While we await the launch of the Return to Flight mission of space shuttle Discovery, here is a moving essay on the people who fly these ships. On the final flight of the shuttle Columbia:

Perhaps ten minutes before eight am on Saturday morning, Rick Husband and Willie McCool started to pay attention to the data coming from the left wing sensors. It was 30 degrees warmer than normal in the left wheel well. Not much, considering the 2-3000 degrees on the leading edge of their wings and nose, but something to pay attention to. Anomalies are never good. There are no pleasant surprises in the flying business.

By 7:55 things were looking worse – a lot worse. Unbenownst to the crew, telemetry beamed to the ground showed that readings from the heat sensors in the left wing started to rise, and then dropped to zero. They were failing, in a pattern expanding away from the left wheel well. Tire pressures were way high on the left side, and then those sensors failed too.

Sensors fail all the time. But this was different. This was a pattern, and it was spreading. And something was starting to pull the ship to the left.

I don’t know the words he used, but I can hear the tone perfectly in my head, because it’s exactly the same tone I’ve heard dozens of times on cockpit voice recorders. It’s concern. Alarm, even. But it’s cool. Disciplined.

All right, we’ve got a problem here...

It’s a long piece, well worth reading.

At TPMCafe, a retired CIA officer talks about the damage done in exposing Valerie Plame:

Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover — in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport — i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.

A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.

The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O’Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.

The Republicans now want to hide behind the legalism that “no laws were broken”. I don’t know if a man made law was broken but an ethical and moral code was breached. For the first time a group of partisan political operatives publically identified a CIA NOC. They have set a precendent that the next group of political hacks may feel free to violate.

The Bush Administration knows all about the Higher Law. That’s the law they make up as they go along, to suit their convenience.

Yesterday, Al Franken quoted The Note from ABC News:

Whatever else one thinks, these facts are not in dispute:

1. Rove’s attorney has acknowledged that Rove talked about Valerie Plame with Matt Cooper, without mentioning her name, days before the Novak column appeared.
2. Rove (and Rove via McClellan) has repeatedly suggested that he had nothing to do with this story at all.
3. The White House has suggested that any person found to have anything to do with the improper leaking of Wilson’s name to the press would be fired.

From this, Franken arrived at the following conclusion:

So we now know that, according to their own rules, they gotta fire him. They gotta fire him. They got to fire him.

Franken is a very smart guy. I’m surprised that he has somehow missed the fact that these Republicans change the rules at will.