Return of the yuppies

 The Chinese space program is bustling and ambitious, but also sloppy.  They seem to have a recurrent problem with what is euphemistically called "uncontrolled re-entry."  The bit to watch for this week is the rocket which launched the living quarters of the future Chinese Space Station and is now wobbling about in orbit, soon to land Mao knows where.  It will probably hit the water, or burn up in the atmosphere, or land on a city like "a small plane crash scattered over 100 miles."  If you find a piece marked "Long March 5B" in Mandarin, you're the lucky winner.  With all the interest in a revived NASA and the DoD paying official attention to "unidentified aerial phenomena," I feel like this should be getting more play than the ravings of the politicians.

For example, Liz Cheney and Trump are battling for custody of the phrase "The Big Lie."  Yesterday the make-pretend president emitted a statement that concluded, "The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!"  (Gotta love that "from this day forth.")  Cheney, who still has a Twitter account, replied, "The 2020 presidential election was not stolen.  Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system."  I hate it when a Cheney is right, but I like it when they pull out the Long Knives on a regular basis.  

Florida is cracking down on election fraud, and not because Trump "won" the state.  Emily Rose Grover and her mother face multiple felony charges for rigging the homecoming queen election at Tate High School in Pensacola.  Grover will be tried as an adult although she was only seventeen when the alleged crime occurred; she and her mother face a maximum of sixteen years.  This is the sort of affront to democracy that Florida takes seriously.  I guess.

Those Florida Republicans are so smart, they passed a vote-suppression bill making it harder to vote by mail and then remembered all the old people in Florida who vote by mail!  And vote Republican!  Read it, it's fun.

The Arizona Republican party may regret its decision to censure Cindy McCain for supporting "leftist" causes.  She has no time for the ludicrous "audit" of ballots in Maricopa County including, presumably, her own.  Rumor has it she's considering a job in the Biden administration.  John McCain's widow -- is that bipartisan enough for you, Mitch? 

 Merrick Garland went to the House Appropriations subcommittee today to ask for more money to combat domestic terrorism, among other things.  (Republicans wanted to talk about The Border, which is not his department, because they like to pretend hungry, dusty asylum seekers are all in the pay of drug cartels or al Qaeda.)  A good place to start would be people with Chinese names who mysteriously donated thousands to the Proud Boys last year.  

Hey, Tucker, I got your nightly outrage right here!  The "woke mob" at the US Army Reserve have "cancelled" the scheduled promotion of South Dakota attorney general Jason Ravnsborg because he's a Republican!  Also that hit-and-run homicide last year, no big deal, couple of misdemeanors.  And furthermore, Chappaquiddick!

Remember yuppies?  It stood for young urban professionals, as I recall, people moving into cities and "gentrifying" areas so that working-class people and artists were forced out.  Timothy Nielsen of Chicago remembers; now 57, he may have been among the displaced.  Maybe that's why he complained to a neighbor about "yuppies on the boulevard out with their dogs" before driving his truck into a group of picnickers Saturday, injuring several.  Then again it could have been just another anti-Asian hate crime, like the woman who was attacked with a hammer in New York Sunday.  She said she's returning to Taiwan where she feels safer.  Right now she'd be safer in Delhi.

May 6 is the ninetieth birthday of Willie Mays.  I expect celebrations, people.