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I just saw this on Powerline, and its way too good to pass up. Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington, President Bush told this joke. Rabbi Stanton Zamek of the Temple Beth Shalom Synagogue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,...

For no particular reason, and in no particular order, here are some snippets of my own private dementia. I really dislike years that end in odd numbers. Writing an odd number on the end always bugs me. This year, 2005,...

Getting a little help from some creative cropping. You know that it has to be difficult to get good, front page photos to run for your newspaper when about every sign and banner carries a "F*ck Bush" or some other...

NASA administrator says space shuttle was a mistake

Any good "hard" science fiction fan was capable of making this analysis. Among others, rocketeer Homer Hickham, author and main character of October Sky retired from NASA and wrote a novel titled Back to the Moon in which NASA is given a pretty good black eye for having become moribund with bureaucracy and political correctness.

Latest in this feeling that NASA had lost its direction comes from no less than the NASA chief administrator himself:

The space shuttle and International Space Station ? nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades ? were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth. ?It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,? Griffin said. ?We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.?

Reading between the lines, it appears to the Chief that NASA needed more von Braun and less Rube Goldberg in its design philosophy:

Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, ?My opinion is that it was. ? It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible.? Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, ?Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.?

Sounds like we finally have a NASA chief worthy of the name after too many bureaucrats, program managers and barely-disguised political hatchetmen, and not nearly enough engineers in the lead. Hopefully now the Congresscritters will give Griffen the support needed to get us back on the road towards the stars. It's absolutely essential if our civilization is to continue to exist and improve itself.

With a courage based on the proposition that, if I get it wrong no one will remember, and if I get it right, I can remind everyone that I'm brilliant, I confidently predict that John McCain will be the Republican...

From USA Today:An Idaho weatherman says Japan's Yakuza mafia used a Russian-made electromagnetic generator to cause Hurricane Katrina in a bid to avenge itself for the Hiroshima atom bomb attack ? and that this technology will soon be wielded again...

I was watching my TiVo'd Battlestar Galactica season finale tonight (ep: Pegasus), when something in the opening credits caught my eye. Maybe sort of a subliminal thing, as I couldn't put my finger on why I had to rewind and...

SDP points out the Mitchell Daily Republic's report on the Grassroots Democrats billboard. Here is my letter to the editor: The billboard that you put up on your 9/21 front-page from the Grassroots Democrats is an example of false...

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