George Rebane
Remember how all the country got gruberized on Obamacare into such a state of dependancy that to this day no one has been able extract them from that calamitous benefit? Well, turns out that ol’ John got caught doing some fraudulent billing for consulting work he was doing for Vermont. But not to worry, the state’s AG will not pursue the MIT healthcare bamboozler under the Vermont Civil False Claims Act if Gruber just promises to go away and not ever come back. He’ll just wait until the next Dem is in the White House ready to get the gruberized version of single-payer onto the books. (more here)
We enjoyed the Nevada County version of the eclipse this morning. Jo Ann and I prepared our instrumentation to witness the celestial spectacle – I with my two sheets of paper with one having a pinhole in it, and she with a more interesting multi-image display on her sheet of paper with her Colander Camera. I also noticed that our trees eagerly participated in the event by casting countless crescent filled shadows as the moon covered more than half the sun’s disk.
NASA’s attempts to present live coverage of the solar eclipse were priceless exemplars of government in action. It was hard to imagine how many more ways one could screw up the presentation of a simple and predictable event for which there was an infinite time to prepare. They could have done better contracting out the production to a teenager with an iPhone on FaceTime. As an alternative to images of the proceeding eclipse, the NASA bureaucrats were convinced we wanted to see talking heads spewing endless repetitions of pabulum from different parts of the country, including the launch of some camera-equipped weather balloons, which event was televised by only showing the back of the heads of two NASA worthies while they watched and marveled at the balloon’s ascent of which the viewers saw nary an image. You can’t make this up. Two and a half centuries ago our Founders were familiar with this kind of bureaucratic mis-functioning, and therefore gave us a Constitution that was supposed to give government a minimalist role in the lives of a free people.
[update] President Trump has pulled the plug on Operation Choke Point. You remember the 2011 Obama program to sic his DoJ on businesses he didn’t like, from gun shops to coal-fired power plants. And oh yes, he also pulled the plug on the Federal Advisory Panel on Climate Change. Seems these guys have been mixing a bit too much conclusive politics with tentative science. For some reason our friends on the Left don’t seem to acknowledge such things as accomplishments of this administration. (more here and here)
President Trump’s speech made several things clear on Afghanistan; one of them being that he realizes we need to keep troops in world hotspots for a long time if we are to maintain our position as the world ‘white hat’ hegemon. But what no one seems to have picked up is that we are again in the business of fighting a tactic – terrorism – and no longer an enemy – fundamental Islam – that uses terror as one of its tactics. Fundamentalist Islam never came up in his speech. Do we again believe that so many young people all over the world give up their comfortable lives and willingly sacrifice themselves in the name of something called ‘terrorism’. I don’t think so. We will never successfully fight an enemy that we cannot recognize.
rebanesruminations.com 
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