Aug
15
2024

They'll Have to Make the Best of Things, It's an Uphill Climb

Prefer taxt? Here you go, from Jim Morhard at the Hill: The US space program is cratering, thanks to a leadership vacuum under Biden

Today, two astronauts, Sunita “Sunny” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, are unable to leave the International Space Station on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. They are safe for now, but after nine weeks, the space capsule in which they arrived does not appear to be reliable enough to bring them home. The choices are risky, difficult and expensive.

NASA is considering several contingency plans, but the two most obvious are either to send only two astronauts up as part of Crew-9, to allow space for Williams and Wilmore to return on the SpaceX Crew Dragon, or to risk bringing them home on Starliner. If Starliner is brought back to Earth without astronauts, it is being reported that Starliner will require up to four weeks to update and validate its software to return to Earth autonomously.

Morhard goes there: as Veep, Kamala chairs the National Space Council, and has been "glaringly absent" in that role. A delay in any risky reentry beyond Election Day would be timed to "avoid a bad day for the Harris campaign."

I have no idea if that's fair, or even true.

Also of note:

  • It's supposed to be the Live Free or Die state. Find New Hampshire in the latest rankings: State Occupational Licensing Index 2024.

    Occupational licensing affects more than 20% of workers in the United States. The extent of occupational licensing greatly differs across states. From both a research and public policy standpoint, it is important to have a comprehensive measure of occupational licensure across states and occupations.

    The table at the link ranks from highest licensing burden (#1, Texas) to lowest (#51, Kansas). NH is in a disappointingly high position, #17. In New England, we are bested by Vermont (#36), Rhode Island (#24) and Connecticut (#34). But we are slightly ahead of Maine (#10) and Massachusetts (#15).

  • Woof. Dominic Pino does a fact check and discovers More Bark than Bite from the Trump Campaign’s ‘Policy Attack Dog’.

    If J. D. Vance is really going to be the Trump campaign’s “policy attack dog,” as Audrey Fahlberg and Brittany Bernstein report, he probably should get a handle on policy.

    Let’s start with trade. He has a line in his stump speech about Kamala Harris and NAFTA. As delivered today in Michigan:

    Remember, this is the woman who voted to preserve NAFTA, to extend NAFTA, the very trade deal that sent American auto jobs to Mexico by the tens of thousands and turned American dreams into nightmares.

    Kamala Harris has hardly moved a muscle in her political life without getting organized labor’s permission. The unions opposed NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the USMCA, the new version of NAFTA that the Trump administration negotiated. So Harris opposed all three. She obviously wasn’t in the Senate in 1993 when the NAFTA vote happened, but she said in 2019 that she would have voted against it if she had the chance.

    A Vance spokesman has said previously that Vance is criticizing Harris for having voted against the USMCA, which she did as a senator in 2020. But she did that because she doesn’t support NAFTA. Despite lots of bluster from Trump, the USMCA is largely identical to NAFTA, with some modernizations for digital goods and some minor tweaks on automobiles and a few other specific categories. Because Harris opposes NAFTA, it makes perfect sense that she voted against basically-the-same-thing-as-NAFTA.

    The candidates seem to be arguing about who's more against free trade. "I am!" "No, I am!"

  • A missed opportunity. Noah Rothman details What Nikki Haley Gets Right about the Trump Campaign.

    Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley’s diagnosis of what ails the Trump campaign is simple: “Quit whining” about Kamala Harris. In a Tuesday night sit-down interview with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier, the onetime governor of South Carolina catalogued the Trump campaign’s failures since Joe Biden left the race. Her verdict establishes what may soon become the conventional wisdom that explains how Donald Trump lost a presidential race that was his to lose.

    “I want this campaign to win, but the campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes,” Haley added. It won’t win by talking about “what race Kamala Harris is,” or “whether she’s dumb.” And it won’t be won if Trump, J. D. Vance, and his allies continue to double down on appeal to voters who make up the MAGA movement. “Republicans need to be fighting for suburban women, for college-educated [voters], for independents, for moderate Republicans, and for conservative Democrats,” Haley concluded. “The American people are smart. Treat them like they’re smart.”

    Never mind treating me like I'm smart; I'd be a sucker for any candidate who didn't actively insult my intelligence.

    But I'm dubious about Nikki's claim that the "American people are smart". We certainly don't vote that way.