But truth be told, as a date to hold a protest, December 16 sucks. So it’s not surprising that today’s tea partiers have decided to focus not on the date of the original party but on the point of the original exercise — it was a tax protest — in picking a time for national protesting.

According to a poll done by Quinnipiac University, 55 percent of self-identified Tea Partiers were women (albeit the poll's margin of sampling error was relatively high). However, the finding is consistent with information gathered by major Tea Party groups.

A Gallup Poll taken a couple weeks ago found that Americans’ worries about environmental issues have dropped to a 20-year low, which the pollsters mostly attribute to economic concerns. I think there’s more to it than that, but first the poll findings.

First some background. A Hiroshima-type atomic bomb requires about 44 pounds of highly enriched uranium. Highly enriched uranium consists of 96 percent U-235 (the fissile isotope) and about 4 percent U-238 (the non-fissile one). By contrast, naturally occurring uranium contains only 0.

One might reasonably believe this thanks to President Obama's announcement last week of $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees for construction of new nuclear power plants. Obama previously (in his State of the Union Speech) called on Congress to up the amount of money available for guaranteeing such loans from $18.

Whatever else it did, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission — that’s the campaign finance case — has prompted a lot of Boulder lefties to take pen in hand and hyperventilate that the American republic, and possibly civilization as we know it, are about to be swept away by a tidal wave of corporate money.

The Wall Street Journal’s story about last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the ban on corporate and union campaign spending in federal elections contained a detail that the New York Times story managed to overlook:

A couple of weeks ago, the Weekly printed a letter from Jim Bryant taking me to task for dissing the decision by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to locate its new $500 million supercomputer in Cheyenne, Wyo. — where it can get cheap, coalgenerated electricity — without suggesting alternatives.

It would be wrong to say that nothing came out of the Copenhagen conference. Just ask the Chinese.

NCAR is going to build a giant new supercomputer, the better to study climate change, which is cool. Indeed, the project has already provided one profound, if wickedly ironic, insight into the problem.