Waxman-Markey

Cap and Trade

Al Gore

If you Google Waxman-Markey, the ‘Climate Change Bill’ coming up in Congress this week, you’ll see that opinions on it are all over the map. Waxman-Markey Will Mandate Greener Building, Drive Green Renovation, Waxman’s Economy Killer, Waxman-Markey bill to address indirect land use change, Global warming bill still contains some smoke and mirrors, – no two giving the same opinion.

It’s a difficult topic, because it touches on economics, science and yes, politics. From an economic point of view, Megan McCardle notes that the bill seems to be low-cost.

But the real question, I think, is whether the low cost is a feature or a bug. The only way a bill is going to have an impact is if it causes real financial pain to American households–enough to get them to change their behavior. Waxman-Markey obviously is not going to do that. And indeed, the projections of its effect on global warming are entirely negligible.

Why should that be? Does this economist have the science to back up that statement?  No, and she doesn’t need it.  She explains that the reason is political, not scientific.  The reason is  – China.

China is not going to let its citizens languish in subsistence farming because 30 years from now, some computer models say there will be some not-well-specified bad effects from high temperatures. Nor is India. Global warming isn’t even high on the list of environmental concerns they’ll want to attack as they get rich; local air pollution is far more pressing. Thinking that we’re somehow going to lead them by example is like thinking that poor rural teens are going to buy electric cars because Ed Begley jr. has one.

In other words, if you believe that climate change is anthropological in nature, you must believe that nothing is going to change until and unless China and India come on-board.

Well, what about the rest of the world? From RealClearPolitics, Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin point out that it’s not happening in other countries either.

As the US Congress considers the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Australian Senate is on the verge of rejecting its own version of cap-and-trade. The story of this legislation’s collapse offers advance notice for what might happen to similar legislation in the US—and to the whole global warming hysteria.

So what do the scientists say? Dr. James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute of Space Science (GISS) said this, as he was being arrested:

I am not a politician; I am a scientist and a citizen. Politicians may have to advocate for halfway measures if they choose. But it is our responsibility to make sure our representatives feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is politically expedient. Mountaintop removal, providing only a small fraction of our energy, should be abolished.

I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he’s saying that the science doesn’t matter; it’s what people feel is right that matters. That sort of works, because the science is apparently being ignored. But contra Hansen, it’s being ignored for the politics. The scientists are playing politics.

A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2.

The source, who chooses not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said that Carlin was rebuffed in his attempt to introduce scientific evidence that does not accord with the EPA’s view of global warming, which largely relies on IPCC reports.

Kevin Mooney at the Washington Examiner publishes on the story:

Scientific findings at odds with the Obama Administration’s views on carbon dioxide and climate change are being suppressed as a result of political pressure, officials at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) charge.
“This suppression of valid science for political reasons is beyond belief,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “EPA’s conduct is even more outlandish because it flies in the face of the president’s widely-touted claim that ‘the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.’”

If this story was about anthrax, possible political manipulation in Congress and scientific intrigue, the story would not sell.  It is a mess, too convoluted, too unbelievable.  And there it is.  We buy it, we believe it’s plausible – why exactly?

Enceladus Is All Wet

…And Is A Moon of Saturn

Geysers on Enceladus

Arrggg! So much news today! But the most interesting (unless you’re a real Michael Jackson fan) is from a paper published in the British journal Nature, by Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg.

The Cassini spacecraft has found what may be the strongest evidence yet that Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus has an ocean beneath its icy surface. If the liquid water finding is confirmed, it would suggest that the moon may be one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for signs of past or present extraterrestrial life.

This is significant.

Saturns Moon Enceladus

You see, there are three ingredients necessary for life; an energy source, a good mix of organic chemicals (both of which Cassini has found on Enceladus already), and water.  Liquid water.

Researchers in Europe detected salt particles in the volcanic vapour-and-ice jets that shoot hundreds of kilometres (miles) into space, the strongest evidence to date of a liquid ocean under the moon’s icy crust.

If Jupiter’s moon Europa also has oceans below its frozen surface, the number of places in the solar system with the potential to harbor life is starting to look distinctly greater than 1.

Cassini has been circling Saturn since 2004.

Staring At The Sun

Not a Flower

But Not For Too Long

What you see in the picture is not a flower, but a sunspot, close up.  Very close up.  The scale shown on the full size image indicates a bar that spans 10 million meters, or about 6,100 miles.  For comparison, the Earth’s diameter is about 8,000 miles.  What’s causing those flares, filiments and tongues of fire?  Why, magnetic fields, of course.

But you knew that.  You see, at the temperature of the Sun’s surface it’s hot enough (about 5,000 deg. K.) that electrons don’t stay tied to the nucleus of hydrogen (and some helium) very long, and go flying off.  That leaves a lot of naked, electrically charged stuff floating around for magnetic fields to play with, and boy, do they have a good time wallowing in all that plazma.

But that’s not the best part of that photogragh.  From Anne Minard at Universe Today:

In the just-released image above, the interface between a sunspot’s umbra (dark center) and penumbra (lighter outer region) shows a complex structure with narrow, almost horizontal (lighter to white) filaments embedded in a background having a more vertical (darker to black) magnetic field. Farther out, extended patches of horizontal field dominate. For the first time, scientists have modeled this complex structure in a comprehensive 3D computer simulation, giving scientists their first glimpse below the visible surface.

It’s good to know about the inner workings of the Sun, and sunspots are the portal through which we can study the sun’s interior.  Why should we bother?  There are two very good reasons.

Sunspots are the most striking surface manifestations of solar magnetism, and they are associated with massive ejections of charged plasma that can cause geomagnetic storms and disrupt communications and navigational systems. They also contribute to variations in overall solar output, which can affect weather on Earth and exert a subtle (and as-yet deciphered) influence on climate patterns.

A quote from Matthias Rempel, a scientist at NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory:

“If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth’s atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve. Our simulations will advance research into the inner workings of the Sun as well as connections between solar output and Earth’s atmosphere.”

That’s the best reason.

The Only Place For News (on Iran)

Is On Twitter

Let Them Eat Ice Cream

Clearly. If you’re following only the MSM, that is, TV, the papers, even radio, then you’re not getting it.

Try here, instead.

Then learn all you can about Twitter.

Land Of The Free

Still?

Years, yea, decades ago, I had a “Social Studies” teacher (I put “Social Studies” in scare quotes intentionally) who left an impression.  J.T. is no longer with us, having died relatively young.  And that’s a pity.  Although a lifelong democrat, liberal and supporter of teachers unions, I suspect that despite our diametrically opposed viewpoints that we would have had great respect for each other and our positions.  Let’s say he was a liberal in a classic sense, which is indistinguishable from mainstream conservatism today.

He recognized me as having a conservative bent even as far back as 1970, when I was busy figuring out how to radicalize my fellow high school students and resist the draft. I never succeeded, btw.

I bring this up because he first introduced me to a pearl of wisdom that I have never forgotten.  We’re always ready to trade our freedom for a feeling of safety.   Of course we are.  People don’t (or shouldn’t) mind that when they buckle a seat belt.  And people reflexively support curbs and outright bans on cigarette smoking in public (and sometimes in private) places.  But is there a point at which we stay “stop” to this?

Homeland Security has instituted a requirement that private aircraft operators seek government permission each time we propose to take off if we are planning to depart for Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean. We must provide advance detailed information about where, when, and who, including the names, social security numbers, addresses, etc., of all persons who will be in the aircraft. The justification for this, they say, is that we, our spouses, family or friends might be on their mysterious and top secret “No Fly List.” The most significant aspect of this is that Homeland Security has indicated that this is a preliminary step toward their ultimate objective of requiring this data submission prior to EVERY aircraft takeoff in America, regardless of destination. Keep this in mind as we continue.

It is important to understand that this requirement breaks entirely new ground. While ENTERING any country requires formalities, never, ever, has it been necessary to seek and receive government permission to LEAVE America, the “land of the free,” much less to travel within its borders. And never, ever, has it been proposed that such permission is somehow necessary to preserve “national security.” This is a requirement only previously seen in Iron Curtain dictatorships.

It’s only one data-point.  Add it to the complaints that gun owners have had for years, that smokers have had for decades, and that businesses have had forever.  The question is legitimate – Are we regulating ourselves out of our God-given rights?  Have we already?  I know the mechanism by which this is done – it’s done one baby step at a time.  What I don’t know, is why.

The 0.1 Second Brushoff

Ohhhh – This Hurts!

From PhyOrg.com, another reason to be so glad I’m married to the AstroWife…

Our brains get a first impression of people’s overriding social signals after seeing their faces for only 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds). Whether this impression is correct, however, is another question. Now an international group of experts has carried out an in-depth study into how we process emotional expressions, looking at the pattern of cerebral asymmetry in the perception of positive and negative facial signals.

Hummm… Back in my bachelor days I noted with some chagrin that most women I saw in the grocery store spent much more time considering loaves of bread on the shelves than I ever saw them considering men in the local bar.  Well, me, anyway.

That’s when I stopped going to bars.   So glad those days are over.

Fedora!

Oh, Just Go For It!

Long time readers know that I’ve been using Linux on my home PC (networked with the Astro-wife’s XP box).  I had been rather happy using the Mandriva distribution for a few years.

Mandriva always had a good reputation within the Linux community, and was considered a good choice for those new to Linux.  That (well deserved) reputation was mostly due to its marvellous installation package.  Installing Linux can be daunting, you see, because of the nearly infinite customization possibilities.  There’s a fine balance between the power to build and fine-tune your system from scratch and being overwhelmed and lost in the details.  Mandriva found a “sweet-spot” between too-complex and too-powerless when it presented its choices.

Even better, the distribution was very good at having at-the-ready suitable drivers for all the peripheral devices that consumers put into their PCs.  When a manufacturer decides that its only going to support Windows, that can be a daunting effort.  Finally, like all Linux distributions, Mandriva has a great selection of software available for download.

Mandriva’s biggest downside was that it’s French.  I keeed!  I kid because I love!  But only partially.  That means that many of their best servers (but not all, of course) are in Europe and relatively slow.

Mandriva worked very well for me, so like the fool I am, I had to try something different.

Fedora is a long-standing, well regarded (and well used!) distribution that’s supported by Red Hat (trust me, you don’t want a distro that’s not going to be around for a while.  Support, especially financial support, is important).  It’s considered a bit of a stalking ground for Red-Hat Enterprise Linux, which is most explicitly not free, and very, very well tested.  Fedora is therefore thought of as “bleeding edge” and more or less up-to-the-minute.  Me likey.

Of course, all that means you’ll be introducing some bugs sometimes, when you use Fedora… which I’ve been doing for six months now.  Just recently I’ve upgraded to their newest version, Fedora 11.

Wow!  It’s fast.  Installation went very smoothly.  It was only weeks ago it seems (well, actually it was years ago, but it seems like weeks), that getting wireless to connect to routers was a major, major hassle, more black-art than science in Linux.  No more.  The full distribution immediately recognized my wireless card (D-Link with an Atheros chip set), chose a suitable driver (Ath5k, but madwifi is available) and connected as soon as I entered the password for my router’s encryption. I  might as well have been wired to the ‘net – it was that straightforward.

Printer, CD-RW, SATA-II hard drive, all recognized, all working properly, but those are the easy ones these days.  Sound and graphics – that’s harder.

I have seen complaints about Fedora’s inability to recognize certain sound cards.  Some of Creative’s models come up frequently in the user’s forums.  I haven’t experienced that problem, because I’m not using a separate sound card (I’m using on-board sound).  Regardless, it appears that the problems have much more to do with, not with Fedora, but with Pulse-Audio.  That’s a package that sits between the applications that play music/sounds (CD players, video and game players, internet radio players…) and the software that controls the hardware.  Pulse-Audio is not made by Fedora, and it does works very well.  But people are still confused by it, and apparently Pulse-Audio is not 100% bullet proof yet. Again, my on-board sound works fine under Fedora’s selection of software.

Graphics support has been a sore point.  Many Linux users are gamers, or would like to be, and require the latest graphics cards be powered by the latest drivers.  Unfortunately, none of the manufacturers fully support Linux.  They don’t like the idea of free video drivers, even if people pay for the cards.  The good news is that for both ATI and Nvidia (the most popular brands) default drivers exist and are getting to be pretty good.  The bad news is that the free default drivers do not support 3-D graphics yet (and 3-D graphics are becoming standard quickly).  The better news is that Nvidia has provided proprietary, but free of cost, drivers for its cards that work very well in 3-D mode, even for Linux (Yeah!).  The worse news is that ATI has not (boo!).  The best news is that Intel graphics cards are fully supported in Linux (Yes!).

I’m using an Nvidia 9600 ePCI card, myself, with the proprietary drivers provided by Nvidia, and it works marvellously.  It does mean, though, that the driver has to be installed manually, and that can be intimidating to a novice Linux user.  The very good news here is that the Fedora users community is one of the best and most knowledgeable around (take that, you Ubuntu users!).  It’s easy to find access to great scripts (look up ‘Autoten’ if you’re interested) that do all the work for you.  It took me less that an hour to install Fedora 11, restore my browser bookmarks, get online to install the last minute updates and bug-fixes, and run Autoten to install the video, DVD playback, assorted codeces for multimedia, and configure the desktop interface the way I like it.  Compare that with the 8 hours I spent installing XP on the Astro-wife’s box two months ago.

After using Fedora for six months I’m more than happy with it.  The most recent release, Fedora-11, is very fast booting and has been tremendously stable for me.  That’s amazing, considering that some of the software is supposed to be right there at the edge.  Fedora uses the Gnome desktop by default, but I prefer KDE myself.  KDE 4.x has been controversial, to say the least, but I really like the latest (4.2).  It installed flawlessly and has not crashed on me once.  Can’t beat that.

Diana Krall – Live

And Wonderful!

Jazz may be an acquired taste, but right now these no better way to acquire it than to listen to Diana Krall’s music.  Last night I had the privilege of seeing her perform live at the Meyerhoff Concert hall in Baltimore.  What a night!

I wish I had taken notes – she started with I Love Being Here With You,  (made famous by Peggy Lee), which allows each of her quartet (guitarist Anthony Wilson, bassist Robert Hurst, and drummer Jeff Hamilton) plenty of room to display some musical fireworks.  She then continues with Sinatra, Nat King Cole, a Gershwin piece, and even a tune done originally by Julie London. But when she covers Sergio Mendez’  So Nice (you know the song even if you don’t think you do), magic happens.

And it kept on happening for the duration. Krall’s studio productions sometimes seem a bit cold.  As much as you’d like to have this very attractive woman singing to you, it’s always feels much more like she’s singing for you and your date. But live, Mrs. Costello is very engaging and warm to the audience (especially when describing the musical preferences of her 2 year old twins, which tend, she says, towards “Itsy Bitsy Spider”).

By the time she does her torch song, you are in a bar, she’s at the piano, the lights and the mood are right and you know you’re going to find someone.

The audience was amazing too.  As a group, they were surprisingly knowlegable and sophisticated about the music, even getting the musical jokes.  It took about three beats for the audience to recognize Krall’s signature piece, Frim Fram Sauce, and show their appreciation.  Listen – When an audience waits until the final echo of a fade, and only then explodes into applause, that’s when you know the performer has them.  That happened last night.

Free Fallin’

Stumblin’ and Tumblin’

I haven’t blogged much about bicycling this spring, but I’ve been doing my share (which, fortunately, isn’t much for old men…) Weekend before last I took my first real fall.

Note to self: When looking over your shoulder, don’t start to turn before checking traffic. Changing your mind will cause you to skid.

And fall. Only my ego got bruised and my elbow scraped. My helmet did bounce off the ground, though.

But I managed to get the strut to which the de-railer is mounted somewhat out of alignment. Not to worry, I thought. I can adjust it. Right? Um… Children, don’t try that at home. Did you know that a good bike mechanic is worth his weight in gold in 14 states? Anyway, I messed up the alignment and the fine tuning of the de-railer, and the bike is in the shop for a few more days. Lesson learned! De-railer adjustment is a black art, who’s practitioners begin their magic with the sacrifice of small electronic appliances while chanting a mystic canticle in Olde English.

Tour-de-cure 100 mile start.

My hat’s off to the astro-bro, who completed the “Tour-de-Cheektowaga” and lived to tell the tale. That’s him, next to Lance Armstrong.

Close. Very, Very Close

1.9 Seconds To Blast-Off

Every so often NASA has to pull the plug at the last second.   Literally.  Nancy Atkinson:

Holy Moly! Not to wish anything like this for Saturday’s launch, but I came across this video of the STS-68 launch attempt in 1994 that was aborted at the very last second. Watching it is enough to make your heart stop. Everyone involved must have experienced a tremendous rush followed by extreme let-down! The main engines had lit, but were shut down 1.9 seconds before liftoff when on-board computers detected higher than acceptable readings in a sensor monitoring the discharge temperature of the high pressure oxidizer turbopump in main engine #3. In the history of the shuttle program, five launch attempts were aborted under five seconds from the planned launch. STS-68 came the closest to hauling the mail before being aborted.

Amazing video.  NASA points to the “Hydrogen venting system” as the cause of the shutdown.

Twittering From Iran

What The MSM Is Not Telling You

…can be found pretty instantly online these days. From Iran, a person going by the handle “Change_for_Iran” is leaving these messages in the hours before midnight of Sat. 13-Jun. Because they’re twitter, the messages are time-ordered with the latest on top.

# my brother thinks they are after a student council activist. the council known as Tahkime Vahdat and belongs to president era. #iranelection 3 minutes ago from web

# I guess the Intel ministry guy is trying to convince university’s security to open the gates #iranelection 11 minutes ago from web

# I’m currently on rooftop with my laptop, most of the city is now looking calm except university of Economy building. #IranElection 15 minutes ago from web

# there were more troops inside the vans and now starting to create a line in front of the only entrance of the building #iranelection 20 minutes ago from web

# no reports from any other part of Tehran, we’re all waiting for a move from mousavi or karoubi. #iranelection 25 minutes ago from web

# Internet barely works, Speed is near 2kbps #iranelection33 minutes ago from web

# they are joining with police motorcycles in front of student’s dormitory buildings firefighters are leaving the area right now #iranelection 35 minutes ago from web

# black riot guards with black vans, it’s my first time seeing this people, no badges! probably Intel ministry #iranelection43 minutes ago from web

# 7am news, still nothing about protests & clashes on TV. #iranelectionabout 1 hour ago from web

# all cellphones now read: Emergency only – No Service! #iranelectionabout 1 hour ago from web

# 6:47 am, police is speaking with students inside dormitory buildings of university of Tehran with speaker. #iranelectionabout 1 hour ago from web

# @matthew951 we’re using twitterfox! thanks for the note!about 1 hour ago from web in reply to matthew951

# Ahmadinejad & his supporters will celebrate their victory today at 5pm local time in Valiasr square & we will try to ruin his party!about 2 hours ago from web

# Major General Jafari, commander of IRG said he will not let mousavi’s green movement to harm Islamic revolution’s ethics #iranelectionabout 2 hours ago from web

# @LovLesmile Internet access in Iran is based on land lines not sat dishes!about 2 hours ago from web in reply to LovLesmile

Chilling. How do you know these are from Tehran? You don’t. But the source is fairly credible.

The immediate cause of what appears to be street riots in Tehran is the possibility (probability?) that the elections held there yesterday, elections that returned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, were utterly fraudulent.

Laura Rozen writing at the Foreign Policy Blog The Cable:

“I don’t think anyone anticipated this level of fraudulence,” Reuters cited the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Karim Sadjadpour. “This was a selection, not an election. At least authoritarian regimes like Syria and Egypt have no democratic pretences. In retrospect it appears this entire campaign was a show: (Supreme Leader) Ayatollah (Ali) Khamenei wasn’t ever going to let Ahmadinejad lose.”

“I’m in disbelief that this could be the case,” Reuters cited Trita Parsi.

They continue:

Rozen also reports that “Iran hands have used words like “coup” to describe what they believe may be taking place.”

The whole world seems to be watching.

Update: Allahpundit at HotAir is now reporting 50 to 100 dead in the city.

The regime shut down text messaging across the country yesterday too to hamper organization of the protests they knew would follow the results. Even so, the Beeb says street violence today is the worst Tehran has seen in 10 years, replete with Iranian cops beating women with nightsticks.

The White house “is monitoring and watching the situation closely.“ I’m a little underwhelmed.

Update x2: Hours later, the MSM, at least, in the guise of the NYT, is reporting on the violence in Iran this morning, as is the Washington Post (I’m no longer registered there, so I cannot link to the article). The nets (CNN, ABC, NBC, but not Fox or CBS) have decided to highlight the story on their front pages. My personal bias says that all these stories are oddly muted:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday his re-election was “real and free” and cannot be questioned — despite accusations of mass voter fraud.

Some Untruths

Things We Thought Were True, But Are Not

When I was learning this stuff, I was told that:

• Astronomers would never see planets circling other stars
• We can see almost to the end of the universe and almost count everything that’s there
• The universe will stop expanding one day, and may even start to contract
• You’ve been as constant as the Northern Star, the brightest star that shines

Oh wait – that last one is from a song by Gerry Rafferty.  It’s as wrong as all the other things in the list, though (Polaris, the “Northern Star”, is neither the brightest star, nor is it constant in brightness).

The latest bit of knowledge circa 1960 that’s gone “poof!” is the idea that the Earth’s atmosphere is pretty solidly connect to the planet, and is shielded from solar storms by the Earth’s magnetic field.  These storms and the solar wind would otherwise drive the atmosphere off the planet.  But unlike Mars, the air is not leaking away.

Oh yeah?

This may mean our planet’s magnetic shield may not be as solid a protective screen as once believed when it comes to guarding the atmosphere from an assault from the sun.

Researchers were stunned to discover recently that Earth is losing more of its atmosphere than Venus and Mars, which have negligible magnetic fields.

Once again, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I still feel fine.

Green Rust

Do Green and Rust Mix At All?

Slates Mickey Kaus points us to an article in the National Journal by Ron Brownstein. It asks one question about my home town (and “rust belt” cities in general), and about the hopes that these town have to rebuild and revitalize on waves of “Green Manufacturing”.   The question is: What are they smoking?

For officials at every level, the great hope is that these fading car towns can move from rust to green, from building autos to manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels or buses and subway cars. These places offer many advantages for such production: factories, supply chains, transportation links, and a skilled workforce “that knows how to do metal,” as Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio says.

Well, those seem like pretty good reasons. Brownstein continues:

But there are few examples of such conversions succeeding in the auto plants already closed, notes Dan Luria, research director for the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center, a government-business partnership. And although Obama’s policies ensure that the U.S. will buy more alternative energy and transit equipment in the years ahead, Luria says, there’s no guarantee that those products will be built in America, much less in these particular communities, unless Washington encourages it through an integrated set of carrots and sticks beyond anything under discussion. Brown, likewise, is urging a national manufacturing policy.

Well, given their advantages, why wouldn’t autos be built in Detroit, and subway cars in Wayne, and wind turbines and solar panels in Buffalo? Kaus throws a clue brick.

Hmm. Why might manufacturers of “alternative energy and transit equipment” want to avoid locating their factories in the heavily-unionized rustbelt? Do you think the ongoing example of Detroit’s Big Three might have a cautionary effect on their decision-making?

The research director, Laria, quoted by Brownstein above, encourages the Obama administration to use “an integrated set of carrots and sticks” to overcome this – um… hesitation.  In English, Kaus notes that it’s also called a “national manufacturing policy”.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Make them stay in Detroit if they want to build “alternative energy and transit equipment”.  They use policy like that all the time.  In communist China and Cuba.

NASA and the Budget

A Spending Increase It’s Not

From Space.com

In a move that reflects the uncertainty surrounding NASA’s current strategy for replacing the space shuttle and returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020, House appropriators slashed by 16 percent the space agency’s $4 billion request for manned space exploration in 2010.

The proposed legislation, marked up June 4 by the House Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, trims $483 million overall from U.S. President Barack Obama’s $18.7 billion budget request for NASA next year. The $670 million cut to the 2010 manned exploration request would leave $3.21 billion, which is less than is available for the effort this year.

Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.), the subcommittee’s chairman, described the move as a “time-out” in the budget process as the White House awaits the findings of a 10-member panel tasked by the White House to reassess NASA’s post-shuttle exploration plans.

It’s funny how then candidate Obama’s proposals for NASA looked so much better last fall.

During the Democratic primaries, he planned to cut into the Constellation program to pay for increased educational spending. Yet by the general election he had reversed himself and promised increased funding to close the gap between shuttle retirement in 2010 and Constellation’s arrival in 2015. Does this change represent a true change of heart and the beginning of a commitment to our future in space, or an opportunistic campaign tactic to appeal to voters along Florida’s important space coast? That remains to be seen.

And it’s not exactly what the Obama administration told NASA just a month ago.

NASA officials said Thursday that the Obama administration will increase funding for the US space agency by five percent in 2010 and will conduct a review of its programme for manned space flight.

The $18.7-billion budget represents a $903.6-million increase over 2009 and includes money given to NASA under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan.

That, was then. This however, is not.

NY State Senate Now Republican

Have Gays Overreached?

The Magic 8 Ball might read “The signs say yes.”

Michelle Malkin and the NYT report that two state senators, Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens, have joined New York State Republicans to give them majority control of the Senate.

From the NYT City Room:

Republicans seized control of the New York State Senate on Monday, in a stunning and sudden reversal of fortunes for the Democratic Party, which controlled the chamber for barely five months.

Interestingly,

After the results of the vote were read aloud, the in-house television station that carries Senate proceedings live in the Capitol went dark. All that appeared on the screen was a still photo of the Senate chamber and the words “Please stand by.”

Okay, it’s time for me to make a silly, meaningless comment.  NY politics is in extreme disarray, and has been since Sept. 11, 2001 (before then, it was merely in disarray).  SSM is not the issue upon which mid-term elections will turn in 2010, but the issue most emphatically does not help the Democratic party with any but the smallest part of its constituent base.  SSM supporters have overreached in NY, as they have in California.

They may be overreaching in Maryland, too.