SWEEPING AWAY SPACE JUNK WITH BALLISTIC GAS CLOUDS?

Here’s a piece that Rob Merges and I wrote on space-debris legal issues in The Environmental Law Reporter last year.

FASTER, PLEASE: New antibiotic cures disease by disarming pathogens, not killing them.

THE DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: Jim Geraghty on “The End of the Cold War and the Triumph of the Cool Pop-Culture Celebrity President.” Or as Geraghty writes, “The pop culture stuff — the cameos on Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show, the celebrity guests at rallies, the appearances on non-news programs — used to be the frosting on the cake of a campaign. Now it’s the cake.”

KINDLE DEAL OF THE DAY: Breakdown, a novel of the aftermath of a deadly flu pandemic, for $1.99.

SO, ANN, criticizing Obama’s racial hypocrisy looks ugly? I see your point, actually, but I think that’s largely in response to a media environment in which any pointed criticism of Obama has been defined as ugly. And that’s a common lefty-media trick, setting things up so that any effective argument is somehow pre-defined as somehow impolite. There’s an instrumental argument that folks on the right need to take this into account, but beyond that, I confess I don’t much care. Obama’s politics are, and have been, ugly in the extreme: Dishonest, personal, vicious. Compared to that, noting that the whole post-racial feelgood vibe of 2008 was, to put it in ugly-but-true fashion, a complete and total lie, seems minor. Perhaps it will nonetheless alienate swing voters, but if swing voters are that easily alienated, and that immune to facts, then maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.

UPDATE: From the comments over at Ann’s blog:

Obama speaks racism in 2007 and I look ugly.

A black woman admits she sold her vote for a free cell phone, and I look ugly.

Obama takes over the UW Madison campus for a campaign event and I look ugly.

Christ almighty.

If you find this stuff ugly — in a way that reflects on Romney and his supporters — then I suggest that your reaction, however sincere, is actually evidence that you’re being played.

END RUN: Michelle Obama: “Barack Has Done Phenomenal Job Working Around Congress.”

UPDATED WITH IRS RESPONSE! SOMETIMES WHAT THEY DON’T SAY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT THEY DO SAY: Cause of Action, an independent non-profit legal activist group based in Washington, D.C., filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March asking for documents on presidential requests for tax returns of individuals or businesses. COA says that what the IRS did not say in its denial of that FOIA suggests President Obama has indeed sought copies of tax returns for somebody. Find out what happened next here.

FLASHBACK: More Race Incitement in Obama Speeches from 2007, as spotted by Christian Adams.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: After $500 Million Spent, Uranium Project To Be Redesigned Because Equipment Won’t Fit. “Because the space issue was discovered so late in the design process it will have a greater impact on the project, and that could affect cost, schedule and safety, he said.”

PLANNED ECONOMY FAILS: Too Many Battery Factories, Too Few Electric Cars.

TWELVE CARS THAT DEFINE CADILLAC at the age of 110.

ARMIN ROSEN on Jeffrey Sachs’ African NGO gone awry: “Sachs gives the impression of being unbothered by leaders who steal elections, imprison dissidents, and meddle in their neighbors’ affairs. Just as importantly, these leaders seem unbothered by him. Sachs’s brand of development doesn’t require systemic political reform—just pliant authority figures who can foster the kind of stability and cooperation that an undertaking like the MVP requires. Considering Sachs and the MVP’s prominence, these are appallingly low expectations.”

HEH: Campaigns Continue to Downplay Expectations Ahead Of Debate.

Related: Nick Gillespie: 3 Reasons Why 1976 Was the Greatest Year Ever for Presidential Debates.

THE 6 BIGGEST 2008 DEBATE PROMISES OBAMA DIDN’T KEEP:  Don’t expect his tonight’s promises to be any different.

HMM: Administration Knew “Within Hours” That Benghazi Attack Was Likely a Terrorist Attack Connected to al Qaeda. But they lied and blamed the video anyway.

AM I THE ONLY ONE OF THE INSTAPUNDIT BLOGGERS AND GUEST-BLOGGERS who loathes the Daily Caller’s exploitation of the 2007 video of Barack Obama stirring up the black churchfolk? I don’t think this is helping Mitt Romney with the swing voters at all. Like last week’s playing and replaying of the Obamaphone lady’s ravings, it repels me from Republicans. I’m a swing voter — I voted for Obama in 2008 and Bush in 2004 — and I am genuinely undecided this year. Those of you who are pleased with these seemingly exciting new weapons to use in the fight to defeat Obama are losing perspective. You are not thinking about how you look to the people you need to convince. Here’s a clue: You look ugly.

OBAMA’S CHANNELING OF AL SHARPTON IS “OLD NEWS” TO PROGRESSIVES:   Progressives and liberals in the mainstream media are scrambling to dismiss the significance of the video released yesterday by the Daily Caller, showing then-candidate Obama channeling his inner Al Sharpton.  James Rainey at the LA Times concludes:

With the release of the video this week, some of Obama’s familiar enemies want to relitigate his old relationships. They want to reopen the question of whether the president is someone Americans really don’t know. Maybe voters can’t wait for a second trial on the president’s sentiments on race. But it’s more likely the only ones who will be listening will be the ones who already condemned him the first time around.

As I stated in an earlier post, this is a revelation to many people who voted for Obama because they thought (wrongly, as it turned out) he represented a post-racial America. It is most emphatically not merely the ones who “already condemned him the first time around.”  People wanted hope and change— many of them have now lost hope and realize the “change” Obama wants apparently applies only to white folks, whom he sees as fundamentally racist.  This is not the post-racial man that most well meaning Americans thought they voted for.

A J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS FOLLOWUP TO THAT DAILY CALLER VIDEO: More Race Incitement in Obama Speeches from 2007. It’s like that whole “post-racial” thing was just a scam or something.

UPDATE: If this is “old news,” as some are saying (see Elizabeth’s post just above) then it raises two questions: (1) Why is the backlash so desperate, then? and (2) Does Obama seem less angry or divisive today than he did before being elected?

MAYBE THE ADMINISTRATION DOESN’T WANT ANSWERS: Libyans say few questions being asked about the attack.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: World Order, Under Siege? As the president has learned the hard way, history makes realists of us all.

FEELING “UNEASE” THEN “MILD IRRITATION,” THEN “SERIOUS CONCERN” about the University of Wisconsin’s decision to let the Obama campaign shut down the center of campus for an entire day, UW—Madison polisci prof Kenneth R. Mayer has 4 problems (itemized in a letter he gave me permission to share):

(1) In order for students to get a ticket for this event (which doesn’t even guarantee entry), the University is requiring them to go to the Obama campaign website, provide contact information, and then click on a button that says “I’m In!” In a very real sense, we are forcing them to become participants in the campaign and express their support for the campaign. This is SOP for a campaign event, but it should not be for the University. Having a president visit as an educational public event is one thing. Forcing students to declare their support for a presidential candidate in order to attend the event on campus is quite another. Should we be in the business of helping a campaign farm thousands of email addresses?

Note: You also have to give your phone number, which for many/most students means a cell phone number, something that I think most people see as more private, since it doesn’t go into the public phone directories.

(2) The location of the rally could not be more disruptive. It hardly seems appropriate to shut the central campus down for an entire day, closing offices and seriously disrupting our mission. I have several colleagues who had scheduled exams for Thursday. Surely there were other venues that would pose less disturbance.

(3) I have learned that classified staff will be required to take a vacation or personal day, arrange to work at another location on campus, or work at home. This is what pushed me into the seriously annoyed category. The UW is penalizing staff (or, at a minimum, dramatically inconveniencing them) for an event that they had no say in organizing or scheduling. That’s wrong.

(4) The University is finessing the central point of this visit. It is not a Presidential visit. It is not a Presidential speech. It is a campaign event. It is a major event when a president visits UW. It is, I’m sure you’ll agree, somewhat less major when the president comes not as a president, but as a candidate.

This is not a partisan issue (my objections would be the same if it were Romney). I think this should have been handled differently, in a way that welcomed the President but did not diminish our basic purpose.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama Was Against Medicare Cap Before He Was For It.

GIVE THE MAN A BREAK, MICHELLE TRAVELS A LOT: @BarackObama is following a porn feed.

TWO OBAMAS IN ONE:

Consider a commencement address by newly elected senator Barack Obama at Knox College in 2005. “So let’s dream,” said our future president. Make sure that college is “affordable for everyone who wants to go,” among other things, and “that old Maytag plant could re-open its doors as an Ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the street, a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of discovering a cure for cancer.” How did we reach the point where a politician could, as Kesler writes, “dangle before the citizens of Galesburg, Illinois, home of Knox College, the prospect not merely of a biotech research lab opening up down the street, but one that is on the verge of curing cancer”?

— From “Escape From Utopia” in the October 15th issue of National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru’s review of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism, by Charles R. Kesler.

“We need additional federal public transportation dollars flowing to the highest need communities. We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs,” where, the implication is, the rich white people live. Instead, Obama says, federal money should flow to “our neighborhoods”: “We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods, so people don’t have to travel from miles away.”

— From the Daily Caller’s article last night on Obama’s 2007 speech to Hampton University in Virginia.

Of course, Obama has long had an ambivalent relationship with suburbia — which he has professed bores him, and which houses those bitter, clinging commuters “going through the motions” — that is, earning an honest wage in private industry for their work, the prospect of which he finds “scary.”

Hey, nobody said being Anthropologist In Chief was easy.