The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut by Greg Palast

I'm guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain's comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain's gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson's.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants - that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a "safe, efficient [and] inexpensive" alternative to oil.

Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren't -period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.

Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I'm looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion - or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say "supposed to," it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.

We're told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, "This time it will be different." Sure. And McCain believes them.

I don't. Maybe that's because I headed the government racketeering investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant's builders. Stone & Webster Engineering and its partner paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the civil racketeering claim over the evidence we found of fraud and perjury. Now Stone & Webster will cash in big-time under Plan McCain.

The other big builder which will hit the jackpot under the McCain scheme is KBR, the one-time subsidiary of Halliburton, whose best known project is the rebuilding of Iraq. (Halliburton dumped KBR last year. Can't blame them.) KBR has built many nukes -not one within a mile of its promised cost.

But that doesn't bother McCain. So who is McCain getting his energy advice from? I'm looking at a photo of the perplexed senator inside the control room, looking like Homer without a donut, getting a lecture on the wonders of nuclear energy from a power company CEO, one Tony Early. Early is the former President of LILCO, the very corporation the Feds and State of New York charged with civil racketeering. (We did not name Early as a co-conspirator. When the government got him on the witness stand, it was clear the guy was too clueless to recognize he was in the midst of a billion-dollar swindle. McCain's got quite some team.)

Now, you Obamaniacs might not want to read this next paragraph:

While McCain is pushing nuclear power, a Senator from Illinois who shall remain nameless (skinny, just gave up smokes), was already embracing radiation as the solution to pollution. This Senator voted for George Bush's energy bill, a law which contained massive giveaways to nuclear energy, legislation which diss'es and dismisses conservation. Indeed, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate has been derided as the "Senator from Commonwealth Edison," the Chicago company which is the nation's largest operator of nuclear plants - and whose executives were the money backbone to his early presidential campaign.

So, we've got both candidates hawking the nuclear snake oil. But there is one difference between them. A big big BIG difference.

McCain's ready to spend a hundred billion dollars on nuclear power, no questions asked. But Barack Obama puts a crucial condition on his approval for building new nukes: an affordable method of disposing the new plants' radioactive waste.

That's not small stuff. While The New York Times reporters following McCain repeated his line about "inexpensive" nuclear power without question, a buried wire story on the same day noted that the Energy Department is putting the unfunded bill for disposing nuclear plant waste at $96.2 billion - nearly a billion dollars per plant operating today. And no one even knows exactly how to do it, or where. Obama has the audacity to ask about the nuclear waste's cost. "Can we deal with the expense?" he said on Meet the Press.

McCain's plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

So there you have our election in a nutshell. We have two candidates who rise above their parties - only to agree on a ludicrous pro-nukes energy plan.

But at least Senator Obama, when confronted with an economic question, doesn't have to take off his shoes to add up the facts.

éirígí is drawing strong parallels between the controversial detention legislation and the introduction of internment in the North 37-years ago.

Indeed, they have billed their August 9 gatherings as both a commemoration of the injustice of internment and a protest against the injustice of 42-day detention.

In addition to the Antrim town, Belfast, Dublin and Lurgan éirígí gatherings, RSF will be holding a protest in Belfast while 32CSM will be doing the same in Dublin. '
More here: http://sluggerotoole.com/index.php/weblog/comments/internment/

What a complete arse.

You can read his unconvincing vain-glorious explanation of this sick stunt here.

The arts & culture magazine 'Variant' has been banned from Tramway, a key cultural venue in Glasgow "that promotes public participation, education and debate, placing the building at the heart of local, national and international concerns, issues and innovation."

It has been brought to Variant's attention that Culture and Sport Glasgow (CSG), the private company set up to take over the running of culture and sport from Glasgow City Council, has issued an order banning Variant magazine from Tramway.

The Summer issue of Variant features an article about the controversial creation of Culture and Sport Glasgow, which is based on an academic study undertaken by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt at the University of Strathclyde.

Despite having been contacted earlier this year to input into the research for this article, James Doherty -- Media Manager of Culture and Sport Glasgow, and President of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) -- on publication threatened legal action over its content, and has since reneged on responding to Variant's invitation to identify and
correct any substantial inaccuracies he alleged existed.

Instead, Variant has learnt that Charles Bell, CSG Arts Development Manager, has issued an order to deprive readers visiting Tramway of access to the magazine.

Doherty's immediate recourse to legal threats and the ensuing attempts at censorship represent an obvious conflict of interest with his role in the NUJ to uphold and defend the principles of media freedom, the right of freedom of expression, and the right of the public to be informed.

Ironically, Charles Bell was a key speaker at today's conference 'Raising the Art of Conversation', billed as "a chance to discuss policy issues affecting the cultural sector".

The article they don't want you to read is:

'The New Bohemia'
by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt
Variant issue 32, Summer 2008

Text version: http://www.variant.org.uk/32texts/CSG.html

PDF version: http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue32/Variant32RGN.pdf

PDF of CSG structure diagram:
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue32/csg_diagram.pdf

And you might also be interested in reading:

'Public / Private Partnership: What crisis of legitimacy?'
by Leigh French
Public Art Resource+Research Scotland (PAR+RS)

http://www.publicartscotland.com/features/5-Public-Private-Partnership-
What-crisis-of-legitimacy-

More here.

If there is a meltdown for Labour, curiously the pressure on Cameron to do anything on the legislative side on Scotland reduces. If he's got a clear majority, he doesn't have to worry about it. It's a notional problem. After all, the whole point of the English issue is only if there's a Labour minority government relying on Scottish MPs to carry through legislation. It doesn't arise if you've got a Conservative government.

More here.

He (Griffin) then goes on to point out Frank Fields writing in the Telegraph:

"At some stage -- perhaps very soon -- the English Question will explode into British politics, and will decisively change the political landscape."

The front page of the Sunday Times suggests that Field is not alone among Labour MPs.

'The anti-Scots backlash has been prompted in part by the humiliation of the Crewe by-election where Labour's campaign was run by a Scot, Steve McCabe, a government whip. He has been criticised for running a negative campaign caricaturing the Conservatives as "toffs" that backfired among English voters.'

Incredible stuff. Cinfirming my belief that Brown is not the next John Major but the next Kinnock, despised for his nationality not his policies.

"No doubt that anarchist ideas are frightening to those in power. People in power can tolerate liberal ideas. They can tolerate ideas that call for reforms, but they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority. So it is very important for them to ridicule the idea of anarchism to create this impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic"

More (much) here...

So what's Scottish about them?

Is that ridiculous? Certainly no more than Martin Bain having the gall to claim that they're not Rangers fans. Russian fans were stabbed in the stadium and fans chased police down like dogs. What will be done about this club? Probably nothing. Nothing by UEFA it seems, nothing by the Scottish Govt and nothing by the British either. A collective disgrace and abdication of responsibility.

As Graham Spiers (himself a Hun) writes:

"Utterly predictably, the fate of Rangers is once again to find excitement on the field marred by loutishness and delinquency off it. Losing the Uefa Cup final in Manchester on Wednesday night was no disgrace for Walter Smith or his team, whose very presence at the game was a triumph in itself. Beyond the stadium, however, before and after the match, events told their own story of how accursed Rangers remain as a club....

Rangers have a repeated get-out for these episodes: the script always says this is "just a small minority" of fans. Moreover, as incident upon incident passes with the club's supporters - at Villarreal in 2006, in Pamplona in 2007 and now in Manchester in 2008 - it is always "heavy-handed policing" and not the Rangers fans themselves who are said to be the blame. "

Read the full article here.

As the blood, puke and glass is hosed down from Manchester another consideration is the city and it's businesses that coined it in from the travelling Hun. Serving booze all day from tent and Offies opening 2 hours early, hoovering up a reputed £25 million.

A good way to make money?

"You must remember, this is a people that has no culture, that has never had one."

Your essential Thursday listening...

One such poster on Iain Dales gang-bangery wrote:

"Now the difficult part comes - making sure the next Conservative government is actually conservative:

There's no point in a 300-seat Tory mejority if all we do is ape New Labour."

Well quite old bean. Obviously all that private education didn't cover spelling.

I'm no friend of New Labour and quite sure that Ken had loads of insiders and cronies hanging about. But a city that elects a racist imbecile like Boris Johnson in the 21st C is astonishing. Im quite sure its half about the sort of darkly-moronic anti-immigrant bile that has been building up in the general culture for years, stoked by the red-tops and fed upon by the BNP and their ilk.

How deeply sad that this man is allowed anywhere near public office. This is deeply deeply embarrasing for England and London and another sign of a deep divide between what passes for public office and political culture North and South of the Border. The deference that is implicitly involved in electing an Old Etonian and the reactionary bourgeois nature of the vote that gives him office is wholly objectionable.
The whole edifice of reactionary right wing xenophobia rolls on. Just in time for the Olympics that we're subsidising.

"Over the last two months, the notion that Barack Obama can't win enough support from white working-class voters has been a key point of debate in the Democratic presidential race. After Rust Belt victories for Hillary Clinton in Ohio, and then in Pennsylvania, gave her flagging campaign new life, Clinton aides had new ammunition for the spin battle. "I think Democrats do have questions about whether or not [Obama] is going to be able to reach out and successfully win over the kind of blue-collar voters that Democrats need to win in order to take the White House back in November," Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson reiterated on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

But that's not what Wolfson was saying back in February, when Obama clobbered Clinton by 17 points in Wisconsin, another state whose largely white, working-class demographics should have made it Clinton country." Full article here.

"The liberation of Iraq -- in other words, the decision that we had to move the Iraqi people and the region into a post-Saddam era -- will stand, I'm convinced, as one of the greatest decisions of American statecraft, as one of the things that American soldiers, male and female, the politicians who voted for it, those who've defended it, will be proudest of in the future of any decision we've ever made."

Hitch, Hitch, Hitch . . . I don't know what to say. Long ago I wrote you off, as did so many of your former friends and allies, and met whatever twisted rhetoric of yours I caught with a weary shrug and a sad smile. But recently, a reader of mine passed on some clips of you debating your brother Peter in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and early in the event you unleashed the above quote. It wasn't so much the words, which are of course mad, worthy of a lesser Lewis Carroll character, but the tense, strange expression on your face as you uttered this lunacy.

I fear that something in you has seriously snapped. Up till now, I assumed that your war-mongering and imperial hubris were career-motivated. A Beltway regular like yourself will never go broke pimping U.S. wars and American exceptionalism. Disgusting, but part of the elite opinion deal. Others have called you crazy, but most didn't know you like I did. They confused professional opportunism for a break with reality, a cheap, easy way to dismiss your rantings. But not me. While I was occasionally fooled into thinking you had gone nuts, I always returned to the fact that you knew exactly what you were doing, that the whole Just War bit was largely a performance, however sordid and unsightly. I no longer buy into that theory. I'm afraid, dear boy, that you've checked into the Presidential Suite of the Rubber Room Hotel.

One would think, after crawling out on a weak limb and crashing to the pavement with this now-classic take:

"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention . . . The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling . . . It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."

You might be through with fantasy predictions about Iraq. Yet, in the charred, smoldering face of all that has happened and continues to unfold, you not only keep talking shit, you do so with this ominous emotional edge, your eyes glazed with contempt. As much as it would impress me on a professional level, I don't think this is an act. You really, amazingly, believe the crap you spew. And from what I hear, you're backing McCain, a man you once told me was a bandit that the Vietnamese had every right to shoot down. Now that he wants to kill Arabs and Persians (and God knows who else) for the next 100 years, he's acceptable to you? Any old mercenary in a shit storm? Where the fuck is this going? How does it end?"

Brilliant hilarious stuff. Welcome.

"The American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents today from the Department of Defense confirming the military's use of unlawful interrogation methods on detainees held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. The documents from the military's Criminal Investigation Division (CID), obtained as a result of the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, include the first on-the-ground reports of torture in Gardez, Afghanistan to be publicly released.

"These documents make it clear that the military was using unlawful interrogation techniques in Afghanistan," said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU. "Rather than putting a stop to these systemic abuses, senior officials appear to have turned a blind eye to them."

Special Operations officers in Gardez admitted to using what are known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) techniques, which for decades American service members experienced as training to prepare for the brutal treatment they might face if captured.

Today's documents reveal charges that Special Forces beat, burned, and doused eight prisoners with cold water before sending them into freezing weather conditions. One of the eight prisoners, Jamal Naseer, died in U.S. custody in March 2003. In late 2004, the military opened a criminal investigation into charges of torture at Gardez. Despite numerous witness statements describing the evidence of torture, the military's investigation concluded that the charges of torture were unsupported. It also concluded that Naseer's death was the result of a "stomach ailment," even though no autopsy had been conducted in his case. Documents uncovered today also refer to sodomy committed by prison guards; the victims' identities are redacted."

Read the full story here.