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Professor Schaff below gives a very serious reason why Chad's Chicken Hawk argument is dreadful. It is, among, other things, a classical fallacy, referred to as an ad hominem argument. In that form, you argue that X must be wrong...

From the AP:The Army is closing the books on one of the leanest recruiting years since it became an all-volunteer service three decades ago, missing its enlistment target by the largest margin since 1979 and raising questions about its plans...

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,...

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.

If America had a true opposition party hanging around, you'd think this would be something of a banner week for them. Y'know, real salad days for folks who hate everything GWB and applaud every miscue real or imagined. Wrong....

From today's Hotline: NEBRASKA: Who's The Fairest Of Them All? The GOP nomination "appears to be wide open" as GOPers "try to determine which of the candidates has electability." Many party activists at the GOP State Central Cmte meeting this...

Rush Limbaugh discloses more media lies: Dan Rather was interviewed last night at the National Press Club in Washington by former CBS News employee-reporter Marvin Kalb. ? KALB: Every now and then it even looks as if the new...

Air America is out in Philadelphia, America's sixth largest market by population. Philly is also one of America's most liberal markets to boot. If you can't make it there, you can't make it anywhere. And Katherine Lanpher, the woman paid...

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