If it was the Bush Education Department, I think that this would be a bigger deal. But what’s important, of course, is for the children to think about how they can help the Leader, not that old-school stuff like grammar.
[Update a few minutes later]
I think that they also need to teach them to go away from the light, not toward it.
[Late afternoon update]
Let’s keep our kids home that day.
Is Sarah Palin the Republicans’ Ted Kennedy?
In the case of Lincoln, Kennedy, the two Roosevelts and Reagan they are, long dead, still motivating Americans in one direction or another. Teddy Kennedy’s entire career derived from the initial push he received as JFK’s little brother. The latter fact is particularly telling, since JFK died in 1963. Only Teddy himself could have carved out the rest of his career, the political careers of relatives of famous presidents frequently having a short shelf life. Theodore Roosevelt’s famous son Ted Jr. fizzled in politics, as did Franklin Roosevelt’s namesake son Franklin Jr. The name can get you in the door. After that it’s up to you.
This is what really drives Sarah Palin’s critics nuts. She sits up there in Alaska with Todd and the kids, taps out a few words on her Facebook page — and presto! ObamaCare has a torpedo amidships! Without doubt this causes Palin’s rivals, just as it once did with Churchill’s and Teddy Kennedy’s, to fret and fume if not foam.
Can you imagine how you must feel if you are an in-state rival like Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski? Who? Exactly. No one in Washington much less the rest of the country is huddled in a corner whispering — “what did Lisa say?” Nor does America take much notice of Palin’s potential 2012 rivals like Romney, Huckabee or Minnesota Governor Pawlenty. The New York Times isn’t wasting ink being catty about Ms. Murkowski because, with no disrespect intended to Senator Murkowski, like most of her Senate colleagues her “head of the table” factor is exactly zero. There are no thundering editorials of disapproval for Romney, no Maureen Dowd snipes at Huckabee, no Keith Olbermann tirades about Pawlenty. It’s Sarah Palin they can’t stand, and it’s visceral — an immediate tip off to her Kennedy-like “head of the table” status.
A long but interesting analysis.
Actually, of them all I like Option 5 (no bill). An analysis of the health-care state of play by Keith Hennessey.
A debate.
So, Orion supposedly passed its Preliminary Design Review (even though it never really made it through a System Requirements Review, and the requirements are still all over the map as a result of the Ares 1 problems and other issues). But I don’t buy this:
If Orion’s companion rocket — dubbed Ares 1 — is spiked in favor of another rocket, then any Orion mission would be delayed by up to two years so engineers could fit a new rocket to the capsule.
That possibility looms large. Ares 1 faces mounting technical and financial problems and an independent presidential panel said this summer that it would be impossible for Ares 1 to meet its goal of a first mission in 2015 without a funding increase of tens of billions of dollars.
Given these funding pressures, it’s uncertain when Orion could be ready for a new mission if a new rocket is chosen.
This is just more FUD by Hanley to try to save Ares 1. It is six years until 2015 (and they already had less than a 35% confidence of hitting that date even with Ares 1). Sure there will be some changes to the vehicle if they switch over to an affordable and safe launcher, but there is no reason in the world that those changes would have to add two years to an already long schedule. I’d be curious to see the project schedule and critical path.
[Afternoon update]
“Rocketman” has a plausible alternate theory:
Viceroy Hanley, standing on one leg with his fingers crossed behind his back, came as close as he’s going to admit the real status of Orion at it’s PDR. He’s at least two years behind schedule. How do we know that?
“It’ll take up to two years to fit a new rocket to the capsule,” he said. Design changes to accommodate weight and size differences are required he says.
But at least one EELV provides more mass margin than the corndog does.
As I note in comments, playing “schedule chicken” like this is a win-win for him — either he gets to keep Ares, or he gets an excuse for his schedule slip. But only if he keeps his job, and someone doesn’t call him on it. If I were Bolden I’d demand a briefing showing (as already noted) the assumptions behind his claim.
[Update a couple minutes later]
What is schedule chicken, you ask? It’s a game in which multiple teams on a project are behind, but they don’t want to report it, and they don’t in the hope that someone else will fess up first, making their own slip moot so they don’t have to. It can have just as disastrous program results as the road version, in terms of delays and cost increases.
Iowahawk has the exclusive story.
Born on July 9, 1947 as the 7th child of legendary La Crosse welding supply impresario and kingmaker Elmer Snitker, Norman Snitker grew up amid the stately opulence afforded by his father’s reported $15,000 fortune, bass boat, and palatial storage shed. By all accounts a precocious drinker, he took early advantage of his birthright and fully stocked basement liquor cabinet, earning the first of his 138 lifetime DUIs at age 11.
Although he grew up in privilege, Snitker insiders say that even at a young age Norm showed a deep empathy for those who were less fortunate.
“Norm would look at the other kids at school, and say, ‘why don’t they have access to the same fake IDs as me? Why must they remain sober?'” said classmate Glenn Hunsaker. “It became a crusade for him, and he became an activist. Every Friday night you’d see him at the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, making sure that every kid in La Crosse got the Pabst and Old Style that they so desperately needed.”
Despite those early accomplishments, young Norm Snitker was often overshadowed by his glamorous and dashing older brothers, Stu, Larry and Wayne, whose tragic deaths transfixed southwest Wisconsin. He was only seven when eldest brother Stu was felled by a salmonella-infected bratwurst. By the time he was was an 18-year old GED student, eldest surviving brother Larry M. Snitker had already taken the helm of the family’s Tri-County Welding Supply dynasty. The brief golden age of Weldalot came to a tragic end at the 1967 ‘Ice Bowl’ game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, when a celebrating LMS was slain by a goalpost icicle. He was succeeded by Wayne, whose life abruptly ended in 1981 after his mullet became ensnared in the rollers of a QuikTrip weenie heater.
There’s more.
Frank J. says that we should train politicians the way we train dogs. The problem is, dogs are smarter, and more trainable.
Dana Blankenhorn misinterprets history:
The problem here for Republicans is their own past success. President Clinton failed to get a health bill through in 1993 and Democrats were hammered the next year, especially their more conservative members. It took them over a decade to win back the majorities they had then.
This may make threats to wreck the careers of those voting “aye” less potent, with conservative Democrats figuring that if they can’t win they might as well stand for something.
The bottom line. If Democrats can’t agree on a proposal given their substantial majorities in both Houses of Congress, they face a generation’s exile in the political wilderness, no matter how many crazy pills some Republicans take.
Emphasis mine. If the last graf is true, then they’re damned either way, because if they ram through a bill that all the polls show is very unpopular, they’ll be hammered like they were in 1994 by angry voters. The key that Dems (and I think that the Blue Dogs) understand it is in the false causation implied in the highlighted statement. Yes, the Dems failed to pass health care in 1993 and yes, they got hammered in 1994. But one didn’t cause the other. What happened in 1994 was due to several things — “don’t ask, don’t tell” as one of the first things out of the box, the mishandling of health care, with Hillary (the most brilliant woman in the world) sent off to draft a big-government bill behind closed doors, passing the “assault weapons” ban, a failure to pass the promised “middle-class tax cuts.” Failing to pass the health-care monstrosity wasn’t the cause of them losing the Congress — it was the very attempt to pass it. Actually passing this bill will be disastrous.
Oh, and the fact that “conservative Democrats” lost seats disproportionately simply means that they were in marginal, unsafe districts. It certainly wasn’t because they failed to vote for a big-government bill. The Dems don’t have any good choices at this point, but passing a Dem-only bill will be Armageddon at the polls for them next year.
Anybody else see what’s missing in this editorial in the Houston Chronicle by several “NASA astronauts,” asking for more money to “stay the course”?
That’s right. No mention of the fact that the vast majority are former astronauts, now working for ATK, Boeing, Lockmart, etc. This is just a special pleading for more taxpayer money for their employers, and their phony baloney jobs.
People with such conflicts of interest certainly have a right to plead their case, but I think that the paper has a duty to make us aware of their affiliations, and not just describe them as “astronauts.”
And that’s a separate issue, of course from whether or not it’s a good idea for people, and particularly people who want to see large-scale human spaceflight activities for all people, and not just a “program” to send a few government employees at a billion dollars a flight, to take advice from astronauts. There’s nothing in the resume of an astronaut that renders them more qualified than others to provide wise judgement on space policy. It makes no more sense than it does to ask a “scientist,” as reporters often do.
[Update a while later]
There’s something else missing from the piece — it’s real big on flight safety (never mind that it’s not at all obvious that Ares was going to be safer than Shuttle) but says nothing about cost, or the fact that every flight is going to cost over a billion dollars. Apparently they think their lives have infinite value.
The good news is that the editorial board at the WaPo seems to recognize the potential for commercial space in addressing NASA’s needs, much more so than NASA has to date. The bad news is that they remain incoherent on the purpose of sending people into space. They also (like FL Today) seem to think that the problem is simply not enough money:
If the committee’s public comments are any indication, its findings will be grim: NASA’s recent budget cuts render the current manned mission plan impossible. This is not the first time NASA’s plans have suffered from lack of fiscal foresight: Once the international space station is completed next year, the current budget calls for deorbiting it by 2016. Maybe it’s time to take a step back to assess the right role for a manned space program that requires billions of dollars annually — and for what? Certainly, boldly going where no man has gone before is an American creed. But with the advent of increasingly complex and precise instruments, science in space requires less and less input from astronauts. Groundbreaking research can occur without humans — witness the Mars Rover and Hubble telescope. NASA should not have to sacrifice programs that are truly ground-breaking — researching dark matter, black holes and gravitational fields of space objects — to keep the international space station manned and supplied.
So they have a recommendation:
Now that the station is nearly complete, this might be an optimal time to open space to entrepreneurs. Many companies claim they possess the capacity to transport humans and payloads into space; the review committee found their reports convincing enough to suggest that these space entrepreneurs could take over the transport of astronauts and supplies to the space station after the shuttle program ends.
The problem is that they seem to have no vision for space beyond LEO, or a commercial role in it. Partly because they fall into the standard mental trap of thinking the primary purpose of human spaceflight is science. So we still have a lot of persuasion to do. But hey, even if it’s for the wrong reasons, if they have some good advice, why complain? After all, when government occasionally makes a good decision, it’s often for the wrong reasons. You take what you can get.
[Update mid afternoon]
The Commercial Spaceflight Federation piles on. Is Congress listening?