Here are this week's topics: the worst presidential contest; Brexit, revisited; Dallas and beyond; a bad week; Jupiter and beyond.

Re-election, Nov  8th: Last week's blog challenged readers to match 2016 to any previous presidential campaign with candidates any more tawdry, for some even loathsome, than Donald and Hillary. This past Wednesday's Roll Call had a piece, "What is [Senator] Bob Corker [R-TN] doing with Donald Trump?" Dah? Running for re-election, of course -- anyway he can. Further down the page was "The Democratic Party's Hillary Clinton problem." It noted that many "down-ballot" Democrats now face a similar problem: a less-than-sterling, slightly odious, candidate.
     There is an old saying in sports, that the team owner or athletic director just gave the not-so-winning coach, his endorsement, the dreaded kiss of death -- just before firing him. So it was with the FBI director delivering the dreaded pronouncement on Hillary: Yes, there was extreme carelessness, but no criminal charges would be filed. Oh, yeah. An even further damaged candidate.
     When Hillary comes to CO (as she must because we Coloradans are now in the presidential cross hairs, being an important "swing" state and all), what will our down-ballot Democratic candidates and officialdom do? Be suddenly called out of town to visit a sick aunt? Will the Denver Post headline wonder, "What is [Senator] Michael Bennett doing with Hillary Clinton?"
     My personal presidential election memories go back only to 1956 and the second Eisenhower vs Stevenson contest. The newspapers and commentators must have been at a loss with no ready "label" for Ike, who had never run for public office before the presidency in 1952. Was he referred to as "Eisenhower (R-US Army)"? Stevenson was, of course, D-IL. True, by 1956, Stevenson seemed as "old and worn" as the famously pictured hole in his shoe sole, but otherwise respectable. To use the parlance of today, Ike was hard to categorize, but Adlai was firmly part of the Washington "establishment."

Tawdry vs. careless. Last week I mentioned George Will, who opined that, however objectionable,  "tawdry and distasteful" were not criminal. This past week it was the FBI director, James Comey, testifying that "extreme carelessness" (i.e. Hillary's damnable email mistakes) did not rise to the level of criminality.
     Inadvertent vs purposefully careless. During the dark days of the Cold War, a front page picture (above the fold) in the  NY Times showed a harried President Johnson walking, talking, and carrying some papers, including a file folder clearly labeled ".......," then one of our most highly classified intelligence projects. No doubt you get the picture: harried and inadvertent vs. purposelessly careless and knuckleheaded.
     Trump's reaction? Once again, he ignored the old military/political axiom: never interfere with an opponent who is in the process of committing suicide. 

Lawless and/or clueless? There are those who are above (and below) the law and due civility. Is Hillary above the law? Is Donald beyond the of dictates of common civility?

Dallas. The news late last Thursday should make all Americans afraid, very fearful of our nation's current racial situation. One cannot but have the distinct feeling that "the chickens are coming home to roost." Coupling that sad shooting news with this education and prison story from the Washington Post should only heighten our concern.
     Here at home, Colorado is among the states that now spend more money on its prisons and prisoners than its college students. Between 1990 and 2013, spending increases for prisons vs education ranged from a low of 63% (Massachusetts) to a staggering 668% (Texas). Startlingly, the US has less than 5% of the world's population, but we now house nearly 25% of the world's imprisoned population.
     Something has gone terribly wrong. Which unfortunate author will shoulder the burden and become America's Edward Gibbons?

Brexit, the morning after. Well, perhaps not the morning after, but Ann Applebaum, an experienced European foreign affairs correspondent, notes that the rift in Great Britain parallels a continuing continental pattern. Namely, "[The] established, integrationist politics on the one hand and isolationist or protectionist nationalist politics on the other..." She thinks that in voting to leave the EU, the Brits strangely became more like their continental compatriots.
A bad week and social media. The opening sentence from Jelani Cobbs' article in the New Yorker: "The least disputable measure of a bad week is any seven-day period that requires a body count at the end of it." An attendant measure might well be when any nation's leader is forced to cut short an important trip abroad in order to address a hateful, man-made tragedy. To yet again,  be characterized in the press as the "mourner-in-chief." Far different than if the San Andreas Fault had shifted dramatically under San Francisco.

Jupiter, Pluto, the Kuiper Belt and beyond. To end on a much happier note, as Juno settles into the first of its 32 scheduled orbits around Jupiter, NASA's New Horizon craft is hurtling past Pluto, on its journey towards the Kuiper Belt, on into interstellar space. With governmental budgets stretched thin, some (especially the science-detractors) question the expenditures for these and other space missions. It goes without saying that Juno's $1.1B price tag makes Spain's 15th century investment in Columbus's four voyages seem impossibly minuscule.
     Nevertheless, unexpected future advances often result from today's seemingly audacious adventures. That light-weight, indispensable Velcro "born" to anchor pens/pencils/tools from floating about space capsules, a battlefield surgeon's "discovery" that superglue worked just fine in a pinch. The list goes on!

Thank you for reading.