Tag Archives: foreign policy

US Access to Space

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Last weekend, a SpaceX rocket carrying supplies to the Space Station exploded while staging after launch. This follows an Orbital Sciences resupply rocket explosion last fall and a Russian resupply rocket failure last spring.

USAF General (Ret) William Shelton, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, is lamenting legislation barring the use of Russian rocket engines in our launchers, and his concern is sparked by those failures.

The problem, and it’s a legitimate concern, is that SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, are the only two American reliable rocket companies we have—Orbital Sciences hasn’t succeeded yet—and ULA uses those Russian rocket engines in its launchers. With the legislation, of the two rocket companies (and at least two are strongly desired for safety and redundantly assured access to space), only one will be able to fly until ULA develops another engine.

The other side of the problem, though, is that of the two current American companies, one can fly only with the engines supplied by one of our enemies. That’s not very reliable, either.

Another Reason We Need Regime Change in DC

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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Patrick Leahy sent their third letter since June calling on the DOJ to reveal its questionable cell phone surveillance policies, after yet another whistleblower allegation of abuse.

Keep doing this, absolutely. But don’t expect any answers for another several months.

We’ll need an administration from the other party before the Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch DoJ can be expected to deliver. And with that change, extended to DoJ, the present DoJ incumbents need to be haled into court and sanctioned for their willful obstruction of these investigations.

Another Faded Pink Line

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“I think it’s fair to say the parties are planning to stay past the 30th to keep negotiating as we have always said we may have to,” the US State Department official said.

Who needs deadlines?

There’s this killer [sic], too:

The final nuclear agreement is meant to block any smooth Iranian path to nuclear weapons by committing to Tehran to tight inspections and concrete measures to wind back their nuclear program for 10 to 15 years.

Not block Iran from getting nuclear weapons, only to make it more “difficult.”

Terror Sponsors

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And yet we’re going to let them have nuclear weapons.

James Clapper, DNI, has made the call.

Iran remains the foremost state sponsor of terrorism and is increasing its ability to influence regional crises and conduct terrorism. This has been the consistent view of the IC [Intelligence Community] for more than three decades.

And

Iran and Hizballah’s efforts in Syria have been instrumental in preventing the collapse of the Assad regime, which they view as critical to maintaining their “axis of resistance” against Israel and the West.

Hmm….

Personal Servers are Secure

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Sure they are. They were inside Hillary Clinton’s house, which itself was guarded by the Secret Service. Furthermore, we have it on the highest authority that there was nothing untoward on those servers. Clinton has said, after all,

I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.

Ex-UN Ambassador John Bolton had some thoughts on one thread of emails, and he disagreed with the UNCLASSIFIED marking at the bottom of the first email in the thread.

I think the information in the email is clearly classified. If I were engaged in the negotiation on that subject reporting back to Washington, my reporting cable would be classified.

They’re dealing with the possible US military operation, sensitive negotiations among NATO partners, talking about US objectives and political arrangements and possible objections to the deal from key partners so all of these at secretary of state level is extraordinarily sensitive.

Apart from hackers, the security of an email server is only as good as the security of the users of the email server. When folks send classified email, the server(s) handling it become classified, whether that was the intent or not.

Clinton is mistaken in claiming her personal server did not handle classified emails.