Robbing NASA To Pay For Pentagon Bloat

I see that Scripps Howard is reporting how NASA tried to maintain the shuttle schedule on a tight budget -- indeed, how last April concerned members of Congress' NASA funding subcommittee discussed how the space agency had lost 40 percent of its funding in the last 10 years, but under pressure from the Bush tax cut, they went ahead and cut NASA's human space flight budget another 10.3 percent.

Scripps Howard quotes Loren Thompson, a defense analyst, "NASA's entire budget -- the entire budget for its civil space program is smaller than the equipment maintenance budget for the Pentagon... NASA gets about $15 billion a year, the Pentagon gets that kind of money every year just to maintain its equipment." With an aging fleet that needs more maintenance, the maintenance budget (called shuttle upgrade funding) was cut under Bush, even though all the fat had been already cut under Clinton.

The media made no fuss when NASA critic/Bush friend Sean O'Keefe was selected to head the agency, and O'Keefe set out a budget that would reduce NASA's shuttle upgrade spending by 43 percent through 2006. Nor did the media make a fuss about the effects of the Bush tax cut for the rich when, in April 2002, NASA's independent auditor Richard Blomberg told the House Science Committee that the budget constraints on the shuttle scared him -- "I have never been as concerned for space shuttle safety as I am right now."

Will the media now, finally, start taking a critical look at where Bush leadership is taking us?

William Chirolas (Massachussetts)

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Remember the classic sci-fi film by that name? In it, an alien landed a spacecraft on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and asked to be allowed to speak to the UN to deliver a warning: disarm or you will be destroyed. The alien, Klatu, didn't specify by whom the destruction would take place. He did make it plain that we would certainly do it to ourselves, even if no one 'out there' did. Klatu never made it to the UN, but he was able to demonstrate to the world that those who sent him meant business. He caused a shutdown of all power throughout the globe at a specified time on a specified date. From cars to trains to wristwatches, everything came to a halt.

On February 15, there'll be a massive rally in London. There will also be demonstrations in cities throughout Europe on February 15. The idea is this: a global work stoppage, an international sick day if you will, to take place on Friday, February 14 to protest the war on the world currently being waged by the Bush administration. The [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] and the Stop the War Coalition have suggested an hour's stoppage on the day after the war begins. Many activists [in the U.K.] are now talking about building on this, and seeking to provoke wider strike action -- even a general strike.

It is we, the folks who show up for work every day, who are providing the tax dollars to pay for this war on the economy, the environment, worker safety, civil rights, and on the poor. We are the ones who keep the machine up and running. We are the ones whose children are being shortchanged on education, health care, and clean air and water. We are the ones who will reap the whirlwind (or will be sucking wind) when the bill for the administration's misguided and dangerous policies comes due.

A general strike early in the last century brought down the Tsar of all the Russias and changed nearly a century of history. The Communist party came crashing down in Poland thanks to the solidarity of its workers. If we choose peaceful noncooperation in maintaining a system badly in need of course correction, we may surprise ourselves at how quickly change can be effected. No organization is necessary, in fact it would probably be counter-productive. Just start forwarding this email. Let's all get truly sick and tired of it all on February 14, 2003 and make it the day the Earth stands still.

Rita Weinstein

Trent Lott Exposes Self In Public

What difference does it make who the GOP chooses to be majority leader? The person may change, but the policies won't. The only thing Lott was guilty of was saying out loud what the GOP leadership says in private to its core constituents: the assorted racists, bigots and hatemongers that the Democrats cast out because the party leadership decided that the right of a black man to vote without fearing for his life was more important than their political power base.

Lott isn't the exception, he's the rule: people like Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft and even Don Nickles are the soul of the racist right. There's no place for them in leadership positions, there's no place for them in our government, and as far as I'm concerned there's no place for them in this country.

Joseph Vecchio (Georgia)

The resignation under fire of Trent Lott as U.S. Senate Majority Leader recalls a mysterious and even more dramatic episode in his life, when he was a cheerleader and fraternity leader at the University of Mississippi forty years ago.

On October 1, 1962, at the climax of a chaotic, 14-hour riot by thousands of white civilians over the arrival of black student James Meredith to the university, a squad of U.S. Army troops from the 716th Military Police Battalion entered the Sigma Nu fraternity house, which was then presided over by chapter president Trent Lott.

According to a long-forgotten U.S. Army document from 1965, the soldiers were acting on a tip of a cache of weapons, and entered the building with the concurrence of university officials. Once inside the Sigma Nu house they discovered, according the report, "two rifles (a .22 and a .30 calibre), twenty-one shotguns, and a .22 Colt pistol, but no ammunition."

The guns were seized by the troops and turned over to university officials. The FBI arrived, and according to an October 3, 1962 FBI cable to Director J. Edgar Hoover made available through the Freedom of Information Act, the weapons were then crated and shipped to the FBI laboratory in Washington, DC for forensic analysis.

Gun ownership was perfectly legal under the Second Amendment, and many Mississippians carried firearms, especially at the beginning of the fall hunting season. But what triggered the raid was the fact that hours earlier, 27 federal marshals were wounded by civilian rifle and shotgun fire during the riot. Significantly, university policy at the time forbade students from possessing firearms in campus residences.

Trent Lott reportedly spent the previous night of the riot ordering his Sigma Nu brothers away from the scene of the fighting. While he was definitely not a riot leader or a rioter, or ever accused of advocating violent resistance, he was also not a visible or publicly notable advocate of "peace" in the highly emotional 2-week buildup to the riot. He was, by his own admission, then against integrating the university, like the vast majority of Mississippi whites.

On the night of the riot, however, he did something important -- he reportedly pulled his 100-plus fraternity brothers away from the fighting, and only one Sigma Nu student was briefly detained by federal marshals. In this case Lott did the right thing, in the sense that he persuaded his fraternity brothers not to attack and kill federal law enforcement officers. That may be faint praise, but in the context of Oxford, Mississippi in 1962, it was something.

There is the lingering mystery of the guns stockpiled at Sigma Nu -- why were they there, who put them there, did Lott know about them, and why would university authorities need to approve a search for and seizure of the guns by U.S. Army combat troops. There is no evidence that Lott knew of either the weapons cache or the Army raid, and there is no evidence that the guns seized were ever connected to the violence. Lott has said almost nothing about the riot for the past 40 years.

The most baffling mystery of all is how Trent Lott could have been at the epicenter of such a violent and tragic event without quickly coming to peace with the idea of treating African-Americans as full American citizens. Instead, it seems to have embittered his segregationist views -- two years later he supported the cause of keeping blacks out of the national Sigma Nu fraternity.

None of the Sigma Nu students were disciplined in the 1962 gun incident.

One year later, in September 1963, a black law student named Cleve McDowell, the second African-American to attend the University of Mississippi after James Meredith, was discovered carrying a pistol for self-defense on the campus.

He was expelled from the university the next day.

Bill Doyle (New York)

Doyle is the author of "An American Insurrection," a book on James Meredith and these events of 1962 that was published in January and has already won several awards.

-- Editor

Death and Boredom in the Afghan War

Great article. Thanks. I think if I didn't cackle at his examples I'd be beyond a glass or two of vodka and still livid at the utter idiocy of two chickshit cowards pumping up for war. One, as you know, was AWOL for 13 months during Vietnam and Cheney hid under a school deferrment, trying to get a Ph.D in basketweaving.

Victoria Roy

And What Does the Darwin - Fish Logo Mean to You?

Thanks for your article. When I see a Darwin emblem on a car, I wonder what they are going to say to the Creator of the universe, the King of Kings and the Lord of lords, the Eternal Living God, when He asks them "How could you have been so foolish?" I must say that we Christians should not be angry at them, but we should feel sad and sorry for them. Dear friend, it is almost finished! Jesus is coming again real soon.

Gary Seymour

Climate Change Could Bankrupt World by 2065

We are always pleased to see serious attention being given to Contraction and Convergence (C&C) and thank you for this. The report made the following remark : *In projections, GCI suggests 2045 will be the year of convergence. It says population forecasts could become critical and be the subject of negotiation.* and carried the following as a GCI quote: - "However, it could be counterproductive to create an incentive for countries to increase their share of the global emissions budget through population growth," says GCI. I hope no-one from GCI put it that way. We have acknowledged that some people have reacted that way and suggested freezing the numbers at a negotiated base year (or even staggered years) as you reported. But we've tried to be sensitive about the issue and tried to avoid giving real credence to that way of thinking. In other words we don't think that the prospect of more pollution permits would seriously affect fertility rates anywhere.

However, I do also notice that the article was published three years ago. A recent statement of C&C is at: http://www.gci.org.uk/memos/EssentialC&C.pdf

Aubrey Meyer, Director, GCI (London)

Bush 'Star Wars' Plans Based On Fantasy

Your article stated that China was America's largest trading partner when in fact this is wrong. Canada is America's largest trading partner and has been so for decades, in fact total trade with China in 2000 was less than a third of total trade with Canada ($116 billion versus $410 billion). Refer to http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/index.html

Please do the proper research before publishing such a gaffe.

Marc Jeffery

Be Nice

I stumbled into your site during a net search. I find your publication to be biased and very left leaning. The articles that attack President Bush dominate much of your content. In short, I'll keep searching.

Tom Reda

Oregonian Drops Arianna Huffington Column

Shame on the media. The excuse the Oregonian uses for dropping Arianna, that because she was involved in the environmental issues of large SUV's using more gas, thereby making us more dependent on Arab oil, thus helping to fund terrorists, is farcical.

Firstly, the ad simply exposes the nutty logic of the Bush drug war (smoking marijuana makes you pregnant was the latest in the Super Bowl) Ð but when that type of logic is used on car mileage you drop the column. How the ad compromises her column, when by definition a column is an op-ed opinion and you have no problem with right wing opinion, is a mystery.

Secondly, Arianna is one of the few columnists who worry about the environment. Are you removing that un-American bias from your pages?

But lastly, it is obvious that all the media is doing is a caving to conservatives who consider her going from right wing to progressive, GOP to Independent, makes her a turncoat, and who have badgered the paper to drop her.

William Chirolas (Massachussetts)

We have received several e-mails such as this one, none of them bulk-mailed form letters. The announcement in late January that the leading newspaper for Oregon and Southern Washington was dropping Huffington's column has obviously struck a nerve across the country.

The problem, Associate Editor Doug Bates told a columnist for the paper, was that Huffington has become "an activist in her opposition to sport utility vehicles. Their inefficiencies, she says, hurt the environment and add to U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Writing about them is acceptable, but Huffington has formed the Detroit Project, in which she personally appeals for money to place broadcast ads on the air...She loses the status of sideline observer." The Oregonian editor also commented that he needed to drop one of their syndicated columnists to make room for another writer.

-- Editor