Author: Robert Zimmerman

New Congress lets expire a decades-old $2.4 billion pork program

11:16 am

Change! The House kills a decades-old $2.4 billion pork program. Key quote:

The Trade Adjustment Assistance program dates back to the Kennedy-era Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and was expanded under the 1974 Trade Act, signed into law by Gerald Ford. It was the kind of bipartisan program thought to be bulletproof. In the last session, it went from a small program, designed to aid workers displaced by foreign trade, to a huge $2.4 billion pork program providing laid-off workers with 156 weeks of “income support,” subsidies and even education.

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SpaceX puts Dragon 9 space capsule on display in D.C.

11:02 am

SpaceX has put the Dragon 9 space capsule that flew in space on display in D.C. Though it is really cool that they are making the capsule so available to the public, this quote tells us the real story:

With Congress preparing in the weeks ahead to again address the question of government contracts for commercial space businesses such as SpaceX, the company wanted to give it (and attendees of the nearby FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference) an opportunity to see the capsule. Members of Congress and of the Obama administration were invited to attend a Thursday evening viewing, and company officials said the response has been enthusiastic.

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Cutting the Full $100 Billion

11:01 pm

Keep this momentum going! The House Republican leadership was forced this week to increase its proposed budget cuts to $100 billion because of tea party movement pressure, both in the House and back at home. Key quote from this New York Times report:

The reversal was the most concrete demonstration yet that the wave of fiscal conservatives who catapulted Republicans into the House majority is reshaping the political and policy calculations being made by the party leadership.

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Great Moments In Government “Investment”

2:51 pm

Great moments in government “investment”. Key quote:

To turn wood chips into ethanol fuel, George W. Bush’s Department of Energy in February 2007 announced a $76 million grant to Range Fuels for a cutting-edge refinery. A few months later, the refinery opened in the piney woods of Treutlen County, Ga., as the taxpayers of Georgia piled on another $6 million. In 2008, the ethanol plant was the first beneficiary of the Biorefinery Assistance Program, pocketing a loan for $80 million guaranteed by the U.S. taxpayers.

Last month, the refinery closed down, having failed to squeeze even a drop of ethanol out of its pine chips.

That’s $164 million of tax dollars to a company that produced nothing.

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The Sun’s continuing wimpiness

12:30 pm

Get those winter coats out of storage! Yesterday NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center published its monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle. I’ve posted the newest graph below, showing the continuing slow rise in sunspots (blue/black lines) in comparison with the consensis prediction made by the solar science community in May 2009 (red line).

Though the sunspot count made a slight recovery in January, it was not enough to make up for the plunge in December. Essentially, the Sun continues to act like a sleepy kitten that really doesn’t want to wake up. This suggests that even the newest and wimpiest prediction for the next solar maximum, from solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center, is still overstating the Sun’s upcoming sunspot activity.

In the past a wimpy Sun has been linked to cold weather, for reasons that scientists as yet don’t quiet understand. And this next solar maximum continues to look like the wimpiest in more than 200 years (see the graph on this page)!

January sunspot graph

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