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"When President Bush delivers a speech recognizing the centenary of heavier-than-air-powered flight December 17, it is expected that he will proffer a bold vision of renewed space flight, with at its center a return to the moon, perhaps even establishment of a permanent presence there.

...

The content of the speech does not appear to be in doubt; the only question is timing. While those who have formulated it have argued that it be delivered on the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight, there exists a slight possibility that it will instead be incorporated in the State of the Union address at the end of January. This has its own, less triumphant, significance, which is in the form of a chilling coincidence. Every American who has died in a spacecraft has done so within one calendar week: The Apollo 204 fire on January 27, 1967; the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986; and the loss of Columbia on February 1, 2003."

Assuming that's true, what a terrible, terrible idea.

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-Skip

I'm having some serious deja vu here.  She's written about this subject before, right?

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You've got to commend pro-lifers' persistence; after a decade of trying, the partial-birth/late-term abortion bill will finally become law. One side proclaims that partial-birth abortion is an "abhorrent practice" that is "brutal, barbaric, morally offensive, and outside the mainstream practice of medicine" (Bill Frist); its passage, the president says, will "continue to build a culture of life in America," whatever the hell a culture of life is. The other side says late-term abortion is a rare, safe medical procedure that protects the lives of pregnant women; its passage, the Howard Dean says, "will endanger the lives of countless women." Abortion raises some heavy questions: Is it morally acceptable to abort the life of a fetus? Does the future of a living woman matter more than the future of her unborn child? Both sides have compelling arguments; the issues are complex, and I respect the opinions of both pro-lifers and pro-choicers.

The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, however, does not tackle those underlying issues.