Newsbreaks for Tuesday

Audio version is here.

NASA announced today that its new space vehicle, the Orion, will be outfitted with a safety system. “If anything goes wrong with the flight,” a spokesman said, “the crew could activate a mission abort rocket that would propel them to safety.” That’s great; now if they could just invent one for the Blue states…

Bank of America and insurer Aetna have teamed up to offer a credit card that gives you extra points for health care expenses. Said one new cardholder, “I’ve adopted ten of these in the past month. I should be a millionaire by Christmas.”

And finally, on Memorial Day, ten more American soldiers died in Iraq. You’ve got to admire what Bush has set up—it’s quite elegant. Soldiers die, we remember them, get sad and angry, so we keep fighting, so more soldiers die…Once you start it up, it’s a perpetual re-election machine—all you have to do is find a war. You can even make one up.

Anybody see a mission abort-rocket around here?