…in Colorado Springs. Good luck to all my friends in the area. I’ve heard they’ve evacuated the Air Force Academy.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s not a forest fire any more. (Note that these pictures are from last night, not sure what status is this morning, except I saw on Facebook that Stephen Green was getting ready to potentially evacuate).
[Update a few minutes later]
Here are more pics from the Denver Post. This could be one of the worst fires in the nation’s history, in terms of residential damage (and perhaps loss of life, too, if people don’t evacuate in time).
“Mr. President, the Washington Post reported that on March 30th of last year, you told Sarah Brady that you were working on gun control, but in a way that was ‘under the radar.’ Is that true, and if so, what did you mean by that?”
Roll Call thinks that the notion that Fast and Furious was a means to buttress administration lies about the source of guns in the Mexican cartels, as a means to build public support for more stringent gun control, is “far fetched.” I don’t know why. I’m having trouble coming up with any other explanation that so well fits the available facts.
Because the Obama campaign knows that one of its most important constituencies is economically illiterate yokels — a demographic to which the president himself apparently belongs — it is on the airwaves claiming “Romney’s never stood up to China — all he’s ever done is send them our jobs.’’ (Whose?) The Obama campaign cites a Washington Post story on the subject, and the Romney campaign has noted that the folks over at WaPo did not distinguish between outsourcing and offshoring (and, indeed, the story is not a very smart one — do read it and see). Obama responded thus: “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.” And indeed you wouldn’t have to make it up, because it is a real thing: different words with different meanings. (Seriously, can we get this guy a library card?)
To be fair, he’s ignorant about business and economics in general. And it shows in his policies.
…is a mass-murdering bureaucracy. It’s not just drugs and medical devices — the food pyramid is a public-health disaster as well, and that’s just advisory.
…why not just legalize prostitution. Legal prostitution is safer and healthier, and it’ll provide employment opportunities for some of those unemployed college grads.
It’s not like it goes away if you make it illegal.
Yeah, I know. I’m just being a crazy “right winger,” as usual.
There are two problems, and they’re old ones. First is the lack of commercial industry participation. They’ve added former astronaut Bob Crippen who’s now at ATK, but that hardly counts. But the more fundamental issue (and reason for the first problem) is the assumption that NASA’s strategic direction should be established by the National Academies, with its own inherent assumption that it is about science and technology development, and not opening a frontier. This in turn may be another remnant of the agency’s beginning in the depth of the Cold War and the Space Act. But somehow, we can never have a serious national discussion about why we spend billions of dollars on human spaceflight, which will be necessary to get a new direction. And part of that discussion should be NASA’s role in the twenty-first century, and what other entities may be required as well.