neil armstrong Archives - Where Is The Outrage?

New GOP Election Strategy

Because of the electoral college, which needs to be scrapped, it’s hard to see how Mitt Romney was going to put together a winning coalition. Although Mitt Romney stated that he needs to win 50.1% of the vote, he is wrong. He needs to win 270 electoral college votes. As we saw in 2000, winning the popular vote does not guarantee that you win the electoral college. Winning the popularity contest is nice but if you want to be president you have to win the electoral college. Mitt Romney and his strategy gurus have decided that he cannot win a significant number of African-American or Latino votes. So, he’s written off these minority groups. It is my opinion that he has also written off women. I do not think that he will make a concerted effort to win a majority of women. Instead, I think that Mitt Romney has decided to double down on winning huge majorities of white men.

Watch the video:

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I find it sad and disgusting that Barack Obama has been hounded about where he was born. I think it was pretty obvious from the start. But it’s hard for Americans to believe that a young black man born in Hawaii could rise to become the president of the United States. Something must be wrong. (The birthers still don’t have an adequate explanation of how Barack Obama’s birth announcement could have been printed in both Honolulu papers back in 1961.) Mitt Romney decided that he needed to make a joke about where he was born. This was no joke. This was a deliberate statement that he made to reinforce that he is an American. Everyone in United States knows that he is an American. Why? Because he is a privileged white male. There’s nothing more American than that. A guy named Barack Obama, we aren’t sure. It doesn’t matter what evidence we are shown; we know American when we see it. Neil Armstrong was an American. (God rest his soul.) George W. Bush was an American. Even John McCain, who was born in Panama, is a real, true American. Barack Obama? We, as Americans, still have questions. (One of my conservative friends told me last week that he was uncertain whether Barack Obama was a Muslim or not. This guy is educated. He’s highly respected. Yet, he’s not sure.)

This comes back to that great article that I pointed to yesterday from Ta-Nehisi Coates from Atlantic Monthly.

NASA's Finest Hour

July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.

This video is the short version:

This is a longer version. Note the computer simulation (graphics). My five-year-old grandson can do better than that now, but then… it was the greatest.

From AP:

Neil Armstrong moved slowly down the ladder. Getting to the moon had been a long time coming. He was an Ohio pilot who came from the same soil as Orville and Wilbur, who ejected from a crippled jet fighter over Korea just after turning 21, who flew seven test flights in the X-15 rocket, who saved himself and a crewmate in Gemini 8, who ejected from a lunar landing trainer a split second before it crashed.

In the 1950s and ’60s, he flew about every propeller, jet, rocket and helicopter built by his country. To say that this Midwestern farmboy was the best test pilot in an emergency ever was an easy argument. That’s why chief astronaut Deke Slayton chose Neil Armstrong to take the first step on a small world that had never been touched by life. A landscape where no leaf had ever drifted, no insect had ever scurried, where no blade of green ever waved, where in the silence of vacuum even the fury of a thermonuclear blast would sound no louder than a falling snowflake.

More than 200,000 miles away, billions of eyes stared at the black-and-white TV picture. They watched Neil’s ghostly figure move like a spacesuited phantom, closer and closer, planting his boots in moondust at 10:56 p.m. ET, July 20, 1969. (more… )