Dump Duhbya

Good Christian?

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.”

Pat Robertson’s Gift

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. …

Theirs

Double Talk

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…

loco

Trust, but Verify

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!

Urenco: UD (English)

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.

—

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

—

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

loco

Don’t worry, Be stupid

ABQjournal: Netherlands Nuclear Plant Is the Model for N.M.
By Harry Moskos, Of the Journal

Herald Voschezang says New Mexicans need not fret over stored waste from Louisiana Energy Services’ proposed $1.2 billion nuclear fuel factory in Lea County.

“There is no issue regarding waste,” Voschezang said as we walked through Urenco’s seven-building, 55-acre uranium enrichment facility in Almelo, located near the German border and about a 90-minute rail ride from Amsterdam. I was in Amsterdam in July, en route to Greece, and took a tour of the plant.

Urenco, with two similar plants in Great Britain and Germany, supplies about 19 percent of the worldwide nuclear power refining needs. The company describes itself as an independent, global group using its own centrifuge technology to do uranium refining for power generation.

The LES plant proposed for New Mexico near Eunice would be patterned after the Almelo plant and would be the first centrifuge uranium refinery in the United States. It would refine uranium for use as nuclear power plant fuel. …

LES would like to start construction next summer with a late-2008 completion date. The New Mexico plant would be the fourth in Urenco’s international network.

Voschezang, one of five shift managers at Almelo, said he sees no problems with storing waste in steel cylinders on site, as they do at Almelo.

“You may store them in my back garden. I have no problem with that,” he said as we looked over an open field with several hundred of the containers.

It is the storage of those cylinders containing uranium waste? “tails”? that is causing consternation in New Mexico. The New Mexico plant would generate about 8,000 tons of radioactive waste annually.

“Leakage is no discussion,” Voschezang added. “The enriched part of the uranium is used to make fuel, and you have the depleted part and that’s the tails. And that is what is in the barrels and they can be stored safely.” …

Each cylinder at the New Mexico plant would be 4 feet in diameter and 8 feet long. The cylinders would contain uranium hexaflouride, a substance that resembles rock salt. …

The New Mexico plant will employ about 210, including security, in the operation of the plant. This would be in addition to construction crews.

“Don’t worry,” Voschezang said, about having a facility that will process uranium for use as fuel in nuclear power plants. “And especially when you see the distances in New Mexico. Here, we are only two kilometers to the center of Almelo.”

Harry Moskos can be reached at 823-3837 or hmoskos@ abqjournal.com.

Did you read the Journal’s glowing account of the company that will build a dangerous nuclear processing plant in New Mexico? Didn’t it sound wonderful? I suggest you read the Sierra Club article about the same company — Urenco. Not nearly as chearleady. peace, mjh

Nuclear Proliferation Article Main Page – Sierra Magazine, May/June 2005 – Sierra Club

Sierra Magazine
Dangerous Liaisons
from the May/June issue of Sierra Magazine

The company whose nuclear secrets leaked to Iran and North Korea now wants to bring its know-how to New Mexico. What will be the fallout? …

Three decades ago, a brilliant young Pakistani metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan managed to steal highly classified nuclear secrets while working in Amsterdam. It was a theft that would first shake Pakistan’s Chagai Hills test site, and ultimately the rest of the planet. Working for a firm that contracted with Urenco, a Dutch-German-British company that provides uranium-enrichment services to nuclear power plants, Khan had access to Urenco’s secret blueprints and manuals. He learned how to enrich uranium in centrifuges to make fuel for nuclear power plants but also for weapons. He took what he learned back to Pakistan, enriched uranium at the Dr. A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories, and helped his country build its first nuclear bomb. …

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. …

The problem is that no one knows whether the 21st-century Urenco has plugged its security leaks.

“[Urenco’s] technology was stolen a long time ago and a lot has changed since then,” says Bruce Moran, an NRC staffer who monitors international nuclear safety. When asked to explain exactly what Urenco had done to ensure that its classified nuclear secrets were secure, a Urenco spokesperson told me that since the New Mexico plant will be an “LES enrichment facility,” I would need to speak with LES (even though, according to an LES spokesperson, the centrifuges will be assembled on-site by Urenco security-cleared contractors). I then asked LES vice president Marshall Cohen what had changed since A. Q. Khan’s day to close security loopholes. Cohen didn’t know offhand but repeatedly assured me, in calls, by e-mail, and in person, his company would provide an answer. It never did. …

In Hobbs, New Mexico, a boom/bust oil town of 28,000, the public is noticeably absent from February public hearings before the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, which will recommend whether to license the LES plant. City officials are solidly behind the idea, and local residents are desperate for new jobs. “Very few people have gone to these public hearings,” says Rose Gardner. “They trust our leaders to make the right decisions.” Gardner, 46, owns Desert Rose Flowers and Gifts in the tiny town of Eunice, 20 miles from Hobbs and 5 miles from the proposed site. On the first day of the weeklong hearings, she and retired Hobbs businessman Lee Cheney are the only members of the audience not associated with either the media or LES. …

“Congress is taking a basically hands-off approach; that LES is a private enterprise and under NRC jurisdiction so there’s no point in intervening,” he says. To the degree that there has been intervention, it has been boosterism on the part of Pete Domenici (R-N.Mex.), the powerful chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. In 2003, the senator pledged to aid LES by working “at all levels to help get through the long permit and regulatory process.” He then praised LES partner Urenco and its history of uranium enrichment in Europe. Of Urenco’s past performance, he added, “We can expect as much here.” …

Senator Domenici is an old friend of the energy industry. He was the top Senate recipient of money from electric utilities (which include nuclear power plants) during the 2002 election cycle. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he received more than $175,000 from electric utilities alone, and more than $400,000 from the energy and natural-resources sector overall.

In interviews with the Santa Fe New Mexican, Domenici has expressed a desire to create a “nuclear corridor” along a 60-mile stretch of the Texas-New Mexico border, where radioactive waste dumps and the LES facility would support existing nuclear power plants and new plants around the country. Though no new nuclear power plants have been ordered since 1978, plans are now in the pipeline to relicense 18 reactors at 9 power plants nationwide. The LES centrifuge project would fuel the renaissance.

loco

Perspectives

ABQjournal: Wilson, City Councilor Tour Valle Vidal
By Martin Salazar, Journal Northern Bureau

Northern New Mexico rancher Alan Lackey hoped he was nevertheless able to drive home the point that even the most environmentally conscientious drilling scars the land with its network of roads, pipelines, well pads and utilities? all visible on Ted Turner’s Vermejo Park Ranch, which is being drilled.

The drilling also depletes natural resources like water, Lackey said, adding that for each well that’s drilled an estimated 1 million gallons of ground water has to be pumped out before it can start producing. …

Lackey? a Republican and a founding member of the Coalition for the Valle Vidal? pointed out the networks of roads and well pads that have sprung up on the Vermejo Park Ranch and in southern Colorado.

As I read today about damage from drilling on Vermejo, I remembered John Dimdahl’s nonsense of 6 months ago. mjh

ABQjournal: Environmentalists Hijack Public Land Multiple Use By John Dendahl, For the Journal
Friday, March 4, 2005

How can those of us wanting balanced public land use be assured that drilling won’t spoil Valle Vidal? The first place to look is in the “environmentalists'” own back yards. Ted Turner, a major financial supporter of the environment movement, owns the Vermejo Park Ranch. An educated guess of his royalty income from gas production is several million dollars a year.

Turner’s ranch hands reportedly ask guests to play the game, Find a Well. There are hundreds of wells on the ranch, yet they are so inconspicuous guests rarely make a find. …

The important point here, though, isn’t the lying and hypocrisy, it’s that production of oil or gas is being achieved at Vermejo and Rainey with essentially no land, water or wildlife damage. …

There are myriad reasons familiar to nearly all of us why we should develop domestic sources of oil and natural gas. Despite dated, obstructionist hype, the needed development can — and will — go hand-in-hand with sound environmental protection.

If Ted Turner and the Audubon Society can write contracts with producers that protect their land and water, so can the U.S. Forest Service and the BLM.

Richardson needs to tell his “environmentalist” pals to take a long, enjoyable hike — maybe go look for wells at Ted Turner’s place up north.

Lifelong New Mexican John Dendahl is a retired executive and political leader. E-mail: jdendahl@swcp.com

mjh’s blog — Search Results for Dimdahl

mjh’s Blog: anti-environmentalists

ABQjournal: Letters to the Editor
Sunday, August 14, 2005

Regarding the Corporate Welfare Act of 2005….

Billions for Billionaires

Why should the oil and gas industry require something on the order of $15 billion in tax breaks when for instance, Exxon/Mobil in one single quarter made on the order of $35 billion in profit? Exactly what kind of an energy strategy does that comprise other than giving huge amounts of money to companies already swimming in money. … And just how will that make us less dependent on foreign oil? Simple, it won’t!
ALAN PEZARO
Sandia Park

Energy Bill a Gift to Big Oil

America needs a new kind of energy strategy, but this energy bill is just another corporate giveaway which fails to help Americans at the gas pump, and deepens our dependence on foreign oil and does not diminish pollution.

The conservative Heritage Foundation said that “we’ll be dependent on the global market for more than half our oil for as long as we’re using oil, and the energy bill isn’t going to change that.”

America needs a new, visionary program for energy independence. …
REV. LARRY BERNARD
Laguna

Fuel Wasted on Energy Bill

WE USED how many pounds of jet fuel for Air Force One and how many pounds of jet fuel for commercial planes in a holding pattern while Air Force One landed and departed? all to fly in and sign an energy bill, which presumably could have gone in to law no matter where it was signed?

Perhaps if our elected leaders led by example, our energy woes would be a step closer to being resolved.
GREGORY ROTHROCK
Albuquerque

Theirs

an insane orgy of gore

alibi . august 11 – 17, 2005
A Fool’s Errand
America should have heeded opponents of the Iraq War
By Jim Scarantino

We tried to squeeze in a dissenting word on KOB’s talk radio, where the hosts rooted for war like it was the Lobos versus BYU. The Albuquerque Journal ignored us. Yard signs were stolen from our homes until we taped them to garages and chimneys where they might last the night. …

We were ridiculed, cursed, banished to France. Friendships were strained, some snapped. We were called mad, when madness was driving the nation we love across the threshold of killing and torturing innocent people, on a course history does not permit to be erased or forgiven. …

Our fears have been realized. Our sons and daughters were sent around the world on a fool’s errand. Tens of thousands have come home maimed or in a coffin. …

Instead of a hobbled Hussein, we face ayatollahs who despise us. That’s what we have bought with the lives of nearly 1,800 Americans. …

I do Jim a disservice by snipping just these parts from his moving essay. Read the whole thing. peace, mjh

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." — Sam Adams