Wind Farms, Cui Bono?

Opposition to proposed wind farms on state forest land in Western Maryland is vocal and growing. More than 500 folks showed up at a public hearing to protest US Wind Force LLC's proposal to lease 400 acres of forest land in Garrett County to build 100 forty-story wind turbines in two state forests.

The Department of Natural Resources must decide the policy matter of whether or not wind turbines are a proper use of state lands before the Board of Public Works can vote on the lease.

A source tells me that US Wind Force LLC has other projects in the works to build wind farms on private lands.

The proposal has caused a minor rift among environmentalists, between those who want to preserve state forest land and global warming alarmists who see wind power as part of the answer to stop global warming. I agree with the conservationists that protecting the forest land is the best policy here. Wind power is expensive to generate and transmit, and currently an unreliable source of energy. That is not to say that it won’t be in the future.

However, there is more to this story. A brief timeline will help illuminate things:

April 2007: Governor O’Malley signed SB 566/HB 1072 into law, which allows wind generating companies like Synergics Wind Energy LLC to circumvent PSC regulations governing building on environmentally sensitive areas. Synergics is owned by Wayne Rogers, former chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party and crony to O’Malley and Senate President Mike Miller. Rogers served on O’Malley’s transition team as an energy expert. His transition team recommended more wind power. You can see the campaign contributions of Wayne Rogers here, and Synergics here.

October 4, 2007: Governor O’Malley, with representatives from US Wind Force, visited potential wind farm sites in Western Maryland.

November 21, 2007: US Wind Force LLC contributes $4,000, the maximum contribution, to Friends of Martin O’Malley.

December 5, 2007: US Wind Force LLC contributes $1,000 to Friends of Peter Franchot.

Do you see a pattern here?

A second public hearing on the proposal was held last night in Annapolis and DNR is scheduled to brief the Western Maryland delegation this morning. Depending on DNR’s policy ruling, the Board of Public Works could vote on the proposal at its February 13 meeting. Given the campaign contributions and past history, my bet is that DNR blesses the proposal and the BPW approves. It is hard to imagine that US Wind Force didn’t notice how Wayne Rogers greased the skids to get approval for his wind farm.

Of course we have seen this same behavior on display before, during the earliest months of the O’Malley administration. Remember David Sutherland and the Kudner land deal on the Eastern Shore? You know the shady land deal in which the O’Malley administration fired career DGS employee Nelson Reichart for informing the press that the state was purchasing land from another member of O’Malley’s transition team, for hundreds of thousands of dollars over the highest state appraisal. The same David Sutherland, who just happened to be DNR Secretary John Griffin’s former boss.

Even if DNR rules against the wind farm it may not matter. O’Malley and Franchot voted to halt a Kent Island development even though MDE secretary Shari Wilson testified that the developer followed all the environmental laws and regulations. Following the rule of law and applying it consistently is not a trait of this administration.

With that track record, I feel quite confident that the O’Malley administration’s handling of the US Wind Force proposal is above board.

From Capetown to Catonsville

South Africa is facing daily power outages, which is halting its economic growth.

But after three weeks of chronic failures —after regularly irregular vexations with lifeless computers, stove tops and stoplights — public forbearance has given way to outrage. This nation, long a reliable repository of cheap, plentiful electricity, finds itself pitifully short of juice.

The government has confessed to an “electricity emergency” and has begun a program of rationing for industrial users. This is a mortifying turn for a country that considers itself the powerhouse of Africa and resists comparisons to its underdeveloped, famine-plagued neighbors.

But electricity shortages, now expected to be a fact of life for the next five years, are more than an embarrassment. They threaten continued strong growth here in a nation that accounts for a third of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic output and ranks among the world’s top 25 countries in gross domestic product.

Because South Africa is an engine of growth for the region, a slowdown here would also affect its neighbors, undermining global efforts to reduce poverty and damaging South Africa’s own drive to slash its woeful unemployment rate of 25.5 percent.

One of this nation’s largest employers, the mining industry, virtually halted production for four days last week because Eskom, the dominant, government-controlled utility, could not guarantee enough power to ventilate and cool the deep underground shafts. Companies that mine gold and platinum restarted production only on Tuesday after emergency negotiations with Eskom, South Africa’s Chamber of Mines said.

“The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary, unprecedented event,” said Anton Eberhard, a business school professor at the University of Cape Town and an energy expert. “That’s a powerful message, massively damaging to South Africa’s reputation for new investment. Our country was built on the mines.”

And how did this happen?

The current crisis stems from Eskom’s lack of capacity to generate enough power, and its inability to keep many of its plants working.

The predicament was foretold. In 1998, a government report warned that at the rate the economy was growing, the nation faced serious electricity shortages by 2007 unless capacity was expanded. The government, led by President Thabo Mbeki, who assumed office in June 1999, tried unsuccessfully to induce private investors to build additional power plants. Only belatedly did it permit Eskom to begin the necessary expansion.

“The president has accepted that this government got its timing wrong,” Alec Erwin, the public enterprises minister, said last Friday at a much-anticipated news briefing that broke a mystifying public silence...

South Africans are appalled by the daily interruptions to their lives. Workers sit idle, televisions flick into darkness and silence, elevators stall between floors, gas stations cannot pump, cakes remain forever half-baked. Every intersection with disabled traffic lights becomes a four-way stop, with drivers in each direction maddeningly delayed as the endless lines of cars inch forward.

Does this sound familiar?

Future power shortages and brownouts are predicted for Maryland due to lack of supply and increasing demand. Yet the mental giants in Annapolis are proposing legislation, which will DECREASE incentives to create generating capacity, and INCREASE energy costs and bring about energy rationing.

Donna Edwards and the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

Donna Edwards is the progressive saint of the FSP folks. They are touting her new "stakeout" ad against Al Wynn. Watch it below. Edwards films Wynn departing the office of big nuclear power company and shows the other "big corporate special interests" that fund Wynn. However, note the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters endorsement logos at the end of the ad.



The Sierra Club and LCV are big players in the constellation of progressive advocacy groups National Review contributor Byron York documented in his book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. One of York's major arguments is that the left's commitment to campaign finance reform and law is purely notional. The left's largest financiers like George Soros, championed campaign finance reform because they saw it as a tool to hamper rich evil Republicans. York points out many many instances of campaign finance shenanigans on the left. The point being, that the left and their special interests are on the side of the angels and not subject to the rules.

PolitickerMD's coverage of Al Wynn's FEC complaint against Donna Edwards reveals that she might be another example of what York noted in his book.

In a letter to the FEC, Lori Sherwood, the congressman’s campaign manager, wrote, “Based on my examination of various records and documents I believe the Donna Edwards for Congress Committee has received substantial assistance by way of unreported, in-kind contributions from organizations who profess to have operated independently of the Edwards Campaign.”

In a lengthy complaint, Sherwood claimed that as executive director of the social justice organization the Arca Foundation, Edwards was “responsible for administering and overseeing grants that are awarded and distributed” by the group – grants that go to some of her campaign's biggest supporters.

“By way of example and not limitation, the Arca Foundation contributed $100,000.00 in grants to the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) from 2004-2006,” Sherwood said.

“That after having been intimately involved in the award of an Arca grant to the LCV, Donna Edwards was appointed to the Board of Directors of the League of Conservation Voters,” she continued. “After receipt of grant money from Ms. Edward's group and her appointment to the LCV Board, LCV endorsed Donna Edwards for Congress in 2006 and 2008.” Sherwood goes on to allege that the “LCV and its principals contributed over $15,000.00 to the Edwards campaign through its board members, employees, and the LCV PAC.”

The complaint also alleges other non kosher relationships with other progressive organizations like EMILY's List and Friends of the Earth.

EMILY's List Executive Director Ellen Moran denounced Wynn's complaint saying:

"EMILY's List is proud to stand with Donna Edwards, a champion for women and families and a leader we know will bring the kind of change the voters of Maryland's 4th District so desperately want. It is a sad indication of Rep. Wynn's desperation that he resorts to launching specious attacks against non-profit community groups, environmentalists and organizations representing workers and women's rights."

And so we come to the left's excuse for everything. Its okay to violate campaign finance laws because their special interests are the good special interests, Therefore, the rules don't apply to them and to point out that discrepancy is bad form. Special interests are special interests no matter where their money goes.

Nothing may come of the allegations and honestly I don't have a dog in this the Democratic primary. I lived in the 4th in Wynn's earlier terms and I can't say I was represented well by him back then.

However, Donna Edwards is a tool of special interests just as she paints Al Wynn to be. True, if she is elected you probably won't have to stake her out at a corporate lobbying firm. You will find her at the lobbying offices of the special interest groups: Sierra Club, NOW, SEIU, LCV, and ACORN.

I wonder what Edwards and the FSP folks think about ACORN, a group implicated in vote fraud and cited by the NLRB for illegally firing its employees who deigned to form a union.

Oh I forgot, they are progressive special interests so they couldn't possibly be a bad influence on our politics.

DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?

Professional talk radio guest Frank DeFilippo is in high dudgeon over the fact that he received a RNC fund raising mailer. Oh the horror! He was so upset he felt to the need whine about it on WBAL.com.

I get mail from the DNC and every liberal group under the sun. I casually dump them in the trash can as I would any other waste and move on. It appears DeFilipo is upset that the algorithms in the RNC database did not recognize him as a haughty Democratic muckety muck. Unfortunately most listeners to the Ron Smith show do know Frank.

The RNC database managers had no idea who Frank DeFilipo is, neither does your average citizen. Okay so Frank was upset and felt the need to pontificate on such an outrage. Fine, whatever. However, DeFilippo felt the need to take some unwarranted shots at we natavist proles suffering under the false consciousness imposed on us by our capitalist masters.

It also must be said, upon professional evidence, that the relevant Zip Code is one of the most fertile fund-raising warrens in the region and so it is how this unapologetic New Deal Democrat, by no means because if his impecunious presence, is now encoded on the mailing list with the GOP’s captains of industry as well as the yammering know-nothings who inhabit its lower ranks.

Yammering know-nothings? Quite a cheeky statement given that it takes one caller to the show to reveal the intellectual bankruptcy of most of DeFilipo's positions. Look at DeFilipo's political philosophy, "unapologetic New Deal Democrat," its easy to see the empty well of ideas and arguments he draws from.

Why dwell on the merits of this policy or that, when its much easier to demean your opponents as yammering know-nothings.

Regulate This!

Surprise Surprise, our electricity rates are going up again. Hey O'Gov weren't you supposed to do something about this? Oh right you did you made the original increase even higher.

Progressives love to regulate big business in the name of protecting "the people" from the greedy clutches of corporate fat cats. As I mentioned before, big business welcomes regulation because it helps them corner the market by making competition too costly.

Case in point, the FERC regulations fueling the new increase:

The PSC staff blame new wholesale market rules that reward power producers in areas where electricity supplies are dangerously tight. PJM Interconnection, which operates the region's power grid and wholesale energy market, implemented the regulations in the spring with approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

These "capacity" charges are designed to entice power companies to build new power plants and transmission lines to meet rising demand. After the new rules took effect in June, capacity charges paid to generators soared about 2000 percent overnight, Trimble said. The problem is most acute in Central Maryland, which is home to BGE's 1.1 million customers.

The capacity charges are controversial within the industry because they put more money in the pockets of power companies regardless of whether they use the added profits to build new power plants. BGE's corporate parent, Constellation Energy Group, is the state's largest producer of electricity and, consequently, a primary beneficiary of the regulations.

In the Sun article, reporter Paul Adams notes that state regulators are handicapped because such decisions are made in Washington, with little input from the PSC. However, the PSC is just as guilty of regulating in favor the utility at the expense of ratepayers. Governor O'Malley's handpicked PSC approved the policy of decoupling. Decoupling allows utilities to separate the rate they charge from the amount of electricity consumed. So no matter how much you electricity you conserve you still pay as if you were not conserving. Where is the incentive to conserve?

All the talk of "re-regulating" electricity markets is tinged with rhetoric of concern for ratepayers. But we know that regulation is just a tool for big business to get from government what it can't get on the free market--and a means for government to get its own taste.

Here is a novel idea. Why don't we try actual, real, deregulation. I'm all for some minimum standards of behavior, but the more you regulate--and progressives from time immemorial have not learned this--the more you encourage business to get into politics in order to buy politicians and write legislation. Let companies sink or swim on their own efforts in a market of free and fair competition.

Transparency for Teacher Contracts

Smart political minorities not only point out where the majority is wrong--as this liberal monopoly often is--they also propose good policies of their own.

Senator Janet Greenip (R -33) has done so. Yesterday she introduced the Public School Collective Bargaining Sunshine Act (SB 230). SB 230 would require county boards of education to make their collective bargaining contracts publicly available within 10 days of the agreement.

Currently citizens wishing to review those contracts must file a FOIA request to obtain them. As I can personally attest, FOIA requests are not an easy process, especially when public officials have something to hide.

Teacher unions, whose members incessantly claim to be the saviors of public school students, should have no qualms about public scrutiny of their contracts. After all they are public employees.

Transparency in government is a notion that is paid a lot of lip service, but rarely any action. This bill would offer taxpayers a clearer view an often opaque process.

Heil T.O.

Jonah Goldberg uncovered even more disturbing fascist history.
Apparently Der Führer was a fan of America's Team.