Yes, Jeff, cut off comments on this. O’Keefe’s departure is a minor issue anyway, given the other stuff that’s going on.

Time for Jeff to shut off comments.

Anyway, we’ve wasted enough time on discussion of the relatively unimportant departure from an academic post of a former NASA administrator. Time to move on here….

Chancellor Sean O’Keefe of Louisiana State University resigned after three years in the position. In his resignation letter, Mr. O’Keefe said the chancellor should have the confidence of the university system’s president and governing board, reinforcing suggestions that board members and the system president, John Lombardi, wanted to fire Mr. O’Keefe. Reports had circulated for nearly two weeks that Mr. O’Keefe had been told by Mr. Lombardi to start looking for a new job because of a dissatisfaction by some university officials and by business leaders. No specific complaints against Mr. O’Keefe were ever lodged publicly, and business leaders around Louisiana voiced support for him. Before taking the chancellor’s job, Mr. O’Keefe was the administrator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

If you are SOOO upset by NASA Watch and all of the horrible things I do, why on Earth do you continue to put yourself through all of this torment? Stop reading it – I am certain that you’ll feel much better right away.

Indeed, why do I have three email addresses of yours blocked?

Find another obsession….

I really don’t understand your actions here. You’ve limited the information to your own readers to a link to an official press release. You’ve provided them with almost no context to O’Keefe’s departure. And you’re over on this site ranting at all of us about it.

This is increasingly common. When NASA announced, on the Friday that started a long Christmas break, that it was slipping the Mars spacecraft by two years, people went to NASA Watch hoping for additional information. What did you do? You attacked Lou Friedman. Your remarks were way out of proportion to anything that Lou said, and they added nothing to understanding the story. This involved a conflict of interest serious enough to delay a mission for two years, and you’re focusing on Lou Friedman’s comments? Why?

You’re now ranting about James Hanson. You trashed the book about him without even reading it. You then complained about how he was stirring up right wing blogs by actually reporting results of NASA’s research. This is a much bigger issue than Hanson. Did you miss the WaPo story about how large sections of the Antarctic ice sheets are destabilizing?

Many people find NASA Watch to be useful, but this behavior is mystifying. Especially when it starts running over onto this site.

* Particularly since it’s my understanding (perhaps incorrectly) that the vetted list of possible administrator choices with bipartisan congressional support is rather limited and perhaps even shrinking. Feel free to correct me on that, especially if you can document it with publicly available material (it’s what the internet is for).