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Monthly Archives: February 2020

Senate GOP blocks three election security bills


The enabling GOP has blocked an attempt to secure future  elections. This is falling in line with White House’s view of elections which is to win at any cost illegal and legal.MA

Jordain Carney,  The Hill   6 hrs ago

 

Senate Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to unanimously pass three election security-related bills on Tuesday, marking the latest attempt to clear legislation ahead of the November elections

Democrats tried to get consent to pass two bills that require campaigns to alert the FBI and Federal Election Commission (FEC) about foreign offers of assistance, as well as legislation to provide more election funding and ban voting machines from being connected to the internet.

But Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) opposed each of the requests. Under the Senate’s rules, any one senator can ask for unanimous consent to pass a bill, but any one senator can object and block their requests.

Blackburn accused Democrats of trying to move the bills knowing that GOP lawmakers would block them and giving them fodder for fundraising efforts.

“They are attempting to bypass this body’s Rules Committee on behalf of various bills that will seize control over elections from the states and take it from the states and where do they want to put it? They want it to rest in the hands of Washington, D.C. bureaucrats,” she said.

Election security has become a point of contention during the Trump era. House Democrats have passed several election-related bills, including a sweeping ethics and election reform measure, but they’ve hit a wall in the GOP-controlled Senate.

A release from Democrats this week that blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for a “legislative graveyard” included a list of 10 election security-related bills that have stalled in the upper chamber.

Senate Democrats have tried repeatedly during the past year to try to bring up election security bills on the floor without success.

The latest attempt comes as Democrats are embroiled in their own days-long scandal after an app malfunctioned, throwing the Iowa caucuses into chaos. The snag was not due to a hack or cyberattack, but a “coding issue,” according to the Iowa Democratic Party.

It also comes as Democrats are turning their attention to the 2020 election after the months-long impeachment battle, as they try to find ways to pressure GOP senators to buck President Trump. The New Hampshire primary is underway on Tuesday, and voters in both Nevada and South Carolina are expected to head to the polls this month.

“The current president of the United States, far from having the same fears about foreign interference as our founders, has been very public about his openness to foreign assistance and manipulation in support of his election,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said.

“The president was just impeached over this issue, and the Senate just concluded a trial in which it appeared a bipartisan majority of senators broadly accepted the fact that the president leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars of military assistance to Ukraine to compel its government to investigate one of his political rivals,” he added.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in his dealings with Ukraine, with the administration arguing he was concerned about corruption and cost-sharing with other European countries. Several GOP senators who voted to acquit Trump on House-passed articles of impeachment also described the president’s conversation with Ukraine President Zelensky as “shameful” and “inappropriate.”

Democratic Sens. Mark Warner (Va.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.) each tried to clear bills on Tuesday.

The bills from Warner and Blumenthal would require campaigns to report offers of foreign assistance, including donations or coordination, to the FEC and the FBI.

“The appropriate response is not to say thank you, the appropriate response is to call the FBI,” Warner said.

Blumenthal, referring to the impeachment fight, argued that Republicans had let Trump “off the hook.”

“There is no doubt that he will only be emboldened in his efforts to illegally enlist foreign governments in his reelection campaign,” he added.

The Securing America’s Federal Elections, or SAFE, Act-the third bill Democrats tried to clear-authorizes more funding for the Election Assistance Commission and includes language that would ban voting machines from being connected to the internet and being produced in foreign countries.

“America is 266 days away from the 2020 election, and Majority Leader McConnell has yet to take any concrete steps to protect our foreign elections from hacking or foreign interference,” Wyden said.

Wyden also argued that not having a nationwide ban on connecting voting machines to the Internet was like “stashing our ballots in the Kremlin.”

Congress passed a mammoth spending package late last year that included an additional $425 million in election security funding.

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Justice Department or Law Breakers?


Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

David A. Graham, The Atlantic

Updated on February 11 at 5:51 p.m.

The Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump elicited predictions that the president would now be “unleashed,” freed to do as he pleased. His actions over the past few days offer a first glimpse of what that might look like. With the threat of accountability gone, or at least diminished, Trump is bestowing favor on his loyal defenders, and visiting revenge on those he feels have betrayed him.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who testified in the impeachment hearings, was sacked from his post on the National Security Council, in what presidential aides made very clear was revenge. For good measure, so was his twin brother, a lawyer at the NSC and a fellow Army officer. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, was asked to resign, and when he refused, he was fired Friday night. Elaine McCusker, who had been tapped to be Pentagon comptroller but clashed with the White House over freezing military aid to Ukraine, will have her nomination withdrawn, according to the New York Post.

And today, a day after prosecutors requested seven to nine years in prison for Roger Stone, the Justice Department suddenly intervened and announced that it would withdraw the recommendation in favor of a lighter sentence, a highly irregular move. Stone was convicted in November on seven counts, including witness tampering and making false statements, in a case that grew out of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election. Trump also tweeted angrily about the proposed sentence. “This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” he wrote. “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Later, at the White House, Trump asserted an “absolute right” to intervene.

The intervention led to a mass resignation from the case in protest by prosecutors. First Aaron Zelinsky, a former Mueller aide, resigned from the case. (Zelinsky remains an assistant U.S. attorney, a career position, in Maryland.) Two others, Adam Jed and Mike Marando, also dropped off the case. A fourth, Jonathan Kravis, resigned from DOJ altogether in protest.

The president has always been obsessed with loyalty, and in particular loyalty to himself, not to rule of law. He infamously asked then–FBI Director James Comey for loyalty in January 2017, and after concluding that he was not receiving it, fired Comey in May of that year. But for the most part, Trump has been somewhat restrained about flexing his muscles to enforce loyalty. He fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, though Sessions had gotten that job only through political fealty. He tried to fire Mueller, but then–White House Counsel Don McGahn refused, and Trump relented.

Trump has been surprisingly spare with his pardon power. He hasn’t hesitated to hand out dubious pardons—to Dinesh D’Souza, for example, and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio—but he has so far not pardoned people like Paul Manafort, the former campaign chair who refused to testify against Trump and was sent to prison. Despite widespread predictions, Manafort remains in the clink.

The president had reason to hesitate. Though the pardon power is not reviewable, abusing it raised the risk of backlash, as did intervening in prosecutions. Voters might have gotten angry; Congress might have decided to investigate or even impeach him. But Trump has now survived impeachment, and has a good sense of how consistently Senate Republicans have his back. Some have even argued that Trump has learned his lesson from the impeachment.

The administration’s rush to aid Stone, especially set against the retributive firings, shows Trump newly willing to flex his muscles, and demonstrates how Pollyannaish the predictions of a chastened Trump were. The apology for firing Vindman goes this way: Vindman remains an officer, and Trump has a right to aides on the National Security Council whom he trusts. But Trump also said Tuesday that the military should consider disciplining Vindman, whose only offense seems to have been complying with a lawful subpoena from Congress.

The intervention on behalf of Stone is particularly disturbing because he was convicted of lying to protect Trump. Thanks to Stone’s stonewalling, we still don’t really know what happened between Trump and Russia in 2016. Stone had Trump’s back, and now Trump has his. So much for the law-and-order president.

During the Senate impeachment trial, House managers and the president’s lawyers tangled over whether a president could be impeached for actions that didn’t break specific laws. Trump’s help to Stone, even if it ends here, shows the stakes of that debate. The president isn’t breaking any laws by intervening in this case, but he is making clear that he places personal loyalty ahead of enforcing the rule of law.

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Treasury Department Hands Over Hunter Biden Info After Withholding Trump’s Tax Records


POLITICS 

02/06/2020 08:34 pm ET Updated 9 hours ago

The impeachment trial is over, but Senate Republicans are pressing forward with an investigation into the Bidens.

By Arthur Delaney

WASHINGTON ― The Treasury Department has given congressional Republicans sensitive financial information related to Hunter Biden after having refused to give Democrats President Donald Trump’s tax returns.

Yahoo News first reported Thursday that the Treasury Department handed over highly confidential information in response to a November request from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for suspicious activity reports filed with the department by financial institutions.

Last year, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin blocked a Democratic request for the president’s tax filings, saying Democrats had no legitimate legislative purpose for seeking the documents.

“The legal implications of this request could affect protections for all Americans against politically-motivated disclosures of personal tax information, regardless of which party is in power,” Mnuchin said in an April 2019 letter.

Apparently, that same standard did not apply when it came to non-tax financial information that may pertain to the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, a Trump political rival.

“The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed,” Ashley Schapitl, a spokeswoman for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, said in a statement.

Senate Republicans are investigating Hunter Biden as part of an inquiry designed to bolster Trump’s unfounded claim that Joe Biden used the vice presidency to benefit his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was involved in setting U.S. foreign policy in Eastern Europe.

For [Treasury] to go willy-nilly handing out financial information of private citizens … is simply outrageous.Steve Rosenthal, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center

The inquiry, which includes at least a half dozen records requests to various organizations and executive branch agencies, has proceeded since fall with relatively little notice. It picks up where Trump left off last summer when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate whether Biden had improperly recommended the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor.

Zelensky never followed through because Democrats learned of the scheme from a whistleblower report, which launched their impeachment inquiry and prompted the White House to release a secret hold on military assistance to Ukraine. The House impeached Trump on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges in December.

In the Senate trial last month, the president’s lawyers said Hunter Biden’s board membership created the appearance of a conflict of interest, but they stopped short of alleging any actual illegality. As the Senate Republicans’ records requests show, the quest for corroboration continues.

In their letter seeking suspicious activity reports related to Hunter Biden and various associates, Republicans cited an internal Senate rule authorizing the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to investigate the effectiveness of “all agencies and departments” of the federal government. Financial institutions are required to file suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department if they reasonably suspect customer transactions may be connected to money laundering.

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Democrats based their request for Trump’s tax records on a federal tax disclosure law granting congressional committees access to private tax information by request. Mnuchin and the Justice Department claimed that Democrats only wanted to embarrass the president, so they refused to comply. Now the request is tied up in court.

It’s hypocritical for the Treasury Department to stonewall Democrats’ request while granting Republicans access to material on Hunter Biden, said Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. He said it’s hard to see what legislative purpose Republicans are after with regard to Hunter Biden.

“For [Treasury] to go willy-nilly handing out financial information of private citizens… is simply outrageous,” Rosenthal said.

A spokesman for Grassley wouldn’t say if the Finance Committee is also seeking Biden’s tax returns. The committee generally doesn’t disclose whether it has sought someone’s private tax information; Grassley has used the tax disclosure law to obtain the returns of tax-exempt organizations, such as nonprofit hospitals, and to investigate ACORN, an organization that registered low-income voters, who tend to be Democrats.

The Treasury Department declined to comment.

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Lincoln on the Declaration of Independence


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An area sacred to indigenous groups is being destroyed for Trump’s border wall.


An area sacred to indigenous groups is being destroyed for Trump’s border wall

Border wall construction in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is threatening a burial ground and other sacred areas.

By Anya van Wagtendonkanyavw@protonmail.com  
Montezuma’s Head in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument’s Ajo Range, near the US-Mexico border in Arizona. 
Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Portions of a national monument held sacred by some indigenous Americans were destroyed this week to make space for President Donald Trump’s signature US-Mexico border wall.

The Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is a designated national monument and a UNESCO biosphere reserve on Arizona’s southern border, about 25 miles west of Tuscon. Home to the organ pipe cactus, the reserve also contains burial sites belonging to the Tohono O’odham Nation, as well as sites revered by other indigenous groups.

This week, crews commissioned by Customs and Border Protection (CPB) began blasting through the park’s Monument Hill to make way for a section of the border wall, allegedly without consultation from the O’odham Nation.

“There has been no consultation with the nation,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) told CBS News. “This administration is basically trampling on the tribe’s history — and to put it poignantly, its ancestry.”

The construction was authorized in May by the Department of Defense, which oversees civil defense-related building contracts, when it awarded $891 million to contractors for wall construction at Organ Pipe and the nearby Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

CBP officials describe the work as “controlled blasting” needed to erect a 30-foot steel wall across 43 miles of desert. Monument Hill, also called Monument Mountain, stands within this stretch of desert, and is part of the Roosevelt Reservation, a sixty foot-wide swathe of public land across the southern border. Blasting is expected to take place intermittently for the next month, according to the Associated Press.

The construction only marks a small part of the work being done across the US-Mexico border, the cost of which has so far totaled about $18.4 billion. Part of that total is a $3.5 billion sum the White House plans to pull from military counter-drug spending, up from $2.5 billion last year, and $3.7 billion that will be rerouted from funds earmarked for military construction funding.

The O’odham and environmentalists have been unsuccessful in their efforts to stop construction

The portion being cleared inside the Organ Pipe park is directly adjacent to O’odham burial sites, according to Grijalva. Indeed, crews working in the area last year found ancient human bones, suggesting that their work has already touched upon indigenous burial sites. According to a memo obtained by the Washington Post, those bones could be just the beginning: The National Park Service found that up to 22 archaeological sites could be damaged by the construction process.

O’odham leaders have had difficulty fighting the construction given the land no longer officially belongs to the tribe. However, O’dham Nation chairman Ned Norris, Jr., has argued that the area should fall under the auspices of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which is meant to protect indigenous burial sites and return important cultural items to affiliated tribal entities.

“The Nation categorically opposes the barrier construction projects, because they directly harm and threaten both the lands currently reserved for the Nation and its ancestral lands that extend along the international boundary in Arizona,” Norris wrote in part. to the CBP last November.

When O’odham representatives and Grijalva visited the site in January, Norris vowed to continue fighting the construction.

“Regardless that it isn’t within our reservation boundaries anymore, but it’s clear, we have inhabited this area since time immemorial,” Norris said, according to the Arizona Republic. ”They’re our ancestors. They’re our remnants of who we are as a people, throughout this whole area. And it’s our obligation, it’s our duty to do what is necessary to protect that.”

The work has raised concerns among environmental activists as well — a group of whom sued to try to stop construction. That suit did not suspend progress.

The monument was designated a biosphere reserve in 1976 in order to preserve its unique desert ecosystem. Environmental advocates have expressed concerns over the impact the wall will have on migrating animals and rare cactuses. Two endangered species, the Sonoyta mud turtle and Quitobaquito pupfish, make their homes in a desert oasis within the park — activists fear the construction could do irreparable damage to their already fragile populations.

CBP officials dismissed these fears, and have said an “environmental monitor” will present during the clearing work.

And although biosphere reserves and Native American sites do have special protections, the Trump administration can bypass environmental and tribal sovereignty concerns by invoking to the REAL ID Act of 2005, which allows the federal government to ignore certain laws in the interest of national security. The Trump administration has used that waiver at least 16 times, according to Grijalva.

The Trump administration has long ignored social and environmental concerns about the US-Mexico border wall

Social and environmental costs have been pointed out to the Trump administration throughout the process of realizing the president’s signature 2016 campaign promise, and those concerns seem to have little effect on the project’s progress.

Vox’s Eliza Barclay and Sarah Frostenson have reported on the significant ecological impact of border wall construction, beginning with the existing 654 miles of walls and fencing that were already on the US-Mexico border when Trump took office. As they wrote:

The existing barrier has cut off, isolated, and reduced populations of some of the rarest and most amazing animals in North America, like the jaguar. They’ve led to the creation of miles of roads through pristine wilderness areas. They’ve even exacerbated flooding, becoming dams when rivers have overflowed.

Proposed construction in Texas would cut through a federal wildlife refuge, a state park, the National Butterfly Center, and more Native American grave sites, they reported. Such damage is not merely environmental, they add, but also potentially political, threatening conservation-based partnerships with Mexico that strengthened the overall relationship between the two nations, according to one conservationist they spoke to.

But immigration — not conservation or reparations — has been this president’s signature issue since before he was elected. It is an issue his base is passionate about, and one he can claim he has been successful in implementing promised policy changes, from reducing the number of legal and undocumented immigrants entering the US to getting sections of the wall built. With November’s election right around the corner, pushback on one portion of his border work — especially from indigenous Americans and environmentalists, not exactly his base, isn’t likely to give the Trump administration much pause.

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Tom Steyer Is Asking The Questions That Every Presidential Candidate Still Needs to Answer


 

He wants to debate the question so many voters care about: How do you defeat Donald Trump in November?

 

By ANDY KROLL

WASHINGTON — Presidential debates moderated by cable-news personalities tend to produce the same, tired questions over and over:

 

Candidate A, why Candidate B is wrong/unprepared/ill-equipped to lead the country?

 

Followed, inevitably, by: Candidate Y, how do you respond to Candidate X?

 

Or there’s the perennial classic: Are you going to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for social program X? And when the candidate tries to explain that any increase in middle-class tax rates will be offset by savings from, say, a universal health-care system, the follow-up question from the tough-sounding moderator is: Yes or no, will taxes go up?

 

During Friday’s Democratic debate in New Hampshire, however, one of the candidates onstage bucked the typical debate script by posing questions of his own — a curious campaign strategy, to be sure, but the result was better, more urgent questions about how the heck the eventual Democratic nominee is going to defeat President Trump.

 

The candidate was liberal California billionaire Tom Steyer, who sounded more like an angry and concerned citizen freaked about Trump’s reelection prospects than a polished presidential contender clinging to his talking points. It was Steyer who, time and again on Friday night, steered the conversation away from yet another tit-for-tat argument and back to the larger question of what the Democratic message should be to defeat an incumbent president with a climbing approval rating and a strong economy (at least for now).

 

Steyer cut his way into a disagreement between Sen. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg by saying, “I have heard this conversation on this debate stage from these people now every single debate, and they’re all right. Everybody on this stage is better on economic justice and health care than anybody in the Republican Party and a million times better than Donald Trump. That is not the question in front of us today.” That question, of course, is: Who can beat Trump, and how?

 

He put a finer point on it later in the debate. “I don’t think there’s any question that after this week there’s a real threat that Donald Trump can get elected,” he said. He went to say that a Democrat with any hope of ousting Trump will have to appeal to voters across the Democratic spectrum — white, black, brown, Asian American, of all income brackets, moderates, progressives, and everyone in between. “Unless you can appeal to the diverse parts of the Democratic party,” he said, “then we can’t beat Donald Trump in November.”

 

 

 

Tom Steyer

✔

@TomSteyer

There’s a real threat that Donald Trump can get re-elected. There’s one way to beat him—turnout. Turnout across the spectrum of Democratic voters, and that means moderates, progressives, and specifically the Black and Latino communities.

 

7:17 PM – Feb 7, 2020

Steyer touted his support from 24 percent of black voters in South Carolina as evidence that he’s the candidate who can unite the party and beat Trump. But there’s scant evidence that Steyer has the kind of mass appeal that he himself speaks about. Nonetheless, he deserves credit for forcing a conversation, in spite of what the moderators sought to do, that addressed head-on the burning question on the minds of so many anxiety-riddled Democrats.

It’s appalling that every debate doesn’t include some version of the question “Why was Donald Trump elected in 2016, and how does your theory of four years ago shape your election strategy now?” You could go down the line of candidates, and each one would give you an original answer. The ensuing debate would be more illuminating than most of the official Democratic debates so far put together.

But that hasn’t happened much at all. Steyer, by hammering away at the Democratic Party’s formidable challenge in November, is doing his party a favor by forcing the issue now.

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Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills


Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills

Chris Martin
Bloomberg
Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills
Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills

(Bloomberg) — A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.

The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones nestled against one another.

“That’s the end of it for this winter,” said waste technician Michael Bratvold, watching a bulldozer bury them forever in sand. “We’ll get the rest when the weather breaks this spring.”

 

Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.

Built to withstand hurricane-force winds, the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet under.

“The wind turbine blade will be there, ultimately, forever,” said Bob Cappadona, chief operating officer for the North American unit of Paris-based Veolia Environnement SA, which is searching for better ways to deal with the massive waste. “Most landfills are considered a dry tomb.”

“The last thing we want to do is create even more environmental challenges.”

To prevent catastrophic climate change caused by burning fossil fuels, many governments and corporations have pledged to use only clean energy by 2050. Wind energy is one of the cheapest ways to reach that goal.

The electricity comes from turbines that spin generators. Modern models emerged after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, when shortages compelled western governments to find alternatives to fossil fuels. The first wind farm in the U.S. was installed in New Hampshire in 1980, and California deployed thousands of turbines east of San Francisco across the Altamont Pass.

The first models were expensive and inefficient, spinning fast and low. After 1992, when Congress passed a tax credit, manufacturers invested in taller and more powerful designs. Their steel tubes rose 260 feet and sported swooping fiberglass blades. A decade later, General Electric Co. made its 1.5 megawatt model—enough to supply 1,200 homes in a stiff breeze—an industry standard.

 

Wind power is carbon-free and about 85% of turbine components, including steel, copper wire, electronics and gearing can be recycled or reused. But the fiberglass blades remain difficult to dispose of. With some as long as a football field, big rigs can only carry one at a time, making transportation costs prohibitive for long-distance hauls. Scientists are trying to find better ways to separate resins from fibers or to give small chunks new life as pellets or boards.

In the European Union, which strictly regulates material that can go into landfills, some blades are burned in kilns that create cement or in power plants. But their energy content is weak and uneven and the burning fiberglass emits pollutants.

In a pilot project last year, Veolia tried grinding them to dust, looking for chemicals to extract. “We came up with some crazy ideas,” Cappadona said. “We want to make it a sustainable business. There’s a lot of interest in this.”

One start-up, Global Fiberglass Solutions, developed a method to break down blades and press them into pellets and fiber boards to be used for flooring and walls. The company started producing samples at a plant in Sweetwater, Texas, near the continent’s largest concentration of wind farms. It plans another operation in Iowa.

“We can process 99.9% of a blade and handle about 6,000 to 7,000 blades a year per plant,” said Chief Executive Officer Don Lilly. The company has accumulated an inventory of about one year’s worth of blades ready to be chopped up and recycled as demand increases, he said. “When we start to sell to more builders, we can take in a lot more of them. We’re just gearing up.”

Until then, municipal and commercial dumps will take most of the waste, which the American Wind Energy Association in Washington says is safest and cheapest.

“Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe, unlike the waste from some other energy sources, and represent a small fraction of overall U.S. municipal solid waste,” according to an emailed statement from the group. It pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone.

 

In Iowa, Waste Management Inc. “worked closely with renewable energy companies to come up with a solution for wind mill blade processing, recycling and disposal,” said Julie Ketchum, a spokeswoman. It disposes all the blades it receives, with as many as 10 trucks per day hauling them to the company’s Lake Mills landfill.

Back in Wyoming, in the shadow of a snow-capped mountain, lies Casper, where wind farms represent both the possibilities and pitfalls of the shift from fossil fuels. The boom-bust oil town was founded at the turn of the 19th century. On the south side, bars that double as liquor stores welcome cigarette smokers and day drinkers. Up a gentle northern slope, a shooting club boasts of cowboy-action pistol ranges. Down the road, the sprawling landfill bustles and a dozen wind turbines spin gently on the horizon. They tower over pumpjacks known as nodding donkeys that pull oil from wells.

“People around here don’t like change,” said Morgan Morsett, a bartender at Frosty’s Bar & Grill. “They see these wind turbines as something that’s hurting coal and oil.”

But the city gets $675,000 to house turbine blades indefinitely, which can help pay for playground improvements and other services. Landfill manager Cynthia Langston said the blades are much cleaner to store than discarded oil equipment and Casper is happy to take the thousand blades from three in-state wind farms owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s PacifiCorp. Warren Buffett’s utility has been replacing the original blades and turbines with larger, more powerful models after a decade of operation.

While acknowledging that burying blades in perpetuity isn’t ideal, Bratvold, the special waste technician, was surprised by some of the negative reactions when a photo of some early deliveries went viral last summer. On social media, posters derided the inability to recycle something advertised as good for the planet, and offered suggestions of reusing them as links in a border wall or roofing for a homeless shelter.

“The backlash was instant and uninformed,” Bratvold said. “Critics said they thought wind turbines were supposed to be good for the environment and how can it be sustainable if it ends up in a landfill?”

“I think we’re doing the right thing.”

In the meantime, Bratvold and his co-workers have set aside about a half dozen blades and in coming months, they’ll experiment with methods to squeeze them into smaller footprints. They’ve tried bunkers, berms and even crushing them with the bulldozer, but the tracks kept slipping off the smooth blades. There’s little time to waste. Spring is coming, and when it does, the inexorable march of blades will resume.

 

 

(Adds detail from company statement. )

To contact the author of this story: Chris Martin in New York at cmartin11@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joe Ryan at jryan173@bloomberg.net, Stephen MerelmanEmily Biuso

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Integrity ET AL


Words That have no meaning in the current administration:

INTEGRITY

HONESTY

TRUTH

GOVERNING ABILITY

FOREIGN SERVICE ABILITY

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY

FOLLOWING THE LAW

Considering this list, there are any who will agree with his list but only as it applies to this administration. It would be well to apply these words to previous administrations to a lesser or perhaps greater degree. The connection shared by the last 4 to 5 administrations has been long serving Congressional members. For better or for worse we have been edging up to the current Congress for years. Our current Congress has been more self serving than any previous and that is why we have the administration we are now experiencing. It is well to observe that there are several former members of Congress serving in the administration who if we look back perhaps were not very good at serving their constituents. What they were and still are good at is playing to the leaders for what will and has favored their own progress. If our objective is to get better representation we need  to do our “homework” on who wants to represent us. This is joyless chore but like any “chore” it is necessary for our (voters) betterment. We have allowed ourselves to became slaves to “entertainment politics” and the truth of the candidates slips by us. The first mistake we all have and still make is adherence to “party Politics”, that is what the party we support tells us. There is no Truth like the Truth and the facts that surround and influence it. We have been inured by the entertainment value of untruth, half truth and the many increments of the truth which ultimately are just lies dressed in nice clothing.

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If You Believe


If you believe in the current administration and Congress actions and activities, please wait for the other shoe to drop. Listing the actions that will and are currently affecting more American citizens would take several ( a lot) of pages so here are the highlights:

EPA- rolling back clean water and air regulations which will allow for coal companies to stop making the efforts to keep waterways free of coal ash and other byproducts of coal production.These rollbacks will affect the air that we breathe.

Reduction of National monuments land so that oil and gas exploration can occur even on Native American lands. Lands that native Americans were forced onto during the Andrew Jackson presidency (one of TOTUS’s heroes). More pain from the original “Trail of Tears”. With the recent “acquittal” TOTUS will now run completely amok with the blessings of the GOP spearheaded by “Botch” McConnell. TOTUS supporters may be cheering these events -until the tentacles of this administration hits them in the face one way or another. In case you missed it, your food, income and health care are in jeopardy as the full effect of “tariffs” become evident. Entertainment is not governance, common sense and intelligence are.

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Trump’s Friday night massacre


 

Anyone who believes TOTUS is not a vindictive “wannabe Dictator”, think again. It a the dire future we face if he is given a second term. It will already take many years to correct his actions, we must remember the Congress is also involved in this travesty.MA

Opinion by Samantha Vinograd

11 hrs ago

 

Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

 

After months of publicly smearing Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, it appears President Donald Trump took a final shot at a man who did nothing more than faithfully carry out the duties of his job — and issued a warning shot to anyone else who dares question him.

According to his attorney, Vindman was fired on Friday from the National Security Council — a decision that will have adverse impacts for American national security. Later that evening, he also fired the US Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, a Trump appointee and Republican donor who gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.

Both men had testified under subpoena before the House Intelligence Committee during impeachment last November. Vindman told the committee that he had listened in (as part of his NSC duties) on President Donald Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian President, and he had been so disturbed by the content of what he heard that he reported it to an NSC lawyer.

Trump made no secret of his anger at Vindman’s testimony, and the timing of Vindman’s dismissal is likely no coincidence. Acquitted by the Senate on Wednesday, President Donald Trump feels emboldened to act on his every impulse, now that Congressional Republicans have shown him they will not hold him accountable — no matter the risk.

Vindman was escorted off White House grounds, according to his attorney, and in a manner that was likely intended to publicly embarrass him. His brother Yevgeny Vindman, who also worked on the NSC and is also a lieutenant colonel, was fired as well. (When asked to comment on the departure of the Vindman brothers, NSC spokesman John Ullyot said, “We do not comment on personnel matters.”)

Trump could have let Vindman depart the NSC with some dignity — and waited until July, when Vindman was slated to leave and could more seamlessly transition his portfolio over to a new successor. Instead, the President appears to have forced Vindman and his brother out in the least dignified manner.

And there is also little doubt that this move was intentional retribution — and designed to send a clear message to any other government official who dares to challenge the President. Speak out, and you risk compromising not just your own job, but that of your family’s.

Of course, the President’s surrogates will defend him and argue Trump has the full right to hire and fire staff as he sees fit. And while that may be true, it also ignores the sad reality hidden in that truth. The President only wants henchmen and yes-men who defer to his orders and actions, no matter how dangerous, inappropriate or potentially illegal they may be.

There have been earlier reports that Trump is downsizing the NSC and stacking it with more political appointees. By removing Vindman, and by moving forward with plans to cycle out career government officials, it appears that the President also does not want witnesses around to report, through legally protected channels, any future actions that may cross moral or legal lines.

But there is a great danger to removing individuals like Vindman from the NSC who have longstanding relationships. Trump appears intent on transforming the NSC — from a critical American policy-making apparatus that advances the rule of law to a political arm for his personal benefit — with little regard for rules or laws.

Just consider the many men serving in the Trump administration who watched the President’s attacks on government officials like Vindman and did nothing. From Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien (to name a few) — these men have remained silent, and in doing so, failed their teams in the short term and the national security interests of the American people in the long term.

To all of the Republicans who said Trump had learned from the impeachment proceedings and would not make the same mistakes again, you were dead wrong. He hasn’t learned from his mistakes — he’s doubling down on them.

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