The Diane Rehm Show

the 1/2 life of Cesium is 24000 years.

hardouf:
Operation Paperclip involved social control and aerospace experts as well as physicists.
There are recycled plutonium rods at Fukishima too. It was dispersed in hydrogen explosions and has also leaked into the water table. Plutonium has a suprahuman half-life too. To excrete one half of breathed or ingested plutonium takes the human body 200 years. It emits alpha, beta and gamma. So recycling warheads and old rods might not be so smart, especially if you suffer a meltdown.

hardouf wrote:
"What about all the Nazis the U.S. cut deals with, gave safe haven to, and protected from prosecution so that the U.S. could build their nuclear bombs which they then dropped on Japanese cities.."

What? While there were Communist spies working inside The Manhattan Project, the U.S. did not employ Nazis. Germany surrendered in May, 1945. The A-Bombs dropped on Japan in August, 1945. While former Nazi scientists worked on the U.S. space/rocket program, they had zero to do with developing the nuclear weapons used on Japan that finally forced them to surrender unconditionally.

cicero: You forget the subsequent Hydrogen Bomb race.
If Russia was an Allied nation, I'm sure their affiliates were involved in the Manhattan Project. Together they defeated the Nazis, but judging from the convergence of the American and Chinese political economies, fascism triumphed, and in Russia too with American assistance.

I wonder why you'd take that identity since your Roman namesake was kind of a Machevellian Propagandist in behalf of the wealthy class.

cicero on April 1, 2011 @ 12:04 pm wrote: “Who could forget the show where Diane was emphatic that the FDA approved Thalidomide even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.”

I didn’t hear that show so this is pure speculation: Is it possible she (or you) are merely confused. Perhaps she was talking about the FDA’s approval of thalidomide for the treatment of lesions associated with Erythema Nodosum Leprosum (ENL) - on July 16, 1998 (according to Wikipedia), not approval back in the 60’s? (There have been other limited approvals for treatment of disease since then.)

Of course what you, and other “government is always the problem” Republi-Cons are ignoring is the fact that the U.S. was spared a disaster as great as other countries precisely because the “big government” FDA refused to approve the drug.

(Oh, and this happened during the JFK administration. One of those nasty liberal Democrats Republi-Cons think are the bane of the nation.)

Grady Lee Howard wrote:
"cicero: You forget the subsequent Hydrogen Bomb race.
If Russia was an Allied nation, I'm sure their affiliates were involved in the Manhattan Project."

Even though the Soviet Union was an ally of the U.S. after Germany invaded Russia in 1941, FDR was gnomic enough to exclude them from the joint British/U.S. Manhattan Project. The problem with allowing British scientists in the Project is that the British vouched for Klaus Fuchs, who was a Soviet spy.

Stalin was not supposed to know about the A-Bomb. When President Truman told him about it at the Potsdam Conference, Stalin just shrugged.

Since the U.S. did not drop any H-Bombs on Japan, harddouf's comment about "Nazis building the U.S. nuclear bombs which they dropped on Japan," is utterly false.

I did not enjoy the second hour of today's show. As The Common Ills pointed out this evening, this was the tenth Friday in a row that the program ignored the Iraq War. I find that very disappointing and, honestly, shameful.
I also don't enjoy the fact that the program can't manage to provide an equal number of men and women as guests.
I did a study with two other women of Fresh Air in 2010. For all of 2010, women made up only 18.2% of Terry Gross' guests.
I will now be tracking The Diane Rehm Show at my blog. I find gender bias in all of NPR's programming and find it amazing since if the same gender bias were applied to hosts of shows, there would be a Don Rhem Show and Tommy Gross would be hosting Fresh Air. It's past time the female hosts of NPR made a real effort to book women.
And for anyone who has forgotten, 18.2% is a lower percentage than what Alicia Shephard found in her study of Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

I agree with Ann Wilson about Iraq. At Stars and Stripes today Megan McCloskey points out, "Iraq was once the dominant story on any given front page and nightly newscast. Today, attention has dropped to less than 1 percent of the daily news, according to the Pew Research Center." Ten weeks and no Iraq on the Friday international hour?
Yeah, I find that offensive but maybe because I'm one of the people who deployed there?
At any rate, thank you to Ms. Wilson for raising the very important issue. And I also agree that there could be more balance on the Friday news roundups in terms of gender.

cicero on April 1, 2011 @ 9:36 pm wrote: “http://thedianerehmshow.org/audio-player?nid=733”

Thanks for the link!

As for Diane Rehms’ mistake, well that’s one reason none of us should take at face value what any member of the media (right, left, or center) has to say.

Fact check.

Fact check.

FACT CHECK

FACT CHECK!

In her defense, however, she probably was confused because while Thalidomide was not approved by the FDA (indeed, it was an example of a “big government” agency interfering with the “free market”, and thereby limiting the damage that drug caused here), the drug was being used in clinical trials here, and that’s one reason there are American “Thalidomide babies”. She was probably thinking of that, and didn’t realize the FDA hadn’t given approval for general use.