This came in overnight from a reader and (apparently) an avid TV viewer.

Some months ago, I posted a blog item that talked about the launch of the space shuttle and how I freeze when I hear the words “Go at throttle up,” at which point the Challenger blew up in January 1986. Those words still make me stop what I’m doing during launch.

Today, the shuttle Discovery came home. It streaked across the United States en route to a safe landing in Florida. The shuttle program only has three more missions before it comes to an end in September.

These landings do much the same for me as the launches. I now stop what I’m doing when the shuttle is coming home, recalling what happened that terrible day in February 2003 when the Columbia broke apart over Texas on its way home after a 16-day earth orbit mission. The mission commander was Amarillo’s own Rick Husband.

Both events, the destruction of Challenger and Columbia, remind us of how dangerous these missions always have been. They’ve never been “routine,” yet we’ve become bored by these missions. How sad.

I truly wish we could rediscover the excitement of those early Mercury and Gemini missions and the first half of the Apollo program; you’ll recall that NASA canceled the moon missions after Apollo 17 because the nation no longer was interested enough in space travel to justify the expense of sending crews to the moon and back.

This morning, I felt the excitement — as I always do — when a space ship came hurtling out of orbit toward a feather landing in Florida.

There are times when I sometimes question my own sanity.

Today is one of those times. I wrote a column for the newspaper about the birther movement, the cult of Americans who believe President Obama hasn’t proved sufficiently that he was born in the United States and, thus, is qualified to hold the office he’ll occupy at least until Jan. 20, 2013.

http://www.amarillo.com/stories/041810/opi_opin2.shtml

Read the responses to the column (see attached link) and you might get a sense of why I think I have rocks in my head. It’s not that I disbelieve what I wrote. It’s that most of the responses suggest I would have better luck arguing this point to the tree stump next to my driveway.

For the record, the birthers are entitled to their opinion. The First Amendment guarantees them the right to speak their mind, no matter how mindless their argument — which includes their insistence that the president produce “proof” that he was born in August 1961 in Honolulu, just as he has said.

But you can lay down the original birth certificate, you can interview the doctor (were he still living) who brought young Barack into the world, you can obtain every possible shred of physical evidence there is, but the birthers will find some pretext to dismiss it all as a fraud. “They’ll find something wrong” with the evidence, my colleague Jon Mark Beilue said.

Yes, and what they don’t find, they’ll fabricate.

Several Amarillo-area lawyers, and at least one sitting judge, have let it be known they want to become the next 47th District judge, replacing the late Hal Miner.

Their names have been forwarded to the Republican Party chairs of Potter, Randall and Armstrong counties. More names could surface before the filing deadline.

But there might be a catch for whomever the chairs select.

This gets a little complicated, but I’ll try to explain it.

Only Republican chairs will take part, given that no Democratic candidates are on the ballot this year; GOP Judge Miner was running unopposed for re-election when he died this past month. The chairs will get to select someone to run for election this fall.

But Gov. Rick Perry has the authority to appoint someone to serve the remainder of the term, which he very well could do.

The word on the street is that Perry would pick whomever the party chairs choose, allowing that person to serve as judge while running for election as the incumbent. But then again, he might veto that choice.

Why? Because name of the person chosen by the chairs could show up on a campaign contribution list for one of Perry’s GOP primary opponents, namely U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Thus, is the governor going to appoint someone who gave money to his chief primary foe?

Yeah. That’ll happen about the time cattle start flying out of our feedlots.

Thus, it just might turn out that the county party chairs are going to be sure that their chosen successor has supported the “right” candidate for governor before publicizing his name.

Then comes the questions: Are they going to select the most qualified person for the job? Or will they be hamstrung by political loyalty?

Amarillo ought to be a great bicycling city.

It isn’t, at least not yet.

Our weather is quite good most of the year — the recent wind notwithstanding. Our terrain is relatively level, which is good for bicyclists with bad knees. Most of our streets are relatively wide, giving motor vehicle traffic sufficient room to maneuver past slower-moving bicycle riders.

But the city hasn’t yet turned into a bike-friendly city.

City Parks Director Larry Offerdahl is talking now about improving the city’s biking image. The city Traffic Commission will get revisions to the city’s bike plan that could add to the city’s 26 miles of striped bike lanes.

I’ve noticed a few of the city’s bike lanes near my neighborhood. To be candid, they don’t make a lot of sense. The bike lanes start, make a few turns around some blocks and then end. The lanes around Windsor Elementary School, for instance, don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason.

I am hopeful that Offerdahl and his parks staff can put together a comprehensive bike plan that creates a friendly atmosphere for those who want to get out of their air-polluting cars and enjoy the outdoors atop a bike seat.

But there might be a major educational initiative in the works: The city should aim it at motorists who don’t want to share the road.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! What’s Sarah Palin doing criticizing Barack Hussein Obama’s NUCLEAR policy experience when she is so ignorant that she doesn’t even know how to properly pronounce the word? Notice, that I refuse to address Obama as President until I see a copy of his (long form) birth certificate. It would proove that he was born in Hawaii and not Kenya, as many sources claim.. I have seen a “Certificate Of Live Birth” but, according to credible sources, that could easily have been obtained by Obama even if he was born in Kenya. I took an oath when I entered the military to “support and defend the Constitution” and that Constitution requires that Obama proove that he is a “natural born citizen” in order to occupy the office of President. I have seen nothing that prooves that fact. Until I see the proof, I refuse to recognize him as President.

The above note came to me this week. It’s from an Amarillo resident who writes letters to the editor of the paper on occasion. It won’t see print, but I thought I’d share it here — without attribution — to illustrate the lunacy of some of our friends and neighbors. Alas, this guy isn’t the only person who believes this malarkey.

This note made me curious about something. The writer insists that President Obama prove his U.S. citizenship. Have we ever asked such a thing of any of the men who preceded him? Has anyone ever seen George W. Bush’s proof that he was born in Connecticut, or any record of Bill Clinton’s birth in Arkansas? Was Ronald Reagan really and truly born in Illinois?

I’ve never been a big fan of electing judges, but that’s what we do in Texas.

Today’s runoff for the Texas Supreme Court offers a Grade A example of why it’s a bad idea. Rick Green, a former legislator from Dripping Springs with no judicial experience, is running against Debra Lehrmann, a 22-year veteran of the bench from Fort Worth. Why this contest even went to a runoff is beyond me.

These two candidates were the top two finishers in a crowded Republican primary; Justice Harriett O’Neill is retiring at the end of her term, thus the open seat brought out a number of challengers.

Green arguably may have been the least qualified of the bunch, but here he is in the runoff.

Texans have been watching over many election cycles good judicial candidates getting beat by inferior opponents for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with qualifications. Most of them have lost because merely because they’re Democrats, which is the curse of political death in such a Republican-leaning state. Others have lost because they have “foreign-sounding” surnames; that’s been the case in Republican primaries.

Electing judges is the Texas way. But surely we need to do a better job of educating ourselves as to the qualifications and philosophy of those who seek to do the serious job of adminstering justice in a fair and impartial manner.

We’re going to publish another letter in a couple of days from someone who doesn’t like one of the columnists who appears on our Opinion page. The target of the latest letter once again is Leonard Pitts Jr.

I’ve been stewing about this all day.

Billy Payne, the chairman of the Augusta National golf club board, chewed the daylights out of Tiger Woods. I admit he’s entitled to his opinion about the misbehavior of the world’s greatest golfer.

But the tongue lashing he delivered the day before Woods teed it up to start his 2010 golf season after all the scandal that has engulfed him for the past five months baffled me.

What did Payne say that hasn’t been said by thousands of pundits already? What new insight did he provide? What was the point of the lecture?

Woods’ problems are among the most documented of any athlete/celebrity in the past decade, or longer. The whole world, it seems, has an opinion of Woods’ behavior, his dalliances, his infidelity, his incredible arrogance. None of it is favorable to Woods.

So here comes Billy Payne to weigh in at the last minute. Why?

Payne has taken some grief from those who contend that he has no moral standing to lecture Woods about anything, given that Augusta National includes zero women among its members and only recently desegregated its ranks. That criticism has merit.

But my concern is that he said nothing that hasn’t been said already. He regurgitated the litany of well-deserved condemnation that has been heaped on Woods already. Had the chairman remained silent, he wouldn’t have exposed himself and his organization to the criticism they’re getting now.

There. I feel better.

Now, back to golf.

Good news for those of us who think green.

Allied Waste is installing additional recycling bins at a new drop off site on Plains Boulevard, near the Hastings Distribution Center.

The new bins make it easier for residents in central Amarillo to take waste products for recycling, rather than tossing them into the Dumpster, and eventually ending up in the landfill.

I like to recycle. I grew up in Oregon, the founding capital of the U.S. environmental movement. I haven’t been as recycling conscious since moving to Texas more than 25 years ago. But my family and I adapted nicely to a curbside recycling program that Beaumont instituted some years ago. Much less garbage ended up in the landfill while the program was in effect.

To that end, it still baffles me that Amarillo hasn’t instituted a curbside program. I know it’s costly, but the energy savings accrued from using recycled products — rather than making them from scratch — is significant over the long term.

The addition of the bins at Plains Boulevard is a welcome addition to the city’s recycling infrastructure.