Mercury, Lead and Arsenic Oh My

Score one for the Environment today, the Supreme Court has handed a ruling, of sorts, that would allow the EPA to to set up new tighter restrictions of emissions of mercury, lead, arsenic and other pollutants that are put out by our nations coal-burning power plants. The rule was actual a denial of an appeal of a lower courts decision on a case presented by Environmental groups, Indian tribes and several states that pretty much said that it wasn't right for the Bush administration to set up different regulations for Coal-burning power plants and that they should also be subject to the Clean Air Act. This is a huge win because the pollutants that are produced by these power plants can be quiet dangerous once they get into the environment.

Coal-fired plants produce about half the nation’s electricity, but they are a major source not just of heat-trapping gases but of pollution as well. Mercury is a particular concern. While airborne concentrations are usually low, when mercury falls to earth it enters streams, rivers and estuaries and can accumulate in the form of methyl mercury in the flesh of fish.

which means the plants will be in operation for a long time, on average some where between 30 and 50 years, and with out proper regulations that can account for a large amount of pollutants. Of course the Obama administration won't necessarily be able to any great changes because the environment is a tight rope issue which means that you can't go too far in any one direction cause you might fall but if you stay still too long you will still fall. SO you need to balance both sides while still making forward progression in order to succeed.

Why is happiness only for straight people

"I Do", a simple phrase that marks the beginning of the best years of ones life but now the phrase is also riddled with the bullet holes of controversy. This controversy is over whether people of the same sex should be allowed to say those two little words, I Do. For the past few years this debate has been going on all over the country, with only a few states allowing it, those being Massachusetts and Connecticut with Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Vermont allowing same-sex civil unions. As even with the wins and half wins these states provide the cause has been dealt a huge defeat recently when the state of California decided to over turn its legalization of same sex marriage. This decision has sparked a country wide up roar and heated up the debate once again. A new battle ground has already been decided, the state legislature of Hawaii. Hawaii's House has passed a bill that would legalize same sex civil unions and the Senate is set to vote on it in the next few days.

Gay rights organizations argue that civil unions would promote basic equality in the nation’s most ethnically diverse state, but opponents fear the erosion of an island culture that values conventional family ties.

I don't see how same sex couples would erode the islands culture, just because a few people are gay and get a civil union doesn't mean that all of a sudden the entire island or even the majority of the island will turn gay. Being gay isn't a disease that can be transmitted from one person to another, it is just who people are. Religious groups in Hawaii have taken out newspaper ads and started websites to protest against this action. The religious people shouldn't be doing this because this type of action goes against the fundamental teachings of God, which was to love thy neighbor. Even if the bible has some passages that condemn gays those are less important than the ten commandments. Also I am pretty sure that even though the bible may condemn gays it doesn't say anything about not letting them marry. Also if you look at the Bible from a historical perspective you would realize why the Bible condemns gays; that would be because at the time the bible was written the Christians were a minority that was being randomly persecuted by the Romans, so they wanted to distance themselves from the Romans as much as possible and back during that time the Greeks and Romans tended to have homosexual relationships and didn't view it as wrong. So the writers of the Bible condemn it as a way of separating themselves from the Romans. Also the religious groups need to adapt to a changing time like they have do before. For example less than 500 years ago if you were considered a witch you would be executed because the Bible specifically states that you shall not condemn a witch to live, yet we don't do that today even though the Bible still says that a witch should die. witchcraft is actual a rising religion,in the form of Wicca, in some countries. Even Though it is only a civil union it counts as a win because once people start realizing that gays who are legally a married coupled aren't going around turning our children gay,they should loosen up and let gays have marriage, its all about just being patient. The best part about this argument is the fact that the federal government has pretty much stayed out of it. The last thing this country needs is for the federal government to tell us how to and who can be married. The Constitution doesn't give the federal government the authority to do that because the founding fathers knew that that would be interfering in peoples personal liberties, which they wanted to protect at all costs.
Good Luck to all Gays in Hawaii, hope it works out for yall.

Is pulling put the safest way?

In his campaign Obama said that he planed to pull troops out of Iraq over the course of 16 month,ending around mid-2010. The top two military officials in Iraq have expressed their displeasure towards Obama's timetable. They wish for a longer timetable to help solidify the transition of security control to the Iraqis, their desired timetable is around 23 months long. During the past few months Obama and Robert Gates have been discussing the three different lengths for the timetable to withdraw the troops, these three plans are 16,19 and 23 months, with the joint chiefs of staffs. It has been reported that Obama may reveal that he will go with the 19 month withdrawal timetable on Friday, when he visits military bases in North Carolina. His withdrawal plan will not remove all US troops from Iraq during that time, a small residual force will stay behind to train Iraqi troops and go on some military patrols with their Iraqi counterparts. The official size of the residual force has yet to be determined but early speculations put it between 30,000 and 55,000 troops. The withdrawal of troops from Iraq will finally end the war that has pissed of so the most people since Vietnam and will free up more men and materials for operations in Afghanistan, where Obama is sending 17,00 troops. It seems that Obama is just ending one war to escalate another one.Yet I still feel that this action will go over well with the American public since most hate the war in Iraq and don't even Know that we are still operating in Afghanistan.

new troop deployments

Obama has tried to show that he isn’t going to continue in the footsteps of his predecessor by putting a time table together for the shutdown of Gitmo and he has started to talk with top officials on a plan to start the removal US troops from Iraq. However that may be easier said than done since Obama has just recently authorized the deployment of an additional 17,000 troops to anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan. This is a nearly 50% increase in the number of troops already stationed there and bring the total number of US troops in Afghanistan to 55,000 by mid-summer. The troop deployments are part of a larger change in tactics which includes more regional counterinsurgency operations and increased aid to Pakistan. Opinion on the new troop deployment is split evenly into three groups (for increase, for decrease and for no change)in the US while it is more one sided in Afghanistan with only 18% of people polled wanted the increase in troops and nearly 44% wanted an reduction in foreign troops.

War-related civilian Afghan deaths -- most blamed on Taliban insurgents but many on U.S. airstrikes -- increased nearly 40 percent to 2,118 in 2008, according to a U.N. report released yesterday.

This increase in civilian deaths has weakened Afghan support for the military operations and makes them more hesitant to accept more troops.
The new troop deployments occurs right when Obama needs to find some price reductions in order to at least justify his nearly $800 billion stimulus plan. The area that is most likely to be hit by this budget cut is the pentagon where its budget has increased steadily since 9/11. The amount of spending we do on the military has be one of the biggest debates for the past few years and now it seems that the military’s budget may see a decrease finally. However the area that will see the most and biggest cuts will be weapons programs such as the tilt rotor osprey, the Navy’s littoral combat ship and the new fleet of presidential helicopters. Most of these programs have hugely out sized their own budgets and haven’t proven useful in the long run yet. The osprey definitely should be scraped because it doesn’t seem useful at all, especially for the cost of the program. In its development phase it has taken the lives of many pilots and other personal in accidents. The osprey has also failed to become what it originally was planned to become. In the original plan the osprey was to be a combat aircraft but it is too unstable to be a weapons platform, so now it has become a troop transport. The military has plenty of other troop transports that the osprey would be just a superfluous aircraft and a dangerous one at that. The area that will most likely not see and cuts in its budget is the personnel sections.

Personnel costs account for about two-thirds of all Pentagon and military spending, but there is little chance that money budgeted for salaries, training, health care and other benefits for military personnel and their families would be slashed while troops are fighting and dying in two wars.

Carbon Dioxide emission

It seems that America may actual decide to try and do something constructive when it comes to the environment. So far America has only really talked about ways to combat climate change and protect the environment, then takes actions that seem to contradict what they were saying. For example the government has been talking of looking for alternative fuels to use as a means of reducing our dependency on oil and helping the environment at the same time; however when oil prices sky rocket and supplies start to be less than demand one of the first options on the table is to drill in Alaskan wildlife reserves, which not only doesn’t help with our dependency on oil but would do drastic damage to a fragile ecosystem. The EPA now seems to be taking action, hopefully. The EPA has recently announced that they would look into putting regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, in an attempt to slow down climate change by reducing the introduction of new greenhouse gases. This plan will practically reverse a December memoranda on greenhouse gas regulations for new coal-fired power plants put in place by the Bush administration. The regulations on carbon dioxide emissions has be a hot debate between the energy community and environmentalist that has recently heated up “when the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.”
The industry has vigorously opposed efforts to regulate those emissions, asserting that the policy should be set by Congress. Moreover, technology for capturing carbon dioxide emissions is expensive and virtually untested.
On the other hand environmental groups have stated that without these regulations any new power plants using conventional technologies would guarantee large production of greenhouse emissions for their entire life time, which is between 30-40 years. I hope the EPA goes through with its plan for carbon dioxide emission regulations because we need to do something about the changing climate and we need to set an example for other nations to do the same thing.

corruption ha ha ha

New signs of corruption on capital hill have risen to eye level with the public. It has come to light that lobbyist firm PMA Group was possibly providing fake campaign funds to Representative John P. Murtha, the chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee and other lawmakers. The lawmakers than earmarked more than $100 million dollars to several clients of the PMA Group, who donated close to $100,000 to Murtha’s campaign funds during a last miniature fund raiser. To add more suspicion on PMA’s actions it turns out that the founder of PMA Group was a former top aide to Murtha. If the allegations are true then all illegal contribution will have to be returned and if it is found out that a blind eye was turned towards the fraud, then they could be in legal trouble. Sadly this incident is just another knot in the ever tangling rope that is the American Government’s credibility. Corruption in the Governmental system is a horrible problem that needs to be fixed as fast as possible because it not only destroys the peoples trust in the Government but also could interfere in the actual productivity of the government. If lobbyist can just give money to lawmakers to make them pass certain laws then the government could become an auction house where laws are decided based on who is the highest bidder. If we ever reach that point then the America we all know and love will cease to exist and will become the laughing stock of the world. In order to keep our pride as one of the most successful democracies in the world we must nip this problem in the bottom and do it quickly like a Blitzkrieg.

Stimulate this

The House and Senate leaders held negotiations to try and find a compromise between the two different versions of the stimulus package. The compromise that the negotiations produced provided for a $789 billion which is a lower price tag then either the House or Senate’s plan. To produce a price tag below $800 billion they had to make cuts to education, health care and funds for the states to the amount of $51 billion. The plan does call for money for infrastructure and tax relief in order to gain the support of the republicans for the stimulus package.

Ms. Collins also seemed to think that all of the wrinkles had been ironed out before they actually were. “This was a good-faith effort on both the House and the Senate’s part, and it shows that, working together, we can indeed accomplish great things,” she said.

The reduced price stimulus package could be the most expensive use of the government’s fiscal powers. The package is supposed to stimulate the economy by creating jobs by putting more money in the hands of companies and consumers. The package now needs a final congressional action and the signature of the president before it will become official. The stimulus package is full of too much pork to be a productive solution to the economic problems of the nation. My biggest problem with the plan is the reduction of money flowing into education and the states. The education system doesn’t really have an effect on the recovery of the economic issues; however I believe that the most effective way to improve the economic system will be to give more money to the states. Giving money to the states beats giving it to corporations because if we can stabilize the economies of the states they will be able to form a firm foundation to hold up the federal economy while it is being fixed.