Bailout Lacks Oversight Despite Billions Pledged by Amit Paley of the Washington Post

A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence by Richard Perez Pena at the NY Times

Supreme Court Rules for Navy in Sonar Case by Adam Liptak of the NY Times

Our Lt. Governor, Catherine Baker Knoll, has died following her battle with cancer.

Key facts:

· 1930-2008, of McKees Rocks

· Sworn in Jan. 21, 2003

· 30th lieutenant governor

· First elected female Lt. Governor

· St. Mary’s High School alumnus

· Served eight years as state treasurer, winning huge % of statewide vote

· Formerly schoolteacher, businesswoman

· Had four children with late husband, Charles Sr. a local postmaster

Well, some jokesters did and created a fake New York Times website complete with articles.

Headlines include such gems as:

“National Health Insurance Act Passes”

“Nation Sets Its Sites on Building a Sane Economy”

and

“Troops to Return Immediately”

After living through sixteen years of two Presidents’ terms, the Baby Boomer generation appears to have run its Presidential course. When Obama, on his way over to Grant Park for his election night event, emailed his millions of plugged-in supporters, he wrote “We just made history.”

As Damien Cave noted:

With that simple “we” in millions of in-boxes, the post-baby-boomer era seems to have begun. The endless “us versus them” battles of the ’60s, over Vietnam, abortion, race and gender, at least for a moment last week, seemed as out-of-touch as a rotary phone. Of course, that was Mr. Obama’s goal. In his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” he was explicit in his desire to move beyond “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”

With an emphasis on consensus, communication, and cooperation, Generation O believes in teams and plans. It openly embraces diversity, meritocracy, and goal-driven achievement.

They saw in Mr. Obama, 47, who was born at the tail end of the baby boom era, the values that sociologists and cultural critics ascribe to them.

Government under Mr. Obama, they believe, would value personal disclosure and transparency in the mode of social-networking sites. Teamwork would be in fashion, along with a strict meritocracy.

Will this mobilization through meetups and social networks endure the slogging messiness of federal politics? Only time will tell, but, as the GOP learned during this election, they count Generation O out at their peril.

Will the rise of this well-informed and politically active generation of young people, and their candidate, be able to overcome the divisions inherent in the cultural fabric of the Baby Boomer? Are Boomers comfortable with the tech-heavy consensus-based ideals of Generation O?

Many baby boomers are unlikely to be comfortable with this generation’s technological boosterism and ease with blurred identities and mixed ethnicities. Peter Wolson, a psychoanalyst and former dean of the Los Angeles of Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, said the crucible of the 1960s helped give baby boomers a deep suspicion of “the other.” Their world was bifurcated: pro-war versus antiwar; communist versus capitalist.

Perhaps, with the sun now setting on Presidential fortunes of the Baby Boomer Generation, a more appropriate question to ask is whether Generation O will be comfortable with its youthful ideals as they age. Given the emphasis on transparency and social networking with Generation O, I am certain that whatever the answer, we will in time have it.

From TAPPED:

There’s been lots of discussion during the past week about the future of conservatism. David Brooks and First Read consider the topic today. In short, the GOP can’t continue to appeal primarily to less educated, Southern, rural, and racist voters in an age of increasing education levels, diversity, tolerance, and migration back into cities and close-in suburbs. What’s the solution?

When looking at the history of whiteness and the creation of ethnicity in this country, the short answer to this question of whether the GOP will consider Latinos white is a resoundingly blunt “No.” For a good reference to this history, I’d recommend the book Working Towards Whiteness by the historian David Roediger.

Again, Dana Goldstein:

In our round table discussion on identity politics and the election, Brentin Mock, Adam Serwer, and I agree that one possibility is conservatives cutting loose the nativist right and embracing Latinos as “white.” Many Latino immigrants already consider themselves white, in part because of different racial attitudes in their home countries. And an appeal to these voters’ religiosity and social conservatism could, as Karl Rove and George W. Bush intended, eventually woo them back into a GOP that stops demagoguing on immigration, but continues to evince enough discomfort with African Americans and secular culture to hold onto the white Southern base. Here’s how Adam puts it:

Serwer: I think the studies showing changing demographics obscure the fact that most Latinos identify as white. So one of two things will happen: The GOP will continue to marginalize itself with hostility to Latinos, or it will redefine whiteness to include many of them. I’m betting on the latter.

Yes, Latinos tend to think of themselves as white, but the self-perception of Latinos is not what will determine their ultimate adoption within whiteness in America. After all, Irish and Italian immigrants during the early 20th century also thought of themselves as white and European.

And yet, they were not adopted into the white mainstream until much later, only after they dropped their cultural distinctiveness from their public lives, deciding to remain Italian, for instance, only at home. It was only then that they had a chance at whiteness, but even then a new term — ethnic — had to be appropriated to describe their peripheral whiteness.

Latinos on the whole do not now appear to be interested in dropping their cultural distinctiveness, and what writers like David Brooks and Adam Serwer seem to forget is that it took from the early twentieth century until the 70s for white ethnics/the “new immigrants” to become Reagan Democrats. It took decades of housing choices and intergenerational mobility for that transformation to full-fledged participation in the GOP’s white base to occur.

Will the GOP suddenly embrace these Catholic brown-skinned Spanish speakers in a rational realization that our country’s demographics are working against them? If history is a guide, Obama and the Democratic Party shouldn’t worry too much about that happening anytime soon.

The New Liberalism by George Packer of the New Yorker

Generation O Gets Its Hopes Up by Damien Cave of the NY Times

Forest-friendly Farming at the Economist

The Charm of Big Cities by the Economist

Census of the Ocean Finding New Wonders by Randolph E. Schmid of the AP

Franklin Delano Obama? by Paul Krugman of the NY Times

Obama Positioned to Quickly Reverse Bush Actions by Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post

Nuclear power production is leaving behind monumental piles of radioactive soil as memorials of the heyday of nuclear power. Way back in the middle of the 20th century when everybody was giddy over nuclear power, the Canadian government set about mining and refining uranium and radium to power its massive nuclear power plants.

One of engineering’s long-standing truisms is that “the solution to pollution is dilution,” and this was certainly the maxim half a century ago. So, when soil was leftover from refining these elements in Port Hope and Port Granby, both east of Toronto on Lake Ontario, it was mixed with some more soil and used primarily as fill.

Of course, radioactive soil isn’t the sort of thing that mixes well with residential and commercial properties, and so now cleaning it up is a big problem. Yes, science knew that long before the 1970s when 100,000 cubic meters of this radioactive soil was shipped around town in dump trucks, but Eldorado Nuclear, at the time owned by the Canadian government, did it anyway.

Now, Port Hope has about 1.2 million cubic meters of contaminated soil and Port Granby has 450,000 cubic meters. To put that quantity into perspective, that’s approximately how much oil Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pump out in a day — over 10.2 million barrels.

The soil will eventually be piled above ground in massive mounds over 2 acres at the base and nearly 40 feet high. These mounds will have linings and be monitored for leaks, but, at the end of the day, this is more about containing maximum risk than about safely storing radioactive material.

Apparently, “it’s anticipated that the mounds eventually will be safe enough for public use,” although I find that rosy outlook something of a stretch. The half-life of uranium-238 is over 4 billion years, about as long as there’s been a planet Earth.

Certainly, these radioactive memorials will make life safer for residents of Port Hope and Port Granby, but what of the families unwittingly moving into town in three decades after dumping stopped and citizens’ group mobilized to take action? What of the children who grew up playing on contaminated soil?

Will they, like the residents of Donora’s killer smog in 1948 be the catalyst that sparks a concerted movement for uncontaminated soil? Will we see a museum erected in Port Hope to honor the victims fifty years from now, as we see happening in Donora today?

The estimated cost for the cleanup is nearly 300 million Canadian dollars, but the true cost of the exposure is likely far, far greater.

The biggest political news story of the day:

President-elect Obama’s advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

Liberal economist (and Nobel winner) Paul Krugman states his case that the “center-right nation” meme is a canard:

Did progressives get a mandate from last week’s election? Lots of people would like to claim that they didn’t — that we’re still a “center-right nation.” And one of the assertions you hear to back that claim is that Obama’s victory wasn’t matched by down-ticket Democratic success.

Except it’s not true: down-ticket Democrats actually did even better than Obama. The Dem share of the House vote, in particular, was higher than Obama’s share of the Prez vote.

…

Maybe the reason people don’t see this is that the Democratic House gains were spread over two elections. But combining 2006 and 2008, what we’ve seen is a “Democratic revolution” substantially bigger than the “Republican revolution” of 1994.

From Britain’s Guardian, a collection of newspaper front pages from around the world: