Compromise Pushes Nuclear Option

"The line I always remember from Winston Churchill is that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after all other possibilities have been exhausted. The good news is that we're there."

J. Wayne Leonard
CEO of Entery

“The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Our is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”

Omar Bradley
US Army General

“Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like women. You just have to read the manual and press the right button.”

Homer Simpson


"...When a brigade of Greenpeace activists stormed a nuclear power plant on the shores of the North Sea a few years ago, scrawling "danger" on its reactor, Robert Tindale was their commander. Then head of the group's British office, he remembers, he stood outside the plant just east of London telling TV crews all the reasons "why nuclear power was evil..."

Read Nuclear Power Regains Support at Washington Post

"It really is a question about the greater evil -- nuclear waste or climate change. But there is no contest anymore. Climate change is the bigger threat, and nuclear is part of the answer."

Robert Tindale
former director of Green Peace

"The national policy of the country in the 1970s was to wean ourselves from oil, so the government said, 'Go build coal and nuclear.' Then Three Mile Island happened, and all we had was coal. Now, it is fundamentally unfair to punish people for having carried out national policy...people in Indiana would be subsidizing people in California, and that's wrong."

James E. Rogers
CEO Duke Power

"I guess you could call it 'grudging acceptance. If we are really serious about dealing with climate change, we are going to have to be willing to look at a range of options and not just rule things off the table. We may not like it, but that's the way it is."

Steve Cochran
Environmental Defense Fund

"Because of global warming, most of the big groups have become less active on their nuclear campaign, and almost all of us are taking another look at our internal policies. We've decided not to officially endorse it, in part because we feel the nuclear lobby is already strong enough. But we are also no longer focusing our energies on opposing it."

Mike Childs
Friends of the Earth

"...The construction of nuclear plants was banned in Britain for years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in what was then the Soviet Union. But now the British are weighing the idea of new nuclear plants as part of the battle against climate change, and Tindale is among several environmentalists who are backing the plan..."

"More than 40 Prairie Island Indian Community members attended a rally today and voiced their opposition to Xcel Energy’s expansion and nuclear waste storage plans for the nearby nuclear plant.

Today is Native American Heritage Day. As a way of honoring their ancestors and protecting the community, officials urged tribal members to contact state legislators and continue voicing opposition to Xcel's plans..."

"We need to let the power plant know we're going nowhere. This is our ancestral lands."

Ron Johnson
Tribal Council President

Read more @ Red Wing Republican Eagle

GOP Still Taking The Southern Route

"By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

Ken Mehlman
Former Republican National Committee chairman

"The Republican Party walked away from the black community in the late 1960s. It was stupid. It was dumb to pursue a southern strategy and it came back to bite them in 1992."

Micheal Steele
Current Republican National Committee chairman

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

Former President Jimmy Carter

Republicans called Carter’s remarks “very destructive” (Newt Gingrich) or “an outrage” (GOP chairman Michael Steele, who happens to be black himself).

"Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks."

Bob Hebert
The New York Times

Hypocritical Oath

"I am not a racist. I am simply a person speaking up to make sure patients don't get hurt by the government and by insurance companies...Because I've been so effective in pointing out how the government plans are going to hurt patients in very serious ways ... the only way they can neutralize my message is to discredit me personally."

David McKalip
Florida surgeon
Sender of image below via e-mail


"...The image is a pastiche. Obama's head is grafted onto a picture of a man wearing nothing but bead necklaces and a loincloth, his legs spread wide, his long, thick fingers grasping a stick in front of him. There's a bone through his nose and a confection of feathers and flowers on his head. The picture evokes the world of National Geographic that once gave children a guiltless excuse to indulge their curiosity in the flesh. Under the witch doctor picture is the slogan "Obama Care," with the red, white and blue campaign symbol serving as the O and a sickle and hammer as the C.

The statement McKalip and his cohort were making is thus a political pastiche as well: Obama is foreign, strange, not "natural born"; half-naked, he is a figure of danger, seductive perhaps for his exoticism, his magic--the promise of cures--but ultimately loathsome, at once clownish, somehow thrilling to confront but also frightening, certainly not someone a white man would want to leave alone with his daughter... and a communist to boot..."

Joann Wypijewski
Read more of Red Scare, Black Scare at The Nation.



"I genuinely regret the decision I made in passing this e-mail message along. Directly to President Obama, I sincerely apologize for offending him. This was, in no way whatsoever, my intention. The image has nothing to do with my feelings or thoughts on any race or culture. I recognize that this image is offensive and hope that the nation refocuses on assuring all Americans have access to high-quality, affordable health care with no party interfering in the patient-physician relationship. My intention is to focus directly on the issue at hand, which is putting financial and decision-making power into the hands of patients and taking it from government and insurance companies."

David McKalip's apology

Turn Your Head And Cough

"The amount of death and disease would be less, if all disease were left to itself."

Dr. Jacob Bigelow
1835