A Michigan-based nuclear power plant has been shut down due to water leakage from the tank, which exceeded its capacity. Inspectors are now investigating the problem to ensure that the public and the plant are safe.

The Palisades Nuclear Power Plant, located in Covert Township, Michigan, was removed from service Sunday morning after the water tank exceeded its site threshold and leaked.

Via:

"This tank has leaked before. It leaked in 2012. The plant had to shut down to repair the leak to the tank," federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokeswoman Viktoria Mitlyng said. "It's a repeat occurrence."

The leakage in 2012 caused water seepage into the plant's control room. Sunday's shutdown happened after the water tank exceeded a 38-gallon daily leak limit set after last year's shutdown.

"The NRC resident inspectors are closely following the plant's actions to identify the source of the leakage and repair the tank," Mitlyng said.

She also said inspectors "are evaluating these actions to make sure that the plant and the public continue to be safe."

The plant is owned by New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. and has been under extra NRC scrutiny after numerous safety issues. It's shut down nine times since September 2011, including in February for a different water leakage problem.

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Pictured are Rep. Paul Ryan (left) and former intern Adam Savader (right).

Um, Republican family values?

Adam Savader, reportedly a former intern for Paul Ryan, was arrested and charged with Internet extortion and cyber stalking by the FBI on Tuesday. Savader apparently sent anonymous text messages to 15 women saying he had nude photographs and threatening to distribute them unless he was sent more photographs. If convicted, he faces a maximum of five years in prison.

FBI:

A 21-year-old Great Neck, New York man was charged in a criminal complaint in the Eastern District of Michigan with Internet extortion and cyber stalking, announced United States Attorney Barbara L. McQuade.

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What can you learn from a zombie? Maybe a lot.

At least that's what a University of Michigan professor hopes her 31 graduate students took away from Tuesday's bizarre, albeit bloody, "zombie apocalypse." The classroom exercise was designed to get School of Public Health students thinking about what the appropriate response should be during a disaster.

Four times as many students who typically attend Epidemiology 651, "Epidemiology and Public Health Management of Disasters," were on hand Tuesday to welcome -- or become -- the undead. The zombie exercise was modeled after a curriculum designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a handful of CDC staffers also participated.

"'Zombie apocalypse' sounds a bit silly, but the point of this is to show that if we're prepared for any hazard, even the unimaginable hazards, like zombies -- because we know they don't exist -- we are capable of preparing ourselves for perhaps anything that might occur," said Dr. Eden Wells, the epidemiology professor who teaches the course and serves as the brains behind the exercise.

Wells initially wasn't sure she'd be able to persuade enough students to dress up as the undead. But by Tuesday, 120 "zombies" and other participants were on hand to take part in the exercise. As the doors to the lecture hall on the Ann Arbor campus flung open, an army of the undead unexpectedly lurched in, their arms stretched forward and their faces painted with faux blood as they aimlessly staggered among the smiling students.

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In a Tax Day opinion piece at USAToday.com, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., writes that the ongoing exploitation of tax loopholes by large, profitable corporations has “helped shift the tax burden onto American families and small businesses, and … added billions of dollars to the budget deficit.”

As chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Levin has spent more than a decade exposing corporate tax loopholes such as the use of offshore tax havens to avoid taxes. He authored legislation, the CUT Loopholes Act, to combat some of the worst tax loopholes.

Today millions of Americans take part in an annual ritual of filing their income taxes. The willingness of millions of families to plod through this ritual rests in part on the understanding that their burden is shared. Today, though, some of us are bearing a higher burden than ever, while others, particularly our most profitable corporations, sometimes pay no tax at all.

From 2008 to 2010, 30 of the most profitable large corporations paid no federal income tax. None. While the top federal income tax rate for corporations is a relatively high 35%, the effective tax rate for U.S. corporations -- the tax they actually pay -- is less than 15%. I suspect most of the families scrambling today to get their taxes done would love to get that kind of tax cut, let alone the pay nothing, as many large companies do.

This gap between the tax rate on paper and what corporations actually pay has helped drive a huge shift in the tax burden from corporations to American families. In 2011, individuals paid about $6 in income taxes for every dollar that corporations paid. In 1980, the ratio was less than 4-to-1.

Continue reading below the fold...

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This article is cross-posted at DeSmogBlog.

Arkansas' Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has contracted out the "independent analysis of the cleanup" of the ExxonMobil Pegasus tar sands pipeline spill to Witt O'Brien's, a firm with a history of oil spill cover-ups, a DeSmogBlog investigation reveals.

At his April 10 press conference about the Mayflower spill response, AG McDaniel confirmed that Exxon had turned over 12,500 pages of documents to his office resulting from a subpoena related to Exxon's response to the March 29 Pegasus disaster. A 22-foot gash in the 65-year-old pipeline spewed over 500,000 gallons of tar sands dilbit through the streets of Mayflower, AR.

McDaniel also provided the media with a presser explaining that his office had "retained the assistance of Witt O’Brien’s, a firm whose experts will immediately begin an independent analysis of the cleanup process."

Witt O'Brien's describes itself as a "global leader in preparedness, crisis management and disaster response and recovery with the depth of experience and capability to provide services across the crisis and disaster life cycle."

But the firm's actual performance record isn't quite so glowing. O'Brien's has had its hands in the botched clean-up efforts of almost every high-profile oil spill disaster in recent U.S. history, including the Exxon Valdez spill, the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, the Enbridge tar sands pipeline spill into the Kalamazoo River, and Hurricane Sandy.

Most troubling of all, Witt O'Brien's won a "$300k+ contract to develop a Canadian-US compliant Oil Spill Emergency Response Plan for TransCanada’s Keystone Oil Pipeline Project" in Aug. 2008.

Thus, if the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline inevitably suffered a major spill, Witt O'Brien's would presumably handle the cleanup. That should worry everyone along the proposed KXL route.

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Via: OccupyWallSt.org, Via: OccupyNationalGathering.net:

We, the National Gathering Working Group 2013 (NGWG2013), propose a National Gathering of the Occupy Movement, and peoples’ movements worldwide, in Kalamazoo Michigan, to collectively assemble and embrace our different ideologies and perspectives; to find our common visions; to share our strategies and actions; and to leave this gathering with steps we can all take in both agreement and diversity; for ourselves, our communities, our nations, and for all of us all over the world.

We further propose that our convergence begin on Aug. 21 and continue for five days of Community and Movement building exercises including speakers, teach-ins, and free-flowing open discussion at a location to be determined by the Occupy Kalamazoo General Assembly. We believe it’s time the people of the world spoke to each other about how to make a better world. We ask you to converge with us, to bring your ideas, your struggles, and your voice and come to Kalamazoo! We already have networks on board with these broad areas of interest and welcome and need your suggestions, participation and contributions:

Fixing Fossil Fuels and Creating an Environmentally Sustainable Future.
Economic and Trade Justice, Equal Access and Ending Corporate “Personhood”, Asserting the People’s Sovereignty.
Making and Supporting Free, Unfettered Media.
Ending War and Our Police State, Building Peace and Cooperation.
Renew Kalamazoo and your community. Homeless Bill of Rights.

We also encourage the creation of local, national and global processes to communicate, organize and converge. We are meeting more and more on the internet, on mumble, on conference calls. Global infrastructures are appearing, to bring more people together and able to participate worldwide. We are able as a people to organize worldwide protests and actions. We envision a day of concerted worldwide actions focused on very local issues that expose those local issues as part of the worldwide fight against systemic injustice. We will gather and share this worldwide action through all the media tools and networks we continue to build through voluntary people power.

We embrace the value derived from face-to-face contact, and understand that no single gathering can be representative of our entire movement. We recognize that attending in person will be challenging, or impossible for many, so we also commit to pursuing an online component through which anyone can participate via the Internet. We encourage the creation of local, national and global processes by which movement resources could be directed towards funding travel for active movement participants that otherwise would not be able to attend.

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It's been tough week for the city of Detroit. The city has a $327 million deficit and owes $14 billion, says the Detroit Free Press. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said in March that he would appoint a emergency manager to oversee city finances. Detroit's City Council had 10 days to file an appeal, which they did, says The Detroit News. Then Thursday, the governor announced that Kevyn Orr, a Washington, D.C., attorney who handled Chrysler's bankruptcy, would take charge. Emergency management is a touchy subject in the Motor City; the appointment caused some local residents to protest a controller who will take over the city reins from elected officials.

To express frustration and draw attention to state-appointed emergency management, the otherwise peaceful protesters planned traffic jams that were organized in the city this week, says WWJ CBS Detroit. WWJ's Chopper 950, flying over the city on Monday, noted three cars on major highways crawling along (driving under 5 miles per hour). This caused traffic to back up. Slowdowns were staged on I-75, I-94, and the Lodge Freeway. One participant dubbed it a "freedom flash mob."

Meantime, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, is continuing to offer support to an emergency financial manager, whoever that may be.

The mayor posted on Twitter Monday morning, “An emergency manager can’t come in here and run this city without the help and support of teammates, I’ll be a teammate. My executive staff will be a teammate. What we need to figure out is not fighting the person but how do we get along to make wins for the citizens in the city of Detroit.”

Other demonstrations occurred at Detroit's City Hall and at the attorney general's office downtown in connection with the governor's EM announcement. Protesters have vowed to continue their efforts, and have a federal lawsuit prepared.

Further fueling protesters concerns, a report on Saturday evening revealed that the newly appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr has tax liens placed on his $4 million Maryland home. Full details here.

Community groups and Occupy Detroit using "any means necessary" to save homes from foreclosure, and keep families from becoming homeless.

My family and I wish everyone at Crooks and Liars a very happy holiday season. We adopted a new kitty recently from our local shelter, and this is her first Christmas. Ziggy Stardust is so tiny, that she doesn't hurt a thing when she climbs in the tree. Next year will no doubt be a different story!

Peace, joy, and a Merry Christmas to all.

In November, Michigan voters repealed Public Act 4, the state's anti-democratic emergency manager law. While you were busy protesting the right to work for less, in the legislature's mad rush to get every evil thing it can passed during the lame duck session, the House passed a new version of the same damn thing and sent it to the Senate, which is expected to pass it and send it to Governor Rick Snyder to be signed back into law.

The only real difference may be that Republicans attached an appropriation to this bill (pdf) so that it won't be subject to referendum.

The state House passed late Wednesday what the Snyder administration says is a new and improved emergency manager law, but opponents say is a warmed-over version of what voters rejected Nov. 6.

The House passed the Local Financial Stability and Choice act in a 63-46 vote, with Rep. Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, being the only Republican to join Democrats in voting no.

Cotter declined to comment after the session on why he voted against the legislation. Rep. Jimmy Womack, D-Detroit, was absent for the vote.

A request for immediate effect for the new bill was turned down 63-45, meaning it would take effect around the end of March if passed by the Senate today and signed by Gov. Rick Snyder. Both moves are expected.

Why do Michigan Republicans hate democracy?