Category: Miscellany

There was no warning of a problem until the explosion, it seems. Columbia was NASA’s oldest shuttle but has been entirely refurbished somewhat recently. This means the cause of the accident is still a mystery. They also seem to be ruling out human error/pilot error. A spokesman for NASA told people who may be in…

I hate getting those calls or email that say, “turn on your TV.” That’s how 9/11 started for me. With all the talk lately about the Challenger disaster it seems cruelly ironic that the Columbia has broken up on reentry. Anything else I was going to post or write about seems trivial right now.

I felt paranoid wondering if there was any chance of sabotage or other hostile actions, but I realize now that I was far from the only person to have this thought, and I flipped to Peter Jennings saying that this has effectively been ruled out, or at least that the accident happened too far up…

Republicans trying to have it both ways on race. Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo is one of the best political blogs around, has a new column in The Hill. His first column takes on Republican tolerance of intolerance: Critics on the left often wrongly claim that the Republican Party is some hotbed of…