“the Space Force will now become the sixth branch of the US armed services. It is the first new service since the creation of the US Air Force in 1947.
The Space Force won’t be built from the ground up, however; it will be created largely by reshuffling the military’s organizational chart.
It will function as a part of the Air Force, supporting the newly promoted US Space Command, and will ultimately be overseen by the secretary of the Air Force, according to military officials. However, the day-to-day operations of the Space Force will be handled by a chief of space operations who will have a seat on the nation’s top body of military advisers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
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“the White House faced a military that was not in favor of a Space Force — a former Navy secretary said it was “a solution in search of a problem,” and then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters last summer: “The Pentagon is complicated enough. This will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart.”
In a sort of compromise, rather than delivering on the administration’s initial grandiose vision for space dominance, Congress attempted to answer both the White House and Pentagon’s concerns.
“Part of the argument for Space Force was that space was kind of getting lost within the Air Force, with its focus on air dominance,” Kaitlyn Johnson, an associate fellow and associate director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Verge.
The Space Force, then, will focus just on space — and on countering Russia and China there — as the Trump administration wanted. But, in response to military concerns, it will not add a completely new structure to the Pentagon, housed as it is in the Air Force. (Its leaders will, however, have the authority to make operational and training decisions without consulting the Air Force.)”
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“”The function of Space Command, or USSPACECOM, differs from Space Force. As a unified combatant command, USSPACECOM is responsible for space warfighting. The organization decides how to utilize the domain of space in the best interests of national security, whether that’s providing space-based communications capabilities for troops overseas or surveilling certain portions of the globe. The Space Force, on the other hand, is responsible for “operating, training, and equipping” all of the space assets that USSPACECOM needs. That entails acquiring the right surveillance or communications satellites, getting them into space, and training people to operate those vehicles.””
“Federal regulators are now actively working to counteract the effects of state-level clean energy policy, despite opposition from virtually everyone except the fossil fuel generators that directly stand to benefit. And by doing so, they will crank up costs on 65 million consumers (as a start).”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/27/21039138/liberia-green-card-path-citizenship-ndaa
“US farmers have taken a particularly harsh beating this year from a one-two punch of nasty flooding exacerbated by climate change and a trade war with China.”
“Burge’s analysis, published Thursday, finds that on issues ranging from border security to immigration detention, white evangelicals — a group that includes dozens of individual denominations, from the Southern Baptist Convention to the Pentecostal movement — are substantially more conservative than the average American and even the next most conservative religious group.”
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“on the whole, the president’s views on immigration have drawn support from evangelicals, a key voting bloc that helped carry him to victory in battleground states in 2016. It’s a strategy that his campaign is hoping to replicate in 2020 and, so far, it appears to be working: Trump has a 75 percent approval rating among white evangelicals, compared to 42 percent among all Americans.”
“Economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, who describe their study as “as the first comprehensive estimates of the effect of recent tariffs on the US manufacturing sector,” argue that the data shows that any benefits from protection from foreign competition have been more than canceled out by retaliatory tariffs from trading partners and an increase in the cost of components sourced from abroad.
As a result, US manufacturing has seen job losses and higher prices for consumers.”
“actually ending someone’s career through the power of public backlash is easier said than done. Few entertainers have truly been canceled — that is, they haven’t had their careers totally shut down by negative criticism on the internet.”
https://www.vox.com/world/2020/1/2/21046745/benjamin-netanyahu-immunity-request-knesset-elections
“in order for this strike to be legal without congressional authorization, it would have to be in response to an imminent threat to the United States. And then we immediately enter into a discussion about what “imminent” and “threat” actually mean.”
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“Many of the people who have shaped our legal understanding of “imminent” over the years understood it to mean that the threat was unfolding right now and there’s no time to do anything other than to kill the person.
The Soleimani killing doesn’t appear to meet that threshold.”
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“If this is just a thing we did, then Congress doesn’t need to be notified. But if it’s an act of war, then clearly Congress needs to be notified.”
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“for better or worse, at a point where the majority of lawmakers have basically acquiesced to the administration’s interpretation of the law when it comes to war, and again, this goes back to the George W. Bush era. So if that’s the case, then eventually the law becomes whatever the current administration says it is. That’s where we are.”
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“there were several AUMFs but none of them, in any way, were directed at Iran. Each of them very clearly gave the executive branch the power to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and later, ISIS in Iraq. And in fact, Iran has been on our side in the fight against ISIS and the Taliban. So there’s just no plausible legal justification under which you could stretch any of the AUMFs to include an attack on an Iranian official.”