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According to Matt Taibbi ("Hunter Thompson, but without the talent!"), Douglas Brinkley left his cats and his maid behind when he evacuated New Orleans. But that's all right, he did this probably knowing that Sean Penn was going to be...

The great British magazine The Economist has an article about John Roberts in their Sept. 15, 2005 print edition [Update: Here's the link; subscription required]:The nominee pleases almost everybody One of the surest ways to guarantee high drama in Washington...

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.

Remember this: anyone who tells you that free speech is alive and well on college campuses is a flat out liar. The First Amendment? Hell, they won't even let anyone tell the truth....

Rush Limbaugh provides support to Sibby?s rule number one (Do not do what the Democrats say): RUSH: We have an opportunity here, folks, with this DeLay business. There's something that I have said throughout the course of my star-studded career,...

The New York Times broke this great story two days ago. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, asked Judge Roberts for his views on New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that revolutionized American libel...

The inimitible Quentin Riggins informs me that we've been called out by certain forces in the South Dakota blogosphere as being chicken hawks because we, generally speaking, support the war in Iraq but have not and do not serve in...

Franklin Delano Bush

The Chief has posted previously on this topic - David Boaz of the Cato Institute has a much more thorough exposition of the same proposition - that President Bush as effectively demonstrated that he is, in reality, closer to a Democrat of the FDR or JFK model: expanding government, while maintaining a staunch international policy. On second thought, JFK would probably have been more of a conservative than Dubya is!

Where is Barry Goldwater now that we really need him?

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