Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Today is the 15th of March, or as its known more ominously, the Ides of March. I didn’t realize the Ides of March actually referred to a nuclear accident. I had trouble sleeping last night thinking about the Fukushima plant in Japan. There are 50 brave heroes left at the plant fighting to prevent a worse accident. There is a lot of false information out there about the accident and the radiation spread. I’m not trusting mainstream news sources, instead I’m looking at updates from the IAEA, All Things Nuclear, Scientific American and other science-based sources. They are generally slower with news than news sites but have accurate and verified information.
One channel you definitely shouldn’t watch for information on nuclear matters is Fox.
This map of nuclear power plants in Japan showed up on Fox News.
One name seems out of place on the graphic — that of “Shibuyaeggman.”
It doesn’t show up on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s list of Japanese nuclear power stations, and this map of Japanese nuclear installations from the Department of Energy’s International Nuclear Safety Center doesn’t have any listing for “Shibuyaeggman,” and doesn’t show a nuclear power plant anywhere near the location on the Fox News map. So I did a little research.
A quick Googling of “shibuyaeggman” turned up no meaningful results. A Nexis search was also fruitless. However, further inquiries revealed that Eggman is the name of a dance club in a trendy neighborhood of Tokyo called… Shibuya.
Perhaps the drinks are nuclear strength or maybe they serve hot wings. I wonder where Fox got this map because someone pulled a joke on them.
There are some signs of life from the non-crazy wing of the Republican party. A GOP freshman from NY criticized the debt/budget game of chicken being played by the GOP.
“The extreme wing of the Republican Party is making a big mistake with their flat-out opposition to a short-term continuing resolution,” Grimm said in a statement. “I know that there is some opposition to working with Senate Democrats from the extreme right of the tea party who would rather see a government shutdown than pass a short-term solution; however, as long as we continue to cut spending each time, we are keeping our promise to the American people to reduce the deficit and fix the economy.”
If more Republicans speak up like this, it should give Boehner some cover to deal with Democrats. Right now Boehner is chasing Teapublicans off the cliff.