FWD: NASA foe Proxmire is now worm food

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/....ap/index.html

....Good ****ing riddance, I say.

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

OM wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/....ap/index.html

...Good ****ing riddance, I say.

Proxmire wasn't so much a NASA foe as he was a foe
of costly programs like space shuttle and space station.
At the time, Proxmire bothered space advocates when
he made his pronoucements, but today it seems that
most space advocates are saying the same things that
Proxmire said - that shuttle and ISS are wasteful. Heck,
even NASA's own administrator is saying that.

Proxmire, it turns out, was right!

- Ed Kyle

Ed Kyle wrote:
OM wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/....ap/index.html

...Good ****ing riddance, I say.

Proxmire wasn't so much a NASA foe as he was a foe
of costly programs like space shuttle and space station.
At the time, Proxmire bothered space advocates when
he made his pronoucements, but today it seems that
most space advocates are saying the same things that
Proxmire said - that shuttle and ISS are wasteful. Heck,
even NASA's own administrator is saying that.

Proxmire, it turns out, was right!

- Ed Kyle


Proxmire was just mad because he once paid for golden fleece.
He paid for a hair transplant and it still looked like a bad comb over.

;-)


Rusty

OM wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/....ap/index.html

...Good ****ing riddance, I say.

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[
Proxmire was to government waste what Joe McCarthy was to communism. In
each case, the purpose of the target was to promote the Senator rather
than to actually do anything about it. He was a foe of virtually all
space spending; he even tried to defund Apollo in the early 60s. He was
also once successfully sued by one of the targets of his "Golden
Fleece" award for defamation.

On 15 Dec 2005 11:15:45 -0800, in a place far, far away, "Ed Kyle"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

OM wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/....ap/index.html

...Good ****ing riddance, I say.

Proxmire wasn't so much a NASA foe as he was a foe
of costly programs like space shuttle and space station.
At the time, Proxmire bothered space advocates when
he made his pronoucements, but today it seems that
most space advocates are saying the same things that
Proxmire said - that shuttle and ISS are wasteful. Heck,
even NASA's own administrator is saying that.

Proxmire, it turns out, was right!

He was, but for the wrong reasons. He's probably best known to space
advocates for his famous "...not one penny for this nutty fantasy..."
in response to Gerry O'Neill's space colonization concepts. Of
course, the idea (or at least it seemed that way to me) was that they
would be self supporting through SPS construction (whether or not that
ever made any economic sense), whereas the popular (and Proxmire)
perception seemed to be that L-5 advocates simply wanted the taxpayers
to support their orbital utopiae. There were no doubt some naive
L-5ers who wanted/expected that, but it wasn't my understanding--the
whole point (or at least a large point) of the O'Neillian vision was
that they would be economically viable on their own.

OM wrote:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/....ap/index.html

...Good ****ing riddance, I say.

****, I thought he'd already died, some years back. So how old _was_ he,
anyway; like, 206 or something?

--

..

"Though I could not caution all, I yet may warn a few:
Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools!"

--grateful dead.
__________________________________________________ _____________
Mike Flugennock, flugennock at sinkers dot org
"Mikey'zine": dubya dubya dubya dot sinkers dot org

OM wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/....ap/index.html

...Good ****ing riddance, I say.

OM
Much fuller Proxmire obit he

http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/dec05/377745.asp

"To head off charges of hypocrisy, Proxmire pinched pennies on his
office spending and refused to take taxpayer-funded trips abroad. He
returned $1 million in unspent funds from his office during his time in
the Senate."

"Proxmire's hand-shaking was so successful that he was re-elected in
landslides in 1976 and 1982 despite refusing contributions. He spent
less than $180 a race, mostly on postage to return donations."

"A stint in the U.S. Army came next. Proxmire volunteered - "I had a low
draft number," he recalled - and served for five years. He began as a
private and left the service as a first lieutenant. He served in the
Army's financial branch, then was transferred to counterintelligence
work in Chicago. In 1944, he was assigned to Washington and given his
commission. There he worked with the military intelligence section,
which was concerned with studying the Japanese order of battle."



I shook Proxmire's hand one year at the Wisconsin State Fair - in the
mid to late'60's I think. A few years back, Jorge referred to Proxmire
as a "liberal" like Walter Mondale. Er...no, hell no!

In article om,
Ed Kyle wrote:
Proxmire wasn't so much a NASA foe as he was a foe
of costly programs like space shuttle and space station.

No, it wasn't that simple or that rational. Your memory is very
selective there.

...today it seems that
most space advocates are saying the same things that
Proxmire said...

Not hardly. By accident, one or two of the things he attacked actually
partly deserved attack. That's very different from saying that he's
been vindicated.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

"OM" wrote in message
...
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/....ap/index.html

Don't you mean, meatball food?

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article om,
Ed Kyle wrote:
Proxmire wasn't so much a NASA foe as he was a foe
of costly programs like space shuttle and space station.

No, it wasn't that simple or that rational. Your memory is very
selective there.

The way I remember it, and I'm pretty sure I'm remembering
it correctly, is that he did not oppose *every* space plan -
but he was a constant thorn in NASA's side. I wrote a
letter to Proxmire in the late 1980s that had to do with the
proposed space station. Proxmire (or I suppose one of
his assitants) wrote me back (I still have the letter
*somewhere*), responding directly to the points in my
letter. He said that he wanted to see man-tended platforms,
like the proposed SSI Industrial Space Facility, rather than
the bloated NASA space station plan.

He was right about SST, about Shuttle, and about ISS.
He was probably wrong about SETI, but it may be too
soon to say for sure. He was point man for shutting
down the Saturn production line, but LBJ had already
made that a given by slashing NASA's post-Apollo plans
(and by venturing into Vietnam).

As for NASA, much of the anti-NASA commentary I
read on this supposedly "pro-space" list could have
been written by Sen. Proxmire himself!

- Ed Kyle