I’m concerned about the loss of the House, of course, both because it will stymie any useful legislation for the next two years and because some loons will be in charge of committees (e.g., Maxine Waters). Also, it will mean all investigations of the Trump administration all the time. On the other hand, that will make it more likely that both Trump and the Republicans in the House will win in 2020.
I assume that Sessions’ resignation was requested, now that Trump has more votes in the Senate to confirm someone who will actually know what he’s doing and what the job of the Attorney General is.
In terms of space, I won’t miss Culberson; his defeat probably means no Europa mission. The biggest loss from a space standpoint is Rohrabacher, unless he can find enough votes in absentees to pull it out. He is one of the few on the Hill who understands what has to happen in space, and if he’d won, and the Republicans had kept their majority, he’d have finally been chair of the Science Committee, where he would have had a lot more clout to make better things happen.
Note: Posting remains light because I’m in DC this week after the dual conferences in LA last weekend. Hopefully things will be back to normal next week, for a couple weeks, before I go to Europe at the end of the month.
[Update after driving to Manassas from Falls Church]
Maybe it’s not a great idea to blab on the phone on the Acela. Jerry Nadler’s plans to impeach Trump and Kavanaugh. Yeah, you want more Trump? That’s how you’ll get more Trump in 2020.
It also means that it is less likely that the Obama administration is held accountable for spying on the Trump campaign, trying to rig the election, and remove the duly elected President in a coup.
It’s a bummer about Rohrabacher but maybe things will be ok for NASA. It isn’t like the Democrats are going to cut spending.
before I go to Europe at the end of the month.
Lot’s of traveling this year, I hope your trip to Europe is more enjoyable than your trips to Florida.
It also means that it is less likely that the Obama administration is held accountable for spying on the Trump campaign, trying to rig the election, and remove the duly elected President in a coup.
I disagree. Impeachment isn’t needed to hold members of the previous administration accountable. What is needed is a strong AG, and with a friendly Senate that can both confirm such an AG and then back up the AG with committee investigations; I think there is a better chance now. Sure, having the House would help, but losing the House will motivate the Republicans in the Senate into action. What Democrats have done with the Russian scandal is far worse than the Kavanaugh hearing.
Oh, and Mollie Hemmingway just reported Nadler is loudly planning to impeach Trump and Kavanaugh. I’m going to treat all such threats like they are coming from crazy Waxman. They can investigate, but all the Democrat gains come up for re-election in 2 years, and no matter how much they want to spin, those gains didn’t come with a mandate to rid us of Trump. If anything Trump was given more power with the gains in the Senate. Anyway, I can’t see the latest flips being able to support an impeachment effort, especially one that will die a quick death in the Senate.
“Nadler is loudly planning”
He does everything loudly.
I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorse Nadler’s plan to try to impeach Trump.
“sentence first, verdict afterwards”
Without a Senate majority, it’s more like “sentence never”.
The DOJ isn’t doing anything to hold the DOJ accountable for what the DOJ did to help rig the election and overthrow the President in a coup no matter who is AG.
Well, at least I won’t be fighting with the county over permits and fixing up a house to sell there.
Sessions is out, and he will be replaced by a much tougher AG. Holder already set precedent for the Executive Branch to ignore Congressional subpoena’s and the deep state has kept up that trend, so Democrat House investigations will only go so far as they can get more people to lie for them. Meanwhile, the new AG will be looking into the Senate referrals from the Kavanaugh hearing. Democrats won’t be able to bury the bodies fast enough.
The thing about Culberson is that Texas 7th was held by a Republican for over 50 years, going back to George H.W. Bush. So that will be the excitement for Democrats. However, its a mix of blue blood old money and now brand new millennial condos. The demographics have changed. Sadly, metropolitan Houstonians haven’t been big on holding Democrat politicians accountable for their lies. So I’m not expecting Fletcher to stick with her platform.
At least the Irishman lost. He would have represented the interests of California, which backed him financially, and not Texas.
Funny how a month ago the nation was gripped by Kavanaugh and all we heard was how this would hang over him and this administration for years.
Now, we see that good old DiFi’s act backfired immensely as it motivated voters who may have not gone out to vote and ended up giving the GOP more Senate seats. No issues with judge confirmations now.
Agree with Rand that when (not if) the looney left leads the House to investigation after investigation, it will simply mean more GOP back in 2 years and 4 more of Trump. I don’t care that much about Trump, except that the market likes him and if he has the opportunity, he will put more judges on the SC and Federal Courts. I love that.
I would say the Dems killed the blue wave and helped Trump a lot.
I expect the Dems will continue committing suicide and we still got dems losing and not a situation of Reps winning [but it’s possible at some point the Rep could begin to win- granted, generally I tend to be wildly optimistic. Such optimism is due to fact that Trump is certainly winning, and maybe the party get a clue.
As far as space policy, I don’t see much to make me hopeful of much progress [ie, exploring the Moon anytime soon, and then exploring Mars].
They don’t have a clue.
I’m not so certain because this requires people to bypass the media for being informed on what is going on. No one has the time to repeatedly investigate from the original sources and the media is superb at creating a false reality. How many people think we live in a time with rampant hate crimes and tens of millions of NAZI and White Nationalists controlling the country?
Even when people see through a little bit of the DNC media’s game, they still buy into some of it.
It would be a marvel and a joy to behold if they (highly unlikely) chose Ms. Occasional-Cortex as Speaker instead of Poor Old Ms. Pelosi. Can you imagine the sound bites!
Pelosi gave some pretty good soundbites (We have to pass it to find what’s in it.) But Occasional Cortex is making them much more frequently.
I’m confident she will rise to the Ocasio.
Change My View: Jim Acosta losing his press pass is Drumpfler’s equivalent of the Reichstag fire.
I promise to consider all arguments fully once I’m safely in Canada.
As a gesture of support for democracy, I will be changing my screen name to “Jim Accost Her.”
Does anyone know a restaurant in Moose Jaw that serves vegan poutine?
Jim Acosta is a secret Trump supporter?
I would tend to think [if crazy] that the senate affirmation hearing was the Reichstag fire.
Or that had an effect- and it seems, Jim Acosta would be forgotten.
CNN should have removed him long ago because he is incapable of doing his job in a professional manner due to his animosity for Trump. Every time he opens his mouth either in a press conference or on CNN it is to start a fight not do journalism.
All his has to do is suck up his wounded ego and not be a dick but he is incapable due to his wounded pride an unearned ego.
Sadly, so is CNN and most of the rest of the White House press corpse.
Poe’s Law.
I for one would like to welcome our new overlords, “Pre-Existing Conditions.”
That’s such a load anyway. Every state has their own government controlled insurance industry. In Washington, you couldn’t be denied for pre-existing conditions pre-Obamacare but there was a waiting period so that people couldn’t game the system by getting coverage before something like a knee surgery and then dumping their insurance again.
If I remember correctly, when Massachusetts implemented Romneycare, people gamed the system in that exact manner.
People shouldn’t get too distracted by the Federal election results.
In my opinion, the nationwide trendlines of State elections are more telling. Check out this NYT article. Except for Minnesota (split control) and Nebraska (which has a ‘non partisan’ legislature), the results of the 2018 election has both houses of every State legislature in the hands of one party; 30 Republican States with 60% of the nation’s population, and 18 Democrat States controlling 40% of the population.
“Election Consolidates One-Party Control Over State Legislatures”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/us/politics/statehouse-elections.html
That’s true but the Democrats flipped some governors. The danger is complacency. Anything can change in an election cycle and we are never more than a generation away from losing our country to totalitarian marxists.
Considering how terrible the news-cycle was for the Republicans in the final week just before election day, the Republicans did much better in the election than I feared might happen.
If anything, the election outcome demonstrates that we live in a fifty-fifty nation, and neither Party has a legitimate claim to a national ‘Natural Majority’.
How would it be if the media were more representative of their audiences and didn’t engage in yellow journolism?
It does not seems like that bad of a result for the Republicans. With both majorities in the Supreme Court and the Senate.
The bad result for the GOP is in progress right now as Florida and Arizona electoral officials feverishly manufacture more Dem ballots to allow them to overturn the Senate results.
Whitaker should have FBI agents swarming those places.
Seriously. How can they “find” almost a hundred thousand ballots and the media not be skeptical of what is going on? We could take the Democracy Dies in Darkness crowd seriously if they actually did speak truth to power rather than just act as DNC propaganda.
A media outlet that actually held all politicians accountable regardless of party affiliation would be wildly popular.
As blatant as the corruption in those counties is with the election, we need to see arrests very soon or the vigilance committees need to move in.
And this kind of election-stealing will not stop until people do serious jail time.
I am also concerned about the loss of the Senate as well.
In this day and age, you can good old fashioned paper ballots that you mark by filling in a box or a circle in pen, and a whole stack of such ballots can be recounted by running them through the electronic tabulator.
We should be able to not only get election results, in 24 hours we should have the “canvas” and the “recount” tied up, so this business of still counting ballots in AZ and FL is pure nonsense. And the holdups are always in the left-leaning big cities.
I thought “conservatives need to win within the margin of fraud” was tin-foil hat thinking, but that is how Mr. Franken achieved a Senate seat. All of these elections decided by a full percentage point on election night somehow manage to swing — it looks like AZ is going that way with Florida (Broward County still counting!) is next.
So the Republican count in the Senate is down to 51? This leaves only a one-vote margin for someone to go wobbly or squish, or a Senator to go, “Please, please, please, Senator McConnell, you got to let me vote no on this one!” 53 would have allowed defections, which sometimes aren’t defections but individual senators wanting to retain their seat.
I would think what is happening in Florida is likely happening in Arizona. However, the evidence of what is happening in Florida is damning. Ballots are being recreated (which is allowed by law) but not with both candidates able to supervise (which is not allowed by law). Ballots are being counted without chain of custody. Anyone can just find them in a typical storage box with just an easily replicated label. There are videos of private vehicles entering areas and dropping off ballots to be counted without supervisors from both parties present. All of this in just two Florida counties.
I just saw a headline that at least one court has ruled against Broward’s actions, but I couldn’t find out more because of ad pop-ups at the site. I hope this is getting shutdown, and then is followed up with a criminal investigation.
Don’t forget how Christine Gregoire became Governor of Washington in 2004– Keep recounting until the Democrat is ahead, then stop. There were multiple recounts, and each time she had more votes than before. Mail-in ballots were appearing weeks after election day.
(You only had to have an election day postmark. In my experience, postmarks have always been illegible and subject to interpretation).
I voted this year for the first time in quite a while, because I wanted to send the Dems a message. I don’t think I’m gonna bother in the future, because the Progressive Left keeps telling me voting is for chumps. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are getting the idea that voting (and playing by the rules) is for chumps, and some of them are going to look for alternate means of expressing their displeasure with the Dems, and that’s when things will get ugly.
Yes, on the third recount they found boxes of ballots in the trunk of a car and those were the ballots that put her over the top. Democrats knew it was fraud but felt entitled because they thought Bush stole the 2000 election.
“I thought “conservatives need to win within the margin of fraud” was tin-foil hat thinking, but that is how Mr. Franken achieved a Senate seat”
Paul, Christine Gregoire did it over a decade ago.
The problem I have with the current ballot system is that there is no way to tie a ballot to a voter after the envelop has been opened. It is very easy to introduce ballots into the system and no way to tell if they were legitimately cast afterwards.
On the flip side, if ballots are traceable to a voter that introduces voter intimidation.
In Canada, each ballot has a perforated strip at the bottom with a serial number matching a serial number on the ballot itself. When the returning officer hand you your ballot, she (usually it’s a woman) years off the strip and puts it in a separate box. Once you’ve filled out your ballot and sealed it, the serial number is visible. It’s easy to compare the serial numbers on valid ballots with the list of serial numbers from the strips.
We also have to show ID.
That was how it was done in California the entire time I voted there — all before the Florida nonsense in 2000.
“In terms of space, I won’t miss Culberson; his defeat probably means no Europa mission.”
I am puzzled by this, unless you mean to say that you want no Europa mission.
Yet to me, this was one of Culberson’s great virtues, since I am quite keen to see a Europa mission. I’d rather it went up on a Falcon Heavy rather than SLS, even at the cost of reducing its science platform; but the SLS boondoggle is going to continue regardless of whether Europa Clipper launches on it or not.
I’m not a big fan of the Europa mission as planned, given that it’s being used as an excuse for the need for SLS. I think Enceladus is a more interesting opportunity, and (AFAIK) Yuri is still planning to do that (though I haven’t seen an update on it since his announcement a year ago).
I care about the Europa Mission because I’m involved with a proposal for one of the instruments to go on the Europa Lander.
I don’t care what rocket gets it there. BFR is fine wit me and preferable over SLS
What was Culberson’s goal? Europa or was that just an excuse for SLS?
Hello Gregg,
Everything I have seen and heard indicates that his enthusiasm for Europa qua Europa is quite sincere. It’s clearly a passion for him.
Mostly, his motivation for wanting it on SLS is two-fold: 1) he wants the mission to get there as fast as possible (i.e., before he’s dead) and with as much science as possible, and 2) it was a way of securing maximum political support for Clipper from space state congress critters.
Personally, I would cut the thing down to 2100kg (the upper limit of mass possible for a direct, non-gravity assist trip on FH to Jupiter) and send it on Falcon Heavy instead – for what you save on the SLS launch, you could afford to send TWO of them! But I can at least sympathize with Culberson’s impulses here.
Oh, I would love to send something to Enceladus…
Why, if you cancelled SLS, you could pay for flagship missions to BOTH Europa and Enceladus just out of this year’s funding!
I don’t think we are in any disagreement about SLS, and the lack of any need to use it to send Clipper to Europa. I just think that Culberson’s enthusiasm for planetary science is sincere, and he moved a lot of political muscle on its behalf. Thus, his sin of putting Clipper on SLS seems (to me) to be fairly venial, since it’s apparent it is more motivated by a sincere desire to pack as much science into the mission than just pork-ridden desire to prop up SLS, almost none of which is subcontracted out of his district anyway.
On the whole, I think NASA planetary science is worse off for his loss, and I regret that.
Something bizarre occurred on election night in the Arizona Senate election. The candidates shifted in relation to each other only by a tenth of a point or so all night. In other statewide races (including ballot measures) the percentages bounced around, like they do in any normal election. But not the AZ senate race. I’ve never seen this occur before, and it made me very suspicious by the time 10% of the vote was in, and moreso as the night progressed.
And now, coincidence of coincidences, there are “voting irregularities” in two counties, plus charges of officials destroying records, and, of course, “found” ballot boxes. And the one race that hangs in the balance is the senate race that I noticed the strange symmetry of all night. (for those unaware, the percentages should very due to individual precincts rarely reflecting the overall state averages).
Something here stinks. A lot.
The Left is trying to steal several elections.
There should be jail time for this.
Snipe sin Florida was guilty of destroying ballots and revealing totals before the polls closed. Why she is within 100 miles of being an election official I cannot say.
And how many times has it happened that Republicans initially lst but “found” votes until they won?
I can’t think of a single time.
Senate races are one thing, but they’re also trying to steal governorships so they can add a gubernatorial veto to their weapons against Republican-drawn House district maps.
California, source of so many of the Dems’ NPC seat-warmers, is going to lose seats as a result of the 2020 census. Dems want to squeeze some blue districts out of as many other populous states as they can to compensate.
Politics is hardball, but redistricting is Calvinball. They want to make sure they get to be Calvin this time around.
This is Why Democrats have a country wide campaign to take over Secretary of State and similar positions. They mean it when they say, “By any means necessary.”