We are going.
For the first time, the @NASA_SLS rocket and @NASA_Orion fly together. #Artemis I begins a new chapter in human lunar exploration. pic.twitter.com/vmC64Qgft9
— NASA (@NASA) November 16, 2022
The @NASA_SLS rocket has reached main engine cutoff, or MECO, in the mission timeline. The RS-25 engines have powered off and the core stage has separated. @NASA_Orion is now in orbit. pic.twitter.com/OlnxhFAlET
— NASA (@NASA) November 16, 2022
NASA took a significant step toward returning astronauts to the lunar surface early Wednesday, launching its massive Space Launch System rocket and lofting the first spacecraft designed for to fly humans to the moon since the Apollo era.
Lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center at 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the rocket thundered through the sky above the Florida Space Coast, as hordes of onlookers cheered an ambitious mission the agency hopes will become a new chapter in the history of human exploration.
“It’s a great day,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said after the launch.
The flight marked the first launch of the SLS rocket, a towering 322-foot tall beast in development for a decade, and propelled a capsule, known as Orion, through the atmosphere toward the moon as part of its Artemis program. Because the mission is a test flight — a rehearsal for future missions — no astronauts were onboard, and the spacecraft won’t land on the moon. Rather, Orion is to stay in lunar orbit in a flight that is expected to last up to 25 and-a-half days and demonstrate, NASA hopes, that the rocket and spacecraft are capable of flying safely…
While a lunar landing may still be years away, the successful launch of Artemis I marked a significant milestone for the space agency. NASA has not sent an astronaut beyond low Earth orbit since the last of the Apollo missions, in 1972, when astronaut Eugene Cernan vowed “we shall return” in a short speech before he climbed back into the lunar module for the return trip to Earth…
Follow Orion’s flight to the moon and back
NASA has built a website that will allow people to follow the journey of the Orion spacecraft as it flies from Earth to the moon and back again. The website will “provide real-time data beginning about one minute after liftoff” and chronicle its flight for the days to come, as it flies some 40,000 miles past the moon.The website can be found here. For more information, NASA urges people to also follow the @NASA_Orion Twitter account.
Space exploration is one of those things that justifies us as a species and seeing something like that, has made my whole day better
— your himbo boyfriend (@swolecialism) November 16, 2022
Meanwhile, here on Earth…
The White House just happens to have launched a new website this evening touting this administration’s record, in what must be a total coincidence of timing with the news out of Mar-a-Lago https://t.co/JqZrZp7chW
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) November 16, 2022
“Not really,” Biden said when @katierogers asked him and Macron if they had any reaction to Trump announcing a run in 2024. https://t.co/YaZIzQhZzZ
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) November 16, 2022
https://t.co/4foP4dYn1j pic.twitter.com/vnkBAfufH4
— Jort-Michel Connard (@torriangray) November 16, 2022
dearly glad we have biden, and not trump, when we have this kind of serious security crisis, re missile strikes across poland border, which require a steady hand, a lot of experience, and an adult.
— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) November 15, 2022
Bigly!
“Rocket Man” on the Mar-a-Lago soundtrack tonight ahead of Trump’s announcement about running in 2024, while Biden is about to gather with world leaders for an emergency meeting on the Ukraine war and the Russian-made rocket that fell on a village in Poland and killed two people. pic.twitter.com/g9ugQX5g32
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) November 16, 2022
Hit him hard, hit him fast, hit him often. Make Trump regret running as much as we regret him ever entering politics https://t.co/HsemEruI6Q
— chatham harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison) November 16, 2022
On The Road – JanieM – My Neighborhoods (Maine #9)
zhena gogolia
Response to the “Rocket Man” tweet:
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Gregory
Hit him hard, hit him fast, hit him often.
Hard agree. Trump can’t let any criticism slide, and it’s much better to keep him reacting — no doubt badly.
It’ll also feed the narrative that he’s a loser, and a sore loser at that.
Frankensteinbeck
It’s hard to know who’s joking in these situations, but I heard that as the speech went on Trump’s ad libs got weird. Like, ‘inject bleach’ levels of weird. That he gave such a stale speech is a clear sign to me that his handlers have been scaring him with DeSantis as ‘reasonable Trump.’ It won’t last.
He can’t pull off what he did last time, either, with the base. He’s too self-obsessed. I don’t watch him, but every report of his rallies has said that he’s cut most of the red meat bigotry sections to whine about how he was robbed. Whine and whine and whine. Only the nuttiest of the base enjoy that. They flocked to him the first time for the hate fix.
evodevo
“Sent a couple of engineers to tighten some bolts to stop the leak” LOL sounds like my car….
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Anne Laurie
@zhena gogolia: I dunno — try: Actual President out in the world, doing the work; Pretend President bloviating in his gaudy gilt hideout, stealing popcult he’s been repeatedly warned not to use…
Cameron
Rocket Man? I thought that was Kim-Jong Un. Or, since he’s “little rocket man,” maybe that makes him Trump’s Mini-Me.
Steeplejack
@rikyrah:
Good morning! 🙏
Baud
Elton John must be unhappy.
Betty Cracker
After going out on my dock twice in the wee hours to witness two previous scrubbed Artemis launches, I vowed not to let NASA punk me again and slept through this one! Damn.
@Frankensteinbeck: I think you’re right — the constant whining about 2020 is a losing message outside the Q-core. Didn’t every single election denier lose on election day?
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Didn’t Elton John deny TFG permission to use the song “Rocket Man”?
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
Agree. Hate is the mother’s milk of the GOP. Their voters will accept a genteel facade, but a candidate has to convey that he or she hates the same people they do in some way.
@Betty Cracker:
I think they all lost in competitive areas. Some won in deep red areas.
Matt McIrvin
I am real skeptical that the program is going to get to a Moon landing as planned–the problem is not SLS but the lunar lander scheme, which is dependent on an evolution of SpaceX’s Starship.
Not that SpaceX isn’t competent at launching rockets–they are, very much so. But Starship seems like it has the most “harebrained Elon Musk idea” smell of everything they do, and the scheme is this complicated thing involving orbital depot refueling that has a lot of unproven steps. I guess we’ll see.
lowtechcyclist
Don’t want to demolish Trump too completely, too soon. I’d hate for DeSatan to waltz into the nomination practically untouched.
hueyplong
I really hope Trump has something real on DeSantis and that he becomes obsessed with using it in a way he finds himself incapable of doing subtly and can’t walk back once it’s out there. The transition is happening in real time and DeSantis has shown himself to be the fascist that TrumpClown merely played at being in between peeks at the mirror.
Of course, the fascist party would then simply turn to another fascist. The bench is deep in that single regard
ETA: looks like lowtech and I are both made uneasy by the perception that they can substitute DeSantis for Trump in a single week of news cycles. It’s really the best way to dismiss any upcoming indictment(s) as “old news that the American People are tired of hearing.”
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Nah, demolish him. Hopefully, with the justice system.
Betty Cracker
Looks like at least some MSM outlets are determined to frame TFG’s comeback attempt in the contemptuous manner it deserves. Take a look at these ledes:
Better late than never?
Baud
@hueyplong:
Yep, no non-fascist had a chance at the GOP nomination. I don’t think any other Republican can create the mindless populism that Trump did between 2016 and 2020, and I don’t think any other Republican would invite Putin to the US for a victory tour. But the battle is far from over.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Or they got the memo from the GOP that the party wants to turn the page.
Splitting Image
@Betty Cracker:
The New York Post’s online header is about Ivanka skipping her dad’s announcement and doesn’t even mention him by name. The print edition reads “Florida Man Makes Announcement” and refers you to page 26.
kalakal
Went out to watch, sadly too much cloud.
Still made me so happy watching the live feed
Matt McIrvin
Assuming that Trump is just going to sabotage the Republican field and make things easy for us smells way too much like 2016 for my blood. Trump can go all the way again and we have to treat that as a real danger. Look at the hypnotic hold he seems to have over Haberman just by successfully reading a sentence off a prompter.
My guess is this episode of the Republican Party turning the page is going to last maybe another week before they go Trump-nuts again.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Depends on how the base reacts. They want to win and if they think Trump is a loser, they’ll move on.
Agree about not being blasé.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud: Well sure, with the justice system.
But given how the MSM has been fellating DeSantis so far, let’s just say I’m nervous about a field consisting of DeSantis and a bunch of comparatively minor candidates.
Looks like they’re finally turning on Trump just in time to clear DeSantis’ path. I really don’t like the way this is shaping up.
Betty Cracker
@Splitting Image: Ouch! Murdoch really IS done with the dissipating orange fart cloud.
PS: Thanks for the NY Post link; I’d forgotten how much fun horoscopes can be. ;-)
brantl
@Betty Cracker: All but one, JD Van(c)e.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Some awful person is going to win the GOP nomination. I’m not going to spend the next two years fretting over which one.
Baud
@brantl:
Was he an election denier?
Betty Cracker
@lowtechcyclist: I’m similarly conflicted because I’ve seen first hand how DeSantis can build a cult following despite having the persona of an enraged, power-mad vice principal at a failing evangelical charter school. But I take hope from the midterm elections, which tell me America isn’t on the same page as Florida. May that continue to be so.
Mimi
@Baud: this
brantl
@Baud: I think he soft-pedaled it.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I think it’ll be interesting to see how much of the DeSantis cult is derivative of the cult mentality among the GOP that Trump fostered. Can DeSantis maintain it if he’s competing against Trump or if Trump washes out early?
I also wonder who else in the GOP will take on DeSantis.
hueyplong
My take is that they couldn’t afford to get after Trump until his mindless minions voted in the midterms. Once FoxNews and the rest decide it’s go time, I’m thinking they’ll be motivated to remove him from front and center quickly so as to render the criminal investigations/trials something they can ignore without so much as pretending to “cover” them.
The thing to watch for is statements that, for better or for worse, Trump’s “policies” were great, they assure his rightful place as a great president, and they should continue. So the early buzz word is “policies.”
Once Trump is safely out of the way, the buzz word is “continue” or “continuation” as in, [DeSantis or some other thug] will continue the work begun by Trump.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Betty Cracker:
The Totebagger Radio headline is downright stunning for them. I’m guessing the regular editors have the week off. Heads will roll when they get back.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
That Fox News would repeatedly put him in the background while their talking heads rambled says to me that either he’s circling the drain, or Murdoch wants him circling the drain.
I think his support is much softer than it once was. The crowds at his rallies have been diminishing. For the past year and a half, I’ve figured that Trumpism would roar on past Trump, and I’m more worried about Trumpism than Trump.
Trump may still be a force to be reckoned with, but especially after this midterm, my take is that we know how to attack him and beat him. We don’t know that about DeSantis yet, and we can count on getting less than zero help from the MSM.
Steeplejack
Florida Man in the news!
BlueGuitarist
Trump Failed America clip ends with offering pardons for January 6 assholes
the Constitution excludes pardons in cases of impeachment
Does Trump having been impeached for January 6 mean he can’t pardon his co-conspirators?
Thought experiment: future president impeached for hiring assassin to kill rival. Does “except in cases of impeachment” mean the president can’t pardon the assassin?
kalakal
@hueyplong: I’m waiting for “He got the big calls right”
Amir Khalid
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Two things: One, even if the artist personally owns the copyright to a song/recording, the licensing to use it in a public space is almost always handled by an organisation like ASCAP or BMI. That’s where you go for a licence to play a hit song at your shopping mall/campaign event/whatever; not directly to the artist. The Stones may hate TFG playing You Can’t Always Get What You Want, but as long as TFG has a licence there’s really nothing they can do.
Two: It’s not like TFG cares about such niceties anyway.
Splitting Image
@Baud:
Exactly this. Concentrate on locking in enough voters to defeat whoever it may be.
hueyplong
It’s possible the major media outlets have been told there will be no pushback anymore if they tell it like it is about Trump.
lowtech might be overreacting as to the net effect of it all in 2024, but is not wrong about the fact that there has been a volte-face in the way Trump is described, attended to, etc. When you see a daily bombardment of propaganda, it’s pretty easy to spot a change in it.
Don’t like interesting times. Never wanted to live in them. Daily tea reading/Kremlinology was less irritating when it wasn’t required of one of the USA’s only two major parties.
BlueGuitarist
@Steeplejack:
Ha!
Before he moved officially moved to Florida
Queens Daily Eagle, Nov. 7 2020:
headline “Queens Man Evicted”
lede
A 74-year-old Jamaica Estates developer has less than three months left at his current address after Americans overwhelmingly voted him out of the White House, the AP projected Saturday.
https://queenseagle.com/all/queens-man-loses-presidential-election-trump
MazeDancer
The hidden good news in the GOP shrinking the runoff calendar in GA, is the incredibly short amount of time you will have me spamming the threads urging you to write PostCards.
We got fresh addresses from the GA SoS. New PostCard designs free to download.
Click on my nym to get started. Warnock for the Win!
BlueGuitarist
@MazeDancer:
thanks!
Eta: love the cards
Win with Warnock!
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I’m wondering the same! Among the Republicans I know IRL, the Venn diagram of Trump and DeSantis supporters is a perfect circle. What if they’re forced to choose? I’ll have more insight after Thanksgiving, which is in wingnut North Florida this year.
Establishment conservatives seem to think DeSantis offers a way to capture the Trump populism that energized his base without all the crazy shit that goes along with Trump. But without the Trump mantle, DeSantis is basically any hard-right culture warrior — sub in that animated ham hock from Mississippi or Gregg Abbott; it’s all the same product.
My guess is someone like Chris Christie would expose that during the primary, but who knows.
Baud
Tragic, but at least WWIII has been postponed.
ETA: Good on them for honesty. We’ve had our fill of presidents who lie us into war.
Amir Khalid
@BlueGuitarist:
TFG was impeached, yes, but both times the Republican Senate caucus prevented his conviction. So he is free to run again, and to campaign on a promise to pardon the insurrectionists (ETA: whether or nothe means to keep it).
Professor Bigfoot
@brantl: I give no fucks what anyone else says or thinks, Tim Ryan fucked up by running as “conservative lite” and chasing after the ephemeral “white working class.”
They ain’t voting for “the party of Negroes,” bruh, and you need to understand that
[ed to add “yeah, i’m still salty about that.]
dww44
@Betty Cracker: well, not quite. Burt Jones was elected Lt. Gov. in Ga and he was one of the fake electors. Was quiet about it but as Lt.Gov he can mess with elections as leader in the State Senate. He should not have been on the ballot and he should be disgraced and barred from public office. He and others like him are why Democrats need parity and power here in the south. One party rule is anti-democratic.
TS
@Betty Cracker:
I wondered if the support in Florida related to the behavior of DeSantis & team after the recent Hurricane. Wandering around in his gum boots seemed to attract very positive attention. We have had similar in my part of the world when a state government won or lost an election based on their actions during and after a natural disaster. When an election comes shortly after such an event that is the main thing on the minds of many voters.
Soprano2
No lie told here. He hates the same people they hate, and gives them permission to hate openly. That’s his appeal to a lot of them.
BlueGuitarist
@Amir Khalid:
Thanks. Sure, he wasn’t convicted, and can run and promise, also as a practical matter repulsican scotus hacks will enable the pardons,
but the constitution is supposed to limit abuse of power, and there might a teachable moment re more of a limit in that “except in cases of impeachment” phrase.
I should be writing postcards,
or, doing my job.
frosty
Brilliant once again BC!
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: I expect there will be at least a couple other well funnded and credible candidates, and they will be doing their best to cut DeSantis down to size.
DeSantis might still win out, but it will likely be more like an alley fight than a waltz.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: Everything you said. The press cannot wait for him to come back, their lives were so much more exciting when they could write about him every day. I think many of them find competent government and actual policies too boring to cover. I read somewhere that a D member of the House said she came out of a hearing on an important bill where no reporters were present to see several reporters following MTG as she walked down the stairs! I think that sums up their priorities in a nutshell.
Martin
The launch was very cool, but two bits of advice for NASA:
Baud
@Soprano2:
I’m not sure the press will as interested in Trump this time around because I don’t think Trump can help with the ratings as much as he used to. A lot of regular folks have moved on from the spectacle.
Soprano2
@Baud: I sincerely hope you are right about that. IMHO their attention boosted him a lot in 2016. Maybe that’s because he was the new, exciting thing (even though he wasn’t new at all) for them to cover.
Betty Cracker
@TS: The hurricane probably gave DeSantis a boost, but the fact is, we haven’t had a Democratic governor in Florida in this century. It’s a red state. I don’t think Democrats should give up on any state, but we need to stop thinking of states like Florida and Ohio as swing states. They’re more like Texas.
sdhays
@lowtechcyclist: The story of Trump over the past 2 years has been slow, but steady, deflation. That’s been the subtext of every story, mostly unintentionally. Losing the election in 2020 and then losing access to Twitter, which made it so much easier for media organizations to enforce their own new policies on reporting on Trump, popped the balloon.
Ever since he left office in utter disgrace, he has been demonstrating weakness. If Republicans had done well in the midterms, he had positioned himself to take credit and get his mojo back. But it didn’t go that way, and now there’s enough blood in the water that he’s going to have to fight.
Fingers crossed, that fight will finally rip the Republican party apart.
OverTwistWillie
He’s out of money and got road hauled by COVID.
This should go great.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: Kinda +1
These folks will do anything for power. That’s why they tied themselves to him in the first place. They don’t care about TFG, they want the big chair (“we can make him sign anything we send him”).
There’s no One Weird Trick. Even with TFG imploding or fading away, we will still have to fight them every single day. There are too many monsters out there.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Soprano2: America was kind of drunk in 2016 and making the kind of bad hook ups drunk people do. Hopefully, we are on the path to sobriety.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty Cracker:
I’m old enough to remember the “New Nixon.” The problem is, Presidential elections aren’t just our base against their base. Each side really needs some of those people in the middle who don’t spend much time thinking about politics.
So you bet I’m worried about the campaign I expect the MSM to run on DeSantis’ behalf, where they polish him up and make him look like the greatest governor of Florida since before Europeans first stumbled across it. Meanwhile, they’ll be trying to make every bit of bad news stick to Biden, just the way they had been doing ever since the Afghanistan pullout. (I think that latter part may be tougher than they think. It only kinda sorta worked in the past year and a half, and they gave it their best shot.)
No, Baud, I’m not going to spend the next two years fretting about it, but I still want to go into the next two years with no illusions about what we might have to deal with. So you’ll have to excuse me for spending a couple hours of this one morning fretting about it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That’s what I’m watching for over the next year or so: Will his ego outweigh his sense of self-preservation?
Martin
Fox will try and downplay Trump but they’re going to A/B test the shit out of Trump and DeSantis. I give them a week before they’re back to knob slobbering the guy. Trump is guaranteed ratings, and they have no self discipline. Showtime calls the show The Circus for a reason. It will be impossible to avoid the guy.
My ask for front pagers – no posts about Trump other than those which involve his legal situation. We’re going to burn ourselves out otherwise.
OverTwistWillie
He clearly got hammered by COVID.
lee
My already low opinion of Maggie H. got lower.
I went to her Twitter feed to dunk on her about that Trump tweet and found out she limits who can reply to her.
That makes me wonder if Stephen Colbert could not ask her the one question everyone wanted him to ask.
sdhays
@Baud: It’s also difficult to overestimate the impact of Twitter. It was a very unique situation where journalists and the public had 24/7 unfiltered access to the (awful!) candidate and President. They could copy and paste, and it was a firehose of content.
Without Twitter, reporters have to report on Trump like they would any other politician. He can’t dominate and drive coverage the same at all.
Of course, Elmu’s Twitter may bring Donnie back. But I’m not sure that would be healthy for Twitter at this stage.
Dorothy A. Winsor
My son’s FIL died yesterday. If you looked at the guy’s life, you’d have expected him to be sitting in a diner telling reporters how much he loved Trump. High school education, 2 years in Vietnam, worked in the steel mills all his life. But he was a Democrat. He once told me that he looked around and realized he did better when the Ds were in office. I think he was just a smart guy who didn’t have a lot of advantages.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Betty Cracker: But isn’t the DeSantis cult more a product of the sort of self-selected in-migration that Florida has experienced for the past 15-20 years? It seems that it is the place where racist east coast and rustbelt authoritarian racists with a little money and an aversion to cold weather wander to.l anymore, now that California and the desert southwest seem to be changing.
Ken
My assumption is that TFG has some really serious, even felony-level blackmail material on Haberman. I’ll assume the same if any Republican senators (to pick an example at random) endorse his run.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Good man. We should do a better job countering the narrative that people like your son’s FIL are dyed in the wool Republicans.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: My R neighbors are fed up with Trump but seem to think DeSantis is a good substitute. “Who else do we have?” one of them asked me, meaning DeSantis was the obvious choice over everyone else
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: having lived through the meteoric rises of John Kasich and Scott Walker, that’s the kind of vibe I get from DeSantis.
If Youngkin learned anything from his foray into tuff talk about the Pelosis, and gets his Suburban Dad Fleece out of the closet (Me? A bully? Look at my fleece!), I’d put twenty bucks on him him being the front runner two years from now. But there’s a lot of road between here and there, and the first stop is Georgia in about three weeks.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
Indeed. For me, it keeps coming back to the fact that we got to the moon with quite literally 1960s technology, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal to do in the 2020s.
I’m still surprised that no other up-and-coming power over the past few decades, especially the Japanese or Chinese, hasn’t tried it just to show they belong in the top tier.
I still really don’t see why we’re doing it – what benefit we derive from putting people rather than robots on the moon. There’s much less added prestige for us doing it a second go-around, and it’s hard for me to see that the scientific benefits are all that much greater than with robots.
retiredeng
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Elton John and The Village People. Pattern?
hueyplong
@Ken: Until the contrary is demonstrated, we should all assume that anyone promoting Trump from now on is either attached at the hip (Bannon, Stone types) or subject to some severe blackmail (Graham types).
Ivanka has signaled that it’s OK to bail by doing so herself, so the bandwagoners are free to flock to Trump 2.0.
sdhays
@Martin:
Probably too much to ask because there will be lots of stories out there, but yeah, we need to pace ourselves. The media can basically only report on politics in the frame of the next Presidential race, no matter how many years in the future, but there’s plenty of much more interesting stuff happening right now.
sdhays
@hueyplong: What else is Haberman going to do? Cultivate other sources? Surely you jest.
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I don’t think Glenn Youngkin will run in 2024. He has the ambition, but Youngkin is a calculating guy and I think he’s got his eye on 2028.
The second spot on the 2024 ticket would suit Youngkin’s ambitions well, though. He’ll try to stay well positioned for that possiblity.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: They’ll have to convince Ukraine of that:
Jim, Foolish Literalist
But Pence, Pompeo and Kristi Noem make the cut! Not exactly a murderers row.
Immanentize
@Professor Bigfoot: Hmmm — didn’t know that phrase, so I looked it up:
Are you a Mainer?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: Good point. A lot these people are young enough to wait out the mess. Just checked and Chris Christie is 60. I bet he goes for it. Embalming fluid and all. Larry Hogan is 66, and I suspect all the never-trumpers are whispering in his ear.
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Was Chris Christy on the list?
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: It’s inherently very hard to put people on the Moon, or anywhere else, because of physics. There’s not the kind of Moore’s Law upside we saw with microelectronics, though obviously new tech can help us around the edges. Rockets fundamentally aren’t a lot better than they were in 1970.
I also think that when it comes to space exploration for science, the difficulties involved in sending squishy, dirty, massive human bodies outweigh the benefits. But I guess that leaves the intangible/romantic/national-prestige reasons. The price is high though.
I am also deeply skeptical of NASA’s specific strategy this time around for a variety of reasons.
Soprano2
Someone asked NPR listeners if they are still covering inflation like they did before the election. The short answer for “Morning Edition” is no. Since November 9th there have been two stories about inflation or higher prices, and both were about turkeys and Thanksgiving. I think I heard one other one, it was about whether corporations were taking advantage of inflation to raise prices more. Didn’t hear anything like that before the election.
Cameron
Sounds like most here are done with la bella Haberman.
https://youtu.be/fgphPFNiVZw
Baud
@Gin & Tonic: Ok. I certainly welcome fact-finding. I assume it shouldn’t be that hard to confirm the nature of the missile that landed in Poland.
Leto
Video of Artemis and photo’s from space, courtesy NASA: The first 4 mins of 8.8 million pounds of thrust and other cool stuff
lowtechcyclist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’d cheerfully bet my twenty against yours. I think the inability of Virginia governors to run for re-election seriously handicaps any potential Presidential aspirations they have.
I think if George Allen hadn’t committed macacacide in 2006, he’d have been the GOP front-runner in 2008. But he’d been Governor and was running for a second term as Senator at the time.
I think there’d have to be a real vacuum, like maybe Trump and DeSantis doing so much damage to each other in 2023 that neither looks good anymore, for Youngkin to stand a chance. And if that happened, it would be a crowded field.
ETA:
@Geminid:
I think you’re right about that, but I really think he needs another win unless TFG picks Youngkin as his running mate. And I don’t see him beating Warner or Kaine if he takes one of them on.
Immanentize
@Betty Cracker: Don’t you think Rick Scott wants to run? Thinks it’s his turn not DeSantis’? I guess the question is Rick vs Mitch. IIRC, didn’t McConnell say that if they lost the Senate he would not be leader again?
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think Paul Ryan is also looking at 2028. He stepped away from the mess in 2018 bcause he saw the trainwreck that was coming. I never thought Ryan was leaving politics for good, though.
Soprano2
They’re already doing stories like that about his wife. What I want to know is, where are the hagiographies about Gretchen Whitmer? She and the Democrats in Michigan pulled off quite a feat, yet you’ve heard relatively little about it compared to what you’ve heard about De Santis. So yeah, it is worrying.
Uncle Cosmo
‘Scuse me, but MAGAt Horriblewoman’s grifting model is to parlay her Access Sally credentials into an easy but profitable career and cushy retirement. She has to keep Trumplthinskin relevant or else the con evaporates & she’s covering school board meetings for the rest of her urinalistic life.
Baud
@Soprano2: Good to know. I wish someone would do a rigorous study.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children (which I’ve recommended before) has some discouragingly accurate things to say about the difficulties of “sending canned primates into space” (his words). Even the robots in that novel think space travel is shit (their words).
Ken
I think I saw one politician mention it with a special call-out of oil company record profits, but the press didn’t really cover it. I guess it wasn’t all that newsworthy. Wish I could remember the guy’s name; Boden? Bilden? Something like that.
Baud
@Ken:
Brandon.
mali muso
@MazeDancer: Writing a few postcards now before I get started at work. Every little bit helps! I recruited a like-minded co-worker and she is going to do some this week as well. :-)
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: I loved reading those!
Absolutely!
If the media nailed him with that every time they talk about him, that could make a huge difference.
Would “all publicity is good publicity” still be true if they hung the big lie, the violent insurrection and Loser stink every time they said his name?
WaterGirl
@Baud:
That’s a depressing take, but quite possibly the correct one.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: Virginia’s term limit for Governors is to Youngkin’s advantage. It makes his planning simpler and frees up time to fly around and introduce himself to Republicans nationwide. Like I said above, I think Youngkin is looking at 2028, and I bet he’s got the framework of a 5 year plan spreadsheets and all.
And since Youngkin can’t run for reelection he’ll have a perfect record of 1 and 0, and in a purple state too.
WaterGirl
@Splitting Image:
That should be a model for how to handle all of the Florida man’s announcements, stunts, and rallies.
WaterGirl
@brantl: @Betty Cracker:
All but two, I think. The other one is the AZ Attorney General race, still too close to call over a week later.
And, of course, the R election-deniers who won seats in the House. We did great, but we didn’t keep them all out.
jonas
@Betty Cracker:
And no more calling in to yuk it up on Morning Joe practically every day, either. He’s going to get *way* less earned airtime this time around.
Betty Cracker
@Martin: I won’t make that pledge, but I do promise to make any post on the subject an open thread so people can talk about whatever they want.
Leto
Lol
Frankensteinbeck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Now, Pompeo might be a serious possibility. Big evangelical cred. “America’s place in the world is a preening asshole” cred. Big “corrupt fascist” cred without being too rude about it. The evangelical support is very important in primaries and he’ll have more of it than anyone but a 2016 Trump-level hate spewer. I could see it.
It’s all reading the wind, though. Remember President Giuliani? We won’t know anything real until 2024, and that’s fine by my stress levels.
@Soprano2:
Ebola disappeared the morning after the (2012?) election. That was when I knew for sure that the national press actively tries to sabotage Democrats in elections. There’s no other reasonable explanation. Whatever story is most favorable (But Her Emails!) to the GOP leads until Nov 5.
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: If you’re actually putting “boots on the ground” somewhere, there are a lot of things you can do that currently aren’t possible or are just really slow with robots. Anywhere further away than the Moon, the light-speed communications lag becomes slow enough that a machine on the spot needs to be pretty autonomous just to survive and get things done, and our AI isn’t that great yet. So that’s an argument for sending people.
But it’s a question of whether it outweighs the downsides–it just becomes so freaking difficult. Anywhere outside Earth’s magnetosphere, which is to say above low Earth orbit, is lacking a lot of radiation protection–NASA is lucky that even the Apollo Moon astronauts were never fried by a solar flare. The long-term effects of weightlessness on the body, if we want to go somewhere like Mars, are generally bad, though at least they’re well-characterized by now thanks to long-term space-station missions. These are all addressable challenges, but they make it hard and expensive.
Ken
Like Weisselberg’s testimony yesterday? Which, I strongly suspect, determined the timing of TFG’s “big announcement”.
Betty Cracker
@lowtechcyclist: Yep. If DeSantis or any other relatively youthful fascist is Biden’s opponent, I expect the MSM coverage to center entirely on the age difference.
MisterDancer
Similar to Betty — I try, REALLY HARD, to avoid talking about Trump directly, but some stuff might come up that I think is worthy of the time. I can say I’ll try for an angle/approach that I think is not served elsewhere.
jonas
Hmm. Is the Murdoch empire starting to turn on Trump? I’ve been reading various rumors for a while now that they really want to cut the tangerine buffoon loose and pivot to DeSantis, but don’t want to be too obvious about it.
Baud
@Ken:
First I’m hearing of it.
mrmoshpotato
LMAO!
Soprano2
@Baud: I do too, because my perception could be completely wrong, but before the election it seemed that every day they were doing a “person on the street” type of story where they talked to ordinary people about how high prices were affecting their lives. My objection isn’t to the coverage, it’s to the “bothsides” thing of what they said was causing inflation. I think NPR is better than most, but even they gave some credence to the Republican framing that Biden and Democrats and the March 2021 Covid bill was what caused inflation. Sometimes they would mention that it was a world wide problem that is a lot worse in most other countries, but lots of the time they never said anything about that, leaving the listener thinking it was just an American problem.
jonas
@Betty Cracker:
“While the Republican candidate’s remarks that ‘America would soon be awash with the blood of his enemies’ and that concentration camps have ‘gotten a bad rap’ in history books raised eyebrows, some are asking if Biden is too old to respond to this effectively…”
MazeDancer
@Baud: You’re right. Media has definitely dumped Trump.
Soprano2
@Ken: The story on NPR was specifically about food prices, and how companies were open on their earnings calls about how they were taking advantage of inflation to raise prices! I didn’t hear NPR cover that before the election, although I knew about it from other news sources online. The thing is, what they cover and how they slant the coverage is their choice; they don’t have to “bothsides” every damn thing. As for that “Brandon” guy, most of the press think he’s boring and don’t want to talk much about the things he says for some reason.
mrmoshpotato
@Martin:
Faux News also has no self-respect.
Kay
Fetterman was able to shave R margins in lower income white suburbs and rural areas. However- I think Whitmer and Shapiro probably did too (they had to or they would have won by 1 or 2).
Interestingly, Fetterman was NOT able to improve with these folks:
The truly unreachable Trump voters- financially comfortable salespeople.
Baud
@Soprano2:
I object to the coverage to the extent I saw essentially the same inflation story repeated every day, even where the content of any one of those stories was unobjectionable.
OzarkHillbilly
Not me, I’m hoping to maintain comfortably numb.
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: On the other hand, I would like a bloody fight between Florida guy and DeathSantis. (virtually speaking, of course)
MazeDancer
@mali muso: Bringing people to the PostCard fun! Yay, you!
MisterDancer
Good point. And yeah — I’m on the record, and nothing in the last month or so since I posted up about DeSantis has changed my mind.
He’s really, really dangerous. We’ll see how the spotlight treats him, but the kind of people lining up behind him – and his “creeping authoritarian” approach to “governance” — is deeply concerning.
Soprano2
@Frankensteinbeck: I remember that well, for weeks Ebola was a major threat to the U.S., then suddenly *poof* it disappeared from the news without a trace, strangely enough the minute Republicans stopped talking about it.
jonas
@Soprano2:
Indeed. And nary a word in *any* major outlet about how this was a major contributor to inflation over the past several years. And Republicans want to turn it up to 11 as soon as they have a chance.
Soprano2
@Baud: Yeah, but I understand that they had to cover inflation because it is an issue right now. I hate how they don’t talk about the actual causes of inflation, but instead to the lazy “Dems say this, Repubs say that” kind of stuff. I think one story a week would have been plenty, rather than every damn day having the same story over and over.
Geminid
@Frankensteinbeck: One thing I keep in mind with Pompeo is his Koch connection.
When Pompeo left the Army he and three partners bought an aviation compenents company in Wichita Falls, Kansas, and the purchase was financed in part by the Kochs.
Wichita Falls is the headquarters of Koch Industries, and within a few years Pompeo became Congressman for the district. Pompeo was the Koch’s “blue eyed boy,” and if he runs I expect he’ll not lack for money from that network.
jonas
@Kay:
And probably the most ethically shady as well. They see themselves reflected in Trump.
Soprano2
@jonas: Interesting that someone actually wrote about that. In all of the stories I heard about how to tame inflation, it was rare to hear “raising taxes” mentioned as a possible cure.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Agreed, and then of course there’s the mother of all bullshit scare narratives they cooked up- the national security threat posed by improper email storage practices.
The minute Hillary Clinton was gone- poof! – disappeared. So we’re absolutely justified in watching them and being aware of their propensity to promote these scares. There’s a history. Past performance often indicates future performance.
JMG
It’s going to be a long wait, as in forever, before there are many stories in the media on “how our large advertisers (donors in NPR’s case) are a primary cause of inflation.”
Splitting Image
Update: Here is the NY Post story from page 26. Link goes to an image of the page posted on Twitter.
It is delightful to watch.
Layer8Problem
@Ken:
He might, but it’s not necessary. Whatever talents she may have as a wordsmith, she still looks like someone who got into the Trump grift via her Trump publicist mom while working at boldfaced-names-crazed places like the New York Post, the Daily News, and Politico, and finally got her berth at the Times because she was Clyde Haberman’s little girl.
He certainly may have blackmail material on others; we can probably thank Roy Cohn for instilling that as part of all the big mobsters’ and machers‘ toolkits.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Same here. In Obama’s first term the drumbeat was about the deficits and debt. Have you noticed that they don’t bring that up anymore because Biden has reduced the deficits and paid down our debt.
In terms of financial indicators Bill Clinton’s presidency was a win-win for everyone but the MSM hates him.
Conclusion: The MSM has a thumb on the scale for our opponents. The financial indicators are just another stick to beat D presidents with. If the economy is doing well and none is available they will invent one.
Kay
@jonas:
I think so too. They’re also marinated in “if you can dream it, you can do it!” woo woo – there’s like a wholly money based sales “religion”, using “affirmations” like people use prayers.
danielx
@Matt McIrvin:
Well, it IS a skill he doesn’t practice very often.
Layer8Problem
@Soprano2:
NPR: “Our work here is done.”
hueyplong
@Kay: In the movie “The Big Short,” the two mortgage brokers they talk to during the Florida investigation are my vision of the salesman Trump fanatic.
Yutsano
AL, did you post this last night?
Soprano2
Yeah, they never noticed that TFG’s people routinely used personal e-mail and personal devices to communicate about government business – it was only for Hillary that this was a major scandal, for some reason. Just yesterday the MO AG’s office was fined by the courts because Josh Hawley improperly kept e-mails sent when he was AG secret to help his 2018 Senate campaign. The coverage of that will be barely a blip, and then it’ll be gone.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: Somebody tweeted that asking MAGAts to support Desantis is like asking Dead-Heads to follow the Eagles.
So long as Trump is alive I can’t really see much of his 30% hold on GOP voters slipping for any reason.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: To some extent the double standard is because of the “man bites dog” bias of news–Democrats are supposed to be smart and careful and competent, so when they’re not, that’s big shocking news, whereas Trump never promised you anything but a clown show, so if he’s bad about information security that’s just Tuesday.
UncleEbeneezer
Weather looks like it is going to be a big storm when we were planning on camping in Yosemite, so we are probably gonna have to bail on another vacation. On the upside, we are now seriously talking about finally visiting Hawaii (Kona) in January which would be super-cool especially since my wife has never been there.
Soprano2
Got a notification of this story. I know HOA’s have a rationale, but too many of them are just nasty dictatorships that live to pick at the residents. Now, one has stolen millions from their members. https://wsvn.com/news/local/miami-dade/5-members-of-hammocks-hoa-charged-with-theft-accused-of-stealing-2-million/ Of course, it’s Florida.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: Sure, but it was also the people around him who were supposed to be more competent who were doing it, and there was barely a peep from the press about how it was a security problem.
Kay
@hueyplong:
One of my sister in laws is one. She sells real estate in Indianapolis. It’s like talking to a religious fanatic, except money is the God.
Scout211
On to more interesting topics (at least to me) since Trump (to me) is kind of boring. Overnight news about the Elon saga:
Kay
@Soprano2:
I just don’t understand how Andrea Mitchell or Jake Tapper sleep at night now that the grave national security threat posed by Hillary Clinton- style communication management practices are going unmonitored by the New York Times.
Why is it not a threat when other people do it? Because they wildly inflated that story and flogged it for 2 years? So we should watch for more of that. There’s a history of poor quality work.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: The Hillary Clinton emails story was also one of those “motte and bailey” things–for Trumpists, the story was never really that she was practicing bad information security, it was that the secret emails hid evidence of some unspecified terrible crimes, maybe a conspiracy in the Benghazi attack or harvesting babies’ blood or something. The information-security angle was the respectable cover for the conspiracy speculation, but the crazy angle was what kept people fascinated by it.
Avalune
@Kay: Fetterman had the full support of the AFT. Shapiro technically did also; however, many members, particularly at a PA community college indicated they would not stomach Shapiro because he torpedoed a contract AFTER the contract was already agreed to because the raise percentages didn’t line up with the paltry ones he’d given the county. Consequently, since then, this college has never been able to negotiate much of a raise regardless of inflation or other factors.
I think if Mastriano had not be so unpalatable – Shapiro would have had a harder time.
Kay
Sherrod will run in 2024. To the surprise of no one.
He’s an incumbent and it’s a Presidential year, so that’s two advantages Ryan didn’t have. Still tough.
Betty Cracker
@Kay:
It’s fascinating to me how many of the insurrectionists fit that description too. One of the Florida Oath Keepers, Kelly Meggs, lived a couple of towns over from me. Before he was jailed for seditious conspiracy, he was general manager of Honda of Gainesville!
Kay
@Avalune:
Agreed. Shapiro had an opponent who was easier to beat than Fetterman did. That’s also true of Whitmer.
Leto
@Scout211: here’s one Twitter engineers assessment. Idk if she still has a job, but it’s funny as hell.
JWR
I’m not up on the comments, so this may have already been mentioned downthread.
@Betty Cracker:
Sadly, no, but you’re right about most or all of the high-profile candidates. From CBS:
Now back to playing comment catch-up.
zhena gogolia
@JWR: But how many of those are in swing states?
Leto
@Scout211: also this is just pathetic, but on brand:
Also that woman hasn’t been fired, yet, but jesus the simp dudes coming after her are something.
Matt McIrvin
@JWR: Lots of incumbent red-state Republicans who jumped on the Trump election-denial bandwagon got reelected easily. The ones who didn’t were largely the swing-state challengers and non-incumbents who made election denial central to their brand, especially the ones who were running for offices like state secretary of state where they could futz with elections.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@UncleEbeneezer: Madame and the kid are flying back from Hawaii tonight. Just a 4 day stay on Oahu.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Splitting Image: And what a lovely snarky piece it is.
“In a move no political pundit saw coming, avid golfer Donald J. Trump kicked things off at Mar-a-Lago, his resort and classified-documents library.”
Nelle
@Geminid: Wichita? Wichita Falls is in Texas.
Booger
Well, bless NASA’s heart, that’s just a sweet little space ship they sent up, but it’s no Sea Dragon…
Frankensteinbeck
@Scout211:
I don’t know whether he’s stupid enough to know this is an absolutely disastrous action or not. I lean to “He thinks he works this hard and is issuing an inspiring call to top performers rather than offering everyone a chance to quit this Hellscape company with 3 months pay.” I’m pretty sure he thinks he works 80 hours a week. A lot of these rich dumbasses do, adding in every conversation they have with anyone in any way related to their business, the hours in-between, vacations that they can describe as ‘business trips’ because of one meeting…
Regardless, this is an insane action. I believed he would destroy Twitter physically through mismanagement before he managed to do it financially, and it looks like I’ll be right.
mrmoshpotato
@Leto: Wow. To call him a whiny ass titty baby would be an insult to actual babies.
James E Powell
@Baud:
I would prefer to see the two main awful Republicans go after each other. I see no reason for us to do DeSantis any favors. I may live to regret saying this, but I don’t see any way Trump could win again. He only just barely got in the first time because he was running against a woman and a woman who was despised by the political press.
Any Non-MAGA Republican who runs as the “reasonable Republican” will do about as well as Matt Dolan did in the Ohio senate primary.
Barbara
@sdhays:
Ding ding ding we have a winner. Seriously, Trump makes Haberman special if not quite indispensable. Also, I assume that Trump’s goal with announcing his candidacy is pretty simple as well — that it dawned on him as his original candidacy took hold that there is no grift that is quite as simple as political grift. People just give you money without putting any strings on it — and enforcement of the rules is, well, not his problem. If it becomes an issue he will figure out how someone else can take the fall.
catclub
@Betty Cracker:
Not Yet. Only if Hannity is saying the same thing as the POST
Avalune
@Leto: I’ve been watching this. Pretty amusing from Mr. FREE SPEEEEECH FIRST AMENDMENT WAIT NO NOT TO BE MEAN TO ME!!!
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: I think there’s a lot of value to returning to the moon, but not in the way we’re doing it.
In the 60s it was just a straight up power move – we can do this, you can’t. If we could extract some other value out of the effort we did, but none of it was really seen as infrastructure building. There was an effort to pivot to that, but Nixon decided that the power move was over, and he didn’t want to pay for it. Out of the ashes of that came the Shuttle program which was sort of a hybrid of infrastructure building and power move.
The problem with SLS is it’s not infrastructure building. It’s not durable. The US is not going to drop a billion or two per launch and create anything of value. Sure, there’s the lunar gateway, but it’s not really building to anything.
SpaceX is building the more durable path with reuse. I’m not saying they are actually interested in building something durable, just that reuse is now a necessary component in that path due to the reduced cost and more importantly eliminating the need to build. The next launch isn’t planned until mid-2024 because we won’t have another rocket until them. Reuse more than saving money allows cadence. SpaceX is launching every 5 days now. They have up to 5 launches scheduled for the next 2 weeks.
This current plan is neither infrastructure nor power move. It’s just a tepid ‘uh, we should do something guys’ out of Congress.
Geminid
The Kansas state motto is “Ad Astra” and the post’s title prompted me to look up a couple Kansas races.
There was very good news in the 3rd CD. Two term incumbent Sharice Davids won handily, by 35,000 out of 300,000 votes cast, or 54.9% to 42.8% (a Libertarian got 2.3%). This was a rematch, and Republicans thought the redrawn district would give Amanda Adkins a fighting chance. Davids is a talented and very hard working woman though, and 3rd District residents must like what she has shown them.
The Governor race was a close call. Laura Kelly won by 14,200 votes, 479,000 to 465,000 (with 99% of votes counted). An Independent and a Libertarian received 19,753 and 10,659 votes respectively.
Geminid
@Nelle: Yes, Wichita Kansas. Thank you for the correction!
Ken
@Leto: The Elon fans provide enough material for several PhD dissertations. It has been fascinating to watch them scramble to hail his genius, even when he is reversing the policies they were lauding just a day or two before.
Kay
Pro publica has audio of far Right lawmakers planning how best to control every aspect of womens lives with two national anti-abortion groups:
They absolutely plan on limiting access to contraception. Women who predicted they would overturn Roe and adopt the most far Right abortion bans were arrogantly dismissed as hysterics. I assume women who actually read what these people say and know they will limit access to contraception will be dismissed too.
But they will. They say it all the time.
Kay
This is EXACTLY what pro choice people predicted when they overturned Roe and EXACTLY what the completely dishonest anti-abortion groups denied they would do. They will absolutely use womens private health information to track and investigate women and health care providers. It shouldn’t surprise anyone.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
If he brings MAGA behind him they will fall in line – because MAGA will spend money when it comes to hate and products can’t buy themselves!
Kay
I’m torn with Trump running. He’s bad for the country but good for Democrats and Democrats are the only opposition toTrump, so in that way his running is good for the country.
On balance I think it’s better he runs. He is a documented loser- lost his own re-elect and congress in 2020 and lost again in 2022 – he never shuts up, and media cover him excessively although he’s unpopular and horrible.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Layer8Problem: Yeah, she has to fluff the former guy because if he stops being a thing, she either has to find someone else who’ll give her the kind of access Trump gives her, and it has to be someone as interesting to draw those page views (no sure thing) or actually try to do some real journalism, which would be too much fucking trouble right?
Geminid
@Leto: And, in early trading Tesla stock is down 3.82% and dropping. The stock has lost 53% of its value so far this year.
I think it is still overpriced, too. I wonder, how much of that is due to Musk’s personal prestige?
sdhays
@Geminid: How much of Tesla’s price has been based on fraudulent claims about how advanced “AutoPilot” is? The reality that Musk’s promises for that technology will never come true has got to factor in as well. Without AutoPilot, Teslas are just another car with a big battery.
Yes, they’re still ahead of the competition, but they’re going to struggle to compete on that terrain. They can’t even bring a truck to market, when even Ford has already.
Ivan X
Watched the launch live last night from NASA’s feed. Really awesome, was exciting to watch it in real time!
Paul in KY
@lowtechcyclist: Agree. We need those 2 to savage each other in the primaries.
Geminid
@sdhays: Tesla is going forward in a very different market than it has faced in the last few years. Ford, GM and others intend to build EVs of comparable value and more efficiently too. I think they will.
Tesla might end up like BlackBerry, an early market leader that got left in the dust.
Paul in KY
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: Yup. How many brothers in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, etc. stayed home rather than trudge out to vote for Repub-Lite?
Pres. Truman nailed it many years ago.
Another Scott
@Geminid: Tesla has more to fear from auto makers like Mercedes and Audi than from Ford and Toyota. The cachet of having a car quicker than a Ferrari or Porsche for lots less money is their claim to fame. That won’t apply too much longer.
Elon’s killing the brands, also too.
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: They are looking for easy, man-bites-dog kind of stories. Their bosses want those stories too.
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: Agree, sad to say.
Paul in KY
@Dorothy A. Winsor: God bless him! Very sorry for your family’s loss, Dorothy.
Paul in KY
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I do think DeSatanis is a cut above Kasich & Walker. He should never be misunderestimated.
Geminid
@Another Scott: I believe that. But some people are buying Teslas because they want an EV and Tesla’s been the only game on town. Ford, GM and other non-luxury brands stand to gain these buyers. The lower sticker price will be a bonus, too.
Another Scott
A Virginia GQP state senator won a US House seat so a special election will be held on January 10.
Democrats seem to have at least one strong candidate to flip the seat (TeamD had a 1 seat majority before Kiggans resigned, and is the blue wall holding the monsters back.)
We have to fight them every single day.
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Nelle: I have been there. It’s where Shephard AFB is. The town is about 10 miles from the OK border.
Betty
@Betty Cracker: Love that description of DeSantis. Precisely this.
J R in WV
@Leto:
I would have found a fire alarm and pulled that SOB on the spot.
Keep me hostage in a ballroom against my will? There’s a legal term for that — it’s called kidnapping. And if Trump’s minions were doing it on orders, that’s a conspiracy to kidnap people. What a ton of fockery!
J R in WV
@Kay:
But, wait… wait, isn’t health information federally protected? Isn’t it a violation of law for anyone not specifically allowed in advance to see private health data?
Oh, wait. That only applies to Demoncrats, right? ChristoFascists are allowed to do whatever they want to anyone, right? That’s the American Fascist Way, isn’t it?
Never mind.
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker:
late to the thread, but OMG, laughing my ass off at this one. Betty C, your flair for invective consistently makes my day!
JustRuss
Amen. It’s already been done, what’s the point? Sending humans to the moon is orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive than robots, and there’s no real benefit.
Spend the money on high-speed rail or something else that’s cool AND useful.