Posted by
Gary Fisher on Saturday, September 20, 2008 9:29:29 AM
In
this current campaign ad, Sen. Barack Obama blames the closure of a Pennsylvania Corning Glass factory on John McCain. While this claim itself is debatable -- the ad actually refers to "Washington Bureaucrats," a group in which Sen. Obama would be included by the ad's own standards -- closer examination reveals the assertion as another clear distortion of facts by the desperate Obama campaign.
As
noted by The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, the factory in question manufactured television picture tubes, a technology which is now as obsolete as Dageurotypes and hand-cranked telephones. The story here is not that such a plant was closed, but that it remained in business for so long, that a buyer was found for the equipment, and that the sale provided jobs for workers who were called back to disassemble and ship the plant. Certainly a federal mandate to keep picture tube plants in operation while our global competitors are hard at work on modern LCD, Plasma and other flat-screen technologies would be the height of regulatory foolishness.
But there's more to the story, for in addition to being obsolete, picture tubes present several environmental hazards.
A picture tube is in effect a particle accelerator,
propelling electrons toward the viewer at speeds reminiscent of those achieved
by the Large Hadron Collider which drew so much recent media attention. The
electrons smash into a coating on the inside surface of the screen with
such energy that light is emitted, causing the familiar CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) glow, but the
process also releases dangerous radiation, so much so that television
repairmen are warned not to rest their forearms along the top of the screen
while performing their duties. To protect the viewers, who spend untold hours
directly in line with the beam of electrons sweeping continuously through the picture tube, the front of the tube is made of heavily leaded glass, lead of
course being well known for limiting the passage of dangerous radiation. This
lead, four or five pounds of it in a standard computer monitor and much more in a full-size TV set, imposes very strict disposal requirements on picture tubes, which are considered a
significant environmental hazard.
What Obama appears to be arguing is that he favors
placing several pounds of lead and an X-Ray machine in every living room.
Somehow, a chicken in every pot sounds more appealing.
If Senator John McCain was personally instrumental in removing this hazardous and obsolete source of environmental pollution from the quiet hills of Pennsylvania, we owe him our thanks. Even if the plant was actually shut down, as seems more likely, by economic reality and the EPA, we can be glad some of the costs could be recovered and workers rehired to bring this about. What should worry us is why Barack Obama "approved this message."