Patterico's Pontifications

4/17/2010

Obama’s NASA Speech

Filed under: Media Bias,Obama — DRJ @ 4:57 pm



[Guest post by DRJ]

Newsbusters posts this from MSNBC:

“The following exchange was aired during MSNBC’s live April 15 coverage at around 12pm Eastern:

ALEX WITT: Right now on MSNBC, President Obama gets ready to head to NASA to try to build support for his efforts to revamp the nation’s space program. Although the international space station will remain active, plans to send astronauts back to the moon are being scrubbed for now and that is dividing, not only Congress, but also some of the few people who have actually stepped foot on the lunar surface. Let’s bring in NBC’s Jay Barbree who’s live for us at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Jay, good day to you.

JAY BARBREE: Good day to you Alex.

WITT: Okay so this is really, there’s a dividing line here between these very few elite men.

BARBREE: It sure is. Well I’ll tell you it’s really not. You have, you have Buzz Aldrin, who is – has his oldest son Andrew Aldrin is a, is the chief planner of the Launch Alliance Group, the Delta 4 rocket and the Atlas 5 rocket and they are the people who are trying to get the job of hauling the Orion spacecraft into space and they’re going to downsize it so they can put them on these rockets. So what – they’re trying to do that. Neil Armstrong and all the rest of the guys, they see what’s happening here. We do not have a conceivable…I can’t get the word out. They do not have continuation of the space program.

WITT: Okay.

BARBREE: But I’m a little disturbed right now, Alex. I just found out some very disturbing news. The President came down here in his campaign and told these 15,000 workers here at the Space Center that if they would vote for him, that he would protect their jobs. 9,000 of them are about to lose their job. He is speaking before 200, extra hundred people here today only. It’s invitation only. He has not invited a single space worker from this space port to attend. It’s only academics and other high officials from outside of the country. Not one of them is invited to hear the President of the United States, on their own space port, speak today. Back to you Alex.

WITT: Alright Jay I can understand why that would certainly get you a bit upset. I will say, on behalf of the Obama administration, they contend that 2500 new jobs will be created, even more, they say, than the 2012 Constellation would have created, that program. So I know all this remains to be seen, but understandably we get why you’re upset, right now. Along with many others down there. Let’s see if the President clears that up later today. Jay thanks so much.

I’ll remember two things from this story: Every Barack Obama promise has an expiration date, and MSNBC’s Alex Witt thinks her job is to speak for the Obama Administration.

— DRJ

9 Responses to “Obama’s NASA Speech”

  1. Good old MSLSD… always good for a laugh, if nothing else.

    GeneralMalaise (24d3e0) — 4/17/2010 @ 5:34 pm

  2. If they are a “journalist” then they pretty much all agree their job is to speak for and “cover” this administration.

    Mr. Pink (bb8267) — 4/17/2010 @ 5:39 pm

  3. He has not invited a single space worker from this space port to attend.

    I have been thinking the guy is just loopy but he sounds pretty practical there. Amazing that he would go back there and rub their noses in it. Maybe he thinks they should thank him. Nothing surprises me.

    Mike K (2cf494) — 4/17/2010 @ 5:52 pm

  4. Still waiting for the president to “clear that up later today.”

    Patricia (fa8e06) — 4/17/2010 @ 6:34 pm

  5. Here in Houston network news is abuzz with the fact that Obama has snubbed the Johnson Space center. Even if jobs are to be created, Texas is being ignored for the sake of Florida. For a president who claimed there would be no red states or blue states, he sure is able to distinguish between the two when it comes down to picking who benefits from his policies.

    chapman (ad6e23) — 4/17/2010 @ 6:42 pm

  6. It has been very appearant for two years now, or longer, that MSNBC is nothing but a PR outlet for the Obama for Obama campaign…why would they change now?

    AD - RtR/OS! (df7269) — 4/17/2010 @ 6:44 pm

  7. Does Witt get two paychecks, one from MSNBC and one from Robert Gibbs?

    Or do they just bypass the middleman and have the White House direct deposit her paycheck every week? Cuts down on her carbon footprint since she doesn’t have to drive to the bank to make her deposit.

    MU789 (25b69d) — 4/17/2010 @ 9:39 pm

  8. What? A “progressive” stifling progress?

    Shocka

    Icy Texan (551933) — 4/17/2010 @ 11:00 pm

  9. I thought Mr. Instapundit would be more on top of this than he was.

    He kinda threw some links out but not with a lot of conviction it was more one hand other hand stuff.

    …here is what Mr. Locke thinks about some of this…

    #

    Comment by Ric Locke on 4/14 @ 6:38 pm #

    You’re welcome, all.

    Mike: I greatly fear that you have fallen into the Leftoid trap of “if the Government doesn’t do it, it isn’t real.” The programs that have been canceled were reinvent-the-wheel boondoggles designed purely to keep NASA and a few big contractors sucking the taxpayers’ teat; the specific vehicle (“Constellation”) was badly conceived, and every time they slapped a patch on the design to make up for the original deficiencies plus the previous patches it went further behind schedule and over budget. We are better off without it. The one bit (“Ares”) worth the match to burn the budget papers has been repurposed and may be saved. Consult Rand Simberg and some of the material he references and links for further details.

    Astronauts, unfortunately, are Government employees, no better and no worse than any other GS-14 administrator. Eric Frank Russell’s novella “A Study in Still Life” applies — I can’t find it on the Web, but it’s been collected in numerous anthologies.

    In hindsight, Mercury/Apollo/Gemini were disasters, not triumphs. The “space program”, so called, was a PR stunt designed to impress the Russians and the world with American prowess, and it cut corners wherever possible to achieve the goal. This resulted in literally nothing left behind — no space station, no reusable infrastructure, no Moon base, nothing; everything but the crew capsule was a beer can, to be discarded when empty. In the process it raided much more long-term projects for funding and engineers, resulting in their abandonment. My own pet peeves there are Dyna-Soar (space shuttles! in 1966! but with USAF on the side), the X-15 program (tiles? we don’t need no steenking jigsaw puzzles in space), and something called Project Pluto that you have to Google to believe. It also turned what had been an extremely useful research agency (NACA, the National Advisory Committee on Aviation) into a top-heavy, hidebound, self-unregulated bureaucracy indistinguishable in any but the brightest of Klieg lights and the highest possible magnification from, say, EPA.

    Obama’s reasons may be misguided, but the result is useful. If there is a future for the US in space, it’s via private companies. NASA has long reached the point where its only real purpose is to keep itself and its administrators sucking blood from the public; the fact that that allows pork-barrelling Congresscritters to brag that they’ve brought home the bacon to their Districts is all that keeps it alive.

    Regards,
    Ric

    and then Mr. Reed who is a for reals rocket engineer scientist person who like doesn’t have to google azimuth replies here

    happyfeet (c8caab) — 4/18/2010 @ 10:17 am


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