Women’s group cites Sen. Clinton
Seneca Falls, N.Y. Inspired by Alan Shepard, the first American to journey into space, a 14-year-old from suburban Chicago wrote a letter to NASA in 1961 asking what she needed to do to become an astronaut.
She got a curt reply: Girls are not being recruited by the nation’s space program.
“It had never crossed my mind up until that point that there might be doors closed to me simply because I was a girl,” recalled the letter writer, better known today as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, as she was enshrined Saturday in the National Women’s Hall of Fame, along with nine other inductees.
Honored with her were Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.; Dr. Rita Rossi Colwell, who became the first female director of the National Science Foundation in 1998; and Betty Bumpers, a crusader for childhood immunizations who was Clinton’s predecessor as Arkansas’ first lady.
The first known women’s rights convention was held in 1848 in this upstate New York village.
Scalia didn’t expect chief justice seat
New York Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday that he had not expected President Bush to nominate him to replace the late William Rehnquist as chief justice.
“I’m not even sure I wanted it, to tell you the truth,” Scalia told reporters at a media briefing before a gala dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan.
Bush, who had in the past mentioned Scalia as one role model for an ideal chief justice, passed on Scalia and nominated John Roberts after Rehnquist’s death.
Scalia said the time he would have had to devote to administering the court as chief justice would have taken away from his thinking and writing. However, he said, “The honor would have been wonderful.”
Scalia was the only justice who did not attend a Sept. 29 White House swearing-in ceremony for Roberts. Scalia said Saturday that he had a commitment.
Governor inadvertently curses hockey crowd
St. Paul, Minn. Maybe Gov. Tim Pawlenty was just out of practice after a year without professional hockey.
The governor made an embarrassing slip of the tongue as he led the crowd in a cheer at the season opener for the Minnesota Wild hockey team. All 30 National Hockey League teams were back in action Wednesday after a year of labor unrest. The script called for the governor to say: “It’s time to drop the puck. So everybody say it with me:’Let’s play hockey!’ “
It was the governor’s tripping over the word “puck” that provoked the snickers. Instead of telling people to drop the puck, he used a very similar-sounding word that made him sound more like Tony Soprano than his usual smooth-talking self. “It was an unfortunate slip of the tongue, and I am sorry for that. I tried my best to say it as they wanted me to say it, and it just came out,” Pawlenty said.