…makes her first foreign-policy speech.
She is one of the most, if not the most impressive and clearest speakers in the race. As Andrew notes, she handles herself and unscripted questions very well, no umms or aahs.
NASA Advisory Council, Day Two
I’m going to switch from listening to NTSB meeting to hear the status on exploration systems at 9 AM PDT. Phil McAlister will be discussing Commercial Crew status later this morning. I would note that in this morning’s meeting in the House, Chairman Culberson was very enthusiastic (as expected) about the Europa mission, but he still insanely imagines that SLS is the solution to it.
The NTSB Meeting On SpaceShipTwo
I’m listening in live now, but Leonard David already has a story up.
[Update a few minutes later]
Doug Messier has the executive summary. Full report won’t be available for a couple weeks.
[Update a while later]
Temporary adjournment to wordsmith final findings. Sumwalt wants to make clear that while it was pilot error (Finding 1), it was an institutional failure at Scaled that made it possible for such an error to be catastrophic. There also seems to be some (IMO, undue) criticism of FAA-AST, and talk of “political pressure” to prematurely issue licenses/waivers. People (including NTSB) need to understand that AST currently has no statutory authority to regulate safety of the spaceflight participants, including crew, and they are chronically under-resourced to carry out the responsibilities that they are authorized to do. In fact, George should be careful what he wishes for, because if the learning period expires this fall, he still won’t have the budget he needs to expand his authority.
One thing that’s not clear yet (to me): If part of the problem was inability to read instruments due to vibration under thrust. If there was a digital readout, that (and other critical information) should be replaced with an actual Mach meter.
[Late-afternoon update]
Here‘s Jeff Foust’s report.
Live In NH, NV, NY Or MO?
The first panel features four senators — Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Dean Heller, R-Nev.; and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H. All four were original sponsors of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act introduced in 2014, and all four are sponsors on the updated version introduced earlier this year.
CASA will surely be the focus of their panel, which is a shame because the bill is devoid of due process protections for accused students. When the bill was first introduced in 2014, I sent six questions to each of the original sponsors. Of the four sitting on the panel this Wednesday, only Ayotte’s office responded — and the response ignored a question about due process. A series of follow-up questions were never answered.
Neither Heller nor McCaskill’s office ever responded to the original questions. A staffer from Gillibrand’s office called me back but was uninterested in answering questions; instead, the staffer merely gave me an overview of the bill. . . .
Those are the eight people who will be addressing campus sexual assault on Wednesday. It is highly unlikely that even one of them will suggest that the draconian measures being thrust upon universities are fundamentally unfair and biased. Not one person is there to suggest that maybe colleges shouldn’t be adjudicating felonies. Not one person is there to suggest that if colleges do continue to adjudicate felonies, then they need to provide students the same protections an actual court of law would provide.
If you wanted to destroy academia, you couldn’t do a better job of what these people are doing. I expect this kind of thing from the Democrats, but it’s sad to see that, apparently, neither party gives a damn about actual justice or due process.
The Left
…embraces the logic of fascism.
No surprise to anyone familiar with the history, since fascism is leftism.
Light Posting
I’ve been on a telecon all day on the NASA Advisory Council meeting at JPL. Some very interesting discussion on launch and technology issues. I’m generally impressed with the tech plans, except for the absence of serious ISRU.
El Nino
It’s refreshing to see an AP/NYT story that doesn’t try to blame it on SUVs.
Politicos Put Graft Before Progress
While this is a good general topic, nowhere is it more true than in human spaceflight:
Sometimes the new competition wins anyway. Uber has been good at generating a large base of mobile customers, then using them to pressure politicians: When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio went after Uber, Uber used its app to let its users pressure de Blasio.
Happy Uber customer Kate Upton weighed in, producing more pushback than de Blasio could withstand — especially when it turned out he’d gotten over $550,000 in donations from taxicab interests.
Other services aren’t so lucky, and the ability to do an end run around regulators, though welcome, isn’t universal. And if, on top of setting up your lemonade stand, you need licenses, permits, lobbyists and subsidies to make it, not many new lemonade stands will get started. That’s good news for existing lemonade stands, and for the politicians they support, but it’s bad news for everyone else.
Including people who actually want to affordably accomplish things in space.
The Coming Democrat Implosion
Kurt Schlichter agrees with me that the Dems should be more worried about another 1968 than the Republicans should be about a repeat of 1992. I disagree with this, though:
Back in 1968, the Democrat Party was divided between liberals who loved America and
liberalsleftists who hated everything about it. The situation is a little different now, with today’s Democrat Party divided betweenliberalsleftists who hate everything about America andliberalsleftists who really, really hate everything about it.
Fixed it for him.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a nice summary:
Nineteen sixty-eight was the year normal Americans saw the Democrats for what they were, and that’s the danger for them in 2016 too – that normal Americans will be reminded about what a circus of welfare-chiseling, race-obsessed, work-averse, baby-shredding freaks the Democrat party is.
I hope so.
Hillary’s Email Plot Thickens
Yes, they never should have been sent on a private system. And despite her deepening troubles, she continues to obfuscate and lie:
“We all have a responsibility to get this right, I have released 55,000 pages of emails, I have said repeatedly that I will answer questions in front of the House committee,” Clinton said at her address in New York, where she outlined a tax plan and endorsed New York’s move toward a $15 minimum wage.
“We are all accountable to the American people to get their facts right, and I will do my part, but I will also stay focused on the issues,” added Clinton, who let her frustration with the stories show.
Even ignoring the fact that (for no good reason whatsoever) she didn’t turn over the emails, but printed pages (making them difficult to search), whenever someone (and particularly a Democrat, and even more particularly a Clinton or a Clinton defender) tells you how many “thousands” of documents they’ve “turned over,” it is to deflect from the number of the documents that haven’t been turned over, and that in many cases have been deliberately destroyed. They think we’re stupid, and sadly, in many cases, too many are. And right on cue:
Democrats rallied to Clinton’s defense, characterizing the referral from the federal watchdogs as routine.
This would be hilarious if it weren’t so criminally corrupt, and this unqualified liar wasn’t still in a position to become president. Matt Welch (no Republican he) calls it like it is:
In sum, the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential frontrunner brazenly violated government transparency policy, made a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act, placed her sensitive communications above the law, and then just lied about it, again and again. Now comes word that, unsurprisingly, two inspectors general are recommending that the Department of Justice open a criminal inquiry into the matter. One of their findings was that the private server, contrary to Clinton’s repeated claims, contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.”*
So how much do Democrats value basic transparency, accountability, and honesty in their presidential candidates? Not bloody much, if you go by the handy polls over at RealClearPolitics. The six national polls taken this January and February, before the email scandal first broke, averaged out to a whopping 43 percentage-point lead for Hillary Clinton. How about the next six, in March and April? Plus 50. The 11 polls in May and June, when Berniementum first started sweeping the country, came in at +48, and the most recent five in July stand at +41.
Do Democrats have any aversion left to Nixonian non-transparency, which had been so anathema to them during the presidency of George W. Bush? Here’s a possible bellwether: Key Nixon-administration turncoat John W. Dean, who wrote a 2004 book entitled Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, reacted to the latest Clinton story by tweeting “Leaking This Makes It Pure Politics,” and “GOP Behind False Charges In NYT. It’s gonna be a long 16 months.
They don’t care about honesty, they don’t care about transparency, they don’t care about integrity. They care about nothing but continuing their power over our lives. At some point, we will rebel, and it won’t be pretty for them, or for the country.
[Update a few minutes later]
Parsing Clinton: What is she hiding?
Clinton has put herself in a box. She can either hand the server over to an independent third party, who would protect her private email and our government’s working email. Or she can stonewall.
The latter course gives every voter the right—and every self-respecting journalist the responsibility—to ask, “What were you hiding, Hillary?”
What are you hiding?
While it’s nice to see that Ron Fournier has finally turned, the Republic continues to have a paucity of “self-respecting journalists.”
[Update a few minutes later]
Andrea Mitchell: “The media underestimated the impact of the Clinton email scandal.” No, as is pointed out, hacks like Andrea Mitchell overestimated their ability to make it go away by pretending it didn’t exist. As with the IRS scandal.