I'm glad Cantor lost, just out of spite. He ran the meanist, ugliest, lyingest, dirty campaign I've ever seen. Running attack ads left and right which were outright lying, just because he could because Bratt didn't have the money to run opposing ads. Cantor was known for not appearing at town halls, snubbing the VCDL and other local conservative groups, and generally treating his own constituents and elections as a nuisance - like a ruling class elite. Apparently, on the day of the election, Cantor was in Washington bragging about how he out-spend Bratt 50-1 in order to crush him to prevent future primary contestants.

He just stated this afternoon that he will not be running as write-in and will be stepping down as majority leader July 31st.

Ok, not sure what the fucking hell beta did to my comment between editing and submitting, but here it goes again:

This isn't really a "battery" any more so than gasoline is. Technically, you could recover the waste products from gasoline combustion, and using various chemical processes + energy turn it back into gasoline. But that doesn't mean your gas tank is a battery. Same goes for this thing. It is basically an engine burning aluminum. Traveling 3000 km in a car that gets 50 mpg requires about 100 kg of gasoline, so this has about the same energy density.

This isn't really a "battery" any more so than gasoline is. Technically, you could recover the waste products from gasoline combustion, and using various chemical processes + energy turn it back into gasoline. But that doesn't mean your gas tank is a battery. Same goes for this thing. It is basically an engine burning aluminum. Traveling 3000 km in a car that gets 50 mpg requires of gasoline, so this has about the same energy density.

We know that there is something that causes attraction between objects and can make predictions based on our observations of that effect,

This is the realm of science.

but we can't explain with any certainty how it actually works or why it exists.

This is not the realm of science.

Iraq was a war for oil only in the sense that Saddam invaded our ally, Kuwait, whom we agreed to protect, to annex their oil fields.

That may have been the case 10+ years ago when most people still had 20" CRT TV's. Now that 50" LCD TV's can be had for under $500, not so much.

Lewinsky wasn't the one charging sexual harassment. She was a willing participant, but was the witness to attest for the person whom was unwillingly harassed, Paula Jones. The case didn't "blow up on technicalities", Clinton was found guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury, and settled the case w/ Paula Jones. The House impeached Clinton but the Democrat controlled senate refused to convict.

You are confused. Monica Lewinsky was the witness to attest that Clinton did garner sexual favors from interns. The sexual harassment suit was by Paula Jones, whom was NOT willing to give sexual favors and thought that her boss making such advances was a highly hostile work environment.

Clinton wasn't impeached for having an affair. Clinton was impeached for pressuring a subordinate intern for sexual favors, lying in court, and pressuring witnesses to lie in court.

Burnup is the standard science and industry term for fission energy produced per kg of fuel.

That is not accurate. Thorium breeder reactors produce weapons-grade U-233. And a reactor designed to use liquid fuel with on-site reprocessing can very easily extract this weapons grade material. It is even easier to do so than a U-238 breeder reactor cause you don't have to worry about burnup requirements limiting Pu-240 production.

The reason why we went with UO2 based reactors instead of thorium ones is simply because that is where our knowledge base stemmed from. UO2 worked and thorium didn't offer any significant advantage worth starting over from scratch on.

The car analogy doesn't really work in this case. The most expensive parts of the plant are the containment building, which doesn't wear out, and the reactor vessel, which can be annealed. The most expensive part of building a new plant is the interest on the loan to pay for it while it is under construction for 5+ years. You can refit an old plant in much less time and you don't need the huge loan from the onset. Although it's true you don't get to take advantage of a new and safer design. I wouldn't want to refit an old gen 1 boiler like Fukushima but the old PWR's have proven to be very robust (e.g. TMI).

Um, we already have. EBR-II started in 1965, and it worked perfectly for 30 years until it was shut down by Clinton in 1995.

Luckily we have about 10,000 - 1,000,000 years worth of energy in uranium and thorium (depending on how fast you think energy needs will grow). Plenty of time to work out fusion and expand into space.