Tim Pawlenty, clearly frustrated with his mediocre results in early polling, came out swinging Friday in Iowa with barbs at President Obama.
"Anyone can stand up here and flap their jaw and give a speech," the former Minnesota governor said Friday in a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to a crowd of about 70.
"We've had Obama with all his soaring rhetoric, with all this nonsense, he's like a manure spreader in a windstorm. It stinks. It's flying all over the place and it's not pretty," the GOP presidential hopeful complained.
Earlier Friday in Waterloo, Pawlenty theorized that Obama's "whole worldview is to grow the government, and take things out of the private sector and put it into the government."
Unfortunately, that statement doesn't jibe with a this chart that argues that the Obama administration has actually killed about 500,000 government jobs since he took office.
Casey Anthony will walk free in several days after the controversial acquittal handed down Tuesday that found her not guilty in the killing of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee.
Instead of possibly finding herself on death row if she had been found guilty of murder, she was sentenced to four years in jail on four misdemeanors for lying to investigators. But since she had already spent three years in jail awaiting trial, Anthony, 25, is scheduled to be set free next Sunday.
Several states, including Florida, are creating laws that, if they had been on the books earlier, would have kept Anthony behind bars for up to 15 years.
Dubbed "Caylee's Law", states are considering legislation that would punish parents for not reporting a missing children after a certain time period or not reporting a child's death.
A bill in Florida would make it a felony if a parent failed to report a child under 12 missing after 48 hours.
Likewise it would also be a felony if a parent or caregiver didn't report the death of a child or "location of a child's corpse" to police within two hours of the death.
Over 700,000 people have signed an online petition to encourage such laws to be drawn up.
"It's certainly something that we want to look into, because right now looking at the Maryland state law we're not seeing anything that would fit the circumstances to the degree that we want to," Joseph Cassilly, a prosecutor in Harford County, Md., told the Associated Press.
Willie Meggs, who served as a state attorney in Florida for more than three decades, told the AP that the Anthony case was so rare that such a law wouldn't be necessary.
"It only applies to people like her and fortunately those are not common, everyday occurrences," Meggs said. "I don't think it changes anything."
Photo: Edward Mehnert of Orlando covers his mouth with duct tape as he protests during the Casey Anthony sentencing in outside the Orange County Courthouse on Thursday in Orlando, Fla. Credit: AP Photo/Alan Diaz
Sarah Palin is probably doing the right thing by spending her summer traveling around the lower 48 states instead of exploring the thawed out Alaskan wilderness.
A new poll [pdf] released Thursday says that nearly half of Alaskans have a "somewhat" or "very" negative feeling of their former governor.
Ivan Moore Research discovered that 49% of the 647 registered Alaskan voters it polled felt negatively about the state's most visible export, while only 39% held a positive opinion toward the hockey mom.
Granted the poll was taken in June, about a week after the state of Alaska released more than 13,000 of Palin's emails from her term as governor. However, none of the emails seemed embarrassing, particularly newsworthy, or damaging to Palin's reputation or future political aspirations (if she has any).
Indeed, Tim Crawford, treasurer of her political action committee, said in June that the emails show "a very engaged Gov. Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state."
Michele Bachmann signed a controversial pact Thursday that is anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-pornography, and floats the curious notion that African American children were better off during slavery than they are under the Obama administration.
The pledge was drawn up by Bob Vander Plaats, a man who ran for governor of Iowa in 2010 and lost in the Republican primary despite the benefit of an endorsement from Internet legend Chuck Norris. Vander Plaats also sought the high office in Iowa in 2002 and 2006 (as Jim Nussle's running mate) but voters gave him the thumbs down.
Somehow he fancies himself a kingmaker and is hoping that other GOP politicians, desperate to appear so-conservative-it-hurts will sign his pledge [.pdf] titled "The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY."
The manifesto, ripe with anti-gay paranoia from the man who once said, "If we’re teaching the kids, 'don’t smoke, because that’s a risky health style,' the same can be true of the homosexual lifestyle."
But the strangest nugget in the pact that the Republican congresswoman from Minnesota signed was one that hearkens back to the good old days when slavery was legal, meaning that black kids had the priceless benefit of having a traditional home.
Once before, NASA and its shuttle program helped to lift America's spirits in times of political and economic uncertainty; now both are victims of changing times and shrinking budgets.
The nation at the beginning of the shuttle program in 1981 was eerily similar to the one at the program's end in 2011, which came Friday morning at Cape Canaveral, Fla., as the space shuttle Atlantis lifted offon the 135th and final mission, to the International Space Station.
"Employment displayed sluggish growth as auto manufacturing failed to keep pace with other industries and homebuilding remained depressed; unemployment held close to the late 1980 levels."
That's the sub-headline from a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which also states that during the first half of 1981, unemployment was 7.4% after years of recession, stagflation and oil embargos.
President Reagan got to preside over the launch of the space shuttle Columbia, but it was hardly his first momentous event of the year -- or of his presidency.
On Jan. 20, he was inaugurated after a landslide victory over former President Carter, and the American hostages in Iran were released minutes afterward.
Then on March 30, only 69 days into the new administration, John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan in the torso outside a Washington, D.C. hotel.
The 70-year-old president was released from the hospital on April 11, a red sweater concealing his bulletproof vest.
The next day, he, the nation and the world watched as Columbia lifted off, launching a new era of manned spaceflight.
Today, with a thankfully uninjured president but a persistently ailing economy, the launch of the shuttle Atlantis means the end of that era, with a loss of many jobs in both NASA -- particularly in Florida -- and in aerospace.
NASA has no manned missions planned and will rely on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Ironically, for an administration that seems eager to involve goverment in many aspects of the economy, the White House now is urging the private sector to fill the gap in low-Earth-orbit transportation.
But in 1981, it was all a brave new world, and the excitement was clear in the voice of ABC News anchor Frank Reynolds, especially when he said, "Go, baby, go ... oh, honey, go, fly like an eagle, go."
Unfortunately, we can't embed the video, so click here and enjoy (Reynolds' exclamation comes at about the 5-minute mark).
After the jump, enjoy the live Tweeting the Ticket's Andrew Malcolm delivered.
Media critic Kate O’Hare is a regular Ticket contributor. She also blogs about TV at Hot Cuppa TV and is a frequent contributor at entertainment-news site Zap2it. Also follow O'Hare on Twitter @KateOH
The scheduled launch of Atlantis space shuttle, with a reduced crew of four, will be all over television today. It's the 135th and final flight in the fabled 30-year history of America's space shuttle adventure.
We are participating in the NASA Tweetup this week with unique access to the space center and NASA experts. So in anticipation of the launch we decided to gather gobs of details about what you won't hear or see on TV, courtesy of numerous interviews at the Kennedy Space Center, most especially with the veteran and patient American astronaut Doug Wheelock. Plus we have some inside NASA launch videos below:
While you were sleeping, technicians fueled the amazing mechanical monster. Flight managers made that decision at 2 a.m. Eastern, hoping to find a clear spot of weather between today's predicted storms.
The rockets are so huge, they will take more than a half-million gallons of liquid oxygen and nitrogen. If you laid Atlantis and its rockets down on a football field, they would reach from one goal line beyond the far 30-yard line.
And these engines have a voracious appetite. At T-minus three hours, technicians will have loaded 150,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 345,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen. The LOX alone weighs 10 pounds per gallon. So there's 1,500,000 pounds right there.
Most of this fuel volume will be consumed in the 8.5 minutes it takes to reach orbit.
Attached to the huge rust-colored tank (the color is thermal protection, no longer painted white, which saves 600 pounds) are those twin solid rocket boosters. Each of those long white cannons weighs 1.5 million pounds. They are reusable. (See video below for a rocket's eye view of the last launch.)
Altogether depending on payload, the rocket-shuttle combo weigh just under five million pounds, even more than the combined weight of Congress after lunch. Did you know that together the package is called the shuttle. When Atlantis returns home alone, weighing less than 250,000 pounds, it's called the orbiter.
There are several holds or planned pauses built into the countdown. The main reason for these: To let human minds catch up with the monitoring and analysis of their computers.
At T-minus 15 seconds, 350,000 gallons of water flood the area beneath the shuttle. But not just, as you might think, for the heat. It's to subdue a sound pulse created by the engines' beyond deafening roar.
Those sparks you might see beneath the main engine nozzles are intentional to burn off any hydrogen fumes. At T-minus 6.6 seconds the main engines ignite. But the entire assembly remains bolted to the pad.
As the thrust from the three shuttle engines builds, it actually moves the tip of Atlantis three feet over and then, in slow motion, back to vertical. If all is well with the main engines, eight explosive bolts tethering the machine to earth are blown. (Watch for small puffs of white smoke at the rocket base in the bottom video here.)
And the solid fuel boosters ignite.
These twin towers of power have no throttle. No controls. They know nothing but full blast. It's basically a pair of two-minute controlled explosions out the rear.
As Wheelock puts it, "Once you light those babies, you're going somewhere."
Together at liftoff the engines provide in excess of six million pounds of thrust and the burning fuel reduces the weight it's carrying by thousands of pounds per second.
Watch this cockpit view video of a launch and see how even the tightly-tethered crew is firmly jostled. (More text below)
Ever wonder why shortly after launch as it starts its flight up the East coast, the shuttle always turns on its back? "Houston, Atlantis roll program." One, that movement aligns rooftop antennas with the myriad of tracking stations below.
But since the shuttle has wings with lift, it wants to fly on its own. Not a good thing when tethered to rockets, or until journey's end. Turning upside down transforms that wing lift into negative force, saving strain on connections.
You're likely to hear a myriad of other terms in the radio chatter. "Go at throttle up," meaning all is well and the engines can be returned to full thrust after passing through the sound barrier.
"CDR" is the flight commander, Chris Ferguson. "PTL" is the pilot, Doug Hurley. "MS1" and "MS2" are the mission spoecialists, Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim.
At two minutes-five second comes "BECO," booster engine cutoff. Those twin rockets that have been burning 11,000 pounds of fuel per second are discarded by explosive bolts. However, since their burning fuel will carry them four miles higher, mini-rockets steer the spent engines away from the shuttle.
In the nose of these rockets is a trio of parachute packages that open, first, to right and steady the falling cylinders, then slow them more and finally take them to a splash landing in the Atlantic, where two recovery ships are already waiting 120 miles off Jacksonville.
If you've ever wondered what it's like to fall about 14 miles, check out this video from NASA booster cameras and then read more below:
You might also hear "Negative return," meaning Atlantis is too high and too far away to return to the Cape if something went wrong. NASA has emergency landing fields around the globe.
"MECO," main engine cutoff, meaning they've made it into orbit. Shortly after the boosters fall away, the shuttle is traveling 4,000 miles an hour. Less than two minutes later it's going Mach 8, about 5,700 miles an hour. Thirty-five seconds later it's increased to 6,600 miles an hour.
Before six minutes of flight it's hustling along at Mach 13, 9,000 miles an hour. A minute later 13,000 miles an hour. One more minute and they're doing 17,500 miles an hour, Mach 25. (And, yes, during launch all astronauts wear diapers.)
Here's another sense of space speed. In orbit, they have a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes. In its 293 days in space Atlantis has seen 4,648 of each with temperature swings of several hundred degrees.
Wheelock recalls casually while returning to Earth one time, he looked down and saw Seattle. Nineteen minutes later he was in Florida -- just one mile from where Atlantis now sits for her next -- and last -- adventure.
Photo: Andrew Malcolm / Los Angeles Times (Atlantis countdown clock at T-minus 11 hours and holding, Atlantis on Launch Pad 39A can be seen just to the right of the clock, three miles away, July 7); Andrew Malcolm / Los Angeles Times (Wheelock by Atlantis, July 7).
Ron Paul, the conservative congressman from Texas, beat the entire field of GOP presidential contenders in a poll conducted recently among "882 highly active Republican voters in Texas."
Answering the simple question, "If the Texas Republican primary were held today, which presidential candidate would you be most likely to vote for?" 22% of those polled selected the 75-year-old affectionately known as Dr. No.
Gov. Rick Perry came in second with 17%, followed by deep dish pizza lover Herman Cain (14%), with Newt Gingrich placing fourth at 11%.
Texans don't seem to care much for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who got 8% and 7% respectively in the poll conducted from May 29 to June 3 by an outfit called Azimuth Research Group.
Azimuth seems to have only done a few polls, judging from its website. If you write to the email address provided on the site, it quickly bounces back with "Unknown address error 550-'unrouteable address.'" Also, the only photo on the site is one of several people on the phone that looks remarkably similar to one taken by a Flickr user named Barack Obama who captioned the photo as "Phone Bank to Repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
Other than that, everything seems perfect. Looking forward to seeing Dr. Paul square off against President Obama.
Photo: Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) smiles as he is greeted at the Village Store during a campaign stop in Freedom, N.H., Friday, July 1, 2011. Credit: Jim Cole / Associated Press
"May God Bless Atlantis and Her Crew" say the signs all along the Eastern coast of Florida near the Kennedy Space Center. There, on Pad 39A Thursday Atlantis was unveiled for its 33rd and last flight, despite leaden skies and vicious circling thunderstorms.
If all goes well, after 12 days 250 miles up at the International Space Station, where the humidity is considerably less than Florida in July, Atlantis will end up as the prime attraction at the historic space facility's Visitors Center.
We are participating in the NASA Tweetup this week for the final U.S. space shuttle launch with unique access to the space center and NASA experts. Scroll down for Thursday's collection of Tweets, vis Storify.com, including a photo of a longtime Ticket reader we finally met in person, Jenn Perry, a veteran launch-watcher.
The photo above was taken about 1,000 feet from the shuttle and booster rockets after the service facility was retracted Thursday afternoon.
The four astronauts are sleeping right now. The launch is scheduled for 11:26 a.m. Friday Eastern time. Bad weather threatens that time, but launch controllers will not decide until the wee hours of Friday morning if the weather will permit loading of hundreds of thousands of gallons of volatile fuel.
If they go proceed with fueling, they will try to find a moderate weather window to launch in time to catch up to the circling ISS. They can scrub Friday's flight, but if they've fueled the rockets, another try can't come before Sunday. If they decide to write off a Friday flight attempt without fueling, Saturday and Sunday are fallback launch dates, when weather is predicted to be slightly better.
There's a tight launch window for NASA's Atlantis because the Air Force has another timed launch scheduled for next week and needs the range clear.
We'll be here, of course, tweeting up our own storm @latimestot with occasional items, numerous Tweets and exclusive photos here too. Spread the word.
Sarah Palin doesn't like the media much. They have their "gotcha" questions about what newspapers she reads; they run around fact-checking her take on American history -- no wonder she calls them "the lamestream media".
Kyle Smith, a film critic for the New York Post, saw an advance screening of a new film about her before it was fully complete. It's typical for film writers to see a movie several times, and sometimes the earliest screening may have some unfinished scenes, especially if music needs to be mixed in or complicated special effects are being finalized at the 11th hour.
Smith saw an early cut of the Palin documentary "The Undefeated" and filed a negative critique saying the film, which will open in selected cities later this month, "is just a fan film from an outsider hitching a ride on [Palin's] fame, hoping that attention from political reporters in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina will provide a springboard for a national release [of the movie]."
Bill O'Reilly, the permanently uptight Fox News host of "The O'Reilly Factor," did a fascinating thing Wednesday night. He began his "Talking Points" segment by saying "it would not be fair to disparage the jury in the Casey Anthony acquittal without first hearing from them," then he went on a spree of disparagement, taking shots at the jury, the defendant, O.J. Simpson's jury and America as a whole.
He named his rant "Dumb, beyond a reasonable doubt."
Later, O'Reilly called Anthony's defense attorney immature in a segment called "Pinheads and Patriots."
But back to O'Reilly condemning the U.S.A., its justice system and the Americans who did their civic duty by serving on the jury. He has nothing but judgmental questions about all of them but strangely no condemnation of the prosecutors who failed to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the lying and erratic Anthony was the killer.
"Have we become a nation that does not make judgments any more about behavior? Is there always an excuse for everything?" O'Reilly asked. "Reasonable doubt was not raised by Ms. Anthony's lawyers. They ran around concocting a lot of bull they couldn't prove," he editorialized, concluding that "the Casey Anthony verdict is a dark, dark day in American history, no question."
Jennifer Ford, Juror No. 4 in the trial, told "Nightline" host Terry Moran on Wednesday that the jury was "sick to our stomach" while making the tough judgment. Ford, a nurse, explained that because they felt the prosecutors did not establish motive or prove that Anthony was the one who killed 2-year-old Caylee, they were forced to return the not-guilty verdicts.
"If there was a dead child in that trunk, does that prove how she died? No idea, still no idea." Ford told Moran. "If you're going to charge someone with murder, don't you have to know how they killed someone or why they might have killed someone, or have something where, when, why, how? Those are important questions. They were not answered."
While O'Reilly was judging the jury on Fox News and speculating that Caylee is in heaven and her mother "will most likely go to hell," Ford addressed why she and her counterparts are lying low.
"Everyone wonders why we didn't speak to the media right away," Ford said. "It was because we were sick to our stomach to get that verdict. We were crying, and not just the women. It was emotional and we weren't ready. We wanted to do it with integrity and not contribute to the sensationalism of the trial."
