TIT FOR TAT

While Republicans were still relishing their victories in New Jersey and Virginia, President Obama decided to cut his losses and do something to protect his political flank. He threw voters in Nevada a big crumb to bolster Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's sagging reelection effort in the Silver State by scrapping the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Depository. The move may win votes in Nevada, but it leaves American taxpayers with the several billion dollar bill already spent on the facility and no place to put waste generated by the nation's nuclear plants, which provide several areas of the country clean, affordable energy.

Obama's overtly transparent move comes on the heels of Reid saying the Senate would probably not be voting on the healthcare bill until after the first of the year. Could scrapping Yucca Mountain also be an inducement for Reid to hold a vote on healthcare yet this year? With Obama's political star in free fall, it may be now or never for the healthcare takeover, despite growing resistance to Obamacare from the American public.

Again, it is the long-suffering American taxpayer who is caught in this Washington vise; left to eat billions in wasteful spending on Yucca Mountain and being force fed a healthcare plan that promises higher taxes, no certainty that all the uninsured will be covered and ballooning the federal bureauracy by more than a hundred new departments.

All the while, several congressional committees are quietly holding deliberations on the Cap and Trade bill, another Obama boondoggle, which the President promised pre-election, would skyrocket our utility bills.

When will this nightmare ever end. November, 2010 cannot come soon enough.