Day: June 2, 2018

Off the Record: Tyson Foods Recycles a Smidge of Tennessee Taxpayer Money as Payback to Gibson County

Chris Alto
OFF THE RECORD

Tyson CEO and President Tom Hayes was the BMOC (big man on campus) at the Humboldt plant ground-breaking on Wednesday when he promised a $500,000 kickback grant to Gibson County. But it’s not really a no-strings unconditional gift, nor is it really money from Tyson Foods’ pocket, is it Tom? First, the ever paternalistic Tyson leadership that has come to rescue Welcoming Witherspoon – who is now out of favor with his Democrat party – has not agreed to just let Gibson Countians decide on their own how to spend their new found wealth. Nooooo.  A steering committee “of community leaders and Tyson Foodsteam members” will decide how to spend the money. Any chance the “community leaders” will be same ones that worked the deal that could possibly “fowl” some of the already threatened nearby waterways? The same leaders like Welcoming Witherspoon who has said that, like Randy Boyd, he welcomes Muslims and immigrants to come work in Gibson County: Randy, like me, isn’t afraid of a Muslim coming to the county and maybe seeking a job, or a legal immigrant coming to the county. He’s not afraid of that; neither am I. If somebody wants to come here legally, and seek employment and…

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Grassley Wants To Pull Out All The Stops To Confirm Trump’s Judges

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Chuck Grassley

by Kevin Daley   GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa urged the Senate to work through weekends and the August recess on Friday to continue processing President Donald Trump’s nominees to the federal courts. Grassley, who leads the Republican judicial confirmation effort from his perch as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Twitter that Democratic obstruction warranted recourse to unconventional measures. Senate Judic Cmte has been hard at work processing judges to fill the 147 judicial vacancies At evry turn it seems we are met w Democrat filibusters Lets work Friday/Saturday/August recess to get more done in the Senate & help the judicial branch do its job — ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) June 1, 2018 Senate Judic Cmte has been hard at work processing judges to fill the 147 judicial vacancies At evry turn it seems we are met w Democrat filibusters Lets work Friday/Saturday/August recess to get more done in the Senate & help the judicial branch do its job — Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) June 1, 2018 Although 2017 saw Trump and congressional allies set a record for appeals court confirmations in the first year of a presidential term, Senate Republicans now must manage a burgeoning pool of nominees, who…

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Inspired by Seashells, New Bendable Concrete Design Can Make Infrastructure Safer, More Durable

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Potholes

by Victor C. Li   Spring construction season is underway, and many tons of concrete will be used in the coming months. Unfortunately, concrete is a brittle material: Placed under stress, it cannot bend very far before it fractures. Some pavements that are being poured now will crack within a few years and require expensive repairs. New concrete will be mixed, and the cycle will start again. But a better solution is in view. My laboratory at the University of Michigan, along with many other laboratories around the world, has shown it is possible to make concrete more ductile – that is, bendable without fracturing. Bendable concrete makes infrastructure safer, extends its service life and reduces maintenance costs and resource use. The social costs of brittle concrete Civil infrastructure very rarely fails because it lacks compressive strength – the ability to bear loads that push it together, as when columns support the weight of a building. Most failures occur because structures do not have enough capacity to carry tensile load – the ability to deform or stretch without rupturing – even though steel reinforcements often are added to concrete to prevent catastrophic structural failure. Many serious concerns about the woeful state of U.S. infrastructure can…

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Commentary: Open-Border Establishment Republicans Like John Kasich Endanger President Trump’s Popular Agenda

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John Kasich

by Jeffery Rendall   Someone should have a sit down with John Kasich. Close followers of American politics – or at least its recent past in the exhilarating Donald Trump era – know the outgoing Ohio governor ran for president in 2016 as a Republican. Well-informed folks also realize Kasich’s following never really grew over the course of the campaign and the only state he managed to win outright (in the GOP primaries) was his own. Nevertheless Kasich appears to be capitalizing on his fifteen minutes of Trump-coattail fame (if it was even that long) to lecture congressional Republicans on what they should be doing to remedy the ambiguity created by Trump’s ending of Barack Obama’s unconstitutional DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. Kasich wrote at USA Today earlier this week, “Ever since the Trump administration’s effort last fall to kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, 800,000 young people living in our communities have faced the fear of deportation from the only homes — and the only homeland — most have ever really known. These are the ‘DREAMers’: our neighbors, schoolmates and co-workers who were brought to America as children and, until now, were eligible to stay and lead productive…

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Oil Companies Lay The Ground Work For Drilling In ANWR

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Landscape

by Jason Hopkins   Several energy companies have begun the process required for drilling in ANWR, a remote Alaskan province long barred from petroleum exploration. SAExploration and two Alaska native companies — Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and the Kaktovik Inupiat Corporation — have applied to conduct seismic work next winter in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, otherwise known as ANWR. The application is a major development since Congress passed legislation in 2017 opening Alaska’s northwest region to energy development. SAExploration stated that “this partnership is dedicated to minimizing the effect of our operations on the environment,” adding that it would utilize small vehicles, sleds and biodegradable lubricants to avoid ecological damage. A provision in the GOP-led tax cuts President Donald Trump signed into law in December put to rest a decades-long battle over ANWR. Since the 1980s, Democrats and other environmental groups resisted calls to open ANWR to oil and gas exploration. Empowered with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was able to push through legislation that authorized a portion of the refuge, known as the 1002 Area, up for exploration. Murkowski — a Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and has been a longtime supporter of…

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The Myth of Deforestation

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Green Forest

by Alexander C. R. Hammond   Recently on the BBC, Deborah Tabart from the Australian Koala Foundation noted that “85 percent of the world’s forests are now gone.” Luckily this statement is incorrect. Moreover, due to afforestation in the developed world, net deforestation has almost ceased. I’m sure that Tabart had nothing but good intentions in raising environmental concerns, but far-fetched claims about the current state of the world’s forests do not help anyone. The record needs setting straight. Getting the Facts Straight After searching for evidence to support Tabart’s claim, the closest source I could find is an article from GreenActionNews, which claims that 80 percent of the earth’s forests have been destroyed. The problem with that claim is that according to the United Nations there are 4 billion hectares of forest remaining worldwide. To put that in perspective, the entire world has 14.8 billion hectares of land. For 80 percent of the forest area to have already been destroyed and for 4 billion hectares to remain, 135 percent of the planet’s surface must have once been covered in forests. GreenActionNews’ claim not only implies that 5.2 billion hectares of deforestation occurred at sea, but that every bit of land on earth was once forested. Ancient…

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Another Government-Run Website Is Failing, and It’s Not HealthCare.gov

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Medicare plan finder

by Joel White   Another government website is shortchanging consumers with inaccurate information, enrollment details presented in confusing Washington-speak, the unavailability of human support, and no easy way to search for doctors covered under your plan. No, I’m not talking about HealthCare.gov—though its shortcomings are well-documented—but rather, its older, clumsier twin, the Medicare Plan Finder. We all remember the disastrous 2013 launch of Obamacare’s online portal, in which a grand total of six people enrolled in coverage on the first day, because the web tool was associated with a highly polarizing law that had been enacted three years earlier. Yet, when the Medicare Plan Finder—the federal government’s online tool to help Medicare beneficiaries and others obtain information about, and make decisions on, coverage options in fee-for-service and Medicare Parts C and D—launched at the height of the dot-com age, no one blinked. [ The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more  ] The dirty little secret is that the Medicare Plan Finder deserves the same stringent oversight HealthCare.gov received and more, because its shortcomings are even more far-reaching. For all the media hype and congressional handwringing, most Americans still bypass…

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Chapter 1: The Media Revolution of 1517

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Martin Luther

This is Chapter 1 (“The Media Revolution of 1517”) from America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power, by Richard A. Viguerie and David Franke “What is past is prologue,” and conservatives can learn valuable lessons from this long-ago media revolution—lessons we can use today as we battle the new media monopolies of the Left. In the Sixteenth Century, the new technology was the printing press, and its first media star was Martin Luther—with a wicked sense of humor, you might call him the Rush Limbaugh of that day.  We learn the importance of being first to use the new technology.  Being No. 2 (the Catholic Counter-Revolution) is better than not using the new technology, thus assigning yourself to the ash-heap of history.  But you can’t eradicate the new mass movement (the Protestant Reformation) that was established by being there first. As you read this chapter, and later as you read chapters 4 through 7, consider how this historic lesson repeated itself, in a different form of course, with the conservative media revolution of the 1960s—how conservatives were the first to use the new and alternative media, how liberals later caught up, but how the conservatives could no…

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Karl Dean’s Lawyer-Wife’s Environmental Organization Opposed Chicken Slaughterhouses Which He Supports

Chris Alto
Karl Deal, Ann Davis

Anne Davis, wife of Democrat gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean, left her position as the managing attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) to help her husband run for governor. Davis, who helped establish the Nashville office in 2012, left her position in 2017, just in time to avoid potential conflicts of interest for Dean should he become governor. The SELC’s regional work challenging the environmental impact of chicken slaughterhouses and processing plants places Dean at best, in an awkward position running for a state-wide office in Tennessee where a fifth Tyson Foods operation is being launched and another is expanding. While Dean was hobnobbing with Tyson Foods CEO and President Tom Hayes at the plant’s ground-breaking ceremony in Humboldt on Wednesday, his Democrat opponent, Rep. Craig Fitzhugh, was busy pointing out the project’s flaws to Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery. Fitzhugh is seeking answers to the concerns raised by constituents in his rural county who are likely to be impacted by the Humboldt plant and the estimated 600 new chicken houses that will supply the chickens to be slaughtered and processed. In addition to the Tennessee office which Anne Davis recently left, the SELC staffs offices in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia…

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