Jay Penn and Chuck Lindley at the Aerospace Corporation have come up with a concept that can get people into orbit for $15,000 per ticket.

I’ve worked with Jay quite a bit over the years, and those numbers actually look pretty reasonable and credible to me.

The NASA strategy for the Strategic Launch Initiative is becoming more clear.

They have recognized the folly of building a single-purpose crew rescue vehicle.

They have similarly recognized that they shouldn’t make the same mistake that they made thirty years ago, in building a single, follow-on “one-size-fits-all” space shuttle.

Unfortunately, they still seem focused on the immediate goal of getting useful value out of our multi-decabillion-dollar space station, that is currently providing little bang for the taxpayers’ buck. This is partly due to the fact that the purpose of the space station has, from its inception, ostensibly been for science, which is a difficult case to make as a justification for a program that is going to cost many tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

There is an old saying in the investment community (and even among ordinary consumers) about the folly of “throwing good money after bad.”

Like many old sayings, there’s at least a grain of truth to it.

It’s natural to want to make the best of any investment. And the greater the investment, the stronger the desire to get some utility out of it, no matter how great a white elephant it’s become.

That’s where we are with our current manned space program. The investment there is over many years, and in terms of dollars, as already described, immense and almost incomprehensible to a homeowner who has to pay a mortgage and other bills of thousands of dollars a month.

The apparent immediate goal of the Bush administration is to satisfy the international partners’ desire to get the International Space Station to the state promised to them (i.e., more than three crew members). The crew size is currently limited, at least officially, by the ability to evacuate them in an emergency, which means that they are currently restricted to the three crew that could be returned to earth via a single Soyuz module.

While they recognize that building a larger return vehicle solely for rescue purposes would be a waste of money, they’ve decided that the same vehicle might be worth building if it could play a role in replacing the costly shuttle sometime in the future.

Accordingly, they’ve redirected funds from the Space Launch Initiative, originally planned to replace the current shuttle with “shuttle II,” toward building such a crew-delivery/return replacement, that will be launched on top of an expendable rocket, despite the high cost and reliability issues of such a scheme.

But why are they doing this?

Three decades ago, the nation made a decision to build a Space Shuttle, that would ostensibly provide cheap reusable transportation to and from orbit.

Almost two decades ago, a decision was made to build a space station, using that space shuttle for the construction and support of it in operations.

All of our current civil space policy is contingent on those decisions.

In 1972, we could have made a different decision in terms of the future of the nation’s space transportation system, but we decided to build a single, one-size-fits-all launch system.

A dozen years later, because we had that launch system (though it hadn’t lived up to its original promises), the nation decided to build a space station with it.

This was the first attempt to throw good money after bad. A much more sensible approach would have been to recognize that the shuttle hadn’t turned out the way that NASA planned, in terms of flight rate, and that the better part of valor would to base a space-station design on a more cost-effective space transportation concept. But to do so would have been an admission that the Shuttle hadn’t lived up to its stated goals, and was thus a failure, which is unthinkable to any bureaucracy except under extreme duress, so this was not a politically-viable option.

Now, having built a horrendously-expensive and marginally-useful space station as a result of that decision, we are confronted with another one. Where do we go from here?

We’ve spent many tens of billions of dollars on this facility. It can support three crew (under the current, and in my opinion overly-stringent groundrules that they must all be able to evacuate to the earth at any time). To simply double that amount, we must invest many billions more, following those same groundrules.

I understand the rationale behind the current decision to build such a limited-use vehicle. We are politically constrained by our past decisions. But more importantly, we are politically constrained by our limits in vision, and our lack of any real goals in space, other than justifying decisions that have come before. That is where the concept of “throwing good money after bad” becomes applicable.

There was another way in 1972, and there is another way now. But in order to seize the day, we must answer a more fundamental question.

What are we trying to accomplish in space?

If it is to simply preserve the status quo, and maintain a minimal space jobs base in Houston and Hunstville and Florida, then the Administration is making a good decision.

If, on the other hand, the goal is to make our nation not merely pre-eminent, but to open up the new frontier and make us a true space-faring nation, one in which we can all achieve our dreams of new frontiers, then it is simply postponing the real decisions.

To do that, we must unleash the power of our country’s entrepreneurial spirit, and harness the forces of both idealism and greed that drove our ancestors across the prairies and mountains to forge a new nation.

But in order to decide which route to take, we have to have a national debate, one that we haven’t had since the late fifties. In the midst of a very real threat from fascist Islamism, it’s a difficult subject to think about, but we are on the verge of another national election in which we will select those who will be making such decisions. As always, it is not an issue on which any significant number of people will vote.

But perhaps one of the reasons is that no one ever even raises it as an issue. After all, it consumes less than a percent of the federal budget.

But until we do, we may continue to throw good money after bad.

We went on a shore dive on Thursday. It was our first dive, and we wanted to get familiar with the equipment (Patricia had a new wet suit and fins) before we went on our more serious boat dives.

The place we chose was called (uncharacteristically for Hawaii, in which almost all the place names are Hawaiian) La Perouse Bay, which was named by some Frenchman. It’s at the extreme south end of the island, well past the last resort at Wailua. It’s accessible only via a narrow, barely-paved road. In order to get to it, one must traverse an extensive field of fresh lava. Well, fresh in geological terms. It’s the remnants of the last eruption of Haleakala, over two hundred years ago.

It was a pyroclastic flow, very much like the one that is going on right now at Kilaulea on the island of Hawaii itself. It burst through the mountain and poured down the hillside to steam the sea as it cooled and expanded the acreage of the island.

As one drives along the road that’s been carved out of it, one can look up the hill and see the stark black infertile scar, all the way up to the source, where a hill was sliced in two by the molten rock.

Looking at the barren, jagged landscape on either side, Patricia remarked that it looked like someone threw up there and didn’t clean it up.

Very poetic. Think of it as the gruesome results of some vast god with a titanic bellyache, and vomit black as midnight on a new moon.

Gaia’s gut juice. Spew of Mother Earth.

Nature is not always our friend.

Spending a few days in Hawaii results, at least for me, in a mild sense of consonant deprivation. I’ll give the language this–the rules are few and simple, and once absorbed, the Hawaiian words are easily read and pronounced. While it’s perhaps very musical and flowing to separate syllables with glottal stops, it gets tiresome after a while, and one misses good old “d” and “r,” and the ambiguous but flexible “c.”

And one of the Hawaiian’s favorite consonants just barely qualifies as one, in my book. Aitch is just too soft a sound to really count. It’s really just a little puff of air.

Take the word “staccato.” Almost onomatapoetic, and one would never mistake it for an Hawaiian word–it contains three hard consonant sounds plus the beginning ess, and one can’t imagine it working with such a wimpy consonant as an aitch. But Hawaiian is such a gentle language that it’s naturally their favorite. They figure if they can’t do without consonants at all, they’re going to make the ones they have as wimpy as possible. The only Hawaiian consonant that has any force at all is the pee.

Take this word: Ha’amaea, which is the name of a harbor on the west coast of Maui (which itself has a vowel/consonant ratio of three to one). It has five vowels and only two consonants, but it still manages to wring five syllables out of them.

Why can’t we set up some kind of exchange program between the islands and the Balkans? The Hawaiians could ship all of their excess vowels to places like Bosnia, that has names like Srbenica, and take as trade the Serbian and Croation overabundance of consonants.

Both languages would be far the better for it. The Balkan folks could savor their syllables, letting them breathe with new-found gentle sounds, and perhaps, for the first time, actually be able to pronounce their children’s names.

The Hawaiians in turn could invigorate their language with not only fresh supplies of their scarce aiches, ems, ens, kays, ells and pees, but whole new frontiers in syllable separation, with the bee and the dee and the tee (not to mention the sibillant ess). They could give their glotti a break, and get more use out of their tongues.

I was thinking about this one day as we were driving along Maui’s north coast, and Patricia suggested that we go explore a little town, which she’d read about on the web, that had a vacation rental.

“What’s the name of it?”

“I don’t remember–it starts with an aitch…”

That’s helpful. We’ve now narrowed it down to about half the places on the island. I mean, the fricken state capital starts with an aitch. Hell, the name of the state itself does.

“I think it might be Hielo.”

Well, that could be an Hawaiian place name. It has the right letters in it, anyway. But I suspect that she’s thinking of the old days driving around Puerto Rico, where the gas stations and quickie marts all had signs proclaiming “HIELO,” Spanish for “ice.”

And I’m pretty sure that hielo doesn’t mean “ice” in Hawaiian. In fact, no word in Hawaiian means “ice.” The Inuit have two hundred words for it, in all its infinite glory and variety, but I doubt if the benighted Hawaiians have a single one. It’s kind of like the French and “victory.”

We dig out the map and find it. It’s “Huelo.” Close.

(A month-old post from Maui)

I’ve never been in Hawaii during election season before. They have method of campaigning that is unique and, in my opinion, dumb.

All over the island, we saw groups of people standing along the road, holding up signs with the name of their preferred candidate, smiling and waving at the traffic as it goes by.

All right, I guess it’s a cheap way of promoting name recognition (assuming that the smilers and wavers have nothing better to do with their time), but is it really an effective technique in persuading people to vote for that candidate? I can’t imagine basing my vote in any way on how many boosters of a candidate I saw along the road, or how vigorously they propelled their arms in greeting, or how pearly white their teeth were.

I don’t know how I could possibly know what the candidate’s position was on any issue I cared about, or how likely he was to keep his promises, based on how many (literally) glad handers were standing on the roadside on his behalf. And I would fear to live in a state in which the electorate was so mindless as to be influenced by such meaningless things.

I wonder if it’s a tradition from the days in which that was the main way of campaigning among the Hawaiian villagers and field workers. It may be that now, while few think that it has any positive effect, its absence might have a negative one: “Look at Johnny Hasagawa–he has no supporters willing to show their support for him.” It’s perhaps become an arms race from which no one can now back down, regardless of how pointless it is.

“Progressives” are fond of saying that only ignorant hicks and uneducated bigots could vote Republican–Democrats are more compassionate and better informed. A one-party Democratic state, in which people are apparently expected to vote based on how many poor schmucks they can get to stand on the roadside in the tropical heat and humidity, and wave and smile, would seem to belie that notion.

I’ve been back from Hawaii for over a month now, but I’m just getting around to posting some stuff that I wrote over there, primarily because it was on my PDA, and I’ve only just gotten around to uploading it to my computer. So over the next couple days I’ll be putting up thoughts and experiences from the trip, for anyone who’s (unaccountably) interested.

What the heck is rateyourmusic.com? As far as I can tell, it seems to be a service that many bloggers use for comments, and it seems to be down a great deal.

Why do you need a separate server for comments? I don’t get it.

I’m talking to you, Jane Galt and Joanne Jacobs (though there are no doubt many other offenders, which is why the system is bogged down so much of the time).

And it’s not just a matter of not being able to read or post comments. It doesn’t do any good to get off blogger and blogspot if we have to wait for some other overloaded system to load before we can see your page.

If you don’t have it, move over to Moveable Type, and run your own comments, on your own server.

It’s now possible to engage in tactile interaction over the net.

They say it’ll take five years to hit the consumer market, but I can think of an application that’s going to accelerate that schedule…

[via Jay Manifold]

I haven’t beaten up on Ted Rall much recently. But I don’t want to get out of practice. Here’s his latest mind-boggling, retch-inducing spew. It’s already been discussed by the sub-intellects at Democratic Underground, but now the head moron, the supreme leader of the flying idiotarian monkeys, is on the case.

George W. Bush and his henchmen stole the presidency.

Lie Numero Uno

They threw thousands of innocent people into prison without even charging them with a crime.

Lie Numero Dos. Which “thousands of innocent people” would those be? Can he provide a cite. Or even a description? And how does he know they’re innocent?

They’re gearing up to invade Iraq without bothering to come up with a substantial justification.

I’ll be generous. This isn’t a lie. It’s just an idiotic and uninformed opinion. What he really means is that he doesn’t agree with (or more likely) doesn’t understand the stated justification. But to say they “haven’t bothered” is to ignore all the speeches made over the past few weeks in a futile attempt to convince idiotarians like Mr. Rall, who apparently lack the perspicacity, by their own admission, to even understand that they were at least making the attempt.

Now some Democrats and progressive Americans are asking the unthinkable about an administration they increasingly believe to be ruled by thugs and renegades. Did government gangsters murder the United States’ most liberal legislator?

Unthinkable is a good word. It accurately represents the non-thought processes that would be necessary to result in the typing of such a sentence.

Talk of foul play began hours after Senator Paul Wellstone’s plane went down over northeastern Minnesota on Oct. 25, killing him, his wife and his daughter, along with three staffers and two pilots. “Please tell me I’m wrong to be thinking what I’m thinking,” a self-described “liberal Democrat” from St. Paul e-mailed me that evening. “I want to be wrong, but I wouldn’t put it past the Republicans- -THESE Republicans–to sabotage Wellstone’s plane.” Internet discussion groups and e-mail in-boxes quickly echoed her sentiment.

Well, if unnamed “self-described ‘liberal Democrats’ from St. Paul” and denizens of Internet discussion groups (you know, like the ones that think that not only was Paul Wellstone assassinated, but that Elvis did it from his secret command post on the Moon?) are concerned about it, it must be something to be taken seriously. At least if you’re a journalist of the lofty calibre of Ted Rall.

People expressed similar fears after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan (news – web sites) died in plane crashes–the latter weeks before facing an election challenge from future Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft (news – web sites)–but the whispers of assassination following the Wellstone tragedy are more widespread and gaining mainstream currency far beyond the usual conspiracy nuts.

Of course, Ron Brown died under extremely strange circumstances. He went down in what was described as “the storm of the century,” which was later found to be a light drizzle, and his body was found with a hole in its skull and X-rays of lead chaff that was physically difficult to reconcile with a plane crash, but was easy to reconcile with a gun to the head after apparent survival of same. This is, of course, ignoring the fact that the X-rays were destroyed, or at least disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and the few military officers with the integrity to point this out were drummed out of the service…

Does Mr. Rall have any equivalent situation to relate here, a few days after the crash?

I didn’t think so.

The Minnesota senator’s death certainly comes at an auspicious time for the Republican Party. Wellstone’s challenger, former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, was considered by both parties to be the GOP’s best chance for recapturing the 50-to-49 Democratic U.S. Senate. Wellstone had been considered vulnerable for two reasons: his principled opposition to Bush’s Iraq war resolution (the Senate voted 99-to-1 in favor) and a strong Green Party candidacy sure to siphon off leftie votes. Bush was so anxious to silence the Senate’s most liberal voice (Mother Jones magazine called him “the first 1960s radical elected to the U.S. Senate”) that he personally recruited Coleman to run against him. Bush then campaigned furiously against Wellstone, attending two fundraisers which raised over $2.3 million–more than he raised for any other Republican candidate, including his brother Jeb.

So let me get this right, Ted. Wellstone, by your own admission in the paragraphs above, was vulnerable to his Republican challenger, so the evil (“unelected”) Bush Administration decided to rub him out?

Republicans resorted to Nixon-style dirty tricks in the Coleman campaign. Coleman called Wellstone “extremist” and implied he was a communist.

How did he do that, Ted? Can you provide at least a quote, if not a cite?

GOP workers phoned senior citizens to tell them that Wellstone was plotting to take away their Social Security (news – web sites).

“News – web sites”? Is that the best you can do to buttress your slander? This is century twenty-one, Ted. You ought to at least provide a specific URL.

They called members of the National Rifle Association to tell them that Wellstone was plotting to take away their guns.

Is that a false charge, Ted? What was the Senator’s position on guns?

They even ran newspaper ads depicting gruesome photos of late- term abortions.

Why is that dirty politics, Ted? Was the Senator pro-life, or did he support late-term abortions? If the latter, why is it so horrible to display the consequences of his position?

Despite the money and sleazy tactics being used against him, recent polls showed Wellstone beginning to pull ahead. With Election Day looming on Nov. 5, many analysts were predicting a Wellstone victory and continued Democratic dominance of the Senate.

Ahhh, now he’s changing his story. Now Wellstone is winning. Note again that he provides no URLs or cites–we are just supposed to take the word of the immaculate and unimpeachable Ted Rall.

Perhaps, the thinking goes, someone in the Bush regime decided Wellstone had to go.

“So the thinking goes”? That’s a generous description of it. I would say more, “so the paranoid fantasizing goes.” But that’s just me. I don’t have the brilliance of Ted Rall.

If Wellstone’s plane was sabotaged, it wouldn’t be the first time that a political figure met his end in the friendly skies. A plane carrying Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung’s hand-picked successor, Lin Biao, crashed under mysterious circumstances en route to Moscow during 1971. The Chinese later claimed that Lin was defecting to the Soviet Union after a botched coup attempt against Mao; guilty or not, most historians believe that his plane was probably sabotaged. On March 3, 2001, a phosphorus bomb blew up a Thai Airways Boeing 737-400 minutes before the country’s new prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was set to board the jet.

Note his choice of precedent. Because a totalitarian dictator may have decided to off his rival (assuming, again being extremely generous, that Mr. Rall isn’t outright lying, since once again he is unable or unwilling to provide even a cite), obviously this isn’t beyond the evil Bush Administration.

Many American politicians–mostly Democrats and liberal Republicans–have died in aviation disasters. Senator John Tower (R-TX) Senator John Heinz (D- PA), Congressman Mickey Leland (D-TX); Ron Brown and Mel Carnahan are among those who have been killed in airplanes since 1989. “Elected officials expose themselves every day to these kinds of risks as they travel across their states or districts,” Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) commented, noting the perils of frequently using small aircraft.

Anyone who has traveled on what is euphemistically called “civil aviation” can tell horror stories about sudden drops, lurches and violent thunderstorms. But it’s also true that security at the regional airports and small terminals at major airports used for such flights–Wellstone flew out of St. Paul–is more easily penetrable than that at JFK and LAX. It would hardly be impossible to sabotage a plane chartered for an inconvenient politician.

No, and of course it would also hardly be impossible to slip a lethal mickey into his drink. But much less difficult. We’ll just ignore the fact that small aircraft like this have much poorer safety records than commercial airlines, and that anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time in them is more likely to thereby die, and that campaigning politicians (given their limited funding, which must be conserved for television ads rather than commercial airline tickets, and their limited time, which must be conserved for handshake time with potential or actual constituents, rather than minimum-wage cretins in airline-security lines) do exactly that.

According to aviation consultant Robert Breiling, the plane that carried Senator Wellstone–the King Air A-100 “business turboprop,” also known as a Beech King Air–is remarkably safe, with 25 percent fewer fatal accidents than other planes in its class. Warren Morningstar, spokesman for the Airline Owners and Pilots Association, says: “It’s a great airplane.”

Note that he compares it to “other planes in its class.” If you want safe travel, that’s not a great class to be in.

So why did Wellstone’s go down? Weather is the lead suspect. Freezing temperatures, which can be severe in Minnesota, came early this year. “This airplane would typically be equipped with de-ice equipment but there are icing conditions that are beyond the measure of any equipment to remove,” Morningstar notes.

Local pilots, however, doubt that ice was a problem. “There was little ice. It was normal. We see it all the time,” said Don Sipola, a flight instructor with 25 years experience.

“Black boxes”–a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder–are often crucial for discovering the cause of airplane crashes. According to Federal Aviation Administration (news – web sites) spokesman Paul Takemoto, the plane was required to be equipped with both. Contradicting the FAA, Carol Carmody, acting chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board (news – web sites), which is investigating the site of the crash, says that the plane apparently carried neither. Were the black boxes lost or were they never aboard? Someone may know, but thus far no one’s saying.

Note again that he provides no cites other than “news – web sites.”

But now, after setting the stage for his conspiracy theory, and setting the paradigm in the minds of readers dim enough to take him seriously, he backtracks in a feeble (and laughable) attempt to regain some semblence of credibility.

Odds are overwhelmingly in favor of a natural or mechanical explanation for the crash of Paul Wellstone’s plane. For one thing, substitute candidate Walter Mondale is expected to retain Wellstone’s senate seat for the Democrats. That’s predictable. The victories of last-minute substitute candidates like Missouri’s Jean Carnahan in 2000 and New Jersey’s Frank Lautenberg this year provide ample evidence that losing a candidate needn’t mean losing an election. If anything, Mondale is more likely to win than Wellstone was, notwithstanding the inadvertent prediction of China’s president Jiang Zemin (news – web sites), who offered his “deep condolences for the loss of the Senate.”

The fact that we’re having this discussion at all is a symptom of the polarizing effect that Bush and his top dogs have had on the United States since assuming office and even more so in the hard-right free-for-all that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. Presidents routinely cause their political detractors to take offense, but one would have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to stack the U.S. Supreme Court (news – web sites) or Richard Nixon’s wiretapping and enemies list to find another American leader who crossed the line of acceptable discourse as extremely as George W. Bush has done.

See, he isn’t asking these questions because he really believes it possible–it’s just because that spawn of the devil, George W. Bush obviously has no scruples.

Ronald Reagan (news – web sites) may have been a hard line conservative, but had Wellstone died during his watch you wouldn’t have heard liberals asking whether the Gipper had had him offed. Bush is different.

Ooooohhhh, that’s good. Unusual for Ted, because he’s usually much less subtle. He pretends that he thinks that this is above Reagan, so that he might be able to pull in another two percent of the morons who are wavering, and like Reagan.

Asking mailmen to spy on ordinary Americans, creating military tribunals for anyone deemed an “enemy combatant,” locking prisoners of war in dog cages, spending a decade’s worth of savings in six months, allowing journalists to die rather than provide them with help in a war zone, smearing Democratic politicians as anti- American, invading sovereign nations without excuse–these are acts that transgress essential American reasonableness. A man capable of these things seems, by definition, capable of anything.

Well, yes, and any crimes so egregious obviously don’t require any explanation, or citation. It should simply be accepted without question that George Bush is guilty of them, and therefore it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone (at least anyone with Ted Rall’s brilliance) that W would have Paul Wellstone whacked, even though he was recovering in the polls. Don’t want to take any chances, you know, with the Senate in the balance, and the opportunity to get some Supreme Court justices that will allow him to lock up everyone who might stand his way of bestriding the earth, like the Father Of All Caesars.

Ironically, Paul Wellstone would have been the last person to suspect Republicans of such a monstrous crime. One of his final acts in the Senate was to praise the career of retiring Senator Jesse Helms, his ideological counterpart on the Right. Like most idealists, Wellstone thought the best of humanity, that people would do the right thing if the choices were properly and clearly explained. Wellstone wouldn’t have wanted to believe that he was assassinated.

Neither do I. So let’s hope those black boxes turn up.

Awwwwww, isn’t that sweet.

Ted is torn. He doesn’t want to believe that our President would assassinate a political opponent. He hopes that his slanderous insinuations aren’t true.

Almost as much as he hopes that he persuades the mental deficients who take him seriously will believe that they are…

[Update the next morning]

Several have commented that there were links in the article that might in theory support Ted’s statements, so I’ll retract my complaints that he doesn’t provide URLs. But considering the source, I’m not going to waste my time going to look at them. I already spent far too much time on this subject.

Another point that I missed, but shouldn’t have, was that Senator Heinz was a Republican, not a Democrat. I’ll assume that Ted was just too dumb to realize this (almost always a safe assumption), and that it’s not an outright lie.

It’s easy to get confused about it because (if I recall correctly) his widow became a big-time Democratic donor with her inherited fortune. Great way to honor her husband’s memory.

[Update in the afternoon]

For an even better critique of Ted’s nonsense, see what Bill Hobbs did to him.

[Another update, at 3:45 PM PST[

Commercial pilot Stephen Quick appropriately chastises me for dissing the safety of chartered King Airs:

Corporate and charter aircraft of this type have a safety record that is equivalent to the airlines. It also has the unfortunate experience of being lumped in with the private pilots (like Carnahan’s son, who was doing the flying in that accident). Most of us hold the same pilot certificate, Airline Transport Pilot, that the pilots at Southwest, American, United, Delta, Continental, etc. hold.

He has further pertinent comments.

You know, I was actually saddened by Paul Wellstone’s death (and not just because it probably increased the probability of the Democrats retaining the seat).

I just listened to excerpts from the “memorial service” on Fox News, and heard his son speaking.

This thing doesn’t sound like a service to honor the dead. It was more of a cross between a campaign rally and an awards ceremony. The son spent several minutes thanking all the people who made it possible, and how important it was to uphold Senator Wellstone’s ideals next week, and it was hard for me to discern any sense of grief in his voice as he spoke.

It was spooky, and not in the literal sense. Is this what the Democratic Party has come to?

It’s particularly disgusting in the wake of the Democrats’ charges that the Repubs are playing politics, when Coleman has basically shut down his campaign.

I also hear that they’re playing games to put Mondale on the ballot as late as possible. There seems to be a pattern here, from Florida and Missouri in 2000, to New Jersey and Minnesota this year.

The Democrats win elections the old fashioned way–any damned way they can, and to hell with the law or decency…

[Update a couple minutes later]

Instantman shows that those Dems sure know how to partythrow a wake.

[Update at 10 PM PST]

It occurs to me that Dick Cheney must be wiping his brow in relief that he didn’t have to attend this macabre Demfest.