darrelplant.com

According to this NPR report, the Japanese are lucky because it’s not the partially-spent fuel rods that caused spikes in radiation levels around the Fukushima nuclear reactors, it was just material from the reactor core.

Along with officials in Japan, independent experts in the United States and Europe are investigating the source and nature of the radiation released. But it looks like most of the material likely came from the reactors themselves, not from the pools of used fuel that have caused such concern.

Like, the reactors aren’t anything to worry about? Were people really more concerned about the spent fuel pools than the reactors or is that sort of a deflection of concerns?

I have to say, that with all of the words spilled in this Glenn Greenwald post at Salon about Joe Lieberman that it’s somewhat surprising that the Gore mentioned in the post is Tipper.

It was, after all, then-VP and presidential candidate Al Gore who chose Joe Lieberman as his running mate in 2000. That act more than anything else gave Lieberman the national slimelight he’s craved ever since. He was the 2000 template for Sarah Palin: the running mate who eclipses the losing presidential candidate who picked them.

It wasn’t just Lieberman’s mendacity during the recount battle that cost Gore the election. There was a large contingent of Democratic voters who sincerely disliked Lieberman for reasons that—while they might not have been apparent to everyone in 2000—have certainly been on display for most of the decade and more since.

It may have been a can of worms that Greenwald wasn’t interested in opening. I’ve certainly run across any number of commenters at sites over the years who’ve claimed that Lieberman “turned to the right” only after 9/11 or after he’d been rejected by the Connecticut Democrats in 2006, as if pettiness and spite were somehow excuses. Maybe Greenwald just ran out of steam; he certainly had a lot of material to choose from. But I’d make the point that the fact that Lieberman was the choice of the elders to be that “heartbeat away” from the country’s levers, combined with the praise Greenwald mentions probably reveals a lot about where the real soul of the Democratic Party is and why it seems moribund and toothless.

The Illinois Apellate Court has overturned a decision that would have let former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel run for mayor of Chicago on the grounds that he moved his family to DC two years ago, rented out his Chicago home, and therefore hasn’t been a resident of the city for a year, a requirement for the post.

That, I think, is indicative of one reason the Obama administration has had such a rough couple of years. Whether or not Emanuel is actually eligible to run for mayor is something the state Supreme Court is likely to decide, but it was a no-brainer to anticipate this potential bump in the road. The past two years have been a very bumpy ride for the administration, but it’s been all the worse because people like Emanuel failed time and again to predict any of the jolts. They were repeatedly caught off-guard and unprepared for opposition to policy proposals and plans. From the reprise of the fifty-year-old casting of national health coverage as “socialism” to the administration’s blissful unawareness of an unemployment level that’s seemingly resistant to all of the happy “Road to Recovery” talk, people like Emanuel have acted as if their very ideas were enough to shape the world: creating their own reality where facts don’t matter, as one Bush-administration official told journalist Robert Suskind.

Like so many challenges of the past two years, this impediment to Emanuel’s run for mayor was completely foreseeable. He may surmount it but there’s a good chance it will screw up his plans and in any case it could have been sidestepped neatly if he’d simply re-established some sort of obvious residence in the city a year ago, presumably when he was thinking about running for the office.

Planning ahead is one of those attributes that’s supposed to be useful in civic leaders, no?

Did we win?