Day: March 13, 2009

2009 Anal-Ocity

Believe me, I cannot make this stuff up…..my imagination is good but damn!  not that good.

Recently the state of Florida the legislature was dealing with a bill dealing with bestiality.  The bill was amended to target only those who derived or helped others derive “sexual gratification” from an animal. The amendment specified that conventional dog-judging contests and animal-husbandry practices are permissible.

Wait for it!  Here is the Anal part!

That last provision tripped up Miami Democratic Sen. Larcenia Bullard.

“People are taking these animals as their husbands? What’s husbandry?” she asked.

Okay…I have laughed enough at this….just goes to show that one does not have to be a smart person to be a politician just electable.

Earmarks UpDate

Earmarks are unrelated pet projects that members of Congress insert in spending bills.

The president maintained that earmarks can serve a useful purpose, but he said it is time for Congress and the White House to embrace a new set of guiding principles.

His remarks came the day after the Senate passed a $410 billion spending bill that included nearly 9,000 earmarks, which are projects designed to benefit individual legislators’ districts.

The earmarks in the spending bill are worth nearly $8 billion. Many critics have deemed them as wasteful, and some observers have questioned Obama’s pledge to end such spending.

The president also said that any earmark benefiting a for-profit private company “should be subject to the same competitive bidding requirements as other federal contracts.”

“The awarding of earmarks to private companies is the single most corrupting element of this practice,” he said.

“Private companies differ from the public entities that Americans rely on every day — schools, police stations, fire departments — and if they are seeking taxpayer dollars, then they should be evaluated with a higher level of scrutiny.”

Obama added that earmarks should “never, ever be traded for political favors.”

The president pledged to seek to eliminate any future earmark that has “no legitimate public purpose.”

Obama has broken with many of his more conservative critics in opposing an elimination of the earmarking process.

If done right, he argued Wednesday, earmarks “give legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects that benefit people in their district, and that’s why I have opposed their outright elimination.”

He conceded, however, that some earmarks “have been used as a vehicle for waste, fraud and abuse. Projects have been inserted at the eleventh hour, without review, and sometimes without merit, in order to satisfy the political or personal agendas of a given legislator, rather than the public interest.”

Okay, all the lip flapping is done……..but will this be something the president can win?  Earmarks are the way that projects in the districts of the congressmen gets funded.  Will this hurt projects back home?

This is a piece of work to watch……who will be the loudest opponent and where will the saga end.

What To Do With Nuke Waste?

If you recall the waning days of the last election, energy was all the rage and McCain was hell bent on the building of more and more nuke plants.  It was billed as a “clean energy”.   And at that time I was involved in an exchange on why I was opposed to the expansion of nukes.  Yes, it is an almost emissions free industry, but my question was then as it is now…what to do with nuke waste?

President Obama’s proposed budget all but kills the Yucca Mountain project, the controversial Nevada site where the U.S. nuclear industry’s spent fuel rods were to spend eternity. There are no other plans in the works, so for now the waste will remain next to Zion and 103 other reactors scattered across the country.

Obama has said there are too many questions about whether storing waste at Yucca Mountain is safe. His decision fulfills a campaign promise, but it also renews nagging questions about what should be done with the radioactive waste steadily accumulating in 35 states.

During his confirmation hearings, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the waste could safely remain at nuclear plants while another plan is worked out. Reversing course from previous administrations satisfies critics in Nevada, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but triggers another round of political maneuvering and regional bickering in Congress.
More than 57,000 tons of spent fuel rods already are stored next to reactors, just a few yards from containment buildings where they once generated nuclear-heated steam to drive massive electrical turbines.

The lack of a permanent solution poses a serious challenge to the industry’s plans to build more than 30 new reactors. Existing nuclear plants produce 2,000 tons of the long-lived waste each year, most of which is moved into pools of chilled water that allow the spent — but still highly lethal — uranium-235 to slowly and safely decay. Uranium-235 has a half-life of nearly 704 million years — meaning that half its atoms will decay in that time.

But containment pools never were intended to store all of the spent fuel that a reactor creates. The idea was that the cool water would stabilize the enriched uranium until it could be sent to a reprocessing plant or stored in a centralized location.

Instead, it keeps piling up. Although industry officials insist the waste is safely stored in fenced-off buildings lined with concrete and lead, there are concerns that a leak or a terrorist attack could create an environmental catastrophe. Many of the nation’s nuclear plants are close to highly populated areas or next to bodies of water.

Obama has taken a high road here….but my question still stands….What To Do With Nuke Waste?

What A Difference A Recession Makes

It is ironic that this discussion of socialism is engaging a political and media elite that for decades has promoted anti-communism and anti-socialism as a virtual state religion. No faction of the political establishment is advancing a policy that in any way challenges capitalism or the interests of the financial elite. Nor is there yet a mass socialist movement of the working class.

However, there is growing nervousness within this layer over the implications of the capitalist crisis and the potential for mass social opposition to the policies of the ruling class. Thus far, political discussion in the US has been contained within an extremely narrow framework. The diversity of views in the media and on the talk shows encompasses various shades of opinion within the wealthiest one tenth of one percent of the population.

Yet there is an objective logic to developments. At a certain point—sooner rather than later—discussion of policy will escape their tight grasp. The masses of people who are directly affected by the global depression will become involved.

There is a sense within the ruling class itself of an enormous anger building up, which, if unleashed, will assume the form of mass opposition to capitalism directed against the wealth and privileges of the financial elite. They are worried that socialism will then develop not merely as a specter, but as a living political movement embedded in the consciousness of millions of people. And they are right to be worried.

Iraqi Violence Grows

As reported in McClatchy:

As the U.S. military begins to shift its focus to a new battle against extremists in Afghanistan, a recent spike in violence in Iraq has some military commanders worried that their Afghan strategy could falter with the need to keep a large force in Iraq to quell the mayhem there.

Since this weekend, there have been at least 20 attacks, including a bombing on the outskirts of western Baghdad Tuesday that killed at least 33 people and injured another 57. Also Tuesday, at least four people were killed in several attacks in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Attackers have used motorcycle bombs, mortar attacks, Katyusha rockets and gunfire.

In Baghdad and Washington, military commanders and politicians are quietly fretting that the attacks are in response the administration’s plan to move out of Iraq.

“There was always an underlying feeling that once we start the drawdown the attacks would increase. But the fear is that these spikes will turn into an upward trend,” a senior military officer who closely monitors Iraq, and asked not to be named because of the issue’s sensitivity, told McClatchy on Tuesday. “Right now, we are taking a wait and see approach.”

The national reconciliation conference was a big target of Tuesday’s attack. Among those in attendance were sheiks whose tribe members were among the Sons of Iraq, a militia formerly sponsored by the U.S. and now under Iraqi control. In the past, its members were engaged in insurgent activities. Their transition into civilian life and the Iraqi Security Forces was among the issues discussed.

Until now, most military commanders were focused on violence in Mosul, which remains one of Iraq’s most unstable cities. January’s provincial election stoked tensions between Sunni Arabs and Kurds there, and some fear the ongoing instability there could spread to neighboring Anbar. The Kurds, although a minority, controlled the provincial government but lost in the last election.

Violence has increased since.