#not to mention burns from not only the laser from the Director's staff
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JD Vance, author of 'Hillbilly Elegy,' enters large, pro-Trump GOP field for Ohio Senate seat
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JD Vance, author of 'Hillbilly Elegy,' enters large, pro-Trump GOP field for Ohio Senate seat
At a kickoff rally Thursday night in his hometown of Middletown, near Cincinnati, Vance delivered a populist message, with large corporations, big tech firms and “public health leadership” in the crosshairs. He also promised to fight for the grandmothers who believe in a secure border and for the “middle-class worker.”
“I want to be not just a fighter, but a fighter who’s fighting for you,” Vance said from behind a lectern where, moments before his announcement, a campaign sign had fallen down.
“There has never been a Republican primary for statewide office in Ohio this wide open and this chaotic,” said one Republican strategist familiar with Ohio. “Each one of these candidates has their own claim to the Republican base.”
The knives were already out for Vance before the 36-year-old venture capitalist joined the race. Earlier this week, Ohio Republicans received anonymous text messages blasting Vance as a “Never Trumper.” The texts are similar to a flurry of messages sent to voters in April,denouncing Vance shortly after he announced he was exploring a Senate run.
Most Ohio Republicans doubt Trump will endorse until closer to the May 3 primary next year, but the fight over his mantle is on. Mandel, for instance, has taken on the role of pro-Trump culture warrior, releasing a video last month of himself burning a protective mask to protest Covid-19 restrictions. The more establishment-aligned Timken can point to Trump’s support for her as Ohio GOP chair in January 2017. And Vance has taken up Trump’s criticisms of “Big Tech” — aligning him with the Trump donor and Silicon Valley gadfly Peter Thiel, who earlier this year pledged $10 million to a pro-Vance super PAC.
Trump’s centrality in the GOP primary reflects how the former president remains a political force in the Buckeye State. Trump won the state twice, earning more than 3 million votes in 2020 and improving his share of the vote from four years earlier by 2 percentage points.
Once considered a perennial swing state, Ohio has trended toward the GOP for the past decade. In that time, Republicans have held every state executive office and the majorities in both houses of the state legislature. Since 2010, only two Democrats have been able to win statewide in Ohio: Barack Obama in his 2012 reelection bid and Sen. Sherrod Brown, who won reelection in 2012 and again in 2018.
Trump’s ascendance has accelerated the GOP’s takeover, allowing the party to corner the White working-class vote that Democrats have struggled to keep in the fold. Amid their own primary battle, Republicans are trying to define the Democrats’ leading candidate, Rep. Tim Ryan, as someone who is captured by his party’s left wing and out of touch with Ohioans.
“As Tim Ryan seeks a promotion, he is trending more and more leftward to appease his liberal bosses — Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, AOC and Bernie Sanders,” said Lizzie Litzow of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “He is in lockstep with these radicals on issues like open borders that have led to the outrageous crisis at our Southern Border and abolishing the filibuster — a blatant power grab.”
Hoping for a reversal in their fortunes, Democrats in Ohio and nationally are counting on a chaotic and messy Republican primary to give their nominee a chance.
“Their chaos is our opportunity,” said Liz Walters, chair of the Ohio Democratic Party. “These Republican candidates are so desperately running their campaigns for an audience of one, for Trump.”
Ryan declined to be interviewed for this story.
Vying for Trump’s base
This competition came to a head in Wellington, Ohio, on Saturday, where each of the top Republican candidates treated Trump’s rally at the Lorain County Fairgrounds as a proving ground.
Leading into the rally, Timken ran a radio ad touting her Trump credentials. On the day of, she had a plane flying over the rallygoers touting her campaign and had campaign volunteers around the event to meet voters. Gibbons hosted a pro-Trump tailgate before the rally and had volunteers and the event. Both Mandel and Moreno took a more casual approach to the event — they attended but mostly just mingled with people.
Trump — in Ohio to kick off his revenge tour against Republicans who haven’t been loyal to him — clearly enjoyed the competition vying for his base’s support.
Standing on stage deep into his rally, the former President began to play up the divisions.
“Hey, do you want to take a poll,” Trump exclaimed about the Senate race, throwing the crowd of supporters into the contentious affair.
When Trump mentioned Timken, the former state party chair earned a smattering of cheers, groans and boos. Mandel, who has tailored his campaign narrowly to Trump’s base, earned more hearty applause, while the response to Gibbons — more of an unknown in the race — was more muted. The former President, seemingly sensing the divisions, said, “I think we’ll get out of this poll stuff,” before mentioning Moreno.
The tension at the Trump rally was just the latest — and possibly most public — chapter of an already frenzied race, one that has seen the candidates already fighting.
The frontrunners
Mandel, the 43-year-old Marine veteran, is considered the current frontrunner even by those supporting his rivals. Thanks to his two terms as state treasurer, he has high name identification and connections with conservative groups and leaders in Ohio.
Mandel also brings a considerable amount of campaign dollars — more than $4 million — left unspent from his short-lived 2018 run for Senate, when he dropped out months before the primary.
“If the election were today, Josh would win,” said one adviser to another GOP candidate.
But Mandel is also facing headwinds in the early months of his current campaign. The Columbus Dispatch reported in May that three of Mandel’s fundraisers had left the campaign, followed by a report this week that two of those staff members departed because of a “toxic work environment” created by Mandel’s girlfriend and finance director, Rachel Wilson.
Mandel declined to comment to CNN about those reports.
Mandel’s most direct competition appears to be Timken, who comes to the race without the experience in elected office but with a formidable organization — including committee chairs in all of Ohio’s 88 counties. Timken also has access to financial and political resources through her husband, Tim Timken, a former steel executive who is a lobbyist in Columbus.
Timken has faulted other candidates “who have based President Trump, refused to campaign for him or quit the tough fights” — something she has done regularly on campaign literature that calls out her opponents by name. Mandel has regularly attacked Timken, casting her as someone not entirely loyal to Trump and tying her to former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who has drawn the ire of Trump loyalists.
Much of Mandel’s focus on Timken has centered around Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, the Republican congressman who voted in favor of impeaching Trump earlier this year. The Ohio Republican Party later censured Gonzalez and called for him to resign.
Timken carefully defended Gonzalez after his vote, touting his record as a legislator and opening up a line of attack for Mandel.
“Question: Why did Jane Timken refuse to censure Gonzalez when she was Chairman? She clearly had time to do so,” Mandel tweeted in May. “So what’s the real reason?”
A ‘different kind of candidate’
Vance enters the Senate race as something of a wild card. Known primarily for his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, the Yale Law School graduate and venture capitalist has emerged as an authoritative voice on the White-working class that makes up the base of Trump’s support in the GOP.
But Vance’s political fate could come down to how he talks about his transformation on Trump, who he publicly opposed in 2016 before reversing his position in 2020.
During the 2016 campaign, Vance wrote in USA Today, “Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” The same year, as it became clear Trump would become the GOP presidential nominee, Vance wrote in The Atlantic that “Trump is cultural heroin,” who “makes some feel better for a bit.”
“He cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it,” added Vance.
As the anonymous text message demonstrates, Vance is already facing attacks for his past opposition to Trump. Some of that will come from the national conservative movement, which has begun to coalesce around Mandel. The Club for Growth’s political action committee, which endorsed Mandel in March, released a statement Wednesday night going after Vance.
“He claims to be a Trump Republican, but in the short time Mr. Vance has been active in politics he’s spent the bulk of it tearing down President Trump and mocking Trump voters,” said the Club’s president, David McIntosh.
Nevertheless, Vance’s allies say he is the most authentic candidate in the field because he can express so well why Trump became president. (They also point out that some of his opponents, including Mandel, first supported other Republicans in the 2016 Ohio presidential primary.)
Earlier this year, Vance met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He also attended his rally last week in Ohio. And his connection with Thiel may further help soften any bad feelings Trump could have for Vance.
A spokesman for the Thiel-backed super PAC, Protect Ohio Values, told CNN that Vance “believes deeply in President Trump’s America First agenda and is laser focused on fighting for policies that will benefit Ohio’s mighty Middle Class.”
“Ohioans want elected leaders with the spine to stand up to Washington’s corrupt political class and we’re confident that JD Vance is the only candidate in this race who fits that bill,” added the spokesman.
The Republican strategist familiar with Ohio called Vance a “different kind of candidate” with an idiosyncratic style and issue-set who could break out if primary voters find themselves underwhelmed by Mandel and Timken.
That jibes with the overwhelming sense from Ohio Republicans that, barring an intervention by Trump, anything could happen.
“This could be the wildest primary of the cycle,” said the GOP strategist.
This story has been updated with Vance’s remarks Thursday evening.
CNN’s Manu Raju contributed to this report.
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Breaking News: Launch abort? Trump tries to get his 'Space Force' off the ground, but not everyone is on board
New Post has been published on https://www.thisdaynews.net/2018/05/22/breaking-news-launch-abort-trump-tries-to-get-his-space-force-off-the-ground-but-not-everyone-is-on-board/
Breaking News: Launch abort? Trump tries to get his 'Space Force' off the ground, but not everyone is on board
In a ceremony earlier this month honoring the Army football team, President Trump took a rhetorical detour to the military’s potential future in outer space.
“You will be part of the five proud branches of the United States Armed Forces: Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and the Coast Guard,” Trump said. “And we’re actually thinking of a sixth, and that would be the Space Force. Does that make sense? Because we’re getting very big in space, both militarily and for other reasons. And we are seriously thinking of the Space Force.”
It wasn’t the first time he had mentioned the idea, which he first broached while speaking to Marines in California in March.
“You know, I was saying the other day because we’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space, maybe we need a new force,” Trump said. “We’ll call it the Space Force. And I was not really serious, and then I thought, ‘Maybe that’s a great idea. Maybe we’ll have to do that.’ ”
As Trump’s offhand comments implied, there is no official plan for something called “Space Force,” and there is opposition within the administration itself, including from Defense Secretary James Mattis. But the idea is popular with some in Congress. While the Air Force has had a Space Command division since 1982, some legislators and analysts believe the military needs a new branch devoted to warfare beyond the atmosphere.
The immediate future of space combat will almost certainly be less romantic than it sounds, less about X-wing vs. TIE fighter dogfights between rocket-jockey pilots than about protecting America’s military satellites in orbit and incapacitating an enemy’s. Satellites are expensive but critical to the U.S. effort, providing GPS, reconnaissance, communications and early detection of missile launches. But they’re also difficult to maneuver, almost impossible to repair and would likely become key targets in any future war. A 2000 report assessing the country’s space capabilities warned of the danger of a potential “Pearl Harbor in space.”
The race to find a technology to destroy satellites started shortly after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I in 1957, raising fears of a nuclear attack from space. Over the ensuing decades the military researched various approaches, including a 1985 test in which the Air Force shot an American satellite out of the sky with a missile from an F-15 fighter plane.
The USS Lake Erie launches a missile at a nonfunctioning satellite as it traveled in space at more than 17,000 mph over the Pacific Ocean in February 2008. (Photo: U.S. Navy via Getty Images)
The anti-satellite arms race hasn’t slowed since. In 2007, the Chinese successfully tested a surface-to-space guided missile, destroying one of their own weather satellites, alarming the Pentagon. The following year the American military showed a similar capability, modifying a missile from the USS Lake Erie to take out an inoperable spy satellite in a decaying orbit. Officials said they were concerned that the toxic chemicals in the satellite’s fuel tank could survive reentry and present a danger on the ground.
These tests leave debris in space, making it more difficult to find room for additional satellites and occasionally threatening the International Space Station. If a number of satellites were destroyed in a conflict, the resulting debris would make space difficult for anyone to use for any purpose, be it government or commercial.
But a missile strike isn’t the only way to take out a potential adversary’s space capabilities. Intelligence officials have raised the possibility of jamming transmissions or using a laser to temporarily dazzle or permanently blind reconnaissance satellites, burning out sensitive optical sensors. Earlier this year an anonymous Russian official said the country had developed a plane with a laser system on top capable of blinding enemy satellites, a potential danger described by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in 2017 Senate testimony.
What are some potential counters? One suggestion is simply to put up more and smaller satellites, decentralizing the network and making it more likely that a country’s imaging capabilities would slowly fade rather than go blind. Other possibilities include a movable shutter on the satellite lens to protect it from a laser attack, and additional shielding and maneuverability.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn. (Photos: Zach Gibson/AP, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the battle is taking place in Congress. The most recent skirmish was over last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., senior members of the House Armed Services Committee, included language that would have mandated the Air Force to create a United States Space Corps. It would constitute a separate wing of the military that would function the way the Marines operate within the Navy but with its own seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The congressmen believe the Air Force has been negligent in modernizing its space capability, raiding funds allocated to Space Command to pay for cost overruns in other projects.
Analysts said the new focus is needed because America’s rivals in space are catching up.
“It’s easy to just delay space programs and not give them the funding increases that were planned in future years,” said Todd Harrison, a director and aerospace expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “and the military’s been able to do that for many years because we haven’t really been matched in space. There weren’t a lot of countries that could put our systems at risk, and now that’s changed. There are an increasing number of countries that can hold our space systems at risk, so we’ve got to change the culture and mindset within the military [so] that this needs to be a higher priority.”
Rogers and Cooper’s amendment passed the House but failed in the Senate. It was opposed by Mattis, who said he shared concerns about the Department of Defense’s space capabilities but wanted to maintain the current structure. In a letter to Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, provided by Turner’s office, Mattis wrote: “At a time when we are trying to integrate the Department’s joint warfighting functions, I do not wish to add a separate service that would likely present a narrower and even parochial approach to space operations.”
Air Force brass Heather Wilson, center, and Gen. David L. Goldfein, right, prepare for a hearing on on the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Year 2018 and the Future Years Defense Program in June 2017. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
At the urging of Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson and others at the Pentagon, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., stripped the Space Corps language from the NDAA. Brian Weeden, a former officer in Space Command who is now a director at the Secure World Foundation, told Yahoo News the Air Force was engaging in some old-fashioned bureaucratic maneuvering.
“If the space mission goes somewhere else, that means the Air Force loses X billion of dollars from their budget and presumably somewhere around 40,000 people from their personnel list,” said Weeden. “And in bureaucracies, budget and people are power.”
The final version of the NDAA did include a few concessions to those pushing for the creation of a Space Corps. There were management and procedural changes meant to streamline the existing space programs and language calling for a study on the creation of a separate branch, which an official recently said would be done by August.
“The Air Force will no longer be able to treat space as a third-order priority after fighter jets and bombers,” said Rogers and Cooper in a joint statement after the NDAA passed in December with the revised language.
Thisday News photo Illustration; photos: AP, Getty
The United Nations attempted to address some space war concerns in 1967 when it urged members to sign on to an agreement known as the Outer Space Treaty. The treaty addressed a wide array of issues, including everything from classifying astronauts as “envoys of mankind” to banning the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit, on the moon or other “celestial bodies.” The treaty states that space should be used for “peaceful purposes,” but peaceful doesn’t necessarily mean nonmilitary; in terms of the treaty, it means nonaggressive in space. Satellites collecting intelligence, handling communications and guiding terrestrial weapons with their GPS have come to be allowed, but under the treaty no country can fire satellite-to-satellite or engage in space-to-surface warfare.
As legislators and administrators debate the space division’s structure and budget, preparations for a future space conflict continue. Space Command officials have set up virtual reality simulations for satellite technicians to practice their response if there were attacks on the U.S. network, an attempt by the Air Force to instill a “war fighting mentality” in veteran space operators. There are also the annual Schriever War Games, an exercise set a decade in the future that attempts to predict the evolution of space-based combat. And while the technological focus is mainly based around satellites, there are a few more fantastical advances, such as a potential new fighter-based laser weapon system, like the one Lockheed Martin was contracted to develop last year, and the X-37B, an unmanned spaceplane capable of flights lasting two years that has been partaking in a series of classified missions and experiments.
Whether under the rubric of a “Space Force” or the existing Air Force Space Command, it seems certain that the militarization of space will continue.
#‘Maybe that’s a great idea#“And we’re actually thinking of a sixth#“We’ll call it the Space Force#“You know#”and there is opposition within the administration itself#000 mph over the Pacific Ocean in February 2008#Air Force and the Coast Guard#alarming the Pentagon#And I was not really serious#and Rep. Jim Cooper#and that would be the Space Force#and then I thought#And we are seriously thinking of the Space Force#Army#As Trump’s offhand comments implied#Because we’re getting very big in space#both militarily and for other reasons#but not everyone is on board#D-Tenn#destroying one of their own weather satellites#Does that make sense?#I was saying the other day because we’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space#In 2007#In a ceremony earlier this month honoring the Army football team#including a 1985 test in which the Air Force shot an American satellite out of the sky with a missile from an F-15 fighter plane#including from Defense Secretary James Mattis#It wasn’t the first time he had mentioned the idea#Launch abort?#Marines#maybe we need a new force
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