Month: January 2010

ROI on Year One of new administration… paltry.

While this article by Doyle McManus isn’t a whitewash of the administration, it does have a few blind spots. One is below (bolding mine):

Take the $787-billion economic stimulus plan that Obama muscled through Congress as his first item of business in February. It was big, bold and ambitious — but in political terms, it’s been a failure. Most economists say the stimulus has saved at least half a million jobs, but Obama hasn’t convinced most voters that the impact is real.

At the current ratio of $1,574,000 per job ‘saved,’ one of course cannot begin to wonder why.

Still, read the whole thing.

Moe Lane

Axelrod on vacation?

Or does he just not care?

Slapdash

That’s from the Whitehouse.gov site, and as Kristinn Taylor of BigGovernment.com helpfully points out the message that this administration apparently wishes to convey with this is… interesting.  Something along these lines:

This message has been automatically generated: I will be out of the office for the next week, and will not be checking my emails.  Please contact Vice President Joe Biden at extension xXXXX or Speaker Nancy Pelosi at extension xXXXX in case of emergencies.

Have a nice day.

President Barack Obama.

I really wish that the White House staff would learn to take better care of the President’s public image – or even any care at all.  It’s embarrassing to all of us.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Martha Coakley’s (D Cand, SEN-MA) oddly obscure cash-on-hand numbers.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit & Vodkapundit readers. As I mentioned below, William Jacobson’s all over this topic.

Interesting. Here’s the short version: Martha Coakley is reporting that she’s raised over 1 million dollars since November 20th, and 5.2 million overall. So, Scott Brown’s (who raised 700K in the same time period, and who has just over 1.2 million overall) in trouble, yes?

No. At least, not from that.

Coakley, who faced three opponents in the Democratic primary, started the special election campaign with less than $500,000 in her campaign account, compared with about $300,000 for Brown, a Republican of Wrentham.

You see, most of that money Coakley raised got spent fighting for the nomination.  William Jacobson’s all over this topic: while he and I both think that she’s got more money in the bank right now than Brown, it’s not the 5-to-1 advantage she’s hyping.  At best, it’s 3-to-2. She’s also facing the problem that her public retreat on abortion language in the bill is going to depress enthusiasm in the progressive netroots; and that Republican activists at least have noted that flipping Massachusetts could – could! – possibly derail the health care rationing bill, and are contributing accordingly*.

Speaking of which: Jan 11th Scott Brown moneybomb here: main campaign site here.

Moe Lane

*Time for some unsolicited advice to the netroots: I understand that none of you want to hear this, but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to start punishing your would-be representatives when they tell you one thing and do another.  Bluntly? Martha Coakley broke her word when she fell into line with Senate Democrats on abortion language.  You know this.  But you will go nowhere until your legislators fear you and yours more than they fear me and mine.  In fact, I’ll tell you: they don’t fear you at all.

So here’s the Scott Brown moneybomb link again. Revenge is a dish that’s best served cold.

Crossposted to RedState.

Earl Pomeroy (D) would do even worse against a ham sandwich.

Say Anything is reporting that private polling is showing that Rep. Pomeroy is losing 50-42 to ‘Other.’ That should be taken with not so much a grain of salt as a lick of one, but I’d be as unsurprised as Jim is if it turns out to be true.  This is shaping up to be a bad year for Democratic incumbents trying to hold down Red districts.

Crossposted to RedState.

The thorium mines of Triton!

That was my first mental response to this article on thorium, the apparent wonder nuclear element of the 21st century (via Instapundit):

After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

[Alvin] Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

…which is probably why thorium mines featured so prominently as a trope in Golden Age science fiction, at that. I ran this story past MoeLane.com’s Science Advisory Council, but she didn’t know anything in particular about thorium: personally, I suspect that there may be a few other reasons besides the Cold War need for plutonium to downplay thorium reactors (possibly involving the phrase ‘hot liquid fluoride salts’). That being said, if it pans out I’ll take cheap power from mildly warm rocks any day of the week, particularly if doing so puts the antiwar nuke crowd into an advanced state of frothing religious hysteria.

Hey, I never claimed to be a Buddha.

Moe Lane

PS: If we’re going to have thorium mines, could somebody maybe come up with a man-portable atom-blaster?  Or maybe a vibro-shield?  Hey, it never hurts to ask.

PPS: You know you want this.

The steadily ebbing OfA tide.

I take exception to the last sentence of this passage from an excellent essay by Micah Sifry:

In the face of strong questioning from Melber about signs of declining support for Obama among young voters, and in the vastly lower counts he is getting on his Youtube video, Plouffe refuses to give out hard, checkable metrics on the health of the Obama base. Hearing Melber describe the disgusted reaction of uber-blogger Markos Moulitsas to a recent OFA fundraising email, Plouffe somewhat hotly replies, “It’s easy to take potshots, but I’m very closely in contact with the people who make up the heartbeat of the ground level of Obama for America, who are still out there.” (Telling that he says “Obama for America,” not “Organizing for America.”) He asserts:

“We’ve had a couple million people out there volunteering for health care, quietly in communities, helping maintain support. It’s different from a campaign; you’re not out there saying, ‘Register eight voters today.’…. I quite frankly am thrilled that over two million people, which is a lot, have done something on health care, meaning: they’ve gone out and knocked on doors; they visited a congressional office; they helped organize a press conference. It’s happened in all 50 states, and we think it’s a small part of why health care will get done.”

I’m sorry, but when two million people are in motion in favor of something, because they put themselves in motion, we know what that feels like. It’s called a movement. It started to happen in 2007-08, and it hasn’t happened since.

Continue reading The steadily ebbing OfA tide.