Month: July 2009

David Frum explains why we create so much nuclear waste but France creates so little. He also visited a French nuclear storage facility:

This past week, I had an opportunity to visit French nuclear facilities as a guest of the U.S. Nuclear Energy Institute. At the end of the trip, I was taken to the large concrete-lined below-ground chamber in which the French store the most hazardous of the nuclear wastes generated by reprocessing. The room in which I stood held something like one-third of the total of all the most hazardous waste produced in France since the 1960s. It was rather larger than a high school gym. I stood atop of a concrete disk with a numeric code. Beneath that disk was a cylinder of concrete perhaps 5 meters deep. Below that was 10 meters of empty space, and below that a stainless steel tube holding nuclear byproducts. After my visit to the room I was scanned for exposure to radiation. My dose? About half as much as I had absorbed on the flight from the U.S. to France, about the same amount as I’d have ingested from a small dish of mussels.

It seems a small risk to run to solve the climate problem.

Agreed. Nuclear now!

Posted online a few days ago:

Marcy Wheeler sorts through the interviews. Much of this we knew. But the further away the decision to wage war in Iraq to remove WMDs gets, the more indefensible it seems. I lean toward the theory that it was an almighty screw up rather than a conspiracy, because history is usually like that. But it's complicated and only a few more years will help us understand it better.

Ackerman tackles John Bolton:

Bolton's position is at least consistent; and tactically speaking, this would probably be, as he suggests, the least damaging moment to make the strike. But the damage would nonetheless be real, the effectiveness of a strike highly questionable, the global terrorist blowback immense, and the initiation of a Third World War would instantly kill the Green Revolution and empower Ahmadinejad. But if the point of all this is not Iranian democracy but maximizing Israel's strategic security for the next couple of years (at the expense of its potential long-term extinction), why would Bolton care?

Jonah reads his email. They're in too deep now. Here, by the way is the column that prompted the emails.  Goldberg is partially in Krauthammer's camp, but, of course, he cannot really upset the Palinites who now make up the core of the modern GOP. From the conclusion:

Here’s the good news: You have time. Here’s the better news: You have something no one else in the party has — charisma. And I don’t mean you have the most charisma like it’s a consolation prize for not being elected prom queen. If money could buy what you have, Romney would have bought it all by now. Good politicians can learn how to win over audiences, but the great ones are born with the ability. Reagan had it. Clinton had it. Obama has it. You have it. You are the “It Girl” of the GOP.

What you lack, you can learn. If knowing how to describe the situation in Pakistan or explain the “doughnut hole” in health-care coverage was all you needed to get elected, an intern with a subscription to The Economist could be president.

So here’s my advice. Stay home and do your job and your homework. You’ll still be a national figure come the primaries. But if you can’t surprise your detractors with your grasp of policy when you re-emerge on the national stage, you won’t win the nomination. More important, you won’t deserve to.

Conservatives4Palin is deeply offended by such criticisms.

DiA counters Savage:

Ezra uses yesterday's WaPo controversy to advocate for publicly funded news:

Ugh. Like the government is more disinterested than lobbyists. Matt Steinglass is also pessimistic about the future of news:

It's on now, as Salter jumps in. He's right: Schmidt was one of Palin's defenders at first, which just goes to show how she can alienate anyone.

I'm really grateful for Patrick and readers for pushing back on my speculations about Palin. The reader who suggests that the implausibility of her labor narrative is simply a function of her usual delusional embellishment is extremely persuasive. In fact, I'd say it's easily the likeliest explanation for what really happened. She made a lot of stuff up, as she always does, in order to make the story more gripping and to add to her aura as the tough-girl Alaskan. So of course the story doesn't make sense (and we may never know which bits are true and which just truthy). And the need to have the kid born in Alaska does make more sense when you consider Todd's extremist politics.

It could also easily be true that, as she said in Indiana, she simply had conflicted feelings about this pregnancy and considered an abortion. Grappling with that, she kept it all secret, got caught in lies about it, and her ambivalence about her pregnancy may even have led her unconsciously to act irrationally during labor. This is very human and very real and deserves our sympathy, not derision. But in national politics, you have to explain all this from the get-go, or just release the medical records on or off the record, and move on by defusing and humiliating bloggers like me. I understand that this is easier said than done, but when you accept a veep nomination, and ask people to contemplate putting you in the most powerful job in the world, you just have to suck it up and tell the truth. That's the awful price of public life. If she had told her story at the start, I think she would have earned much more support and admiration and become a real and much more persuasive advocate for the pro-life movement. But she didn't. And so the rubber-necking began.

Still, I am not convinced by Patrick's core argument – that a conspiracy, however unlikely, is near-impossible to sustain in this case. Here's why, as a reader explains:

Palin is quite prepared to use her public office to pursue personal vendettas. She's easily the biggest celebrity Alaska has produced in ages and the most powerful person in the state. Many people in Wasilla are terrified of her; and she's also, as we know, compulsively secretive and protective of her family – even as she pushes them into ludicrous crusades like Bristol's abstinence thing. Besides, the only conceivable, logical alternative to Palin being the natural mother of Trig is another close family member. Nothing else makes any sense -and anything more complicated would have been exposed by now. But close family members are also the most likely to keep secrets, especially since this whole thing transpired long before Palin was really in the global media klieglights. You think you can't get away with all sorts of (benign but odd) stuff when you're just a governor of what is, in effect, a population of a medium sized city spread out over half a continent? Her local hospital is also highly influenced by members of her church; and her personal doctor has gone into virtual hiding since the veep announcement. The more you know about Alaska, and I now know more than I would have ever imagined, the more successful a small-town, benign and actually admirable decision to bring a child into the world and care for him is not impossible. Highly unlikely, I know, but not impossible.

And look: I'm perfectly aware that continuing to air even the faint possibility of this makes a lot of people think I've gone round the bend. And maybe I have on this. Blogging obsessively can do that to a person. But if you haven't figured this out by now, I don't care much about what people think of me. I'd just like to know the truth, please. That's why I'm a blogger and a journalist. That's why I've published a lot of things in my time that others wouldn't. As long as I am not deceiving anyone or publishing untruths, and airing counter-arguments, I think I'm doing my job. Others have a different view of what legitimate discourse is, and I respect that. And I certainly think the brickbats are valid. But this is the way I am. Read someone else if you don't like it.

One more thing: whatever actually happened, I want to reiterate what I have said from the start. The decision to have Trig and to care for him and support him and defend the rights of children with special needs is a noble, admirable thing. Whatever happens to Palin in the future, she deserves enormous props for this, and is a real inspiration for the pro-life movement in this respect. We're all human and this decision was, in my view, the best one Sarah Palin has ever made, whatever the precise facts behind it. I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Palin in this respect. It's a beautiful thing and Trig is a beautiful, precious, powerful human being.

And you wouldn't read any of this in the Washington Post, would you?

Greg Weeks tries to establish some points about Honduras. Can you remember a story where pundits have varied so widely on the basic facts? Jamie weighs in here.