Ten Lessons from Obama

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ARCHIVE    |    LATEST    |    LOG IN OCTOBER 4, 2011 4:00 A.M. Ten Lessons from Obama In less than three years Barack Obama has reversed all expectations. The election of Barack Obama brought all sorts of contradictions. Aman with about the least prior executive experience in presidential history was suddenly acclaimed a “god” and the smartest man ever to assume the office. Most important, a number of critical changes were heralded that would help address the supposed disasters of the Bush administration: a new “reset” foreign policy, a Keynesian economic miracle, a commitment to “millions of green jobs,” and a promise to end politics as usual, specifically the hardball divisive rancor of the past. Obamism, in short, was not a mere change in administration, but a religion. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ADVERTISEMENT - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In less than three years, however, the Obama administration has established a far different legacy from the one it promised, and the lessons of 2009–2011 will be with us for a long time: 1. The type and nature of a presidential candidate’s prior experience will be examined as never before. Obama’s two years in the U.S. Senate are now universally seen as insufficient preparation. The result will be more emphasis on executive experience and far longer tenure. Fairly or not, the Obama legacy hangs over the possible presidential aspirations of everyone from a Chris Christie or Marco Rubio to a Sarah Palin or Herman Cain. 2. For the time being, the media have lost any credibility as nonpartisan and disinterested investigators of presidential candidates. That many journalists now admit they were “saps” or accept that Obama was unqualified only confirms prior culpability. After 2008, can anyone possibly take the media seriously if they complain that a candidate will not release his undergraduate transcripts, or that he once bragged that he attended every service (“each week”) of a racist pastor, or that he once liked “blow”? After Obama, an entire array of old gotchas are off the table. 3. Ivy League certification and prestigious awards will mean far less. The architects of the massive but ineffective borrowing — Geithner, Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers — were either esteemed academics or high-ranking bureaucrats. We are no longer impressed that Barack Obama and Eric Holder have Ivy League law degrees, or that President Obama and Steven Chu hold Nobel Prizes — not after Solyndra, Fast and Furious, and the present stagnation. Americans assume that Herman Cain learned far more of value turning around Godfather’s Pizza than Barack Obama learned as editor of Harvard Law Review. Texas A&M is about as relevant to Rick Perry’s creating millions of jobs as Harvard is to Barack Obama’s destroying millions. 4. Again, fairly or not, “green” no longer denotes a noble effort to conserve resources and achieve energy independence. A Van Jones, a Solyndra, yet another promise to emulate Spain’s windmills and solar plants, one more call to borrow hundreds of billions for high-speed rail, and more Al Gore profit-driven escapades and fiery outbursts finally add up. Note that the president simply cannot any longer repeat the mantra, “Millions of new green jobs.” You see, there are too many video clips of such boasts associated with failed ventures. The age of Obama has turned “green” into a refuge for scoundrels. The next era will be marked by unprecedented national wealth from vast new gas and oil exploration, not from thousands of acres of subsidized solar panels and windmills. How ironic that Barack Obama will eventually do more for the gas and oil industry than any other president in recent memory. 5. We are reminded that populism and the high life don’t mix. Barack Obama’s efforts to play Huey Long were sidetracked by First Family detours to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Vail. One cannot both beg from and demonize Wall Street, and still play community organizer. Obama cemented the notion that liberal Democrats are the party of really big money and of very little money — and of few in between. The next populist will have to cut back on golf, stay at Camp David, and avoid the playgrounds of the rich and famous. 1   |   2   |   NEXT

WH SCREAMS: Justice Department’s “Operation Fast and Furious” scandal?

Published: 2:16 PM 10/04/2011 | Updated: 4:21 PM 10/04/2011

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By Jeff Poor - The Daily Caller

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Did the White House try to strong-arm a journalist in the wake of the Justice Department’s “Operation Fast and Furious” scandal? CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson says government leaders took a very aggressive tack following her revelations earlier this year.

On Tuesday’s Laura Ingraham Show, Attkisson said DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler and White House associate communications director Eric Schultz yelled and screamed at her over the story.

“The DOJ woman was just yelling at me,” Attkisson said. “The guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me.  Eric Schultz — oh, the person screaming was Tracy Schmaler. She was yelling, not screaming. And the person who screamed at me was Eric Schultz at the White House.”

Attkisson explained the vicious tongue-lashing:

“In between the yelling that I received from the Justice Department yesterday, the spokeswoman — who would not put anything in writing — I was asking for her explanation so there would be clarity and no confusion later over what had been said. She wouldn’t put anything in writing,” she said.

“So we talked on the phone and she said things such as ‘the question Holder answered was different than the one he asked.’ But the way he phrased it, he said very explicitly, ‘I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.’”

Attkisson also said the DOJ and White House representatives complained that CBS was “unfair and biased” because it didn’t give the White House favorable coverage on the developing scandal.

“Is it sort of a drip, drip. And I’m certainly not the one to make the case for DOJ and White House about what I’m doing wrong,” she added. “They will tell you that I’m the only reporter, as they told me, that is not reasonable. They say The Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable — I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.”

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Tags: CBS, CBS reporter, Eric Schultz, Fast and Furious, Laura Ingraham, Laura Ingraham Show, Sharyl Attkisson, Tracy Schmaler, White House

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/04/cbs-reporter-white-house-doj-yelled-and-screamed-at-her-over-fast-and-furious-scandal/#ixzz1ZqaL2jfE

The Left’s Pathetic Tea Party

RICH LOWRY ABOUT    |    ARCHIVE    |    LATEST    |    FOLLOW    |    E-MAIL    |   LOG IN OCTOBER 4, 2011 12:00 A.M. The Left’s Pathetic Tea Party The Occupy Wall Street movement is a juvenile rabble. In the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Left thinks it might have found its own tea party. MoveOn.org and some unions have embraced the protesters. The left-wing Campaign for America’s Future is featuring them at its conference devoted to reinvigorating progressivism. Liberal opinion-makers have celebrated them — Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne welcomes their spirit, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof compares them, astonishingly enough, to the demonstrators at Egypt’s Tahrir Square. This is a sign either of desperation to find anyone on the left still energized after three years of Hope and Change, or of a lack of standards, or both. The Left’s tea party is a juvenile rabble, a woolly-headed horde that has been laboring to come up with one concrete demand on the basis of its — in the words of one sympathetic writer — “horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought.” - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ADVERTISEMENT - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Right’s tea party had its signature event at a rally at the LincolnMemorial where everyone listened politely to patriotic exhortations and picked up their trash and went home. The Left’s tea party closed down a major thoroughfare in New York City — the Brooklyn Bridge — and saw its members arrested in the hundreds. On the cusp of the confrontation, the protesters chanted “This is what democracy looks like,” betraying an elemental confusion between lawbreaking for the hell of it and free discussion. They flatter themselves that, in contrast to the wealthiest 1 percent, they represent “the 99 percent.” It might be true if the entire country consisted of stereotypically aging hippies and young kids who could have just left a Phish concert. What was remarkable about the Right’s tea party is that it depended on solid burghers who typically don’t have the time or inclination to protest anything. Occupy Wall Street is a project of people who do little besides protest. It’s all down to a standard operating procedure: the guitars, the drums, the street theater, the age-old chants. If the perpetual rallying cry of demonstrators is to be believed, “the whole world” does little else than “watch” activists stage protests. The New York Times quoted one Occupy Wall Street veteran telling a newcomer: “It doesn’t matter what you’re protesting. Just protest.” That captures the coherence of the exercise, which is a giant, ideologically charged, post-adolescent sleepover complete with face paint and pizza deliveries. “The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” the first official release of Occupy Wall Street, is Marxism for people whose familiarity with Marx probably begins and ends with seeing his bearded visage on some T-shirt. It thunders that “corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth.” The myriad charges against corporate America include poisoning the food supply, torturing animals, and using the military to suppress freedom of the press. Of course, corporations stand accused — in a hardy perennial — of perpetuating colonialism. The long list of complaints is thoughtfully affixed with an asterisk and an accompanying note, “These grievances are not all-inclusive.” The Tea Party had such an impact because it had a better claim on the middle of America than its adversaries. It wrapped itself in our history and patriotic trappings. It plugged in to the political system and changed the course of the country in the 2010 elections. The Left went from denying it, to ridiculing it, to envying it. Occupy Wall Street is not a real answer. It is both more self-involved and more ambitious than the Tea Party. It represents an ill-defined, free-floating radicalism. Its fuzzy endpoint is a “revolution” no one can precisely describe, but the thrust of which is overturning our system of capitalism as we know it. If elected Democrats dare associate their sagging party with this project, they need immediately to consult their nearest psychiatrist and political consultant, in that order. Occupy Wall Street is toxic and pathetic, the perfect distillation of an American Left in extremis. — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2011 by King Features Syndicate

Article:

Giant Asteroid Vesta Has Mountain Taller Than Anything on Earth

SPACE.com Staff

Date: 03 October 2011 Time: 03:44 PM ET

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NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image of the giant asteroid Vesta with its framing camera on July 24, 2011. It was taken from a distance of about 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometers). Dawn entered orbit around Vesta on July 15, and will spend a year orbiting the body. After that, the next stop on its itinerary will be an encounter with the dwarf planet Ceres. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA  View full size image

A NASA spacecraft orbiting the asteroid Vesta is revealing new details about the huge space rock's surface, including a massive mountain that rises taller than Mt. Everest on Earth.

NASA's Dawn probe has been circling Vesta since mid-July, when it arrived in the asteroid belt that orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. So far, Dawn has beamed back surprising views of Vesta that revealed an enormous mountain in the asteroid's southern hemisphere and show that its crater surface is incredibly diverse place.

"We are learning many amazing things about Vesta, which we call the smallest terrestrial planet," Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, said in a statement. "Like Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury, Vesta has ancient basaltic lava flows on the surface and a large iron core … The south polar mountain is larger than the big island of Hawaii, the largest mountain on Earth, as measured from the ocean floor. It is almost as high as the highest mountain in the solar system, the shield volcano Olympus Mons on Mars."

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Vesta's giant southern mountain is nearly as tall as Olympus Mons, the largest mountain (and volcano) in the solar system, which soars about 15 miles (24 kilometers) above the surface. On Earth, the largest terrestrial volcano is Mauna Loa in Hawaii, which rises up 6 miles (9 km) high, including the portion of the volcano that extends underwater to the sea floor. Mount Everest, the tallest mountain above sea level on Earth, is a paltry 5.5 miles (8.85 km) tall. [Latest Photos of Asteroid Vesta]

Dawn also revealed that Vesta's surface appears to be much rougher than most asteroids in the main asteroid belt, which is a vast region full of space rocks between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Additionally, preliminary estimates of crater age dates on Vesta suggest that regions in the southern hemisphere are far younger than in the north — with some areas in the southern hemisphere only about 1 to 2 billion years old.

The findings were presented today at the 2011 European Planetary Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences Joint Meeting in Nantes, France.

Dawn at Vesta

The $466 million Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta on July 15, beginning a yearlong mission to orbit and study the asteroid. After a year of studying Vesta, the Dawn probe is expected to head off to explore Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system.

Vesta, which measures about 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, is the second-largest object in the main asteroid belt and is the brightest asteroid in our solar system.

The surface of Vesta provides scientists with clues into the space rock's past. Since July, Dawn has been moving steadily closer to Vesta, transitioning into a polar orbit as it scans the asteroid's surface. In mid-August, the probe mapped the entire sunlit surface of Vesta in visible and infrared wavelengths.

The spacecraft has since moved into a lower orbit and will spend the coming month mapping the asteroid's sunlit surface at a different resolution, said Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator.

Scientists are now closely studying Vesta's craters, ridges and hills, and hope to have the sunlit surface of the asteroid completely mapped by the end of the year, Russell added.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on July 18, 2011. It was taken from a distance of about 6,500 miles (10,500 kilometers) away from the protoplanet Vesta.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

View full size image

Dawn's framing camera is equipped with seven color filters that collect spectral information that enable scientists to show surface features in false color maps that would not normally be visible to the naked eye. These false colors are ratios of light intensity at different wavelengths, and are indications of different surface materials.

The spacecraft's observations showed particularly strong differences in surface composition around craters. [Dark Feature Spotted on Asteroid Vesta ]

"Data from different wavelengths can be combined to investigate different types of materials," said Maria Cristina de Sanctis, of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics, which manages Dawn's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIR). "The color variations seen by VIR suggest variability in the surface mineralogy."

NASA's Dawn spacecraft took this image of the south polar region of Vesta, which has a diameter of 330 miles (530 kilometers). The image was taken on July 9, 2011, and it has a scale of about 2.2 miles (3.5 km) per pixel. To enhance details, the resolution was enlarged to .6 miles (1 km) per pixel. This region is characterized by rough topography, a large mountain, impact craters, grooves and steep scarps.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

View full size image

Calculating ages on Vesta

Researchers also said that the difference in the number of craters in the northern hemisphere compared to the southern hemisphere is also striking. The relative ages of the craters and regions can be roughly calculated by counting the number of craters per unit area in the different terrains.

Early estimates show that areas in the south may be much younger than in the north. The oldest ages that have been found in the south so far are younger than 4 billion years old, which was surprising to the researchers since meteorites from Vesta were calculated to be about 4 billion years old.

But, the ages of Vesta's craters should become more precise as Dawn continues its yearlong mapping mission, the scientists said.

"The variation in Vesta's brightness as the sun angle changes indicates that the surface of Vesta is very rough, causing light to scatter," Raymond said in a statement. "This roughness could be at the scales of surface features or at the scale of individual minerals in the rocks, or both. Vesta's roughness is larger than most asteroids in the main asteroid belt."

NASA's Dawn probe has only just begin its mission to map Vesta, and should continue to study the asteroid through mid-2012 before continuing on to its next target: Ceres. Dawn is expected to arrive at Ceres in February 2015.

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