Needlenose

There seems to be only one means to achieve bi-partisan support for a bill – lard it with pork.  Or make it a pork-only bill, with cash for everybody’s constituents!

Case in point – 5 members of the GOP, hearing the “Woo pig sooie!” siren call of pork-barrell spending, crossed the aisle to vote for the so-called Jobs Bill.

The Repugs used this to good effect in the early post-9/11 days of the Shrubya Preznitcy to bring Democrat pigs to vote on their bills – Remember those bipartisan bamboozles such as the Agribusiness Handout  of 2008, the original Agribusiness Handout of 2003, and perhaps the most odious piece of legislation ever, the Big Energy Handout of 2003?

That must be why the Health Care Bill stalled out…insufficient pork!

Nuclear powered car? Well not exactly, but if the Repugs get there way next year and ram their pork-laden energy bill up our orifices we may well be driving cars indirectly powered by nuclear. Many moons ago I predicted that King George the Witless’ so-called ‘hydrogen economy’ was really just a smokescreen for the “nuculer” (sic) industry. In one of those “I hate it when I’m right” moments, apparently the energy bill does exactly that – it “includes $1.1 billion to construct an atomic reactor in Idaho to produce hydrogen.” And didn’t President Pathological Liar claim that the so-called hydrogen car would be nonpolluting?”

“A public that yearns for, and has now been promised, “pollution-free” energy will be given instead something that produces plutonium, strontium, cesium and dozens of other highly toxic radioactive waste products. One can only imagine the chuckles inside the White House about the “gotcha” built into the hydrogen initiative. You environmentalists want clean hydrogen instead of oil? We’ll give you plutonium. “

Swopa laughed at me when I termed the energy bill ‘pure evil,’ but check out this next wonderful provision:

“The energy bill would also reauthorize the Price-Anderson Act, the most extraordinary piece of corporate socialist legislation in U.S. history. Price- Anderson immunizes the nuclear industry from as much as 99 percent of the liability it might face in case of a serious release of radioactivity in a major accident. This subsidy has always been difficult for nuclear advocates to explain. On the one hand, they tell the public that the technology is safe and people living near reactors have nothing to worry about — in fact, we should be building more of them. On the other hand, they tell Congress correctly that the technology is so dangerous that no insurer will accept the risks, and that unless Congress limits the public’s right to compensation for damages, the free market will bring nuclear power to a halt.”

Clean Cars? Clean Coal? Safe Nukes? Dickhead Cheney must keep 1984 on his nightstand for inspirational reading!

As the energy bill wends its way through the Greedy Old Pig-party controlled Congress, it’s rapidly shedding any vestige of public interest and looking more like the same-old same-old. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. (who heads up the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources) has managed to whack out the bill’s renewable portfolio standard (mandated that U.S. utilities purchase a meagre 10% of energy from renewable sources, eliminated a ban on toxic MTBE additives (and put in legislation to protect MTBE polluters from lawsuite), put back in the caribou-killing plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and open more protected federal lands to exploration and drilling.

For the one self-style Libertarian that peruses this blog (are you reading this Gun Buddy?) who doesn’t care much about nature and stuff, but always rails on about corporate welfare and government waste, The Greedy Old Pigs have sequestered themselves in a smoke-filled room behind locked doors to go about the business of slingin’ pork in earnest, including:

* $33 billion in tax credits and incentives for for oil, gas, nuclear, coal and electric utilities
* $1.1 billion for making a hydrogen fustion reactor (what’s 1 billion more after we’ve already wasted $10 billion on perpetually ‘around the corner’ fusion energy?)
* $800 million in ‘targeted pork’ to build a Minnesota coal-burning power plant (watch Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn flip-flop and vote yes to drilling the ANWR now. )
* $125 million in loan guarantees for Healy Clean Coal Plant – to retrofit the failed ‘clean coal’ experiment back to a traditional coal plant!!!!
* $1.3 billion in new loans to the money-losing Bonneville Power Administration – sure, enterpise is ‘free’ when the taxpayers foot the bill!
* price subsidies (of as-yet unknown cost) for the to-be-developed Alaska Gas Pipeline

Energy Bill? Energy Scam is what this is! Trash the America of tomorrow – today!