Tag Archives: Faith

News

Report finds Labor Department’s green jobs program failing

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From the liberal Washington Post.

Excerpt:

A $500 million Labor Department program designed to train workers for green jobs has come up far short of its goals, with only 10 percent of participants finding work so far, the agency’s assistant inspector general has found.

The report said the low rate makes it unlikely the program will meet the goal of placing nearly 80,000 workers in careers in energy efficiency or renewable energy by 2013.

“Grantees have expressed concerns that jobs have not materialized and that job placements have been fewer than expected for this point in the grant program,” said the report from Assistant Inspector General Elliott Lewis.

The report comes as the Obama administration has been on the defensive about making a $528 million loan to Solyndra LLC, a now-bankrupt solar panel maker that has become a target for critics of the administration’s green energy program.

The $500 million for green jobs training was part of the $787 billion stimulus act passed in 2009. Although the money was awarded in a series of grants in 2009 and 2010, only one-third has actually been spent by grantees. Lewis’ report said the rate of expenditures has been decreasing. He suggested the department should consider returning unused money that may not be needed.

“At this point, there is no evidence that grantees will effectively use the funds and deliver targeted employment outcomes by the end of the grant periods,” the report said.

[…]Another problem the report highlighted is that workers who completed training and were placed in green jobs have had trouble retaining their posts. Of the 8,035 workers placed, only 1,336 — or 2 percent of the overall target — have held those jobs for at least six months.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who requested the audit, said the report “paints a pretty bleak picture of the program’s effectiveness in job creation.”

“It’s hard to see how leaving $300 million in unused funding for the program in the hands of the Labor Department benefits either the taxpayers or the unemployed,” Grassley said.

The news media loves the Democrats and they are constantly making fun of Republicans for doubting evolution and global warming. I submit to you that believe in green jobs programs is the scientific equivalent of flat-Earthism. And I have the numbers to prove it. They have the blind faith and the insults. We have the evidence.

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News

Public schools warn coaches for bowing heads at student-led prayer

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It’s bad enough that public schools don’t educate children well, but they also do things like this.

Excerpt:

Some football coaches are in trouble for something they did with their players. They said a prayer.

That has the school district taking action.

And the policy, while it may be the law, has plenty of people up in arms.

Every school district has a responsibility to follow the law, and separate private faith from public school. It can be a fine line at times. One crossed in Sumner County, it seems, when the coaches didn’t say a word during a student-led prayer, but they did bow their heads.

In a town like Westmoreland, faith and football seem to matter.

“We’re just respectful, God-fearing people up here,” resident Tony Bentle said.

Bentle called games for Westmoreland High School for 42 years.

“A lot of history. A lot of changes. A lot of football,” he said.

So when he, like a lot of people, heard what happened after a recent game at the middle school.

“It actually blew my mind, that we had come to that point,” he said. “Nobody in this town is offended if you pray. Nobody.”

During a student-originated, student-led prayer, four coaches bowed their heads. They didn’t say a word.

But the principal and the district found out.

“We’ve been telling our principals to kind of be looking for those things, because that is kind of a shift in how things have been done,” Sumner County Schools spokesperson Jeremy Johnson said. “It can in no way appear like it’s endorsed by Sumner County Schools personnel.”

Where do you think this happened? It happened in TENNESSEE. But this is what you can expect from public schools – they are run by the government, and religion is a rival to the government in terms of having conflicting views of what people should be doing with their lives.

Christians really need to get serious about cutting funding for these public schools and voting for politicians who support school choice. Michele Bachmann has the best record on that issue.

News

This one graph should end the debate on wind and solar energy

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Federal subsidies per unit of electricity
Federal subsidies per unit of electricity

(Click for larger image)

From a U.S. House of Representatives report. (H/T Doug Ross)

Excerpt:

In the fall of 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama made a campaign promise to jumpstart the economy with an influx of green jobs… The President has kept his promise to spend billions of borrowed dollars on green energy, but his promises that such spending would create a new, self-sufficient industry capable of providing millions of jobs for Americans have proven empty.

[…]Two years later, the President’s promise of millions of jobs stands in stark contrast with reality. As a recent report from a Bay-Area news organization made clear, green jobs predictions are “proving a pipe dream.”

[…]Since its introduction in the 2009 stimulus bill, the Department of Energy (DOE) has issued $40 billion in new loan guarantees for private-sector loans for renewable energy projects that might not otherwise have been market-viable. Already, multi-million dollar projects, initially labeled as successes, have failed:

• The first renewable energy loan guarantee recipient, solar start-up Solyndra, received a loan guarantee for $535 million in the fall of 2009, even after repeated warnings from federal financial analysts. In the spring of 2010, it failed to complete its initial public offering after an independent audit questioned the ongoing viability of the firm. Then, in the fall of 2010, the firm closed one of its manufacturing facilities and laid off 180 workers. Finally, the firm declared bankruptcy and laid off 1,100 employees only 15 months after Obama visited a company factory.

• Beacon Power, received a $43 million loan guarantee in July of 2009. Since then, its stock price has dropped by 90 percent – a period during which the NASDAQ exchange on which it is listed has increased by 40 percent. The company has not been in compliance with NASDAQ listing requirements, leading to a delisting determination from the exchange.

• First Wind Holdings, received a $117 million loan guarantee in March of 2010. First Wind withdrew its initial public offering in October of 2010, due to a lack of investor demand. According to the Boston Globe, investors shied away from the company because “First Wind owes more than $500 million, loses money on a steady basis, and reports a negative cash flow.”

Even in the midst of these failures, DOE has been advertising additional loan guarantee recipients, announcing a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to another solar company just one day after the FBI raided Solyndra’s offices. Congressional investigators are initiating a review to examine how many future Solyndras have been already financed by this loan-guarantee program or approved through shoddy review, and how can we prevent future examples of this kind of wasteful federal spending.

Why are we in a recession and bleeding jobs? Because we voted for an anti-science ideologue whose energy policy is designed to 1) pay off his Democrat campaign fundraisers and 2) allow him to put on a show about caring for the planet more than those nasty Republicans. We aren’t going to have a lower unemployment rate and lower consumer prices on energy until we kick out the anti-science crowd. I understand that some people believe in religious nonsense like global warming and Keynesianism. That’s fine – let them keep that in the university classroom. Let the Democrat professors of rhetoric like Christina Romer and Paul Krugman make fine-sounding speeches and build castles in the sky there. But out here in the real world, we have to be more practical than that.

In other news, I note that naturalist High Priest Eugenie Scott is claiming that there is no evidence against Darwinism and global warming. God, save us from being ruled by flat-Earth religious nutcases. I don’t mind if they want to say these things in atheist churches, but the rest of us should NOT have to be ruled by their dangerous religious delusions. There’s a place for blind faith, and it’s not in legislature. They shouldn’t be subsidizing their religion with taxpayer dollars. Separation of church and state.