Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. AK Primary
2. SpaceX
3. Canada
4. LA $
5. Lawfare
6. Measles
1. AK Primary. Alaska Division of Elections released its updated count for the primary. This count included absentee ballots. While few leaders shifted positions, the Election Day results of winners and losers were mostly locked in. This is the point where people start deciding to either stay in or jump out of the race based on their expectation to make the Ranked Choice final four so as to advantage or disadvantage their favorite political party. Whatever happens, it should be quite the week. Hang on.
- The two democrat frontrunners for Governor, Jonathan Kreiss-Tompkins (JKT) and Tom Begich polled the most in the governor’s race, 22.5% and 20.8% respectively. JKT was strong in Southeast Alaska while Begich was strong in the Interior. The unions decided they were going to back JKT Thursday and Begich suspended his campaign Friday.
- On the Republican side, 11 candidates split 48% of the remaining vote, with Bernadette Wilson’s ticket coming in with 10% of it. Second place finisher. Former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson was second with 8.1%. The remaining 8.7% was divided between three non-partisan / undeclared candidates, with former governor Bill Walker getting 4.5%.
- In a perfect world, now that democrats have consolidated their support behind JKT, 10 of the Republicans will drop out, pledging to support Bernadette, presenting a unified front to the union-backed democrat ticket. Not so fast, Moosebreath.
- Bronson promised a Republican District in the Kenai to drop out of the race should he not come out of the primary with the most Republican votes. He immediately reneged on the promise made in writing, with the District Chairman claiming that the pledge didn’t really mean what it said. If any Republican remains in the race, we will lose the governorship in the RCV sort after Election Day in November. Remember that the RCV sort is a subtraction problem as ballots who do not have votes on them for the remaining candidates for the next round are dropped as “exhausted.”
- For US Senate, Mary Peltola hoes an 8% lead over incumbent Dan Sullivan, 49.5% top 41.4%, with Decoy Dan Sullivan a rousing 2.5%. Fake Republican Gerald Heikes just misses the runoff with 1% of the vote. The remaining votes are divided between a second democrat in fourth place and a variety of democrats, Republicans, Libertarian, undeclared, non-partisan and Green candidates, all individually under 0.6% (collectively 5.6% of the total). Sullivan has been a pretty good US Senator. We have a job ahead of us to get him reelected, especially with a pair of fake Republicans (Decoy Dan and Heikes) either on the ballot or lurking just below the cut line.
- Monday is going to be a festive day. We will see who is willing to put the interests of the state above their own personal interests. Republicans who fail to drop out of the race for governor need to be very careful, as there will be a wide-open race to replace Lisa Murkowski in 2028, and any of these candidates whose fingerprints help elect JKT governor will end up as politically toxic as Sarah Palin became in this state. Palin’s fingerprints are on the election of three democrats to statewide office – Begich over Ted Stevens in 2008, Bill Walker over Sean Parnell in 2014, and Mary Peltola twice in 2022.
2. SpaceX. Quite the week for SpaceX. They recovered Ship 40 from a bay at Christmas Island, an Aussie territory S of Java. They announced purchase of just over 525 km2 of Louisianna swamp south of I-10 for Spaceport Louisiana, with at 10 – 12 launch / recovery towers. Their final announcement was no more Falcon 9 Starlink launches from Cape Canaveral. Clearly big things are afoot as long as the feds don’t get in the way, which makes timing of all this significant given the active obstruction of Starship development during the Biden years.
- SpaceX ended up towing Ship 40 to Christmas Island. 350 km south of Java and 1,550 km NW from Oz. The Ship was not without damage, listing a bit to one side, losing one of the forward flaps and thermal protection tiles scoured from its side by wave action and towing lines. Still, it made it. They procured the services of a semi-submersible barge, Forte, which maneuvered under the floating Ship 40. Pumped out water and rose to cradle the Ship on its deck. The trip home will take about 6 weeks. Unknown at this time whether it will be an easterly run to the Panama Canal or a westerly one south of the Cape of Good Hope. Either way, looks like this high-stakes exercise was successful.
- Second story was the announcement of Spaceport Louisiana. SpaceX purchased just over 525 km2 from Louisiana, SW of Lafayette / I-10. The plan is to build a spaceport with up to 12 launch towers, 30 flights/day. The huge footprint mitigates neighbor beefs about noise, as there is not a lot in that part of Louisiana other than water and swamp. SpaceX expects to start construction next year with the first launch in 2029. Note that Louisiana provides what their launch operation needs most, natural gas and footprint. The $100 billion project represents the largest launch complex in history. Note that in that part of Louisiana, the relationship between shoreline and land is negotiable. It is often difficult to tell the difference, and the shoreline moves around over time. The location also gives Spaceport Louisiana the ability to launch to all possible orbit inclinations from polar to equatorial.
- As SpaceX ramps up to a Starship future, so must its infrastructure. Today, there is a single operational tower, Pad 2 at Boca Chica. But it won’t be alone for long, as its tower at Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) and Pad 1 at Boca Chica both be ready for operations by year’s end. Next will be a pair of towers at Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37), both of which should be ready for launch and recovery operations next year. With 5 operational launch towers, SpaceX can manage a launch a week sometime next year.
- Now that you can launch once a week, what do you do next? You start standing down less efficient and capable Falcon 9 Starlink launches. SpaceX announced that last Tuesday’s Starlink launch was the last Falcon 9 Starlink out of the Cape. This somewhat surprising announcement was more an acknowledgement of obsolescence of Falcon 9 Starlink V2 Minis than anything else. We will see within the next couple weeks the first operational Starlink V3 launch by Starship on IFT 14. This will carry somewhere between 20 – 60 V3’s. The V3 is roughly 20x more capable than the best previous version. Do the math, and it will take a shade over 7 Starship launches to orbit the identical Starlink capability that Falcon 9 has orbited out of the Cape May 2019, over 8,600 satellites. Falcon 9 launches will continue for other customers and Falcon 9 launches will continue out of Vandenberg populating polar orbits until Spaceport Louisiana can start launching polar Starlink flights.
3. Canada. Trade negotiations broke off with Canada last week, with both sides throwing 50% tariffs on one another. Democrats were positively giddy, actively working with Canadian liberals, both using the current impasse to political advantage. As an aside, anyone remember a time when democrats didn’t back a nation that was in a dispute with the US? The breaking point came when US called Canada on allowing Chinese steel and aluminum into North America, passing it through Canada and reselling it in US markets as Canadian steel and aluminum. Canada is importing cheap Chinese metals, relabeling it or barely reprocessing it before sale, which effectively bypasses US tariffs on the metals. Current trade agreements, which have lapsed, require the metals to be melted completely before resale. Canada’s negotiators made some last minute, bad faith demands, blowing up a deal agreed upon earlier in the week. This put Trump into full trolling mode, as he renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America. I don’t think this is going to end well for the Canadian liberal government and will only serve to exacerbate separatist movements in a few western Provinces.
4. LA $. From the land of “How is this Legal?” comes a story out of LA, where Mayor Karen Bass’ Super Match Program uses taxpayer money to match qualifying campaign donations at a 6:1 ratio. A candidate qualifies for the program if they pass a threshold amount from local donors, have an opponent, participate in public debates / town halls. The maximum matchable contribution per contributor is $257, which turns into $1,799. Each candidate is limited to just over $1.5 million per election from this program. With this, democrats in LA have managed to turn local governance into the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone. They aren’t even bothering to hide their corruption anymore.
5. Lawfare. The lawfare train continued to roll last week with a pair of rulings. In the first one, SCOTUS set aside the injunction stopping all work on the WH ballroom project pending trial. This effectively allowed construction to proceed to completion. I suspect that the majority is of the opinion that the litigant does not have standing to stop the project and as such cannot show any injury should the project complete. The second is much more critical and on the fast track to SCOTUS. Judge Talwani’s TRO against USPS bar code scanning on mail-in ballot was rejected by SCOTUS a week ago pending publication of their rule. In the interim, USPS published the rule which triggered a sprint by ACLU to her courtroom to get a newer, better TRO against the new rule. She gleefully complied, cleaning up her earlier issues and carefully using the very arguments made by DoJ against them. Time is short, and this will need to be directly appealed to SCOTUS as North Carolina’s mail-in ballots are mailed Friday this week. Whether they take this up or what they do afterwards is entirely up in the air. Her action may have driven a coffin nail into the whole enterprise, at least for this election.
6. Measles. PA Governor Shapiro, up for reeelction in November played the COVID card last week, claiming the Trump administration and RFK Jr’s HHS is doing nothing about the Next Great Epidemic, this one the return of measles. Worse, the anti-vax hysteria they are pandering to has already killed two kids, one of them an infant. Hair raising stuff, right? As it turns out one of the kids was an infant who died of a ruptured spleen. No word on the second. As it turns out the county coroner disagrees with the characterization of both deaths as caused by measles. They are instead, with measles, which was the same game played by Fauci’s NIAID and CDC during COVID where anyone who died during COVID and was found to have COVID antibodies or virus in their system was counted as dying of COVID rather than with it. The infant did have measles antibodies in the system but that was not the cause of death. Shapiro defended the PA state health department as listing them as measles-associated deaths. Now, to be fair, PA does have a bit of a measles outbreak underway, with perhaps 460 cases across 31 counties with 30 or so new cases reported daily. Of course, it takes 7-10 days for an uncomplicated measles case to heal. From here, it looks like Shapiro is grandstanding during his reelection campaign using the old Fauci-written COVID playbook. I am sympathetic with the parents here, given the explosion of “recommended” vaccinations for infants to teens during the last couple decades. The current list of 90+ shots is rapidly being decreased under the RFK, Jr HHS. Some people don’t like that a lot, most of them are without children to worry about.
More later –
- AG