Via: Stay Up Late Tonight to Watch The Last Night­time Shut­tle Launch Ever [Reminder]

If you live any­where on the East Coast and are at all inter­ested in cool stuff that hap­pens in the sky, you’d be remiss not to stay up late tonight to watch for the last ever night­time shut­tle launch.

Or you could wake up early, that works too. Either way, at 4:39 A.M. early tomor­row morn­ing NASA will launch the Endeavor space shut­tle, and it will be the last time it does so at night.

On its way up to the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion, the shut­tle will fly par­al­lel to America’s east­ern seaboard and the shuttle’s rock­ets will thus be vis­i­ble to a sur­pris­ingly huge area, weather per­mit­ting. Here’s a map of where the rocket will be in the first ten min­utes after launch and what areas of the coun­try will be able to see it:

I told you it was a sur­pris­ingly huge area! To find out more about what you’re look­ing for and where exactly you should be look­ing for it, check out Space.com’s com­pre­hen­sive run­down of the late night launch. [Space.com]

From: Eustace Mullins -” Last Writ For A Mar­tyr via

Eustace Mullins, known for his sem­i­nal book, The Secrets of The Fed­eral Reserve, passed away at the age of eighty-seven on Feb­ru­ary 2, 2010. His pass­ing, like his books, was com­pletely buried in the estab­lish­ment media. For all his efforts in reveal­ing the nature of “our” bank­ing sys­tem, he achieved the sta­tus of a non-person, a blacked-out dis­si­dent in the Amer­i­can Oligarchy.

From: Santa Fe Insti­tute econ­o­mist: one in four Amer­i­cans is employed to guard the wealth of the rich via

Here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing pro­file on rad­i­cal Santa Fe Insti­tute econ­o­mist Samuel Bowles, an empiri­cist who says his research doesn’t sup­port the Chicago School effi­cient mar­ket­place hypoth­e­sis. Instead, Bowles argues that the wealth inequal­ity cre­ated by strict mar­ket eco­nom­ics cre­ates inef­fi­cien­cies because soci­ety has to devote so much effort to stop­ping the poor from expro­pri­at­ing the rich. He calls this “guard labor” and says that one in four Amer­i­cans is employed to in the sec­tor — labor that could oth­er­wise be used to increase the nation’s wealth and progress.

The greater the inequal­i­ties in a soci­ety, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with rel­a­tively unequal states like New Mex­ico employ­ing a greater share of guard labor than rel­a­tively egal­i­tar­ian states like Wisconsin.

The prob­lem, Bowles argues, is that too much guard labor sus­tains “ille­git­i­mate inequal­i­ties,” cre­at­ing a drag on the econ­omy. All of the peo­ple in guard labor jobs could be doing some­thing more pro­duc­tive with their time–perhaps start­ing their own busi­nesses or help­ing to reduce the US trade deficit with China.

Guard labor sup­ports what one might call the beat-down econ­omy. Com­mu­nity Action’s Porter sees it all the time.

“We have based almost every­thing we have done on the idea that we always need a part of our work­force that is marginalized–that we can call this group into action at any time, pay them noth­ing and they will do any­thing that needs to be done,” she says.

More dis­cour­ag­ing, per­haps, is the sta­tis­ti­cal fact that a per­son born into this work­force has lit­tle chance of ris­ing beyond it.

From: Late Night: How Not to be “Seen” via

I said this last week:

The White House has spent this last year insu­lat­ing the pres­i­dent from the grit and grime of the health reform bat­tle, think­ing that if Obama stayed above the fray, he would be seen as more presidential—or at least would retain that “new car smell” and those lofty approval numbers.

And this week, it seems more and more peo­ple are noticing—or, per­haps, more accu­rately, they noticed a long time ago, but now they feel more com­fort­able talk­ing about it.

Take, for instance, Sen­a­tor Sher­rod Brown (D-OH), who told Sam Stein:

The pres­i­dent was weigh­ing in pretty heav­ily on the dis­cus­sions between the House and Sen­ate before the Mass­a­chu­setts spe­cial [Sen­ate] election–it’s dried up since.

Or the Demo­c­ra­tic source that told Chris Frates at Politico that dur­ing a Thurs­day meet­ing between the Demo­c­ra­tic cau­cus and Obama:

Pelosi expressed frus­tra­tion with the pace of progress and the president’s deci­sion not to weigh in pub­licly on a way for­ward, accord­ing to the source.

There are also sim­i­lar leaks and state­ments about frus­tra­tions expressed by Sen­a­tors Franken (D-MN) and Sanders (I-VT).

And then there’s Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-OR), appear­ing ear­lier tonight on The Ed Show, who was even more explicit:

The White House has really checked out of this debate—I mean, they have not been direc­tive. I mean, the pres­i­dent came to our cau­cus and in response to one mem­ber said he sup­ported the pub­lic option. Well that’s great, but where was the bully pul­pit in sup­port of the pub­lic option? … I haven’t seen them deliver at all in this debate. Remem­ber, they started by cut­ting a deal with the Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal industry—couldn’t have been a worse start.

But, in con­trast, Pres­i­dent Obama made a series of pub­lic stops yes­ter­day where he made a point of urg­ing Con­gress, like he did in his State of the Union, to pass health care leg­is­la­tion. Pub­licly engag­ing (after months of what many com­plained was an obvi­ous absence from the debate) while pri­vately step­ping away. Is that a strat­egy for get­ting real health care reform, or is that a strat­egy for get­ting reelected?

I know what the White House is think­ing, but I’ve got news for them: Not only will leav­ing Con­gress to “get it done” all by themselves—leaving the House to try to fig­ure out some way to pres­sure the Sen­ate into mak­ing sen­si­ble, pro­duc­tive changes—not pro­duce a qual­ity reform bill (or any bill at all), the pres­i­dent will not be insu­lated from the failure.

I expect the polit­i­cal team at 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Ave. thinks that it might be a win-win. Either they get to sign a bill, no mat­ter how inef­fec­tual, and call it a vic­tory, or they don’t get a bill, and can blame obstruc­tion­ists in Con­gress or the flawed process dur­ing this year’s elec­tions (and 2012, too). But it’s not going to go down that way.

Here’s John Nichols from the same Ed Show segment:

[T]he Amer­i­can peo­ple don’t care what a fil­i­buster is, they don’t care what clo­ture is—there’s a new pew cen­ter poll that says that they don’t even know what those things are—what they care about is whether their kids, whether their par­ents, whether they have health care. And if the Democ­rats don’t get this—I start with Barack Obama, nobody gets off the hook, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the whole Demo­c­ra­tic Party—if they don’t get that the issue is health care, not Sen­ate rules, they are going to be beaten awfully badly this fall. They may not lose all their majori­ties, but they will lose their abil­ity to func­tion, and, in so doing, they will have sac­ri­ficed their abil­ity to set this coun­try right, that isn’t just bad pol­i­tics, that’s bad morality.

The White House still does not seem to under­stand this, but it looks like many in Con­gress (such as those quoted above) now do. After a year of avoid­ing the spotlight—letting Con­gress work out their health reform plans in pub­lic while cut­ting his own deals in private—the pres­i­dent now tries to appear engaged in front of the cam­eras while try­ing hard not to have a hand in either a failed effort or the break­ing of some of his secret deals behind the scenes. Instead of “The buck stops here,” Obama is posi­tion­ing him­self for “It’s not my fault.” From “agent of change” to “vic­tim of cir­cum­stance.” Is that really how the pres­i­dent wants vot­ers to think of him in Novem­ber of 2010 or 2012? Is that really how he wants to be seen?