Will Santa Barbara Get a Taste of Space Force Pork?

Salud Carbajal can’t get no respect. Not from the Trump administration, anyway.

For two years, Santa Barbara’s congressmember couldn’t get a simple callback from Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior and a fellow South Coast resident, and just last Wednesday, he suffered yet another serious diss. Vice President Mike Pence pointedly didn’t invite Carbajal — a former Marine and current member of the House’s Armed Services Committee, no less — to his rah-rah American military might rally at Vandenberg Air Force Base. “Very sneaky, very partisan,” Carbajal complained.

Pence gripped the podium and spoke for 25 minutes to more than 400 cheering troops about asserting U.S. dominance in space. The “heavens above,” he proclaimed, are a “warfighting domain.” Pence reiterated Trump’s promise to establish a Space Force to wage battle against off-world adversaries, but, like the president, he didn’t let his light-saber rattling get bogged down by details. He only explained that this new division would be the “natural evolution of American military supremacy” and that its creation was all but a done deal. “Get ready, folks,” he thundered, “the United States Space Force is gonna be here before you know it.”