Republicans scraped the bottom of the barrel last October when they elected the little-known Mike Johnson of Louisiana Speaker of the House of Representatives and second in line to the Presidency of the United States. Johnson emerged as the fourth Republican nominee in what had become a clown show of political infighting after the Republican caucus threw out Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Johnson’s election required fifteen votes.
McCarthy was voted out of the job in an extraordinary showdown, a first in U.S. history, forced by a gang of hard-right conservative Republicans. The vote threw the House and its Republican leadership into chaos. McCarthy’s crime was to have reached a bipartisan agreement with Democrats to fund the government for a brief period to prevent a shutdown.
I heard him long before I met him. I remember sitting in the cafeteria CBS had set up in the basement of New York’s Madison Square Garden to feed the hundreds of staff members it had brought to the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Believe it or not, in those days the political conventions meant something and, in part because of legal requirements, they were extensively covered by broadcasters.
Just two years out of journalism school, I had been sent by my employer, WBBM-TV, the CBS owned station in my hometown Chicago, to manage our coverage. Along with me was a terrific video crew and a wonderful reporter who needed no supervision and little assistance, and an anchorman who definitely needed both. Those are stories for another day. Today, I just want to talk about the voice.
When we last visited the Clown Show, in January of 2023, we were talking about the farce the Republicans put on trying to elect a Speaker of the House of Representatives. Kevin McCarthy of California finally won the post on a historic fifteenth ballot. But power really lay with roughly fifteen right-win radical Republicans, who battled McCarthy relentlessly.
I took a break from this subject as the GOP stumbled though one of the least productive House sessions on record. Now it’s time to catch up.
Let me give you a piece of advice. If someone asks you what caused the Civil War, the answer is “Slavery.” Do not equivocate. Do not hesitate. Do not complain about being asked a “tough” question. Just say, “Slavery”.
If you think I’ve written something like this before you are correct. The last time I was talking about three women who were in charge at three of our top universities. Today I address one woman who wishes to be in charge of the whole nation.
(L-R) Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, Liz Magill, President of University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Pamela Nadell, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at American University, and Dr. Sally Kornbluth, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 05, 2023, in Washington, DC. The Committee held a hearing to investigate antisemitism on college campuses.
Let me give you a piece of advice. If someone asks you if calling for the genocide of the Jewish people violates the standards of your organization, the answer is “Yes!” Do not equivocate. Do not hesitate. Do not turn to your lawyer and ask for a legal brief balancing the right of free expression against the fighting words involved in a call for the violent elimination of a race of people. Just say, “Yes!”
It was my last year of grade school, and I faced all the usual crises. My family was about to move about five miles closer to the center of the city because my parents wanted me to attend a different high school than the one serving our current neighborhood. I was about to lose most of my grade school friends because only two others were switching to the same high school. And for some reason the girls, who I had recently become interested in, were not so much interested in our current hero, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn. They had eyes only for the blood sidekick Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum.
McCallum died yesterday in New York City at the age of ninety.
On Sunday September 24, 2023, just before noon eastern time, a sample capsule containing about one pound of the asteroid Bennu should arrive in Utah. Go ahead. Back up. Read it again. Amidst all the angst of our everyday lives, which is the usual subject of this column, we have a wonder like that to contemplate.
The capsule will have come from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx was launched on September 8, 2016, flew past Earth on September 22, 2017, and rendezvoused with Bennu on December 3, 2018. It spent the next two years analyzing the surface to find a suitable site for landing.
On October 20, 2020, OSIRIS-REx touched down on Bennu and successfully collected a sample. Though some of the sample escaped when the flap that should have closed the sampler head was jammed open by larger rocks, NASA is confident that they were able to retain between 400 g and over 1 kg of sample material, more than the 60 g (2.1 oz) minimum for success.
The sample capsule will be released when the spacecraft reaches an altitude of 63,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. The capsule will then be sent spinning towards the atmosphere below and will pierce Earth’s atmosphere at 10:42 a.m. EDT, coming to rest near a military base in the Utah desert. A recovery team will board four helicopters and head out into the desert to retrieve the capsule as quickly as possible to avoid contaminating the sample with Earth’s environment. Once located and packaged for travel, the capsule will be flown via helicopter to a temporary clean room on the military range, where it will undergo initial processing and disassembly in preparation for its journey by aircraft to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the sample will be documented and distributed for analysis to scientists worldwide.
There have been previous missions that have returned samples from outer space to Earth. Between 1969 and 1971, the Apollo program carried out six missions to the surface of the moon. The astronauts brought back a total of 842 pounds of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand, and dust from the lunar surface.
NASA’s Stardust mission, launched in 1999, flew past the comet Wild 2, collecting thousands of dust particles from the comet’s coma and returning them to Earth for laboratory analysis. Japan’s Hayabusa, launched in 2003, successfully returned samples from the asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2010. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 returned samples from asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2020.
If successful, OSIRIS-REx will be the first United States spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid.
All these missions have significantly contributed to our understanding of asteroids and the early solar system. The samples returned by these missions provide valuable insights into the composition, structure, and history of asteroids, as well as clues about the formation of our solar system and the origins of life on Earth.
Bennu was chosen as the target of this study because it is a “time capsule” from the birth of the Solar System. Bennu has a very dark surface and is classified as a B-type asteroid, a sub-type of the carbonaceous C-type asteroids. Such asteroids are considered primitive, having undergone little geological change from their time of formation. In particular, Bennu was selected because of the availability of pristine carbonaceous material, a key element in organic molecules necessary for life as well as representative of matter from before the formation of Earth. Organic molecules, such as amino acids, have previously been found in meteorite and comet samples, indicating that some ingredients necessary for life can be naturally synthesized in outer space.
Which doesn’t mean we will find a place we can relocate to in our neighborhood any time soon.
