President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Part of the problem is that neither party is all that friendly to education. Democrats are better about it, but both sides keep screwing with public education.

Free tuition to public colleges would be a fantastic idea, but it won't mean much if we don't find a consistent direction and more money for public education at the K-12 level. Instead, thanks to half the country having its head up its collective asses on election day, we're going to see Trump doing as much damage as possible to public schools. He wants to eliminate the Department of Education. He insists he wants to send control of schools back to the states, but that's a lie. He wants voucher programs to siphon money away from public schools nationwide. He wants to eliminate diversity efforts and make sure children don't have to learn anything about things like slavery and the long-term impact of discrimination in this country. He wants to force those initiatives on every state. Then maybe he will let the states make some decisions.

 

With heavy emphasis on government and how it, its branches, and elections, work!

 

Well, it goes right along with the fact that no one but no one holds Trump responsible for anything.

 

Being a Dem politician is like being a ref. You do the job right, no one notices. But if you screw up....

 

This country is so fucking stupid.

 

Exactly. It's why I've been so upset at this result. It's beyond my simply hating Trump. I just cannot get my head around how anyone, let alone enough people to elect him, could be just fine and dandy with him as the President of the United States.

For me, the most memorable post of this thread lately remains one put up by BYM2, presenting JL Cauvin's angry post-election reaction on X.com. It just says it all, perfectly. It sounds terrible to say that I've wanted to post something like it. Even though I never would, I've wanted to.

x.com

 

Nope ... and FWIW, have long admired and respected your knowledge of American space program.
So, I'll ask: had he lived, do you think Virgil Ivan Grissom would have been the first human being to walk on the Moon?
My first birthday was on Jan. 27, 1967. The Apollo One crew was killed at approx. 6:33 p.m. eastern time, right? I was living in the central time zone.
So, I've often figured my family was celebrating my first birthday party when those men died.
As a result, I've always felt a weird connection with Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee ... may they rest in peace.

 

Finally

 

You forgot the most important thing to hos last education secretary: Keeping grizzly beard off campus.

 

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO LOWER INFLATION?

 

Well, it was kinda de rigeur after the Apollo 1 fire to speculate that Grissom would have been first to walk on the moon, and I think Deke Slayton has been quoted at various times as saying he would have, but I kinda doubt it because it would have been unlikely he would have rotated back up in the flight rotation fast enough to do it.

I guess assuming the Apollo 1 fire never happened with no other major disasters and progress on the rest of the program had kept pace, we probably might have seen something like this:

Apollo 1, Feb. 67: Grissom-White-Chaffee.
Apollo 2, May 67: Schirra-Eisele-Cunningham. Orbital rendezvous with boilerplate LM docking target and EVA tests
Apollo 3, Aug 67: Borman-Lovell-Collins. High earth orbit flight
Apollo 4, Sep. 67: Unmanned Saturn V test
Apollo 5, Oct 67: McDivitt-Scott-Schweickart. Lunar orbital flight Satun V with 'non-operational' LM
Apollo 6, Dec. 67: Gordo Cooper-Eisele-Ed Mitchell: Dress rehearsal with operational LM and 10 km descent
Apollo 8, Feb 68: Armstrong-Aldrin-Anders: First lunar landing
Apollo 9, May 68: Conrad-Gordon-Bean: Second landing; precision touchdown near Surveyor 3
Apollo 10, Sept. 68: Stafford-Cernan-Haise: Scientific landing at Hadley Rille
Apollo 11, Sept. 68: Grissom-Shepard-Young: Precision landing and on-surface rendezvous with A1o crew. Worldwide drama when A1o springs major fuel cell leak due to tank explosion in lunar orbit and all 6 astronauts must return to earth in A11 CM, Columbia
Apollo 12, March 69: Lovell-Collins-Mattingly. First use of lunar rover
Apollo 13, July 69: Scott-Cunningham-Swigert. First launch of Saturn 5B, augmented with strap on solid boosters to increase capacity.
Apollo 14, Oct. 69: Slayton-Duke-Schmitt: First landing in Tycho Crater with geology specialist Schmitt in new 3-man uprated LM. First use of lunar habitation laboratory, a 20-foot long habitation module landed separately on lunar surface


Or ... maybe not.

 

If I may dip my toes into this conversation because it's a topic I am also passionate about (have all the Apollo patches on my work desk):

I would hypothesize no for two big reasons.

1. I would have some serious doubts that Grissom would want to. The only member of the Mercury 7 who got to the moon was Shepherd and that's with a lengthy timeout due to his inner-ear disorder. He probably would have been offered the job had he stuck around into 1968, but I'd argue he wouldn't have stayed in the fishbowl that long.
2. The Apollo 1 fire probably precluded a much bigger disaster. The CM was, by all accounts, fucked up in December 1967, and had it failed on an actual mission, they very well could have left some people in space. That shutdown gave them a chance to reset and I'd argue made it more likely to accomplish the Kennedy goal.