You know this is bad if it's in the NY Times - Companies Face Fines for Not Using Unavailable Biofuel

REPEAL the Environmental Protection Agency!

Companies Face Fines for Not Using Unavailable Biofuel - NYTimes.com

By MATTHEW L. WALD January 9, 2012

WASHINGTON — When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.

But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.

In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.

“It belies logic,” Charles T. Drevna, the president of theNational Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, said of the 2011 quota. And raising the quota for 2012 when there is no production makes even less sense, he said.

Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide. In fact, while it may seem harsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007Energy Independence and Security Act.

The law, aimed at reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, its reliance on oil imported from hostile places and the export of dollars to pay for it, includes provisions to increase the efficiency of vehicles as well as incorporate renewable energy sources into gasoline and diesel.

It requires the use of three alternative fuels: car and truck fuel made from cellulose, diesel fuel made from biomass and fuel made from biological materials but with a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gases. Only the cellulosic fuel is commercially unavailable. As for meeting the quotas in the other categories, the refiners will not close their books until February and are not sure what will happen.

-more at link-

REPEAL the TSA - Especially now that they are an ever expanding bureaucracy!

This is a bunch of worthless, over reaching and power hungry, no skill, security guards, who are now just growing like cancer!

GO AWAY!

TSA screenings aren't just for airports anymore - latimes.com

By Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau

December 20, 2011

Roving security teams increasingly visit train stations, subways and other mass transit sites to deter terrorism. Critics say it's largely political theater.

The Transportation Security Administration isn't just in airports anymore. TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country.

"We are not the Airport Security Administration," said Ray Dineen, the air marshal in charge of the TSA office in Charlotte. "We take that transportation part seriously."

The TSA's 25 "viper" teams — for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response — have run more than 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year. Department of Homeland Security officials have asked Congress for funding to add 12 more teams next year.

According to budget documents, the department spent $110 million in fiscal 2011 for "surface transportation security," including the TSA's viper program, and is asking for an additional $24 million next year. That compares with more than $5 billion for aviation security.

-read at link-

REPEAL the EPA - new Power Grab

They have no facts, act subjectively in their own interest for a bigger bureaucracy, These governmental thieves need elimination!

New Expansive EPA Power Grab | FrontPage Magazine

By Tait Trussell On December 23, 2011

The environmental Protection Agency has plans to exert vastly expanded power over businesses, communities, and ecosystems.

The agency intends extensively to change the way it analyzes problems and arrives at decisions, as described in a Dec. 19 FoxNews.com article. The new, enlarged decision-making process goes under the term “sustainable development.”

Sustainable Development, by no coincidence, is “the centerpiece of a global United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro next June,” explains the new EPA article by George Russell, executive editor of Fox News.

Guiding EPA thinking is a huge study commissioned by the agency last year for $700,000. The study was conducted by the National Academies of Science. A variety of consultants from different fields took part in meetings to develop the broad but vague concept of sustainability.

In a recent meeting with members of the National Academy, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson talked of sustainability as a scientific concept that will “spread to other (federal) agencies.” She called it a “new opportunity” and “the next stage forward” for the EPA. The agency has already cost industries billions of dollars in its often capricious decisions.

In an executive order as early as 2009, President Obama called for establishing an integrated strategy towards sustainability in the federal government and to make reduction of greenhouse gas emissions a priority for federal agencies. The phobia of global warming was even stronger then.

The study by the National Academy of Science said it will “provide guidance to EPA on how it might implement its existing statutory authority to contribute more fully to a more sustainable-development trajectory for the United States.” In other words, said Russell, “how to use existing laws to new ends,” or squeezing the most from laws that EPA wields.

-read on at link-

Stryker to cut 5% of workforce | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

Repeal Obamacare!

Stryker to cut 5% of workforce | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

MANUFACTURING

Stryker, the Kalamazoo-based maker of artificial hips and knees, will cut 5% of its global workforce by the end of next year to reduce costs in the face of new fees on device makers required by the U.S. health care law.

The job cuts will reduce annual pretax operating costs by more than $100 million beginning in 2013, when the medical-device excise tax is scheduled to take effect, Stryker said Thursday in a statement. Stryker had more than 20,000 employees as of Dec. 31, according to Bloomberg News data.

Stryker expects to record $85 million to $95 million of the expense in the fourth quarter of 2011.

REPEAL TSA: Secret Report On TSA Pat Downs, Body Scanner Failures Will “Knock Your Socks Off” Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

AND THE WHOLE LOT AT HOMELAND SECURITY!

» Congressman: Secret Report On TSA Pat Downs, Body Scanner Failures Will “Knock Your Socks Off” Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

“Off the charts” failure rate “sort of like the record of the Marx Brothers”

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
October 25, 2011

The chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which oversees the TSA, has asserted that the release of a classified report on TSA security failures will renew calls for the replacement of the agency with private airport security personnel.

“The failure rate (for body scanning equipment) is classified but it would absolutely knock your socks off,” Florida Republican, Rep. John L. Mica told reporters during a briefing Monday.

Mica also asserted that recorded instances of pat downs failing to detect contraband are “off the charts.” This information is also currently still classified, but is due to be released within weeks as part of an upcoming committee report on the TSA’s first decade.

Mica suggested that the TSA’s performance report would read “sort of like the record of the Marx Brothers”.

The TSA has withheld results of its official security tests, despite repeated requests to release the information under the Freedom of Information Act.

-read on at link-

Repeal the DOE! Education Entropy - Biden’s Fourth-Grade Economics - Team Obama flunks economic stimulus

The saddest man in the world I ever knew was a school administrator. He understood the waste and economics of it.

Biden’s Fourth-Grade Economics - Mark Steyn - National Review Online

by Mark Steyn 10-22-11 - excerpts-

How to justify unaffordable and inefficient stimulus

Joe Biden ... talk to schoolchildren. Last week, it was the fourth grade at Alexander B. Goode Elementary School in York, Pa., that found itself on the receiving end of the vice president’s wisdom:
Here in this school, your school, you’ve had a lot of teachers who used to work here, but because there’s no money for them in the city, they’re not working. And so what happens is, when that occurs, each of the teachers that stays have more kids to teach. And they don’t get to spend as much time with you as they did when your classes were smaller. We think the federal government in Washington, D.C., should say to the cities and states, look, we’re going to give you some money so that you can hire back all those people. And the way we’re going to do it, we’re going to ask people who have a lot of money to pay just a little bit more in taxes.

Who knew it was that easy?...

So how come the Brokest Jurisdiction in History is able to “give you some money” to hire back those teachers that had to be laid off?

No problem, says the vice president. We’re going to “ask” people who have “a lot of money” to “pay just a little bit more” in taxes. ...

Since 1970, public-school employment has increased ten times faster than public-school enrollment. In 2008, the United States spent more per student on K–12 education than any other developed nation except Switzerland — and at least the Swiss have something to show for it. In 2008, York City School District spent $12,691 per pupil — or about a third more than the Swiss. Slovakia’s total per-student cost is less than York City’s current per-student deficit — and the Slovak kids beat the United States at mathematics, which may explain why their budget arithmetic still has a passing acquaintanceship with reality. As in so many other areas of American life, the problem is not the lack of money but the fact that so much of the money is utterly wasted.

So the president spent last week touring around in his weaponized Canadian bus telling Americans that Republicans were blocking plans to “put teachers back in the classroom.” Well, where are they now? Not every schoolmarm is down at the Occupy Wall Street drum circle, is she? No, indeed. And in that respect York City is a most instructive example: Five years ago (the most recent breakdown I have), the district had 440 teachers but 295 administrative and support staff. If you’re thinking that sounds a little out of whack, that just shows what a dummy you are: For every three teachers we “put back in the classroom,” we need to hire two bureaucrats to put back in the bureaucracy to fill in the paperwork to access the federal funds to put teachers back in the classroom. One day it will be three educrats for every two teachers, and the system will operate even more effectively. ...

-read it all at the above link-

Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.

Repeal the Dept. of Homeland Security - It is fake make work and dangerous to our freedoms

What is next, Obama Youth telling the People's State Police that their parents were acting suspicious and criticizing the administration, mass roundups and interrogations, no warrants?

This is serious stuff!

Tennessee Becomes First State To Fight Terrorism Statewide - NewsChannel5.com | Nashville News, Weather & Sports

10-20-11

PORTLAND, Tenn. – You're probably used to seeing TSA's signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

[Do they really have to keep coming up with stupid names and acronyms?]

"Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

Agents are recruiting truck drivers, like Rudy Gonzales, into the First Observer Highway Security Program to say something if they see something.

"Not only truck drivers, but cars, everybody should be aware of what's going on, on the road," said Gonzales.

It's all meant to urge every driver to call authorities if they see something suspicious.