Had the massive 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.

The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.

All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as fifty countries.

San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.

Senator Sherrod Brown apologized after giving a speech on the Senate floor March 4 where he stated the obvious, that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Egyptian President Mubarak all crushed independent labor unions. No need to apologize, Senator Brown. The Republicans never do, as they endorse the policies of union busters. The only thing, Senator, you should be mildly chagrined about, is failing to point out Ohio Governor John Kasich and Wisconsin Governor Walker's similarities to Mussolini's fascism.

As Kasich takes money from the new corporate robber barons – the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch – let's quote Mussolini directly: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Kasich has just won his battle to privatize economic development in Ohio. Again the more accurate word would be "corporatize."

Recent polls suggest that while a majority of U.S. people disapprove of the war in Afghanistan, many on grounds of its horrible economic cost, only 3% took the war into account when voting in the 2010 midterm elections. The issue of the economy weighed heavily on voters, but the war and its cost, though clear to them and clearly related to the economy in their thinking, was a far less pressing concern.

U.S. people, if they do read or hear of it, may be shocked at the apparent unconcern of the crews of two U.S. helicopter gunships, which attacked and killed nine children on a mountainside in Afghanistan’s Kumar province, shooting them “one after another” this past Tuesday March 1st. (“The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting.” (NYT 3/2/11)).