While Kevin’s on vacation, we’ve invited other Mother Jones writers to contribute posts.

Early Friday morning, the Cassini spacecraft ended its 20-year-long journey as it burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere. 

One last look…Explore the final @CassiniSaturn pics, taken just hours before its fateful plunge into the planet: https://t.co/dyewjqLoiZ pic.twitter.com/NeOxO8EFHR

— NASA (@NASA) September 15, 2017

Cassini spent seven years in transit (space travel ain’t quick), followed by 13 years orbiting Saturn and collecting data from the solar system’s second largest planet and its moons. Over the course of its run, Cassini sent back countless breathtaking images.

For folks my age (I’m 31), it’s easy to forgot just how new and perception-altering it is to have pictures of other planets in the solar system. Humans didn’t have pictures of our neighbors in the far reaches of the solar system until Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977. That’s a major shift in how we view the solar system, our galaxy, and the universe! Thanks to missions like Cassini, people now grow up not just imagining what other planets might look like, but actually getting to explore Saturn’s rings and other wonders from space.

Here’s a brief sampling of images we have thanks to Cassini’s journey.

(All pictures via NASA. There are plenty of more amazing photos in their database—both from Cassini and other missions—so take a break from depressing Trump news to enjoy the beauty of the universe.)

I may be traipsing around in Ireland right now, but the miracle of technology has allowed me to make sure you get your weekly dose of cat. Here is Hopper cooling herself off from the afternoon heat in the underbrush of the jungle that is our backyard. Next week I hope to have an Irish cat or two in this space. We’ll see.

In other news, the Economist has produced a chart of presidential pets that allows us to identify our most cat-friendly president. The winner is…Rutherford B. Hayes! His three cats make him an honest winner of this contest, unlike his rather dubious election to the White House. The Presidential Pet Museum informs me that his first cat was Siam, given to him as a gift from the American consul in Bangkok. She was the first Siamese cat in America. His second cat was Miss Pussy, another Siamese cat. Finally, with his third cat, he started to show a bit of naming creativity, choosing Piccolomini for reasons lost to history.

It’s been a long time since a president had more than one cat. Calvin Coolidge was the most recent, with his two cats Tiger and Blacky. I have a feeling I know what they looked like.

While Kevin’s on vacation, we’ve invited other Mother Jones writers to contribute posts.

As Republicans have tried to rip apart Obamacare this year, one of their most frequent rhetorical strategies has been highlighting areas of the country where there might be zero insurance plans sold on the insurance exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act. 

That threat was mostly overhyped. In various counties around the country, after insurance companies pulled out, other insurers quickly stepped in to fill the void. But last week an insurance company suddenly pulled out of Virginia, leaving 48 counties and 73,000 Obamacare participants without out an insurance option. That would have been a big deal! And unlike past insurance company announcements, this one came late in the process, leaving the state little time to correct the problem before 2018 open enrollment starts in November.

But those fears proved misplaced. Virginia’s governor announced Friday that Anthem—which earlier this year announced it would pull out of Virginia—would step back in and fill the state’s gaps.

Just got call from @AnthemInc. They are staying in Virginia! No bare counties. Thank you, Anthem! You have saved VA lives.

— Terry McAuliffe (@TerryMcAuliffe) September 15, 2017

White House officials have regularly trumpeted news reports about insurance companies pulling out of markets. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the White House to celebrate the latest news that there will be no bare counties next year.

Here is my new blogging home:

This is not intended to make anyone jealous. It’s purely informational. Also, I met one of my neighbors this morning:

I told him I had just arrived from America, and his reply was, “Bah.” I guess that’s appropriate.

The expression on this little girl’s face is priceless. I took this picture at Disneyland, on the raft leaving Tom Sawyer’s Island, and I figure she’s either bored by the whole TSI experience or annoyed at being forced to leave so soon. Hard to say which. But she’s definitely projecting some attitude.

Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post via ZUMA

I know what you’re thinking: no president has ever been successfully impeached, so of course it would set a new record. But that’s not what I have in mind.

At the moment, we have five living ex-presidents: Carter, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama. Has this ever happened before? Yes! When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, we also had five living ex-presidents: Van Buren, Tyler, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan. This lasted for 320 days, when Tyler died on January 18, 1862.

It’s also happened twice since then, most recently when George W. Bush was inaugurated. This lasted for more than three years, until Ronald Reagan died on June 5, 2004.

We will exceed that record in 2020—assuming everyone stays alive until then. But we can do better! If we impeach Trump, we’ll have six living ex-presidents. I think this is a record worth trying for. Republicans like setting records, don’t they?

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

I’ve still got an hour before I have to leave for the airport, so let’s take note of two examples of party dynamics today.

First up is Bernie Sanders and his Medicare-for-All bill. What’s been the response among the lefty wonkocracy? Let’s call it…hesitation. Everyone’s for single-payer, that’s not the problem. But Bernie’s plan has issues. And he doesn’t say anything about how he’ll pay for it. Plus it might be too generous. And how do we handle all the people with employer health care who will be nervous about losing their doctor? Etc. etc.

Compare this to Repeal and Replace. It literally had no detail at all, but Republicans ran on it for seven years and everyone was all for it. During that time, no one on the right spent more than a few minutes seriously wondering what the replacement would look like. There were occasional “white papers” that tossed out the usual Republican cocktail—tort reform, state lines, high-risk pools, HSAs, blah blah blah—but that was it. Nobody cared.

Next up: Hillary Clinton’s memoir. What’s been the reaction on the left? Endless griping. Why is she relitigating 2016? Why won’t she accept any blame for her loss? Why won’t she just go away? Haven’t we had enough of the Clintons?

On the right, I guess losers don’t write post-election memoirs. Do they? And if they do, the response is mostly respectful. The guy’s a true conservative and should be proud of his service to the nation.

On the left, we just can’t help ourselves. We have to get things off our chests, regardless of whether it’s useful or helpful. If we want to flatter ourselves, we call this a dedication to intellectual honesty. If we want to be a wee bit more self-aware, we’d call it an endless hunger to show off our intellectual chops. Is it helpful? Does it work? Hard to say. But it’s all part of who we are. And it’s very much not a part of who conservatives are.

This is the Killarney Pub in Huntington Beach. I had lunch there on Monday and—

Oh, who cares where I had lunch on Monday? I have much more important news: I’m going on vacation! Can you guess where? Huh? Can you?

Yep: Marian and I are going to Ireland. We’ll be in County Kerry for a couple of weeks, a few miles south of Killarney in the general vicinity of Sneem. I expect it to be cool, relaxing, and rainy. Then it’s off to England, where we’ll spend three weeks in London. If you happen to live in either Kerry or London and want to get together for lunch or something, just drop me a line. My sister is housesitting for us, so Hilbert and Hopper will be in good hands.

However, this is only a partial vacation. I expect to blog the entire time at a reduced pace and possibly at odd hours. Other folks might also fill in here, though that’s up to the gods. The only way to know for sure is to check in now and again to see what’s here.

I’ll be traveling today and tomorrow, but I’ll most likely post something on Friday or Saturday, assuming we don’t get hopelessly lost and fall into the North Atlantic. Keep an eye on Donald for me while I’m gone.

Starmax/Newscom/ZUMA

Over at Vox, Ezra Klein has an interview with Hillary Clinton about the 2016 election. Here’s his nickel summary:

Clinton is not a radical or a revolutionary, a disruptor or a socialist, and she’s proud of that fact. She’s a pragmatist who believes in working within the system, in promising roughly what you believe you can deliver, in saying how you’ll pay for your plans. She is frustrated by a polity that doesn’t share her “thrill” over incremental policies that help real people or her skepticism of sweeping plans that will never come to fruition. She believes in politics the way it is actually practiced, and she holds to that belief at a moment when it’s never been less popular.

This makes Clinton a more unusual figure than she gets credit for being: Not only does she refuse to paint an inspiring vision of a political process rid of corruption, partisanship, and rancor, but she’s also actively dismissive of those promises and the politicians who make them.

This makes me sad, but not because I disagree with Clinton. In fact, I agree completely. The Bernie revolution was never going to happen, and neither will the Trump revolution. Otto von Bismarck had a saying about this: Politics is the art of the possible. If you want to get things done you have to understand that.

But there’s another saying, this one from Mario Cuomo: You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. Would Clinton have won if she could have figured out the poetry part? I guess we’ll never know.

Catherine Rampell writes about the latest Republican effort to punish the poor:

Never accuse Republicans of being uncreative. Once again, they’ve found an innovative way to punish the poor and simultaneously increase budget deficits — all with one nifty trick!

To pull off this impressive twofer, they would put every American applying for the earned-income tax credit (EITC) through a sort of mini-audit before getting their refund. This would both place huge new burdens on the working poor and divert scarce Internal Revenue Service resources away from other audit targets, such as big corporations, that offer a much higher return on investment…. The language is vague but appears to refer to a Heritage Foundation proposal that would require the IRS to “fully verify income through a review of Form W-2, Form 1099, business licensing or registration, and relevant invoices” before dispensing any refunds. So, a mini-audit.

Rampell is right about almost everything. But she gives Republicans too much credit for being creative. They’ve been going after the EITC ever since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. Here is David Cay Johnston in Perfectly Legal:

The most vociferous critics of the credit were those in the forefront of the campaign to cut taxes on the rich, notably House Speaker Newt Gingrich…. President Clinton, fearing that the new Republican majority had the votes to savage the program, proposed a diversion. How would Congress feel, Clinton asked, about giving the IRS more than $100 million a year just to audit applicants for the credit to make sure that only the deserving working poor benefited? Congress went for the deal.

In 1999, for the first time, the poor were more likely to have their tax returns audited. The overall rate for people making less than $25,000 was 1.36 percent, compared with 1.15 percent of returns filed by those making $100,000 or more.

Republicans have been obsessed for decades with fraud among the working poor who receive the EITC. At the same time, they’ve also been obsessed with reducing funding for audits of rich people:

During the Trump era, I’m sure we can count on audits of the rich continuing to go down, while audits of the poor get a new lease on life. He’s a populist, you see.