Remarks on CyberSecurity and More Bad News From Solyndra . . .
. . . Is It Fair For Americans To Pay More For Obama's Failed Energy Policies?
Today in Washington, D.C. - April 30, 2012:
The Senate and House are both in recess until Monday May 7th.
On May 7, the Senate will take up 3 district court nominees. On May 8, the Senate is scheduled to vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to S. 2343, a bill dealing with federal student loan interest rates.
Before leaving for recess last week, the House passed the following bills on April 27:
H.R.4849 by unanimous consent - Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks Backcountry Access Act - directs the Secretary of the Interior to issue commercial use authorizations to commercial stock operators for operations in designated wilderness within the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and for other purposes.
H.R.3834 by unanimous consent - Advancing America's Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act of 2012
H.R. 4628 (215 - 195) "To extend student loan interest rates for undergraduate Federal Direct Stafford Loans."
Cybersecurity Bills:
Also, H.R. 2096 was passed 395 - 10) -- Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2011 (really 2012). The bill was to "advance cybersecurity research, development, and technical standards, and for other purposes." The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act would mandate the creation of security automation standards and checklists by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which would be guidelines for agencies rather than requirements. NIST also would cooperate on the development of international security standards, as well as the standards for cloud computing. There is no companion bill in the Senate which is considering its own series of cybersecurity bills. This bill may well die in the Senate if the Senate does not take up the bill.
Obviously the passage of this bill was not as controversial as the bill passed the day before and detailed next.
On Thursday, April 26, the House also passed (248 - 168) H.R. 3523: Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) - To provide for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cybersecurity entities, and for other purposes. Most of the Republicans voting in favor and most of the Democrats voting against. Regardless of how people voted; the arguments surround who gets what and who can do what to whom. The goal of the bill was to make it easier for corporations and the government to share information about potential cybersecurity issues. However, it appears the bill will also allow web companies to share virtually any information about their users with the government, without a court order. Ouch - privacy laws appear not to apply.
The sponsor of the bill Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) said, “We can’t stand by and do nothing as U.S. companies are hemorrhaging from the cyber looting coming from nation states like China and Russia.” Bloomberk BusinessWeek reported that "Hackers and illicit programmers in China and Russia are aggressively pursuing American technology and industrial secrets, jeopardizing an estimated $398 billion in U.S. research spending, the National Counterintelligence Executive, the agency responsible for countering foreign spying on the U.S. government, said in a November report."
Bloomberg also identified the opposition from the White House who is threatening a veto if the bill makes it through the Senate. “As we’ve seen repeatedly, once the government gets expansive national security authorities, there’s no going back,” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an e-mailed statement after the House vote. “We encourage the Senate to let this horrible bill fade into obscurity.”
It does appears there is a problem which needs to be addressed! But it is strange to find the Republicans on the opposite side of protecting individual's privacy. I expect we will see the death of this bill and a "do over" in the new Congress next year.
More on Solyndra:
Politico reports today, “Republicans are hoping to keep Solyndra alive this summer with a series of hearings and legislation to reform the Energy Department loan guarantee program. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), an Energy and Commerce subcommittee chairman, said a bill is being drafted, and he expects it could be on the House floor in July. ‘We’ve got an outline,’ Stearns told POLITICO. The intent is to ‘make sure the Department of Energy can’t give money out to companies where the marketing information is clear that it’s going to go bankrupt,’ he said. This includes ‘better tools of management and accountability.’ Stearns wants to add punitive measures to the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which Republicans say the Obama administration violated when it restructured the $535 million Solyndra loan guarantee. ‘Right now, it’s not clear. So a lot of people say, “Well, even if we broke the law, the administration will say, ‘So what, there’s no punishment.’” So we want to tighten that up.’
“To that end, Stearns is planning three additional hearings. The first hearing could come in late May or early June and involve administration officials from the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Energy and Treasury departments, he said. A second hearing would follow shortly and would include the committee’s final report on Solyndra. A third hearing, he said, would probably be held on the legislation being drafted. Stearns said the Republicans are taking a skeptical look at the administration’s job creation numbers. ‘We’re also looking at the impact of all these loan guarantees and what jobs they created,’ Stearns said. ‘We found that a number of jobs created by these have been negligible for the amount of money, and we want to make the point that this green energy has not produced the jobs that the president has continued to talk about.’”
Meanwhile, according to CBS San Francisco, “Three months ago, CBS 5 caught Solyndra tossing millions of dollars worth of brand new glass tubes used to make solar panels. Now the bankrupt solar firm, once touted as a symbol of green technology, may be trying to abandon toxic waste. . . . Solyndra leased a building on California Circle for the final assembly of its solar panels. But the cleanup at the leased building in Milpitas is in limbo, because Solyndra doesn’t want to pay. CBS 5 found the building locked up, with no one around. At the back, a hazardous storage area was found. There were discarded buckets half filled with liquids and barrels labeled ‘hazardous waste.’ . . . “Essentially it looks like they left a pretty big mess behind,” San Jose State Assistant Professor Dustin Mulvaney told CBS 5. Mulvaney has written a white paper on solar industry waste for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Looking at CBS 5’s video, Mulvaney said it’s hard to tell how much hazardous waste is at the Milpitas facility. But he said one thing is for sure. ‘Materials labeled hazardous waste require a lot more protocol, so it’s actually a lot more expensive to clean,’ Mulvaney said. ‘It’s very sad looking at this facility taken apart like this, because a lot of money went into building this.’”
And despite the Solyndra mess President Obama is still going around the country touting his administration’s spending on the type of programs that led to this $500 million debacle. He’s been demanding “fairness,” embodied in tax hikes like the Buffett Tax and a new tax on American energy producers, so he and fellow Democrats can spend ever more taxpayer money on “investments” like Solyndra and other bankrupt “green energy” companies. Yet he still refuses to approve the Keystone XL pipeline or other commonsense energy policies that could lower energy prices.
As Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said, “That’s this President’s notion of fairness: that struggling Americans pay more at the pump while their tax dollars go to prop up solar companies like Solyndra and the executives who run them into the ground. Well, I don’t think it’s particularly fair for people who are out there trying to scrape a living together to subsidize bonuses for folks who wouldn’t even have a business card without a taxpayer hand-out. But that’s the economy this President wants. That’s what his policies lead to. That’s his vision.”
Tags: Washington, D.C., Congress, CyberSecurity, More Bad News, Solyndra, Obama Administration, Failed Energy Policies To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!
Today in Washington, D.C. - April 30, 2012:
The Senate and House are both in recess until Monday May 7th.
On May 7, the Senate will take up 3 district court nominees. On May 8, the Senate is scheduled to vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to S. 2343, a bill dealing with federal student loan interest rates.
Before leaving for recess last week, the House passed the following bills on April 27:
H.R.4849 by unanimous consent - Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks Backcountry Access Act - directs the Secretary of the Interior to issue commercial use authorizations to commercial stock operators for operations in designated wilderness within the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and for other purposes.
H.R.3834 by unanimous consent - Advancing America's Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act of 2012
H.R. 4628 (215 - 195) "To extend student loan interest rates for undergraduate Federal Direct Stafford Loans."
Cybersecurity Bills:
Also, H.R. 2096 was passed 395 - 10) -- Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2011 (really 2012). The bill was to "advance cybersecurity research, development, and technical standards, and for other purposes." The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act would mandate the creation of security automation standards and checklists by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which would be guidelines for agencies rather than requirements. NIST also would cooperate on the development of international security standards, as well as the standards for cloud computing. There is no companion bill in the Senate which is considering its own series of cybersecurity bills. This bill may well die in the Senate if the Senate does not take up the bill.
Obviously the passage of this bill was not as controversial as the bill passed the day before and detailed next.
On Thursday, April 26, the House also passed (248 - 168) H.R. 3523: Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) - To provide for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cybersecurity entities, and for other purposes. Most of the Republicans voting in favor and most of the Democrats voting against. Regardless of how people voted; the arguments surround who gets what and who can do what to whom. The goal of the bill was to make it easier for corporations and the government to share information about potential cybersecurity issues. However, it appears the bill will also allow web companies to share virtually any information about their users with the government, without a court order. Ouch - privacy laws appear not to apply.
The sponsor of the bill Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) said, “We can’t stand by and do nothing as U.S. companies are hemorrhaging from the cyber looting coming from nation states like China and Russia.” Bloomberk BusinessWeek reported that "Hackers and illicit programmers in China and Russia are aggressively pursuing American technology and industrial secrets, jeopardizing an estimated $398 billion in U.S. research spending, the National Counterintelligence Executive, the agency responsible for countering foreign spying on the U.S. government, said in a November report."
Bloomberg also identified the opposition from the White House who is threatening a veto if the bill makes it through the Senate. “As we’ve seen repeatedly, once the government gets expansive national security authorities, there’s no going back,” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an e-mailed statement after the House vote. “We encourage the Senate to let this horrible bill fade into obscurity.”
It does appears there is a problem which needs to be addressed! But it is strange to find the Republicans on the opposite side of protecting individual's privacy. I expect we will see the death of this bill and a "do over" in the new Congress next year.
Politico reports today, “Republicans are hoping to keep Solyndra alive this summer with a series of hearings and legislation to reform the Energy Department loan guarantee program. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), an Energy and Commerce subcommittee chairman, said a bill is being drafted, and he expects it could be on the House floor in July. ‘We’ve got an outline,’ Stearns told POLITICO. The intent is to ‘make sure the Department of Energy can’t give money out to companies where the marketing information is clear that it’s going to go bankrupt,’ he said. This includes ‘better tools of management and accountability.’ Stearns wants to add punitive measures to the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which Republicans say the Obama administration violated when it restructured the $535 million Solyndra loan guarantee. ‘Right now, it’s not clear. So a lot of people say, “Well, even if we broke the law, the administration will say, ‘So what, there’s no punishment.’” So we want to tighten that up.’
“To that end, Stearns is planning three additional hearings. The first hearing could come in late May or early June and involve administration officials from the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Energy and Treasury departments, he said. A second hearing would follow shortly and would include the committee’s final report on Solyndra. A third hearing, he said, would probably be held on the legislation being drafted. Stearns said the Republicans are taking a skeptical look at the administration’s job creation numbers. ‘We’re also looking at the impact of all these loan guarantees and what jobs they created,’ Stearns said. ‘We found that a number of jobs created by these have been negligible for the amount of money, and we want to make the point that this green energy has not produced the jobs that the president has continued to talk about.’”
Meanwhile, according to CBS San Francisco, “Three months ago, CBS 5 caught Solyndra tossing millions of dollars worth of brand new glass tubes used to make solar panels. Now the bankrupt solar firm, once touted as a symbol of green technology, may be trying to abandon toxic waste. . . . Solyndra leased a building on California Circle for the final assembly of its solar panels. But the cleanup at the leased building in Milpitas is in limbo, because Solyndra doesn’t want to pay. CBS 5 found the building locked up, with no one around. At the back, a hazardous storage area was found. There were discarded buckets half filled with liquids and barrels labeled ‘hazardous waste.’ . . . “Essentially it looks like they left a pretty big mess behind,” San Jose State Assistant Professor Dustin Mulvaney told CBS 5. Mulvaney has written a white paper on solar industry waste for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Looking at CBS 5’s video, Mulvaney said it’s hard to tell how much hazardous waste is at the Milpitas facility. But he said one thing is for sure. ‘Materials labeled hazardous waste require a lot more protocol, so it’s actually a lot more expensive to clean,’ Mulvaney said. ‘It’s very sad looking at this facility taken apart like this, because a lot of money went into building this.’”
And despite the Solyndra mess President Obama is still going around the country touting his administration’s spending on the type of programs that led to this $500 million debacle. He’s been demanding “fairness,” embodied in tax hikes like the Buffett Tax and a new tax on American energy producers, so he and fellow Democrats can spend ever more taxpayer money on “investments” like Solyndra and other bankrupt “green energy” companies. Yet he still refuses to approve the Keystone XL pipeline or other commonsense energy policies that could lower energy prices.
As Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said, “That’s this President’s notion of fairness: that struggling Americans pay more at the pump while their tax dollars go to prop up solar companies like Solyndra and the executives who run them into the ground. Well, I don’t think it’s particularly fair for people who are out there trying to scrape a living together to subsidize bonuses for folks who wouldn’t even have a business card without a taxpayer hand-out. But that’s the economy this President wants. That’s what his policies lead to. That’s his vision.”
Tags: Washington, D.C., Congress, CyberSecurity, More Bad News, Solyndra, Obama Administration, Failed Energy Policies To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!
Posted by Bill Smith at 1:52 PM - Post Link
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