Duty to Warn

As Vermont seethes with radioactive contamination and the Democratic Party crumbles, Barack Obama has plunged into the atomic abyss.

In the face of fierce green opposition and withering scorn from both liberal and conservative budget hawks, Obama has done what George W. Bush could not---pledge billions of taxpayer dollars for a relapse of the 20th Century’s most expensive technological failure.

Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

The Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.

When the U.S. military began a major offensive in southern Afghanistan over the weekend, the killing of children and other civilians was predictable. Lofty rhetoric aside, such deaths come with the territory of war and occupation.

A month ago, President Obama pledged $100 million in U.S. government aid to earthquake-devastated Haiti. Compare that to the $100 billion price tag to keep 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a year.

While commanders in Afghanistan were launching what the New York Times called “the largest offensive military operation since the American-led coalition invaded the country in 2001,” the situation in Haiti was clearly dire.

With more than a million Haitians still homeless, vast numbers -- the latest estimates are around 75 percent -- don’t have tents or tarps. The rainy season is fast approaching, with serious dangers of typhoid and dysentery.

No shortage of bombs in Afghanistan; a lethal shortage of tents in Haiti. Such priorities -- actual, not rhetorical -- are routine.

"God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board."
--Mark Twain

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has highlighted yet another mob of extremists using the Texas School Board to baptize our children's textbooks.

This endless, ever-angry escalating assault on our Constitution by crusading theocrats could be obliterated with the effective incantation of two names: Benjamin Franklin, and Deganawidah.

But first, let's do some history:

1) Actual Founder-Presidents #2 through #6---John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams---were all freethinking

Deists and Unitarians; what Christian precepts they embraced were moderate, tolerant and open-minded.

Last summer, a man spinning the wheels of a pick-up truck , shouting f--- you ! and shaking a one finger salute as a blue cloud of burned rubber hovered near Goldman Environmental Prize winner Judy Bonds and other protesters against mountain top removal mining showed a sad but not surprising irony : working-class people in this Appalachian community are in conflict with each other, while those at a safe distance from this drama have been getting rich by damaging other people's air, land, and water.

Bonds and other activists know this, but their efforts to find common ground with the miners has become very difficult as this controversy has led to tensions in this generally poor rural community. Even though Bonds has been threatened with violence on many occasions, she recognizes the workers engaged in strip mining are also being exploited.

Like a decayed flotilla of rickety steamers, at least 27 of America's 104 aging atomic reactors are known to be leaking radioactive tritium, which is linked to cancer if inhaled or ingested through the throat or skin.

The fallout has been fiercest at Vermont Yankee, where a flood of cover-ups has infuriated and terrified near neighbors who say the reactor was never meant to operate more than 30 years, and must now shut.

In 2007 one of Yankee's 22 cooling towers simply collapsed due to rot.

Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has confirmed tritium levels in a monitoring well at Vernon to be 3.5 times the federal safety standard. The leaks apparently came from underground pipes whose very existence was recently denied by VY officials in under-oath testimony at a public hearing. Vermont's pro-nuclear Republican Governor Jim Douglas has termed the event "a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated."

I recently joined a group of activists who traveled across the state to protest Dr. Larry James' “Psychology of Terrorism Executive Workshop” at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Col. Larry James was Chief Psychologist of the Joint Intelligence Group and a senior member of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), from 2003 to 2007. For most of the critical torture years of 2003 and 2004, James reported to Major General Geoffrey Miller. Miller was transferred from Guantanamo to Iraq to take over administration of the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, from which stories and pictures of U.S. torture emerged in 2004. Send Comments

Amber Nitchman,19, spent 9 days in a tree and did jail time as a part of Climate Ground Zero's most recent campaign of non-violent civil disobedience to stop mountain top removal mining.

As advice for anyone wanting to stop mountain top removal mining but not sure about whether to be a part of a tree-sit Nitchman said, “ Not everyone has to come down here (West Virginia) and be an activist that sits in a tree. But everyone can contribute in some way, whether it's through supporting our group itself, or doing some other mountain top removal resistance work.”

Nitchman said local campaigns are needed in which people in, for example, Central Ohio, can pressure their local utility companies to find ways to generate power without using coal mined by mountaintop removal. At ILoveMountains.org, we can find out about how our electricity connects to this issue simply by entering our zip codes.

Greetings to everyone,

34 years. It doesn't even sound like a real number to me. Not when one really thinks about being in a jail cell for that long. All these years and I swear, I still think sometimes I'll wake up from this nightmare in my own bed, in my own home, with my family in the next room. I would never have imagined such a thing. Surely the only place people are unjustly imprisoned for 34 years is in far away lands, books or fairy tales.

It's been that long since I woke up when I needed to, worked where I wanted to, loved who I was supposed to love, or did what I was compelled to do. It's been that long-long enough to see my children have grandchildren. Long enough to have many of my friends and loved ones die in the course of a normal life, while I was here unable to know them in their final days.