• Pinboard Links,  The Morning Flap

    The Morning Flap: February 24, 2012

    February 24, 2012 /

    These are my links for February 23rd through February 24th:

  • Pinboard Links

    Flap’s Links and Comments for March 30th on 18:06

    March 30, 2011 /

    These are my links for March 30th from 18:06 to 18:20:

    • Budget Negotiators Reach Tentative Deal To Avert Government Shutdown – Sources tell me that  budget negotiators on Capitol Hill have tentatively agreed on a deal that would involve at least $33 billion in spending cuts from this year’s budget.  That’s $23 billion dollars more than Democrats have previously agreed to in short-term continuing resolutions, and $28 billion less than Republicans previously passed in the House.

      Members of the House Appropriations Committee will begin discussing how to hit that number with their Senate counterparts as soon as tonight, and Vice President Biden is heading to Capitol Hill for a 6pm meeting with the Senate Democratic leadership.

      The deal could still fall apart over the composition of the cuts, or policy “riders” previously passed by the House. These include issues like de-funding Planned Parenthood and President Obama’s health care legislation.  It’s also not clear that this compromise will fly with rank-and-file House Republicans, which means that the $33 billion goal could still climb by a few billion.  But this is most significant progress since the beginning of negotiations.

      Update: Kevin Smith, a spokesman for the Speaker of the House, tells me "“There is no agreement on a number for the spending cuts. Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

      ======

      OK for this year but only with a balance budget amendment.

    • Arnold Schwarzenegger is back as ‘The Governator’ – He’s been a famous body builder. He’s been a killer cyborg from the future. He’s been Governor of California. And now, in this week’s exclusive cover scoop, Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals his plans for the next phase of his extraordinary career: He’s going be a cartoon superhero, known as The Governator. “When I ran for governor back in 2003 and I started hearing people talking about ‘the Governator,’ I thought the word was so cool,” Schwarzenegger, 63, tells EW in his first press interview since leaving office last January. (Watch an EW-exclusive video of Schwarzenegger talking about the project.) “The word Governator combined two worlds: the world of politics and the movie world. And [this cartoon] brings everything together. It combines the governor, the Terminator, the bodybuilding world, the True Lies…” 
      The animated TV show and comic book, being co-developed by no less a superhero authority than Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee (pictured, right), won’t be out until next year,…

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      Hope the cartoon ends up better than his Governorship which was horrible.

    • Barack Obama authorizes secret help for Libya rebels – President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

      Obama signed the order, known as a presidential "finding", within the last two or three weeks, according to government sources familiar with the matter.

      Such findings are a principal form of presidential directive used to authorize secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. This is a necessary legal step before such action can take place but does not mean that it will.

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      Read it all.

    • Barack Obama’s jaw-dropping hypocrisy on energy – McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor this morning that including these zingers:

      Over the past two years, the administration has undertaken what can only be described as a war on American energy. It’s cancelled dozens of drilling leases. It’s declared a moratorium on drilling off the Gulf Coast. It’s increased permit fees. It has prolonged public comment periods. In short, it’s done just about everything it can to keep our own energy sector from growing. As a result, thousands of U.S. workers have lost their jobs, as companies have been forced to look elsewhere for a better business climate.

      Consider this: just three of the areas we could tap in Alaska are thought to hold enough oil to replace our crude imports from the Persian Gulf for nearly 65 years. So the problem isn’t that we need to look elsewhere for our energy. The problem is that Democrats don’t want us to use the energy we have. It’s enough to make you wonder whether anybody in the White House has driven by a gas station lately.

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      Well, at least he made a speech on energy – finally.

      The Democrats will do nothing to end American dependence on foreign oil by domestic exploration and drilling.

  • Pinboard Links

    Flap’s Links and Comments for March 28th on 09:23

    March 28, 2011 /

    These are my links for March 28th from 09:23 to 09:27:

    • Bioenergy Crop Company Plants Its Flag in India – Super Green Biofuels Inc., which aims to make fuel from the inedible seed of the Jatropha plant, says it is expanding its operation into India.

      Better known as SG Biofuels, the company has amassed a huge library of DNA and genome information about Jatropha, so it can design hybrid seeds to best fit the land, sun and growing patterns of different areas.

      “Our expansion into India marks a significant milestone for the company as we continue to expand our commercialization efforts,” SG Biofuels Chief Executive Officer Kirk Haney said. “Our ability to quickly develop and scale productive Jatropha plantations using elite, high performing material will play a significant role in providing energy security and economic development while reducing greenhouse emissions.”

      SG recruited Subhas Pattnaik as director of operations for the market. Pattnaik formerly led operations for Mission NewEnergy Limited in India, where he managed the rollout and operations of the largest Jatropha plantation acreage in the world, spanning more than 200,000 acres, 124,000 farmers and five provinces, said a March 7 SG news release announcing the company’s expansion into India.

      According to a report by the Office of Scientific & Technical Information of the U.S. Department of Energy, the shortage of reliable, inexpensive and sustainable energy is a key factor in keeping India and Brazil at poverty levels higher than necessary. Both areas are also potentially prime Jatropha growing areas.

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      Read it all

      Another example of American companies expanding into other countries bringing technology to produce clean energy.

    • Koch Membrane Systems: Filtering the world’s water is a growth business – When the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo needed to cleanse large volumes of waste water, it turned to Koch Membrane Systems Inc. in Wilmington — a company that is finding a growing market for its filtration technologies in places where development is running up against water supplies.

      Last year, for the first time, water and waste-water systems accounted for more than half of Koch Membrane’s sales.

      In Brazil, Koch’s polymer membranes are at the heart of a $150 million water reuse project that is one of the largest such projects in the Southern Hemisphere.

      Koch was selected by Aquapolo Ambiental SA, a joint venture of Foz do Brasil, the environmental engineering company of Odebrecht SA, a construction and engineering group in Brazil, and Sao Paulo’s state water and sewer company.

      The facility now under construction will filter up to 265 gallons per second of waste water from a sewage treatment plant.

      The water will be used by local industrial customers, who will be able to draw less from the drinking water system — saving enough drinking water to supply about 600,000 residents.

      Koch Membrane also sells filtration systems in China, Egypt, India, and Singapore; it expects water filtration to be at least 75 percent of its business by 2015.

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      Read it all.

      American business cleaning up the environment – fancy that.

      Yet, the LEFT demonizes the Koch Brothers. How ridiculous is that?

  • Pinboard Links

    Flap’s Links and Comments for March 13th on 17:53

    March 13, 2011 /

    These are my links for March 13th from 17:53 to 17:59:

    • Mark Steyn: Now even cowboys dependent on Washington – How mean-spirited are House Republicans? So mean-spirited that they would end federally funded cowboy poetry! Tuesday, Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, took to the Senate floor to thunder that this town ain't big enough for both him and the Mean-Spirited Kid (John Boehner).

      "The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts," said Sen. Reid. "These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist."

      "Tens of thousands" would "not exist"? There can't be that many cowboy poets, can there? Oh, c'mon, don't be naïve. Where there are taxpayer-funded cowboy poets, there must surely be cowboy poetry festival administrators, and a Bureau of Cowboy Poetry Festival Licensing, and cowboy poetry festival administration grant-writers, and a Department of Cowboy Poetry Festival Administration Grant Application Processing, and Professors of Cowboy Poetry Festival Educational Workshop Management at dozens of American colleges credentialing thousands of cowboy poetry festival workshop co-coordinating majors every year. It all adds up. In Western railroad halts where the Last Chance Saloon shuttered in 1893, dusty one-horse towns are now glittering one-grant towns, where elderly hoochie-koochie dancers are being retrained to lead rewarding lives as inspectors from the Agency of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Handicapped-Access Compliance. Used to be a man could ride the range for days on end under lonesome skies with nuthin' on the horizon 'cept a withered mesquite and a clump of sagebrush, but now all you see are clouds of dust and all you hear's the mighty roar of thundering hooves as every gnarled ol' wrangler in the territory races for the last hitching post outside creative-writing class.

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      Read it all

    • Hugh Hewitt: Obama’s oil production protest fails fact-checking – "So any notion that my administration has shut down oil production might make for a good political sound bite, but it doesn't match up with reality." So declared President Obama Friday with the practiced firmness of voice and direct look into the teleprompter that signals to veterans of the Obama watch that the chief executive has strayed far from the truth.
      In May of 2010, Obama's secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, issued a six-month moratorium order for drilling on the outer continental shelf. When the courts struck down that illegal order, Team Obama switched to a slow-roll strategy, demanding new permits for exploration, and accomplished the same thing as a moratorium.

      Jonathan Tilove, the New Orleans' Times-Picayune's Washington correspondent, set a standard that few met national reporters met when he collected the statements of Louisiana legislators in response to the president's whopper:

      "The gap continues to widen between what President Obama claims to be true about domestic energy production and what Louisianans know is true," said Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

      "With prices at the pump climbing toward $4 per gallon, the president is asking us to believe that his administration supports expanded drilling off the Gulf Coast," Vitter continued. "I guess that's true only if you don't actually need a permit."

      "Someone should tell the president that April Fool's Day is still weeks away," said Rep. Jeff Landry, R-La., told Tilove. "Today's news conference is another example of the president misleading the American people regarding his energy policy.

      Tilove got similar quotes from Louisiana Republican Reps. Charles Boustany (the "president's remarks … are wholly untrue"), Rodney Alexander, Bill Cassidy and Steve Scalise. They all provide variations on the same theme: The president isn't telling the truth about oil production and his administration's war on new supplies.

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      Obama has NO energy policy and is frankly voting present.

    • General Electric-designed reactors in Fukushima have 23 sisters in U.S. – The General Electric-designed nuclear reactors involved in the Japanese emergency are very similar to 23 reactors in use in the United States, according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission records.

      The NRC database of nuclear power plants shows that 23 of the 104 nuclear plants in the U.S. are GE boiling-water reactors with GE's Mark I systems for containing radioactivity, the same containment system used by the reactors in trouble at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The U.S. reactors are in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont.

      In addition, 12 reactors in the U.S. have the later Mark II or Mark III containment system from GE. These 12 are in Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington state.

      =======

      Time to re-examine the entire nuclear power industry through Congressional hearings.

      Past time for the Obama Administration to develop a national energy plan.

  • Barack Obama,  Michael Ramirez,  Oil

    The Obama Energy Policy of the Future

    June 26, 2008 /
    ramireztoon062508

    Michael Ramirez with apologies to Jed and his kin

    If American voters think today’s oil and energy policies are grand with soaring prices and the dependence on countries who do not like the United States, then they will love the “NEW” policies of a President Obama.

    The Democrats have blocked meaningful domestic oil exploration and development for decades. They have blocked the development of nuclear power plants. They have blocked the development of shale oil.

    They have been good at regulation, taxes and demagoguery about oil company CEO’s.

    The Democrats and Obama have stayed in the nihilistic past and will lead America into gasoline shortages reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter years.

    Just wait……

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