The Lofty Lantern

Obama should have hit McCain on his advocacy of Nuclear energy; his talk about reprocessing was strange, shallow, and alarming.  Sure, Nuclear Reprocessing exists, but it doesn’t succeed in eliminating nuclear waste.

What the process does is to seperate the waste into different components.  Some such as plutonium are used for nuclear weapons, some can be used to generate more energy, and - contrary to McCain’s implications - a significant amount is nuclear waste that’s going to be around a very, very long time.

This was a great opportunity for Obama to attack McCain on his understanding of foreign policy, domestic security, and energy.  Nuclear reprocessing has been at the core of Iran’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons, and it’s sad to see that McCain doesn’t really understand the issue.

On a positive note, at least McCain hasn’t started talking about some imaginary ability of the government to reprocess the investment bank’s toxic assets.

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With the news that Sarah Palin’s unwed 17 year old daughter is pregnant, many are predicting that the GOP will be thrown into disarray. They’re wrong; this will prove a boon in mobilizing the fundamentalist vote and will help humanize the pro-life movement in the eyes of mainstream voters.

It’s true that Sarah Palin was unable to keep one of her five children from choosing to stray. Yet given the consistent failure of abstinence-only indoctrination, this situation should be familiar to every fundamentalist in the country who has seen it play out in the life of a friend or family member. Already they are seeing it as a cause for solidarity:

Bristol Palin is not going to abort her unborn child. She’s going to keep the baby and marry the father. Good for her. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did happen, and now she’s going to do the right thing — the hard thing. Again: good. Mother and child — and father — need support.

Sarah Palin has stood by her daughter’s side through a crisis, and persevered. Rather than having an abortion, her daughter is getting married. Her family is growing and stable, and she’ll soon have the joy of being a grandmother. In their eyes it’s a perfect example of how pro-life ideology can transform a bad situation into a happy ending.

I expect that most moderates will also appreciate this development. Every parent hopes to one day have grandchildren, and recognizes that simply being there to hold their child’s hand is often more important than anything else.

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