Author Archives: William V. Wainscott

Jeb Bush Has an Obamacare Problem

Mother Jones

From Politico:

Jeb Bush is stepping down from the board of a health care company that has reportedly profited from Obamacare, a move that comes as the Republican explores a run for the presidency.

According to various media reports, Tenet backed President Barack Obama’s health reform act and has seen its revenues rise from it. Bush’s involvement with Tenet could give ammunition to conservatives in the GOP who view him as too moderate — particularly those who despise the Affordable Care Act.

I can’t help but get a chuckle out of this. In normal times, Bush would have left Tenet because it’s a big, soulless corporation that’s paid fines for Medicare fraud and been criticized for dodgy tax practices at the same time it was beefing up executive pay. A man of the people who aspires to the Oval Office can’t afford to be associated with this kind of dirty money.

But no. At least if Politico is to be believed, this isn’t really an issue in the GOP primary. What is an issue is that Tenet might have profited from Obamacare, which in turn means that Jeb may have profited from Obamacare. Even if it’s a double bank shot, that’s dirty money in tea party land.

Of course, Jeb also has some of the more conventional plutocratic image problems:

Soon after his tenure as governor ended, Bush became an adviser to Lehman Brothers and, later, Barclays….In May 2013, Bush set up Britton Hill Holdings and dove into the private equity business….Bush’s first fund invested in Inflection Energy….His next one, BH Logistics, raised $26 million this spring from investors including China’s HNA Group….Bush’s newest fund, U.K.-based BH Global ­Aviation, is his largest and most complicated. It deepens his financial ties to China and Hainan….“In many deals, the U.K. ­effectively serves the same function as the Cayman Islands or Bermuda,” Needham says. “It’s like a tax haven, except it’s the U.K.”

Plus there’s the fact that Jeb stayed on as an advisor to Barclay’s for years after it was fined for illegally trading with various blacklisted countries, notably including Cuba and Iran. If being on the board of a company that profited from Obamacare is a problem, surely this is at least equally bad. The attack ads write themselves, don’t they?

Anyway, apparently Jeb is now in cleanup mode:

“These are all growth investments that the governor has worked on,” said Bush’s spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell….Campbell said the 61-year-old former governor is “reviewing all his engagements and his business commitments” now that he’s begun to focus on a potential race. “That’s a natural next step,” she said.

Indeed it is. On the other hand, Mitt Romney severed most of his ties with Bain Capital a full decade before he ran for president, and just look at how much good that did him. Jeb probably isn’t out of the woods yet.

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Jeb Bush Has an Obamacare Problem

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Pesticide makers have found a new way to kill bees

Pesticide makers have found a new way to kill bees

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Sulfoxaflor sucks for pollinators.

It’s a new type of neonicotinoid insecticide that was approved by the EPA in May for use on a long list of crops — despite its toxic effects on honeybees, bumblebees, butterflies, and other pollinators. 

Environmentalists, beekeepers, and other groups that were already suing the EPA to try to block the sale of other classes of neonic pesticides have launched a new legal effort to overturn the agency’s recent sulfoxaflor ruling. From legal documents filed Monday:

Scientists have linked the drastic declines in honey bee and other pollinator populations to systemic pesticides, and more specifically, to a category of systemic pesticides known as neonicotinoids. Sulfoxaflor is a systemic pesticide with the same mode of action as neonicotinoids, and one that EPA determined is “very highly toxic” to bees. …

Far from being supported by the required substantial evidence, EPA’s decision is contrary to the record evidence, and in violation of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). EPA failed to rigorously examine the uses and impacts of sulfoxaflor, particularly in light of the environmental stressors already faced by pollinator populations. Further, EPA’s decision considers only the alleged benefits of sulfoxaflor, while wholly ignoring the significant costs that registration will have on the agricultural economy, food security, and the environment.

“This case and brief is a critical part of the story for our nation’s beekeepers and their survival,” said Peter Jenkins, attorney for the Center for Food Safety. “Beyond that, sulfoxaflor threatens native bees, other insects, birds and ecosystem health generally. The many groups joining our brief — and we think all Americans — have a huge stake in ensuring EPA does not continue its ‘business as usual’ approach of green-lighting more and more dangerous insecticides.”


Source
Center for Food Safety Joins Fight Against Newest Bee-killer, Sulfoxaflor, Center for Food Safety

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Pesticide makers have found a new way to kill bees

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The NSA Strikes Back

Mother Jones

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The great European spying scandal just got a little more complicated. There’s been an uproar in France and Spain over reports that the NSA has collected millions of phone records in those countries, but today brought this news:

Leaked U.S. documents appearing to show that the National Security Agency collected data on tens of millions of European phone records, an issue that has sparked outrage among U.S. allies, actually represented data handed over to the NSA by European intelligence services as part of joint operations, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

Hmmm. What records were involved? Why were they turned over?

Army Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said reports to the contrary, based on revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, were “completely false.” He said European intelligence services collected phone records in war zones and other areas outside their borders and shared them with the NSA.

“This is not information that we collected on European citizens,” Alexander told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “It represents information that we and our NATO allies have collected in defense of our countries and in support of military operations.”….The French and Spanish intelligence agencies have had extensive, long-running programs to share millions of phone records with the United States for counterterrorism purposes, according to current and former officials familiar with the effort.

And what do Spain and France have to say about this?

The NSA declined to comment, as did the Spanish foreign ministry and a spokesman for the French Embassy in Washington. A spokesman for Spain’s intelligence service said: “Spanish law impedes us from talking about our procedures, methods and relationships with other intelligence services.”

Roger that. The NSA, aka “current and former U.S. officials,” is also fighting back on a different front, saying that European countries have targeted the communications of U.S. citizen in the past. The obvious implication is that European leaders should cool it on the feigned outrage over NSA wiretapping of their citizens.

Will this work? Or will it simply piss off the European public even more? I can’t decide. Wait and see.

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The NSA Strikes Back

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"The Bridge": A Serial Killer Drama That’s Also About Immigration Politics, Corruption, and Human Trafficking

Mother Jones

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If you’ve heard of The Bridge, chances are good that you’ve heard it favorably compared to two cable-TV powerhouses: The Wire and Homeland. Given the fact that both are critical darlings—and that the former is frequently heralded as the greatest thing to ever happen on TV—this likely puts a hunk of pressure on creators Meredith Stiehm and Elwood Reid. (Stiehm is herself an alumnus of the Homeland writers’ room.) But if The Bridge‘s first three episodes are any indication, it might just have a shot at measuring up.

The new series (premiering Wednesday, July 10 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX) is a loose adaptation of the eponymous Danish/Swedish cop drama, which revolves around the murders of a Swedish politician and a Danish prostitute, and the subsequent murders. The cross-border premise was intriguing enough to warrant an upcoming British/French version, as well. The American incarnation kicks off at the Bridge of the Americas, a border crossing between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, where the remains of a controversial, anti-immigration American judge and a Mexican prostitute have been dumped. El Paso detective Sonya Cross (the reliably awesome Diane Kruger) and Chihuahua state police officer Marco Ruiz (the Oscar-nominated Demián Bichir) arrive on the scene to find the body parts literally straddling the painted border line. As the body count rises, and a mysterious man takes responsibility for the slayings, the detectives find themselves working closely together, in both jurisdictions. Ruiz is the troubled family man resisting the temptations of drug-cartel bribery, and Cross is the by-the-book hard case with Asperger’s. She is attentively watched over by her boss, Lt. Hank Wade (Ted Levine, who has a fair share of experience with detective shows and serial killers).

What may at first sound like another tired, gritty, and gimmicky police procedural briskly evolves into something sprawling and timely. The series examines the real-world problems of Juárez—an area where the drug war and killing is so bad that local businesses demand UN peacekeeping forces. The show offers a panorama of law enforcement officers, journalists, immigrants, drug lords, and ordinary citizens whose lives collide during the murder spree. And the butcher at the center of all this is a (supposedly) high-minded serial killer who uses slaughter to make social and political points: Will well-off American society pay more attention to the daily horrors south of the border if he brings that reality to the nation’s doorstep?

The Bridge unfolds as an intense, thoughtful look at human trafficking, drug cartels, police corruption, immigration, poverty, and border tensions—all wrapped up nicely in the form of a buddy-cop show.

Check out this TV spot for the new series:

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"The Bridge": A Serial Killer Drama That’s Also About Immigration Politics, Corruption, and Human Trafficking

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Coal companies get sweetheart deals on federal leases, shortchange taxpayers

Coal companies get sweetheart deals on federal leases, shortchange taxpayers

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As if climate disruption, air pollution, health problems, and landscape destruction weren’t bad enough, here’s another reason to hate the coal industry: Coal companies are shortchanging U.S. taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars they should be paying for the rights to mine federal land.

A new report [PDF] from the inspector general of the Interior Department reveals that the Bureau of Land Management routinely underestimates the value of coal, letting companies like Peabody and Arch Coal snap up federal mining rights for a song, often with little or no competition. More than 80 percent of coal leases up for auction in the past 20 years received only one bid, the report found.

The New York Times reports:

The report said that the process by which the value of the leases is computed is faulty, costing the government millions. At the current rate of coal leasing, the inspector general found, every penny-a-ton undervaluation costs the taxpayers $3 million.

Further, the Bureau of Land Management allows coal companies to expand their leaseholdings by as much as 960 acres with no competitive bidding and little oversight, the report says. The bureau has approved 45 such lease modifications since 2000 without adequate documentation, the report states, potentially costing taxpayers $60 million.

Allowing coal companies to pay bargain-basement prices for mining rights supposedly keeps coal-fired power cheap for Americans. But as we turn to cleaner and increasingly cheaper sources of energy, coal’s share of the electricity market is falling — from 50 percent to 40 percent over the past decade. That’s leading U.S. coal companies to ship their goods to Asia, where coal sells for four to seven times more than it does in the U.S., yet the BLM isn’t properly accounting for that higher export value, the report found.

Interior is conducting a separate investigation into whether coal being exported to Asia is properly valued by the BLM. Meanwhile, at the request of Congress, the Government Accountability Office is taking its own look at coal leasing programs.

Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association called the loss of value highlighted by the inspector general’s report a “rounding error” compared to the $2.4 billion in royalties and lease payments the government collected from the coal industry last year. Hardly. An independent study published in 2012 estimated that the BLM’s consistent undervaluing of coal cost the government $30 billion over the last 30 years. Add in all the hidden external costs of coal mining and production, and this is looking like a really terrible deal for taxpayers.

The BLM says it’s revamping it process and convening a task force to consider how it values coal leases. Green groups like the Sierra Club are unimpressed; they’re calling for a moratorium on all coal leasing on federal land.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Coal companies get sweetheart deals on federal leases, shortchange taxpayers

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How sustainable is pet ownership?

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How sustainable is pet ownership?

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How To Create Solar Panel

When there is a shortage in electricity, a solar panel is useful especially. However, these are very expensive that is why many people want to build their own solar panels. Building a solar panel is a very easy task. Gather the tools and components that will be used. If possible, gather information in book or in the internet. , if its parts are not available you can search it in Google or eBay.

In purchasing a solar panel, you can use a voltmeter for testing to make sure that it will work properly. Also, for a solar panel to produce 100 watts of electric power, 80 cells can make it. If for instance you wanted to have an 18 volt battery, you will need 36 solar cells each .5 volts.

For areas that don’t get much sunlight, you will need to determine the amount of energy that each cell will be produced. You can then cut the dimension of the plywood that is enough for the solar cells to fit. After you cut, apply the UV-ray protective varnish.

After connecting the solar cells, fix them accordingly to the plywood panel. You can use silicon when fixing. Have two unattached wires that hang from the connected solar panel, drill two holes so that your wires will be exposed through it. Seal the gaps around the holes with the silicon.

Make a frame for the panel then drill screw holes. Seal the holes, no matter how small with silicon to avoid moisture to penetrate inside. The last thing that you are going to do is drill a small hole to the bottom of the panel but away from the wiring to allow air and keep the moisture from building up inside.

Make a frame for the panel then drill screw holes. Cover it with Plexiglas and adhere firmly to the plywood adding more silicon and putting screws in the frame. Male sure that it’s waterproof and allow no gaps. Seal the holes, no matter how small with silicon to avoid moisture to penetrate inside. The last thing that you are going to do is drill a small hole to the bottom of the panel but away from the wiring to allow air and keep the moisture from building up inside. This also allows rain to keep collecting inside.

Looking to find the best deal on how do solar panels work, then visit solarpanelsatlanta.net to find the best advice.

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