Candidate Gingrich Pushes a Moon Base, Other Space Initiatives 602
New submitter thomas.kane writes "Newt Gingrich announced yesterday, while visiting Florida's Space Coast, a visionary plan for the future of space travel. He suggested a combination of the current private incentives and a government funded section, developing a moon base, commercial near earth orbit, and continuous propulsion systems to better reach Mars." "Visionary" seems an awfully positive spin on it; Gingrich is not the first President or presidential candidate to propose revisiting the moon — and the moon seems like small potatoes, by some measures.
Back to the future (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bigger governmnet (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously US has no money for this, but that never stopped a politician from making promises.
The US has enough money to do this 20 time over.
We just give that money to poor people in our country and to kill poor people (usually brown people) in other countries.
What? it's true.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. Had he said this anywhere else it may have been credible. Instead, he's in Florida and while the message the rest of the country may be hearing is "a bold new plan for space and the moon", the locals are hearing "I'll pay out loads of government contracts around Cape Canaveral and pump money into the local economy". It's pork and nothing more.
Re:Back to the future (Score:5, Informative)
And that was done. By the Russians.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually there is nothing wrong with a one term Senator.
I don't see how only serving one term as senator equates to losing "speaker of the house" due to ethics violations ( book deal that he himself accused his predecessor Jim Wright of doing), cheating on two different wives while pretending to defend the sanctity of marriage, and pretending to be a Washington outsider when he lobbied for Freddie Mac with possible legal ramifications due to not registering as a lobbyist (BTW Newt Gingrich abstained from voting on the HR 2564 "Lobbying Disclosure act of 1995").
Speaking of going to the Moon (Score:5, Informative)
Coincidentally today is NASA's day of remembrance for all those who lost their lives during the pursuit of space.
Tomorrow (Jan 27) marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee.
Saturday (Jan 28) marks the 26th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster that killed Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith and Dick Scobee.
Next Wednesday (Feb 1) marks the 9 anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster that killed Rick D. Husband, William McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon.
Also the following were killed during astronaut training: Theodore Freeman, Elliot See, Charles Bassett, Clifton "C.C." Williams, and Robert Lawrence.
The following are were killed during space flight or cosmonaut training: Vladimir Komarov, Georgi Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev, Vladislav Volkov, Valentin Bondarenko, Yuri Gagarin, and Sergei Vozovikov.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Informative)
Or a no term anything like Eisenhower, or Grant, or Jackson, or Pierce, or Taylor, or Harrison, or Garfield, or H.W. Bush... The Founding Fathers weren't exactly brimming over with executive experience either. You don't need to have been a governor or long-serving Senator to be an effective leader. In fact there are all too many examples of presidents with that experience who were terrible leaders (Nixon, Carter, Wilson, W. Bush, Johnson? John Quincy Adams was, by most accounts, a bumbling, egotistical buffoon).
If you don't like Obama then fine, but it's a stretch to say that the election of a first term Senator spells doom for the Republic.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Informative)
When on earth has the US actually cared how large the debt gets.
Before the US quit paying it back regularly or keeping it in check, essentially after the New Deal policies were put in place in the 1930s.
Actually it was later than that. The New Deal created the first set of "entitlements", the big one being Social Security. But they still paid attention to debts. The US ran up a pretty big debt (historically) during WW2, and made some major efforts to get that paid down, and it was.
The worst things happened during Johnson and Nixon. Johnson decided that since SS was bringing in so much money, they could spend it on anything they wanted to, and pay it back "later" (still hasn't happened, BTW). Nixon dropped the last of the gold backing for the US dollar, turning it into pure fiat money. Other countries expressed outrage over it, but they were so invested in dollars there wasn't much they could do.
And now that I think about it, it seems it was during the Reagan era that people started saying that "debt doesn't matter" at the Federal level. But back then it was quite a low percentage of GDP. I don't think they ever imagined it would grow so large that it would take 12% of revenues just to make the interest payments. And that's with interest rates at the lowest point ever.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Informative)
Gingrich is probably as seious about establishing a moon base as he was when he swore "til death do us part" to the woman he later served divorce papers to while she was hospitalized with cancer, or "Clinton needs to be impeached!!!" while Gingrich himself was screwing around on his second wife. The man is a liar and hypocrite with no obvious sign of morals or ethics whatever.
Nothing that blowhard says shoud EVER be believed. I can't figure out why anyone would vote for that guy.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:1, Informative)
"Clinton needs to be impeached!!!" while Gingrich himself was screwing around on his second wife.
Clinton was impeached for lying under oath, not for anything he did with Lewinski. But nice revisionist history.
Re:USA has 11 aircraft carriers (Score:5, Informative)
Ummh? Ron Paul?
Of course, the corporate media is doing the best they can to ignore him, and getting absolutely frantic when he makes a good showing...almost EXCLUSIVELY because he talks about military cuts.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, you're right. The actual charge of impeachment was for perjury and obstruction of justice. But there's more to the story than that.
What got the public up in arms to begin with was the affair. Gingrich took that fact and ran with it, leading the charge against Clinton. When Clinton was caught lying, that's when the charges were brought against him.
Mostly, the whole thing was a political maneuver of Republicans (lead by Gingrich) against Clinton. The action was so unpopular that Gingrich eventually resigned. But underlying it all was the affair, which makes Gingrich a hypocrite by any measure.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:5, Informative)
By the way, Clinton WAS impeached. (Impeached roughly means "indicted by the House of Representatives, so that there will be a trial.") The Constitution says that the President can be removed from office by the Senate if he commits "high crimes or misdemeanors" and is impeached for them by the House. Gingrich said that Clinton should be brought up on charges because he felt that lying under oath is an example of a "high crime or a misdemeanor."
Also, Clinton was cited for contempt of court in connection with the original case. He was fined $90,000 and had his license to practice law suspended.
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:3, Informative)
ooh! Ohh! I'll play!!
Applied Socialism:
Public Schools
Public Roads
Public Police Force
Public Fire Departments
Right! And all state/locally funded. Once the feds get involved, things tend to go downhill. Of course, there is a place for federal involvement, but nearly all of them are Constitutional. A national fuel standard would be a good thing. It would prevent refineries from having to create 20-something different blends of gasoline to meet varying state regulations. Since most of these would fall under interstate commerce, regulations would be perfectly Constitutional. It's when the feds get involved in things like setting school curriculum and mortgage rules that bad things start to happen.
Applied unregulated freemarket Capitalism:
Ethiopia.
OK, but I could use N. Korea or the former Soviet Union as counter examples. Power corrupts. When you make the government all powerful, which is necessary for true Socialism, corruption happens.
True Capitalism is just like true communism. Great in theory, horrible in practice. There is a healthy balance of taking elements from both theories. Taking the socialist approach to ensuring a safety net over which a capitalist driven system can opperate. Take out the safety net, and one mistake can have catostrophic results. Build too big of safety net, and the tightrope of capitalism will get tangled up in it.
I agree. I also feel that the Constitution allows for just the right amount of federally mandated socialism. If we actually tried it and found that more was needed, we could amend the Constitution giving the federal government whatever power was necessary. The rest, as the 10'th states, should be handled by the states.
And I think we can surmize, given the US's current level of social-capitalist involvement, as compared to the rest of the modern world (G7 and BRIC), that we are not anywhere remotely close to the excessively socialist side.
Some would say that's why we have the world's largest economy by far. We certainly have the most production per capita of any nation in history, and we are a lazy lot.
Re:USA has 11 aircraft carriers (Score:5, Informative)
And yet amazingly, there are plenty of countries that make it through each day without any carrier groups at all!
Re:Going to the moon, with what money?? (Score:4, Informative)
He didn't lie under oath.
a) He was testifying for something that he shouldn't have been testifying for to begin with.
b) He specifically asked the prosecutor to define sex. The prosecutor defined sex as not including blowjobs. Therefore, Clinton told the truth about not having had sex with Lewinsky; 100% true, and again, something he shouldn't have had to testify about to begin with.
c) The Republicans changed their definition of sex, in order for there to be *something* they could attempt impeachment over. Even with their millions of dollars worth of investigations, they uncovered NOTHING except some bullshit "lie" that was completely irrelevant to everything to begin with..
Fast forward to today and we still have morons who don't know what happened and try to play this bullshit "Clinton lied!" card. And even if he had lied, so fucking what? I'll say it one more time: it was about something that was nobody else's business to begin with. It wasn't about his finances. It wasn't about how the country was being run. It wasn't about anything relevant to his presidency or his previous career. It was about where he put his dick.
Personally, I'd rather have controversy over a stain on a blue dress than (for instance) controversy over whether or not our soldiers tortured people half way around the world, but then I guess my priorities are too fucked up to be a Republican.
--Jeremy