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I think the world (or you, Shaun,) is too quik with the "Spain bowed to the terrorists" thing...

The Spanish have more experience with terrorism than since the Al-Quaida attack, and I wonder how the Australian people would've voted if something similar happened days before the elections and Howard screaming it was the Aboriginals doing it. (Not a totally fair comparison, I know...)

It was a combination of factors, IMO. Their ruling party tried to use the bombings to their advantage in a really cynical way, but did it in a very clumsy way... (Saying it was the ETA, despite of all proof against it, how low can you go?) and i think a significant percentage voted against them, because of that. Of course a lot of people probably 'bowed' too, in shock, but not all of them...

They had this crisis, and their leaders outright lied to them. For power. I'd vote against those XXXXXXXXXX too.

This depends on our answer to another question. What should NASA be accomplishing?

Low cost Earth to Orbit. Nuclear power propulsion and generation in space. Closed life support. Material extraction and manipulation in space. Artifical gravity. Radiation shielding. Solution to long term zero-g exsposure.

Most of this is part of VSE, or is the product of pursuing VSE.

And, can we expect the federal budget to be sufficient to sustain the answer to the above question?

Depends. Low cost to Earth Orbit makes everything else cheaper in the long run...

I can agree that there is value in hiring some professionals to market NASA accomplishments in such a way as they become more broadly meaningful to a wider audience.

But then another angle occurs to me. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, so I hear it said. Americans... we're not the most vigilant people of late. We're soft and lazy, we truly believe that having to wait an hour to board a cross-country flight is some great hardship. Gas is $2.00 a gallon! My God, the sky is falling and it's on fire, we're all doomed! This skewed mentality is likely both the cause of our obession with terrorism and the motivator for wanting to believe it's just another nuisance. Paradox, another great American virtue.

*Of course the only REALLY important issue currently is Mary Cheney's being a lesbian and Kerry mentioning it during the last debate!  VP and Mrs. Cheney are outraged, it's all over the media.  Yep, Mary's sexual orientation sure is of vast concern to me, as is her parents' over-protectiveness. 

--Cindy

Addicted to 9/11 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear the president and vice president slamming John Kerry for saying that he hopes America can eventually get back to a place where "terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." The idea that President Bush and Mr. Cheney would declare such a statement to be proof that Mr. Kerry is unfit to lead actually says more about them than Mr. Kerry. Excuse me, I don't know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives.

If I have a choice, I prefer not to live the rest of my life with the difference between a good day and bad day being whether Homeland Security tells me it is "code red" or "code orange" outside. To get inside the Washington office of the International Monetary Fund the other day, I had to show my ID, wait for an escort and fill out a one-page form about myself and my visit. I told my host: "Look, I don't want a loan. I just want an interview." Somewhere along the way we've gone over the top and lost our balance.

That's why Mr. Kerry was actually touching something many Americans are worried about - that this war on terrorism is transforming us and our society, when it was supposed to be about uprooting the terrorists and transforming their societies.

The Bush team's responses to Mr. Kerry's musings are revealing because they go to the very heart of how much this administration has become addicted to 9/11. The president has exploited the terrorism issue for political ends - trying to make it into another wedge issue like abortion, guns or gay rights - to rally the Republican base and push his own political agenda. But it is precisely this exploitation of 9/11 that has gotten him and the country off-track, because it has not only created a wedge between Republicans and Democrats, it's also created a wedge between America and the rest of the world, between America and its own historical identity, and between the president and common sense.

By exploiting the emotions around 9/11, Mr. Bush took a far-right agenda on taxes, the environment and social issues - for which he had no electoral mandate - and drove it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr. Bush made himself the most divisive and polarizing president in modern history.

By using 9/11 to justify launching a war in Iraq without U.N. support, Mr. Bush also created a huge wedge between America and the rest of the world. I sympathize with the president when he says he would never have gotten a U.N. consensus for a strategy of trying to get at the roots of terrorism by reshaping the Arab-Muslim regimes that foster it - starting with Iraq.

But in politicizing 9/11, Mr. Bush drove a wedge between himself and common sense when it came to implementing his Iraq strategy. After failing to find any W.M.D. in Iraq, he became so dependent on justifying the Iraq war as the response to 9/11 - a campaign to bring freedom and democracy to the Arab-Muslim world - that he refused to see reality in Iraq. The president seemed to be saying to himself, "Something so good and right as getting rid of Saddam can't possibly be going so wrong." Long after it was obvious to anyone who visited Iraq that we never had enough troops there to establish order, Mr. Bush simply ignored reality. When pressed on Iraq, he sought cover behind 9/11 and how it required "tough decisions" - as if the tough decision to go to war in Iraq, in the name of 9/11, should make him immune to criticism over how he conducted the war.

Lastly, politicizing 9/11 put a wedge between us and our history. The Bush team has turned this country into "The United States of Fighting Terrorism." "Bush only seems able to express our anger, not our hopes," said the Mideast expert Stephen P. Cohen. "His whole focus is on an America whose role in the world is to negate the negation of the terrorists. But America has always been about the affirmation of something positive. That is missing today. Beyond Afghanistan, they've been much better at destruction than construction."

I wish Mr. Kerry were better able to articulate how America is going to get its groove back. But the point he was raising about wanting to put terrorism back into perspective is correct. I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them - the bad guys - not about us. We're about the Fourth of July.

The primary purpose of the United States was to test out the Republican form of government base on the General Welfare concept and man in God image and then to export it back to Europe.

PS - The Chicago Tribune reports NASA has hired a professioanl storyteller. Some guy from Evanston IL.

They are paying him $25,000 per year.

*Can you please link to the article?  Storyteller in what capacity, precisely? 

--Cindy

Be tasteful, !!!!!

The issue is long term funding , not short term bumps of funds, to build space over the next fifty years, we need to move 3-5 Trillion dollars ( 60-100 Billion per year ) into space exploration and colonization to make humanity in space a reality. Also to go beyond our solar system you would require the combined resources of the solar system to explore the galaxy.

We can find that funding but you need to work on global solutions not , a single country solution, ( unless you want to lose the same amount out of the american defence budget ) I don't think so, most people would say !!!!!.

I have worked out a way for private enterprise could do that funding for the next fifty years and more. All issues / problems have solutions / answers.

I think all of you think small in terms of what we are trying to achieve for humanity. You think that mars is the first target or goal but not the end, and colonization of mars will take thousands of people from all different occupations, beliefs, and ideals.

Are we ready , for the move ? are we ready for the responsibility of a space race ? are we ready to build and settle on other worlds ?  Think on these questions about humanity.

He has also been quite consistent on telling us his interpretation of what John Kerry stands for.

Somebody has to. 

"Consistent" and "John Kerry" in the same sentence.  :laugh: