The [Olympia, Washington] City Council on Tuesday voted 4-3 — with Mayor Mark Foutch and members Jeanette Hawkins and Doug Mah dissenting — to draft a resolution opposing the arrival of the USS Olympia and send the message that the vessel is not welcome here. A public hearing to consider the item is set for May 25.
The USS Olympia decided to cancel the visit.
Essentially, the activists robbed the sailors on board the USS Olympia of a chance for shore leave in their namesake city, which they had visited more than once before, with no problems.
Since John Kerry served four months in Vietnam, the “mainstream” media consider illegitimate to say that anyone on the left is unpatriotic or does not support the troops. But some on the left (and a few on the right) are unpatriotic. This action is one example, and I expect to see many others.
Whatever one may think of our foreign policy, there is no reason, in my opinion, not to support the enlisted men and women, who do not make that policy.
The lefties didn’t mean that they’d support troops who were so gauche as to have weapons.
[source]
After the malfunctions of two of the three U.S. spacesuits aboard the international space station, a critical spacewalk to repair a broken stabilization system must now be made next month using Russian spacesuits. But the Russian willingness to step in and bail out NASA’s spacewalk comes at a price, outlined in documents obtained by MSNBC.com. “We agree to perform an EVA [extravehicular activity] provided that we receive the appropriate compensation from NASA,” Valeri Ryumin, the Russian head of the space station project, told NASA counterpart William Gerstenmaier in a memo dated Wednesday.
Finally, our nationalized space program is on par with the Russian nationalized space program. Maybe they’ll hold on long enough to be rescued by Space Ship One.
Atlanta Public Schools misspent or mismanaged nearly $73 million from a national program intended to give poor children access to the Internet, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation has found.
[…]
Now, Atlanta says it needs $14 million a year — three times the district’s textbook budget — just to run and maintain the network. And much of the promised benefit to students has yet to materialize.
[…]
At one elementary school, equipment powerful enough to operate a small school district runs just 20 computers. At another, Atlanta billed the program for electronics for twice as many classrooms as the school has. Millions of dollars were spent at other schools that were closed or demolished within a few years. Elsewhere, boxes of costly computer components, some still wrapped in plastic, gather dust in storage.
At three Atlanta elementary schools, the cost of bringing high-speed Internet access to classrooms reached about $1 million. Suburban Forsyth County, by contrast, paid about $200,000 for the same result at much larger schools.
[…]
The national program that financed Atlanta’s extravagance, called E-rate, won’t pay for computers but helps schools pay for Internet infrastructure they might not otherwise be able to afford. Now, amid charges of waste and fraud around the country, the program faces mounting scrutiny in Washington.
Americans everywhere have picked up the tab for E-rate through a surcharge on their telephone bills.
What, doesn’t the very act of spending money on that equipment improve students?