Monday, October 03, 2011

Quick Dispatches from the Culture Wars

* Grounded: Obama Dismantles the Once-Inspiring Space Program

High-profile critics fear President Barack Obama's commercial overhaul of human spaceflight is going nowhere and could mark the end of half a century of US supremacy among the stars and planets.

"We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future," Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, warned lawmakers at a recent hearing.

The end of the space shuttle era has left America's human spaceflight program in an "embarrassing" state, Armstrong said, arguing that NASA needs a stronger vision for the future and should focus on returning humans to the Moon and to the International Space Station.

With the US space shuttle program now mothballed after its last flight in July, the United States is forced to depend on Russia's Soyuz capsules to ferry astronauts to the orbiting research laboratory until at least 2015...
(Breitbart story)

* A Tragic Investment

If you ever watch TV, you probably know the face of Don Lapre, a multi-level marketing salesman and infomercial star who touted such products as "The Greatest Vitamin in the World" and the "Making Money Package." Earlier this summer Lapre was arested on 41 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and promotional money laundering. And yesterday Lapre was found dead in his jail cell, authorities believe by his own hand.

* You Still Doubt the Totalitarian Ambitions of "Liberal" Politicians?

Check out the recent statements of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who not only believes that government's "highest duty" is requiring people to adopt a healthy diet but that the United Nations and international laws need to be hauled in to make sure we all eat what government puts on our plates.

* ObamaCare's "Health Care Savings" Are Actually Steep Rises in Costs

Workers at the Flora Venture flower shop in Newmarket, NH, remember when presidential candidate named Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., promised that their health care costs would go down if they elected him and his health care plan was enacted.

On May 3, 2008, the president told voters that he had “a health care plan that would save the average family$2,500 on their premiums.”

Last year workers at the flower shop saw their insurance premiums shoot up 41 percent.

“I basically work for the health care payments,” says manager Pat Cowhig, whose husband has medical issues.

The Kaiser Family Foundation shows family premiums topped $15,000 a year for the first time in 2011, increasing a whopping 9% this year, three times more than the increase the year before. The study says that up to 2% of that increase is because of the health care law’s provisions, such as allowing families to add grown children up to 26 years old to their policies...
(ABC News)