Air Traffic Controller sleeps on duty at Reagan National Airport
Isn’t it ironic, considering that President Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers, that an air traffic controller falls asleep on the job at Reagan National Airport?

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Similar to the boy in the bubble among us? Or simply a nuisance to everyone else?
Where do we draw the lines to our accommodation of those with disabilities? At what point do we say, enough, you (the disabled person) need to limit your actions because of your predicament? Regardless, it’s another reason to homeschool.

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eBooks, weeding, and the demise of the public library?
No, the title is not an Elmer Fudd pun on the act of reading. An interesting op-ed argument regarding how the advent of ebook technology, along with the limits of ownership rights, may impact how libraries currently function.

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Imagine a truck, full of printer ink, spilling its load
Imagine no more (click the image for stunning detail)…

Image © Boston.com

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Video: Pelosi violates the “separation of church and state”
But it’s okay, because it suits her needs.

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Geek News of the Week:  Hi-res photo of Mars Rover Opportunity from orbit
7 years into a 3 month mission, Opportunity was photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Click the image for a hi-res version.

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Well, it IS “Frie”-day
For all those IN-N-OUT aficionados out there (and for those who long for the experience).

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insists that she is going to get a vote on healthcare reform over the weekend but one has to wonder what she thinks she is going to accomplish. According to the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, there are some Democrats who are questioning the wisdom in pushing ahead especially in light of Tuesday’s election results:

It’s one thing to be serene under fire, it’s another to be delusional.

More than a few Democrats in Congress are perplexed and worried that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting on ramming through a 1,900-page health care bill on Saturday, just days after her party took heavy losses in Tuesday’s elections. “It reminds me of Major Nicholson, the obsessed British major in the film ‘Bridge on the River Kwai,'” one Democrat told me. “She is fixated on finishing her health care bridge even as she’s lost sight of where it’s going and what damage it could cause to her own troops.”

Indeed, the Speaker’s take on Tuesday’s off-year elections struck some of her own members as delusive “happy talk.” “From our perspective, we won last night,” a cheerful Ms. Pelosi told reporters, citing her party’s pick-up of a single House seat in a New York special election and retention of another strongly Democratic seat in California.

That’s not how many of her own troops see it. Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama told Politico.com that members are “very, very sensitive” to the fact that the agenda being pushed by party leaders has “the potential to cost some of our front-line members their seats”

On health care, added New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell: “People who had weak knees before are going to have weaker knees now.”

Meanwhile, Republicans have outlined their own common sense and no-cost reform proposals that actually reform the health insurance system rather than turning the whole thing into another gigantic government bureaucracy.

Speaker Pelosi might just get her wish and see her bill pass the House. Chances are that even if she succeeds to keep enough Democrats together to pass it the bill will undergo vast changes in the Senate. More importantly, passage of a massively complex healthcare bill may fufill Democrats’ dreams of government healthcare but it will likely cause so many of their members to lose seats that they could be in the minority for many years to come. The key question will be how many Democrats are willing to risk political suicide for the sake of passing this bill. My guess is not many.