Griffin: China will beat US to the Moon

spacepolitics.com
17 September 2007

Earlier today NASA administrator Mike Griffin gave a luncheon speech in Washington to talk about the "space economy," a concept part of the agency’s new strategic communications plan. His most noteworthy comment, though, came near the end of the Q&A session after his talk, when he was asked about the potential for cooperation and competition with other emerging space powers, including (but not limited to) China:

I personally believe that China will be back on the Moon before we are. I think when that happens, Americans will not like it, but they will just have to not like it. I think we will see, as we have seen with China’s introductory manned space flights so far, we will see again that nations look up to other nations that appear to be at the top of the technical pyramid, and they want to do deals with those nations. It’s one of the things that made us the world’s greatest economic power. So I think we’ll be reinstructed in that lesson in the coming years and I hope that Americans will take that instruction positively and react to it by investing in those things that are the leading edge of what’s possible.

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GOP-backed bid to reform California's electoral process collapsing

By Carla Marinucci
San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco, California
28 September 2007

Days after a controversial organization began collecting voter signatures for a ballot measure to change California's winner-take-all primary, a founder of the GOP-backed group says its major players are resigning - and the group will fold - due to lack of funding and support.

"The levels of support just weren't there," said Marty Wilson, the Sacramento-based fundraiser, in a telephone interview Thursday.

Wilson was among the founding members of Californians for Equal Representation, the group led by Sacramento attorney Thomas Hiltachk that intended to collect roughly 434,000 signatures to qualify the Presidential Election Reform Act for the June 2008 ballot.

The measure would have changed the state's winner-take-all means of awarding Electoral College votes to a proportional system that would have awarded 53 of the state's 55 electoral votes - one by one - to the popular vote winner of each of the state's 53 congressional districts. The other two electoral votes would have gone to the statewide popular vote winner.

The change, Democrats had complained, would benefit the GOP - and perhaps alter the outcome of the 2008 presidential election.

"There has not been the financial level of support necessary to run a viable campaign, and there wasn't sufficient interest from donors inside or outside the state to qualify the measure for the ballot," Wilson said.

Wilson said he has disassociated himself from the committee, and he confirmed that Hiltachk, who has represented both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state GOP, resigned from the committee Wednesday, as has spokesman Kevin Eckery.

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Raucous system seems immune to change

By Matt Stearns
McClatchy Newspapers
26 September 2007

Florida's defiant decision to hold its presidential primary weeks earlier than both national parties dictate highlights one inescapable fact: There's no easy fix for this mess of a presidential nominating system.

Parties set rules and dates, but self-interested states ignore them with little fear of meaningful consequence or much concern for the national interest. Would-be reformers tout a variety of fixes, which the states find lacking. Congress suggests that it might step in, but the Constitution might not allow it.

"States are tripping over each other to get to the front lines, and most of them are operating within the rules of the parties," said Ryan O'Donnell, spokesman for FairVote, a non-partisan electoral-change advocacy group. "Clearly, the parties are failing to control the process."

The problems of the current primary-and-caucus nomination game are well documented: It's too fast, too expensive and each election cycle is accelerating the absurdity. Plus, Iowa and New Hampshire, two idiosyncratic early-voting powerhouses that barely reflect the rest of the country, play an outsized role in this electoral Survivor.

The still-unsettled 2008 primary schedule is the worst one yet: With states leapfrogging one another to gain influence and attention, neither Iowa nor New Hampshire has formally scheduled its vote, which both states are determined will remain first and second, come what may.

This chaotic system encourages states to jockey for position and leads to overcrowded primary days, forcing campaigns to rely on barrages of negative ads, expensive television buys and quick fly-ins rather than engaging in substantive discussions with voters one state at a time over many months.

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Electoral Vote Initiative Is Unconstitutional

By Thomas Gangale

Never mind the partisanship behind Republican lawyer Tom Hiltachk's so-called Presidential Election Reform Act, an initiative that seeks to peel off about twenty of California's electoral votes to Republican presidential candidates in 2008 and indefinitely into the future. Let's just consider the question, does the US Constitution permit a state to determine via a ballot initiative how to cast its electoral votes?

Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 says in part: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." The Legislature directs... how does this power devolve upon the voters?

Proponents of the Hiltachk initiative might argue that California's initiative process permits the voters to assume some legislative functions, and that this includes changing the rules about allocating the state's electoral votes. Perhaps the initiative's supporters will say that the state legislature gave citizens the right to "legislate" when it gave them the power to propose and pass ballot initiatives; so in effect, nearly a century ago, the state legislature "directed" a "manner" for appointing presidential electors that contemplated the abdication of this power to the people.

This is tortured logic. The body of citizens is certainly not the state legislature. When the Constitution says "legislature," it means exactly that. The initiative process is not an abdication of legislative power; the legislature still legislates. Rather, the initiative process is an alternative method of enacting law. It is not only outside of the legislative power, it is also outside of the executive power; the governor can veto legislation, but he cannot veto an initiative. Therefore, an initiative is not just another kind of legislation, it is of its own kind. Likewise, when we act as a body of citizens, we are not acting in the capacity of a legislature; we are of our own kind.

The distinction between the body of citizens and the legislature as sources of law goes back 2,500 years to the Roman Republic. There were some types of laws that the Senate could pass, while others required passage by one of the various citizens' assemblies. Hence, SPQR, senatus populusque romanus, the Senate and People of Rome. In the same vein, California's legislature and its body of citizens are two distinct lawmaking entities; they aren't us, and we're not them.

Clearly, the Framers of the Constitution also drew this same distinction between a state's legislature and its people. From the beginning, members of the US House of Representatives have been elected by the people. This is not true of the US Senate. Originally, the Constitution provided for senators to be elected by the legislatures of their states; the Framers created two distinct methods of electing the houses of Congress.

The election of US senators by the people came about as a result of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. This transfer of power from legislatures to the people was a very specific reform born of the Progressive Era. To infer that another Progressive Era reform, the initiative process, also transferred the power to appoint electors, is a legal fallacy. If Progressives had intended to transfer such power, they would have stated so explicitly, either in the Seventeenth Amendment or in a companion amendment. They did not.

So, if neither the Framers nor the Progressives intended the people to have the power to direct the manner of appointing electors, the only possible conclusion is that the power does not exist. If enacted, the Hiltachk initiative could not stand legal challenge, and the state attorney general would be forced to waste millions of taxpayer dollars defending a lost cause. Rather than have our pockets picked by Tom Hiltachk, we voters should defeat his initiative at the ballot box. Better yet, don’t sign his petition and keep the initiative off the ballot.

NASA aims to put man on Mars by 2037

Mars Daily
24 September 2007

NASA aims to put a man on Mars by 2037, the administrator of the US space agency indicated here Monday.

This year marks the half-century of the space age ushered in by the October 1957 launch of the Sputnik-1 by the then Soviet Union, NASA administrator Michael Griffin noted.

In 2057, the centenary of the space era, "we should be celebrating 20 years of man on Mars," Griffin told an international astronautics congress in this southern Indian city where he outlined NASA's future goals.

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