John McCain

Will the push to open Yucca Mountain shift Nevada toward Obama?

The Bush administration is pushing full speed ahead with plans to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain — and that could affect the presidential race in the battleground state of Nevada, where John McCain and Barack Obama are in a dead heat. Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed to review the federal government’s license […]

More Couric and Palin, on drilling and climate change

More excerpts from the Couric interview with Palin, on subjects including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The trademark borderline-incoherence is in full effect: Here’s the transcript. Here’s the part on climate change, where she tries to back off or at least muddy up her skepticism: Couric: Is it man-made, though in your view? […]

McCain claims U.S. has ‘the world’s largest oil reserves’

John McCain did an interview via satellite yesterday with WSYX ABC News in Columbus, Ohio, in which he claimed that the United States has the world’s largest oil reserves. You can watch the video, or here’s a transcript of the relevant section: Reporter: Now, some say it would be health care, some say it’s the […]

Debate part 1: McCain tells the truth and lies at the same time

Let me briefly hit the big picture on the debate. The two insta polls out, from CBS and CNN, show that McCain lost by a large margin, by 13 percent or so. That large a gap means independents in particular didn’t like his performance (by 22 percent in this poll). And that is no big […]

McCain campaign releases contrived ads promoting coal

The McCain and Obama campaigns have been bickering for the past week about who loves coal more. Today the McCain campaign released new coal-happy radio ads in Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The ads claim that “clean coal means cleaner air,” but “Obama-Biden and their liberal allies oppose clean coal.” In reality, Obama has been […]

Where does McCain get his claim that nuclear will create 700,000 jobs?

In this post, I questioned John McCain’s claim that building 45 new nuclear reactors between now and 2030 would create 700,000 new jobs. I couldn’t find any numbers to back the claim up, and plenty of numbers that cast doubt on it. I contacted the campaign, and they sent along a 2004 study called "U.S. […]

In presidential debate, McCain misleads on nuclear power

John McCain made his central energy pitch in Friday night’s debate. It’s a short passage, but it is remarkable for the amount of nonsense it manages to pack in. 1. This came at the culmination of a discussion about cutting spending, with McCain touting his credentials as a fiscal conservative and even boasting of a […]

Debate: spending

Last night moderator Jim Lehrer pressed the candidates about what spending priorities they would postpone or cancel in response to the financial crisis (a bit of framing I find maddening). In the heat of the debate I was irritated with Obama for not countering the frame directly. Going back and watching, though, he did seem […]

Question

Will McCain’s “spending freeze” include spending on nuclear power and clean coal?