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Shining Lights

I don’t often praise Democrats, but I want to point out that there have been at least three who have been acting as statemen, rather than politicians, recently. One is Joe Biden (surprisingly to me, because I’ve never been very impressed with him in the past). A second is Evan Bayh. And a third is Bob Kerrey. It’s a shame that they have to share a party with the likes of Ted Kennedy.

I was also gratified to see Condi Rice amend her previous statement (“Nobody could have imagine using planes as weapons”) which is hands-down the dumbest thing that she’s ever said (and it’s rare for her to say things remotely dumb). She said in this morning’s hearing that she should have said “I couldn’t imagine…”

I also disagree with her that armoring cockpits was the only thing that we might have done to prevent 911. A different attitude toward hijacking by the public would have helped as well. Now that we have the mentality that there are purposes of hijacking beyond extortion–that there are worse things than losing an airplane and its passengers, it will be much more difficult if not impossible to hijack an aircraft, and if we’d somehow had that mentality prior to 911, the towers might still stand.

[Late afternoon update]

Just in case anyone was confused, I was referring to Senator Kerrey’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today, to which I linked above (sorry, registration may be required), not his hectoring performance in the hearings this morning.

General

Busy

Sorry for light posting, but I’ve got a lot of stuff to do around here, and I’ve been fighting with my computer all day trying to get a new mouse to work. Why can’t I just plug in an optical mouse and get it to work properly out of the box? I tried a Logitech last night, and it wouldn’t work at all (I’m guessing because it’s a combo USB/PS-2 that I was running into a PS-2 port on my KVM switch). I went out and bought a cheap one from BTC. It sort of works, but I had to install some software to get it to work properly, and when I did, it kept popping up this stupid control panel over the cursor from some program called KeyMeistro every couple seconds, which I had to manually close each time, so it was really impossible to use.

Back to Frys to try something else. Sigh…

General Science

Mystery Solved

Well, not completely. They still don’t know why Saint-Exupery’s plane went down, but now they know where.

Which reminds me. I thought that there had been an expedition launched a couple years ago to go look for Amelia Earhart’s Electra, after seeing what may have been wreckage offshore from a satellite image. Does anyone know the status?

General

My Team Is Undefeated

I’m not much of a baseball fan, but when they’re winning, just out of ancient tribal loyalty, I’m a Tigers fan. And given my experience of the past several years, I can’t help but feel a little schadenfreude for Joe.

7-0 losers. Against the worst team in baseball. On Opening Day. With last year’s Cy Young Award winner on the mound for the Jays. Oh, the embarassment.

As Glenn would say, heh.

Space & Campaign 2004

Full NASA Funding?

Frank Sietzen says that Congress is coalescing about a plan to do just that.

With the rapidly dwindling calendar — fewer than 60 legislative days actually remain before Congress recesses for the fall political campaign — next year’s federal spending may be wrapped into a continuing resolution that funds all non-defense and homeland security agencies at 2004 spending levels.

There is one exception to this outcome, sources said. That would be NASA, receiving the funding requested by Bush for 2005.

The breakthrough emerged during negotiations over the new Senate budget resolution, which sets a ceiling on federal spending. A bipartisan effort managed to amend the original NASA amount adopted — only a 1.4 percent boost for the space program — to restore nearly all of the $866 million the administration was seeking.

And for those who think that the administration’s silence on the subject, in the State of the Union and elsewhere, indicated that support for the new initiative was wavering, this explanation makes more sense:

According to congressional sources, several House members complained Bush has failed to say anything more about the moon-Mars plan since his Jan. 14 speech, and his silence has been interpreted as a cooling of support. The group was told the White House was silent, not because Bush was rethinking his grand space plan, but was instead trying to avoid further politicization.

One source told UPI that Bush would “keep his powder dry until the myths, legends, and political barbs on this strategy subside,” and the president probably would speak again about his space plan sometime late in his re-election campaign.

It’s not an obvious big vote getter, and the myths and legends about it (particularly the costs) have been well documented here and elsewhere, so it seems like a reasonable strategy to me. People shouldn’t infer support or lack of it from speeches by the president. Everything that I see going on at NASA, to the degree I have any visibility of it, indicates that plans continue to move forward.

I’m not a big fan of the president’s plan, as far as it’s been described, but I do like the fact that we’ve declared it national policy to go back to the moon and the rest of the solar system with humans. There’s plenty of time to fix the specifics of how that occurs, and I suspect that after the election perhaps more hard decisions will be made.

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