Irish Trojan in Tennessee

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

The U.S. Navy successfully shot down an inoperable spy satellite before it crashed to Earth, the Pentagon confirms.

Missile hits satellite; Earth eclipses Moon

By Brendan Loy

It's a hit! The missile hit the spy satellite! No further details are available yet. [UPDATE, 12:05 AM: According to the AP, "In a statement announcing that the Navy missile struck the satellite, the Pentagon said, 'Confirmation that the fuel tank has been fragmented should be available within 24 hours.' It made no mention of early indications, but a defense official close to the situation said later that officials monitoring the collision saw what appeared to be an explosion, indicating that the fuel tank was hit."]

Folks on the west coast and in Canada: Did you see anything unusual in the sky -- like a "swarm of meteors", perhaps?

[UPDATE, 12:25 AM: Blogger "scorpy808" captured what appears to be a photo of the eclipsed Moon with a piece of re-entering satellite debris right next to it!. OMG! Awesome! (I found this by searching Google Blog Search for the word "satellite" and the phrase "I saw.") And here is another possible sighting report. Not to mention Lisa's in comments!]

Back here in the southeast, the only thing unusual in the sky right now is a very reddish moon, which is just starting to show a sliver of white on the lower right edge as it begins to emerge from the Earth's umbra. As I mentioned below, the clouds eventually cleared and Becky, Loyette and I were able to see it. Well... Loyette may not have seen it, per se, but she was in its presence, anyway. :)

Here's a photo I took of the eclipse at 10:45 PM:

That's Saturn at the bottom of the photo, and the star Regulus at the top.

UPDATE: Here's a wider view, taken at 10:56. The clouds appear orange due to the Greater Knoxville light dome:

Reader Ken Wagner sends along eclipse photos from Nashville. Thanks, Ken! Others' photos can be found here and here.

Clinton introducer goes ballistic on "two-faced" "wunderkind" Obama

By Brendan Loy

Hillary Clinton supporter Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, went off the deep end last night in true Zell Miller-esque fashion, as his introduction of Senator Clinton turned into a 12-minute tirade against Barack Obama.

Buffenbarger derisively dismissed Obama as a mere "wunderkind," a "man in love with the microphone," and "a poet, not a fighter." He repeatedly and pointedly called him "the junior senator from Illinois" (as if Hillary isn't the junior senator from New York?). He compared Obama to "Janus, the two-faced Roman god of ancient times." And then he really got going:

The Barack Show is playing to rave reviews, sold out on college campus after college campus, standing-room-only crowds to hear his silver-tongued oration. Hope! Change! Yes, we can! Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine!

Heh. But the most offensive and ridiculous line, IMHO, was Buffenbarger's blatantly anti-intellectual argument -- repeated twice -- that Obama can't "fight" for the working class because he was "the editor of the Harvard Law Review." I guess Hillary's stint as an editor of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action establishes her credentials as a real union stiff?

Anyway, here's the video:

I suggest the creation of a new verb: "to buffenbarger," meaning "to engage in an inappropriately vitriolic attack on a member of one's own political party."

To their credit, Hillary's supporters were not impressed by Buffenbarger's buffenbargering. In the above video clip, you can see the supporters standing behind the podium growing visibly uncomfortable -- several of them sit down during the speech -- and, as Fox News points out, "midway through his remarks, [Buffenbarger] could barely be heard over the yells of the crowd - which was alternately shouting for Hillary and agitating for him to leave the stage." Here's a video, taken from the crowd, of Buffenbarger being heckled and booed.

More here. (Hat tip: Andrew Leyden.)

Don't forget...

By Brendan Loy

...about the eclipse tonight! It's the last total lunar eclipse until December 2010 -- which will be almost two years into the Obama Administration! :)

Visibility map here. Totality goes from 10:01 PM to 10:51 PM EST, with mid-eclipse at 10:26. The partial portion begins at 8:43 PM and ends at 12:09 AM.

UPDATE, 8:44 PM: Here in Knoxville, it's completely overcast at the moment. Perhaps it'll clear, but I'm pessimistic about getting to see the last total lunar eclipse of the decade. :(

In a not-really-related story, Brian Williams stated on NBC Nightly News that the weather west of Hawaii has now improved to the point where the military thinks it probably will be able to go ahead with tonight's satellite shoot-down attempt, around 10:30 PM EST. More here. Apparently Defense Secretary Gates gets to give the final order.

UPDATE, 10:27 PM: Just stepped outside with Becky and Loyette (the latter wrapped up in a blanket, sound asleep) and caught a glimpse of the eclipsed Moon, in between clouds. Yay! Baby's first eclipse! (She'll be almost 3 years old when the next one rolls around...)

The Michelle Obama problem

By Brendan Loy

Is the Obama campaign's reaction (or lack thereof) to the Michelle Obama "proud of my country" kerfuffle disturbingly similar to John Kerry's initial non-response to the Swift Boaters? Jonathan Martin thinks so, and I fear he may have a point.

Personally, I think it's pretty obvious what Michelle Obama meant. Even before Barack Obama said this...

"What she meant was, this is the first time that she's been proud of the politics of America. Because she's pretty cynical about the political process, and with good reason, and she's not alone. But she has seen large numbers of people get involved in the process, and she's encouraged."

...I figured that's exactly what Michelle was trying to say. Frankly, it's pretty ludicrous to suppose that she actually believes the literal meaning of her words; it's perfectly obvious to a fair-minded observer that this was a gaffe, a botched line, not a revelatory Freudian slip exposing the dark inner reaches of Michelle Obama's unpatriotic soul. But the facial implausibility of the less charitable explanation won't stop people like Rush Limbaugh from saying things like, "Doesn't it just grate on you that liberals in general are not proud of their country, period?" Nor will it stop those statements from damaging Obama's campaign (if only by firing up Republicans to levels of hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-McCain-ism that at least begin to approach what we'd see if the likely opponent was Hillary Clinton.)

In a way, this is a lot like a different John Kerry controversy: the kerfuffle over his "botched joke" in 2006 about American soldiers and/or President Bush getting "stuck in Iraq." As I wrote at the time, it was perfectly obvious what Kerry meant, that the whole controversy was -- at its substantive core -- much ado about nothing. Yet it destroyed Kerry's '08 presidential ambitions (thank goodness) and caused him to basically slink off the stage lest he damage Democratic prospects in that year's election.

I suspect that most Americans are inclined to be more forgiving of a gaffe by a presidential candidate's wife -- particularly when it comes nine months before the general election -- than they were of a gaffe by a once and future (or so we thought then) candidate. But to be forgiven, you have to actually ask for forgiveness. Instead of doing that, Team Obama let this thing fester for a while. Now they're finally starting to do some damage control, but I'm afraid the damage may already be done. In a Feiler Faster/Two Electorates world, the public absorbs sensational, controversial news -- the type with sufficient oomph to break through the bubble of political apathy that surrounds most people in their everyday lives -- very quickly, yet is very slow to absorb more mundane contradictory information. So when something like this happens, you have to strike fast in an effort to dilute the impact of the initial information while it's still being absorbed into the public consciousness. A full news cycle later, it may already be too late for that. Barack Obama, already a crypto-Muslim Manchurian Candidate in the eyes of many, may now be a crypto-Muslim Manchurian Candidate who steals other people's speeches and whose wife hates America. Great.

P.S. The plagiarism thing would normally be too arcane to break through the apathy bubble. But although I wasn't listening to talk radio or watching cable news yesterday, I suspect it may have piggybacked in with the Michelle Obama thing, thus allowing a silly quasi-scandal to become a potentially indelible part of the broader public's impressions of Obama.

Shuttle lands; satellite shot uncertain

By Brendan Loy

The Space Shuttle Atlantis landed safely in Florida this morning, clearing the way for the Navy to proceed with plans to shoot down the errant spy satellite as early as tonight. But those plans could be delayed by weather:

Navy gunners in the Pacific were watching the sea and sky Wednesday, waiting for perfect conditions to take a kill shot on an errant satellite 150 miles above them.

They have just a 10-second window to fire, a Pentagon official said, and may not be able to take their shot on their first opportunity at 10:30 p.m. ET Wednesday.

"It's not enough to say 'no,' but we're watching the weather," the official told reporters at the Pentagon. "It's on the margin."

The cruiser USS Lake Erie will get one 10-second window each of the next nine or 10 days to fire an interceptor missile that will destroy the faltering spy satellite before it can tumble to Earth and -- possibly -- release a cloud of toxic gas. ...

[S]wells in the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii [are] running slightly higher than [the] Navy would like.

The National Weather Service forecast 12- to 15-foot seas west of Hawaii Wednesday with a storm developing in the area.

The United States plans to spend up to $60 million to try to destroy the satellite even though there is only a remote possibility the satellite could fall to Earth, survive re-entry and spew toxic gas in a populated area, said James Jeffrey, deputy national security adviser.

   "The regret factor of not acting clearly outweighed the regret factor of acting," he said.

Either that, or this is a convenient opportunity to get away with doing a missile test, as some have speculated.

Hillary's slow collapse

By Brendan Loy

The final result in Wisconsin last night was a startling 58 to 41 margin for Obama -- closer to the unweighted exit polls (60-40) than the "final," weighted ones quoted by Fox (55-43). I'm no polling expert, but it occurs to me that maybe the "weighting" process somehow took into account the degree to which exit polls in previous contests had overstated Obama's support -- but this time, that didn't happen.

If so, it could be another sign of Obama gaining strength. Not only is he winning, or damn near winning, many of Hillary's core demographics (women, low-income voters, non-college-educated voters, etc.), he may also be converting the fake-Obama-supporter demographic into real Obama supporters. Where, two weeks ago, some voters would tell people, including pollsters and exit pollsters, that they supported Obama -- the hip, young, black, inspirational candidate with the celebrity music video and the liberal hipster allies -- but would then cast their ballot in secret for the "safe" candidate, Hillary ... now those people are actually voting for Obama.

Just a theory. And probably a wrong one. :) But I thought I'd throw it out there.

On a related note, Michael Crowley looks at the Collapse of Hillary. But the candidate herself seems not to have noticed. For the third straight election night, Hillary's "concession" speech failed to mention that she'd lost anything, or that there had even been an election held that day. And today her campaign has opened a new front in the delegate-counting war, collecting all their ridiculous spin in one convenient "hub." It's like they don't realize they're losing -- like they're whistling past the graveyard. News flash to Team Billary: you can't win the nomination purely on back-room machinations. At some point, you'll have to win some more primaries. A bunch more, actually. Not just Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico. You'll need those -- by wide margins -- but you'll need others, too. And that seems like an increasingly dubious prospect.

By the way, here are yesterday's speeches.

Life imitates The West Wing

By Brendan Loy

I believe this has already been noted here on the blog: there are eerie similarities between this year's presidential race and the campaign in the last two seasons of The West Wing.

A fireball, a spy satellite, and an eclipse

By Brendan Loy

Did any readers up in the Northwest (i.e., Washington, Oregon, Idaho or Montana) happen to see the fireball yesterday morning at around 5:30 AM? (Video here; lots of local news articles here). I'd love to see one of those someday...

Speaking of skywatching events, don't forget about the total lunar eclipse tonight. Mid-totality, at 10:26 PM EST, will be visible all across the 48 contiguous states. And those in the Pacific Northwest may also want to keep a weather eye to the western sky right around then -- i.e., approx. 7:30ish local time -- because, as I mentioned yesterday, they might be able to see some spy-satellite fragments streaking across the sky. Just call it Fireball Country!

Bill Clinton on "experience"

By Brendan Loy

Heh. (Hat tip: Sully.)