Red Equal Signs: A Study in Sorting?

(Now that the bar exam is over and I have had time to sort out a number of personal and professional items, this blog is being revived. Sorry for the suspense.)

Odds are, you have a Facebook account. No, really. Over 50% of Americans have Facebook accounts. So, odds are, you have a Facebook account. (25 other countries are also over the 50% threshold, including the United Kingdom and Canada.) So, odds are, you've seen a red equal sign in the last few days.

In the extremely unlikely event you don't know what I'm talking about, here's what happened. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court, highest court in the country, heard challenges to the laws known as Proposition 8 (the California law prohibiting the performance of same-sex marriages in that state) and the Defense of Marriage Act (the U.S. federal law restricting federal marriage benefits from same-sex marriages*). Among the many memes and other trends on the Internet relating to the cases, Facebook was awash in red. The Human Rights Campaign urged followers to change their profile pictures in support of marriage equality, and it caught on. I haven't seen any estimates of how many people changed their pictures, but it was a lot. It also spawned a number of spoofs, from Ernie & Bert to corgis to bacon.

This is not a post about marriage equality. Sorry to disappoint. But I am going to talk about Facebook and social sorting, so click on!

Space Leadership Act: Innovative Government or Constitutional Minefield?

This week, five members of the House of Representatives introduced a bill that is being called the "Space Leadership Act". The proposal has gotten a lot of press this week, but some basic highlights of the bill include:

• a ten-year tenure for NASA Administrators
• an eleven-member Board of Directors whose duties would involve nominating Administrator candidates and proposing the NASA budget
• a quadrennial review of all NASA programs
• "for cause" removal of Board members and Administrators.

The five Republican authors of the bill claim that the measure will reduce politicization of NASA and provide for long-term stability and predictability in NASA programs. (It is worth noting that at least one Democrat is apparently prepared to cosponsor the bill.)  It should come as no surprise that all of the five representatives proposing the bill come from Texas (John Culberson, 7th District; Pete Olson, 22nd District; Lamar Smith, 21st District), Florida (Bill Posey, 15th District), and Virginia (Frank Wolf, 10th District).

Current NASA Administrator Charles Bolden spoke this week, and, although he didn't address the bill directly, it was obvious from his remarks that he was defensive of the current structure:

“Such talk undermines our nation’s goals at a very critical time. . . The truth is we have an ambitious series of deep space destinations we plan to explore and we are hard at work exploring the hardware and the technologies to get us there.”

It is easy to argue that NASA reform is necessary: over-budget and underfunded programs are frequently in the news, and the Administration's recent challenges have given it a lackluster reputation at best. However, this bill raises a lot of potential problems.