Author Archives: RodrigoStanbury

Nearly all of Puerto Rico is without power AGAIN after a line repaired by Whitefish fails.

by RodrigoStanbury Posted on November 10, 2017

Kathleen Hartnett White, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality, stammered through her confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

When Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, a Democrat, asked if she believes climate change is real, she wavered but settled on the right answer: “I am uncertain. No, I’m not. I jumped ahead. Climate change is of course real.”

That’s a surprise. Hartnett White, a former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has a long history of challenging climate science and promoting fossil fuels. Notably, she has said that carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant.

But that’s not to say she’s made peace with established science. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, quizzed Hartnett White over how much excess heat in the atmosphere is absorbed by oceans. “I believe there are differences of opinions on that,” she said, “that there’s not one right answer.” For the record, the number is about 90 percent.

Then things got bizarre. Appearing frustrated with equivocating answers, Whitehouse pressed her on basic laws of nature, like whether heat makes water expand. “I do not have any kind of expertise or even much layman study of the ocean dynamics and the climate-change issues,” she said.

Watch below, if you dare:

After the hearing, Whitehouse tweeted, “I don’t even know where to begin … she outright rejects basic science.”

View this article:

Nearly all of Puerto Rico is without power AGAIN after a line repaired by Whitefish fails.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, Ringer, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Nearly all of Puerto Rico is without power AGAIN after a line repaired by Whitefish fails.

Congressional Democrats Back Obama on Immigration Reform

by RodrigoStanbury Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

With the election safely over, congressional Democrats have regained their courage on immigration and are now urging President Obama to go ahead with an executive action on immigration reform. Here’s an excerpt from a letter that several Democratic leaders in the Senate sent today:

The principle behind most of what Obama plans to do falls under the category of “prosecutorial discretion,” which means he can decide where best to use the government’s limited law enforcement resources. Just like previous presidents, he can decide that resources should be directed in a certain way, which effectively means that certain immigrants will be free to stay in the country simply because no one will be targeting them for deportation.

We can argue about just how far presidents should be allowed to go down this road, but basically it’s something with a fair amount of precedent. This is clearly the focus of the letter from Senate Democrats, and although I’m not a lawyer, I’m pretty confident that the Justice Department will produce an adequate legal defense of Obama’s constitutional authority in this area.

But what’s probably most important goes unsaid—or perhaps merely implied—in the Senate letter: if you qualify for “deferred action,” you can also get a work permit and a Social Security number. I don’t quite understand the legal authority for this, but it’s part of the mini-DREAM executive action Obama signed in 2012, so apparently it’s on firm legal ground.

In any case, it now looks like Obama is not just firmly committed to this, but has the public support of key congressional Democrats as well. It’s coming whether Republicans like it or not.

From: 

Congressional Democrats Back Obama on Immigration Reform

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Congressional Democrats Back Obama on Immigration Reform