STS not achieving full reusability was not a failure of the design or the people who built and operated the system; none of the fully-reusable designs were selected back in the early seventies when the Nixon administration made the choice. That administration opted for a design that traded away full reusability for a faster and cheaper DEVELOPMENT process (with the penalty coming later with higher operating costs that would be borne by later administrations (politicians in BOTH parties are really good at choosing THAT short-sighted path, sadly)).

Rapid turn-around was lost partly due to the design selected, but also because this was the very first reusable spacecraft and it involved a huge pile of new technology that was not yet mature enough for anybody to know how it would work out. We SHOULD have operated perhaps two shuttles for a few years and then begun the design and construction of a second generation of shuttles using all the lessons learned. Government programs, however, are run by politicians who tend to focus on politics and have little understanding of cutting-edge tech... so we flew the initial STS design for three decades. Just imagine if we had been that bone-headed with aviation: World War II in the skies over Europe would have been fought with Wright Flyers.

Additionally, people forget that in the 1970s NASA did not get a big enough budget from congress to develop and build the STS program; NASA had to go and make deals with the Air Force to get some pentagon money. Part of the deal was that the STS would become the primary launcher for a class of large spy sats and be prepared for some rather hush-hush missions. The USAF required a huge payload bay, and they planned to launch orbiters from Vandenburg, go once-around the planet, and then land the orbiter back on a strip at Vandenburg. This meant the orbiter needed about a thousand miles of cross-range glide on reentry (Earth would be rotating east under the orbiter during that once-around) and with less than a thousand miles of cross-range capability, the orbiter wound end up in the Pacific Ocean. These USAF requirements drove the size of the orbiter, and required its delta wing and even affected things like the design of the thermal protection.

The Wright Flyer was a miserable poor excuse for an airplane with terrible performance and almost no capability, but it was nearly perfect for the time and place where it initially flew. It got mankind into the air using the tech available at the time, proved flight in heavier-than-air vehicles was possible, and paved the way for all planes that followed.

Similarly, the STS was a dangerous and rather marginal system that never lived up to the hopes of its designers, but it was glorious for the time and place where it initially flew. It proved re-usable spacecraft and routine space operations, including with non-test-pilot non-nearly-perfect-human-specimens civilian PASSENGERS was possible and it paved the way for everything that will follow. We just SHOULD have only operated them within the design limits (would have saved lives) and SHOULD have not operated them for three decades.

I know, you probably put it there for a laugh, but "well, still blows up, but who is counting??" is not actually appropriate. Both the booster and the starship are carrying cryogenic fuel and oxidizers internally, while being red-hot metal structures when they each hovered over the ocean to simulate being caught by the tower - and at that point, there were no explosions. The tests for each stage then concluded and they were dropped into the cold seas (no tower to catch them) no-doubt causing a bunch of internal structural failures and the resultant mixing of liquid methane and LOX in the presence of glowing hot steel. The explosions AFTER THE END OF THE TEST FLIGHT were completely expected. Your complaint about the explosions, after the test was completed, was about as appropriate as complaining that toilet paper is dirty and gets destroyed after you've used it.

It always helps to know what you're looking at before deciding if it was good or bad.

As to the performance question you raised, the folks at SpaceX know what the design target is, and what the current performance is, but the rest of us are not in a position to evaluate it - the flight carried a minimal payload (just enough dummy starlink satellites to test (successfully) the deployment scheme and mechanism) so SpaceX were free to use/discard whatever quantities of methane and LOX and run the engines at whatever mixture ratios and throttle settings they wanted, consistent with the desired trajectory. In the Apollo program, we flew two full unmanned Saturn V stacks (Apollo 4 and Apollo 6) just to LEO, and yet nobody pretended that the failure to use the full potential of the Saturn V on those flights indicated some problem with the design or some shortfall that would hobble the then-future lunar landings.

When leaning-in to the snark, please maintain at least a smidgen of humanity (and humility). Remember: there are a huge number of people pouring buckets of "blood, sweat, and tears" into this program which is trying to do things humanity has never done before. They know what they're doing, to the extent it's possible for ANYBODY to know, and they're far better positioned to know how it's going than any armchair critic with no skin in the game.

Well done, to ALL the folks at SpaceX from the engineers and techs, to the electricians, pipe fitters, welders, concrete folks, janitors, etc - that's one hell of a company and workforce and it's managing to do things all the traditional big defense contractors said could not be done for ten times the price.

When you typed "Solar keeps on winning. The data is undeniable" you were both wrong AND you probably did not realize you were refuting your own argument.

"As you stated: "This momentum didn’t happen by chance. It's the direct result of a decade of forward-looking policy: Obama’s 2009 recovery investments, state-level renewable standards, and critically, the long-term tax credits extended by Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)." - in other words: this is the result of YEARS of government policies screwing with the marketplace, stealing money from some people and giving it to others to push these "renewables" and there's been no actual improvement in the economics of wind and solar; they cannot compete without the heavy hand of government. As you went on to admit: "These policies created market certainty, driving down costs and making solar plus storage cheaper than natural gas in much of the country." - yup, nothing about these corrupt schemes is honest, and thus market forces will not be able to lower the prices for consumers while avoiding shortages. It's just typical Marxist central planning, subsidized by stealing from a marketplace.

Oh, and you are wrong here too: "The only thing standing in the way is a reactionary political agenda willing to sacrifice that progress for short-term political points and campaign cash.", and on multiple levels. The thing actually standing in the way is ECONOMIC REALITY; these things cannot stand on their own (which is why Obama and Biden had to subsidize them so heavily AND wage war on coal and oil and nuclear) , so they'll fall down when the subsidies end, or when the public has had its fill of inflated energy prices and shortages, or when industries can no longer compete while running on these expensive energy sources and they shutdown or leave for greener pastures. Oh, and does "Solyndra" ring any bells? Yeah, a number of these eco-friendly companies have been founded by political supporters of Obama and/or Biden, then had their values artificially boosted by infusions of subsidy cash (artificially and temporarily making them seem like good investments) whereupon those investors sell their stocks to gullible chumps (making a killing) and then when the subsidies expire the late investors end up holding the worthless bankrupt bag - but the Obama and Biden supporters are golden.

If government puts its finger on the scale and presses really hard, then yes, boutique energy sources like wind and solar are the cheapest...but ONLY because government has artificially inflated the prices of the other, actually cheaper, sources.

In the 1960s, electricity companies were constantly encouraging their customers to consume MORE electricity. New nuclear plants were going online and the industry was saying that electricity was becoming "too cheap to meter" - they were starting to talk about just charging customers a flat rate. Then the anti-nuke people got all wound-up and they started fighting every nuclear plant in the courts with lawsuit after lawsuit, while backing anti-nuke politicians and driving an environment with more and more regulation. It eventually got to the point where the regulatory burdens and delays, combined with all the costs of unending lawsuits made nuclear so expensive that we stopped building these plants. The high cost of nuclear had NOTHING to do with the cost of nuclear and everything to do with the artificially-imposed legal and regulatory burdens.

Similarly, coal, which has always been the absolutely cheapest energy in the US, has had its price artificially boosted by lawsuits and regulations. Coal is still cheap, and coal-burning power plants are still cheap to build and operate (why do people think the Chinese are building so many?) but the politics have shifted and now government is artificially pushing the price up to an absurd level to artificially make wind and solar LOOK cheaper. Note that nearly every source of the claim that coal is more expensive is made by some entity associated with "decarbonization" or a government agency implementing ant-coal policy and they never want to talk about the actual cost per kilowatt hours but rather they talk about the "true cost of coal" (in which they artificially inflate the cost) and when they do comparisons now they talk about the costs to build and maintain the coal plants under the new regulatory systems that inflate the prices.

I know there will be left-leaners here and environmentalists who will HATE this argument and mod this post TROLL, but they need to answer this basic contradiction: IF wind and solar are truly cheaper without artificially inflating the costs of coal and nuclear, then why have the rates consumers pay per kilowatt hour skyrocketed as we have moved from coal and nuclear to wind and solar? A second issue they need to address is that power companies now urge their customers to use LESS of their product (a phenomenon not seen an ANY free market economic situation where a for-profit entity makes a profit on each unit of its product). When a vendor urges his customers to use less, there is rationing occurring, AND in any free market, the supplier would bring more units of product to the market as soon as possible to boost profits. The effective rationing of electricity in CA is all the proof anybody needs that wind and solar are actually NOT cost-effective - the power generation people are not willing to spend to bring them online fast enough to get past rationing (and the pace of deployment is thus tied to government subsidies).

To have TRULY honest numbers, wind and solar must be subjected to the same sorts of regulatory burdens as coal and nuclear, and have added to them the costs of any lawsuits that some activists opposed to them could possibly file. They need full environmental impact studies and permitting that goes on for years and looks into every possible effect (including studies into the effects of harvesting that much energy from the kinetic activity of the atmosphere, the birdstrikes of endangered species and confusion of whales etc of windfarms etc). They also need the same sort of in-depth examination of the extended environmental costs for things like the strip mines used to get the materials for solar and wind, and the disposal costs for wind and solar, and environmental studies into the potential toxic releases when wind and solar are retired, etc. Let's see ho much a solar array costs when there are 20 years of litigation in a dozen courts attached, and when a president and his party pledge to ban all solar panels and put in place regulatory schemes to advance that cause...

I'm actually NOT anti-solar (I run my home completely on solar) but what I am opposed to is fake distorted economics. I want the efficiency of the marketplace, NOT the inefficiency of the peoples' committee. I want all energy sources to compete on actual raw costs, or on equally-government-inflated costs, NOT on a biased-by-corrupt-politicians and their activist pals phony numbers. California is the result of the latter - we've shut down all but one of our nuke plants and gone heavily into wind and solar and batteries and we now have some of the highest energy prices in the nation, which are doing severe harm to people not as well setup as I am. Incidentally, I made MY solar decision NOT because it was best in raw numbers (it was NOT) but because it was best [1] after government subsidies and [2] when considering that California was waging a war against all traditional energy sources and thus electricity here was going to get more and more expensive.

1. Nobody's "pining for only white babies", well except perhaps for the bigots at Planned Parenthood, which was founded by infamous eugenics freak and fave KKK guest speaker Margaret Sanger (who wanted to reduce the number of brown people by aborting them). The "pro life" folks in the US have been for halting abortions, which would necessarily INCREASE the proportion of black and brown children in the country. Hint: even noticed which communities have historically been home to most abortion facilities? Your implication that people in Lincoln's party are the racists is patently false - it was the anti-Lincoln party that did the KKK and segregation, and supported (and still rabidly supports) all those abortion clinics.

2. There's a HUGE difference between [a] kids born in America to American citizen parents, most of whom would be raised with English as their only (or primary) language, and US culture as their culture, and [b] people born outside the US, who do not speak English well or at all, do not understand or fit into US culture, and who (as their first act on American soil) break our federal immigration laws then follow-up by staying and breaking numerous other laws (like identity theft and fraud, which they ALL do if they work in the US while here illegally). The illegal immigrant is far less likely to be as productive at higher-skill (and higher-pay) jobs in the US, and will make a far less ideal consumer for all those American companies whose business models depend on ever-increasing customer bases. This has NOTHING to do with skin color and everything to do with education and culture.

The old image of the illegal alien was that of a poor but industrious Mexican man who slipped into the country and worked in the fields picking crops and sending the money home to his family... but that ain't the current reality. Now, most of the illegals who came in under the Biden administration went straight to big urban centers and were immediately signed-up for various food, housing, and medical benefits. It's telling that when told these people are being deported, people on the left start shrieking "who's going to pick the crops? Who's going to clean our houses? Where we get our nannies?"... it's enough to make a person thing we've gone back to the 1850s and we're near a plantation....

The party of the racist slave owners is STILL the racist party, and always will be; they simply cannot shake the tendency to see everybody as a member of a group -- and they see groups defined by skin color or sex. They once decided to make some people into slaves because of their skin color, then they sought to segregate people because of skin color, then they realized they could get political power from such people by hiring/firing/promoting based on skin color. It's ALWAYS skin color with that political party. When a Republican president took away their colored slaves, they killed him. The current Republican president is depriving them of their poor illegally imported (and often non-white workers - because that's who THEY chose to let in illegally, not because HE is only deporting certain skin colors), and they tried to kill him too. Twice.

something somewhat related. When people asked him about the future, he used to predict that biotech would likely follow the path computing had taken... that it started as an extremely expensive activity of governments and other big institutions, but eventually the tools would shrink and become inexpensive and individuals would be able to hack away at the stuff, bringing in a wave of creativity and economic activity that nobody could predict (Here is a bit of him mentioning the idea he expounded upon more elsewhere). As I said, it's not the same thing, but I think he would have probably similarly seen a future with a lot more chemical engineering as well, and that activity also becoming small and affordable and eventually in the hands of hobbyists and entrepreneurs.

We mostly tend to focus on all the badness in the world and presume things will always get worse, but if one takes an optimistic look, and considers what the world did with computing, it's quite possible some really neat stuff could happen in these other fields. At this point, I think I would advise kids today to consider an education that INCLUDED computer stuff, but actually focused on chemical or bio stuff.

Actually, it's NOT always the winners who write the history books.

If you did K-12 in the USA in public schools, there's a good chance you got your history from a book ("A People's History of the United States") written by an anti-American Marxist named Howard Zinn, who wrote his history books to be as anti-American as he could make them while still getting school boards to buy them. He was a big hit with left-leaning unionized school teachers who stuck up for the books any time they [the books] or he [Zinn] were criticized. If you were taught from this book, that would explain a lot.

Are you smart enough to notice the title of that book? It's no accident, as Zinn would brag. It's like "The People's Car" (the Volkswagen), "The People's army", "The People's Committe" or any other Marxist thing which is named as though it belongs to all the people in a Marxist utopian society. It's a deliberate finger-in-the-eye to anti-Marxists, and Zinn intended it that way. Zinn intended his book to aid in the re-programming of America's youth to be against the nation's history and culture and eventually spark a revolution.

Before you assert that I think that book ought to be burned, let me assert that I think it should be in all libraries, right alongside Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto so people will always be able to study the workings of truly evil, deceitful, warped minds.

The Japanese were NOT actually trying to surrender. SOME Japanese made an effort to stop the fighting on terms favorable, and this would have preserved the Imperial Japanese Empire in the form that had been running wild across the Pacific theater mass-murdering the innocent - an absolutely non-starter negotiating point. None of the allies would have accepted any of this, given the total disregard for diplomatic and societal norms they'd displayed. Remember: the attack on Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack on a Sunday Morning while Japanese diplomats in the capitol of the nation attacked were still actively pretending to be in a state of peace and in serious negotiations. While the war was underway, no norms of civilized nations were being observed by the Japanese. Oh, and while the war was underway, the Japanese were developing biological AND nuclear weapons to drop on the civilians of the US (a nation THEY sneak-attacked, NOT one that sneak-attacked them). The Japanese were told, immediately after Pearl Harbor, that they would eventually be required to make an unconditional surrender. There was no mystery to what the allies expected of them, and any scheme by them to do anything else constituted a stunt to delay matters, not an actual effort to stop the bloodshed.

If you SERIOUSLY study what the Imperial Japanese did for about a decade before the surrender, you would easily understand why nobody was going to accept some mealy-mouthed cease fire from them. The Empire had to be dismantled and the Japanese people disabused of the idea that their emperor was a God, or this would re-arise again with better weapons and even more ruthlessness. What happened in that war was awful. Far too many died on all sides, and far too many who would have preferred long peaceful lives were instead put into uniforms and sent out to kill. All of that awfulness, however, paved the way for a modern world in which the US and Japan are friends and the Japanese are a positive force in the world. None of the post-WWII Japanese have any responsibility for what happened in that war, and no post-WWII allied kids have ANY moral right to question the way their elders defeated that evil - they were not there and did not face it.

Oh, and I'll note that you posted YOUR drivel as an anonymous coward - showing an unwillingness to even post under an internet handle/avatar while being critical of people who put their lives on the line in the face of a global war and mass murder so bloody you cannot possibly comprehend it.

The saying "There are no winners in war" is a pure moron play. It's the trite stuff amateur script writers put into TV shows.

It's fine to declare that nobody should start a war, as an OPINION.

It's fine to state that lots of people are "losers" in war, as a fact.

It is, however, objectively false to state that there are no winners in a war - the winners are the winner, and most people are mighty happy about that. When the NAZIs decided to roll tanks and making the Polish people into losers, and then they decided the show the French how to lose a whole other type of Tour De France, Panzer style, making more losers, it became mighty important for some body with a better moral compass to come along and be winners. Had the allies not WON that war and not been WINNERS, Europe would be a mighty dark place (well, in all but skin colors of course). Had the allies not been WINNERS, it's possible that even the US and Canada might have fallen, depending on the progress of Germany's physicists and whether the Americans had been stupid enough to buy into the "everybody loses in war" crap and thus NOT do the Manhattan Project, and NOT do the Liberty ships and the massive production of planes and tanks and jeeps and trucks, etc.

For those who'd like to dismiss the whole violent misbehavior of the Germans of that era, perhaps you ought to read some damned history of the Pacific basin to see just how necessary it was for the allies to WIN there too. Try reading up on the "Rape of Nanking" and those spiffy little misdeeds of the Imperial Japanese Empire which were actual war crimes. If you're too wimpy to face it all, just start with Unit 731 and look into other happy little "incidents" like the happy little meals on Chichijima island

Younger generations are far too ignorant of history to make any profound statements about it; their teachers were too-often the old former sixties hippies, or even worse: air-headed youngsters TAUGHT by them - people who started shoveling wads of cotton candy into the brains of the little urchins in their care before they themselves had any life experiences in the real world. Those warped idiots playing teacher were far too busy stuffing their students' brains full of crap about prophylactics and alternate uses for dental dams, lots of newly-discovered genders, boys and girls being interchangeable, Marxism as a reasonable thing that might finally work if the right people got to try it, everybody deserving a trophy, etc and not nearly enough about how to read, write, and do math at grade level, how to read a map, where Western Civilization came from and how and why it arose, and how to reason like a person with an actual brain. People with functioning brains can actually face the fact that the world is a harsh, unforgiving place with a LOT of really psychopathic people in it, some of whom lead nations and start wars. It does not generally matter why they start them, when the psychopaths start wars, somebody else damned well needs to come along and WIN them, or the human race descends into a nightmare run by those victorious psychopaths and the masses of amoral drones who willingly serve them as they grind the innocent into the ground.

I knew too many people who served in that war to just stand by and watch some idiot who knows nothing of value try to re-write history or pretend that what was done by the allies was not ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY and justified. The wonderful Japan the world knows today, that is, as much as any other nation, a "good actor" on the world stage is only possible because, in LOSING that war (and losing it the WAY they lost it), they learned that their emperor was not, in fact, a God.

IIRC Lovell was the first Astronaut to fly to the moon twice, yet he never got to land there (Apollo 8 had no LM, and Apollo 13 needed the LM as a lifeboat rather than a lander).

Think about it, and how YOU might respond if you worked for years to be among the most-elite and to walk on the moon and actually got so close, yet were unable to complete the task you'd aimed yourself at with intense focus, TWICE, and with nobody, including yourself, to blame. Typical cool, level-headed, self-controlled test pilot...an American with The Right Stuff.

People here are commenting on the life of an American hero who, by all counts, lead an extraordinary and exemplary life, and you turn it into a political rant against [of course] The Bad Orange Man. It's childish, and annoying, and says more about you and your character than it says about either Mr Lovell or Mr Trump.

There's a certain type of derangement that cannot keep a thought to itself. Apparently it's a shared trait of vegans and people deranged by Trump. Normal people see Trump as a sort of carnival barker business guy who got elected and was about as partisan as the average president, as verbally clumbsy as a Bush, as flat in his speaking as some AI voice, doing some stuff Republicans long promised to do but didn't, saying and doing stuff Democrats USED TO say and support (he WAS a Democrat most of his life), and most-importantly, a guy who will leave office in several years and be replaced by the next flawed and imperfect president who will be similarly partisan in his/her own way, and similarly upset/anger opponents while pleasing supporters. Historians will marvel at how this one man made so many people spin-off into madness and lose all self-control.

"34 felony convictions" Really? Still on that campaign stunt? It disappeared from the news because it did not work... it was a junk case that everybody with a brain knows will be overturned on appeal; it's only actual purpose was to give the Democrats a campaign talking point. The 34 counts are all the same one thing, and THAT was not even illegal - it was an act that could only be construed as illegal if it was covering another crime. The judge had to instruct his rigged jury that they could find Trump guilty even if they could not agree on the underlying crime - so they convicted without agreeing on a crime and they specified no crime in their ruling. To this day, NOBODY has seen an official court document specifying the actual crime. This WILL be overturned on appeal. Even the nation's top Democrat lawyers know this, and they would not want it to stick, because this scheme could then be deployed against Democrats in Republican jurisdictions.

"Bankrupted six casinos" Know any recent history? Atlantic City was being setup to be a new East Coast version of Las Vegas, where gambling would be legalized (it used to only be legal in Nevada). Trump, and others, built casinos there. If THAT was the end of the story, and Trump's casinos failed, then sure, it would make Trump look singularly dumb. That's NOT, however, what happened. Sprinkle in some legislation and some court rulings, and it became legal for native American tribes to run casinos on their reservations. Suddenly, people did not need to fly to Vegas to gamble, or to Atlantic City either. Atlantic City, with little casino history belly flopped. Vegas, re-tooled and tried to make itself a family vacation destination and host to conventions. Trump got out of his Atlantic City investment. Atlantic City casinos eventually rebounded a bit, but it never became the "sure thing" it was intended to be. Your tired talking point about Trump's casinos is as devoid of context as if you had derided somebody for allowing his Pacific Palisades home to burn down, without any reference to the Palisades wildfire.

"Laundered money for the Russians" OK, this one's just plain slanderous. You have no evidence here of anything. It's as fake as the Hillary-Clinton-funded "dossier" claim that Trump [a guy Democrats used to famously accuse of being a germophobe] paid prostitutes to urinate on his bed in Russia. The Democrats had 8 YEARS to try to prove this accusation to a Democrat-run Department of Justice, and never had any evidence of it. All they had were lies they paid people to repeat. Those lies worked well to agitate and animate the Democrat party's base voters, and they sure sounded solid rolling off the lips of countless Democrat "journalists", but they failed where it mattered: in the legal system. Remember the claims Trump had a computer in Trump Tower electronically tied to a Russian Bank? Yup, they never had a shred of evidence...just more lies on the heap of lies they kept telling the viewers of MSNBC to whom they breathlessly promised Trump would be seen serving years in prison.

I have my own issues with Trump, and he clearly does not need me defending him here... he's done quite well in the courts with his lawyers and in the 2024 election cycle. I'm just here pointing out how deranged your regurgitation of failed DNC talking points is. Those points you cited were all cooked-up to generate headlines that would sink the Trump campaign, and they FAILED to perform that function. Rage against the President all you want...it's a free country,,, but the talking points you're using are stale, and long-debunked. Do some original thinking. Come up with same creative fake accusations of your own. Show some initiative! Just relying on Joe and Mika is lazy.

The elimination of the Executive Order would effectively eliminate the Constitution and the basic structure of our government.

1. The Constitution sets up 3 branches: Legislative (to write the laws, provide the funds, and provide oversight), Executive (to execute the laws and manage foreign policy and wars), and Judicial (the referees and interpreters of the Constitution).

2. The Constitution defines the number of members of the House and Senate (the Legislative Branch) and the manner in which they are elected, But only defines the Executive branch as the President, vesting all powers and responsibilities for that branch into his hands - this form is called a "unitary executive". The President can hire lots of people to work in the executive branch, in his cabinet and in agencies etc, but they all operate under his authority and direction. Some of these people are important enough that they require approval of the Senate, but the basic principle that they follow the orders of the president and serve at his pleasure stand. Incidentally, this is why it's impossible to have any person in the executive branch (like at the FBI) who out-ranks the president or who can have access to more-classified stuff than the President (like some general - that's the stuff of poorly written movies).

3. The congress is free to write the laws the way they choose, and allocate funds too with as little or as much detail as they choose (and as they can get a president to sign into effect). It's the duty of the president to carry out these laws and spend the allocated funds.

4. Where the congressional laws and/or budgets are vague or very general, SOMEBODY has to decide on the exact specific implementation. This is what Executive Orders do. A president writes an order to the people in the executive branch (his employees, acting under his authority) telling them how to implement the laws the congress wrote. If congress allocates money for a battleship, but does not specify what size guns if has, or what to name it, or what color to paint it, a President must build it, but is free to either leave his employees on autopilot to do it the traditional way, or he can issue an Executive Order saying "Paint it gray, put 16" guns on it, and name it after the state of Nevada".

Most executive orders are invisible to the average citizen, because they do entirely non-controversial things. Sometimes, however, Presidents use them to drive policies they know the congress did not intend but which they think can fit through a verbal loophole in the existing legislation. In those cases, either a court will slap them down, or the congress is to blame for writing sloppy laws. Congress could write a literacy law calling for the education department to buy kids books, then an Obama could issue an EO telling them to buy his "Dreams From My Father" (outraging Republicans) and then a Trump could get in and issue an EO ordering the purchase and distribution of copies of his "The Art of the Deal" (outraging Democrats) - both would be stretching things a bit, but the fault would lie with congress for writing a dumb and poorly worded law.

If there are to be no Executive Orders, then you're saying the president cannot order the people in the executive branch to do things... and that completely screws-up the structure of our government, effectively saying the Chief Executive, in whom all executive powers are vested, may not USE those powers, meaning the executive branch cannot execute policies.

Bill Clinton is the low hanging fruit here, so I'll just bypass it as the hyper-obvious rebuttal to your post.

How about Democrat hero Woodrow Wilson, after which many things were named-in-honor by Democrats? Let's see here: [1] He was a racist who screened the pro-KKK film "The Birth of a Nation" in the White House, then went on to segregate the federal government along racial lines. [2] He gave us the Fed, putting our money in the hands of a board of private bankers. [3] He reduced tariffs and shifted the financial burden to a new thing, called a federal income tax, which he promised would only affect the richest 3% of the population, hitting them with a rate of 1%. In the end, like Biden, he was so decrepit that his aides were lying to the public about his health and his wife was running things.

How about Democrat hero Andrew Jackson, after whom the Democrats named their famous fund raising "Jefferson Jackson Dinners"? [1] He owned hundreds of slaves. [2] He lived with another man's wife. [3] He killed a man in a duel. [4] He condemned opponents of slavery as monsters and said they should die. [5] He pushed most native Americans out of the lands east if the Mississippi river. Ever hear of "the trail of tears"?

Of course, there's the oft-cited Nixon who committed several crimes while trying to cover-up the fact that, without his prior knowledge or participation, some of the people working for him got caught breaking into the Watergate hotel to try to plant bugs in the phones at the Democrat campaign headquarters... but this one has lost its bite now that we have the documented proof that Obama bugged candidate Trump, and used both the FBI and CIA to try to stop him from getting elected, and then having failed at that, to handicap his administration, using as justification a "dossier" he knew at the time was made-up campaign crap (read-up on the August 2016 Oval Office meeting with Obama, Biden, and the FBI leadership on the dossier...)

Yeah, that's a mighty strange scale on your outrage-o-meter if Trump's the one pegging it.

Consider (and while I'm gonna mention Trump, it's NOT about him so don't get distracted) what just happened in a broader context:

Jim Acosta was a journalist at CBS and then, for almost 20 years, at CNN. In his time at CNN he famously got into many arguments with Trump in which Trump accused him of being or providing "fake news", a charge Mr Acosta loudly decried. If he ever was a neutral and unbiased journalist, that time was long ago - he has clearly allowed his personal views into his work for years now, but probably a large portion of his audience did not mind and would have sided with him on the whole "fake news" kerfuffle. But now, after years of arguing that the "fake news" accusation was a lie, he has allowed his personal biases to cloud his judgement so much that he has literally cooked-up and reported "fake news" in the form of an "interview" of an AI-driven animated picture of a dead person supposedly giving answers the dead person WOULD HAVE given IF he was not dead. Yup. A supposedly neutral and unbiased journalist has been driven by his own political passions to create and report completely fake news.

I suppose I could have a lot of different reactions to this one, but I'm actually just dumbstruck. I cannot grasp how this man could have thought this was a good idea, given the larger context.