Word: plan
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...While Obama’s plan for improving education is admirable, his private actions should match his public promises. All the policy initiatives in the world will not fully solve America’s education problem if the rich and powerful are able to flee the public school system into $25,000-a-year private schools. Politicians need to see problems firsthand as parents and PTA members, not by reading statistics. And surely concessions could be made to make a public-school arrangement suitable and safe for both the Obama children and their parents...
...Within days, Washington snapped into action. Secretary Paulson strode into the Capitol building with a now-infamous $700 billion rescue package, and even wounded egos and weekend flights could not dampen the urgent sense that something must be done, overtime pay be damned. At first, his plan did not pass—a common fate of laws that are divisive, unwanted, and absolutely necessary. This time, however, the crisis intervened. The bill was put to another vote and signed into law with bipartisan and hysterical relief—because there was nothing else to be done...
...that, suspecting that the whole idea was just a bag of election year goodies for space-happy states like Florida and Texas, as well as for voters nostalgic for the glory days of Apollo. But Bush, NASA and Congress did mean business, and eventually came up with a plan under which the space station would be completed and the shuttle would be retired by 2010. That would free up about $4 billion per year, which would be used to pay for a new generation of expendable boosters as well as a 21st century version of the Apollo orbiter and lunar...
NASA has moved with uncharacteristic nimbleness in the last five years and is already cutting metal on the new machines in the hope of having crews in Earth orbit by 2015 and on the moon by 2020. Schedules have slipped some - the original plan was to launch the orbital missions in 2014 - and costs have swollen, though so far not dramatically. (See the Top 50 space moments since Sputnik...
NASA is right to be uneasy about just what Obama has planned for the agency since his position on space travel shifted - a lot - during the campaign. A year before the election he touted an $18 billion education program and explicitly targeted the new moon program as one he'd cut to pay for it. In January of 2008, he lined up much closer to the Bush moon plan - perhaps because Republicans were already on board and earning swing-state support as a result. Three months before the election, Obama fully endorsed the 2020 target for putting people...