades. I wonder if the Europeans who criticized the U.S. for not signing on to the Kyoto protocols will change their tune... no, probably not.

The Pyrenean ibex lives again (for a little while at least)!

Wow, I think this is huge news. A team of Spanish scientists were able to clone and birth a Pyrenean ibex, a species extinct since 2000. Unfortunately the ibex kid didn't survive. It seems like big progress towards preserving endangered species though.