Encounter Intelligence

In a letter to the New York Times, Robert Zubrin writes:

The landing of the terrific Curiosity rover on Mars has rightly thrilled the world, and the nation’s leaders are taking a bow. “If anyone has been harboring doubts about the status of U.S. leadership in space,” the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, said, “well, there’s a one-ton automobile-size piece of American ingenuity. And it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now.”

But alas, the Curiosity mission is a legacy of the Bush administration, begun by one NASA administrator, Sean O’Keefe, and rammed through to completion over the objections of vocal critics by his gutsy successor, Mike Griffin, who also initiated the Maven Mars orbiter, scheduled for launching next year.

The Obama administration, however, has no plans to continue in like vein. Far from it. It has canceled NASA’s plans for joint Mars missions with the Europeans in 2016 and 2018 and is proposing to butcher the program budget.

Read the rest of the letter here. Learn more about Robert Zubrin and his new book Merchants of Despair here. 

The Wall Street Journal reviews Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote At Risk by John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky:

With little fear of detection, fraudsters can register illegal immigrants or phony names and use absentee ballots. Or send imposters to vote in person for deceased citizens still on the rolls—most states don’t require a voter to show poll workers a photo ID.

The potential for mayhem doesn’t stop on Election Day. During recounts, votes that weren’t counted originally can later be “found” by election officials, as happened in King County (Seattle) in the infamous 2004 Washington-state gubernatorial recount. Or absentee ballots that were rejected on Election Day because the voters’ signatures on ballot sleeves didn’t match the ones on registration cards can be re-examined and accepted, as occurred in the 2008 Minnesota senatorial recount. Judging whether a vote is valid is a subjective process—and the people making the judgments are often partisans who know full well which candidate will benefit from their decision.

Read the full review here.