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Last night’s most surprising note of conciliation among pundits had nothing to do with the State of the Union address. It came after Stacey Abrams’ SOTU rebuttal speech, the response to which was virtually unanimous: She did a great job.

It may have also been one of the best campaign launch speeches ever! The question remains: what is she campaigning for? Whatever it is — I’m in.

Abrams, the first black woman ever selected to give the Democratic response to the State of the Union, got extra points for excelling in one of politics’ most difficult and thankless jobs. No surprise there given women of color have changed the world inch-by-inch for generations by leveraging the hell out of exactly such unwelcome and underestimated roles.

While some pundits may have been enlightened by Abrams’s seamless performance, its unlikely that anyone who has ever seen her speak was the least bit surprised – whether they agree with her politics or not.

On her worst day – jet lagged, ill prepared, with both hands tied behind her back, and no teleprompter for 300 miles – Abrams is a far better orator than Donald Trump at his rehearsed best. Keep in mind that is pretty much what he offered last night.

As a lawyer, writer, and former Georgia House Minority Leader, Abrams, 45, is a gifted and experienced communicator, who has both drawn upon and honed these skills throughout her career – never more than in the last 18 months as she ran (from coast-to-coast) for Georgia governor.

While she didn’t prevail in that race, she managed to spin a technical loss into a moral and political victory that has her supporters eagerly anticipating her next run.

While Abrams’s specific ambitions yet to be articulated, her campaign may have just begun. Need evidence? How about her speech’s stated family values of “Faith, service, education, and responsibility.” Need more? Start with these most memorable quotes below. Campaign slogan, anyone?

The 6 Best Quotes From Stacey Abrams’s SOTU Rebuttal Speech

1.”Victory is not winning for our party; victory is winning for our country.”

2.”Our power and strength as Americans lives in our hard work and our belief in more.”

3.”Our most urgent work is to realize Americans’ dreams of today and tomorrow.”

4.”The foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections, where voters pick their leaders, not where politicians pick their voters.”

5.”Our progress has always been found in the refuge, in the basic instinct of the American experiment, to do right by our people.”

6.”Together, we are coming for America. For a better America.”

Abrams will be a featured speaker at this year’s Women of Power Summit. There is still time to register for the event being held at the Mirage, Las Vegas, February 28-March 3.

The ideas and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author’s and not necessarily the opinion of Black Enterprise.

The post The 6 Best Quotes From Stacey Abrams’ SOTU Rebuttal Speech appeared first on Black Enterprise.

Avi Loeb, the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, has sparked excitement and ruffled the feathers of his peers with the suggestion that an alien ship could be sailing past Jupiter.

As The Washington Post reports, Loeb, a prominent astronomer in his field, has introduced the idea that the first known interstellar object, spotted in 2017 and dubbed ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “Scout”), might be technology from another civilization.

What you can’t call Loeb is a crank. When astronomers in Hawaii stumbled across the first known interstellar object in late 2017 — a blip of light moving so fast past the sun that it could only have come from another star — Loeb had three decades of Ivy League professorship and hundreds of astronomical publications on his résumé, mostly to do with the nature of black holes and early galaxies and other subjects far from any tabloid shelf. […]

“Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua” — pronounced Oh-mooah-mooah — “is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,” Loeb wrote with his colleague Shmuel Bialy in Astrophysical Journal Letters in November — thrilling E.T. enthusiasts and upsetting the fragile orbits of space academia.

The Post article spends some time with the animated Loeb and the range of reactions to the lightsail theory. If you love the idea of aliens, as do I, when someone credible in their field suggests aliens could be close(ish) at hands, it feels thrilling.

And am I the only one who thought of the DS9 episode “Explorers” with the old Bajoran legend that Ben Sisko decided to test out with Jake by building a lightship? Hopefully there are no Cardassians solar sailing that light fantastic.

Wikipedia has this to tell us about ʻOumuamua:

ʻOumuamua is tumbling, rather than smoothly rotating, and is moving so fast relative to the Sun that there is no chance it originated in the Solar System. It also means that ʻOumuamua cannot be captured into a solar orbit, so it will eventually leave the Solar System and resume traveling through interstellar space. ʻOumuamua’s system of origin and the amount of time it has spent traveling amongst the stars are unknown.

I … love it? I feel teary-eyed about an interstellar object? Me right now:

(via The Washington Post, image: “Artist’s Impression of ‘Oumuamua“)

• “This dinosaur had a mohawk of horns.” Aliens and dinosaurs—today is a good day. (via The Atlantic)
• Here’s the trailer for the next DC animated movie, Justice League vs. The Fatal Five. (via Comicbook)
• The legendary Rita Moreno has some notes for the upcoming West Side Story script. (via Vanity Fair)
• Watching the TV show YOU without Joe’s narration is disconcerting, to say the least. (via TVLine)
• Wow. Wow. Wow:
  

  Fox, apoplectic over its own polling showing wide public support for @AOC and @ewarren‘s wealth tax proposals, literally blames the fact that schools teach kids to be fair:

  “The idea of fairness has been promoted in our schools for a long time.” pic.twitter.com/GowAZWYWpZ

  — Steve Morris (@stevemorris__) February 5, 2019

What did you see out there today, lightsailors?

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