Carl Paladino decided to go out drinking last night in Buffalo:
Archives for November 2010
I’d Support This
We’ll file this under divine retribution:
Opponents of a Nevada nuclear waste dump thought they’d finally managed to kill the Yucca Mountain project. Then came Sharron Angle.
The tea party-backed Republican stands a good chance at ousting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has spent much of his career fighting the nuclear repository. And without a senior Nevada lawmaker in position to fend off Yucca’s supporters, the project could have new life.
A Yucca kick-start would be welcome news to the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear lawmakers who see the lack of a long-term repository as a roadblock for what they foresee as a U.S. nuclear renaissance.
Nuclear power has become a central tenet of congressional Republicans’ energy agenda; senators like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander say expanding the power source will help to cut dependence on foreign oil and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Democrats and the Obama administration have shown a willingness to compromise on the issue, and nuclear is posed to be a focal point of energy talks next year on Capitol Hill if Republicans make major electoral gains.
Reid often takes credit for killing the multibillion-dollar Yucca project by leading efforts to starve its funding and prodding the Obama administration to explore alternative sites. But Congress is full of powerful lawmakers eager to restart the project, and Yucca opponents fear that the rest of the Nevada delegation won’t be strong enough to fend them off if Reid loses.
I’m all in favor of rewarding Nevadans for their Sharron Angle votes. If we have to tolerate her toxic waste on the national scene, you get our radioactive waste in your back yard. Seems like a fair trade.
When Republicans sweep to power in the next 48 hours, this site is a no sympathy zone. Everyone of you jackasses who complained about how there was no difference between the two parties better find another website for your tears as the cold, cruel reality of wingnut rule becomes clear. There will be no sympathy here. Have fun, protest people. Now you really have something to protest about, and you don’t have Rahm to kick around any more.
The Fed Finally Acts
Better late than never, I guess:
The Federal Reserve is preparing to put its credibility on the line as it rarely has before by taking dramatic new action this week to try jolting the economy out of its slumber.
If the efforts succeed, they could finally help bring down the stubbornly high jobless rate.
But should the Fed overshoot in its plan to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, it could produce the same kind of bubbles in the housing and stock markets that caused the slowdown. Or the efforts could fall short and fail to energize the economy, leaving a clear impression that the mighty Fed is out of bullets – thus adding even more anxiety to an already dire situation.
The meeting of Fed policymakers Tuesday and Wednesday is set to be a defining moment of Ben S. Bernanke’s second term as chairman of the central bank. Although he helped win the war against the great financial panic of 2008 and 2009, he now risks losing the peace if he fails to end the protracted economic downturn that followed.
They better act quickly, because the teahadists will be sponsoring bills to eliminate the fed on the way back to the gold standard in a couple of weeks.
Sing a Song of Butthurt
The Rally to Restore Fear and/or Sanity is going to increase demand for Preparation H among our media elite:
- Olberman is pissed and thinks Stewart “jumped the shark” because Stewart criticized MSNBC along with Fox.
- Tweety gets a little huffy about it, too, wondering if Stewart was saying that the media should “write stories about how there was no accidents on the highway last night, everybody had a good night’s sleep.”
- David Carr thinks that Stewart was “shifting the blame”:
It was a beautiful day on the Mall, and who doesn’t like kicking the press around, but speaking of ants, media bias and hyperbole seem like pretty small targets when unemployment is near 10 percent, vast amounts of unregulated cash are being spent in the election’s closing days, and no American governing institution — not the Senate, not the House of Representatives, not even the Supreme Court — seems to be above petty partisan bickering. Mr. Stewart couldn’t really go there and instead suggested it was those guys over there in the press tent who had the blood of democracy on their hands.
Carr’s response is worth reading in full, because he trots out every weak argument that’s going to be used by the media to deflect attention from Stewart’s critique. He argues that not a lot of people watch cable TV without acknowledging that cable drives mainstream media coverage. He intimates that Stewart doesn’t have the balls to go after the truly powerful, when Stewart does it all the time and was taking the media to task for failing to do the same. And he talks about “media bias” which is what he wished Stewart had attacked. “Bias” is the media’s favorite strawman, because it lets them trumpet their view-from-nowhere objectivity. If Carr wants to find someone “shifting the blame”, he doesn’t need to watch a rally in Washington, he can just open a copy of his own paper, which is so “objective” and “un-biased” that they twist themselves in knots to avoid using the plain word “torture”.
Early Morning Open Thread: Beg!
From commentor Tony S:
You asked people to send in rescue stories… I’ve got a bunch of them.
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I’ve been looking for a reason to write them up. If you’d like, I’ll be glad to tell the tale of the 11 dogs we’ve rescued since we bought our house 10 years ago, one at a time…
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To whet your appetite, here are some photos of our latest rescue, Snarls Barkley, who I briefly mentioned in our previous post–first from the day we got him, then in recovery with his collar off, then peacefully snoozing on my wife’s shoulder.
I guess if we want to hear Snarls’ story, we’re all gonna hafta beg…
Late Night Open Thread: Happy New Year
Don’t know about your neighborhood, but around here the fate of jack-o-lanterns after Halloween… is not pretty.
Happy Old Celtic New Year, and I don’t think too many people will be nostalgic for the last twelve months. If you’re still working on your resolutions or haven’t sent out your cards yet, you can always choose to celebrate the Viking New Year on November 11, known to medievalists and folksingers as Martinmas. The tradition in northern Europe was to butcher & preserve any livestock that wouldn’t be needed for next spring’s breeding on that day, and in the winemaking regions to tap the first of the summers’ vintage (thus recalling Viking customs), seasonal necessities where old pagan customs gradually accreted around the “new” Christian saint’s history. One season ends, the next one begins, and the wheel of the year progresses…