And he kept his Mitt Romney powder dry, preferring instead to attack establishment Republicans who have not embraced the Gingrich campaign. To put it mildly.

That establishment, Gingrich charged, is “managing the decay” of the party, and sees his campaign as a “mortal threat” to their insider Washington lives.

“We intend to change Washington,” the former House speaker said, “not accommodate it.”

Delivering a version of his familiar stump speech, Gingrich faced a lukewarm crowd that he managed to bring around with his trademark mix of humor, history, media jabs and a laundry list of promises whose only omission was his plan to build a lunar colony.

These are the bold ideas, Gingrich said, after ticking off the legislation he would repeal, the federal agencies he’d close, and the study commissions he has planned.

He acknowledged his lack of money and organization, but said he’s undeterred.

“We are running a people campaign,” Gingrich said, with little money, but with “a plan.”

“We need to teach the Republican establishment a lesson,” he said.

Gingrich’s address followed speeches earlier in the day by two of his three rivals for the GOP presidential nomination: former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Texas Rep. Ron Paul did not attend the event. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

In recent years, dozens of new angel investor groups have formed to finance startup companies that banks and venture capitalists deem too risky in this post-recession era. Today, there are about 350 angel investment groups across the country — 50 of them formed after the recession started in 2008.

Kelly Fitzsimmons is the co-founder of an angel-supported startup. As waiters in white shirts and black ties take drink orders, Fitzsimmons makes her way across the Milwaukee social club’s shiny, red tile floor. Over five years, this group of investors has given Fitzsimmons more than $1 million for HarQen, her fourth Milwaukee startup. HarQen is a Web-based service that records voice conversations and allows users to take notes, share photos or slides, and then quickly retrieve key passages once the conversation is over. Right now, it’s used mainly for job interviews by staffing companies.

“We text, we email, we tweet,” Fitzsimmons says, “and yet when a conversation is vital, we stop texting, and we pick up the phone and we talk.”

At least that’s what Fitzsimmons hopes we do. Tonight, she’s asking Silicon Pastures to open their checkbooks yet again. She says angels have become a lifeline for entrepreneurs who can’t get a bank loan or don’t have the cash to bootstrap a company on their own.

‘The Guts Of The American Experience’

Silicon Pastures is one of more than 20 angel investor groups in Wisconsin. That makes for an awful lot of money in the dairy state, considering you have to be a millionaire to join an angel group.

Tim Keane is director of the Golden Angels, another Milwaukee investor group. He says such groups allow investors to spread the risk and bet on ventures they may know nothing about.

“We had a deal a couple of years ago that was [an] advanced generator of hydroxyl radicals for purifying water,” Keane says. “And the guy said that to me, and I thought, ‘Hmm, I wouldn’t know a hydroxyl radical if it shook my hand.’ “

But another member of the group did know about hydroxyl radicals and encouraged fellow investors to pour money into the company. Keane says the group genuinely cares about helping good local companies grow by providing guidance and networking, in addition to cash. He says Golden Angels’ investments over seven years have generated thousands of new jobs in Wisconsin.

“All growth in this economy comes from startups; it comes from people forming new companies and new ideas and taking risks,” Keane says. “To me, that’s the guts of the American experience.”

After their latest meeting in Milwaukee, Silicon Pastures investors likely won’t put their checkbooks away for long. In a few weeks, entrepreneurs in the field of telemedicine will pitch to the group, hoping for cash to turn their startups into profitable businesses. [Copyright 2012 Milwaukee Public Radio]

Mitt Romney waxed eloquent in French as he promoted the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, calling the two years he spent as a young man in France an “enriching experience.”

But now that he’s running for president of the United States, Romney doesn’t talk a lot about his time as a Mormon missionary in France.

“Voilà,” says Philippe Brillaut, as he points to the site of what would be France’s first Mormon temple.

Brillaut is the mayor of Le Chesnay, which lies just outside of Paris and next to Versailles, and can point to Louis XIV’s chateau from his office.

He says a petition against the pending Mormon temple is causing him real headaches.

“People are wary of the Mormons because they’re rigorous, organized, and they have money,” Brillaut says. “People are scared of organized groups that have money because that means they have the means to achieve their goals.”

He says many people also think the Mormons are a cult.

Romney in France

When Romney arrived in France to do his mission work in 1966, many had never heard of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Nicole Bacharan, now a political scientist, was one who had. She says her parents used to invite Romney to dinner. Though she was only a girl at the time, Bacharan says she remembers him well.

“He was fun, he was smart, he was quick,” she recalls. “And he was always surrounded by an adoring crowd of friends. You know, other young missionaries who always said, ‘This young guy is going to be, one day, the president of the United States.’”

Bacharan notes that Romney was in France when it erupted into chaos in May 1968. Student demonstrators set fire to cars and hurled cobblestones at riot police. Romney has said he had a firsthand view of that very volatile time.

“He probably had a very difficult time understanding what happened in ’68,” Bacharan says. “Because it was very foreign for [someone from a] conservative family and a young man coming from Michigan, the son of a governor.”

Christian Euvrard, a prominent French Mormon, says things have changed a lot in France since Romney was there.

Then, the church was seen as American. Today, he says, France has 36,000 Mormons.

“Certainly in the ’60s, you would go in a restaurant and say, ‘We don’t take wine.’ Oh, they would look at you in a strange way,” Euvrard says. “But today, it’s much, much, much easier. We’re not as different, in a sense, today than maybe we would have been looked at in the ’60s.”

Life-Changing Experiences

Casey Coleman, 20, is a Mormon missionary from Annapolis, Md. He practices the French introduction he uses when he goes door to door, as Romney did, telling people about the Mormon faith.

He says being a missionary is a life-changing experience.

“Being thrown out into a country where you don’t speak the language, and where you’re just with no one that you know,” Coleman says, “You’re kind of forced to grow up a little bit.

Romney may have had to mature more than he wanted.

He was involved in a fatal car accident that killed the wife of the mission head.

Romney was driving when a drunk driver plowed into their car. He was badly injured, but recovered quickly and went back to being a missionary known for his charm and winning ways.

Trashing Europe

Now, on the campaign trail, the memory Romney shares from that time is of primitive French toilets. And he often disparages France and Europe as he attacks President Obama.

Obama “wants to turn America into a European-style social welfare state. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity,” Romney said recently, to cheering crowds.

Nicole Bacharan says she doesn’t understand that.

“He had some families who really liked him and welcomed him and he spoke French perfectly, I mean, very well at least. And his trashing Europe the way he does it is a bit painful,” she says.

If Romney does make it to the White House, he may have to start talking about Europe with a little more finesse.

[Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Wyoming has finally struck a deal with the federal government for how wolves will be treated once the state takes over. But environmentalists believe the agreement denies wolves an important refuge.

There weren’t any wolves in Wyoming until the federal government reintroduced them in the 1990s. Now there are at least 329 in the state. But the state is eager to shrink the population because wolves kill livestock and game.

“My personal opinion is they need to be hunted wherever and whenever they occur because wolves are extremely secretive creatures; they’re extremely intelligent,” says Joe Tilden, a county commissioner in Wyoming and the founder of a hunting advocacy group.

Under the new deal, Wolves in the northwestern part of Wyoming could be managed as trophy animals unless they’re in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

But conservationists worry hunting will be allowed on a stretch of national park land that connects Yellowstone to Grand Teton. It’s called the John D. Rockefeller Parkway.

“Wolves use that area extensively traveling through the two parks, and it’s a very wild area,” says Sharon Mader, who represents the national parks conservation association. She says this corridor is essential for maintaining viable populations. “Unique and iconic wildlife, such as wolves, that are just coming off the endangered species list deserve the ultimate protection that national parks offer.”

She says it’s especially important for the parks to provide this a sanctuary for wolves in Wyoming because they will be hunted on other federal lands there. If they wander out of the state’s northwest corner, they will be considered predators and could be shot on sight.

The National Park Service is against hunting wolves on the Rockefeller Parkway too.

“Visitors come to Yellowstone; they come to Tetons; they come to the Parkway just to see wolves, so we want to manage the park so that people can enjoy wildlife viewing,” says Herbert Frost, an associate director of the Park Service. He says his agency has the authority to ban wolf hunts on park land, but he’s not picking that fight with the state…yet.

“We haven’t ceded anything. We’re just working with the state so that we can work together as opposed to working at odds with each other,” he says.

Most national parks forbid hunting, but the legislation creating the Rockefeller Parkway allows for some hunting. Scott Talbot, who heads the Wyoming Game & Fish Department, says his agency manages hunts of other animals in the Parkway and it wants to keep its options open to hold wolf hunts there too.

“As we move forward, it may be fairly important for the department to move forward with wolf hunting in the JDR [Parkway],” Talbot says.

For instance, if the population gets out of hand, hunters like Joe Tilden may be needed.

“When you’re hunting a predator, you’re not only out to enjoy the sport, but you’re out to control the number of predators,” he says.

The wolf in Wyoming is expected to come off the endangered species list by early autumn, and conservationists hope there’s a hunting ban in the Rockefeller Parkway by then. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

But C-sections aren’t always best for baby, according to new research.

Preemies who were small for their gestational age did better when they were delivered vaginally, researchers found. The babies delivered by C-section were 30 percent more likely to have trouble breathing, a big problem in preemies.

That runs against current thinking that it’s best to get these fragile babies out quickly via C-section, then whisk them off to the neonatal intensive care unit. The study’s results, though not yet published, are almost certain to become ammunition in ongoing efforts to reduce the number of C-sections performed in the U.S.

“We think that the vaginal delivery process must do something to help those kids’ lungs mature, whether it’s the contractions or the act of transitioning more slowly from inside to outside,” says Erika Werner, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Johns Hopkins. She’s the lead researcher on the study, whose findings she presented Thursday at the annual meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in Dallas.

The researchers looked at the health of 2,560 babies who were small for their gestational age, and who were delivered between 25 and 34 weeks of pregnancy in New York City hospitals from 1995 to 2003. (Birth before 37 weeks is considered preterm). Forty-six percent were delivered vaginally and 54 percent by C-section.

The C-section babies didn’t do any better when it came to common complications of premature birth, such as brain bleeds or seizures. And they had a higher risk of respiratory distress syndrome.

Preemies are much more likely to be delivered by C-section than are full-term babies. In 2009, 46 percent of preemies were born by C-section, compared to 29 percent of full term babies, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Being small for gestational age can be caused by a mother’s high blood pressure, problems with the placenta and chromosomal problems like Down syndrome. It increases a child’s risk of health and developmental problems. Typically about 10 percent of babies are small for gestational age.

Werner is also studying the effect of C-sections on preemies who weren’t small for their gestational age, and says she’s found no benefit. “Those kids, besides having more respiratory distress, also were more likely to have a low Apgar score,” she told Shots. The Apgar test measures a baby’s breathing, heart rate, and muscle tone right after birth, and is used to judge how well the baby tolerated birth.

“These findings overturn conventional wisdom that C-sections have few or no risks for the baby,” Joe Leigh Simpson, a senior vice president for the March of Dimes, said in a statement yesterday. The organization has led efforts to persuade doctors and mothers to avoid C-sections when possible. “Although in many instances a C-section is medically necessary for the health of the baby or the mother, this research shows that in some cases the surgery may not be beneficial for some infants.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

For 11 years, former gang members in Chicago have entered dangerous neighborhoods in the city and staged group interventions for at-risk youth, in an effort to try to stop the cycle of retaliatory gang violence that plagues the city’s western and southern neighborhoods.

The men and women, known as “violence interrupters,” work with an organization called CeaseFire, which operates under the assumption that violence moves through a city in the same way that an infectious disease moves through the body. To fix crime, says the organization, violence needs to be stopped at the source.

But there’s a problem: “Not just anybody can come in and tell a guy to put his gun down,” says CeaseFire’s director Tio Hardiman, in a scene from The Interrupters, a new documentary about the group. “Most of the violence interrupters come from the hierarchy in some of these gangs. [And they] have one goal in mind: to stop killings. They’re not trying to dismantle gangs. What they’re trying to do is save a life.”

The film is a collaboration between Hoop Dreams director Steve James and journalist Alex Kotlowitz, who profiled their organization in 2008 for The New York Times Magazine. The topic of violence in Chicago hit particularly close to home for both men, James tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

“Alex saw three people in the course of writing [his book There Are No Children Here] perish on the streets,” he says. “And for me, two people [related to the cast] from Hoop Dreams … were murdered. … What we wanted to do, in some ways, was to refocus some attention on this issue because it feels like we’ve gotten to a point where murders are down, but they’re still way too high. And I think there’s this feeling that we’ve kind of done what we can do — and it’s just the way those neighborhoods are at this point.”

Members of CeaseFire establish relationships with people affected by violence and then work to get them to channel their anger in non-violent ways. The film profiles three of the interrupters, including a man whose father was murdered and another who committed a murder when he was 17.

The third subject of the film is Ameena Matthews, one of only two female members of Chicago’s interrupters team. Matthews is the daughter of a famous gang member and had been in a gang herself — which, she says, gives her credibility when navigating potentially volatile situations among teens on the streets.

“The first thing they’ll say [to you] if you come on the block and you haven’t lived or walked the walk, [is] ‘How can you tell me anything? You don’t know how I live. You don’t know how I breathe. You don’t know nothing,’” Matthew says. “And nine times out of ten, these little young guys and girls that I encounter, they know my father.”

Gang members who aren’t familiar with Matthews or her father will often do research on her before she comes back to talk to them again, she says.

“And when I come back around, the way they look is ‘Oh my goodness, what did I do to have this person come and speak to me?’” she says. “It’s a door opener.”

When Matthews was heavily involved in gang activities, it was her Muslim faith, her children and grandmother who served as her own violence interrupters, she says.

“[My grandmother] would step in the middle of raids, asking, ‘Where’s Ameena?’” she says. “Guns were drawn and she’s not even looking at the guns or the gas that was thrown in the building to smoke us out, she’s yelling my name and telling me to get my behind out. … She was there.”

Interview Highlights

On having a camera crew follow her while talking to former gang members

Matthews: “When Steve and Alex were on location, [there was] still business that needed to be tended to. And that was something that I needed not to worry about, these cameras. I needed to make sure the business at hand was taken care of … I didn’t feel from my heart that Steve and Alex were there for any type of ill.”

On making sure Matthews was comfortable with filming

James: “It took us a long time to get Ameena to a place where she was fully open with us. She gave us access to her mediations and she gave us an initial terrific interview, but when we talk about this, there was a point earlier in the process where I think she did see us as maybe like the other media and she was really wondering, ‘What is it that these guys really want?’ And I think it took a while to get to that place.”

Matthews: “The issue is that I fought so hard to get to where I am today. And what I do in the streets, it’s personable and it’s personal but they wanted the storytelling about who Ameena is inside and out of being a violence interrupter … I have children and some people don’t look at my life — as far as my dad being who he is and as far as my journey and where I’ve come — [as a] nice thing. And it was hard for me to let that guard down and let them in.”

On fighting back

Matthews: “When you’re looking at these guys and these girls and they’re on defense, they don’t want to fight, they don’t want to kill. That’s the given of what happens and then when I come in, someone after knowing where I’ve been, will use that as an out. ‘Well, you better be glad that Ameena told me to fall back because if it wasn’t for her that came in and stopped that, then I would have done what I needed to do to take care of my business.’”

On funerals

Matthews: “Chicago has always been notoriously known for street organization, crimes and murders and all that but what’s so profound for me is to see that, as I’m growing up, that death is inevitable and we’re not afraid of it … In that casket, I’m looking at 13, 14, 15, 18, 19-year-old men and women dying on the streets of Chicago. That’s what’s so profound to me about the violence.

“People look at it and they say, ‘Oh, well, Chicago has always been violent.’ But Chicago has not always had the youth violence and the youth death as high as it has been for the last several years. [That] has struck my nerve and my heart and my soul.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The reason, of course, is that Energizer got caught up in the controversy surrounding last week’s decision by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation to cut off its funding for Planned Parenthood.

Komen later partially reversed course, but that came too late to prevent Energizer, which had just been named part of the group’s “Million Dollar Council,” from receiving plenty of flak.

Energizer — like many other companies that have been big donors to Komen — found itself fending off thousands of negative emails and comments on its Facebook page.

“No company ever wants to do something which polarizes its supporters and stakeholders,” says Jim Ziminski, chief marketing officer for Energizer Global. The company has donated $1.2 million to Komen since 2007.

The experience of Energizer points to the surprising danger involved in corporate philanthropy. Any business, it seems, can become tainted by association with a nonprofit organization that becomes embroiled in controversy.

“It’s certainly a lesson, the fact that controversy can bubble up in any area,” says Faith Stevelman, an expert on corporate governance at Seattle University.

“Branding yourself by virtue of affiliation with any organization is always precarious, because you’re not in control of what happens in another organization,” she says.

By Virtue Of Giving

Relatively speaking, corporations are not big givers. They generally contribute about 3 to 4 percent of the roughly $290 billion given to charity in the U.S. each year, says Kim Meredith, director of the Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Private foundations give several times more, but the vast bulk of charitable donations — more than 80 percent — are made by individuals.

There’s some irony involved in a business getting burned by giving, suggests Stevelman, the Seattle law professor. Because disclosure requirements are so weak, the public generally only knows about donations when corporations decide they want to announce them.

Companies that seek a halo effect by giving to good causes, though, can find their halos tainted if the charity becomes embroiled in controversy.

That can happen with any group, through a sudden change in policy course, as with Komen, or simply mismanagement — nonprofit executives taking too generous a paycheck, say.

“The Komen situation will motivate corporations to be a bit more involved in the decisions that their partners make,” says Denise Bortree, a communications professor at Penn State University, who studies nonprofits. “This will raise significant concerns for corporations as they consider future relationships.”

Becoming More Conservative

Many companies are seeking out causes that are in keeping with their own functions, says Stanford’s Meredith — a chocolate maker such as Nestle seeking to raise incomes among West African cocoa farmers, for instance, or an aspirin company like Bayer giving to the American Heart Association.

Part of the problem in the Komen situation, Bortree suggests, is simply that the foundation had so many corporate partners. Its well-known pink ribbons and hues can be found on blenders, bicycles, yogurt lids and many other consumer goods.

A charity that relies heavily on a single corporate funder, or a small set of them, will be more careful about taking into account the impact its actions can have on its donors, Bortree says.

As a result of the current controversy, she adds, corporations will become more conservative in their giving — not politically conservative, but simply more careful about giving only to well-established, long-trusted nonprofit groups.

“There will be more of an onus on the corporate people to look at what they’re sponsoring,” says Katy Snyder of JVA Consulting, a Denver-based group that advises nonprofits — and has worked with both Komen and Planned Parenthood. “They’ve got to do this due diligence before they enter into these partnerships.”

Corporations are already pretty risk-averse when it comes time to take out their charitable checkbooks. The local symphony or the United Way is more likely to benefit than some new charitable startup, no matter how worthy its mission.

“Most corporate grants are fairly predictable, even when corporate donors talk about being innovative or entrepreneurial,” says Jerome Himmelstein, a sociologist at Amherst College.

Corporations Seek Safe Harbor

Himmelstein points out that there is some irony regarding the latest flap. “It was Planned Parenthood that put controversy on the radar of corporate philanthropy back in the early 1990s,” he says.

As long as it concentrated strictly on family planning, Planned Parenthood was considered a “safe” charity that everyone gave to, Himmelstein says. As the group became more vocal about abortion rights, it drew protests and its corporate supporters were threatened with boycotts.

In 1990, AT&T announced it was ending its long-standing tradition of giving Planned Parenthood $50,000 annually.

But although most corporations are allergic to political controversy, most don’t want to change course once they’ve decided to give.

They don’t want to be perceived as caving in to pressure, in part because it will call into question their judgment in having given in the first place, Himmelstein says, but also because they don’t want to anger consumers on the other side of the issue.

No More Pink Batteries?

Instead, companies seek to emphasize the importance of the underlying cause that led them to give in the first place, downplaying their association with the latest twists and turns their recipients have taken.

In the case of Komen, corporate donors have sought to reiterate their support for the primary purpose of combating breast cancer. In Energizer’s case, it underlined that stance after the Komen controversy by giving $50,000 on Feb. 3 to Siteman Cancer Center, located near its headquarters in the St. Louis area, to fund mammograms for low-income women.

“While it did not, nor was it meant to, erase [consumers'] concerns about the situation, we were able to demonstrate our commitment to the cause,” says Ziminski, the Energizer executive.

As for cutting its ties with Komen itself, Energizer is still weighing its options.

“This issue is still top of mind for Energizer,” Ziminski says. “We are working as quickly and thoughtfully as we can to address this complex situation, which will take time to resolve.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

To get some of those answers, NPR’s Steve Inskeep spoke with Santorum strategist John Brabender on Friday’s Morning Edition.

“This race is much, much more wide open than people have realized,” Brabender said. “Republican primary voters generally want to vote for a candidate that they believe is conservative and the senator has a record, a long record … and they trust it.”

Brabender went on to say that “this is signaling a concern, an uneasiness about whether Mitt Romney really has the conservative credentials to be the Republican nominee.”

Although Romney has a much larger campaign war chest than Santorum, Brabender said that was not a good rationale for his candidacy. “Mitt Romney certainly spent a lot more money than we did,” he said, joking that Romney should have a campaign bumpersticker: “Mitt Romney for president because we have more money than you.”

How did Santorum manage to get his message out with scarce resources, Inskeep asked?

The campaign relied on getting its message out “neighbor to neighbor” and having the candidate show up in the states where this week’s caucuses were held, Bradender said. They also did some advertising. “I also think the debates mattered,” he said. “It isn’t going to be just who runs the most negative ads who gets the nomination for president.”

Christian conservative leaders — who endorsed Santorum in Texas earlier this year — certainly helped, Brabender acknowledged. But they alone didn’t account for victories like Santorum’s win in Missouri, where he won every single county and won by 30 points over Romney, Brabender said.

“You don’t win a state that dramatically by just concentrating on one coalition,” he said. Santorum also drew support from Tea Party voters and some mainstream Republicans. “The only way you can win by that margin is to put all those coalitions together,” he said.

That doesn’t mean Santorum isn’t happy to have social conservatives fueling his recent rise: He’s expected to receive an enthusiastic welcome at the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference when he addresses the crowd on Friday. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

The Southern Co. will build the reactors at its Vogtle site in Georgia, where two older reactors already operate.

Scott Peterson, vice president of the industry’s Nuclear Energy Institute, says it’s not a “nuclear renaissance,” but instead a “first wave” for new reactors.

“It’s obviously a critical event for the industry in terms of moving forward with the next generation of reactor technology,” he says.

The new reactors would be the first of a standardized design; instead of each one being unique, they’ll all be nearly identical.

Costs

But demand for electricity is flat, and the price of natural gas, also used to make electricity, is low. The Vogtle plant will cost $14 billion at least to build. Peterson says that’s OK. Nuclear still has a place, he says, gas prices are unpredictable, and so is energy from wind and solar.

“Nuclear plants, because they are very large, 24/7 power producers, really anchor the entire U.S. grid for electricity,” he says.

There are objections, however. A coalition called the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy plans to sue to stop the reactors. Alliance head Steven Smith says the region doesn’t need a new plant. He says the power company is motivated by a healthy profit margin guaranteed by the state.

“Not because we need the power, but because this is going to so help their bottom line by brining this major financial asset in,” Smith says.

Japanese Meltdown

Smith also argues that engineers are still figuring out what went wrong at the Fukushima meltdown in Japan last year. He says Southern Co. might have to make expensive retrofits if the NRC requires big design changes.

“We would argue that not only from a safety point of view but also from an economic point of view that you need to get these lessons learned incorporated in before you rush to build the reactor,” Smith says.

Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the five-member NRC, apparently agrees. His was the sole vote against the license. He says he wants Southern Co. to promise it will incorporate lessons learned from Japan. But experts on the NRC staff point out that the new reactors, made by Westinghouse, can already handle some of the things that went haywire in Japan.

For example, in Japan, the reactors lost electric power, so emergency pumps couldn’t cool the melting cores with water.

Roger Hannah, an NRC spokesman, says the new reactors’ use gravity instead of pumps to feed in emergency water.

“These passive systems do not require electricity to operate cooling system, so you could actually flood the core and provide water for cooling without having access to power,” he says.

‘Important Test Case’

The Vogtle plant is one of several that have been slogging through the permit process at the NRC.

Energy analyst Richard Caperton at the Center for American Progress says its approval provides the nuclear industry with a shot of adrenaline, but it’s also going to be a target.

“This is going to be an important test case,” Caperton says. “What we learn form the southern plant is going to impact what we do with nuclear power over the next 10, 20 to 30 years in this country.”

If things go as planned, the reactors will be making electricity four to five years from now. If not, the company is seeking an $8.3 billion loan guarantee from the federal government to cover losses. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Catholics narrowly support the White House position in polls. There are potential political consequences: In presidential elections, Catholics are swing voters. They supported Al Gore in 2000, President George W. Bush in ’04 and President Obama in ’08.

The GOP presidential hopefuls are certainly using this issue. Framing it as a question of religious freedom is a guaranteed way to fire up the conservative base.

“If you believe in the right to worship God without government interfering, come join us,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.

Mitt Romney vowed: “This kind of assault on religion will end if I’m president of the United States.” And Rick Santorum added: “What they’ve done is an egregious affront to religious liberty.”

Mandate ‘Beyond Politics’

In the audience at that Santorum event in Rochester, Minn., was Charles Slater, a family physician who agrees with the candidate.

“I think a lot of people don’t understand or see that’s a principle that people of Catholic faith are being asked to violate,” he said. “So the mandate from the government goes beyond politics. It goes down to the very center of theology, Catholic theology, or teaching about the human person.”

But not all Catholics share that view when it comes to birth control. In fact 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lifetimes. A new survey by Public Policy Polling shows that a narrow majority of Catholic voters think women employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have access to contraceptive coverage through their health plans.

Among them is Pat Schaffer in Minneapolis, who says Catholic institutions are not being asked to supply birth control themselves, only include such coverage in health care plans.

“If they employee agrees with them, then they won’t use the contraception,” she says. “And if the employees in conscience disagree with the bishops, then it’s up to the employees what to do, and I don’t see how the bishops have the right to force the employee to take a particular stand anymore than they have the right to control how an employees uses their wages.”

Seeking Exceptions

Across the river In St. Paul, students at University of St. Thomas have been talking about this issue in classrooms and over lunch at the student services building.

“I believe it’s the Amish have the options to opt out of the draft and the Quakers have the option, too,” said Katie Moosbrugger, a Catholic studies, German and Education major. “There are lots of exceptions for religious institutions and Catholics, we don’t hold that contraception is something to be supported.”

Hanna Heinicke, who is also a student at St. Thomas, acknowledges it’s complicated, but says she has to “err on the side of the bishops.”

“I think it’s not fair that religious organizations would have to provide services that they are morally wrong,” she says.

But Heinieke supports the overall health care bill signed by Obama in 2010.

“I’m actually a huge fan of it,” she says. “I think everyone should have the right to have health care. I think it’s a human right.”

In Washington on Thursday, a group of women backing the White House rule on the issue held an event at the National Press Club. Their concern, amid all of the debate, is that the president stick to his guns.

“I have faith in him that he will do the right thing. I will be praying that he does the right thing,” says Callie Otto is a student at Catholic University of America. “But I will also be praying that the bishops can realize that they’re wrong and they back down so he doesn’t have so much pressure.”

Catholics on each side of this are offering prayers. For its part, the Obama administration is looking for an answer allowing it to defend its decision while also somehow addressing the concerns of it’s opponents. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]