Fox News is making their daily announcement that the church standoff is about to end.

The current chairman of the Senate committee that oversees NASA authorization made the following statement.

I want to recapture the vision of John F. Kennedy’s commitment to putting a man on the moon by 1970. Today, it is not enough to endlessly circle the Earth in low orbit. NASA should set the goal of putting a person on Mars and work with Congress to set a date to do it. But the aim must be to reach Mars both safely and cost-effectively, or not at all.

Of course, he did it in the context of an overall statement that NASA must get its finances and management house in order before such a thing can be seriously contemplated. And of course, he may not be the chairman next year…

And a rerun of Apollo would be daft. Apollo set us back decades–I’d hate to think of the effect of Apollo to Mars.

[Update at 2:44 PM PDT]

Mark Whittington has some further interesting thoughts on this.

Some folks are arguing whether or not there’s a Saddam connection to September 11.

WTF difference does it make, to anyone but a Eurohypocrite and their fellow travelers here? We don’t need such a connection to justify replacing him, any more than we would have needed proof of past crimes to take out Osama prior to September 11, if we had known what he was planning.

The “War on Terror” (quotes because it’s clear, in light of current Israeli/Palestinian policy, that it’s no longer that) isn’t about revenge–it’s about prophylaxis. A good offense, particularly with thugs like this, is not just the best, but probably the only defense.

My new Fox column is up. It’s basically a shortened version of this post from a few days back. I removed most of the stuff about man rating.

The other day, I posted about how the focus of the space budget tends to be about “jobs,” rather than wealth, or value to the taxpayers. Here’s a typical example in the Houston Chronicle.

Several who testified Wednesday urged the House Economic Development Committee to increase state support for efforts to recruit new military and commercial aerospace companies to Texas.

Nice goal, but more thought has to be given to this than just getting the Congress to pony up more bucks for NASA. Like markets, and investment…

Here’s my entry to Eugene Volokh’s contest–a sunset amendment.

“All laws passed by the Congress shall remain in effect for no more than ten calendar years from the date of passage, at or prior to which time they must be repassed, or expire. All federal laws in existence at the time of passage of this amendment shall have staggered expiration dates, as a function of their age on the books, according to the formula, time-to-expire = 35 x (year-of-amendment-passage – 1787)/(year-of-amendment-passage – year-of-law-passage) + 5. Repassage of all existing laws will also have a lifetime of ten years.”

I’ve put some (but not a tremendous amount of) thought into this. The idea is to make the whole mess go away eventually, but you wouldn’t want to have a single date of expiration for all existing law–it would simply overwhelm the system. What I’m hoping for here is something that whelms the system only slightly, but enough to keep them so busy renewing important laws that they won’t have time to renew antiquated or bad ones, or to cause new mischief.

The formula has the earliest phaseouts (of the most recent laws) occur in five years, while the oldest laws (some of which, given their age, might have actually been good ones), can hang on as long as forty. The last sentence may be redundant, because it’s implied by the first sentence, but I want to make it clear that once law existing prior to amendment passage has been reauthorized, it has no special status among laws passed later–it is simply treated as any other newly-passed law.

I also suggested repealing the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments.

If this man’s calculations are correct, asteroid impacts may be the least of our problems. We’d have to colonize other star systems to get the eggs out of the basket for this one.

(Thanks to fellow blogger Bob Ballard for the heads up)

If this man’s calculations are correct, asteroid impacts may be the least of our problems. We’d have to colonize other star systems to get the eggs out of the basket for this one.

(Thanks to fellow blogger Bob Ballard for the heads up)

If this man’s calculations are correct, asteroid impacts may be the least of our problems. We’d have to colonize other star systems to get the eggs out of the basket for this one.

(Thanks to fellow blogger Bob Ballard for the heads up)

While the current Middle East policy muddle is depressing, there is a little good news, and there is a substantive difference between Bush and Gore.