March 26, 2005
 
THUMBS XVIII: Homer Hickam and the Shuttle; Welcome to My World, Maureen Dowd; Summers FFA Chapter Charges Ahead
 
by David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
 
Hinton (HNN) — This is the eighteenth installment of an occasional series expressing approval or disapproval of recent news events, commentaries, etc. Thumbs Up for approval; Thumbs Down for disapproval. I welcome contributions, which will be credited in the item. The contributions can come from within the HNN family or from our readers – I welcome them all. Contact me at davidkinchen@hotmail.com or send the contributions/suggestions to stories@huntingtonnews.net.

THUMBS UP – To NASA veteran rocket engineer Homer Hickam, a native of McDowell County, West Virginia, and author of "Rocket Boys," "The Ambassador’s Son" and "Torpedo Junction," among other books, for saying forcefully in a March 22, 2005 Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal that the Space Shuttle should be abandoned in favor of the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEW) "that President Bush announced with fanfare last year."
 
Hickam’s take-no-prisoners article, "Shuttle Fatigue," is worth looking up and reading in its entirety. He says he left NASA in 1998 to pursue a writing career and he’s "glad I did, because I could no longer stand to work on the Space Shuttle: 24 years after it first flew, what was once a magnificent example of engineering has become an old and dangerous contraption. It has killed 14 people and will probably kill more if it continues to be launched."
 
There have been no launches since the Columbia disaster of 2003 and none are planned for the near future, as far as I can tell. Hickam points to the Chinese, who are doing "cutting-edge" work in space. He even suggests that if the U.S. is not up to designing and building the CEW – which NASA says won’t be able to fly until 2014 – we ought to buy the Chinese version. You could call that the Wal-Mart solution, since just about everything in W-M comes from China!
 
Hickam believes that with the abundance of talent available in NASA, the CEW could fly in a few years. He pleads with the powers that be to unleash the power of NASA’s talented rocket scientists. In my trip to Houston last year, which included a tour of NASA, I saw some of that talent on display in the agency’s headquarters. In his article, Hickam doesn’t use the acronym NIH, which stands for "Not Invented Here" – and is widely understood in the engineering community – but I think it’s applicable. We’re still parroting the phrase "greatest country on earth" referring to ourselves. When we can’t learn from our mistakes and discard old and dangerous technology, we don’t deserve the appellation.
 
THUMBS UP — To New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for her March 24, 2005 Op-Ed piece "DeLay, Deny and Demagogue," in which she quotes U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., one of the five House Republicans who voted against the bill changing the jurisdiction of the Terri Schiavo case from state (Florida) to federal court jurisdiction. Shays said: "This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy. There are going to be repercussions from this vote."
 
In her cogently written piece, Dowd joins the ranks of true conservatives of the ilk described by Thomas E. Woods Jr. in "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" (Regnery).
 
True conservatives, Professor Woods points out, believe all powers not specifically assigned to the federal government are to be left to the states. This is the Jeffersonian position, as opposed to the Hamiltonian position. I don’t think Dowd, a liberal, would appreciate being mentioned in the same commentary with Woods, whose book was savaged by a New York Times reviewer, but like it or not, she’s taking the truly conservative, state’s rights point of view in her brilliantly written (yes, she’s a wonderful writer and I recommend the audio version of "Bush World" to everybody) column.
 
She cites a CBS News poll of March 23, 2005 that found that 82 percent of the public opposed Congress and the President intervening in the Schiavo case; "74 percent thought it was all about politics."
 
Of course it is! It’s about "Tom DeLay and Bill Frist propping up between them this poor woman in a vegetative state to indulge their own political agendas," as Dowd says. She’s just as hard on Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, "who are trying to curry favor with red staters." (Look for my review of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," coming soon in HNN).
 
THUMBS UP — To Summers County High School for its chapter of Future Farmers of America, created at the Hinton school last July. I was surprised to learn that the Bobcats didn’t have an FFA chapter, considering the rural nature of our county of 13,000 residents. My high school in rural Illinois has had an FFA chapter almost since the founding of the organization in 1928. U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-WV, toured the FFA chapter’s greenhouse on his visit to Summers County on Thursday, March 24, 2005. Meagan Lane, the chapter’s president, says the organization has 11 officers and 86 members. As a person who spent his first 10 years on a farm in Michigan, I say more power to our Bobcat FFA chapter!