Free Republic

As news stories generally go, the retirement of a longtime member of Congress typically causes barely a ripple in the pool of politics. Unless the personage was a major power player or notorious for some other reason, our system of government treats the coming and going of most elected officials with only a modicum of interest. So it is likely to be with Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who, having served seven terms in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate, announced he is retiring at the end of next year. The senator’s record in the overall...

Two big ideas often come up in discussions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. One is the Drake Equation, which estimates the number of civilizations in our Galaxy whose signals we might be able to detect--potentially thousands, according to plausible estimates. The other is the so-called Fermi paradox, which claims that we should see intelligent aliens here if they exist anywhere, because they would inevitably colonize the Galaxy by star travel--and since we don't see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their signals is pointless. The Drake Equation is perfectly genuine: it was created by astronomer...

Living with Alzheimer's, ex-Sen. Proxmire is cut off from his storied past BY KATHERINE M. SKIBA Milwaukee Journal Sentinel WASHINGTON - KRT NEWSFEATURES (KRT) - He was a poster child for health and fitness, a physician's son from a tony enclave near Chicago. His degrees bore the imprint of Harvard and Yale. For more than 31 years he toiled in the U.S. Senate, becoming the nation's best-known scold against government waste. His public relations genius was such that his name became a household word. Bill Proxmire. His legendary hand-shaking among throngs at the Wisconsin State Fair, Green Bay Packers games...