Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Trump’s GOP Endorsers

75 Comments

Rich Lowry has no sympathy for them:

The Republican establishment has reacted in shock and dismay at Trump’s attacks on the judge hearing the Trump University case, as if it were unaware the party had nominated a man whose calling card has been out-of-bounds, highly charged personal attacks on his opponents.

It must have missed it when he took shots at Ben Carson’s Seventh Day Adventism. It wasn’t watching TV that time when he doubted that Mitt Romney is a Mormon. It put it out of its mind that one of his main arguments against Cruz was that he was a Canadian ineligible for the presidency, and that he liked to sneeringly let it drop every now and then that Cruz’s real name is Rafael. Trump’s suggestion that Cruz couldn’t be an evangelical Christian because of his Cuban ancestry and his Dad might have been involved in the Kennedy assassination must have been similarly memory-holed. And Trump’s birtherism? Hey, who hasn’t harbored suspicions that the president might have been born in Kenya and covered up his secret with a fraudulent birth certificate?

If Trump didn’t call Curiel a Mexican unworthy of hearing his case, you’d almost wonder what had knocked the candidate off his game. But the Republican establishment seems to have believed that it had an implicit pact (unbeknownst to Trump) that he could have the party so long as he didn’t embarrass it too badly.

The breach in this imaginary agreement has occasioned epic ducking and covering. The new equivalent of medieval scholastic philosophers are the Republican senators insisting on heretofore unnoticed distinctions between different levels of support for a presidential candidate.

I share his lack of sympathy.

Business, Media Criticism, Space

Patti Grace Smith

13 Comments

I don’t see anything on line about it, but I’ve been informed by a mutual friend that she has died from pancreatic cancer. It’s kind of a shock, because I was at a workshop in DC with her in March, and I saw her at the National Space Symposium in April, and had no idea that she was ill. She was George Nield’s predecessor at FAA-AST, and a good friend to commercial space.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Here’s the story at Space News.

[Afternoon update]

[Thursday-morning update]

Here’s the obit at the New York Times, but I don’t think this is correct:

Appointed in 1998 to a newly created post, Ms. Smith was the first person to head the Federal Aviation Administration’s agency for commercial space transportation.

This implies that she was the first head of the office, but the post had been “newly created” five years earlier, when Gore demoted OCST and moved it under the FAA. Frank Weaver was the first head of the office.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s Jeff Foust’s piece. I don’t understand what Jim Muncy means when he says she was the first “real Associate Administrator.” That she was more pro-active than Frank?

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