A very big scandal

The way the Solyndra scandal is shaping up it will make the Teapot Dome scandal during the Harding Adminstration seem like a picnic at Kindergarten.  This article in business Insider reveals how politicized this project had become.  It also reveals how clueless everyone in the Obama administration is about business in general and the energy field in particular.  Even Rahm Emmanuel, who was supposed to have some business/market credibility based on his couple of years working for a Wall Street investment bank at which he "earned" 16 million essentially for his government contacts, has his fingerprints all over this ridiculous boondoggle.  In a sane world, like the one that existed at the time of the Teapot Dome affair, everyone of these Obama officials who had anything to do with Solyndra, would be frog-marched off to jail and prosecuted for fraud and abuse of public trust.  As it is. this mess will be obfuscated to death and eventually pass from the scene as merely a legitimate government backed venture capital risk that went bad for reasons beyond anyone's control.  It actuality it was a project that never should have been backed by the federal government in the first place, and when it was,  some adult (of which there are none in this administration) should have been assigned to oversee every dime the company spent at every step along the way and been ready to pull the plug as soon as it appeared the company was not meeting benchmarks and was'nt going to make it.  The mindless incompetence of this administration borders on the incomprehensible.

Is Romney the man?

Mitt Romney has never really captured the imagination of Conservatives in the manner Reagan did.  That's just a fact. The guy seems to be either highly programmed or bloodless, neither characteristic is very appealing.  Also, there's the matter of his flip-flops, particularly with regard to the Romneycare health program now running out of control in Massachussetts.  In this post Steve Hayward points out another of Romney's questionable positions in his Governor days.  It's important to remember that Hayward is a true blue conservative who wants nothing more than to get rid of Obama.  And yet he has the same reservations many other conservatives do about the depth and sincerity of Romney's beliefs about the economy, climate matters and the role of the government.  After all it does us no good to be rid of Obama and his crowd and replace him with just a lighter, paler but similar version of collectivist leadership.  Conservatives truly believe the government is too large and intrusive and must be reduced in size and influence.  The question is does Romney believe this or doe3s he just want to be POTUS?  This question and these doubts are the reason conservatives keep looking for a viable alternative to Romney all the while candidates keep dropping out of the race.

Ken Burns interview with Reason Magazine

Ken Burns has done some quite interesting work in the documentary filmmaking field and  here gives an interview to Reason Magazine, a libertarian publication.  Since the 40% of Burns's work is sponsored by government grants, and presumably the rest from private sources, it is not surprising to hear Burns defend government funding of the arts.  In fact he suggests that in a perfect world all arts would be funded by the government in order to remove the perniciousness of commercialism.  Nick Gillespie, who interviews Burns for Reason, tries to challenge him on taxpayers funding of artists but is overwhelmed by an almost tidal flood of points and arguments for such funding to the degree Gillespie can hardly get a word in sideways.  Nevertheless it is an interesting interview to the extent it reveals the thinking of a highly successful documentarian of our times.  To date while not personally knowing enough about his work to make a judgement on its bias or lack thereof, Burns appears in the interview to be reasonably fair-minded and even-handed in his political outlook.  Nevertheless, any true conservative has to have a problem with state sponsorship of the arts which is the use of taxpayer funds without taxpayer approval.  Burns claims he personally is without political bias, that there has never been an attempt to influence his work, and that he is only interested in telling a story about history to as many people as he can.  That's just peachy, but who is to say who gets the funding and who doesn't and for what reasons?  Is it a democratically elected body making this decision?  Or is it a panel of "experts" who are appointed by a political body? And who makes the judgement there is no political bias in an artists' work?  Sounds pretty confusing. Best to keep the government out of the arts.

A welcome retirement

the At last one of the most liberal judges ever has decided to "hang it up".  Stevens defined relativism and all the other "isms" that liberals love, in short he was a big government collectivists of the worst sort.  Of course Comrade Zero will appoint another liberal, to be expected, but it's hard to imagine one more destructive than Stevens has beenI.  This post by Steven Hayward on Stevens' interpretation of the freedom of religion protection in the Constitution demonstrates his sheer ignorance of history at the very least.  And to think Stevens was an appointee of a republican, Gerald Ford, albeit a Rino who in today's world would be only very slightly to the right of Obama.  As an aside it's hard to see why those who denigrate or reject Original Intent do so.  The principal argument of the left in this regard seems to be that times change and the mores and laws by which we are governed must change as well.  This is of course relativism that has given us Affirmative Action laws and all the rest that have led us to the divisiveness that no rules the land.  How is this progress?  It will be a great day when a spike is driven through the heart of all "isims" once and for all and we can return, as a country, to celebrating the importance of individual rights and responsibilities.  At that point in time we'll begin to see true progress again.