Manganese Oxides – Dendritic crystal growth

After almost a week in Washington DC and an off-off year election, you didn’t really think that there wouldn’t be a political post, now did you? On Monday, after a day-long museum crawl, I was walking back to the hotel. As I passed the Capitol building, I noticed more than the usual amount of activity on the part of the Capitol police. One officer was standing on the opposite street corner, with an AR-15. I came to the conclusion that Moscow Mitch and Red Rand would soon motorcade down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Whitehouse and join Trump on a flight to Kentucky. Their combined mission was to prop up the incumbent Republican governor. Unfortunately for them all and even though Trump stated that “losing sends a really bad message” and pleaded with his fans, “you can’t let that happen to me!” It happened. The Democrat won the popular vote, with Medicare. Now the GOP is maneuvering to game that election.

All week, DC television had been dominated with political ads by candidates for Virginia’s state legislature. Democratic ads harped on their opponent’s NRA support, “A bullet travels the length of a football field before it is first heard.” The NRA rally that I had previously seen on the Capitol grounds, must have been in response to this campaigning. Meanwhile, Republican ads harkened back to the scandals that engulfed Virginia’s Democratic administration earlier this year, “If your head is held down, then it is not consensual.” They were all highly repetitive. In the end, the Democratic message won out.

We are now less than a year out from next year’s 2020 Presidential election. Tuesday’s elections were the largest last set of elections before that election. Except for elections in the reddest of red state of Mississippi, things went pretty much in favor of the Democrats, which is an encouraging sign.