The actual location of the Four Corners Monument is off a bit, but not by the 2.5 miles reported by the Associated Press and a Salt Lake City newspaper.

However, legally (and symbolically), the Four Corners Monument is, indeed, on the spot where the borders intersect, since the Supreme Court of the United States decreed it to be so in 1925. Political boundaries are, after all, at the behest of politicians and judges.

However, the actual intersection of the defined longitude and latitude may be as far away from the monument as six hundred meters.

I found the Four Corners monument using both Google Earth and Google Maps. Even between the two Google sources, they disagree. They both show a segment of border that runs slightly west from the monument. I could find no reference to the anomalous segment.

I checked several other on-line map sources and no two agree. Some show the anomalous border segment and some do not.

The Arizona Geology Blog has a brief post about the confusion.

Wikipedia has already picked up on the cause of the erroneous report:

The Four Corners Area is generally defined as a circle around the Four Corners Monument located at 36° 59″ 56.31532′ N by 109° 02″ 42.62019′ W. A series of news stories from April of 2009 indicated that more recent surveys had determined that the intersection of the corners was not where it was intended to be.

However, the news stories used whole degree co-ordinates, not accounting for the fractional degree offset between the Washington Meridian, standard used at the time, and the current standard, the Prime Meridian. In addition, general U.S. land principles, law, and the Supreme Court have determined that the location of the monument is the legal corner of the four States.

Click on either image to enlarge.

This picture shows Damsel standing on the Four Corners Monument the last time we were there.

NASA Rejected ‘Colbert’ as the name of ISS Node 3 and named it “Tranquility” in commemoration of the first manned Lunar landing in 1969. Colbert did not come away empty-handed though, since the ISS treadmill has been dubbed the ‘Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill,’ or COLBERT.

From NASA:

The International Space Station module formerly known as Node 3 has a new name. After receiving more than a million responses in an online poll, NASA is naming the node “Tranquility.”

The name Tranquility was chosen from thousands of suggestions submitted by participants on www.nasa.gov. The “Help Name Node 3″ poll asked people to vote for the module’s name either by choosing one of four options listed by NASA or offering their own suggestion. Tranquility was one of the top ten suggestions submitted by respondents to the poll, which ended March 20.

Colbert, as you may recall, prompted his fan base to write in ‘Colbert’ as the name for Node 3. NASA received a lot of “Colbert” support, but selected “Tranquility.”

I, for one, am amused by the way it turned out. Although NASA was trying to gracefully placate Colbert with this treadmill business, it seems like a smackdown to me.

Click on the logo above to see the full-sized version (courtesy NASA).

Taken from Charles Krauthammer’s comments on Fox News yesterday about Obama’s California Townhall meeting:

Well, Obama’s modus operandi is when the going gets tough, he gets going. He gets out of town. The best thing he does is campaign, so that’s what he wants to do. He’s not apparently that good at governing. He is not a lot of experience. He never ran a candy store in the past and he’s having a little stumbling trouble these days running his government. But, you know, presidents who are good speakers have charisma and popular support, like Reagan, will go over the heads of Congress directly to the people when they are in trouble and need help.

Gospel according to Ronald Reagan:

Conservative folks in South Carolina and everywhere, really, will enjoy reading the Columbia Conservative Political Examiner, now that The Welshman, of The Liberty Sphere, is writing articles.

Congratulations on the new enterprise!

Melanie Morgan, a San Francisco Bay area talk show personality, appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show this evening.

Set Your DVR’s To “Stun” - Melanie Morgan to Appear on O’Reilly

Get ready to be amazed by my brilliant rhetorical skills, stunning passion, and 2-day old acne outbreak.

That’s right, the “war whore” as the lefties call me, is going to be appearing today on The Factor with Bill O’Reilly - that’s Fox News Channel for those of you who aren’t paying attention.

I will be enunciating why a souless villian like Bill Ayers, Domestic Terrorist who can’t say he’s sorry, should be protested at St. Mary’s College tomorrow night.

Melanie Morgan’s website displays the ‘Never Forget Tribute‘ in their sidebar. The website has more information about the protests planned against Ayres.

I’m a couple of days late on this, but there is movement in the blogosphere to proclaim last Saturday as “VICTORY IN IRAQ” day. I have placed this logo in the sidebar for a few days with a link to the Victory in Iraq website.

Despite clear signals from the military and others in a position to know that the war is won, you won’t see or hear much from the media. Congress won’t be declaring victory. The talking heads from the left will continue to trivialize the tremendous effect that the surge had in securing Iraq.

Worst of all, the men and women of our armed forces that took part in this significant achievement will be coming home to the complacent masses who don’t know why they voted the way they did except it ‘felt right.’

We commend our armed forces and wish the best for them as they return to their civilian or military regular jobs. Good work folks, and God Speed.

Hat tip to Kini who put the bug in our ear about this.

It’s with sadness that we re-post this piece we did in December 2005 - the great George Putnam passed away over the weekend. Even late in his life, he was busy writing his unique “One Reporter’s Opinion” columns at NewsMax. We will miss George Putnam.

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No one who lived in the Los Angeles area between the fifties and the seventies, will forget the iconic television newsman, George Putnam. One of the regular features on his newscast was “One Reporter’s Opinion,” during which he would editorialize on a topical issue. I enjoyed watching Putnam’s newscast, primarily because of his conservative point-of-view in spite of the liberal Times-Mirror’s ownership of the television station, KTTV.

Well, I’m happy to report that George Putnam’s “One Reporter’s Opinion” feature is alive and well at NewsMax on line. Better yet, his politics are still in line with reality:

One Reporter’s Opinion - Americanism Left ‘Cold in the Night’

It is this reporter’s opinion that the very heart of America is under attack. There are those, foreign and domestic, who actually HATE this great nation and all it stands for. Led by atheists and the ACLU, there are groups who would love to destroy the promises on which our nation was founded - our very way of life.

Aided and abetted by strange court decisions and oddball judges, each day brings a new shocker. We find federal judges ruling against the Pledge of Allegiance as unconstitutional, finding that “one nation under God” violates schoolchildren’s right “to be free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.”

The latest target of the atheists is to remove “in God we trust” from our currency, claiming that this phrase violates the so-called separation of church and state.

Continue reading George Putnam’s article on NewsMax: One Reporter’s Opinion - Americanism Left ‘Cold in the Night’

Damsel and I mourn the passing of Tony Snow. The Nation and the media world have lost an extraordinary human being. Tony’s wife and children have lost a wonderful husband and father. God bless Tony’s family and friends in their time of loss.

This past weekend, we celebrated Armed Forces Day by visiting some of our military folks who brought some static displays and military equipment to show off to the public. The Army brought this UH-60 Blackhawk for all to sit in, touch, photograph and just plain gawk.

While I gawked, I remembered something that a 70’s news anchor, Harry Reasoner, said when he compared airplane and helicopter pilots with the following statements:

The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly.

A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying, immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

That is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why, in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened, it is about to.

- - Commentary by Harry Reasoner, February 16, 1971

As you may or may not know, I am a pilot - I’m rated in both airplanes and helicopters. While I agree with Mr. Reasoner’s basic corollary, I can see that it only applies to a pilot while flying a particular aircraft type.

For example, while flying airplanes under visual conditions, I do a little drill by identifying potential emergency landing sites around the airplane - an alert, but mostly casual drill. But, when piloting a helicopter, I find myself making slight course changes in order to be in a position to autorotate to a landing site. Sort of like a stepping-stone approach to navigation. It’s a bit more intense then the airplane drill.

When not flying, I like to think that I can be as extroverted or introspective as conditions warrant.

As a veteran, I am outraged by Time Magazine’s desecration of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the U.S. Marines raising the American Flag on Iwo Jima.

We never cease to be amazed by the inability of the left to feel shame and its lack of reverence for America and those who defend its freedoms, including the right to be stupid. The cover of the April 21 issue of Time, taking the famous Joe Rosenthal photo of Marines planting our flag on the blood-soaked island of Iwo Jima and replacing our flag with a tree, qualifies for obscenity of the year.

It echoes the greenie theme first advanced by Al Gore in his book Earth In The Balance that the internal combustion engine is the greatest threat in the history of mankind. Gore and Bill Clinton have both said that global warming is ultimately a greater threat than terrorism… This trivializing of the sacrifice of American blood and treasure to defend freedom ignores the fact that in World War II we faced a real enemy with a terrible agenda. The bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor were quite real, not the output of some badly fed computer model.

‘Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,’ Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center, [said]: ‘The Japanese Empire on February 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history’.”

—Investor’s Business Daily

I call on veterans and others outraged by this to boycott Time-Warner Corporation! If you subscribe to Road Runner, get another high-speed carrier. If you get cable from Time-Warner, it’s time to look into DirecTV, which, by the way, is owned by the parent company of the Fox News Channel. Most of all, never, ever buy another copy of Time.

Hat tip to The Patriot Post.