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Alessandra's avatar

Thanks for the moving music, brings tears st times like these, and as for press coverage of these briefings, I personally cannot be the only person who finds them so offensive , the sounds of that man reading so much as the phone book so repugnant, I quite literally run for the remote, and then go doing something life affirming like taking out the trash or scrubbing toilets.....

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Theodora30's avatar

The networks also refused to show Obama’s immigration reform speech live because it was deemed “too political”. No double standard here.

Off topic but I just finished reading David Ignatius’s article about Trump’s new Space Force. Call me crazy but it sure seems that Ignatius is acting like a cheerleader not a journalist. He describes how the Air Force chief of staff “...said that a key moment on his “journey” to embracing the new force came when he visited Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and talked with a group of young officers training for space operations. He asked how many favored a separate service, and every hand went up but three.” What a shock! People who volunteered for the new Space Force say it should be a separate force? That settles it, then.

Ignatius also describes how the new chief assured him our new military branch will be lean and agile, clearly not wasteful and expensive the way the other branches are. Then he goes to tell us that the space business is really hot right now and that:

“ One creative idea is allowing lateral transfers from the space business — recruiting a vice president at a fast-growing technology company, say, to become a part-time colonel, sharing his expertise.”

What could possibly go wrong if we let corporate executives become temporary officers? They won’t have any incentive to advocate for their own company’s goods and services so that they will get rewarded after they return to that company, right? And we all know that if the Space Force starts out small it will stay that way.

Ignatius describes the threats we face in space from Russian and China. He tells us that in March the Space Force deployed its first offensive weapon, a jamming system. That seems a bit odd since the Space Force is launching this week. Are we supposed to believe that this weapon was developed overnight? Or that before this we had no defensive or offensive capability in space? Clearly the Air Force Space Command, which has existed since 1981, was the entity that developed and deployed this weapon. The Space Command has been doing this kind of thing for years.

Ignatius offers no proof that our existing Space Command is too expensive, inefficient, inept, etc. and therefore needs to be replaced. Instead he gives readers the clear impression that because Trump has gotten his Space Force we will finally be protected.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/with-its-first-graduates-the-space-force-is-ready-to-launch/2020/04/16/df07d7b6-801e-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html#comments-wrapper

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