Visual source: Newseum
NY Times:
As workers at Japan’s crippled nuclear plant piled up sandbags and readied emergency storage tanks on Tuesday to stop a fresh leak of highly contaminated water from reaching the ocean, criticism rose over the handling of the crisis by the top governmental and civilian authorities.
The Economist:
To be fair to TEPCO, which has been getting all the bad press lately, it at least appears to be aware of how serious the threats are. When asked when the cooling systems might be brought under control, a spokesman says: “We just don’t know how long it will take.” That sounds like an honest assessment.
But candour at this stage will only get TEPCO so far. Its relationship with the government, which is directing disaster efforts from within the utility’s darkened headquarters in Tokyo, is about as tainted as Fukushima’s turbine water. On Tuesday Koichiri Gemba, the minister for national strategy, left open the possibility of nationalising TEPCO (or at least its nuclear arm). Presumably, that is partly to reassure potential claimaints from the vicinity of Fukushima, who may have lost everything as a result of radiation. TEPCO is already now under intense scrutiny to see whether it cut corners on safety prior to the disaster. Its president, Masataka Shimizu, is being lambasted for falling ill (some say going AWOL) during the emergency; the company has yet to explain his absence. And its emergency staff (some of them poorly paid outside contractors) are suffering miserable conditions on-site to carry out some of the most dangerous work on the planet; not only do they have insufficient food, they have to sleep on the floor under a single blanket.
Follow the
Japan Nuclear Incident Liveblogs for the latest info.
Juan Cole:
I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed. I can still remember when I was a teenager how disappointed I was that Soviet tanks were allowed to put down the Prague Spring and extirpate socialism with a human face. Our multilateral world has more spaces in it for successful change and defiance of totalitarianism than did the old bipolar world of the Cold War, where the US and the USSR often deferred to each other’s sphere of influence.
The United Nations-authorized intervention in Libya has pitched ethical issues of the highest importance, and has split progressives in unfortunate ways. I hope we can have a calm and civilized discussion of the rights and wrongs here.
and in response
Robert Naiman:
There doesn't appear to be any plausible way right now to try to completely undo the fact that the Obama Administration has made this power grab for the war-making power of the Executive Branch, which goes beyond anything that the last Bush Administration did on war powers. Whatever else may be true about them, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 were authorized by Congress. In the case of the Iraq war, there was a vigorous Congressional and public debate before the war took place.
h/t to APR readers
forester and
caul for the links.
The Fix:
Tova Wang, a senior fellow at the public policy group Demos and opponent of the Voter ID laws, said the new efforts often go further than even the most stringent of the current laws. And she said the GOP efforts in upwards of a dozen states stand a good chance at passing.
“I don’t think we’ve seen an attack like this on voter’s rights in many years,” Wang said.
In spite of this large-scale effort, the Voter ID issue isn’t exactly front-of-mind for most American voters. Polling on the topic is piecemeal and not all that reliable. But what it does show is that opposition to Voter ID, if it exists, is far below the surface.
NY Times
Does the reading public really need yet one more rundown of the repeatedly debunked claims linking childhood vaccinations and autism? The positions of those who uphold vaccine safety and those who assail it have at this point thoroughly saturated the news media; what more is there to say? Or so I thought before opening Seth Mnookin’s new book. Barely a dozen pages in, I began to reconsider, and by the end I had completely changed my mind: Mr. Mnookin’s passionate defense of vaccination may be just what the public needs, in equal parts because of what it says and because of who is saying it.
Mark Bittman:
I stopped eating on Monday and joined around 4,000 other people in a fast to call attention to Congressional budget proposals that would make huge cuts in programs for the poor and hungry.
By doing so, I surprised myself; after all, I eat for a living. But the decision was easy after I spoke last week with David Beckmann, a reverend who is this year’s World Food Prize laureate. Our conversation turned, as so many about food do these days, to the poor.
Who are — once again — under attack, this time in the House budget bill, H.R. 1.
WaPo:
Having difficulty finding consensus within their own ranks, House Republican leaders have begun courting moderate Democrats on several key fiscal issues, including a deal to avoid a government shutdown at the end of next week.
That'll go over well with the tea party.