I guess it's human nature, as every group breaks into factions, yet at a time when we are trying to be taken seriously, it can confuse people - especially when it moves from being about where you want to go and what you want to do to why the others are idiots.

The opening of space to human development and settlement is the most important activity of the human species. From hope to health, from wonder to wealth, the environment, and the very act of living, space is the future.

The opening of the Frontier is not an engineering problem. It is not a money problem. It is a challenge to our ability to decide to make it happen and to think and act the right way to get the results we want, we need, we demand.

I want the government to focus on the stuff we cannot yet do, like beginning to learn how we can live in space long enough to go to Mars or how to build and operate human communities on the Moon and Mars.

Life comes forth for no other reason than to be and make more life. It will fight and crawl and do anything in its power to live, and once alive, it will stand against all to remain alive. Its existence is its own argument.

I want to capture and express that passion I see in life all around me to go wild, to push into anywhere we can, and make of those places new domains for life.

Like most Americans, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I am pro-future, pro-hope, and pro-abundance. I am pro-frontier and will talk to and work with anyone else who shares my belief that it is our goal and destiny to expand life and civilization into space.

It is in the failures of our striving that we find ourselves, and it is then, in the rising above them and trying again, that we carry ourselves to the next level. If the runner stumbles, they get up and run again.

There is in us a spark of something good, something right and beautiful.

The Apollo generation wasn't a historical fluke. It was the predictable result of what happens when a free nation actually decides on something and goes for it. We can do it again, do it better, and do it for keeps this time. But we must decide: Will America, as a nation, support the settlement of space?

We have a space agency desperately in need of purpose, whose employees and capabilities have been wasted for decades on make-work projects and dead-end PowerPoint pioneering placebos designed to do nothing more than keep the billing high.

We have an industrial base - one that, if made to take orders rather than being allowed in the vacuum of leadership to create them, if enabled by the elimination of cost-plus contracting to produce and achieve rather than waste and receive, could make something worth the cost rather than making work that costs us our dreams.

We need Big Ideas, as we are in a time of small people, and as Kennedy showed with Apollo, doing something grand in space is the biggest. At a time of huge national doubt and fear of losing our leadership as a nation to others, it focused us, gave us something positive and inspired a generation.

I would just ask you for one moment to imagine what today would be like if we had built on that landing by creating a permanent and growing community there and moved on to Mars.

Crazy may not be the one who says the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth is round, and someday people might fly. It may be those who laugh at such words whose minds are lost.

As we have seen in our own history, the injection of new ideas from other worlds transformed life for all, and with the establishment of new frontier communities far from the reach of the old world, new social systems also formed, more in tune with the fact that it was the individual who had to make the decisions and do the work of pioneering.

Our society's youth will grow up knowing that tomorrow can be better, that there are alternatives for the future, that there are living, breathing humans of all colors and creeds out there in the sky building new worlds.

Space is a canvas, as large and blank as any ever created, for it is indeed creation itself, and it calls to us to paint upon it with our own dreams and imaginations anything we wish, anything we want, and anything we can imagine.

By opening space, for the first time in our history, rather than inexorably extracting the blood of life from this oh-so-precious sphere in our quest for wealth, we will turn outwards and upwards, creating new wealth from places already dead, advancing into places where there is no life, and bringing its seeds with us.

This is what the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) represents. Experimental, explorational science. Learning about Mars as a new world. Discovering new things that will tell us about the history of our solar system, help reveal the secrets of life, and continue blazing the trail that may someday be traveled by the rest of us.

Vets are different than other people. Frontline or support, they carry themselves differently than the rest of us. It is as if they entered the service as one person and came out another, and that is the person who they are the rest of their lives.

After he retired, Dad worked at my uncle's boat company, a camp for kids, and eventually became County Commissioner for a term. He is known around town, works at the Food Pantry my mother helped start, and is a very serious member of Kiwanis.

It was the summer of 1968 or so, and Dad and my little brother were out camping. While up in the mountains, my brother was bitten by a rattlesnake. As they raced back to the base, my dad sucked out the venom and used his hands as a tourniquet and probably save his life, for it was a serious bite, and he was just a little kid.

There's a reason most Republicans and a vast majority of voters loathe Donald Trump: his vulgarity, his blistering ignorance, his constant dishonesty, his venality, and his utter lack of the knowledge, judgment, or temperament to be president of the United States.

When authority is total, so too is the madness of the man who declares it, and the potential for abuse of power.

As much as progressives hate the Electoral College - and we can argue its flaws all day long - in 2020, the Electoral College is the only game in town. There's not going to be some miracle where it's not the rule book. The winner of the Electoral College is president. Doesn't matter how many popular votes you get.

Trump has learned over his long career as a lying liar who lies that none of his stories have to be true.

For Donald Trump, any opposition, either personal, ideological, or political is treason. Anyone who stands in his path betrays the Great Leader. Anyone who fails to take the knee is a traitor.

Part of the sales pitch for the Trump campaign is their unique, esoteric secret sauce based on a rabid cult following motivated by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media manipulation.

Every re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent. Every. Single. One.

Donald Trump, like many cult leaders, understands the power his words will have over the minds and actions of his followers... but few cult leaders have a pet media infrastructure.

Richard Nixon is typically considered the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.

Trump will never, ever do the right or decent thing, and his consultants certainly won't. He will make outrageous, unsupported claims.

Like all alchemists, Trump seeks to convert dross into gold, to toss a broth of his incompetence, denial, delay, deception, and failure into some supernatural alembic and extract political advantage.

Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and others who raced to the microphones at the slightest hint of Obama overstepping the lines were damn quiet as Trump wildly colored outside the lines of any rational version of executive power.

Extinction isn't pretty, especially when you know it's coming and do nothing about it.

America once used the words 'treason' and 'traitors' only in cases of actual betrayal of our nation's most vital secrets or interests.

Donald Trump is an idiot and a moron and just a kook of the first order, but he is surrounded by a bunch of guys like me, who are ride-or-die for him. They don't love him ideologically, but they're stuck. And they're very smart. And they're very determined and they will do anything to win.

Only a fool would believe Trump would draw a sharp, bright line between his personal and family financial interests and the interests of the nation.

I've written about this before, but the sad truth is this: There are only a handful of Trump true believers in the Senate. The rest are chugging a toxic slurry of cowardice, ambition, and opportunism that has led members of the upper house of a co-equal branch of government to relinquish their power and prerogatives.

Trump-era name-calling is just as tiresome and juvenile as it is nonsensical.

Trump is a masterful con man, he's always trying to squeeze a little more juice out of his marks.

Be it China, the World Health Organization, the Bavarian Illuminati, or lizard shapeshifters, it's never Trump's responsibility. It's never Trump's fault.

American populism is no stranger to our political life. From the earliest anti-Federalists to William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and George Wallace, and many in between, we've sampled the populist temptation, often in times of national distress and dislocation.

Crony capitalism on the left and crony capitalism on the right are still crony capitalism.

The purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter. The mission of deterrence to make all parties in possession of nuclear weapons never, ever use them.

It's become a cliche to stare in mute horror at Donald Trump's endless stream of Twitter vomit, wondering what chthonic god finds pleasure in watching us writhe as Trump brings out the very worst in his followers and new levels of willful ignorance from Republicans determined to see no evil, no matter how in their face that evil is.

Our leaders ranged from bad to extraordinary. But through it all, the GOP was the one party even vaguely amenable to limited-government conservatism, to at least some adherence to the Constitution over the social preferences of the moment, and to the constraints on government power that our Founding Fathers so cherished.

Trump, like any good Stalinist, knows that one death is a tragedy but 100,000 is a statistic.

For Trump, there's always a dark conspiracy arrayed against him. Someone is always doing him an injustice by not treating him with the required deference.