THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION: What's next?

"We're trying to tell people it's there," Suffredini told SPACE.com. "A lot of people don’t know its there, sadly enough. And in a lot of cases people don’t know what it can do for them. We need people to know it's an asset out there they can utilize and there's all kinds of benefits if we can figure out how to utilize it."

'How to utilize it' should have been known before the ISS was built.

PAUL GREENBERG on the 'mercy killing' of Britian's News of the World.

OBVIOUSLY the ethics didn't take.

EDUCATION IS WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT -- and it's the Bush administration's fault. Of course.

HAS IT BEEN 42 YEARS ALREADY?

POPULATION CONTROL might not be a bad idea if it is liberals whose population is being controlled.

POVERTY, AMERICAN STYLE: "In contemporary America, poverty is not so much a material condition as a spiritual one, often characterized by drug abuse, alcoholism, mental illness and illegitimacy. Until voters have a better understanding of what today’s poverty is and is not, it will not be possible to craft effective solutions to the very real problems–mostly behavioral–that afflict a significant portion of our population."

HOW TO ACHIEVE A BALANCED BUDGET: don’t pass an increase in the debt ceiling. Make government live within its means right now.

U.S. SUPREME COURT again rejects most decisions by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. "... the 9th Circuit was often out of step even with the high court's liberal justices, who joined with the conservatives in 12 unanimous rulings."

SPACE NEWS: The MightyEagle is landing.

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER REID is giving "Dirty Harry" a bad name.

HEH: Shared Sacrifice.

THOMAS SOWELL on Good Things.

WHO WILL BE HELD RESPONSIBLE in the Atlanta Public School Cheating Scandal?

The children, obviously. If they had done better on the exam there would have been no need for the school system to ... er, "modify" their test scores.

"UNLESS WE come to grips with spending now, there isn't going to be a future."

"THERE IS NO RATIONAL REASON why a small republican experiment in 1776 grew to dominate global culture and society -- except that America is the only nation, past or present, that put trust in the individual rather than in the state and its elite bureaucracy."

Read it all.

BOOSTER CAMERA VIDEO from the Atlantis launch. Cameras mounted on the two solid rocket boosters that helped propel space shuttle Atlantis into orbit on July 8 provide unique angles of the launch from the Kennedy Space Center and their subsequent water landing downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

The whole sequence is about 30 minutes long, 5 minutes each from 6 embedded cameras. SRB separation is at about 120 seconds in each video; then the remaining video is of the booster tumbling in reentry before the parachutes open for landing at about 400 seconds.

FIRE THE MBA'S and put engineers in charge. "[M]oving numbers around can do only so much. Over the long haul, you've got to invent or improve real products and services to grow."

THE GREAT CHARADE: The spenders are negotiating among themselves how much debt they’re going to burden you with.

Read it all.

DEFICITS ARE A GRRRL'S BEST FRIEND: And this is what passes for education these days? The only intelligence is in the comments.