Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Tillis
2. Trans
3. Lawfare
4. AfD
5. Tariff
6. Generals
7. Space
1. Tillis. NC Senior US Senator Thom Tillis announced his opposition to the nomination of Ed Martin for US Attorney in DC Monday. That led to a few days of consternation before Trump pulled the nomination, replacing him with Jeanne Pirro. Tillis is channeling his inner Lisa Murkowski, deciding to be a thorn in the side. His reason for opposing the nomination is Jan 6, specifically Martin’s defense of several Jan 6 accused as a lawyer. I thought John Adams set the precedent in Mar 1770 that everyone regardless of how venal their action may be deserves proper representation. Adams famously defended British soldiers who participated in the Boston Massacre. Tillis is of the opinion that any and everyone involved in Jan 6 ought to be locked up with the key thrown away, which is what Biden Attorney for DC and the DC Circuit judges did their level best to do. And his mind is a steel trap, with about the same number of operable brain cells. As Tillis is the senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chairman Grassley was not going to being the nomination forward without his support. Tillis’ public opposition made it easy for a number of other squish senators, the usual suspects Collins, Murkowski and McConnell this time joined by Lindsay Graham to publicly oppose the nomination. The opposition was painted by the media a sharp stick in Trump’s eye. Trump pulled the nomination midweek, assigning Martin three jobs. One of them in the Justice Department looks into the weaponization of the judicial system against Trump and his supporters, something he explained to Tillis to no avail. In response, Trump appointed FNC personality former Judge Jeanine Pirro, who was harshly vocal against the Jan 6 prosecutions. Tillis quickly announced she was a good nomination and would support her even though it has been decades since she’s tried cases in open court. Tillis is up for reelection in 2026, in a race expected to be tough. That reelection bid will be even tougher after this stunt. NC has been painted as purple in recent years, usually electing a democrat governor while voting solidly for Trump in 2024.
2. Trans. SCOTUS granted an emergency request by the Trump administration that will allow them to remove active duty trams from the military. The order lifts a nationwide injunction against the action pending trial. The vote was 6-3 in favor with the three liberal women voting against DoD. Note that the injunction is aimed directly at the ability of the Executive to prepare, train and equip its forces for military action, something that neither belongs to congress nor the judiciary. SECDEF Hegseth paused all gender affirming medical procedures on Feb 7, He also stopped active recruitment of transitioning individuals into the military, which is a Good Thing as the mentally ill have no business in the military at any level, something that seems to escape the trans cheerleaders and those who traffic in and profit from the medical care (surgical mutilations and irreversible hormone treatments) demanded by the mentally ill they prey upon. This isn’t the end of the discussion, though it will go a long way to setting up the court case. Hegseth announced that DoD was going to start actively separating trans from service.
3. Lawfare. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman funded lawfare against President Trump, most recently the two E Jean Carroll cases in NYC. Hoffman laundered his money through a nonprofit named American Future Republic which in turn paid Carroll’s legal fees. Carroll won a pair of judgments in her civil lawsuits. The first was for defamation. The second renewed the defamation claim and charge of sexual abuse. The verdict in the second case was unanimous May 2023 on something that Carroll claimed to have happened some 30 years before. It took legislation by NY to change the statute of limitations to allow the sexual abuse case to go to trial. The first case was reopened in Jan 2024 with the trial once again in NYC. Another win for Carroll. Total damages against Trump are over $83 million. Both cases are being appealed. None of this happens without Hoffman paying her legal fees through a nonprofit. It turns out that funding civil suits against Trump are not the only bright idea out of Hoffman. He appears to be funding Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation claim against Fox News for supposedly stoking conspiracy theories against Smartmatic in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Fox unsuccessfully attempted to depose Hoffman who is reportedly backing Smartmatic’s lawsuit with $25 million to hopefully destroy Fox News as a business entity. If third party funded defamation lawsuits work against Trump, why not trying the same thing against Fox? Of course, none of this explains why we are actually using voting machines in the first place. Precisely what have they improved? Beter yet, why are we importing equipment used by the CIA to flip elections in other nations into the US unless they are going to be used for the same thing here? If Fox does this right, the results could be highly embarrassing, especially with a more friendly team now in charge of the spooks.
4. AfD. Speaking of spooks and lawfare, we have the German government going after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party. The most recent action was a declaration by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) that AfD was “confirmed right wing extremist.” BfV is part of Germany’s post war legacy and charged with policing adherence to the German constitution. Those that deviate from the establishment enforced status quo are investigated and / or spied upon. The background on this was AfD’s performance in the last national election becoming second largest political party and official opposition in the German Bundestag. In response to its success, the German establishment has returned to doing what got them in trouble in the 1930s, using the power of government to go after their political opposition. AfD appears to be at worst, a Reaganite response to the idiocy of the German coalition government over the last couple decades. It started in the former East Germany, and like a lot of the former Warsaw Pact nations became quite nationalist and conservative, something that was rocket fuel for its political rise. While I get the power of calling someone right wing extremist in Germany, it requires complete ignorance of the very real fact that the Nazis were socialists. It’s the second word in their party name – National Socialists. This is not the only action taken against AfD in recent months with several German states attempting to ban AfD members from serving as police or civil servants, something Harris – Biden tried to do in DoD, banning and separating Trump supporters as white supremacists. extremists and other imaginary insults to the body politic, while in fact all they really ended up being were white conservative men from the south. The Trump administration and congress have noticed the German foolishness with VP Vance, Secretary of State Rubio and Senator Tom Cotton all issuing warnings to Berlin to be careful playing their new game. We will see if they are smart enough to listen.
5. Tariff. The trade wars continued last week, with the first agreement between the US and Great Britain signed. Democrat cheerleaders in the media immediately downplayed the significance of the agreement. This reporting surprised nobody. The CCP, after hard-balling the first round of tariffs, figured they had an economic problem and decided they wanted to talk. How meaningful these discussions are is anyone’s guess, as they have been Bad Actors on international trade since Nixon went to China. Trump is the first guy who has ever pushed back, which is something they don’t understand. One outcome from the British agreement is a baseline 10% tariff declared by the WH against all nations, which seems to be the end game for all the agreements. 10% isn’t all that large for a tariff, but it will serve as a continuous reminder to all our trading partners that we are watching and will continue to watch. It also serves as a stub, an agreed upon baseline that can be changed at any time in response to little games played against American goods in the future.
6. Generals. SECDEF Hegseth announced plans for a 20% cut in the number of Generals / Flag Officers (Generals and Admirals) military-wide, which should include National Guard and reserves. I don’t know if the cuts will extend to the Senior Executive Service (SES) civilians. The 20% is a first round and should happen quickly. There is a second round of another 10% that will follow based on a reconsideration of the Unified Command Plan sometime in the near future. Note that these numbers are set by congress. Democrats, ever reminding us that they are completely out of airspeed and ideas accused Hegseth of politicizing the military. I guess they should know as they have been busy doing precisely that since 2009. The background to this is the inflation in the number of flag officers since the end of WWII. At the close of the war, there were over 2,000 Generals / Flag Officers for a force of over 12 million active troops. This is a ratio of 1:6,000. Today, we have some 900 Generals / Flag Officers for 1.3 million active troops, a ratio of 1:1,400. Has this made us a better, more effective fighting force? Hardly. Maybe it is time to consider another approach, which appears to be what the Trump team is doing.
7. Space. A few space stories this week as we await Integrated Flight Test (IFT) 9 of Starship.
- IFT 8 took place on March 6. It was the second flight in a row that the Starship upper stage exploded during its engine burn. Most of the thinking out of the SpaceX external community was some sort of vibration issue in the bay above the engine mounts and the liquid oxygen (LOX) tank above that compartment. There was a smaller community suggesting actual engine failure of one or more of the new Raptor 2s flying, though the Raptor 2s on Superheavy (booster) seemed to behave themselves. Of course, they do not burn nearly as long as the six on the Starship upper stage. To date, this is all speculation, as SpaceX has not yet published its accident investigation results.
- SpaceX does a couple live fire tests before each IFT. The test of booster went well a week or two ago. Last week’s test of Starship, not so much. The test was a 30-second-long live fire that ended with a couple flashes and what appeared to be a fire underneath following its completion. There was a boat inspecting the water around the test stand the next day. Current speculation is that an engine came apart late in the test. If so, this would be very good news, as it would be the first time they managed to reproduce something that looks like their inflight failure mode. Still, without any word from SpaceX, this remains speculation.
- SpaceX issued notices to airmen and seamen that indicate they are looking at IFT 9 as soon as May 19. We will see. They have a lot riding on getting the problem solved in a timely manner. Once they do, expect the cadence of tests this year to increase until the next snag / failure.
- The FAA approved SpaceX request to up to 50 flights / year out of Starbase in Texas. The production line and launch facilities are quickly approaching the ability to keep that cadence up over an extended period of time. SpaceX has a similar request for flights out of Cape Canaveral and are building their launch tower (known in their system as Stage 0) to support that flight rate. This will not be the only tower at the Cape.
- The final space related story is the reentry of Kosmos 482, a Venus lander launched Mar 1972. The Venera probe failed to complete the transfer burn to send it to Venus, leaving the main probe in a high Earth orbit since then. Two pieces of the stack reentered in the years after the launch. The last piece, the probe itself, finally reentered May 10 somewhere over the Indian or Pacific Oceans. Note that a Soviet Venus probe is a tough piece of equipment and likely survived the reentry. No reports of its untimely arrival in a backyard as yet.
More later –
- AG