Activate the Mechanism!

sarahlee310:

Ha!

Headline should read: Newt Gingrich is a big whiny baby who had no problem with Fox’s bias when it was in his favor.

Am I the only one SUPER fucking tired of this shit.

(Source: sarahlee310)

My column this week on Politics Break, concerning Newt Gingrich squirming in his seat during an interview on NPR this morning.

I was somewhat impressed listening to NPR this morning when they called Newt Gingrich out on his (and the right in general’s) bullshit.

Gingrich first suggested that Obama’s plan to lower gas prices was “to beg the Saudis to pump more oil.” and asked “Why not Texas, why not Alaska, why not Louisiana”.

The interviewer (I believe it was Steve Inskeep) then brought up the fact that oil production was up in the U.S. and had gone up since Obama took office. That reliance on foreign oil was down, domestic production was up, which was the opposite of the trend of the previous administration.

Newt’s answer was that production was up despite the president and it was only up on private land and that production was down on government land. That if we were “serious” we could be the number one oil producer in the world.

The interviewer then told Newt that annalists have said we are already on our way to oil independence and that tensions in the middle east were a driving factor in higher gas prices. Newt went on to say that if production was higher we wouldn’t have to worry about the middle east - but then the subject quickly shifted back to the GOP nomination.

I’m trying to wrap my head around exactly what it is Newt was trying to say here. Production is up but only on private land and that’s not good enough?

At this point the U.S. is a net exporter of petroleum products for the first time since the late 1940′s.

Besides, I thought Republicans were all about private industry.

To me, this looks like another right wing myth being blown apart (more U.S. production of petroleum products = lower gas prices) and the right wing, never learning, desperately clinging to it.

letterstomycountry:

Newt Gingrich must be totes surprised.  From TGDaily:

According to Solazyme, the U.S. Navy Frigate fleet ship USS Ford just sailed from its homeport in Everett, Wash., down to San Diego using 25,000 gallons of the company’s Soladiesel blended in even proportions with F-76 military diesel.

Solazyme didn’t say exactly how far the trip was, but charts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [PDF] peg the distance from Seattle (about 30 miles south of Everett) to San Diego at 1,228 nautical miles.

The Navy has set a goal of deploying a “Great Green Fleet” powered entirely by alternative fuels by 2016, and of reaching 50 percent alternative energy use overall by 2020. The service has also tested alternative fuel in a yard patrol boat at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and in a landing craft utilityoff the Virginia coast.

South San Francisco-based Solazyme, which ferments algae to produce oil that can be refined into fuel, is one of two big players in the Navy’s biofuels program. The other is Louisiana-based Dynamic Fuels, a Tyson Foods-Syntroleum joint venture that makes its fuel from used cooking oil and non-food-grade animal fats. Last December the Navy said it will pay $12 million to purchase a total of 450,000 gallons of biofuels from the companies to help power a carrier group during big maritime exercises this summer.

After November’s remotely controlled biofuel test, the Navy reported “there was absolutely no difference, whatsoever, in the operation or performance of the ship” using the algae-derived fuel. Solazyme said that was the case on this longer voyage as well.

“Feedback from the ship’s engineers was favorable; the crew reported that operational performance of the fuel system and gas turbine engines on the 50/50 blend was…comparable to operations on traditional petroleum F-76,” Solazyme confirmed in a statement.

Creating a renewable source of fuel for the military’s ground and air fleets is a matter of national security.  In support of this proposition, I’d like to quote from a Villanova Law Journal Symposium on shale natural drilling that was published last year:

[W]orldwide, we are at a point in time called Hubbert’s Peak. Hubbert’s Peak is that point in time in which half of the world’s oil has been used up. America is well ahead of the Hubbert’s Peak curve because America has used more than fifty percent of its oil reserves; America has used seventy to eighty percent. This number may be higher than eighty percent if natural gas is also taken into account. The world, in total, has used about fifty percent of its oil right now. So in terms of absolute numbers of barrels, there are about two trillion barrels accessible worldwide, of which one trillion have already been used. Most of that oil is located outside the United States.

— Source: ”Shale” We Drill?, 22 Vill. Envtl. L.J. 189, 192 (2011).

That means that in order to power our fleet on conventional petroleum-based fuel sources, we are at the mercy of those who provide it to us, along with all the diplomatic issues that accompany such dependence.  ”going green” on fuel production is not only environmentally sound energy policy, but a national security imperative.  

This is yet another reason why Newt’s jab at Obama over using “algae” as one solution to our energy crisis was severely misplaced, and frankly, stupid.  Perfecting this technology is in our national interest from an environmental, economic, and national security standpoint.  Newt Gingrich’s decision to disparage this technology was an egregiously boneheaded display of political cravenness.  Thankfully, he is becoming more and more irrelevant by the day as the primary season winds down.

h/t sarahlee310

I wold like to ask Newt Gingrich how his foot tastes. 

letterstomycountry:

Forgive my candor, but sometimes, the truth of one’s convictions cannot be conveyed accurately with any but vulgar argot.

Via DCDecoder, I ran into this gem from Gingrich’s victory speech in Georgia, addressing energy policy:

But the president had an alternative to drilling - and this is…

(Source: sarahlee310)

thepoliticalfreakshow:

Newt Gingrich has made headlines and raised eyebrows on the campaign trail for proposing to make poor children work as janitors in their school, saying it would help them understand the value of work and money.

But apparently, even on child janitorial work, Gingrich is employing a double standard. As Karen Tumulty notes, in a 1995 Vanity Fair profile, Gingrich seemed to refuse to get a job as a student. From the profile:

Newt, who avoided Vietnam with student and marriage deferments, resisted taking a job. During his college years, Newt called up his father and stepmother to ask for financial help. His stepmother, Marcella McPherson, can still hear his exact words: “I do not want to go to work. I want all my time for my studies…Bob Gingrich told me he will not help me one bit. So I wondered, would you people help me?” Big Newt began sending him monthly checks.

Dolores Adamson, Gingrich’s district administrator from 1978 to 1983, remembers, “Jackie [Gingrich’s first wife] put him all the way through school. All the way through the P.h.D…He didn’t work.” Adds Adamson, “Personal funds have never meant anything to him. He’s worse than a six-year-old trying to keep his bank balance…Jackie did that.”

This is where the whole conservative ideology on this falls apart under scrutiny. 

They say, get a good education so you can get a good job. Great. Then they say, oh but you have to pay for that good education. You either work your way through college or take out a loan.

Fine, great, but as Newt illustrates here, it may not be so easy as to “work your way through college” as presented. You need to have time for your studies, or you might not be able to afford college on the funds you can make.

So, lets say you take out a loan, but then let’s say that you don’t get a good job, say the chips don’t fall in your favor. Now you’re already in a ton of debt and may not be able to make enough income to pay it back.

Not everyone has the privilege to have been born into a wealthy family who can assist with your schooling expenses. 

All I ever hear from conservatives is “well, you should have gone to school - well you should get a job - well you should pay back your debts”

It can’t be all three when going to college is incredibly expensive, you can possibly work though school but I doubt you’re going to have the income to do so without taking out any loans, it’s not like well paying jobs grow on trees.

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that people who think like this have never been in this situation and have no idea what they are talking about.

(Source: thepoliticalfreakshow)

technipol:

The Grio:

Among the changes pushed through by Gingrich and his conservative caucus as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, was the replacement of the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, which had been in place since 1935, with something called TANF: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The new program put a five-year limit on cash benefits for needy recipients, imposed tighter limits on who could receive food stamps (most immigrants became ineligible), and most importantly, required welfare recipients to get a job within two years of receiving benefits.

Ironically, Gingrich, a key champion of the work requirement, now claims that poor children don’t see anyone around them working, when by Gingrich’s own design, those on welfare, after the 1996 reforms, are required to work.

Meanwhile, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Gingrich and the Republicans’ crowning achievement also increased Americans’ reliance on food stamps. By restricting the cash assistance available to families, TANF indirectly pushed more working families to rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs — also known as “food stamps” — to fill in the gap.

So despite his zeal to push “personal responsibility” and to force people off welfare, Gingrich, like Dole, may have inadvertently become a Republican godfather of food stamp growth.

Or to put it another way: Gingrich just might have been the “food stamp Speaker of the House.”

(via diadoumenos)