Month: March 2011

It's a fight between talk radio right and the Washington punditariat. On one side, we have Will, Krauthammer, Frum, Wehner. On the other, we have Rush and now Levin. On his Facebook page, Levin has posted a lengthy defense of Sarah Palin that includes the favorite trick of noting that Ronald Reagan was also widely criticized before he ran for president:

As a Reaganite pre-dating Reagan's 1976 candidacy, the contempt for Palin does, in fact, remind me of the contempt some had for Reagan, especially from the media and Republican establishment, although no comparison is exact. 

It's the high-water mark of absurd Reagan nostalgia: the way people criticize you reminds me of how different people criticized him more than 30 years ago. Ergo, you must be worth defending! Even more shoddy than the logic is the absurdity of a self-described foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution eliding the manifold differences between that president and the failed vice-presidential candidate from Alaska. As noted by Jaime at Federalist Paupers, Reagan gave this speech in 1964:

How you react to that speech probably depends on your larger opinion of Reagan, but it should be plain to everyone that 16 years before he ran for president, he was giving speeches many times more substantive and intellectually serious than any speech Palin has ever given. Equally obvious is that he served two successful terms as the governor of the most populous state in the nation, as opposed to a half-term running Alaska.

Jaime also notes that "not once does Levin defend Palin by pointing out her virtues, he simply points out the flaws of her attackers." That isn't a surprise. The man is incapable of insightful constructive commentary. One of the weakest part of his flawed book Liberty and Tyranny is the weak attempt at a positive agenda near the end. But this is an uptick in the conservative civil war over Palin:

1. As I demonstrated last week, remarkably George Will missed the Reagan Revolution not only in 1976 but as late as 1980.  In the 1979 Republican Presidential Primary, his first choice was Howard Baker, his second choice was George H. W. Bush, and his third choice was Reagan.  Not until days before the 1980 general election did he write on November 3, 1980 that Reagan deserved election.  For all his wonderful columns, the Republican electorate better understood the needs of the nation and the excellence of a potential Reagan presidency than Will.  It is hard to believe he was so wrong about a matter of such great import, despite Reagan's presence on the national scene for many years. 

2. Charles Krauthammer was not only wrong about Reagan, as late as 1980 he was a speech-writer for Vice President Walter Mondale.  Krauthammer, like Will, not only missed the significance of the Reagan candidacy, but was putting words in the mouth of a terribly flawed politician from a philosophical perspective. I certainly do not begrudge, but in fact encourage, liberals becoming conservatives or Democrats becoming Republicans.  Reagan was a Democrat who famously changed parties.  But I do not believe that individuals touted by a left-wing "news" site as two of the leading conservative intellectuals, who stunningly opposed Reagan's candidacy while both were of mature age and mind, are necessarily reliable barometers in this regard.  The "non-intellectual" voters knew better. 

He goes on to criticize George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Frum, and Wehner. Remember that Levin is one of those conservative movement loyalists who at other times has attacked people for criticizing their fellow conservatives. But apparently Sarah Palin and "non-intellectualism" is a sufficiently important cause to suspend that rule.

Most remarkable about all this is that Levin is defending Palin and comparing her to Reagan shortly after having insisted that Mitch Daniels, a fiscal conservative and successful governor, isn't presidential. Go figure.

Bachmann urges a Tea Party revolt. Money quote:

We have two moments. One is this week, with the continuing resolution, and one is the debt ceiling.

What happens when a candidate runs for office by threatening a fiscal catastrophe? I guess we'll find out. The word "compromise" does not exist in the GOP's current dictionary.

“The only ideas we have right now are using a helicopter to spray water from above, or inject water from below. We believe action must be taken by tomorrow or the day after,” – a Tepco official on the immediate challenges ahead. The radiation plume could reach Tokyo, we now learn. But what of the possible radiation plumes to come? And why not use helicopters now?

Another video of the moment when the tsunami hit. Slowed down by half, it seems even more horrifying. Maybe because we simply cannot absorb that much power arriving that swiftly.

In the dizzying vortex of changing accounts, limited information, government defensiveness, and unavoidable confusion, one thing seems to me to stand out about the Fukishima plant. Clive Crook puts his finger on it:

My father, who retired many years ago, was a mechanical engineer in the British nuclear power industry. He worked on the designs of several new reactors, specialising in the handling of fuel. I vividly recall his telling me decades ago that the thing that concerned him most about nuclear power was not the reactors but the storage of spent fuel. This needed to be very carefully managed. If planners insisted on giving nuclear installations the smallest footprint, everything would be on the same site. What would happen to the spent fuel if an accident meant a site had to be evacuated? Insufficient attention was being paid to this, he said. The conversation passed through my mind as soon as the first reports of problems at Fukushima appeared. Where do they put the spent fuel?

Today the New York Times tells us where: on "the top level of the reactor buildings".

The NYT confirms the real risk:

The pools are a worry at the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because at least two of the reactors have lost their roofs in explosions, exposing the spent fuel pools to the atmosphere. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.

If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.

A reader writes:

Another headline you won't see: "Millions saved in Seattle by good engineering and government building codes". California is thought to be safe from >8.0 earthquakes (but even 6.x quakes do quite a bit of damage). The Pacific Northwest, on the other hand:

A magnitude 9.0 or above quake in the Pacific Northwest is expected. Those quakes, which are the product of vast and deep faults, are characterized by their severity and the duration of shaking when they strike. … A quake in the 9.0 range occurs in the Pacific Northwest region every 300 – 500 years. The last one was in 1700, which scientists know because of a tsunami that was recorded in Japan at the time.

Current Seattle building codes are probably pretty good, but older buildings – and there are more than in Japan because the city hasn't ever been hit by a devastating quake or war – are at heavy risk.

The estimated damage:

A study from 2008 indicates that as many as 1,000 buildings in Seattle could fall down in a strong earthquake. In that study engineers looked at 575 buildings from the outside and further that estimated 850 to 1,000 old brick buildings that date back to the 1930s would be at risk if a 6.7-magnitude earthquake occurred on the Seattle fault, which runs through the center of Seattle and Bellevue.

The Seattle fault is widely considered the most dangerous quake threat to Seattle. Scientists have predicted that a significant earthquake on this fault could cause widespread devastation and at least 1,000 deaths in the city because of collapsed buildings, fires and other infrastructure failures. … In October the Washington State Department of Transportation released an animated video showing what could happen to the Alaskan Way Viaduct during an earthquake.

Photo by Flickr user Jeff Greene, who captions:

This is an impression from my window at the Seattle Sheraton, where the Marketing Association of Credit Unions was holding its spring 2007 conference. A button in each elevator at the Sheraton says "push in case of earthquake," which scared us East Coasters to no end.

One of those buttons here.

A reader writes:

I've been noticing the increasingly shrill tone of Sarah Palin's tweets on energy policy over the last few days. She seems desperate to get some attention for her one so-called area of expertise, but can't seem to manage it. Granted, the earthquake and tsunami stole some of the thunder she was expecting when she began belittling Obama's latest speech on energy initiatives before he even gave it. Even so, the woman can't seem to get any real press whatsoever for her righteous indignation about Obama's energy policy. Even Haley Barbour is getting more coverage on this now.

The latest news about Sarah is, as usual, abundant, but it's all about the ever-growing chorus of conservative thinkers who are coming out against her, and a rift with Roger Ailes, not her take on decreasing dependence on foreign oil.

I'd imagine this really frustrates Palin. I can see why it would. But I think we are witnessing exactly what happens when a politician chooses reality TV stardom over familiarizing herself with policy and answering questions that are not pre-scripted. No one cares what she says on policy anymore. There was a time recently that people were paying attention to anything and everything she said (even her shallow policy proclamations). This is now changing.

Thing is, this is the bed she's made.

The intensity of support for him only grows. Both he and Bachmann are ahead of Palin on what Gallup calls a "positive intensity" axis. That's the number of highly favorables minus the highly unfavorables. But when you look at simple enthusiasm – i.e. the highly favorables alone – Huckabee, Bachmann and Palin are all within a 4 percent band with a margin of error of 3 percent.

Romney, by the way, follows Santorum's frothy wake.