Ellen Goodman – August 26, 2005
[0]ur Knight in Shining Armor Prize goes to George Bush for so many reasons, but especially this one. He didn’t follow his wife’s advice to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court, but he did let her appoint the first woman chef to rule the White House kitchen. Who said there wasn’t progress?
Before Pat Robertson slips completely from our short attention spans and the 24 hour news cycle, let’s take a moment to remember not only what an ass he is but what kind of Christian he must be to call for killing and then lie about that and, in classic right-wing fashion, blame the media for misrepresenting him. Pious scoundrels like Robertson, and a long list of cohorts, will not only bring about the downfall of the Republican Party, but possibly Christianity itself and god help America in the process. mjh
Confidence In Military News Wanes By Josh White, Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 24, 2005; Page A04
The U.S. public’s confidence that the military and the media keep them informed about national security issues has eroded significantly over the past six years, according to a new poll that shows 60 percent of Americans believe they do not get enough information about military matters to make educated decisions.
According to a McCormick Tribune Foundation/Gallup poll scheduled for release today, Americans are more interested in national security than they were in the past. But only 54 percent of Americans say they feel the military keeps them well informed, down from 77 percent in 1999 — before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Similarly, the public grew increasingly skeptical of the news media’s efforts, with 61 percent of Americans saying that the media keep them well informed on military and national security issues, down from 79 percent in 1999. More than three-quarters of Americans also believe that the military occasionally provides false or inaccurate information to the media, according to the poll, which surveyed 1,016 adults during the first two weeks of June.
Don’t look far for who to blame for loss of public confidence: it’s the Republican Party’s fault. Oh, sure, we can single out countless individuals, with Karl Rove and Duhbya near the top of the list, but the Republican Party has ridden to near absolute power by undermining nearly every institution — the media, elections, the courts, science — through constant assault. They say corporate media is liberal (hah!). They say the founders were evangelical zealots. They say creationism is science. They say they’re making the world safer. So much nonsense being spewed. mjh
Wave of Marine Species Extinctions Feared
“At the end of my career, I get to document the destruction of the species I’ve been documenting for 20 years,” he lamented as he watched the bulldozers. “Wonderful.” – Samuel H. Gruber — a University of Miami professor who has devoted more than two decades to studying the lemon sharks that breed … [in] mangroves being ripped up to build a new resort, [which] provide food and protection that the sharks can’t get in the open ocean….
CNN.com – Robertson: Chavez remarks misinterpreted – Aug 24, 2005
CNN) — Conservative religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Wednesday that his remarks about the removal of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez were taken out of context and that he never called for the killing of the Latin American leader.
“I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ I said our special forces should ‘take him out.’ And ‘take him out’ can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP [Associated Press], but that happens all the time,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club” program.
The controversy began Monday when Robertson called Chavez “a terrific danger” bent on exporting Communism and Islamic extremism across the Americas.
“If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it,” said Robertson on Monday’s program. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.”
“We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” he said. “We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”
Robertson Apologizes for Calling for Assassination
Robertson, 75, at first responded by insisting that his remarks had been misinterpreted by the news media.
“Wait a minute, I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ I said our Special Forces should ‘take him out,’ and ‘take him out’ can be a number of things, including kidnapping,” he said on yesterday’s edition of his flagship show on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Yesterday evening, however, Robertson issued a written clarification acknowledging that he had used the word “assassination.” He said he had ad-libbed his original comments Monday, which included the sentence “I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it.”
Robertson’s clarification went on to say: “Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement. I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.”
Robertson Calls for Chavez Assassination By Alan Cooperman, Washington Post Staff Writer
Robertson, 75, made a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. Although his influence among evangelical Christians appears to have waned in recent years, he still has a substantial personal following in Virginia Beach, where he founded Regent University in 1978, and on television. He made his remarks on “The 700 Club,” a news show that claims to have a million daily viewers.
He has sparked controversy in the past by praying for God to create vacancies on the Supreme Court; calling Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, a “robber and brigand”; defending Liberian warlord Charles Taylor; and agreeing with Jerry Falwell that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were God’s punishment for “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU and the People for the American Way.”
WE WON’T even pretend to have given television evangelist Pat Robertson’s latest obnoxious utterance much thought, considering his long history of pious bloviations that have made him come across to most Americans as, well, witless. …
[W]e would have preferred to allow the Christian Coalition’s founder to continue his slide from America’s mainstream into the obscurity he has so richly earned. … an act of stupidity only he could outdo …
But Mr. Robertson’s slide from the mountain peak of evangelical pontification was not because of his politics but because of his mouth. When his words were not ill-advised, they were moronic; when not callow, downright loopy, as in: predicting God would curse Orlando with a hurricane if gay-pride events were celebrated at Disney World; wishing a nuclear bomb would be dropped on the State Department; and suggesting that America had it coming on Sept. 11 because God had been insulted “at the highest level of our government.” …
Still, it is curious how some of Mr. Robertson’s fellow travelers have not been able to locate their tongues over this latest Robertson-inspired international disturbance. The Family Research Council and Traditional Values Coalition spare no moments in rushing forth to denounce irresponsibility on the part of those they dislike. Not so with Mr. Robertson, who only called for the United States to murder a foreign head of state. Even the Bush administration can’t bring itself to censure a fellow conservative who publicly calls for his country to break the law. “Inappropriate,” the State Department managed to say. The White House, embarrassed by Mr. Robertson yet again but too afraid to mix it up with his narrow but loyal base of support, simply averts its gaze. …
Limbaugh baselessly compared Cindy Sheehan to B … [Media Matters]
From the August 15 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:
LIMBAUGH: I mean, Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There’s nothing about it that’s real, including the mainstream media’s glomming onto it. It’s not real. It’s nothing more than an attempt. It’s the latest effort made by the coordinated left.
Limbaugh backs off Sheehan comparison with Burk … [Media Matters]
But on the August 17 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Limbaugh falsely claimed that his comments were being misreported:
LIMBAUGH: Let me take a brief time out here to address something. I have been the recipient of a pretty decent amount of hate mail, far, far, far more hate mail than I usually get. Just this morning — and I don’t really get a whole lot of hate mail. And most of it’s funny as it can be. But apparently there is something that is out there misreporting what I have said. And of course, these people are reading that rather than listening to this program and choosing to believe it.
Apparently, what’s out there is that I said that Cindy Sheehan is no different than Bill Burkett, that Bill Burkett lied and Cindy Sheehan lied. They’re actually out there, people saying that I am accusing Cindy Sheehan of making up the fact that she had a son and making up the fact that her son died in Iraq. And of course, I’ve never said this. That I, early on in this, if you wanna go back — and we’ll post the archives on my website tonight just to illustrate this. I’m the one that actually expressed a little compassion for her. And I said I don’t really wanna talk too much about her, particularly because she’s lost a son here. And that can never be easy. And I don’t care — there are all kinds of different people that have all kinds of different reactions to this. But losing a child is the absolute worst thing that can happen to an adult. There’s nothing that rivals it, in my estimation.
So the idea that I think that she’s making it all up is just another sign of the desperation of the people on the left who love to take us all out of context to try to get their side riled up. What I said was that the media looks at her the same way they look at Bill Burkett, as an opportunity. It didn’t matter whether Burkett was telling the truth or not, and it doesn’t matter what the specifics of Cindy Sheehan’s case are. She is protesting Bush, Burkett hated Bush. That’s why they’re attractive to the media, and that’s why the media is willing to exploit her.
Limbaugh himself featured his original statement on his website as a “Members Only” quote…
A friend wrote in response to my previous entry contrasting the way the Journal and the Sierra Club handled the story of Urenco and LES bringing nuclear materials refining to New Mexico. She mentions several things I should pass on to you and ignores a few things we should not.
For starters, she points out that the story of Urenco and Dr. A. Q. Khan, notorious nuclear pirate, is 30 years old and says nothing about Urenco today. I’m forced to glibly retort that I wonder if the kind of president Nixon was 30+ years ago really says nothing about Republicans today. OK, so maybe Urenco is stellar today. Haven’t Worldcom and Enron taught us to mistrust any corporate claims?
She mentions that this story has found new legs as part of a whisper campaign being put forward by a competitor. That’s news I am happy to pass on here, based on my trust of her research. She suggests it is bizarre that environmentalist are allied with this competitor. She is also very frustrated that environmentalists refuse to consider nuclear power as an alternative to more immediately destructive and widely used sources like coal (or, though she said nothing of this, as an alternative to less immediately promising sources like wind and solar). My friend is nearly a Vulcan in wishing all of society would weigh all of the options relatively and rationally. Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way, but bless her for wishing people, on the Left and Right, were more rational.
My friend and Moskos said nothing about how this plant is of a type that threatens to escalate nuclear proliferation. The “Stockholm International Peace Research Institute [has called] for a worldwide, permanent ban on centrifuge technology,” says Marilyn Berlin Snell in what my friend disparages as a “hit piece.”
<quote>One problem with Iran’s proposed enrichment facility is that, unlike the older, gaseous-diffusion technology to enrich uranium, centrifuge plants can be much smaller and use much less energy, making them harder to detect. Centrifuge plants, of which there are only a handful worldwide, can also be easily and covertly retooled to produce weapons-grade uranium, the key component in nuclear warheads.</quote>
This new centrifuge plant could be one of the reasons that Iran said just last week that the US has no grounds for moralizing with other countries on nuclear proliferation (nuclear bunker busters may be another reason); Moskos makes no mention of this in his “far more journalistically respectable look” at the issue.
One of the reasons Moskos so irked me was how he blithely quotes a guy who works for Urenco in repeatedly dismissing and downplaying any and every concern. Are we to simply accept these words because an engineer says them? “There is no issue regarding waste”; “You may store them [waste cylinders] in my back garden. I have no problem with that”; “Leakage is no discussion”; “the barrels … can be stored safely”; “The air coming out of our plant has less radioactivity than the air which goes inside.” Surely a guy who works for the company wouldn’t lie/exaggerate/tell us what we want to hear. Again, have we learned nothing from Enron, Worldcom or BushCo?
And surely a fine journalist like Moskos would have asked tough questions and corroborated these happy-face claims through other sources. Surely.
It may well be that the Sierra Club didn’t publish a dispassionate, fair and balanced report on Urenco/LES. It may also be that one shouldn’t expect investigative reporting from the “Spare Change” column. I see my role as connecting others to two radically different views and asking some questions. mjh
A little something about uranium hexafluoride — you’re soaking in it now!
UF6 is not flammable, not explosive and inert in dry air. On the other hand, it reacts with water – the humidity of the air is sufficient – to undergo a rapid conversion into water soluble uranyl fluoride (UO2F2) and hydrogen fluoride (HF). In the presence of excess water hydrogen fluorine forms hydrofluoric acid, which may cause serious burns. But even at very low concentrations – long before a possible health threat – HF is clearly visible as a grey white fog.
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In order to dispose of the byproduct, it must be changed from uranium hexafluoride back to the more chemically stable uranium oxide form. This process is called ?deconversion.?
There are no commercial deconversion facilities in the U.S. at this time. …
There are currently more than 700,000 metric tons (MTs) of byproduct owned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) stored on site at these locations. LES will produce 7,800 metric tons per year at full production. …
Once the uranium hexafluoride byproduct has been ?deconverted? to uranium oxide, it can be disposed of in existing facilities or in abandoned mines. …
These facilities could bury the byproduct deep underground or contract with a company who owns an abandoned mine to bury the byproduct in its mine once the proper permits were obtained, for example, the Cotter mine in southern Colorado [mjh: west of Colorado Springs and Pueblo; can we assume the waste vehicles will go straight up I-25?].
http://www.nefnm.com/documents/infosheets/uranium.pdf
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So, the low humidity of New Mexico may save our lives (except during monsoon season). At least you’ll see the big white fog coming towards you. And all this immensely safe waste will be shuttled all over. I can’t understand why environmentalists don’t just roll over. Let’s all buy furniture made out of nuclear waste! mjh