Cool Morning

A Platform for Democrats

 Bernie has fleshed out a platform for Kamala and the Democrats emphasizing urgent income and health care reforms.  See:

Kamala Harris was great in the debate. Will that be enough to win?

NOAH BERGER | Credit: AFP via Getty Images

On Solving the Wrong Problem

 I've long been opposed to the huge amounts of time, money an talent which are being proposed in support of the quest to take people to Mars.  It has always seemed to me that an equivalent amount of resources devoted to combating human-induced climate change might actually have a chance of success.

It is indisputable that space-directed technology has produced useful results in the fields of earth and climate sciences.  If science wants to lob some instruments at the moon or further that is likely also to produce something of value to humanity.  Such projects, however, get dicey when the rockets are loaded with weaponry or when humans are included in the cargo, which vastly complicates things and results in astronomical budgets, along with clear threats of the extinction of life on earth.  

The men-to-Mars proposal as envisioned by billionaires like Musk will result in more billions flowing into their accounts, but is unlikely to yield anything of value to all the rest of us.  All of this is explained at length in an excellent article at Defector by Albert Burneko, Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars.

And the Winner is...

 In the debate it seems to me that Kamala clearly came out ahead in that she spoke to those in the middle who may be the ones to decide the election outcome.  She also did a good job of getting under Trump's skin with reminders of Trump's compulsive lying, his legal and ethical vulnerabilities, and his waffling about his abortion stance.

Trump stuck to his script pretty well, emphasizing those issues which he thinks favor his chances.  However, he seemed unable to resist the bizarre extremes believable only to his faithful followers such as the stories about people's pets being eaten, or the extravagant and unsupported claims about migrant criminality.

The debate is not the election, and it alone will not be determinant in the final outcome.  Trump has unlimited financial support which will help to produce the appearance of a more coherent platform in the time remaining.

Harris made some unforced errors which she may be penalized for.  She could have taken a lot of wind out of the attacks on her stance on fracking by just pointing out that the advances in green tech will gradually make the phase-out of coal and oil inevitable.

The Harris response on gun violence was woefully weak.  The only response she came up with was a statement that both she and Walz are gun owners!   No mention of the most recent school massacre?  That is quite a missed opportunity.

Harris elected to stick with the Biden's position of calling for a ceasefire in Gaza without backing that up with any proposals for U.S. actions that could actually force a stop to the indiscriminate bombing.  Unless she can make at least some move in the direction of real action, she is endangering the support of people like me for whom Gaza is a high priority.

Kamala may have tipped the scale slightly in her favor with this night's performance.  However, as Hillary showed us, just winning the popular vote - even by over a million or two - is not enough in our electoral system.

UPDATE:

Lots of media commentary contrasting the Harris and Trump performances.  The best I saw was from Ben Burgis  at The Jacobin.  He recognized the superior showing by Harris, but also put her performance into the larger context of American society and politics:

...We live in a profoundly unequal and militaristic society. America is the only developed country where cash-strapped diabetics die because they try to ration out their insulin. Our billionaires take private space flights while our working class is one of the only in the world that isn’t guaranteed so much as a single day per year of paid vacation. And as Americans argue about what to read into the tea leaves of the latest polls from Pennsylvania, US-supplied bombs are dismembering children in Gaza...