Tag Archives: RealClearInvestigations

Pay For Play Only Works If You Get What You Pay For!

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The Democrats are getting ready to be in charge of Congress. They have already stated that if they get control of Congress in the mid-term elections, they will begin impeachment hearings against President Trump immediately. It really doesn’t matter if he has done anything worthy of impeachment–they just want to impeach him. The media is already getting ready to help.

On Wednesday, RealClearInvestigations posted an article about the latest false accusation leveled against President Trump.

The article reports:

In a segment titled “The Pardon Economy,” veteran CBS reporter Lesley Stahl alleges that Trump has upended the way U.S. presidents have dispensed pardons for “100 years or more” by creating a “new system” that involves lobbyists and high-priced “pardon brokers.”

Stahl’s report suggests that Trump has replaced the normal order – in which pardons typically go through an apolitical review by the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney– with a scheme that looks like “pay-to-play.” It has already led Democrats to vow they will investigate the issue if they retake the House in the November mid-term elections.

To situate Trump in this “pardon lobbyists” narrative, Stahl links the White House to two convicted con artists who claim close ties to Trump without disclosing one critical detail: There is no evidence the two have ever succeeded in getting anyone a pardon. While their efforts suggest that some in Washington may be trying to capitalize on the narrative about Trump’s alleged corruption – inspired, in part, by questionable pardons he has issued previously – “60 Minutes” offers no concrete proof connecting the administration to these money-making schemes.

Stahl’s report also ignored the long history of wrongdoers paying exorbitant fees for lobbyists to get their pardons viewed by the Oval Office – most famously Bill Clinton’s brother, Roger, and Hillary’s brothers, Hugh and Tony Rodham.

Although Stahl’s report quotes Trump officials denying her claims, a DOJ official who was outraged by her “misleading” report provided RealClearInvestigations with documents showing that well-connected D.C. insiders are routinely involved in the pardon process.

The article explains that the charge involves two people who were offering to obtain pardons for people for $300,000. But the people who paid them the money never got the pardons. That doesn’t sound like President Trump is the one with some legal questions to answer.

I wonder if the people who paid for the pardons will get their money back since they didn’t get the pardons.

When You Don’t Think Something All The Way Through

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This is a picture of a landfill with used windmill turbine blades. Note the size of the tractor in comparison to the size of the blades.

The picture is from an article posted at The Federalist on Friday.

The article reports:

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills. 

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals — not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines — pose no threat currently to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

…“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar eWaste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in net zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

The article concludes:

What’s more, bankruptcies among European companies have begun to mar the renewable wind landscape as surely as the towers, a trend that could continue or accelerate as the Trump administration stops the federal spigot.

“The government has let them off the hook by shaping their policies around climate activism,” Shaffer said. “They’re not putting down escrow money for decommissioning and someone’s going to have to come along and remove them, or we’ll be staring at these rotting towers in the ocean.”

The blades are so big that they are usually broken into three pieces when decommissioned, and the giant chunks of fiberglass, resin, and composite materials go to landfills or warehouses.

Already, horror stories exist of municipalities faced with decommissioning problems. Towns like Sweetwater, Texas, which for many years has been the leading state for wind power, have seen turbine recycling contracts ignored. Global Fiberglass Solutions, one of the companies handling such contracts, did not return requests for comment.

“You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already,” Isaac said. “It’s an environmental disaster we’re looking at.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.

There is nothing environmentally friendly about either wind or solar energy when you look at the bigger picture–how it is manufactured and how it has to be disposed of.