The Hollywood Liberal

Virgin Galactic Gears Up for Space Flights
As if his plan for global domination weren’t enough, Virgin Group honcho Richard Branson is taking to space with his new commercial spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, which will grant six paying customers at a time the experience of weightlessness for six minutes.  —KA Check out Virgin Galactic’s Web site here. BBC: SS1 became the world’s first private spaceship with a series of high-altitude flights in 2004. Its successor, however, is twice as large, measuring 18m (60ft) in length. And whereas SpaceShipOne only had a single pilot (and the ballast equivalent of two passengers), SS2 will have a crew of two and room for six passengers. “This is a very big space ship so you have got a lot of room to float around, lots of windows to looks out,” the AFP news agency quoted Sir Richard as saying. About 300 individuals are reported to have signed up for a flight. They are all willing to pay about $200,000 (£121,000) for the privilege of experiencing six minutes of weightlessness during what will be a two-hour end-to-end flight. Read more READ THE WHOLE ITEM

As if his plan for global domination weren’t enough, Virgin Group honcho Richard Branson is taking to space with his new commercial spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, which will grant six paying customers at a time the experience of weightlessness for six minutes.? —KA

Check out Virgin Galactic’s Web site here.

BBC:

SS1 became the world’s first private spaceship with a series of high-altitude flights in 2004.

Its successor, however, is twice as large, measuring 18m (60ft) in length. And whereas SpaceShipOne only had a single pilot (and the ballast equivalent of two passengers), SS2 will have a crew of two and room for six passengers.

“This is a very big space ship so you have got a lot of room to float around, lots of windows to looks out,” the AFP news agency quoted Sir Richard as saying.

About 300 individuals are reported to have signed up for a flight. They are all willing to pay about $200,000 (£121,000) for the privilege of experiencing six minutes of weightlessness during what will be a two-hour end-to-end flight.

Read more

READ THE WHOLE ITEM

Related Entries

• December 7, 2009 Larry’s List: Rainy Day Edition
• December 3, 2009 Tiger Woods Scandal

Chris Weigant: Random 2010 Thoughts
As 2009 draws to a close, the politically wonky among us begin to turn our eyes towards the 2010 election landscape. Congressional midterm elections will…

Av Sinensky: Did The White House Crashers Follow The Rules Of Wedding Crashers?
Unless you’ve been on line for and unpacking your purchases from some Black Friday sale for the last two weeks, by now you have probably…

Tom Dunkel: Setting Free the Salahis
The other day I flipped through an old photo album and, as suspected, there they were: Tareq and Michaele Salahi, seated near the glazed…

Conservatives express outrage over Reid slavery remarks — yet routinely claim progressives enslaving America

Conservative media figures have attacked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) remarks linking slavery to Republican opposition to health care reform legislation, but have routinely attacked progressives and the Obama administration for creating “slavery” and enslaving the public.

Conservatives express outrage over Reid remarks

Fox’s Bolling: “Were you shocked as I was when I heard him?” On the December 7 edition of Fox News’ Your World, guest host Eric Bolling — who also frequently guest hosts for Glenn Beck — asked Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (TX): “[W]ere you shocked as I was when I heard him compare — if you were against health care, you may actually be in favor of slavery?” Bolling later asked if Reid’s comments were an indication of “desperation” about health care reform.

FoxNews.com: Reid “took his GOP-blasting rhetoric to a new level Monday.” In a December 7 article, FoxNews.com wrote that Reid “took his GOP-blasting rhetoric to a new level Monday, comparing Republicans who oppose health care reform to lawmakers who clung to the institution of slavery more than a century ago.”

Limbaugh: “This is outrageous.” On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh said that Reid’s remarks were “outrageous, because Harry Reid knows the Republican Party was born in the fight against slavery.” Limbaugh added that Reid’s remarks are an indication of what Democrats have “been reduced to.”

Malkin: Reid “playing the race card.” In a December 7 post, Michelle Malkin wrote that Reid was playing the race card in his remarks, adding: “I’m sure Nevadans appreciate being likened to slavemasters, too.”

Conservatives frequently accuse Obama administration, progressives of creating “slavery”

For instance:

• Beck: Recipients of federal aid have been “taught to be slaves”

• Beck: Progressive policies create “slavery”; “slavery to government, welfare, affirmative action, regulation, control”

• After ranting about how “illegal immigration is modern-day slavery,” Beck compares himself to Ben Franklin

• Beck says he can “make a case” Rathke brothers are “enslaving people through ACORN”

• Beck: “The government’s irresponsible spending is turning us into slaves”

• Tax deduction change latest Obama proposal Beck claims “involves enslaving people”

• Beck: “You know what this president is doing right now? He is addicting this country to heroin — the heroin that is government slavery.”

• Beck says of stimulus package: “It is slavery”

• Beck again compares recovery bill to slavery

• On Fox, Forbes’ Ozanian refers to Employee Free Choice Act as “pro-slavery bill”

• Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com publishes blog post comparing health care reform proposal to slavery

• In rant on health care, Levin equated Senate Finance bill with “economic slavery”

• Limbaugh: Democratic Party “obsessed with your death,” “party of abortion and euthanasia, slavery and not liberty”

• Limbaugh’s guest host is latest radio host to compare current policies or proposals to slavery

White House Stance On Rogers Testimony Mimics Bush
In invoking the separation of powers to refuse to let Desiree Rogers testify about the Salahi episode, the White House is mimicking its predecessor’s stance.

Shays Campaign Manager Charged With Embezzling Funds
The campaign manager for former Connecticut GOP congressman Chris Shays was arrested this morning and charged with embezzling about $250,000 in campaign money.

NASA Diver Insists Tale Of Porn-Watching Muslim Hijackers Is True, Despite Discrepancies
A NASA employee who claims he witnessed a “dry run” by Muslim hijackers on a plane at Atlanta’s airport last month told TPMmuckraker this morning he is standing by his story, despite several holes in the tale and the carrier’s claim he was not even on the plane.

The Raucous Baucus Caucus

Obama Gets Surge in War Approval
A new Quinnipiac poll finds public support for the war in Afghanistan is up nine points in the last three weeks, as American voters say 57% to 35% that fighting the war is the right thing to do. President Obama’s approval for handling of the war is up seven points in the same period.

Said pollster Peter Brown: “President Obama’s nationally televised speech explaining his policy and troop buildup has worked, at least in the short term, in bolstering support for the war effort and his decisions. History teaches that the bully pulpit can be a powerful tool for a president who knows how to use it, especially when it comes to foreign policy. The American people tend to rally around their presidents in military matters, at least for a while.”

The Art of the Tick-Tock
Walter Shapiro looks at “one of the most insidious forms of insider journalism, the White House tick-tock.”

Specifically, he takes apart the weekend stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post that provided “lengthy fly-on-the-wall dramatic renderings of Barack Obama’s bold Afghan decision to…well…surge and then not surge.”

“For all the talk about journalism as the ‘first draft of history,’ stories like these are more apt to be the first draft of spin. There are so many ways that presidential images can be sugar-coated and top officials like Biden can get the shiv. Of course, we want to know what happened in the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room. But these semi-authorized instant histories provide the illusion of an insider account without anyone, including the president, being accountable.”

Meet Stewart Resnick, Corporate Farming Billionaire and One-Man Environmental Wrecking Crew
Thanks to his generous relationship with Dianne Feinstein, a corporate farmer is successfully crusading against environmental preservation in California.

What the Frack? Poisoning our Water in the Name of Energy Profits
An estimated 77 billion barrels of contaminated water were generated worldwide in 2000 by oil and gas operations. In recent years this volume has increased.

Why Fake Optimism Is the Worst Way to Deal with Life’s Problems
Looking at crap and calling it candy has become a growth industry. But experts say there are better ways to deal with crisis.

Burn a Tree to Save the Planet? The Crazy Logic Behind Biomass
It might seem crazy that anyone would think the incineration of wood and its byproducts are a green substitute for toxic fuels such as coal. Think again.

Digital Dollars: Why the Marketing and Ad Industry Are Afraid of New Regulatory Watchdogs
The firms doing the spinning for some of the financial meltdown’s biggest players have good reason to be worried. Their crimes, after all, went largely unnoticed.

Media Value Destruction
So Comcast has bought control of NBC Universal. BFD! What did they gain for the $30 Billion pricetag put on the company? Exclusive rights to NBC Universal content? No. A high growth business in broadcasting, movies and cable networks? No….



NBC Universal – Cable television – Comcast – Business – Television

Presented By:

Berman Skeptical About Afghan War–What About Israel’s Wars?
“I’m not as prone to jumping into wars as I used to be.” That is what Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said about President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy. It’s a good sentiment. The less prone we…


Afghanistan – Barack Obama – War in Afghanistan – Israel – United States

Sen. Hatch?s Solution For The Economy: Put The Country ?Back Into Conservative Republican Hands?
Today, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) appeared on Fox Business and unleashed an angry tirade against the Democratic majority in Congress. As Fox host Alexis Glick fawned over the senior Republican senator — praising his characterization of Democrats’ policy ideas as “doggone stupid” — Hatch agreed that Democrats are trying to “socialize the country.” Towards the […]

Today, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) appeared on Fox Business and unleashed an angry tirade against the Democratic majority in Congress. As Fox host Alexis Glick fawned over the senior Republican senator — praising his characterization of Democrats’ policy ideas as “doggone stupid” — Hatch agreed that Democrats are trying to “socialize the country.”

Towards the end of the interview, Glick asked him what his “solutions” are to the problems the country faces, prompting Hatch to respond that he’d start by putting the country “back into conservative Republican hands” and keeping the Bush tax cuts:

FOXBIZ: What are your solutions to jobs, the unemployment situation, rising health care costs, energy costs that are rising, inflation that is still a concern, how do we solve these issues right now? Are we trying to do too much too quickly?

HATCH: Number one you get the arrogance of power by throwing the Democrats and get the control back into conservative Republican hands. Number two we should not do away with the Bush tax cuts, those marginal tax cuts are a major help to try and keep the economy going. Number three we should use fifty state labratories to do health care.

Watch it:

While the country continues to face enormous economic problems — like a double-digit unemployment rate and the number of Americans on food stamps hitting an all-time high — there is little evidence that a return to the policies pursued by conservatives that Hatch favors would do anything to improve the situation.

During the last year of President Bush’s term, the median household income in the United States dropped 3.6 percent to $50,303, the sharpest drop since the government began keeping records in 1947. During Bush’s tenure, the number of Americans in poverty increased 26.1 percent, while child poverty jumped 21.4 percent. In total, the Bush years saw 8.3 million people fall into poverty.

There was one group, however, that did well under the Bush years Hatch seems to yearn for. The Congressional Budget Office found in 2007 that families “earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts,” prompting the New York Times to conclude that “rich families were the undisputed winners from President Bush’s tax cuts.”

Liberation of a magazine editor
NEW YORK–When Adam Moss put “The Sex Diaries” on the cover of his magazine — explicit jottings from such hot-to-trot folks as “The Polyamorous Paralegal” and “The Trader Who Will Fly for Sex” — it hardly seemed like a subject fit to print for the New York Times.

Obama preparing new push to add jobs, tackle deficit
President Obama plans to outline Tuesday a major push to tackle one of the biggest threats to the economy and to his administration: the soaring unemployment rate.

Entering an election year, Democrats sharpen focus on jobs
President Obama’s renewed focus on the economy underscores an elemental truth of politics. For all the attention the White House and Congress have given to health care and Afghanistan this fall, no problem poses a greater political threat to the Democrats in 2010 than joblessness and slow economi…