Monday Mashup Part Two (7/12/10)

(Part One is here.)

Good catch by Politico here, I have to admit…

Rep. Thad McCotter (R-Mich.) has spent at least $30,000 in taxpayer-provided Republican Policy Committee funds to hire a consulting firm run by his chief of staff’s brother, Saul Anuzis, even as McCotter planned to kill the policy committee because it’s a “superfluous” waste of federal money.

The payments of $5,000 per month to Anuzis’s Michigan-based Coast to Coast Strategies, discovered by POLITICO in a review of RPC spending records, could roil a high stakes Republican leadership power struggle over the controversial proposal by McCotter, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, to eliminate the 61-year-old policy shop — a fight that carries larger implications for the House GOP’s balance of power.

And of course, Anuzis believes that there is nothing “improper” about the arrangement by which he received $30,000 in taxpayer-provided RNC funds through a policy committee that McCotter has promised to “kill.”

I wonder if now, as a result, we will be treated in another lesson in how to speak “Democrat” as the one McCotter provided here, something else to consider along with McCotter’s opposition to the “stim,” of course, besides his vote against expanding the (Michigan) State Children's Health Insurance Program, which rightly earned him criticism from Catholics United for it (that, allegedly, is McCotter’s faith); McCotter called the group "the devil" over it.

At least Catholics United isn’t “skimming” from taxpayer funds for the benefit of your chief-of-staff’s brother, you hypocrite (not to my knowledge, anyway).

It depresses me unutterably that so many politicians who supposedly practice the same faith that I do are Republicans.

Also, I found myself wincing more than a little bit over this story in the New York Times yesterday…

MANNING, S.C. — On a blisteringly hot afternoon here, Alvin M. Greene talked in a perfunctory way about his improbable candidacy for the United States Senate. But his voice intensified with grievance when the subject turned to his short-circuited career in the Army, from which he was discharged in August involuntarily.

Mr. Greene said the Army discriminated against him by not promoting him. And yet, he said, it promoted to the rank of major a man who would later be accused of shooting 13 people to death last year at Fort Hood, Tex.

“I didn’t have one promotion in six-and-a-half years of active duty, full time,” Mr. Greene lamented in an interview the other day at his father’s house on the outskirts of this small town in the south-central part of the state.

Yes, this is the same Alvin Greene who somehow won the Democratic Party nomination for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina to run against Jim DeMint (who, sadly, probably won’t even bother having to campaign to keep his seat).

Also…

(Greene) is still due in state court Monday on (an) obscenity charge, in which a student at the University of South Carolina said he showed her pornography and tried to go to her dorm room with her. Afterward, a relative paid the $500 fee to a bonding company for him to be released on $5,000 bail.

And in addition, this tells us the following…

ON THE ECONOMY, he wants to produce Alvin M. Greene action figures.

“Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays,” he told a British newspaper, The Guardian. “Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an Army uniform, Air Force uniform, and me in my suit.”

Hey, don’t laugh too much – it worked for Obama’s predecessor (a stretch, I know).

And finally, it seems as if Joe Pitts has too much time on his hands again (here)…

In March, the Department of Energy asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to withdraw the government’s application to approve Yucca Mountain, Nev. as the nation’s nuclear waste repository. By law, the government is required to collect nuclear fuel and provide for safe storage. Without such storage, no new nuclear power plant can be licensed.

So what is Yucca Mountain? Over the last 23 years the government has been constructing a waste repository beneath a mountain in the middle of a military facility. The desert stretches for miles around the site located 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Because of decades of intensive study, we know more about the geology of Yucca Mountain than perhaps any other place on the planet. Between 1987 and 2002, the government spent $3.8 billion on scientific and technical studies of Yucca Mountain. Miles of tunnels and hundreds of boreholes have been dug into the mountain.

In 1998, the Department of Energy, under President Clinton’s leadership, concluded that Yucca Mountain was an appropriate site. Approval was granted in 2002 and work began to move forward on building the appropriate containment facility. During all this time, scientific studies continued to be conducted.

Now, with $90 billion already spent to build the repository, (Energy Secretary Steven) Chu has halted the project and cut off funding without a substantive scientific study to back him up. Instead of relying on decades of existing studies, President Obama and Secretary Chu have created yet another “blue ribbon panel” to determine what we should do with nuclear waste.

Only a life form as dim as Pancake Joe would take the issue of Yucca Mountain and frame it as a policy debate between Democrats and Republicans (and Yucca Mountain, by the way, really isn’t even remotely close to PA-16, last I checked).

Yes, a certain Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History ordered Yucca Mountain to go online in 2002 (here), but former presidents from Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter to Poppy Bush opposed it. It also currently faces bipartisan opposition from both embattled Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons (who credits Obama for “zeroing out” the Yucca Mountain project to store the nuclear waste here) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Pitts does have an ideological kinsman (woman?) on this issue, and that would be Reid’s Repug opponent in the campaign for his Senate seat, Sharron (Wrong) Angle (here)…

…In short, American Presidents since Gerald Ford have come to see the issue of reprocessing nuclear materials as fraught with environmental, non-proliferation, and budgetary problems. This brief history of Administration policies on reprocessing also illuminates a lack of depth in candidate Angle's understanding of the intrinsic issues related to nuclear material reprocessing.

(Angle) appears not to understand that launching a commercial/military reprocessing operation at Yucca Mountain would require far more than a simple reversal of a Bush I administration's executive directive. The installation would require re-negotiation of non-proliferation agreements which might, in part, have an impact on our current international efforts to sequester the contemporary attempts by the Iranians to elude regulations.

At times like this, I wish Pitts would stick to doing what he does best (a debatable prospect, I know – the assumption that Pitts is a master of much of anything except setting a bad example), and that is to vote No (and once more, to do something in response, click here).