The Year Of Campaign Chaos
Yet Freedom
McCain Replaces Palin With Startled Deer
Blaming Homeowners For This Crisis? Please
Memo To Republicans - Politics Is War
The Uplifting Debate
A Movement to Break the Silence of Churches in Political Campaigns
Of Generals And Victories
Post - Wall Street
Michelle Obama's Fearful Vision
Only Ourselves To Blame
Interesting Times
Memo To McCain: Take The Gloves Off
Main Street Need To Support Bail Out
A Heartbeat Away
The Curtain On The Last Act
Trust Us? In A Pig's Eye, I Say
Hoover-Era Ghost Stories No Longer Apply
America's Nervous Breakdown -- And The World's
Harper's Index
Why Independents Care So Much About Health Care
Gagging On Wall Street's Bailout
Does McCain Still Agree With Reagan That Government Is The Problem?
The Grip Of Bad Ideas
Who Needs To Pay Their Mortgage And Who Doesn't?
In Sunny Santa Monica, A New Appreciation Of Life
The War To Promote Terror
If Rescue Passes, Here's Who Gets Credit And Blame
Hail Mary Vs. Cool Barry
GOP To McCain: Attack Obama Now
Biden Can't Abide By The Truth
Adult Supervision Required
Pols, The Press And The Financial Crisis
Dear Congress: Put The Gun Down Now
No Country For Liberals
Palin Wins Big With A Reagan-Like Flair
Boon For Voter Fraud, Bust For Democracy
Village Idiocy
And In Other News …
What Is A Loophole?
It Was Palin's Night To Avoid Losing
Compassion, Certainly, But Justice, Too
Gotcha Questions For Katie Couric (And Her Colleagues)
Palin Alone Disqualifies McCain
Taking Stock of Testosterone
Whodunit ?
The Worst Of Both Worlds
The Change That Has Already Happened
The Supersize Bailout
Pundits Side With Wall Street Over Main Street
How To Talk To Someone Who Sounds Racist
Tough Speeches Instead Of Tough Choices
Palin Dominates VP Debate
Why the Bailout Is a Crock -- Opinion
Catholics And Abortion (Again)
Blind Defense of Koran Abrogates Reality
The Sky is Falling
What McCain Learned From The Rough Rider
McCain's Debate Challenge



Why We Need Nukes And Gitmo
Jonah Goldberg 5/14/2008
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What do Yucca Mountain and Guantanamo Bay have in common?

Well, there’s the obvious stuff. Both have Spanish names. Neither is a great spot for a family vacation. Each is controlled by the federal government.

Oh, and both are essential tools in wars a lot of people claim they want to win.

See, Yucca Mountain is where the government wants to keep incredibly dangerous substances — nuclear waste — until we figure out a better way to handle it.

Guantanamo Bay is where the government keeps incredibly dangerous people — jihadi enemy combatants — until we figure out a better way to handle them.

Victory in the war against climate change is inconceivable without nuclear power. Even if we turned America’s breadbasket into ethanol-corn and solar farms, we wouldn’t come close to reducing carbon emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s avowed goal, compared with John McCain’s target of 60 percent). Even if every American lived like a Prius-driving, vegan eco-feminist, we’d still fall far short. A recent MIT study found that even the homeless in America have twice the carbon footprint of the global average.

Clean, efficient, safe nuclear energy could force enormous savings
in CO2 emissions, replacing coal- and gas-burning power plants on a scale solar never can. It also would boost America’s “energy independence,” a phrase environmentalists use to enlist support from Americans immune to climate fear-mongering.

Is it a silver bullet? Surely not. But expanding our nuclear energy infrastructure belongs near the top of the list of options for those who say we must do “everything in our power” to stop global warming. (I’m not one of those people, by the way.)

But generating nuclear power produces radioactive waste, so we really should find a safe place to put it. Yucca Mountain, in the Nevada desert, is just such a place. But anti-nuclear environmentalists have done everything they can to keep it from opening, largely because having a safe waste repository would make nuclear power more attractive.

Which brings me back to Guantanamo Bay, where the Yuccafication process is nearly complete.

Much like Yucca Mountain, lots of things are said about Gitmo that aren’t true. Yucca is derided as unsafe, when its biggest shortcoming is that its designers can’t promise that in 10,000 years a passerby who digs up waste won’t be exposed to much more than a few chest X-rays’ worth of radiation.

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Guantanamo Bay
By Paresh Nath - The National Herald, India * Posted 07/19/2007
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Guantanamo Bay
© Copyright 2007  Paresh Nath - All Rights Reserved.
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