Space

Good News On The Regulatory Front

Emailer Jon Goff points out an article by Alan Boyle indicating that the logjam over HR 3752 has apparently been broken. It looks like the legislation can be passed this year. At least this will help things move forward on the private front (which I think is more promising anyway) even if the president’s new vision doesn’t get funded.

It looks like he’s not going to make a public fight for it, since he didn’t take the opportunity of the Apollo anniversary to say anything about it. But he may still try to twist arms behind the scenes.

[Update at 10:30 AM PDT]

Here’s an interesting development. According to space.com, the president is threatening to veto the appropriations bill if it doesn’t fund the new vision. Hard to know whether or not this is bluff. It would substantiate the Cowing/Seitzen thesis that the president truly wants this if he actually does veto this bill, because it would be the first bill that he’d have vetoed in his presidency. Of course, the fact that he’s never vetoed a bill yet takes away some of the credibility of the threat if he’s only bluffing. A president has to choose battlegrounds carefully to maintain clout, because he doesn’t want to get into a position from which he has to back down.

Space

Some links

SpaceToday reports that a Russian millionaire may be the next ISS tourist. The giggle factor for space tourism continues its death spiral.

Apparently some amateur rocketeer (though there’s rumor he was actually a fireworks maker) blew himself up in Denver. Sad for the family, potentially very bad news for amateur rocketry.

The University of Georgia has received a 5 million grant to study electromagnetic accelerators. The piece claims they can be used for launchers, but I’m extremely skeptical. Going hypersonic in the lower atmosphere doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. OTOH, for launch from the moon it could be just the ticket, but that’s a long time off.

Political Commentary

A Dose Of Reality

You may or may not be surprised to learn that the Commission doesn’t agree with Michael Moore’s foolish and libelous characterization of Bush as being “too frightened to do anything without his handlers” after learning of the second aircraft strike. From pp. 38-39:

The President was seated in a classroom when, at 9:05, Andrew Card whispered to him:

Political Commentary

More Trousergate Thoughts

There are reports that, among other things, Berger “inadvertently” requested that the rules be suspended for his visits to the archive and have monitors removed, so he could “inadvertently” have private phone conversations from the room in which the documents were held. I can’t imagine this is normal procedure.

But he also reportedly took many unescorted bathroom breaks while going over the documents. Perhaps he has a medical problem that would account for this, but one has to wonder if he also found a way to “inadvertently” dispose of inconvenient documents while not even having to leave the facility.

Political Commentary

Trousergate Heating Up

Mickey has a couple questions to which I have answers:

if, as I suspect, Berger took the various drafts home simply because it’s a lot easier to pore over them at home rather than at the National Archives, that may be understandable and ultimately excusable. But it would also mean Berger has tied himself up in …er, veracity problems by saying he only took the documents “inadvertently.” … P.S.: The WSJ ed board has called for the “release [of] all the drafts of the review Mr. Berger took from the room.” But wait a minute. The reason it was wrong for Berger to take the “review” documents is that they contained sensitive, classified information. If the drafts can now be actually released publicly without damaging national security, then why was it so terrible for Berger to take them home? The WSJ is making Berger’s case for him.

If Berger simply took them home to review them in more comfort, then a) why didn’t he simply check them out, as procedure allowed (assuming that he had a secure place to keep them)? Why be so furtive? And b) why did he not return them–why did they “inadvertently” disappear?

Sorry, but I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with an innocent explanation for this, particularly given the nature of the specific documents of interest. It appears very much to me that he was hoping that he could destroy original (and unique, with no copies) documents that may have contained very damaging information, either to him personally, or the administration that he served, or both. That is not to say, of course, that that’s the case, but it’s certainly how it appears.

Glenn has a lot more on this theme.

And I should add that it would certainly appear that way to the entire media establishment as well, and that this interpretation would be trumpeted from the rooftops, and most of the nation’s ink supply devoted to saying it, were the political parties reversed here.

As for resolving the WSJ’s call for release of the documents with Berger’s behavior, that’s quite simple. The Journal is calling for a declassification of the documents (in the absence of knowledge of their contents). Once declassified (perhaps with suitable redactions to protect the most important information), they can be released to the public. Whether this is a good idea or not cannot be known except to those with current access to them, though if it occurs, then we can all judge after the fact.

But they haven’t been declassified, and Berger, at least in his current role as private citizen, cannot unilaterally make a decision to do so. They retain their classification level until someone decides to change it. That someone cannot be Sandy Berger, and he has to treat them properly until that situation changes. And unlike the Journal, he knows their contents. And at this point, with regard to the missing ones, he may now be the only person on the planet who does.

Or ever will.

[Update a few minutes later]

Iowahawk has further updates.

New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent defended the newspaper’s scant coverage of the Berger imbroglio, pointing out that “newsprint doesn’t grow on trees.”

“If you run the numbers, printing that Berger is a Kerry advisor would have cost the newspaper over $300 in additional ink costs, not to mention the potential strain on delivery trucks,” said Okrent. “The Times has a fiduciary duty to its st0ckholders and employees to keep an eye on the bottom line.”

Okrent said that ‘Berger’ may appear in an upcoming Sunday crossword, “if [editor] Will Shortz finds a suitable 6-letter space, and comes up with a really, really hard clue.”

[Update at 10:40 AM PDT]

This is pretty funny, too.

While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle celebrated the discovery of Mr. bin Laden in the former White House aide’s trousers, this latest episode left Mr. Berger, once again, with much explaining to do.

The former adviser to President Clinton said that his lawyers would not permit him to divulge how, when, or why the world’s most wanted man had found safe haven in his pants, but he did tell reporters, “It was an honest mistake.”

At the White House, President George W. Bush ordered an immediate and thorough search of Mr. Berger’s pants “to see what else might be in there,” hinting that the discovery of Saddam Hussein’s long-sought weapons of mass destruction might be at hand.

Technology and Society

Bad, Bad, Bad idea

There’s a bill working its way through congress that will criminalize sale of technology that intentionally induces a person to infringe copyright. That places all recording media under threat. This is one of those bills which is written at the behest of major corporations looking to compete via legislation rather than the marketplace.

Information simply cannot be force fit into the conventional mold of property rights law that originated in the ownership of land. Patents are workable as a means of protecting intellectual property, though they have been abused somewhat recently. Copyrights on the other hand are being abused and manipulated to an unprecedented degree. We recently saw the extension of copyright by an additional 20 years (thanks to some heavy lobbying by Disney, among others), and there’s no doubt that when those 20 years are up efforts will be well under way to extend by another 20. The copyright system is broken, and this latest bill will just break it still further. We need to completely rethink the way we handle copyrights from the ground up. I can’t claim to know what the answer is, but it’s clear what it isn’t: banning technologies just because they can infringe copyright. That is an idiotic route that leads to making pen and paper technically illegal.

Space

What’s DeLay’s Angle?

There’s an article in the Houston Chronicle about the cuts to NASA’s 2005 budget request. The Majority Leader does seem to be on the warpath about it:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land Republican whose district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center, called the cuts “unacceptable,” then warned: “It would be very hard to get this bill to the floor if it’s unacceptable to me.”

DeLay, the second-highest-ranking House Republican, schedules measures for floor consideration and wields considerable power over spending bills.

So, why?

I haven’t looked at the cuts in detail, but they seems mainly to affect the president’s new vision. One of the biggest cuts is in the Prometheus Program (largely Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter at this point), most of which would go to California (JPL and whatever contractor is selected) and DOE labs for the reactor work. No money for JSC there. The general exploration activities, including CEV, are nominally funded out of Houston, but it’s managed at HQ and will go to contractors all over the place. Shuttle is fully funded, as is ISS. This action doesn’t seem to be bad for JSC at all, all things considered, from a pork perspective.

So why is DeLay up in arms about it? He is supposedly, after all, one of those Republicans who are supposed to be concerned about federal spending.

Theory 1: He’s greedy, and assumes that any budget cuts will affect JSC to some degree, however minor (probably a valid assumption).

Theory 2: He wants to support the president in his budget request, out of loyalty to the White House.

Theory 3: He actually believes in the vision, and wants it to be funded this coming year.

Theory 1 doesn’t seem worth holding up an appropriations bill over. I’ve got to surmise that it’s theories 2 and 3 in some proportion. Can it be that the Hammer has become a space nut?

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!