From the NASA news release 17-079 on Friday, September 15, 2017:

“A thrilling epoch in the exploration of our solar system came to a close today, as NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made a fateful plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn, ending its 13-year tour of the ringed planet.

Telemetry received during the plunge indicates that, as expected, Cassini entered Saturn’s atmosphere with its thrusters firing to maintain stability, as it sent back a unique final set of science observations. Loss of contact with the Cassini spacecraft occurred at 7:55 a.m. EDT (4:55 a.m. PDT), with the signal received by NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna complex in Canberra, Australia.”

During my assignment to the Los Angeles Field Office, I had the opportunity to visit NASA JPL on several occasions, meet some of the people there, and see projects in various phases of final assembly.  The most memorable one for me was being able to watch some of the final clean room assembly of the Cassini spacecraft.

There is no doubt that there were very few dry eyes in the NASA JPL control room when NASA’s Cassini program manager Earl Maize hugged spacecraft operations team manager (Cassini mission at Saturn) Julie Webster after he announced that Cassini’s signal had been lost and in another 45 seconds, Cassini would be intentionally destroyed in its final plunge to Saturn.

For students, please take time to look at NASA’s information about the entire Cassini project.  It is available online in The Grand Finale Toolkit.

You can check the air quality in our area by going to the EPA’s AIRNow website and entering the ZIP code.

Here is what our air quality was at 3 p.m. today in 83815:

In our July 4, 2017, post entitled Not a Good Idea, we raised several issues and concerns we had with Coeur d’Alene Police Department officers being trained as phlebotomists to do evidentiary blood draws.

A recent incident in Utah seems to confirm some of our concerns about what could happen here in Coeur d’Alene.

On or about July 26, 2017, nurse Alex Wubbels was arrested at Salt Lake’s University Hospital for refusing a police detective’s order to perform a blood draw from an unconscious patient, a motor vehicle accident victim.

The most complete version of the story we’ve seen was published by The Salt Lake Tribune on September 1, 2017.  The story is headlined Video shows Utah nurse screaming, being handcuffed after refusing to take blood from unconscious victim.

According to the Tribune article, the detective who arrested nurse Wubbels, “…was suspended from the department’s blood-draw program — where officers are trained as phlebotomists so they can get blood samples — but he remains on duty with the Police Department…”

The public has every right to expect that a police officer who has received special training and certification to perform a very invasive search of a person’s body for evidence will also be familiar with and fully comply with both department policies and applicable law.  The public can also expect that such a trained officer will not try to circumvent either policy or law by ordering a hospital employee to perform the search.

Likewise, the public has every right to expect that a police officer’s supervisor, in this instance Lieutenant Tracy, will be even more familiar than subordinates with department policies and applicable laws and will take any and all steps necessary to ensure that the subordinate complies with them rather than tries to circumvent them.

What is also very distressing in the Tribune article was

“No claim or lawsuit has been filed, Porter said, but she [Wubbels] has had discussions with Salt Lake City police and she believes the department will educate its officers.

So why weren’t the police department’s policies updated immediately after the court’s decision, and why weren’t all officers properly and completely trained in the application of the new policies?

Exactly why should the people here in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, have any assurance that something similar to what happend to nurse Wubbels in Salt Lake City couldn’t happen here?

Well, well, well.

It seems that the Southern Poverty Law Center, the fund-raising darling of left-wing extremists and their skewsmedia propagandists, has been caught salting away a lot of its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt cash in offshore banks.

Here’s a link to The Washington Free Beacon reporter Joe Schoffstall’s excellent and well-researched article posted August 31, 2017,  entitled Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities.

People interviewed in Schoffstall’s article asked a good question.  Why does an  IRS certified 501(c)(3) organization (already tax exempt) that supposedly exists to provide legal assistance “… in the area of children’s rights, economic justice, immigrant justice, LGBT rights, and criminal justice reform …” need to stash cash offshore?

OpenCdA also thought it was interesting that the Wall Street Journal is beginning to ask questions about the Southern Poverty Law Center and some of its most recent major ultra-liberal corporate donors including Apple and J.P. Morgan Chase.  See Kimberley Strassel’s opinion piece J.P. Morgan’s Hate List (subscription required) published in the Wall Street Journal on August 24, 2017.   Her op-ed article revealed

“… the SPLC isn’t even considered a sound charity.  Karl Zinsmeister excoriated the outfit in a recent article for Philanthropy Roundtable:  ‘Its two largest expenses are propaganda operations:  creating its annual list of ‘haters’ and ‘extremists’ and running a big effort that pushes ‘tolerance education’ through more than 400,000 public-school teachers.”

Zinsmeister’s quote went on

“And the single biggest effort undertaken by the SPLC?  Fundraising.  One [sic] the organization’s 2015 IRS 990 form it declared $10 million of direct fundraising expenses, far more than it has ever spent on legal services.”

Considering Zinsmeister’s quote in conjunction with the great question raised in Joe Schoffstall’s article in The Washington Free Beacon, OpenCdA hopes that once the Trump administration’s Justice and Treasury Departments have been sufficiently flushed of the Obama administration’s career swamp-dwellers, they will reinvigorate the FBI and IRS’s interests in money laundering and asset hiding investigations and in anti-trust violations by major corporations.  And while the IRS is noodling around in the SPLC’s books, please take a renewed look at its 501(c)(3) exemption from federal income taxes.