Newt Gingrich has some interesting thoughts on reforming health care.

Looks like President Bush will be pushing for more fusion energy research and development.

Here's an interesting space related site. Notice the free ad (of which I was unaware until a few minutes before posting this) for Children of Apollo. My thanks to Ken Paul for the free plug.

So Iraqi agents are stirrinh up the so called "peace movement." And here I thought the peaceniks were just well meaning, patriotic people who just opposed war.

Some silly person from National Public Radio named Bruce Kluger is horrified that the Fox News Network even is allowed to exist. Kluger, who works for a government subsidized network which has been an epicenter of left wing bias likely longs for the day when alternative points of view, which Fox provides, were not allowed on the air.

Kluger destroys his credibility by claiming Bill O'Reilly is "staunchly right-wing" and that Phil Donahue is "genuine, affable, well mannered and well informed." In fact O'Reilly has an eclectic span of views and is just as likely to advocate-say-draconian fuel standards for SUVs as he is to oppose the activities of the ACLU. Donahue, on the other hand, has become a shrill, nasty, rude piece of work whose show is frankly unwatchable to anyone who is to the right of Karl Marx. And sure enough, no one is watching.

Left wingers like Kluger need to understand that their monopoly control of the media has been broken forever. They need to conduct a long and honest self examination as to why they are losing the battle of ideas. Unfortunately they will not like what they see and will likely continue to wallow in denial.

The battle against the luddites who would foreclose humankind's expansion beyond the Earth has been joined, Their dubious statements on the environmental risks of space based nuclear power have been exposed. Their opposition to the projection of military power in space is addressed.

Teddy Kennedy's latest proposal certainly lacks the grandeur of "pay any price, bear any burden."

Outside of the Axis of Weasels of France and Germany, there exist in Europe a group of nations which can best be described as the Alliance of Courage.

Here's an article about Captain George Fishley, hero of the American Revolution, with an accompaning photograph (yes, a photograph).

One of the first practical applications of the nuclear engine to be developed by Project Prometheus will be a mission to the moons of Jupiter in which several moons will be orbited and examined in detail one after the other.

On this date, in 1967 and then in 1986, the crews of Apollo 1 and the Challenger Space Shuttle respectively gave the last full measure of devotion in the quest to expand human civilization beyond the Earth. May they be remembered and honored for as long as human being explore, though it be to the farthest star.

Al Sharpton seems to be causing the Democrats fits. However, my dream Democratic ticket would include Howard Dean.

In a move which seems sure to offend PETA, Wisconson may be about to make hunting and fishing Constitutionally protected rights.

The doctors' revolt against high malpractice insurance rates has spread to Florida.

Will Prometheus spark a nuclear space race with China? The writer seems to hope so, for obvious reasons.

Even Hans Blix has sadly concluded that the Iraqis are liars and cheats and are playing the UN for fools. Yet Kofi Annan wants more time for the Iraqis to continue to lie, cheat, and make fools out of the UN. Fortunately it looks like that President Bush will save the UN from that dubious fate.

And speaking of making a fool of oneself, anti nuclear luddites are getting ready to wage total war against NASA's Project Prometheus, designed to develop nuclear power and propulsion. After waxing hysterical about safety, the author finally reveals the real reason for his opposition:

In the end hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars will be wasted on plans for the nuclearization and weaponization of space. In order to fund these missions Bush and Congress will have to cut programs like social security, education, health care, child care, public transit and environmental protection. In the name of progress and security the lives of future generations will become more insecure.

There you have it. The radical left intends to bring up the starving babies vrs space canard which was so potent in killing space exploration in the early 1970s. This, in my humble opinion, is as evil as it gets in politics, not just for the rank dishonesty, but for the potential of once again deferring the dreams of space exploration for another generation.

By the way, take note in the article about "indoctrinating" children. That is their word, not mine. Evil.

After making a fool of himself by playing the race card in his attempt to reinstitute the draft, Charlie Rangel tries the class warfare card instead.

Peggy Noonan. who has never been a discredit to any cause she has articulated, gives President Bush some needed advice,

Janeane Garofalo believes that the fact that the media is giving her air time to wax incoherent against war in Iraq is proof of a plot to discredit the "peace movement."

"They have actors on so they can marginalize the movement," the stand-up comic says. "It's much easier to toss it off as some bizarre, unintelligent special-interest group. If you're an actor who is pro-war, you're a hero. If you're an actor who's against the war, you're suspect. You must have a weird angle or you just hate George Bush."

Of course, Janeane, there are two ways to foil that evil plan. One way is to refuse to talk about Iraq in public. The other way is to talk about Iraq in public, but to have an informed opinion on the subject.

Thanks to Daniel Duffy for pointing out a review of a fascinating new book, The Edict of Caracalla, available at the moment only in France, wbich has a slightly different take on how Europe can deal with "American Hyper Power."

With anti-Americanism on the rise in Europe, it's hard to believe a European would publish a book in which the hero, a Frenchman, renounces his citizenship to become an American. It's even harder to believe when the author is the French homme de gauche Régis Debray-a man whose résumé includes fighting alongside revolutionary Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia, advising Chilean President Salvador Allende, serving as a confidante to French President François Mitterrand in the heady days of his first government, and supporting Serbia during the NATO campaign in Kosovo.

But in March 2002, Debray published The Edict of Caracalla, or a Plea for the United States of the West by Xavier de C***. His book makes the ostensible argument that resistance to the United States' overwhelming power is vain and that Europe's only hope for survival is in its absorption by the United States.

The Edict of Caracalla takes the form of a long letter, purportedly written to Debray by a former classmate, Xavier de C***, who became a U.S. citizen after a long career as a French high official. Written in English, his adopted language, the letter is de C***'s attempt to justify his decision to make common cause with the United States after the devastating terrorist attacks of 2001. For de C***, becoming American is a way to get on the winning side-and could be Europe's only hope for survival. "By changing allegiance, I feel I have fulfilled the agenda Dei," de C*** writes. "That I am realizing rather than renouncing our millennial heritage by anticipating its only possible future."

De C*** hopes his individual act will be repeated by all Europeans. The nations of Europe are subservient to the United States, he argues, and have no say in decisions made in Washington that affect their lives. Therefore, it would be beneficial for all if an institutional framework existed that would reflect this de facto situation. He proposes the creation of a "United States of the West," a federation in which each nation-state of old Europe would have roughly the same degree of sovereignty as U.S. states. This new arrangement, de C*** says, would elevate Europeans from their current status of "second-tier Americans to that of full-fledged Americans."

He appeals to an inspired U.S. president to take as a model Caracalla, the Roman emperor who granted citizenship to all free men of the empire in A.D.212. "Becoming Americanized in the twenty-first century is like becoming Romanized in the first," de C*** says. It is to evolve from the status of "Syrian, Spaniard, Gaul or slave, to that of man."

For Europeans, the benefits would be immense. There would be obvious economies of scale: a streamlined foreign policy, military force, and civil service. But most important, the people of Europe would gain the right to vote for the U.S. president. "By electing directly the president of the Western United States," de C*** says, "the integrated Europeans will at last be able to exert some influence over what happens to them. They might even rediscover the feeling of having a collective manifest destiny."

De C*** also provides a list of benefits Americans would accrue if they were to embrace Europeans as compatriots. He cites, for example, the expertise in regulation that the U.S. government would gain if it were to integrate European civil servants into its bureaucracies.

Ultimately, however, de C***'s adoptive patriotism proves as destructive as readers of the old Debray would expect. In fact, it proves fatal. Propelled by his sense of duty as a newly minted U.S. citizen, de C*** volunteers his services as a Central Asia expert to the Pentagon and is killed in Afghanistan-by an errant U.S. bomb. His letter, we learn in the epilogue to The Edict of Caracalla, is being published posthumously.

Debray intends his book as satire, and the book is often quite funny. But de C***'s presentation is also perversely seductive. And for some in France, it turned out to be uncomfortably close to the bone. The slim volume was greeted with stunned silence in Paris literary circles. Jean Daniel, a close friend of Debray's who edits the left-leaning magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, echoed the sentiment of disquiet the book's publication received. "The demonstration a contrario by the anti-hero ends up being too effective," Daniel wrote. "The tongue-in-cheek inventory of humiliations becomes more and more convincing."

In an interview in July 2002, Debray said his goal was to give France a jolt and make his compatriots confront their nation's "Swissization," by which he meant its creeping irrelevance and mediocrity. Using the same technique as Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, Debray hoped to outrage."

I suppose if they can't beat us, they can always join us.

NASA engages anti-nuclear luddites head on.

George Will suggests a form of diversity which would horrify most universities. He even provides a questionaire to detemine how diverse a collage applicate is.

Bill Buckley artfully includes Bill Clinton in the Axis of Weasels along with France and Germany.

Dispelling rumors to the contrary, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced that Project Prometheus is real. He also hints at other things to be announced February 3rd when the 2004 budget is rolled out.

Done Deal reports that the first of Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Inmortality books, On A Pale Horse, is being developed as a film. In the book, a man shoots the Angel of Death and is forced to take his place. The hope is apparently that all seven books, which includes stories on the Incarnations of Nature, War, Fate, Time, Evil, and Good will become a film franchise.

Rand Simberg places Gary Hudson, he of a myriad of space commercial ventures, in the hot seat.

The irrepressible Ann Coulter shall shortly offer us a new book, entitled Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

What I really find funny about Ann is her tendency to hold back and not state clearly what's on her mind.

I'll bet no one has thought of this before as a space commercialization opportunity.

Howard Kurtz muses about Gary Hart's most formidable opponent in his quest for a political comeback: his own past. He quotes your humble servant when I suggest the Monkey Business Scandal will be a factor.

Rand Simberg muses about space anniversaries past, and then dreams of the future.

As if the Axis of Evil was not bad enough, now we have the Axis of Appeasement.
Update: Of course this works just as well.

Ed Harris, who has played John Glenn and Gene Krantz in the movies, has some strange ideas about manhood. Plus, more foolishness about abortion.

President Bush has a list

President George W. Bush reportedly still keeps a running tally of the 22 Most Wanted terrorists and their dispositions in his desk drawer.

The CIA's top counterterrorism official, Cofer Black, has been given the mandate to track these terrorists down and kill or capture them. Inside accounts claim that Black has a box with dry ice ready to deliver Osama bin Laden's head to Bush once he's found.

Of course it could be Orion?

Is it possible that Prometheus is not nuclear at all, but something else?

China seems to understand that space is the next realm for developing its super power status.

ABC is evaluating pilots for the fall season and there is at least one intrguing possibility:

As for "Teranus," ABC opted to order multiple scripts to evaluate the show's prospects rather than a pilot because of the prohibitive expense of staging a Greco-Roman period piece. The project, from exec producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron and writer/exec producer Thomas Wheeler, revolves around Julius Caesar's exiled 17-year-old nephew Augustus and the disgraced gladiator who is sworn to protect him.

Network TV hasn't had a good record for historical dramas. The last attempt along these lines was something called Covington Cross which depicted a "typical" family living in 13th Century England. The show was ruined as the writers eschewed historical accuracy for political correctness. For example, the "spunky" teenaged daughter ran around dressed as a man. And one of the sons, while on Crusade, decided he was a pacifist and hung up his broadsword to become a cook. (And let's not talk about Xena Warrior Princess which, while great fun, has as much relation to what really went on in Ancient Greece as Star Trek has to the real space program.)

Still, the idea of an episodic TV show set in Ancient Rome is interesting enough that I'd like to see the attempt.

It's Roe V Wade time again and fanatics on both sides will take the opportunity to hyperventilate. Uncharecteristicly, my additude has always been a plague on both their houses. I find it hard to choose between one group who suggests that at any moment women are going to be killed off by back alley abortions if Republicans get their way and the other who wax wroth about "40 million babies murdered."

A few years ago an SF story was published which depicted a new proceedure which transplaneted fetuses from women who did not want to carry them to term and ordinarily would have had an abortion to women who ordinarily could not conceive children. I think that this technological solution is the only slim hope of our ever putting this tiresome controversy into the dust bin of history.

Orbital Recovery Corp is a good example of space commercialization.

Glenn Reynolds is optimistic about the prospects of Project Prometheus.

Tom Friedman tries to tell his fellow liberals that-well-liberating Iraq will be a good thing. I doubt many will listen. Liberals today seem to be in love with fascist dictators so long as they are anti American.

The latest attempt to use slavery as a means to extract loot from corporations has sadly occured in Texas. Oddly enough the people behind this suit have the brass to say they are motivated by desire for "racial reconciliation." A stick up artist, in my opinion, has more honor because he at least is honest about what he wants.

Both Rand Simberg and Glenn Reynolds actually think that Gary Hartpence would make a formidable candidate. I'm rather puzzled by this, because it seems to me to be the equivilent of the Democrats choosing to run Walter Mondale for Senate last year. And the former Senator could not even beat Mondale.

And of course two words occur: Donna Rice. Will there be enough people who want to go through that sort of thing again? Somehow I doubt it.

Newt Gingrich and Peter Schweizer think they have found out why they (being foreigners) hate us. Tony Soprano and Britney Spears appear to be to blame.

Mr. Ritter, did you actually believe that this would not come out sooner or later?

The Frogs are actually behaving as if their opinions matter.

Thanks to reader Steve Johnson for this entertaining and possibly true story:

In the 16th and 17th centuries, before commercial fertilizer was invented, large shipments of manure were transported by ship. It was shipped in dry bundles because in dry form it weighed a lot less than when wet. But once water hit it at sea, it not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began, a by-product of which is methane gas.. It didn't take long for methane to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern, BOOOOM!

Several ships were destroyed in this manner before somebody figured out what was happening. Once they determined the role that manure played in the explosions, everybody began stamping the bundles with the term "Ship High In Transit," so that the sailors would know to stow it high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.

Thus evolved the term "S.H.I.T," which has come down through the centuries and is in use to this very day. You probably did not know the true history of this word. Neither did I. I always thought it was a golf term.

Update: Reader Michael Montagne informs me that the above is untrue:

Amusing but untrue. Thats kind of like the story of another word being a legal term for couples being permitted to cohabitate until such time as anitenerant proest might be on hand to marry them: Fornication Under Consent of the King. Both these Emglish vulgarisms are derived from solid German origins. In the case of your word, scheisse, translation unnecessary and not to be confused with schiessen, meaning to shoot.

Virginia Heinlein, widow of the late, great SF writer Robert A. Heinlein, has passed. Her love and care likely added twenty years to Heinlein's life. She will be missed.

Sorry, George, but that's wide of the mark. Tony Soprano would have had you wacked with ice picks for saying half of what you've said. The President will likely just shake his head sadly and wonder at the extent of human folly.

Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, and Howard Dean were in Iowa last night. Gephardt and Dean, taking a page from Walter Mondale's winning playbook from 1984, advocated raising taxes. Gephardt went even further and took another page from Hillary Clinton's winning health care strategy from 1993-94. No word as to how much John Kerry hated being there.

Nancy Pelosi invokes the name of Martin Luther King to call for judging people by the color of their skin, rather than by the content of their charecter.

Two hundred years after Jefferson, the LA Times thinks another visionary President is going to open up the Next Frontier with the Prometheus nuclear rocket.

Two hundred years ago this weekend, President Thomas Jefferson requested money from the Congress to pay for the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Guess who is returning to Afghanistan to kick Al Qaeda butt.

NASA apparently doesn't like the LA Times using the term nuclear rocket. I suppose they are paranoid about the No Nukes crowd. I wouldn't be if I were them.

Historical blogging seems to be the latest thing. Here are the dispatches of one Caius Julius Caesar direct from the front lines in Gaul.

Meanwhile, the first Chinese astronaut will travel to space this October.

According to the LA Times, President Bush is going to ramp up funding for nuclear rockets with possibly a State of the Union boost.

The Bush administration has signed off on the ambitious nuclear-rocket project -- though not specifically for the Mars landing -- and the president may officially launch the initiative during his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in an interview with The Times. The project, dubbed Project Prometheus, would greatly expand the nuclear propulsion plans that NASA quietly announced last year when it said it may spend $1 billion over the next five years to design a nuclear rocket. NASA and the Bush administration are keeping the lid on the details, including how much more the agency expects to request from Congress, but O'Keefe said the funding increase will be "very significant."

Jesse Jackson utters some really looney ravings in pursuit of more swag from guilty white folks. It seems, among other things, that our ancestors came to America for the "right to kill Indians."

Some more versions of Lord of the Ring as written by other people.

Iraq and its useful idiot supporters in the West (like Scott Ritter) are already trying to spin the discovery of undeclared and illegal chemical wareheads as no big deal. Certainly not worth the bother of a war.

Barring a miracle, hopes of reviving Firefly are just about dead.

This just in from NASA Watch:

Word has it that NASA got a verbal confirmation today that it had passed a audit conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and that it would receive an "unqualified" rating. The formal report is due in a few weeks. Quite a turn around from the last audit conducted during Dan Goldin's tenure - one that NASA flunked.

Indeed.

157 days to go until we have Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

I've been a great fan of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novels ever since Hotel Transylvania came out twenty five years ago. For those who are not familier with the series, the books relate the many adventures of a five thousand year old vampire calling himself Count St. Germain. Each book takes place in a different period in history, stretching so far from Ancient Egypt to Weimer Germany. There was a spinoff series about an Ancient Roman vampire lover of St. Germain's Olivia, as well.

I've now discovered that an E-Book is available about another vampire lover of St. Germain's, Madelaine de Montalia, first introduced in Hotel Transylvania and also appearing in Out of the House of Life. The book, available at Amazon, is entitled In the Face of Death. The time is the American Civil War and Madelaine meets and falls in love with none other than General William T. Sherman.

Just when you though "Reality" TV could not get any sillier. What person in his right mind would want to enter a contest, the prize being to get beat up by Mike Tyson?

John Carter McKnight looks to that marketing genius P. T. Barnum for lessons on how to get space tourism off the ground.

Tom Daschle is trying to see if Bill Frist is as big a push over as was Trent Lott.

Colonel Illan Ramon's space flight is going to give the people of Israel something to be joyous about, something they sorely need.

The White House has decided to oppose racism at the University of Michigan. This will seem to the Democrats to be odious behavior.

John Le Carre, whose George Smiley spy thrillers were based on the supposition that there was no moral difference between the Soviet Union and the West, has completely lost his reason.

Rand Simberg places Jeff Greason, head of Xcor Aerospace, in the hot seat.

Sheryl, let me explain it to you. Saddam, the terrorists, and quite a few others have already earned "karmic retribution." And we're it.

Michael P. Farris gives Arianna Huffington the back of his hand. And about time, too, in my opinion.

Sauron, the true Lord of the Rings, tries to set the record straight.

Stephen Moore, of the Club for Growth, is looking for a primary opponent to run against that loose cannon on deck, Senator John McCain. Now I don't blame the White House as much as the author of this article for McCain's nutty behavior. McCain has been peeved at GW Bush every since he got thrashed during the 2000 GOP primaries and seems more than willing to vent his spleen at every opportunity, regardless of the damage he does to his party or the country. It is about time something should be done to at the least get his attention and at most retire him from politics.

Governor Ryan, whose last act in office was to literally empty Illinois's Death Row of some of the most vile murderers imaginable, was an example of being "cruel to the kind by being kind to the cruel."

Jonah Goldberg muses about the attempts to silence Bjorn Lomberg. Jonah compares Lomber to Galileo, but not quite in the way one would expect.

This is wonderful and heart breaking at the same time.

Something which calls itself The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power In Space, doubtlessly a name more born in spin than reality, wants to protest the two upcoming Mars rover missions to be launched this spring:

George W. Bush and NASA have announced a $1 billion research and development program called the "Nuclear Systems Initiative" that will expand plans to launch radioactive sources into space. As nuclear launches increase so does the chance of accident and contamination dramatically increase. NASA is now working on the nuclear powered rocket to Mars and plans nuclear powered mining colonies of Mars in years to come. NASA's nuclear development program would also provide the Pentagon with nuclear reactors to power space-based lasers.

I get the impression that this group thinks that all that are bad things.

One of the thing some of my readers say when I expound upon the idea of a Sino-India space race to the Moon is something along the lines of, "Are you crazy? A couple of improverished, third world countries land men on the Moon?" Well, let's examine some facts.

According to the World Bank the GDP for China and India were about a trillion dollars and 450 billion dollars respectively in 2001.

According to the Information Please Almanac, the GDP for the United States in 1961 was roughly 556 billion dollars (1998 dollars adjusted for inflation.)

1961 was the year President Kennedy started the Apollo Moon landing program.

So, I'm not sure that either China or India are "too poor" to mount their own Moon landing programs.

Jim Pinkerton thinks that President Bush's stimulus/tax reform plan will be popular with the voters. A recent poll seems to bear that out.

Just what the world needs, another TV show about a smug, sanctemoneous, left wing politician. I suspect that Mr. Sterling will fail, but that's not the point. Hollywood seems incapable of creating good, solid, sympathetic conservative charecters, even though more than half of it's domestic audience tends that way. For an example, note the GOP Presidential candidate on The West Wing recently.

David Frum, by the way, had a good point on The West Wing. He said that it might as well be set on a Klingon battle cruiser for all the relationship it has with what really goes on.

Bad news about the prospect of bringing back Firefly. There is still some hope that the SciFi Channel might be interested, though.

Ramsey Clark, one of the many sad people who never got out of the sixties with his sanity intact, calls Jesus Christ a terrorist for beating up on the moneylenders.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist,does battle with his critics who want to destroy him for his nonalarmist views on enviornmental matters.

The BBC is expounding on the China vrs India space race.

What the world's only space superpower, the United States will say about China and India looking towards the Moon, which it conquered and abandoned so long ago, one can only speculate.

Indeed.

Recently Hollywood had a chance to have some fun with the collapse of Enron. Unfortunately the TV movie Crooked E seems to have been an exercise in extreme sexism and hypocrisy. My question: Do these people hate women or just women who live and work in Texas?

I wonder how the President's environmentalist wacko enemies will take this bit of news?

Oh, the horror! The horror!

Zell Miller will not run for another term as Senator from Georgia. The good news, from the point of view of the Democrats, is that a maverick statesman who regularly bucks the far left leadership of the Senate Democrats will not longer be around. The bad news, again from their standpoint, is that he'll probably be replaced by a Republican.

I finished reading October Horse: A Novel about Caesar, Cleopatra, and the Fall of the Roman Republic, Colleen McCullough's final book in her series on the fall of the Roman Republic. The book spans from Julius Caesar's adventure in Egypt to the Battle of Phillipi, covering the last battles of the Roman Civil War, the assasination of Caesar, and the formation of the Second Triumverate along the way. Like the other five volumes of McCullough's epic series, October Horse brings the past and it's inhabitants alive.for our time. The sad thing is that McCullough does not intend to write any more in the series, stopping at the very beginning of the career of the remarkable young man who history will know as Augustus.

Still, the series would make a wonderful twenty part miniseries in the style of I, Clauidius.

Dennis Wingo discusses the perils and promise of space commercialization.

Soccer moms, listen up. If you continue to drive your SUVs, the terrorists will win. And here I was thinking that voting for Liberal Democrat appeasers did that.

Incidentally, the producer of the commercial in question has admitted that he drives a Mercedes. He promises to give it up " as soon as the lease expires." What a guy.

Overtaken by 60s nostalgia, Charlie Rangel wants to bring back the draft. He wants to do this for two reasons. One is that he thinks there are too many black folks in the military (actually about 20 percent are minorities of all types), a sentiment which should get him pilloried for racism but won't (lefties are never racist.) Two is that he thinks that we won't actually want to defend the nation is we had a conscrupt army, which is apparently fine with him.

Tom Wiley suggests that the GOP can pick up the space faring flag fumbled to the ground by the Democrats.

Michael Moore is a fat, racist pig. Not that it matters. You can be that if you are a man of the Left.

Bill Safire entertains the possibility-as I did-that the Democrats will give up on the current list of candidates and try to draft Hillary "All will love me and despair!" Clinton.

Amir Teheri suggests that the European Union regenerate itself by extending membership to countries which used to be provinces of the Roman Empire but are not, strickly speaking, in Europe. Oddly enough, Syria, Lebenon, Israel, and Jordan are not on his list.

Of course maybe the reason the Left are such losers is that Medicare was their last big idea.

The Left is engaged in their equivilent of the search for the Holy Grail, which is a liberal version of Rush Limbaugh. The theory is that somehow the Left is getting a good whipping from sea to shining sea because they are not "getting their message out." Let's leave aside for a moment what is happening daily on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and even-on occassion-Fox. There are two reasons that there has not and may never be a liberal Rush Limbaugh. One, the Left lacks a well developed sense of humor. Two, (and this was the suggestion of the Curmudgeon's lady wife) there is a dearth of manly men among the Left. (And, no, yelling and screaming like James Carville or Paul Begala does not make one manly.) Of course, even she exempts Chris Mathews from that last observation.

Remember the Fighting Whities, pride of the University of Northern Colorado? The idea seems to be spreading.

Alan Stern talks about the necessity of fully funding the probe to Pluto. He should know as he is the chief scientist of the project.

The Raelians claim to have birthed another clone baby. There is, as with the first, no baby, no mother, and no DNA test. Nevertheless, the media is going nuts over this fake story.

I wonder. If I were to announce that I and a group of friends successfully landed a woman on the Moon, would the media rush to interview me? Now we would have no astronaut and no photographic proof, but it shouldn't matter. Of course it is also true that no one I know of participates in group sex nor believes in UFOs nor dresses up like Mr. Spock's demented older brother (at least on days other than Halloween or when there's a Star Trek Convention). Even so, I must be missing something.

Some of the "experts" in the West still don't get it about China's drive to become a space faring power.

In the United States, however, the American news media have mostly ignored the buildup of the Chinese space program and people are wondering about the extent of the country's capabilities and -- perhaps just as important -- the motive. Is it a nationalistic bid for bragging rights? Is there some military advantage being sought in name of science? Is the country trying to show other world space agencies that it deserves some role in International Space Station partnership?

Political, military and space experts contend the answer to all three of those questions could be yes.

And all of that misses the point. China recognizes, as perhaps few people do in the West, that the development of space power is the key to becoming the preeminate super power of the 21st Century, supplanting the United States in that role. This was true of air power in the 20th Century and naval power in the 18th and 19th. Policy makers in the West better start paying more attention to what the Chinese are doing.

Here's some more on the coming space race between China and India. Even the New York Times has taken notice. Now the question is, will the nation which first landed a man on the Moon take up the challenge again, or cede it-and the rewards involved-to other countries?

The North Korean government is waging genoicide against it's own people. Some time soon it may be necessary to bomb that country out of the stone age.

Looks like there may be a race to see whether tandori or hunan is the first cuisine to be served on the Moon.

Michael Kelly examins the answer to the question: What if even the most evil and venal in our society repented and were redeemed?

The ACLU's worse nightmare, Detective Victor Mackey, will be back next week to keep the peace, uphold the law, and line his own pockets on the FX Channel. He's the rogue cop who makes other rogue cops very, very afraid.

It looks like that, contrary to some rumors, President Bush will engage the Democrats fully with a big, tax stimulus package. If I were Pelosi or Daschle, I would worry.

Jonah Goldberg gives a good whipping to those people who think The Lord of the Rings is racist. Along the way he laments that in the real world evil is rarely as obvious as a horde of blood thirsty orcs bent on destruction.

Happy eleventy first birthday, J. R. R. Tolkien.

Victor Davis Hanson gives Senator Patty "Al Qaeda" Murray the back of his hand.

A lot of people, including Professor Reynolds, are warning that people should not dismiss John Edwards as just another trial lawyer. Well, to be sure, since we were not able to dismiss Bill Clinton as just another philandering narcissus. However, Senator Edwards has other weaknesses, including very bad reelect numbers in his home state, as well as a dearth of experience in national politics.

My guess is that the White House is going to put him in a box by pushing tort reform this year, with Bill Frist leading the charge. Edwards will be given the choice between abandoning his trial lawyer contributers, who will be against tort reform, and opposing (or at least waffling) on a very popular issue.

Director's Cut nominates the best 10 upcoming films of 2003.

It's stuff like this which makes me think that John Edwards (the Senator, not the psychic) should not waste time and money running for President.

Rand Simberg gives NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe his marching orders.

Senator Frist, MD is truly the worse nightmare of the Democrats. How do you demonize someone who saves lives on a regular basis?

Looks like the Chinese are going to make Prediction 5 come true and send a man into space later this year.