Sputnik Will Make Us the Best Place to Do Business

Two things. First what sense does it make to evoke the manned space program while presiding over the closing down of the actual real space program of today? It only reminds me that the Russians are now the only ones still in the space flight business. In the end we LOST the "sputnik" race, and its a national shame and a disgrace. This is why it is such a false note for him to mention it. It is not inspiring; its depressing and discouraging. The fact that he is so out of touch not to understand that is incredibly disturbing.


Second, its this "best place to do business" crap. We had a governor in my state who thought it was smart to make up a new slogan: "West Virginia: Open for Business". What he meant was that he would give anything to bribe some company to set up a headquarters in West Virginia - cut any tax, refund fees, revoke regulations to undercut the offer any other governor could offer, to be "competitive" effectively in a race to the bottom.

It went so far the one gas company dropped their plan to set up their main offices in the state because they lost a court case where they were being sued by several landowners for cheating them out of royalties for gas pumped out of their land and Governor Manchin did not fix it for them.

Hullabaloo: State of the Union

Jonathan Schell at The Nation has written an excellent critique of the president's speech that captures the nagging problem I've had with it since I first read the transcript. As with so many policy discussions lately, it seemed to be forcefully addressing a problem that isn't acute and ignoring the ones that are:

Why has that moment, now more than a half century past, been dragged out of obscurity to define the present? And why was the associated theme of American competitiveness in the world market chosen as the theme of the president’s State of the Union speech? After all, no superpower is aiming terrifying new weapons at the United States, as the Soviet Union seemed to be doing with its ballistic rockets during the cold war. As a matter of fact, even this was an illusion. The Soviet lead in rocketry almost immediately gave way to clear US superiority, although the mistaken belief in a “missile gap” persisted for years and was in fact instrumental in producing the Cuban missile crisis.