Making Conservatives Cringe Since 1977

As you've noticed there is a picture of Yellow Cake right between pictures of Judith Miller and Matt Cooper, as well as Karl Rove and Robert Novak in the scroller above. Yellow Cake is refined Uranium ore, so the placement of a bag of regular old cake mix in between these characters is a play on the whole Plame-Gate Scandal that's still brewing. When refined further with nitric acid, Kerosene, and other solvents Uranium ore becomes U-235. According to Dr. Frank Settle's site on Nuclear Chemistry and Uranium Production, "Reactors use both enriched (3 to 5% U-235) uranium metal and uranium oxide as fuel while weapons use more highly enriched uranium (up to 90% U-235)."

I'm no chemist so if UO3(s) + 2H+(aq) --> UO22+(aq) + H2O confuses you, I'm right there with ya.

The technical stuff doesn't matter, and the rest is real simple depending on which side you take. The CIA sent Valerie Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson to investigate claims that Iraq was trying to buy Yellow Cake from certain South African countries. He concluded, and the CIA latter verified, that Iraq was doing no such thing. Regardless of this finding the President used the now infamous phrase, "[T]he British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This patently false statement later had to be retracted when Joe Wilson came forth with a New York Times OP-Ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

In retaliation the Administration, through the office of the Vice-President (specifically the VP's chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby) leaked classified information about Wilson's wife, who we now know was, "part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran." Basically the whole thing boils down to defending the pack of lies that sold the country on going to War in Iraq (while compromising Plame, every other CIA officer she ever worked with, and undermining the agencies work with Iran).