If you have NASA TV, the hearings for Bolden and Garver are scheduled for 2:10 PM today.
Does NASA Need More Money?
Paul Spudis doesn’t think so. Neither do I. In fact, given what they’re doing with it, they apparently have too much.
Out Of Touch
Does Steny Hoyer have any idea how comments like this come across to normal people?
“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
So, therefore, it’s not reasonable to expect people to read it. Right.
I have an radical idea. How about shorter bills?
[Update a few minutes later]
I think that this would be an item for a new Republican Contract with America.
[Update mid afternoon]
Voxiversity Continues
It’s chapter three, on Woodrow Wilson. Go take the quiz, and discuss.
An Economic Gloom Roundup
Over at Instapundit. Lots of links to depressing news.
Sunspots
They may finally be starting up again, after a long drought.
No More California Dreamin’
If California is really where national trends start, the nation is in trouble. The good news, though, is that an anti-big-government revolt may be brewing out there.
[Update]
Michael Barone: Are Americans getting cold feet over Obama economic proposals? Let’s hope so, finally.
An Interview
And, by the way, I don’t want to start yet another long and dumb argument, but I am not going to capitalize it. Capitalize Luna, capitalize Selene, but not moon.
Because “moon” isn’t its name. It’s “the moon.” The word takes a definite article. We don’t say, as Tarzan might, “Me going to Moon.” We say, “Me going to the moon.” When we use the definite article, at least in context, we all know which moon we mean (if it were a discussion about Jupiter and its satellites, then we would know from context that it wasn’t Luna). When we stop using the definite article for it, and it gets officially named “Moon,” then I’ll start capitalizing it. I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
Continuing Computer Problems
I’ve got a hardware problem of some kind.
I put in a brand new terabyte drive and installed Fedora 11 on it. As I was doing some package updates, the screen froze, just as it did yesterday, when all the trouble started. When I tried to reboot, it didn’t even recognize the drive as a system disk. I rescued it, and fsck said the boot sector was clean (I don’t know if that means no problems, or it has no data).
I did a full memory check overnight last night, so I don’t think it’s that. Maybe Carl had the right idea about a bad video card, but how would that cause it to trash the hard drive? Any other ideas?
Five Stimulus Plans
…better than Obama’s first one. It’s not hard.
If they want a “second stimulus,” step one would be rescinding the first one.