Magpie

Friday, January 16, 2004

The axe falls on the Hubble Telescope.

Dubya's new space agenda means that there will be no more missions to service the orbiting Hubble Telescope. Without having its worn gyroscopes replaced, Hubble will end its useful life by 2008, and fall to earth by 2012. While the Hubble is supposed to be replaced by another telescope in 2011, Dubya's shift of priorities most likely means that scientists will be without a space-based telescope of Hubble's caliber for up to three years.

Outside Dubya's administration, there is a fair amount of grumbling about Hubble's fate. For example, here's an excerpt from an online discussion that the Washington Post had with former Clinton science advisor John Gibbons on Thursday:

I think the Hubble is one of our best investments and one of the best uses to date of manned spaceflight. It would be a tragedy to cut its lifetime short.

The Hubble is a glorious instrument and has paid off rich rewards in terms of the nature of the universe. It also proved the enormous value of having humans in earth's orbit. When it was first put up, it needed eyeglasses due to incorrect building. Astronauts were able to go up and fix it. But that's totally different from sending humans off to another planet.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:55 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Another threat to our security.

Flutes.

Or, as it turns out, bagpipe chanters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:29 PM | Get permalink

Keeping US election news honest.

The folks at the Columbia Journalism Review are doing all of us in the US a big favor with their new site Campaign Desk. The site's mission is to 'analyze and criticize press coverage in real time, so that suggestions for improved coverage might actually be heeded, and incorporated into campaign coverage, while the campaign is still under way.'

So far, Campaign Desk is keeping its promise. It's first day's posts include critiques of how the AP is being slipshod with its coverage of polling data; how ABC News ran with a story about Howard Dean that never should have seen the light of day; and good take-down of the Drudge Report for distorting comments made by Wesley Clark.

You can find Campaign Desk here. You can bet it's going on our must-read list.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:19 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Better late than never.

We really should have mentioned The American Street when it got going on Monday, but we were bad. However, our negligence is your gain, because you can now go read the backlog of posts on what's proving to be an excellent new group weblog.

Today's post by Digby is big fun:

Boy, you could have bowled me over with a feather when I heard that former secretary of the treasury Paul O'Neil was claiming in his new book that President George W. Bush is, shall we say, a man whose elevator doesn't go all the way to the top. He describes a man who disengaged, incurious, downright dumb. He asks no questions, doesn't read even short memos, and appears bored and distracted. I couldn't have been more shocked.

"My God," I thought, "George W. Bush can't be a good enough actor to fake this, can he?? Our great leader may be a "plain spoken" man, a man who tires easily, a man who hates travel and hates foreigners, a simple man of the people (well, the right people anyway) a man who makes fun of condemned women and speaks unintelligibly at press conferences, but there is no reason to believe that he isn't smart.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:32 PM | Get permalink

Two simple charts.

They eloquently show why the US Congress should re-approve extended unemployment compensation.

These two figures illustrate the difficulty in finding employment throughout this tenuous economic recovery—especially in terms of opportunities for the long-term unemployed. Recent economic data give us no reason to think that extended unemployment benefits are no longer necessary. Hundreds of thousands of new workers will exhaust their state benefits each month for the foreseeable future with no substantial hope of finding a job.

Of course, the Republican are hoping that the people whose benefits have run out aren't going to vote.

Via Economic Policy Institute.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:27 PM | Get permalink