Month: November 2009

Nuclear Socialism?

Bradford Plumer addresses the conservative love of nuclear power:

Many projections for a low-carbon future do envision a supporting role for nuclear power–indeed, a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, by making fossil fuels pricier, could help usher in the first new wave of reactors in the United States since the 1970s. But that's not enough for the GOP, which wants to put nuclear into overdrive. The party's energy plan, released in July, calls for a whopping 100 new reactors built by 2030. That's twice as many as even the most optimistic industry forecasts envision, and, given that the plants are estimated to cost at least $6-$10 billion a pop and have difficulty attracting private investment, they would likely need hefty subsidies–something the right is supposed to frown at. "For reasons I don't fully understand," says Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress, "nuclear power has a magical place in the hearts of conservatives."

Yglesias piles on while Frum counters.

You Aught To Remember

A new blog gets a jump start on summing up the cultural milieu of the millennium, cataloging the "100 trends, fashions, memes, personalities and ideas that shaped the first decade of the 21st Century."

So why the decade and not the quarter-century? The digit change inherent with calendar progression is a superficial but not wholly trivial reason. The real truth, however, lies in the light-speed shifts that zeitgeist transformation can now undertake. Once upon a time, centuries divided eras of change; the 20th Century though pushed even ten year demarcations to their breaking point, so drastic were the upheavals in social reality that modernity hath wrought. Ten years time was more than enough to alter the course of history, leaving America and the world a different place than it had been just ten years before.

A list of the entries thus far, after the jump:

Obama On The Debt

Ambers reports on the administration's smoke signals about  the debt:

There will be talk of real, across-the-board limits to discretionary spending. There will probably be a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel set up, along with, perhaps, another Social Security reform commission.

Talk is cheap. And commissions are often ways of avoiding, not expediting real cuts in entitlements and defense. For this independent supporter of Obama, the key issue in the next year will be seriousness about reducing long term debt. If he cannot do it, or fails to make it a priority, he will lose me and many others. I understand why circumstances and inheritance have propelled the debt up right now. But circumstances cannot explain away the long-term crunch. A real leader tackles that. A phony leader ducks it.

Cantor Fail

It's good to see Eric Cantor actually distance himself from the notion that Obama is another Hitler, and to talk of inclusion as an important GOP value. But when you see what his actual proposals are, you realize how empty all this is. He says the most important thing is the debt. But his only policies are further tax cuts. This is the money quote:

He refused to say whether he would cut entitlement spending to help reduce the deficit.

They have nothing to offer but anger.

Same Nuts. Same Squirrels.

SICKLEChipSomodevilla:Getty

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"This kind of rhetoric – on the same day that the Fort Hood massacre took place – is gasoline on a fire of atavistic hate. Someone in the GOP leadership needs to call it out – before its logic propels us

toward more violence and social division."

But they won't call it out. They'll embrace it, use it, and then lapse into a carefully-scripted victimology - as feigned as it will be ferocious - should the fringe activists they are now currently whipping into a frenzy erupt into violence and people start to point fingers at the enablers in the GOP establishment.
 
We have seen this before. Gingrich spent the better part of a decade, and the entire two-year election cycle leading up to the 1994 GOP route, inveighing against "sick", "pathetic", "traitorous", "cheating", "radical", "permissive", "anti-American" elements in the government, the Clinton White House, and the Democratic party. Bill and Hillary Clinton were "the enemy of normal Americans". Dick Armey compared the New Deal and the Great Society to Stalin's Five-Year Plan and Mao's Great Leap Forward – two of the

most murderously destructive state experiments in human history.

GOP congressmen openly sympathized and courted anti-government "militias". The hated, amorphous, ill-defined, all-purpose "bureaucrat" that Clinton (or Obama, or Carter, or the Communists, or the blacks, or the gays - take your pick) controlled with diabolical precision existed for no other purpose than to keep the selfless and God-fearing Southern Man, and his fellow "Real Americans", from enjoying his beer, his NASCAR, and his guns. One man finally decided to do something about it and killed 168 people. When gently questioned by Tim Russert as to whether the white-hot vitriol he rode to power might have contributed to a political climate which made Oklahoma City possible, Gingrich of course reacted with the wounded pride of the professional mountebank - "How dare you?", such comparisons are "grotesque", and on and on.

Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Steve King, John Boehner - they're calling the same plays from 15 years ago. Same nuts. Same squirrels.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

Quote For The Day

Pam Spaulding reacts to the DNC's refusal to support marriage equality in Maine and its subsequent transparent lies about it:

Shut the gAyTM down; only give directly to candidates and organizations you believe are truly working in your best interest. Not a penny to the DNC; it's the only leverage you have as an average citizen. The big donors in our community have to take a stand on this kind of nonsense, otherwise, they are enabling this kind of treatment of our community. It's party-building at our expense each and every time, as we watch windows of opportunity close. The thought of a halt to the cash flow will stop this BS pronto, if only to make them listen for a goddamn minute before stepping on the gas to run over us again.

It's the obvious problem with having all our eggs in the Democratic basket. That's largely the GOP's fault, of course, as they have done all they can to make gay Republicans extinct.

But the DNC/HRC fusion robs the community of any actual representation of us, and should remind us that any civil rights movement that puts its trust in any political party loses both its integrity and its success.

We have to do this ourselves, from the ground up, in our living rooms and churches, synagogues and mosques, workplaces and family get-togethers. We need to change the leadership of HRC to end their role as the Democratic party's chief enablers of substantive inaction. And we need to remain focused not on the nastiness of our opponents, but on our own positive arguments for change. We must not take the Christianist bait. We're winning because we have the better argument. So keep making the argument, and stop looking to others to save us.