Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

First of all, Hanford was a WEAPONS plant, and as such is totally irrelevant to the topic of energy generation. Because the Department of Defense does not have to answer to either stockholders or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it could leave its waste in drums, in liquid form, lying around where the drums would eventually corrode and leak into Washington's plentiful groundwater. Commercial waste does not even take the same form.

More importantly, commercial nuclear waste is a resource, not a problem. It consists mainly of 'unburned' uranium, plus plutonium that was formed in the power-generating reaction. Recycling of waste, as the French and Japanese do, recovers these two elements so they can be fed back into the power stream to generate more energy. This gets rid of the two elements that make nuclear waste "dangerous for thousands of years." What's left is a small "inventory" of miscellaneous isotopes, most short-lived and many of which are critically valuable in medicine. Other isotopes can, if separated, be eventually burned up in purpose-built reactors when enough of these substances accumulate to make such a thing worthwhile. Divested of all these isotopes through recycling, remnant nuclear waste is not only minuscule in volume but becomes harmless in about 200 years.

Why does nuclear fear persist in America? I don't blame my country, I blame my generation. Though we're the ones who talk endlessly about how cool we are because we once had sex in the mud at Woodstock, we're also the generation whose fear of technology has held the nation back since 1970. Nuclear, GMO, robotics, high-speed trains: these are all wonders that Asians coluld develop and enjoy because they weren't saddled with Boomers.

Think of today's market crash as my generation's Luddite legacy to the young. Now that we are thankfully aging out of the economy (good riddance!), we leave it to the young to bring technology back to America. You're going to have to learn French to pick up the technology and Mandarin to crank up the production, but you can do it. And take the advice that we ourselves dispensed back then: don't trust anyone over thirty.

"Down 500 is nothing. The market is still above 10K and likely to stay there for a while. The 'panic' that everybody is screaming about is just not there. The big boys are still keeping their money in the market."

The bailout will pass, but in a form that is less likely to reward people for incompetence. The cushy salaries for CEOs who performed badly will have to go, and so will the payoffs to "community organizers" whose purpose in life was to get unqualified homebuyers approved for mortgages. I hope we get a real, no-holds-barred energy independence program out of this. By this I don't mean yet another "program" of federal spending, but a sweeping fix to the regulatory and tort systems that cuts Luddites out of the legal process entirely. Let them starve in their mud huts while the rest of us rebuild the economy.

"No. Because he'd never make assumptions about an entire group of people based on his own arrogant, elitist poorly informed prejudices."

Don't forget that you're posting on ArrogantElitePoorlyInformedPrejudice.com . Let's have another round of yuks over the vice-president's ree-tard baby.

"I am an American-born Canadian whose extended family remains in the US. So I say this with much love as though I were speaking to one of them..."

As a foreign-born American who once lived for a time in Canada, I don't see a problem at all. I've seen enough of the world to know that our American elections are no more irrational than your own eternal silly wrangling over Francophone separatism, or than any other culture's particular set of problems. What I love about Sarah Palin is that her nomination has reduced the left to complete gibbering idiocy, as this Tennis column so richly illustrates. People who grew up believing that their years of higher education qualified them to lord it over hoi polloi with opinions delivered from on high in quiet, measured tones have turned into sobbing, whining wretches. Sadly, this includes a few commentators I once appreciated, like Garrison Keillor.

As your country's own best political columnist, Mark Steyn, put it:

"First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy."

You liberals actually believe that beauty and brains trade off, don't you? And, of course, that this holds only for a woman.