Worked for Gerry Ford, ran 2 Campaigns against Reagan
Treasury Secretary under Reagan (tax reform)
Chief of Staff for Reagan
Dissolution of Soviet Union under Bush
Campaign operative for George W. Bush, etc
Slogan: Don’t start any fights you can’t win.
Florida Recount
It was a political event with legal elements
The Willy Horton Ad:
I told them to stop running it (after several weeks)
I don’t know if it was Identity politics.Scapegoating
After Reagan did poorly, people were looking for a whipping boy and they wanted to fire __________.
After the Soviet Union, don’t know why the relation soured, but maybe it was good local politics to blame the US.
Trump’s Immigration Scapegoat
The diversity visa program is far from the main terror threat.
So it’s unfortunate and counterproductive that President Trump’s first instinct has been to politicize the tragedy by blaming—what else?—immigration.
.. He then shot off a barrage of tweets blasting the lottery, which he called a “Chuck Schumer beauty,” singling out the Senate Democratic leader. “We are fighting hard for Merit Based immigration, no more Democrat Lottery Systems. We must get MUCH tougher (and smarter),” Mr. Trump tweeted.
.. While we’re all for better vetting of immigrants, and monitoring of terror risks, the sad reality is that a radicalized U.S. citizen could also have committed the attack.
.. Chained family migration favors countries in Latin America while a disproportionate number of Chinese and Indians have immigrated on employer-sponsored visas.
.. Lottery winners make up less than 5% of the total legal immigrants. Applicants must have graduated from high school or have at least two years of formal training in an occupation. Initially, most visas went to European countries, but Africa has lately been soaking up the most.
.. In any event, reducing immigration or improving background checks wouldn’t have prevented the New York attack or many of the other two dozen or so Islamist-motivated attacks since 2001. Testimony from Mr. Saipov’s former acquaintances suggested that he didn’t come to the U.S. radicalized and that he became emotionally disturbed over time.
.. More than an immigration crackdown, the Saipov case might call for better monitoring of terror websites and groups that are more likely to be radicalized. We’re also with Mr. Trump—and Senator John McCain —in suggesting that Mr. Saipov should have been interrogated at length before he was read his Miranda rights. The first priority is preventing future attacks and breaking any terror networks.
.. Perhaps we will learn that Uzbekistan is a terror breeding ground from which immigrants need special vetting. But the Commander in Chief in particular should wait for answers before jumping to policy conclusions or exploiting immigration fears.
ESO Telescopes Observe First Light from Gravitational Wave Source
ESO’s fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — long-predicted events called kilonovae — disperse heavy elements such as gold and platinum throughout the Universe. This discovery, published in several papers in the journal Nature and elsewhere, also provides the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are caused by mergers of neutron stars.
.. As night fell in Chile many telescopes peered at this patch of sky, searching for new sources. These included
- ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the Paranal Observatory, the
- Italian Rapid Eye Mount (REM) telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, the
- LCO 0.4-meter telescope at Las Cumbres Observatory, and the
- American DECam at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
- The Swope 1-metre telescope was the first to announce a new point of light.
It appeared very close to NGC 4993, a lenticular galaxy in the constellation of Hydra, and VISTA observations pinpointed this source at infrared wavelengths almost at the same time. As night marched west across the globe,
- the Hawaiian island telescopes Pan-STARRS and Subaru also picked it up and watched it evolve rapidly.
.. “ESO’s great strength is that it has a wide range of telescopes and instruments to tackle big and complex astronomical projects, and at short notice. We have entered a new era of multi-messenger astronomy!” concludes Andrew Levan, lead author of one of the papers.
You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy
The factory I used to work at routinely fires competent, productive engineers because they need scapegoats for management failures. The bigger the failure, the bigger the scapegoat, so sometimes it goes all the way up to director level, but that’s only once every few years. Realizing that all it would take to lose my livelihood would be for me to be in the wrong place at the wrong time was one of the big reasons I left.