Congresswoman Berkley speaks out against McCain, Yucca Mountain

The day before John McCain’s visit to Nevada, some Democrats are calling him out for his stance on Yucca Mountain.

Congresswoman Shelley Berkley and former Nevada Governor Bob Miller want McCain to apologize for comments he made about the safety concerns surrounding the nuclear dump.

“This will create thousands of jobs in Nevada. This will be a great boom for the economy,” says McCain. “I’m confident when we reprocess, which we can do, which the Europeans do, there will be a much smaller amount of nuclear fuel to be stored.”

Berkley believes Yucca Mountain could have devastating effects on our community.

“We need people coming to Southern Nevada to enjoy our entertainment. The last thing we need is a nuclear dump 90 miles away,” says Congresswoman Berkley.

McCain says he’ll support Yucca Mountain only when it meets environmental and safety standards, which he believes will happen.

McCain Forgets Who Endorsed Him

On October 26, John McCain appeared on Meet the Press and proudly boasted of the endorsement of five former Republican secretaries of state…except he couldn’t quite remember all their names:

Nuke dump debate: Mountain or molehill for McCain?

Presidential and nuclear waste politics presented Nevada voters Monday with some crosswinds to contemplate.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed to review an application from the Energy Department to build the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, a review process it said could take four years. Though routine, it put the issue back on the front burner briefly/

The presidential campaigns of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain soon put their spin on this expected bureaucratic regulatory step.

The Obama camp attacked President Bush for proceeding and tied McCain to the administration. The McCain camp said the NRC decision was just a step in the process and added the GOP nominee supports nuclear waste transport and storage when safe.

Normal crosswinds in a political year, but then came an unrelated statement issued by Sen. John Ensign, R-NV. Ensign, who opposes the dump, said Nevadans do as well. It was just a routine release, not related to the presidential race, but showed a potential McCain problem in what could prove a swing state.

“There can be no question that the citizens of Nevada are opposed to Yucca Mountain,” Ensign said, adding the congressional delegation is fighting hard to block the idea. He called the NRC decision “merely a formality” and expressed confidence “the red flags for this proposal will become even more apparent” during the review process.

Ensign isn’t just any senator; he is the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial (campaign) Committee and, in the Senate, serves on the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

So his statement might prove a discordant note for the McCain camp, which acknowledged Yucca Mountain is an issue but also noted in some ways it represents a national security matter.

“It’s a national security issue in a larger sense,” said Rick Gorka, regional spokesman for the McCain campaign.

Gorka — whose role encompasses the states of Nevada, Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska and Hawaii — said nuclear power reduces reliance on foreign oil. He said waste storage in one spot – if safe and secure – is better than in hundreds of places.

Asked if he thought the Obama campaign would try to make hay out of the NRC decision and Yucca Mountain coming into the news again, he replied: “I think the other side can make hay out of anything, regardless of the facts.”

The Nevada Obama camp statement came from Kirsten Searer.

“The Bush administration is continuing to pursue the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump despite the mounting scientific evidence that it is not safe for the people of Nevada,” she said, adding: “John McCain backs the dangerous Bush plan…”

Why isn’t President Bush campaigning for McCain?

Of all the differences between Barack Obama and John McCain, here’s one that could really make a difference down the home stretch: One has a president to help him and the other one does not. And at first glance, it’s not what you might think.

After his appearance with Barack Obama tonight at a rally in Kissimmee, Florida, former president Bill Clinton plans to criss-cross the country on behalf of Obama in the closing days of the campaign. Tonight will mark President Clinton’s first joint appearance with Obama on the campaign trail. Despite his lukewarm support at first,President Clinton as well as Hillary Clinton will campaign hard in the next few days to help Obama try to close the deal.

Watch: Cafferty: Cafferty: Bush support McCain?

But what about John McCain? He has a sitting president in his party. President Bush has been dubbed “the invisible man” when it comes to campaigning for his dear friend and fellow Republican, John McCain.

McCain is misleading on nuclear power…

I watched McCain give a speech in Florida where he pushed his regular piece about the safety of nuclear power… and his complaint that Obama will consider it,but has a problem with spent fuel. And then he said that the French recycles their waste and “we always want to be like the French” and he laughed.

I felt the need to do a web search on France and spent nuclear rods. This is an example of what I found:

France recycles spent rods, but they still have a portion that cannot be recycled into fissile material. This stuff gets vitrified by mixing into molten glass, and gets stored. Now, in case you didn’t know, France still has overseas colonies. I don’t remember the details, but last I remember, they shipped their waste away to be stored at one of their colonies, which is a disgrace.

Response To RNC’s New McCain Attack Ad ‘Storm’

The RNC’s newest McCain attack ad (“Storm”) makes the case that John McCain would be a steadier presence in the Oval Office than Barack Obama. It’s a silly ad, and not just because the financial crisis revealed McCain to be as herky-jerky as Obama is confident and composed.

The problem with the ad is that when you’re 72 and you’ve selected Sarah Palin as your running mate, the last argument you should be making is the experience argument.

I’ve put together a response to the new RNC attack, turning the ad around on itself, and applying its line of attack to Sarah Palin. Here it is:

Video: Is Palin a plus or a drag on McCain?

Is Palin a plus or a drag on McCain?

McCain raises specter of nuclear war

John McCain raised the specter of nuclear war as he struggled to overcome rival Barack Obama’s widening lead in the polls with just 14 days left in the epic race to the White House.

Warning voters that the United States faces “many challenges here at home, and many enemies abroad in this dangerous world,” McCain returned to the attack line that Obama has poor judgment and is not ready to lead the United States.

The next president “won’t have time to get used to the office,” the Republican said at a rally on Tuesday.

“I sat in the cockpit on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise off of Cuba. I had a target,” McCain said, referring to the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.

“I know how close we came to a nuclear war and I will not be a president that needs to be tested. I have been tested. Senator Obama has not.”

McCain Evolved From Reluctant Warrior to Interventionist

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain fixed his sights on Saddam Hussein long before President Bush sent the U.S. military to oust the Iraqi dictator in March 2003.

[Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ) listens to Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) during the presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee October 7, 2008. Although he's cultivated a maverick image, McCain's fixation with Iraq, and with regime change more generally, is squarely in step with his party's neoconservatives, many of whom now work for his campaign. (REUTERS/Jim Young)]Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ) listens to Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) during the presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee October 7, 2008. Although he’s cultivated a maverick image, McCain’s fixation with Iraq, and with regime change more generally, is squarely in step with his party’s neoconservatives, many of whom now work for his campaign. (REUTERS/Jim Young)
Four years earlier, the Arizona senator told a Kansas State University audience that Saddam was amassing illicit weapons, and that the U.S. should arm opposition groups to overthrow him, along with North Korea’s leaders and other “odious regimes.”

Saddam, however, no longer had any chemical, biological or nuclear arms programs. Covert U.S. efforts to oust him had all failed because the Iraqi opposition was riddled with feuds and Iraqi spies, and because the exiles whom McCain favored – led by Ahmad Chalabi, a purveyor of bogus intelligence on Iraq who also had ties to Iran – had virtually no followers in Iraq.

For years, McCain repeated the same assertions about Iraq’s weapons programs and ties to terrorism that the Bush administration later used to make its case for invading Iraq. Today, he insists that the war was right and that last year’s surge of additional troops to Iraq has put the U.S. “on the road to victory” there.

Although he’s cultivated a maverick image, McCain’s fixation with Iraq, and with regime change more generally, is squarely in step with his party’s neoconservatives, many of whom now work for his campaign. Neoconservatives believe that the U.S. must preserve its unchallenged global dominance and military superiority, and reshape the world, by force if necessary.

“There is no question that he (McCain) reflects the hard-line neocon view,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. John Johns, a former supporter who’s known McCain since his return from Vietnam but is backing Democratic nominee Barack Obama. “With his attitude, his finger on the trigger, the slightest thing will (cause him to) execute that philosophy.”

Not true, responded Max Boot, a McCain campaign foreign-policy adviser.

“He is not a warmonger, as the caricature has it, but someone who is very prudent on the use of the American military,” Boot said. “He takes things on a case-by-case basis. He has no overarching ideological vision that he would impose on the messy reality of the world.”

McCain says that as a Vietnam veteran and a former prisoner of war, he “hates war” and believes that force should be the “last option.”

He promises to employ “all instruments of national power” – military, economic and diplomatic – and work with allies to deal with adversaries, and with Democrats to forge bipartisan foreign policy.

“Senator McCain has always made his own calls based on his assessment of the various situations we face in various parts of the world,” Boot said. “He is a very careful, prudent thinker who knows the military and how it should be employed.”

The words “diplomacy” and “State Department,” however, don’t appear on the McCain-Palin campaign Web page, which outlines a national security platform heavy with vows to pump up U.S. military muscle.

While McCain has toned down many of his hard-line pronouncements in this campaign, a McClatchy review of dozens of his speeches, interviews, statements and writings over more than two decades traces an evolution from reluctant warrior to advocate of U.S. military intervention on a global scale.

The Other Joe: McCain and Palin Resurrect McCarthy’s Attacks

Just over fifty years ago, Joseph McCarthy attacked Edward R. Murrow with some of the exact same language that John McCain and Sarah Palin are using today to attack Barack Obama.

In these chilling excerpts originally broadcast on Murrow’s own show, McCarthy accused the CBS newsman of defending “traitors” and associating with a “terrorist organization”: