About Me

Name: Stay Red
Loading...

Create Your Own Blog Find Other Townhall Blogs

Comments

Blog Roll

 

March 31, 2008

  
Follow this link to view an effective video attack on Barack Obama. The video is well done and features footage of Jeremiah Wright’s GD America, um, sermon, interspersed with 9/11 footage, including some of those still-horrendous, still-haunting images of people leaping to their deaths from the WTC.  One of the more surprising aspects of this particular video is that it appears at a Dim site. Even more surprising than that: the video was posted there by a Hillbillary supporter, ostensibly because if the Dims do not say it, the GOP will. Well worth checking out…
 

To kno-o-ow Hill is to loa-o-oathe Hill...

And few people know Hillbillary any better than Dick Morris, campaign advisor for Bill Clinton’s successful 1996 reelection bid.

Hillary’s list of lies

Hillary simply cannot tell the truth. Here’s her scorecard:
 
Admitted Lies

• Chelsea was jogging around the Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (She was in bed watching it on TV.)
• Hillary was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. (She admitted she was wrong. He climbed Mt. Everest five years after her birth.)
• She was under sniper fire in Bosnia. (A girl presented her with flowers at the foot of the ramp.)
• She learned in The Wall Street Journal how to make a killing in the futures market. (It didn’t cover the market back then.)


Whoppers She Won’t Confess To

• She didn’t know about the FALN pardons.
• She didn’t know that her brothers were being paid to get pardons that Clinton granted.
• Taking the White House gifts was a clerical error.
• She didn’t know that her staff would fire the travel office staff after she told them to do so.
• She didn’t know that the Peter Paul fundraiser in Hollywood in 2000 cost $700,000 more than she reported it had.
• She opposed NAFTA at the time.
• She was instrumental in the Irish peace process.
• She urged Bill to intervene in Rwanda.
• She played a role in the ’90s economic recovery.
• The billing records showed up on their own.
• She thought Bill was innocent when the Monica scandal broke.
• She was always a Yankees fan.
• She had nothing to do with the New Square Hasidic pardons (after they voted for her 1,400-12 and she attended a meeting at the White House about the pardons).
• She negotiated for the release of refugees in Macedonia (who were released the day before she got there). 

With a record like that, is it any wonder that we suspect her of being less than honest and straightforward? END EXCERPT, which appears courtesy The Hill.

Mark Steyn, on one of those Hillbillary lies:

The defining fiction arose back in the mid-Nineties when she visited New Zealand and met Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest, and for some reason decided to tell him he was the guy her parents had named her after.

Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and a somewhat unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. If any of the bigshot U.S. newspaper correspondents on the trip noticed this inconsistency, they kept it to themselves. I mentioned it in Britain's Sunday Telegraph at the time, but like so many other improbabilities in the Clinton record it sailed on indestructibly for years. By 2004 it was preserved for the ages in Bill Clinton's autobiography, on page (gulp) 870:

"Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea's mother had been named for."

Eventually, when it was noticed that Hillary was born six years before the ascent of Everest, Clinton aides tried assuring skeptics that her parents had seen a press interview with Sir Edmund in his beekeeping days, Mr. and Mrs. Rodham apparently being the only Illinois subscribers to The New Zealand Apiarist. Then, in the early days of her presidential campaign, Sen. Clinton quietly withdrew the story, by which time the damage was done. Edmund Hillary passed away a couple of months back, and, as I recall, the New York Times headline read:

"New Zealander For Whom Sen. Clinton Named Dies; Also First Man To Climb Everest. Sen. Clinton Was At The Summit To Greet Him, After Landing Under Heavy Sniper Fire From The Abominable Snowman."

And more from Steyn, this time on the protracted battle between Obama and Hillbillary:

Alas, Sen. Sir Edmund Hillary Danger Rodham Clinton couldn't have foreseen that the Democratic primary season would dwindle down to the Palm Beach recount replayed as a civil war: Two 50-50 candidates slugging it out, but both Democrats – and so the party's formidable skills at the politics of personal destruction and its fierce determination to win at all costs are now turned in on itself: As Edwin Glover said of the British defenses at Singapore, the guns are pointing the wrong way. END EXCERPT

Scholars and diplomats who have closely studied civil wars describe them almost as forces of nature, grinding on until the parties exhaust themselves, shredding bonds that cannot be stitched back together even long years after the killing stops. James Fearon

Here’s hoping the Dims spiral out of control and into civil war, wherein Fearon’s assertion about irreparable damage is borne out…

Stay red

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 27, 2008

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last ~ Winston Churchill

Since 2003, Europe — not the United States — has experienced a series of attacks, and near-constant threats, ranging from bombed subways and rail stations to Islamic demands to censor cartoons, operas, films, and papal exegeses. 

It is in Europe, not in post-Iraq Kansas, where a Turkish prime minister announces to Muslim expatriate residents that they must remain forever Turks and assimilation is a crime; it is in post-Iraq Europe, not Los Angeles, where politicians and churchmen talk of the inevitability of Sharia law; and it is in post-Iraq Europe, not the United States, where honor killings and Islamic rioting are common occurrences.

Why? A number of reasons, but despite all the misrepresentation and propaganda, the message has filtered through the Middle East that the United States will go after and punish jihadists — but also, alone of the Western nations, it will risk its own blood and treasure to work with Arab nations to find some alternative to the extremes of dictatorship and theocracy. Europe, in contrast to its utopian rhetoric, will trade with and profit from, but most surely never challenge, a Middle Eastern thug. Victor Davis Hanson, posting March 14, 2008 at National Review Online

***********************************************************
“It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before” ~ Author unknown
 
 

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.  ~Author Unknown

 Global warming hucksters baffled over recent data…

Vow to press on until data support their assertions…

Another global warming oops

From climatologist Dr. Roy W. Spencer, formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center where he received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal:

“There are huge error bars on our observational estimates of feedback” used by the UN’s IPCC climate models. In other words, what scientists see doesn’t jibe with what is assumed to build the computer models. SNIP

“The fact is, we DON’T know how much of recent warming is natural,” Spencer says, “simply because we don’t have good enough global cloud observations back to the 1970’s (and earlier) to measure any long-term changes in cloudiness to the required accuracy – 1% or less. SNIP

“I fear that the sloppy science that too many climate researchers have lapsed into could, in the end, hurt our scientific discipline beyond repair. The very high level of certainty (90%) claimed by the IPCC for their manmade explanation for warming can not be justified based upon the scientific evidence, and is little more than an expression of their faith that they understand the causes of climate variability – which they clearly don’t. END EXCERPT, which appears courtesy OC Register.com

Then there’s The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat, excerpted here from a posting at Free Republic (my bold emphasis):

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. END EXCERPT

From the Australian (March 22, 2008) excerpted here are some “Climate Facts to Warm to”:

Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, when asked whether the Earth is still warming: 

"No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years." SNIP

The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant." SNIP

When asked to explain the temperature dip in spite of rising levels of greenhouse gases, Marohasy says:

(T)he head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."

And it appears that the deep diving ARGO is not the only NASA system returning data that is baffling the so-called climate experts. In 2002, NASA launched its AQUA satellite, equipment specifically designed to collect data not only on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapor. 

By way of backgroud, many of the climate models that predict global catastrophe are based on the assumption that warming caused by rising carbon dioxide levels will result in increased water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere. Feedback from AQUA indicates that carbon dioxide and water vapor levels have risen over the past several years. But the results are contrary to what most global warming models predict. Again from Marohasy:

“What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

Marohasy thinks the global climate is more robust than has been portrayed by some of the doomsayers, many of whom are having trouble getting their heads around some of the latest findings:

These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide. SNIP

The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point." END EXCERPT

Even though the planet is not warming up, the argument about global warming figures to get a lot more heated in the next few months. Hey, Goreacle: the debate about global warming is not over; it is just getting started…

Stay red… 

  

 

 

 

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 26, 2008

Now I’m a real boy! ~ Pinocchio

I’m human. ~ Hillbillary Clinton

"So I made a mistake," she said. "That happens. It proves I'm human, which you know, for some people, is a revelation." ~ The Hillinator, speaking about its latest deviation from the truth.

So here’s what some real humans have to say about Hillbillary’s prevarication about a visit to Bosnia:

From the New York Post article "NOW BUNKO HILL IS UNDER FIRE"

Hillary Rodham Clinton's lies about risking her life under sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia as first lady have infuriated the US military brass and troops.

"She has no sense of what a statement like that does to soldiers," fumed retired Maj. Gen. Walter Stewart, the former head of the Pennsylvania National Guard.

"She is insulting the command in its entirety," he said yesterday. SNIP

Air Force Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson, a John McCain supporter who ran the air attack in the first Gulf War, said, "It bothers me any time anyone running for the highest office in the land fabricates a story.

"That should bother any American, whether you're military or nonmilitary."

Another source, a former Army analyst who was stationed abroad when dignitaries visited, said, "You know, we have soldiers overseas now who are getting shot at by real bullets from real enemies who really want to kill them.

"Getting shot at by snipers is not something you forget - or make light of," he added. END ARTICLE

Courtesy Breitbart.tv.com:

"No evasive maneuver. I tell ya, I will give it to the commander of Air Base Eagle... Not only were there no bullets flying around, there was no bumblebee flying around," Retired Colonel William "Goose" Changose, (speaking about Hillbillary claims that inbound flight to Bosnia had to make evasive maneuvers to avoid enemy fire.) END

The lies about Bosnia are just more of the same from Hillbillary.  Few know Hillbillary any better than Dick Morris, a former Clinton campaign advisor.  Morris cites a few recent Hillbillary tall tales:

"I was deeply involved in the Irish peace process"

Those words were uttered by Hillary Clinton — with a straight face!

Ever since she began her campaign for the presidency, Hillary and Bill Clinton have both boldly — and falsely — claimed that she played an important role in the Irish peace process. Suddenly rewriting history, they’ve claimed that her success in bringing peace to Ireland is all part of the vast experience that makes her qualified for the White House. SNIP

(R)ecently released White House schedules show that Hillary’s assertions are one big fantasy. Hillary’s role in all of the Irish visits were no different than any other first ladies, the ones who didn’t think that accompanying the president to a foreign country was a major diplomatic coup.

The daily schedules show that Hillary visited Ireland on numerous occasions with the President. For the most part, her role was to stand next to him, shake hands, and occasionally introduce him before he gave a speech. Sometimes, she met with women’s and children’s groups. SNIP

And more from Dick Morris:

Now that Hillary Clinton's schedule as first lady has been released, her near-total lack of serious involvement in the real inner workings of the government is bluntly apparent.

There are few, if any, meetings with Cabinet members, congressional leaders, the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, leaders of the Irish peace process, player s in the Bosnian crisis or representatives from Rwanda. All of her so-called experience is absent from her daily schedule
. SNIP

During her international travels, there was no serious diplomacy, just a virtually endless round of meetings with women, visiting arts-and-crafts centers, watching native industries and photo opportunities for the local media.

So Hillary's experience, real enough in 1993-94, led to a total disaster, the first loss of the House for the Democrats in 40 years. Her experience in 1998-99 was focused almost exclusively on defending against impeachment, hardly relevant for the future. But her schedule shows the vacuity of her experience in the years in between - the key years of the Clinton presidency - when the budget was balanced, the economy turned around, welfare reformed, Bosnia transformed and Kosovo freed. END, appears courtesy DickMorris.com

As has been asserted many times in this space, lying is about the only natural thing about Hillbillary: Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Clinton’s gotta lie.

That Hillbillary has been recently caught in so many lies merely proves that the Hillinator unit has some flawed programs, nothing more. Hillbillary is no more human than a microwave oven, or the computer you’re using to view this blog.

Make no mistake about it: Hiillbillary is a heartless soulless terminator with but one mission; to get and keep power. The Hillinator will not quit until it achieves its mission or is destroyed in the effort…

PictureinMarch132008doc.jpg Hillinator picture by kevinmcdonald_photo

*************************************

More good news for the GOP…

22% of Democrats Want Clinton to Drop Out; 22% Say Obama Should Withdraw

From Rasmussen Reports:

Twenty-two percent (22%) of Democratic voters nationwide say that Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination. However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that an identical number—22%--say that Barack Obama should drop out. SNIP

Let’s hope the Dims are right about this one:

85% of all Democrats believe it is at least somewhat likely the Democratic nomination will remain unresolved until the Democratic convention in August. END EXCERPT

There is no guarantee that selecting a nominee will help heal the Dims…

From Gallup:

A sizable proportion of Democrats would vote for John McCain next November if he is matched against the candidate they do not support for the Democratic nomination. This is particularly true for Hillary Clinton supporters, more than a quarter of whom currently say they would vote for McCain if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

The longer this battle goes, the more time and effort the Dims can spend nuking one another. Here’s to a protracted war that leaves the Dim party scorched, its political survivors envying their dead…

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 24, 2008

 




Hat tip to reader Andrew P. for the cartoon.

(L)ast week, Barack Obama told America: "I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community."

What is the plain meaning of that sentence? That the paranoid racist ravings of Jeremiah Wright are now part of the established cultural discourse in African American life and thus must command our respect? Let us take the senator at his word when he says he chanced not to be present on AIDS Conspiracy Sunday, or God Damn America Sunday, or US of KKKA Sunday, or the Post-9/11 America-Had-It-Coming Memorial Service. A conventional pol would have said he was shocked, shocked to discover Afrocentric black liberation theology going on at his church. But Obama did something far more audacious: Instead of distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that the guy is not just his crazy uncle but America's, too. Mark Steyn, from his Saturday March 22, 2008 Op-Ed “So much for the 'post-racial' candidate”

Find me someone at 20 who is not a liberal and I’ll show you someone without a heart. Show me someone at 40 who is not a conservative, and I’ll show you someone without a head~Winston Churchill

Playwright David Mamet shares his after-forty epiphany, in Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal, excerpted here: 

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f  up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a partSNIP

I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it. SNIP

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well. SNIP

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism. END EXCERPT, which appears courtesy The Village Voice.

My grandmother’s brain was dead, but her heart was still beating. It was the first time we ever had a Democrat in the family~Emo Phillips

Some encouraging signs for Republican chances in November (my bold emphasis)…

The lengthy Democratic primary contest bodes well for Republican chances of holding the White House, a new poll suggests.

As Democratic Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York slug it out for the nomination, many of their supporters -- at least in Pennsylvania, site of the next major primary -- aren't committed to the party's ticket in November, according to a Franklin & Marshall College Poll.

Among Obama supporters, 20 percent said they would vote for Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, if Clinton beats their candidate for the nomination. Among Clinton supporters, 19 percent said they would support McCain in November if Obama is the Democratic nominee. (See poll) END EXCERPT, which appears courtesy CNS News.

White House strategists are feeling a new rush of optimism about President Bush's remaining 10 months in office. One reason is a new internal Republican poll, obtained by U.S. News, which indicates that while Bush's job-approval ratings remain low, some of his major policies have become quite popular. If Bush and his surrogates can make the policies better known, GOP strategists believe that will lift not only Bush's approval ratings but the overall standing of his party. SNIP

About 64 percent of likely voters approve of Bush's economic stimulus package passed earlier this year; 67 percent back his initiatives to help struggling homeowners survive the current mortgage crisis; 70 percent endorse his plan to allow monitoring of foreign communications of suspected terrorists; and 72 percent back his visit to the Mideast to promote peace. In addition, 52 percent approve of his surge of U.S. troops into Iraq. END EXCERPT, which appears courtesy US News and World Report

Looking ahead to the General Election in November, John McCain continues to lead both potential Democratic opponents. McCain leads Barack Obama 49% to 41% and Hillary Clinton 50% to 42% (see recent daily results). New polling shows McCain leading both Democrats in Georgiaand Arkansas.In Minnesota,the race is very close.

On Sunday, McCain is viewed favorably by 54% of voters nationwide and unfavorably by 42%. Obama’s reviews are 47% favorable and 51% unfavorable. For Clinton, those numbers are 42% favorable, 55% unfavorable (see recent daily results).   

The Rasmussen Reports Balance of Power Calculator shows Democrats leading in states with 200 Electoral Votes while the GOP has the advantage in states with 189. When “leaners” are added, the Democrats lead 247 to 229. Over the past month, McCain has gained ground in Ohio,Michigan, Minnesota,Colorado, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Both Democrats continue to lead in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticutand California (see summary of recent state general election polling). END EXCERPT, which appears courtesy Rasmussen Reports.

Hugh Hewitt has an idea to help McCain build on his momentum…

If Senator McCain selected a running mate early and set about the country with a team of advisors that will accompany him into the executive branch in some capacity, the contrast with the rapidly deteriorating Democratic front bench would be profound, just as this week's trip to Iraq, Jordan and Israel showcased the chasm between McCain and Obama.  Conventional wisdom says McCain waits as long as he can to name a running mate, but with a fund-raising gap that will only widen as the left gets more and more energized about having a nominee with a radical past and pastor, there's an opportunity to cement the GOP support and claim the center right and energize fund-raising and organization in front of Team McCain.  END

I like Hugh’s idea, but I would like to see McCain go even further. I suggest that the Republican nominee begin recruiting potential cabinet members and floating those names to the public. And I would like to see McCain reaching out to a couple of folks from outside the GOP; Joe Lieberman pops out as a real solid possibility…

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Happy Hillbillary Friday! March 14, 2008

PictureinMarch132008doc.jpg Hillinator picture by kevinmcdonald_photoRFTLC, rights reserved

The Hillinator: Badly damaged, and daily taking more hits, but not totally out of commission. It will not stop until it completes its mission or is totally destroyed in the process...

Giving Team Hillbillary hope is the potential for fallout from Obama’s association with Tony Rezko scandal. And this week Obama has been put on the defensive over controversial remarks made by Jeremiah A. Wright, Reverend of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Obama has attended Trinity United for twenty years; Wright married Barack and Michelle Obama and christened the Obama’s daughters.  

Obama has been particularly weak in his attempts to explain his ongoing association with Wright who, among other things has:

·        Blamed the US government for creating the AIDS virus, which was ostensibly developed to kill blacks.

·        Asserted that 9/11 was America’s comeuppance for US foreign policy.

·        Suggested that American blacks should not sing “God Bless America”, but instead should sing “God D*mn America”.

Check out Ronald Kessler’s Op-Ed piece in today’s Opinion Journal for more on Wright and his pal Louis Farrakhan. 

Obama has mildly criticized Wright’s remarks, though his denunciation seems somewhat insincere. Obama compared Wright to “an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with."

Relative or no, it is a pretty safe bet that many Americans, me among them, would head for the door the first time they heard anyone spouting racist or anti-American rhetoric. And, as others have pointed out, one may not be able to choose his uncle, but one can choose his friends; or his minister. Obama had a choice, yet he stayed….for twenty years. 

And Wright remains an advisor and “sounding board” to Obama.

In religion as in politics, leadership is about saying and doing things that resonate with the constituency. Essentially, we tend to follow and support people whose values we share. I wonder which part of Wright’s racist, divisive teachings so strongly resonate with Barack Obama (the great uniter) that he has stayed with the church for more than two decades….

*************************************

Just wondering: How does Barack Obama’s mother, a white woman, feel about her son’s willingness to remain close to a man who has spent so much time and energy attacking whites?

*************************************

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported earlier this week that this year’s average winter temperatures are two-tenths of one degree above the average for the twentieth century. Yet this year’s temps are the lowest since 2001.

The report also noted “record Northern Hemisphere snow cover in January and above-average snow cover in February”.   

Television’s “big three”, ABC, CBS and NBC, have remained very quiet about the NOAA report. Does this merely reflect the big three’s lack of interest in global warming?

According to a recent study by BMI:

Over the last 6 months of 2007, the big three did 205 stories on global warming.

On the three networks, 80 percent of stories (167 out of 205) didn’t mention skepticism or anyone at all who dissented from global warming alarmism. CBS did the absolute worst job. Ninety-seven percent of its stories (34 out of 35) ignored other opinions. Williams’ own network, NBC, came in a close second with 85 percent (76 out of 89) excluding skepticism. ABC was the most balanced network, but still censored dissent from 64 percent of its stories (34 out of 53).

(P)eople with alternative views barely got face time on the networks. Instead, they received insults and hostile questions.

Journalists also called skeptics “deniers,” conjuring images of Holocaust deniers, and cast them as flat-earthers – ironically forgetting that there was once a scientific consensus that the earth was flat.

*************************************

Speaking of MSM bias, Newsbusters reports that it took awhile for the big three to get around to mentioning that Eliott Spitzer is a Dim:

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, substitute NBC Nightly News anchor Ann Curry and reporter Mike Taibbi failed to identify disgraced outgoing New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as a Democrat, but on Thursday night Curry finally informed NBC viewers of the party affiliation -- a fact network journalists always consider relevant when a Republican gets caught in scandalous behavior.  SNIP

For the record, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric cited Spitzer's party on Monday and Wednesday nights while ABC's World News didn't until Wednesday evening.

The morning shows have completely blacked out the fact Spitzer is a Democrat.   END EXCERPT

*************************************

For what it's worth: The same media suppressing dissent about global warming, and dragging its heels in citing Eliot Spitzer’s political affiliation is the same MSM covering Barack Obama…

*************************************

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has admitted that he has been involved in a prostitution ring. This is the same man who when he was attorney general went after the prostitution rings. So apparently for not giving him good service . . . Jay Leno

If Gov. Spitzer resigns over his prostitution scandal, he will reportedly go into private practice as a lawyer. When asked why he wanted to practice law again, Spitzer said, “I like businesses where you charge by the hour and screw your clients."  Conan O’Brien

Earlier today, the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, resigned. In his resignation speech he said, "To whom much has been given, much is expected." Which is the same thing he said to that $5,000-an-hour hooker.  Jay Leno

Political experts say that before the scandal, Hillary Clinton had considered him for a possible running mate. Now, Hillary is considering Spitzer as a possible husband. Conan O’Brien

Stay red…

 

 

 

 

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 11, 2008

"I hope to continue the great tradition that you have created for us in this state of leadership in Albany."~ New York Governor Eliot Spitzer

N.Y.'s Spitzer linked to prostitution ring

One of my favorite Op-Eds on the Spitzer Scandal is "Eliot Rex", appearing in today’s American Spectator. Here are some excerpts:

But Spitzer himself does not deserve an ounce of sympathy for the public humiliation he is set to endure, because he built his career on the public humiliation of others.

Back in 2002, as a wave of corporate scandals rocked Wall Street and the Securities and Exchange Commission was seen by some as too slow to respond, Spitzer cleverly seized on an opportunity to make his name. By broadly defining his role as New York's Attorney General and using any angle he could, Spitzer aggressively prosecuted corporate malfeasance, whether it was real or perceived.

HIS TARGETS WERE always unsympathetic -- insurance companies, mutual funds, Wall Street investment banks, and greedy CEOs -- and the victims were always average investors who lost money as a result of corporate skulduggery.

The media, which was clamoring for action and in no mood to empathize with big business, ate it up. They affectionately dubbed Spitzer the "Sheriff of Wall Street" and compared him to legendary mob-fighter Eliot Ness.

It never mattered whether companies or individuals actually did anything illegal, because his cases rarely made it to court. Wall Street investors abhor uncertainty more than anything else, and when publicly traded companies watched their stock prices crater amid a barrage of Spitzer-generated negative headlines, it was always in their best interests to reach a settlement to put the scandal behind them. On the few occasions when his targets did fight back, Spitzer's success rate was far less impressive.

Spitzer's arbitrary choice of targets highlighted his political opportunism. When Richard Grasso was forced to resign from his position as head of the New York Stock Exchange because Spitzer filed a lawsuit charging him with receiving excessive compensation, Spitzer also went after NYSE board member Ken Langone, a prominent Republican.

But he didn't lay a finger on Carl McCall, an influential New York Democrat, even though McCall served on the NYSE board as chief of the compensation committee that had approved the $140 million pay package that Spitzer deemed not only outrageous, but illegal. END EXCERPT (the article is worth a complete read)

The Dims aren’t exactly rushing to their comrade’s defense:

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman. But, hey, I wouldn’t mind it. At least she’s good lookin’" ~ Bill Clinton

"If I am elected, I will make health care affordable for that prostitute and her small business, Emperor’s Club VIP." ~ Hillbillary Clinton

"How bad can it be; I mean the girl made it home alive." ~ Ted Kennedy

(Regarding calls for an investigative probe about the cash Spitzer paid the prostitute) "I have been probed by aliens. Repeatedly." ~ Dennis Kucinich

(On viewing the room at the Mayflower Hotel, site of the Spitzer-hooker liaison) "I personally saw cut off ears, cut off heads, cut off limbs, blown up bodies and razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan." ~ John Kerry

"I certainly hope that Spitzer did not ask that young lady for change." ~Barack Obama

"Like everyone else, I am wary about the way spending is being increased at some levels." ~ Eliot Spitzer

But apparently not wary enough to refrain from spending $5500 per hour for a prostitute, eh, Elliot?

*****************************************************

In honor of Chuck Norris’ 68th birthday on Monday March 10, here are some Norris legends (a few courtesy the Boston Globe):

Chuck Norris can hit you so hard that he can actually alter your DNA. Decades from now your descendants will occasionally clutch their heads and yell, "What the hell was that?"

When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris sleeps with a night light. Not because Chuck Norris is afraid of the dark, but the dark is afraid of Chuck Norris.

When Chuck Norris sends in his taxes, he sends blank forms and includes only a picture of himself, crouched and ready to attack. Chuck Norris has not had to pay taxes ever.

Chuck Norris once bet NASA he could survive reentry without a spacesuit. On July 19, 1999, a naked Chuck Norris reentered the earth's atmosphere, streaking over 14 states and reaching a temperature of 3,000 degrees.

An embarrassed NASA publicly claimed it was a meteor, and still owes him a beer.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but a Chuck Norris' glare will liquefy your kidneys.

Medical researchers have concluded that Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Now if someone could only get Chuck to cry.

*************************************

With the end of the first week of March, there has so far been only a single American fatality this month (incurred in a non-combat Iraqi helicopter crash). If that were to continue (and it could change tomorrow), we are in a period in which the entire war could be redefined as something analogous to ongoing operations in Afghanistan or even the Balkans. And that, coupled with Iraq’s strong economic performance and political improvement, would radically change the Obama message of Iraqi as an ungodly horror worthy of abject withdrawal.  Victor Davis Hanson

As Hanson’s comments suggest, things have quieted down in Iraq. But there is still some fighting and Michael Yon is on scene in Mosul, one of the last bastions for al Qaeda in Iraq. In his most recent posting, Yon reports on an extraordinary group of fighters he calls the Guitar Heroes.

Kiowa Warrior (the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior, an economy-sized helicopter that would make a Ford Pinto seem spacious) pilots (in Mosul) spend part of their time on call, often playing Guitar Hero to pass the time. SNIP

One day after a long mission, LTC Jamison was just coming down to a hover back at the airfield when mortars exploded nearby. Before touching down, he lifted straight off. The counter-battery radar gave Jamison and his left-seater, Chief Warrant Officer 2 George Siegler, a Point of Origin (POO) to the firing site about four kilometers away in the Al Uruba district of Mosul. Swooping in, Siegler spotted a mortar team through the Plexiglas under his feet, and a split second later about four enemy machine guns and two RPGs fired at once. Ambush! Three bullets struck the helicopter and one hit Jamison’s helmet. The flight helmets have no ballistic protection because Kevlar is heavy, and when you crash it can break your neck or even snap your head off. The bullet went straight through the back of Jamison’s helmet, through the Styrofoam and out the other side, missing his head by maybe an inch. Jamison told me it felt like getting whacked with a bat. "Just a little bat," he said. Last year, a helicopter pilot in Mosul was shot in the head and killed.

Just as Jamison got whacked, he felt a strong blast come in from Siegler’s side. Jamison pushed the helicopter lower and started doing S-turns to break out of the kill zone.

Jamison asked Siegler if he were okay, but Siegler didn’t know. Jamison started patting down Siegler for blood while still flying low because oftentimes soldiers are seriously or even mortally shot and have no idea they were even hit. When Siegler saw bullet holes in Jamison’s helmet, he started patting down Jamison for blood. Jamison thought it strange because Siegler didn’t bother to tell him about the holes in his helmet, and Jamison didn’t know he had been helmet-shot. Meanwhile, Jamison had flying to do. The aircraft was badly damaged, almost no instruments were working. They flew back toward the base. The moment Jamison touched skids to tarmac, Siegler unstrapped and ran to another helicopter and started the engine. While those rotors were picking up speed, Jamison quickly shut down his broken helicopter, unbuckled, joined Siegler in the other helicopter and they flew back to the ambush site.

These pilots are fighting every day. They get into so many gunfights, rocket-fights (where pilots are launching rockets and the enemy is launching RPGs), and Hellfire attacks, not to mention flying so low the left-seater is shooting the little M-4 out the door, that it’s hard to know what fight the reader might want to hear about. It would take a book to explain half of them. END EXCERPT

I excerpted Guitar Heroes to keep today’s blog to a reasonable length, but Yon’s piece is a compelling story of some very impressive soldiers. I highly recommend a complete read.

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 10, 2008

Fare thee well! And if forever,
Still forever, fare thee well. ~Lord Byron

Guitarist Jeff Healey passed away on March 2, 2008. Healey finally succumbed to lung cancer, but he had battled cancer in one form or another for his entire life. Retinal cancer had robbed him of his eyesight as an infant. 

Back in the 90s, I had the good fortune to see Healey perform at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theater. These many years later, I still vividly remember that show.

With the notable exceptions of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn-who was responsible for bringing Healey to the attention of the music world-I saw just about every one of the great rock guitarists of the 70s and 80s, many of them multiple times; some more than a dozen performances. Healey’s performance that night at the Roxy ranks in the top twenty percent of all the shows I have ever seen. It was definitely one of the most unusual performances I have witnessed.

Healey usually played with the guitar across his lap, sometimes while seated, sort of like a pedal-steel player. The style looked a little awkward, but it did not prevent Healey from playing blisteringly fast, soaring, fluid runs. And neither his style nor his blindness restricted Healey’s showmanship.

Adding a little visual flash to his virtuosic playing, Healey picked with his teeth; he played behind his back.  We’re not talking gimmicky stuff here, either. In his lap or behind his back, Healey played searing, don’t-miss-a-lick, amazingly melodic blues-rock. 

Watching him play that night, it was easy for me to see why Guitar Player Magazine in 1990 named Healey “Best Blues Guitarist”. Jeff Healey was a player. He was just 41 years old when he died.

Saying he was “mentally tired”, quarterback Brett Favre on Tuesday announced his retirement from professional football. Favre, 38, played 17 seasons in the NFL, all but one of them for the Green Bay Packers. He is a first ballot Hall of Famer.

Favre played the game with boyish exuberance and reckless abandon, a style that made him unpredictable and a bit like Mother Goose’s “little girl with the curl”: when he was good, he was very, very good; and when he was bad he was horrid. 

Favre threw an NFL-record 288 interceptions, many of the errant throws coming at very inopportune times.  In the Packers’ last 8 playoff games (3-5 record), Favre threw 16 interceptions. His interception during overtime of this year’s National Conference final set up the Giants’ winning field goal. 

But those pickoff throws were often the result of Favre trying to force something good to happen, something Favre did plenty of times.

He set NFL career records for touchdown passes (442), passing yards (61,655), pass completions (5,377), and pass attempts (8,758). Those personal stats helped Favre win the NFL MVP three times.

More importantly, under Favre’s leadership the Packers won 160 times, a record for a starting NFL quarterback.

Perhaps no statistic, personal or team, tells as much about Brett Favre as his streak of 253 consecutive regular season starts (275, including playoff games). For perspective, Favre went nearly 16 straight seasons without missing a single start.

Favre was an ironman and a leader of men, he was a consummate professional. Yet it never appeared that pro football was just a job to Brett Favre. Favre was a tough, fiery competitor, but he never seemed to forget that football was a game, meant to be played for fun. The NFL was lucky to have Brett Favre and it may be a long, long time before we see another quite ike him…

The message was faint but unmistakable: the small UN force was outnumbered and outgunned, pinned down on open ground and taking heavy fire from Taliban forces holed up in a well-fortified building. The pilot on call broke off his approach to the base in Afghanistan and immediately turned his plane around to help. Several minutes later, the pilot released a 500-pound laser-guided bomb, steered toward the enemy stronghold by the plane’s sensor operator.

The bomb scored a direct hit, though the building remained standing. The crew could see that there were no “squirters”, people who run in all directions from the point of impact, but to be on the safe side, the pilot dropped a second bomb on the building.

The soldiers on the ground, just a few hundred yards from the bomb strikes, confirm that the building has been destroyed; no sign of any Taliban survivors. 

Their mission accomplished, the plane’s crew congratulate one another and then step from their “cockpit” and into the bright sunshine of a Nevada afternoon.

Welcome to the future of war.

The Taliban combatants probably never knew what hit them, their annihilation delivered by a whisper-quiet aircraft, flying nearly 5 miles above the battlefield. The plane that exterminated those Taliban vermin was an MQ-9 Reaper, the US Air Force’s next generation of unmanned aircraft. The military calls the Reaper, which has as much firepower as an F-16, the world’s first remote-controlled hunter-killer.

The Reaper has several big advantages over a piloted aircraft. It costs less than a third of what an F-16 costs. Where fuel capacity often reduces to mere minutes the time an F-16 can spend over a battlefield, a Reaper can spend hours in the air. This extended flying time allows the Reaper to find the enemy-including tracking him if he moves, assess the surroundings, target, engage and destroy the enemy, and then assess the damage. And the Reaper can do all of that without putting a pilot in harm’s way.

Current plans call for a fleet of 60 Reapers, which will compliment the US military’s 160 unmanned Predator aircraft.

Note: I have taken extensively from Peter Godwin’s article “The Future of War”, which appears in the April 2008 edition of Men’s Journal. I would have preferred to excerpt the article and link it for readers, but it appears that Men’s Journal does not provide content on the web.

Michele Malkin has linked to a site that allows visitors to “Name that Collectivist”; it’s clever and fun. It is also very enlightening and worth the time to check out.

A friend of mine sent me this short but cool video, “Stopping Time at Grand Central Station”. 
 
Stay red...
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Happy Hillbillary Friday! March 7, 2008

"I declare that civil war is inevitable and is near at hand" Sam Houston

Samantha Power, then an advisor to the Obama campaign, speaking to a reporter from The Scotsman:

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

"You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive." END EXCERPT

Though Power resigned Friday under pressure for her remarks, she has a point about that whole Hillbillary as monster thing.

Then there was the Clinton shot at Obama:

Chief Clinton spokesperson, Howard Wolfson, in a May 6, 2008 conference call to reporters (courtesy My Way News):

"After a campaign in which many of the questions that voters had in the closing days centered on concerns that they had over his state of preparedness to be commander in chief and steward of the economy, he has chosen instead of addressing those issues to attack Senator Clinton," Wolfson told reporters in a conference call. "I for one do not believe that imitating Ken Starr is the way to win a Democratic primary election for president." END EXCERPT

Mmmm. Sounds like this will get bloody; deliciously, wonderfully, mesmerizingly bloody.

"(T)he only thing we can hope for is civil war, untold bloodshed, and the end of (the Dims’) dreams" Archie Lee Moore (highly paraphrased)

Robert Novak, posting Thursday at Real Clear Politics, does not see a ceasefire any time soon:

(There is now) the prospect of seven weeks of fierce campaigning by the two candidates stretching out to the next primary showdown April 22 in Pennsylvania, but also perhaps what Democratic leaders feared but never really thought possible until now: a contested national convention in Denver the last week of August. SNIP

A showdown in Denver may be unavoidable.

Such a showdown would reveal consequences of eight years of Democratic procedural decisions that made no sense save for the premise that Hillary Clinton, as she expected, would be handed the nomination on Super Tuesday Feb. 5. Holding the convention unusually late raises the prospect of not knowing the identity of the Democratic nominee until shortly before Labor Day. The decision to deprive Michigan and Florida of delegates because their primaries were scheduled too early cannot stand in a contested convention. That Hillary Clinton's candidacy still lives forces Democrats to cope with their mistakes. END ARTICLE

Anyone who expects Clinton to quietly or gracefully go away needs to think again. Hillbillary is a heartless, soulless terminator with but one mission: winning the presidency.

Even the libs are onto Hillbillary’s scorched-earth tactics. Lefty loon Jonathan Chait, who most frequently puts crayon to grocery bag for the Los Angeles Times, had this to say today in hard-left leaner the New Republic:

Clinton's path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn't going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton's Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn't going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.

That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama's. The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama's general election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand the nomination to her. Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified response as to whether Obama is a Muslim ("not as far as I know"), her repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified. SNIP

Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. END EXCERPT

"We will get (the nomination) or choke their rivers with our dead!" Hillbillary Clinton (borrowing and paraphrasing Bart Simpson)

Look for Hillbillary to hit Obama often and hard over the next few months. One target for Hillbillary, and eventually for Republicans, is Barack Obama’s connections to Chicago area (ahem) businessman and fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko. Rezko is a businessman the same way Tony Soprano is "in sanitation".

Rezko is accused of using his political connections to extort money from companies wishing to business in Illinois. His trial started Thursday. Rezko has also been connected to Khaled Ahmed who, along with his brother Zubair A. Ahmed, has been accused "of conspiring to commit terrorist acts against American military personnel in Iraq, as well as others abroad, in an Islamic holy war against the United States and its allies."

Rezko is also Obama’s neighbor-literally-and there have been questions about his involvement in the real estate Obama made to get the property.

Conservative talker Hugh Hewitt, came up with the concept of a web-based clearing house for all things Rezko, Rezkorama.com. It’s worth a look, especially if Obama manages to hang on and win the Dim nomination.

If, on the other hand, this Rezko scandal grows and engulfs Obama, it may provide just the excuse senior Dim leadership (there’s an oxymoron!) needs to cheat Obama out of the nomination.

"Compare (the Dim party) to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions." Henry George (paraphrased)

Cartoon courtesy Townhall.com

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 6, 2008

Part 3 of a three-part series on Nuclear power in America

As America’s need for electricity grows, and public concerns continue to rise over the cost-both environmentally and in real dollars-of using fossil fuels to generate power, people are looking for inexpensive, non-polluting alternatives. One such alternative to fossil fuels is nuclear, which has cheaply and reliably and cleanly and safely produced electricity for nearly 30 years.

But public fear remains a major obstacle to increasing nuclear power generation in the US. Concerns remain over the operating safety of nuclear power plants. Then there is the vexing issue of what to do with all that nuclear waste.

Three Mile Island’s 1979 meltdown rattled people’s faith about the safety of nuclear power. The Chernobyl meltdown seven years later shook public confidence like a magnitude 8 earthquake. Much was made of Chernobyl at the time, and it is still cited and studied as the world’s greatest nuclear disaster. Yet many people are under-informed about the Chernobyl meltdown.

The cause of the meltdown at Chernobyl was:

A. Untrained, inexperienced crew.

B. Flawed reactor design.

C. An experimental test that went awry.

D. All of the above

Which meltdown caused more nuclear fallout in Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island (Pennsyvania) or Chernobyl (Ukraine)?

A. The answer cannot be scientifically determined

B. Three Mile Island meltdown

C. Both about the same

D. Chernobyl meltdown

How many people died as a direct result of the Chernobyl meltdown?

A. 4,000,000

B. 400,000

C. 40,000

D. 4000

The answer to all three Chernobyl questions is "D". The meltdown at Chernobyl occurred when an inexperienced crew-some of whom had been transferred in from jobs at coal-burning power plants-violated safety procedures and performed a fatal experiment on one of the reactors. The Chernobyl plant’s major flaw was the lack of a steel-reinforced, concrete containment structure around the metal vessel housing the reactor. The lack of secondary containment allowed radiation from Chernobyl’s reactor vessel to immediately escape into the atmosphere.

The Chernobyl reactor also used a "carbon moderator" to facilitate the nuclear chain reaction. During the meltdown, the carbon moderator caught fire. It burned for nine days, delaying clean up efforts and prolonging the leakage of radiation into the surrounding area. As radiation continued to escape from Chernobyl, some of it found its way into the upper atmosphere, to be globally distributed by air currents. This helps to explain why ground level monitoring in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania detected higher radiation levels after Chernobyl than had been detected after the meltdown at Three Mile Island.

Opinions vary regarding the number of deaths that directly resulted from the Chernobyl meltdown. Great Britain’s Lancet-the same medical journal that claims the US liberation of Iraq resulted in 655,000 "excessive" Iraqi deaths-published a study alleging that Chernobyl’s meltdown killed every human being on the European Continent and in Asia. More serious and reliable estimates place Chernobyl’s death toll at around 4000 people. Between 50 and 100 of the deaths were plant workers or clean up personnel, most of whom received extremely high radiation exposure and died within a couple of weeks of the meltdown. The remaining deaths were spread over a number of years and were mostly attributed to exposure-related ailments such as cancer.

Based on the available information, all current US nuclear power plants have reinforced concrete containment structures around a separate metal reactor vessel. This would be the required configuration for any new nuclear plant construction. And US plants do not use carbon moderators, they use water.

A disaster like Chernobyl simply could not happen in the United States. American nuclear plants have had a clean safety record for nearly three decades. Even the 1979 incident at Three Mile Island-a "perfect storm" of things gone wrong-did not result in any injuries. If the odds of a nuclear accident are so small, why all the fear?

GQ’s Meltdown has one possible explanation:

What drives this (fear), in many cases, is the conflation of magnitude with probability. That is, when people worry about nuclear power, what they worry about is the scale of an accident, not the likelihood.

So even if the probability of a nuclear meltdown is one in a million, that one occurrence strikes people as potentially devastating. Nobody wants her/his city to be the one smoldering in radioactive ruins.

Though some opposition to nuclear power generation results from worries about the day-to-day safety of America’s nuclear power plants, even more resistance comes from people concerned about what to do with the nuclear fuel after it is no longer useful for generating power. There are two primary options for nuclear waste, which maintains some level of radioactivity for thousands of years: recycle then dispose, or dispose.

France gets 80 percent of its power from nukes, and has the cheapest electrical rates in Europe. The French also the have cleanest air in Europe, and annually export $4 billion worth of electricity to their European neighbors. France recycles its nuclear waste. From FOXNews article "Recycling Nuclear Fuel: The French Do It; Why Can’t Oui?":

Upon its removal from French reactors, used fuel is packed in containers and safely shipped via train and road to a facility in La Hague. There, the energy producing uranium and plutonium are removed and separated from the other waste and made into new fuel that can be used again. The entire process adds about 6 percent in costs for the French.

Anti-nuclear fear mongering has proved baseless. The French have recycled fuel like this for 30 years without incident: no terrorist attack, no bad guys stealing uranium, no contribution toward nuclear weapons proliferaton, and o accidental explosions.

France meets all of its recycling needs with one facility. Indeed, domestic French reprocessing only takes about half of La Hague’s capacity. The other half is used to recycle other countries’ spent nuclear fuel.

Since beginning operations, France’s La Hague plant has safely processed over 23,000 tones of used fuel—enough to power France for fourteen years. SNIP

The French recycling process is also being adopted by Japan and is being considered by the Chinese. At some point, even the recycled fuel runs out, at which point the French process involves encasing the spent material in glass blocks. The glass blocks then go for "deep geologic disposal" (translation: burial in a really, really deep hole), covered momentarily in this piece.

Current US laws prohibit recycling of nuclear waste, thanks to a 1977 directive signed by then-president Jimmy Carter.

That is unfortunate because the US currently has 112 million pounds of nuclear waste. Recycling would reduce that unusable nuclear waste down to about 12 million pounds. The 100 million pounds of recycled uranium could potentially produce enough electricity to light every home in the United States for the next twelve years.

As a consequence of the ban on nuclear recycling, US nuclear plants currently store nuclear waste onsite, typically in reinforced cooling ponds designed specifically for that purpose. This practice is a big part of the reason that many Americans fear nuclear power. Storing nuclear waste onsite at a nuclear power plant creates the potential that radiation will seep out into the surrounding land, eventually getting into the local water supply.

Concerns about potential groundwater contamination are not unfounded. Nuclear power plants need plenty of cool water to keep the reactors from overheating, so plants are typically located next to large bodies of water. That close proximity to water increases the risk that escaping radiation can contaminate one or more local water sources.

The majority of experts seem to agree that keeping nuclear waste onsite is needlessly risky. And expert consensus is that deep geological disposal is currently the best disposition for spent nuclear fuel. It appears that the only consensus on where to locate the repositories is "in someone else’s backyard".

The French are apparently some of the world’s most informed people when it comes to nuclear power. They are also pragmatic when it comes to nuclear; they understand that there are risks involved, but they trust the people who design and manage the nuclear power systems. And they seem to feel that cheap, clean power is a worthwhile tradeoff for the risks involved.

Yet, enlightened as they are about nuclear power, the French people are not comfortable about the idea of having a large repository for nuclear waste on French soil. Amid much ongoing controversy, the French have yet to settle on their nuclear disposal site.

The US has settled on its disposal site, in tunnels, 1200 feet beneath Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. From Meltdown:

(The mountain) consists of four principal layers, which alternate between a hard and relatively brittle material known as welded tuff and a sponge-like material known as nonwelded tuff. SNIP On the surface, the harder material cloaks the mountain, shedding most rainfall down the sides and into the surrounding plains. The water that does seep into the cracks would have to travel 300 feet through fissures in a layer called Tiva Canyon, saturate a hundred feet of the softer rock, and then continue through fissures in another several hundred feet of hard rock known as Topopah Spring in order to reach the repository. Even then, to be dangerous, that water would first have to penetrate the metal canisters that are molded around the waste, become irradiated, continue down through several hundred more feet of hard rock, and fill yet another layer of spongy rock known as Calico Hills, before finally reaching the water table, where it might, depending on whose data you believe, either surface a century later in the middle of Death Valley, or else not at all. Also, since the spongy layers of Yucca Mountain happen to be rich in minerals known as zeolites, which are known to neutralize radioactivity. SNIP

The US government has already spent billions of dollars building Yucca and preparing it for operation, even going so far as hiring staff. But then things ground to a halt, primarily stopped due to political pressures. And they may not restart for awhile. Again from Meltdown:

The people of Nevada, by a large majority, believe the repository should be in somebody else’s backyard and have thrown up legal challenges at every stage of the site’s development. With the ascension of Nevada’s Harry Reid to the position of Senate Majority Leader in 2006, the state’s quest to block Yucca Mountain seems more likely than ever to succeed. Although development continues, progress is glacial, and Congress has been, to put it mildly, slow to grant approvals. As recently as January of this year, congressional budget cuts forced the repository to fire nearly all its on-site employees, scaling back to a mostly administrative operation. When (someone) asked Senator Reid what would happen to the repository in the coming years, he minced no words. "It will never happen," he said flatly.

It should not matter that Harry Reid said Yucca will never open. Reid is arguably one of the most ineffectual Senate leaders of the last 100 years. He has no credibility; his words carry no weight.

The risk of storing nuclear waste onsite at nuclear plants outweighs whatever risk there may be in storing waste at Yucca Mountain. America has 104 nuclear power plants, spread across 39 states. It boils down to a decision to put the residents of one state at some slight, theoretical risk, or expose people in 39 states to obvious ongoing hazard.

Eventually Yucca will open, but that may only be the beginning of the fight to store nuclear waste in Nevada. As an RFTLC reader astutely points out, next will come protests over transporting of nuclear wastes over America’s roadways and railways. Expect people blocking roadways and chaining themselves to the tracks to protest nukes traveling through their town-or somebody else’s. The design of the shipping containers and other precautions greatly minimize any risk of radiation leakage from a transportation accident. But, as with a meltdown, nobody wants the accident to happen in his backyard.

The irony of Nevadans fighting the Yucca Mountain project does not escape Meltdown’s author, who notes:

(Nevada, which has America’s dirtiest coal plant,) is unable to generate its own power and currently imports as much as 15 percent of its electricity from California and Arizona. Of course, since they produce 14 percent and 23 percent of their power at nuclear plants, respectively, that means Nevada, which likes to proclaim itself "nuclear-free," actually gets a considerable amount of its power from nuclear plants, too—but at markup prices that profit California and Arizona.

In some ways, the Nevadan attitudes reflect the attitudes of America. The Nevadans embrace the familiar but dirty old king coal, unaware or unconcerned that it is killing people and harming the environment. And maybe folks are more okay with nuclear power generation than they let on; provided the power plant is far enough away that it is no threat to them.

RFTLC believes that America must shift away from using fossil fuels to make electricity; the sooner the better. Renewables such solar and wind power would be this corner’s preference, but those technologies are still unproven and each has its own set of negatives. Nuclear power is availabe now.  It proven; it is cheap and it is clean. And it is safe.

Twenty-four thousand people die each year from coal-related pollution. That is real, not theoretical. Projections of catastrophe due to a meltdown or radiation leakage from nuclear waste are theoretical. But a serious accident has not happened in over thirty years of nuclear power production. There has not ever been a single fatality from US nuclear power generation.

Perhaps Americans can learn something from the French, who understand the threats and the benefits and, having weighed each, choose nuclear power as a clean, inexpensive and, ultimately, safe source of energy…

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 5, 2008

As a US Navy pilot, he survived 5 ½ years of beatings and torture while a prisoner at North Vietnam’s infamous Hanoi Hilton. He survived attacks from a tough crowd of conservatives who claimed he was too liberal, too old, too crotchety and too broke to ever win the Republican nomination. After overcoming that kind of opposition and adversity, John McCain should have no problem whipping a Dim in the general election…

Okay, Republicans, we now officially know who our guy is for the next election. Even if McCain was not your guy (he certainly wasn’t my candidate initially; six months ago I had his candidacy dead and buried) he is now the Republican nominee. It is now time for Republicans to get together behind McCain and help him defeat the Dim candidate, who will likely be the oh-so-inspirational but utterly insubstantial Barack Obama.

Fred Barnes’ Weekly Standard article, "Now the Hard Part", lists the three things McCain must do now that he has wrapped up the Republican nomination:

The most important is to bring Barack Obama down to earth from his pedestal in the heavens. He's still the likely Democratic nominee, after all, despite Hillary Clinton's primary wins yesterday. And he's mostly gotten away with campaigning as if he's on a mission to purify America, not merely running to capture the presidency.

McCain must also organize a turnout effort to match President Bush's in 2004--or exceed what Bush put together. This is necessary because it's clear the Democratic turnout is going to be larger and more enthusiastic than it was four years ago.

And he must gear his campaign to attract independents while not antagonizing conservatives, who constitute the Republican base. Conservatives are loyal Republicans, for the most part, and they didn't ditch the party even in its darkest of days in the 2006 election. It was independents who fled in 2006 to vote for Democrats, and they must be lured back this year. END EXCERPT

I agree with Barnes; Republicans did not quit in 2006. And we will not quit now. Conservatives should not be discouraged that the Dims are enthused and mobilized. Numbers and noise don't scare. We are not the ones making the most noise.  We are just the ones quietly getting the most done.
Republicans are historically always the minority party. If every voter turned out and voted along party lines, Republicans would lose just about every election. But we overcome the odds by outworking the Dims and turning out a higher percentage of voters. That is part of the reason we won in 2004. We can do in 2008 just what we did in 2004.

And Republicans should not despair that the 2008 election is a lost cause. After things looking so gloomy for the GOP just months ago, there are now some glimmers of hope. From today’s Rasmussen Reports:

Looking to the general election, John McCain has a slight lead over both Democrats. McCain now leads Obama 48% to 43% and Clinton 46% to 45% (see recent daily results). A Rasmussen Reports videosuggests that the Clinton victories in Texas and Ohio are good news for John McCain. (Looks like Rush Limbaugh was on to something-Kevin) In Washington State,McCain leads Clinton and is essentially even with Obama. The Governor’s race in Washington is also a dead-heat.

Nationally, McCain is viewed favorably by 52% and unfavorably by 45%. Obama’s numbers have slipped a bit recently and he is now viewed favorably by 50% of likely voters nationwide, unfavorably by 48%. Clinton earns positive reviews from 49% of Likely Voters nationwide and negative assessments from 50% (see recent daily results). END EXCERPT

In watching Tuesday’s primary wrap-up, I found it somehow appropriate that winning in the state of Texas helped push John McCain over the top. It was Sam Houston, first president of the Lone Star state, who said:

"We view ourselves on the eve of battle. We are nerved for the contest, and must conquer or perish. It is vain to look for present aid: none is at hand. We must now act or abandon all hope! Rally to the standard, and be no longer the scoff of mercenary tongues! Be men, be free men, that your children may bless their father's name."

************************************************

hindenburghillary.gif picture by kevinmcdonald_photoRFTLC

Oh, the Hillmanity!

The Hillaryburg is still flying high! But maybe not for much longer. According to the delegate counts, Hillbillary essentially needs to run the table to overtake Barack Obama. That is a tall order for Clinton.

Prior to winning Tuesday in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas Hillbillary had lost eleven straight to Obama, who still leads by 95 delegates. Obama did manage to pick up a victory Tuesday in the Vermont primary.

With just twelve primaries to go, it looks increasingly likely that neither Clinton nor Obama can win enough delegates to lock up the nomination before the convention. The next round of Dim primaries, stretched out over the next two months, probably will not make the picture any clearer.

The biggest remaining prize is the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania, with 158 delegates. According to Real Clear Politics, Clinton currently leads Obama 46 percent to 37 percent. The Dims proportion delegates based on election results, so if the polls hold up, Clinton would gain some ground, but not nearly enough to catch Obama, who would also pick up a few Pennsylvania delegates.

Even if Hillbillary wins by a landslide in Pennsylvania, Obama victories in Mississippi (March 11, 33 delegates) and North Carolina (May 6, 115 delegates) will offset some or all of the Clinton pickup. Real Clear Politics has Obama leading 47 percent to 38 percent in North Carolina. There currently are insufficient polling results for Mississippi-Rasmussen will begin polling there this week-but it is reasonable to project Obama doing at least as well in Mississippi as he is doing in North Carolina.

With neither candidate able to win the nomination outright, and neither side prepared to concede, that leads us to Denver and the Dim National Convention in August. There is a chance (read: likelihood) of some Hillbillary shenanigans at the convention.

First off, look for team Hillbillary to demand the inclusion of the 350 delegates from Florida and Michigan. The Dim National Party stripped Florida and Michigan of their delegates for moving up their respective primaries. With nothing apparently at stake in Florida or in Michigan, the Dim candidates agreed, in writing, not to campaign in those states.

Despite the agreement, Hillbillary campaigned in Florida and followed by campaigning in Michigan. Clinton won both states convincingly; taking Florida by nearly 2-to-1 and winning 55 percent of the vote in Michigan. As an interesting sidelight, Clinton ran unopposed in Michigan, but over 40 percent of Dim voters chose "uncommitted" rather than choosing Hillbillary.

Clinton opponents contend that Hillbillary may have won those states, but their lack of opposition allowed the candidate to win by a larger margin, thus awarding the candidate an unfairly large share of the Florida and Michigan delegates.

Expect Clinton and Obama to come to some compromise that allows inclusion of the Florida and Michigan delegates. Yet that compromise will not give either candidate the required number of delegates to secure the Dim nomination.

That throws the deciding votes to the 796 super delegates. Count on the Clintons to do plenty of arm twisting in an effort to keep super delegates who initially pledged for Hillbillary from switching their votes to Obama. Team Hillbillary will disregard the conflict this creates for some delegates who pledged early for Clinton-probably anticipating a Hillbillary walkover-and who have since realized that a vote for Obama best represents the wishes of their constituents.

Put out of your mind any notion that Hillbillary may allow the super delegates to break their commitments in order to avoid fracturing the Dim party. Forget, too, the idea that Hillbillary will step aside for the good of the party.

This is not about the Dim party; it is about the Clintons getting into power. It has been that way since the early 90s…all about the Clintons. This is war for the Clintons, their enemy is anyone who stands in the way of a Hillbillary presidency. Hillbillary wins the nomination or leaves behind scorched earth.

Any damage Hillbillary does to the Dims makes it that much easier for McCain to win in November…

Returning Thursday: RFTLC’s series on nuclear energy in America.

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 4, 2008

Twenty-nine years ago, a string of mechanical failures, compounded by human error, led to a reactor meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. No one was hurt and TMI was far and away America’s most serious nuclear accident. And TMI’s performance has since been near-flawless.

Yet nearly three decades later, in the face of rising energy costs-oil pegged $120 per barrel today-and increasing concerns about the environment, the American public remains resistant to nuclear power, a source of cheap, environmentally friendly energy.

Today less than 40 percent of Americans favor nuclear power; roughly one person in ten advocates the outright decommissioning of America’s 104 nuclear power plants.

This public resistance to nuclear power generation has effectively deterred the development of new power plants; the last time the US issued a new permit for a nuclear plant was more than thirty years ago.

In 2007, US nuclear facilities generated a record 807 billion kWh of electricity (with record uptime, too), about twenty percent of the nation’s electrical power. That output would not be quick or easy or cheap to replace.

American facilities currently using renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, wind and solar are all running at or very near capacity. And each of the renewables is currently limited in its ability to add to, let alone replace, the electrical power currently generated by atomic energy.

There are already hydroelectric dams at many of the best spots. What few good spots are left are often unavailable due to environmental or safety concerns. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1968, also prohibits building dams on some rivers.

Wind power is unstable and unpredictable, making it tricky to connect to the electrical grid. The electrical grid, in turn, also is limited in its capacity to store surplus power generated by wind. The typical wind farm takes up a sizeable amount of open space and not everyone likes the idea of a couple hundred multi-story (some as tall as 400 feet) structures-required to replace a single conventional power plant-spoiling their view of the landscape. Just ask Teddy Kennedy and his Massachusetts neighbors, whose protests led Congress in 2006 to block the "Cape Wind" project in Nantucket Sound. Cape Wind’s 130 towers would have generated seventy-five percent of the power required for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Solar power has produced mixed results; using the sun’s energy to make electricity via steam generation appears economically unviable, but there has been encouraging success with photovoltaic cells.

Where it can be difficult to predict the availability of wind power, solar power is very predictable: If the sun shines, the cells generate power. And solar electrical power is often at its best when people need the most electricity: hot, sunny days when air conditioning use drives up electrical demand.

But solar cells share some disadvantages with wind power; namely they take up plenty of space and not everyone finds them pleasing to the eye. The solar cells required to supply all of the power for an average home would cover one-half of a regulation football field, or about half an acre (No truth to the rumor that it would take solar cells spread over an area the size of Manhattan for Al Bore’s palatial estate; Manhattan is a little too small). And large banks of solar cells are aesthetically objectionable to some onlookers.

Based on current technology, solar electric is still somewhat expensive; upwards of $150,000 for that half acre of solar cells required for the typical home. Then there’s issue of the cells sitting idle when the sun doesn’t shine.

Random factoid: it takes anywhere from 2-5 years for a solar cell to capture the energy originally used to produce it.

Since renewables are not a ready option for replacing nuclear power generation, that leaves the old standby: fossil fuel. There are downsides there, too.

Coal is the most common fuel used in power generation. It is cheap and abundant; some experts say the Earth has a limitless supply of coal. But coal is about the dirtiest fuel currently used to generate electricity in America.

A typical 1000 megawatt power plant will burn more than 100 railcars of coal per week. Burning a ton of coal produces three tons of carbon dioxide, a major source of greenhouse gas. The combustion process also produces sulfur dioxide, a primary component of acid rain.

In 2007, American power plants burned one billion tons of coal and pumped three billion tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

One may safely debate the effects of acid rain on the environment. And skepticism is abundant-and growing-about the effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s climate. But it is a pretty safe bet that few people would advocate a double-digit annual increase in America’s greenhouse gas output. That is what would likely happen if America eliminated nuclear power generation in favor of coal.

From GQ’s "Meltdown" here is some additional perspective on replacing nuclear with coal:

To produce the same amount of electricity, a coal-fired power plant would have to incinerate more than 3 million metric tons of fuel, producing 500 pounds of carbon dioxide per second, as well as 1,200 pounds of ash per minute and 750 pounds of sulfur dioxide every five minutes. SNIP

Picking up on public concerns about pollution from burning coal, three of the largest Wall Street investment banks are imposing environmental standards that will make it tougher to finance construction of coal burning power plants.

Oil burning power plants generated less than 2 percent of America’s power in 2006, the last year of published statistics from the Energy Information Administration. Oil is not quite as big a polluter as coal, but burning it is wasteful when there are so many other, more productive uses for oil. Like the plastic in your computer, for example. Or the tires on your car. Or your detergent. Or that aspirin you feel like taking right now.

Natural gas burning power plants produced about the same percentage of US power as the nuclear plants. And the current trend is upward, increasing over the past ten years from about 14 percent to roughly 20 percent today.

Natural gas is the cleanest burning of the fossil fuels. But it is not as abundant as coal. Back in the 1990s, America became a net importer of natural gas. Today Canada supplies about 15 percent of the natural gas consumed in the US. It is not cost effective to ship natural gas due to its bulk, so most natural gas is transported via pipeline. This restricts competition; even if there is a surplus of natural gas in Siberia, there is no economical way to get the gas to America. Restricted supply and rising demand are at least part of the reason that natural gas prices have increased more than 60 percent since 2000.

Like oil, there are plenty of other, better uses for natural gas (heating water, for example) than making electricity. Natural gas is used to manufacture plastic, fabrics and even pharmaceuticals.

On Wednesday (perhaps Thursday if today’s Dim primaries make big news): Why the continued fear about nukes?

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

March 3, 2008

In the pre-dawn hours of March 29, 1979, a simple mechanical anomaly set off a chain of events that radically changed the way America generates its electrical power.

The GQ article Meltdown describes how the incident nearly thirty years ago at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island (TMI) has led to American-and possibly global-fear and loathing about nuclear power.

The meltdown at TMI started when the filters for cleaning incoming water-used to cool the nuclear reactor- simultaneously shutdown. The cooling system attempted to automatically bypass the filters and bring in unfiltered water, but the bypass valve failed to open. With no incoming water to cool down the system, core temperatures began to climb in the reactor.

Rising temperatures and increasing pressure triggered a relief valve to open, venting the system to the outside air. After just ten seconds of operation, the relief valve failed, sticking in the open position and allowing the cooling system water-mostly in the form of steam-to escape. This over-venting only added to the overheating problem by further depleting the water in the system.

Even with all that had gone wrong to that point, there was still a chance to avert a catastrophe. But the two operators on duty-each with decades of experience-both inexplicably froze. When they finally decided what to do, their actions only worsened the crisis.

Inside the plant’s cavernous control room, they stood before a seven-foot-high instrument panel, crammed with hundreds of -dials, gauges, and meters, many of which were erupting with alarm sirens and flashing lights, but none of them had any idea what it meant. As the minutes turned into hours, and the plant’s internal temperature soared above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, then 1,500 degrees, with water levels plummeting and the prospect of meltdown becoming more likely by the second, the confused operators did nothing to improve the situation. In fact, they made it worse. When one of the plant’s emergency systems began replacing water at a rate of nearly a thousand gallons per minute—which probably would have stemmed the crisis—operators turned the pumps off. Then, for reasons that are difficult to comprehend, they shut down the plant’s circulating pumps, preventing the cool water still inside the building from reaching the superheated core.

It would be another two hours before the morning shift arrived and stopped the leak.

By then, it was too late: The temperature inside the reactor had risen to more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat had caused the top half of the radioactive chamber to collapse on itself. The uranium fuel had melted into a lake of radioactive liquid. The zirconium skin around that fuel had evaporated into a broth of volatile gases, including a giant cloud of hydrogen that would soon explode into a fiery ball. And the nation, still asleep in the early-morning hours, was spiraling into the worst nuclear accident in its history, a cataclysm of fear and public mistrust that would consume the airwaves and charge the political dialogue for months; that would bring white-suited emergency-response crews to the site and would summon the president of the United States to visit in a pair of bright yellow protective booties, ordering a full investigation; that would take ten years and a billion dollars to clean up, would destroy the nation’s faith in atomic technology, and would bring the hope and promise of nuclear power—promoted since the 1950s as a clean and plentiful source of energy that would be "too cheap to meter"—to a grinding, glowing, terrified halt. SNIP

Three Mile Island is the poster child for all that has gone wrong with American nuclear power. Yet TMI continues to operate today, reliably generating cheap, non-polluting power.

Over the past ten years, the plant has become famous for its constancy, setting records for continuous operation. The latest, among more than 250 similar reactors worldwide, was 689 days without pause or fail.

What all this amounts to, in a typical year, is about 7.2 million megawatt hours of electricity, or enough to satisfy the needs of 800,000 homes. The carbon footprint of a nuclear plant is precisely…nothing. SNIP

Today, TMI is a veritable wildlife sanctuary. But what about back in 1979? Just how much damage was done by the meltdown at TMI?

From a radiological standpoint, the impact is somewhat easier to measure. Radiation is counted in units called millirems. Because the earth is warmed by the largest nuclear reactor of all—the sun—virtually all of us are exposed to a certain baseline of millirems each year, depending on where we live. At higher elevations, like Denver, the sun is closer, and citizens receive about 180 millirems per year; at lower elevations, like Delaware, residents receive only 20 or 30. Building materials can also make a difference: Because of the presence of -elements like radon in many rocks, people who live in brick or stone houses tend to receive 50 or 100 millirems more each year than people who live in wooden houses. Region also has an impact. In areas rich with coal, residents absorb about 100 millirems annually from the ground; in northeastern Washington State, residents get about 1,500 millirems from local minerals; in certain parts of India, as much as 3,000 millirems per year may come from the ground. A cigarette smoker gets about 1,300 millirems per year, mostly from the presence of the radioactive isotope polonium-210, which is found in tobacco (and, recently, in the autopsy reports of Russian spies). Back home in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney gets about 100 millirems every year from his pacemaker. Every time you go in for a dental X-ray, you get 5. Chest X-ray: 15. PET scan: 650. In fact, just by being alive, you generate a little radiation of your own, and most people absorb about 40 millirems each year from themselves.

At Three Mile Island, according to a 1980 inquiry by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the maximum level of radiation that anybody within a fifty-mile radius could have received from the accident was about 100 millirems—the equivalent of moving to Colorado for a year, or into a brick house for two. According to another study, by the Pennsylvania Departments of Health and Environmental Resources, among 721 locals tested, not a single one showed radiation exposure above normal. A similar study by the state’s Department of Agriculture found no significant trace of radiation in the local fish, water, or dairy products, which tend to register minute impurities. And a study released in 2000 by the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh found that, twenty-one years after the accident, there was still no evidence of "any -measurable impact" on public health. SNIP

No one was injured by the Three Mile Island meltdown. And, according to the GQ article, "nuclear plants have not claimed a single American life". Yet the effects from the TMI meltdown linger on the American psyche.

On Tuesday, the case for nuclear power.

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Happy Hillbillary Friday! February 29, 2008

 

 

meltinghillary.jpg Melting Hillary picture by kevinmcdonald_photoRFTLC, all rights reserved.

I'm melting! I'm melting! "Ohhhhh... What a world! What a world! Who ever thought a little guy like Barack Obama could destroy my beautiful wickedness?
************************************************

Word of thanks to reader Andrew P. for sending along the cartoon.

"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper." Sir Francis Bacon

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times. Patricia Hampl

So what is it that makes people so eager to buy the empty box that is Barack Obama?

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds. Will Durant

And why is that Obama just might succeed?

"If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing." Napolean Bonaparte

*************************************************

Victor Davis Hanson has a great take on the Libs’ populist political pandering:

In these gloom-and-doom narratives by (Clinton and Obama), we less fortunate Americans are doing almost everything right, but still are not living as well as we deserve to be. The common culprit is a government that is not doing enough good for us, and corporations that do too much bad to us.

Hanson’s piece is short, well written and very much worth a complete read. And it touches on a key reason for much of the appeal of both Dim candidates: the tactic of blaming government and big business for whatever woes any of us currently face…

*************************************************

"A liberal is a man who will give away everything he doesn’t own." —Frank Dane

In just the first few days after it was published, this February 9, 2008 Op-Ed brought more than 1,000,000 hits to the website for the Aspen Times News, a Colorado paper with a circulation of less than 12,000.

Rush Limbaugh talked about the piece on his nationally syndicated radio program. So did conservative talker Neal Boortz. And about 10 RFTLC readers sent me the article, possibly for inclusion on this blog.

At the center of all the hubbub is author Gary Hubbell’s admonition:

In election 2008, don’t forget Angry White Man

Hubbell’s piece deserves a complete read, but here are some of my favorite excerpts:

Each candidate is carefully pandering to a smorgasbord of special-interest groups, ranging from gay, lesbian and transgender people to children of illegal immigrants to working mothers to evangelical Christians.

There is one group no one has recognized, and it is the group that will decide the election: the Angry White Man. The Angry White Man comes from all economic backgrounds, from dirt-poor to filthy rich. He represents all geographic areas in America, from urban sophisticate to rural redneck, deep South to mountain West, left Coast to Eastern Seaboard.

His common traits are that he isn’t looking for anything from anyone — just the promise to be able to make his own way on a level playing field. In many cases, he is an independent businessman and employs several people. He pays more than his share of taxes and works hard. SNIP

He believes the Constitution is to be interpreted literally, not as a "living document" open to the whims and vagaries of a panel of judges who have never worked an honest day in their lives. SNIP

The Angry White Man is not a metrosexual, a homosexual or a victim. Nobody like him drowned in Hurricane Katrina — he got his people together and got the hell out, then went back in to rescue those too helpless and stupid to help themselves, often as a police officer, a National Guard soldier or a volunteer firefighter. SNIP

He also votes, and the Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader. It’s not that she is a woman. It’s that she is who she is. It’s the liberal victim groups she panders to, the "poor me" attitude that she represents, her inability to give a straight answer to an honest question, his tax dollars that she wants to give to people who refuse to do anything for themselves. END EXCERPT

As much as I enjoyed Hubbell’s piece, I also disagree with much of what he has to say. For example, I do not care much for Hubbell’s cheap shot on President Bush:

(E)verybody seems to recognize that our next president has to be a lot better than George Bush.

Even as we watch Bill Clinton’s legacy erode faster than a urinal cake at an Oktoberfest, many of us who follow history know that President Bush’s reputation will grow and improve over time. It sometimes takes awhile, but history has a way of scraping away all of the stuff at the surface, sort of like the way a glacier ponderously scours the landscape right down to the bedrock. When all of the current emotionalism and bias is scrubbed away, history will view George W. Bush as a man of courage; a man of character; a leader of consequence (if only he had been as aggressive in fighting pork barrel spending as he was in combating terror; and if only he had been little more effective at communicating and selling his agenda).

Hubbell-described by the staff at the Aspen Times News as the paper’s resident redneck-also takes a swipe at women:

(The angry white man) knows that his wife is more emotional than rational, and he guides the family in a rational manner.

I’m not buying that "woman as the weaker sex" crap. I know plenty of strong, smart, rational women, including my wife, my sister and my mom. And guess what: those three ladies and numerous other women are irritated about many of the same things that set off Hubbell.

Then there’s this from Hubbell:

His last name and religion don’t matter. His background might be Italian, English, Polish, German, Slavic, Irish, or Russian, and he might have Cherokee, Mexican, or Puerto Rican mixed in, but he considers himself a white American.

I am not down with Hubbell when he seems to suggest that this anger is just a "white guy thing". It is not a white thing to expect people to do their fair share, without undue government involvement. It is not a white thing to believe in America’s greatness and to defend her culture. Those are all American ideals. Or at least they used to be.

Ultimately this election is all about values. Hubbell’s side (my side, too, despite my differences with some of what he has to say)-plus a few people he left out-seems to view America as essentially great but always capable of being greater.

On the other side are people who see an America that is at the root of much that is wrong in the world and an American government that does not do nearly enough for its people. If they get their way, we will see America’s global stature reduced. And we will see significant deterioration of our individual rights. We will see a Supreme Court packed with liberal, revisionist judges who, by judicial fiat, can change America’s laws-regardless of whether those changes reflect the will of America’s citizenry. We will see confiscation and redistribution of wealth. Ultimately, we will end up with an America that is a little less fiercely independent; and Americans who are a little less free.

The other side is growing in number. The other side is vocal. The other side is energized. If our side is not angry, we had better be alarmed. And we had better get to work to stop the other side. If we let them win, we will have plenty to be unhappy about…

Stay red…

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

February 26, 2008

Baby, it’s colder outside

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Lorne Gunter, National Post  Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year. SNIP

The article’s author, Lorne Gunter, notes that one winter does not immediately signal a shift toward more "traditional" winter weather. But Gunter joins a growing number of skeptics questioning the idea of manmade global warming. And Gunter points to evidence that the Earth may actually be entering a cooling phase:

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, (here’s a link to Sororkhtin’s piece, which is an informative read-Kevin) a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon. SNIP

Sunspots are actually cool spots on the sun; so how does an absence of sunspots lead to lower solar output? Gary Rottman, SORCE Principal Investigator and a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explained this seeming paradox in an August 2004 posting at Space.com:

Sunspots indicate greater solar activity in general. While they do dampen sunlight while on the face of the Sun, they are surrounded by intensely bright regions called "faculae" or "plage." When sunspots are on the limb of the Sun -- just rotating onto or off of the face -- the plage are prominent from our vantagepoint, creating a significant increase in radiation that far outweighs the dip of radiation caused by the rest of the sunspot's transit.

Seen on a graph, total visible and infrared radiation increases just before a sunspot appears, dips slightly for several days as it crosses the surface, then increases again as it disappears.

A lack of sunspots indicates inactivity in the Sun, and less radiation overall. END EXCERPT

And so what happens here on Earth when the sun undergoes a prolonged period of inactivity? Again from Gunter:

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.END EXCERPT (Big hat tip to reader Andrew P. for sending along the Gunter piece, which appeared in the Canada’s National Post).

In 1645, somewhere the middle of the Little Ice Age, astronomers noticed unusually low sunspot activity. Astronomers had become interested in tracking sunspots shortly after the invention of the telescope, which made it much easier to see small irregularities on the sun’s surface.

What the astronomers observed in 1645 was the beginning of a seventy-year period of extraordinarily low solar activity, since named the Maunder Minimum (word of thanks to reader Dan M. for refreshing my memory on this). During the Maunder Minimum, observed sunspots fell to less than 1 percent of normal. Solar activity dropped. The Earth cooled, or kept cooling.

Winters were so severe during the Maunder that there are historical accounts from the 17th century of the Baltic Sea and the River Thames freezing over, the latter so solidly that Londoners had an ice carnival on the river.

There are at least three other "minimums" on record; the Oort Minimum (1010-1050), the Wolf Minimum (1280-1340,) the Spoerer Minimum (1420-1530), and there is evidence to suggest severe cooling during each of those periods. Alas, there are no sunspot observations to correlate diminished sunspot activity during those minimums, each of which occurred before Galileo’s 1609 invention of the telescope…

Stay red…

 

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Happy Hillbillary Friday! February 22, 2008

Falling flaming from the sky!

No, not that satellite the US Navy shot down; we’re talking about Hillbillary’s monstrous crash and burn…

clintonstaked.jpg

Photo courtesy Ace of Spades HQ

Much to the chagrin of this writer, Republicans in general and Clinton haters in particular, it appears that Hillbillary is out of the Dim race for the presidency. Many of us were hoping to see the beatable Hillbillary hang around long enough to get trounced in the November presidential election.

Hillbillary’s flameout likely signals the end to any hope (or threat) of a Hillbillary presidency. With Hillbillary out of the race, we are also seeing the end of nearly twenty years of Clinton domination of the Dim party. That will leave team Hillbillary wondering what to do next.

Bill Clinton will have time on his hands to-in no particular order-womanize; watch the accelerating, counter-clockwise, downward spiral of his reputation; and collect outrageous sums of money for giving speeches. Oh, and he can pretend that he still matters.

So where does that leave Hillbillary?  Ace of Spades asserts, and I am inclined to agree, that Hillbillary will try to find a way to remain relevant:

Her next-best option now is simply to be a beloved standard bearer of the liberal left.

And now that her presidential ambitions are scotched, she will move to unabashed left-liberalism, where her heart has always been, just like another loser, Al Gore. END EXCERPT

In global warming (or climate change, or climate warming, or whatever the hucksters are calling it this week) Al Bore found a triple-crown winning scam; one that allows him to stay in the limelight, stuff his pockets with money and grab power and influence that he has neither earned nor can wisely wield. Ironically, Bore’s failure to win the presidency freed him up to start his climate-change-traveling-snake-oil-show, a role that in some ways allows him to do even more long term damage to America and the world than he ever could have done as president.

Look for Hillbillary to try for a similar scam. Coming soon: Hillbillary care, part dos…

************************************

Hey man, nice shot…

Shooting down that crippled spy satellite-with a single shot, no less- was a remarkable achievement for the US Navy and for American technology.

Some people, including government officials from Russia and China, have contended that taking out the satellite was an excuse to test American anti-missile technology. That is probably at least partially true. But shooting down the satellite was a in some ways a bigger challenge than intercepting an inbound ICBM.

Launching within a 10-second launch window, the crew of the USS Lake Erie shot down a satellite travelling about 17,000 miles per hour, 133 miles above the Earth.

The highest ICBM reentry speed is about 15,000 miles per hour. Reentry is the "terminal defense segment", a point beginning about 60 miles above the Earth when anti-missile systems would intercept the incoming missile. An inbound ICBM has a strong heat signature, making it easier to find and track than the nearly inert spy satellite the Navy intercepted and destroyed.

America’s anti-missile defense system is primarily designed to stop threats from inadvertent launches or deliberately hostile acts by rogue states such as Lil’ Kim’s North Korea’s or Ach-Man’s Iran. But this week’s smashing success should give pause to anyone with designs on threatening the US. So, Russia and China, if the shoe fits…

*************************************

This almost feels like piling on…but, what the heck? In another few months it won’t be near as much fun to kick ‘em around.

Barack Obama won two more states. That makes 10 in a row. I think the only way Hillary’s going to get into the White House now is if she uses that tunnel Bill dug to sneak out. Jay Leno

Hillary is worried that Bill will wander off in Texas, so today she had him branded and gelded. David Letterman

Hillary Clinton still doing very well in one state: the state of denial. Jay Leno

Stay red…


Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive
« Previous12345Next »