Making Doo-Doo Work For You

A meatpacking plant in Nebraska is going to reduce its waste footprint, its carbon footprint, and its cash outlays for for fuel and waste disposal, all at one stroke:

Construction of a biogas facility at the JBS Swift meat processing plant in Grand Island will begin Tuesday with a groundbreaking ceremony.

The project will convert paunch wastes and other meat byproducts into methane gas to fuel the plant’s boilers.

Environmental Power, the Portsmouth, N.H., corporation developing the project, said the methane gas will offset about 25 percent of JBS Swift’s annual purchase of natural gas and is the energy equivalent of 1.7 million gallons of heating oil per year.

[…]

The biogas plant will consist of two 1.2 million-gallon anaerobic digesters, as well as a purification system that cleans the gas prior to its use. The digesters use bacteria to break down meat byproducts.

The anaerobic digester process captures methane — a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — and turns it into fuel. It also can be used to deal with human waste, and provides fertilizer as a byproduct as well as power — and since much of modern agriculture is based on petroleum-based fertilizers, anything that saves us from having to use oil to grow food is a good thing. Even better, the efficiency of the digestion is aided by the use of glycerol, which just happens to be a byproduct from biodiesel production.

Poll: American Jews Not Responding To Neocon Scare Tactics

You’ll never see this on the evening news, even once, but it’s been true for years.  American Jews, contrary to what the noisier neocons keep suggesting, are not enamored of neocon nonsense on Iraq — or Iran, for that matter.

Why he folded his Trent

Scott Horton, Harper’s:

     I have learned that the criminal investigation that produced the indictments [of four Mississippi lawyers and one law firm employee on charges of attempting to bribe a state circuit judge, Henry L. Lackey] may have a connection with events that rattled Washington only 36 hours before a team of FBI agents descended upon the Scruggs Law Firm in Oxford, when Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, who just secured reelection last year and had five years left on his term to serve, suddenly and dramatically announced that he was resigning from the Senate to pursue other objectives. …

     Scruggs’s name has figured prominently in another high profile case of judicial corruption. U.S. Attorney Dunnica Lampton brought charges against three judges and Scruggs’s close colleague, lawyer Paul Minor, in July 2003. …

     What allowed Scruggs to dodge the bullet in the prior case? Those who followed the case offer two explanations. First they point to Scruggs’s strong pattern of campaign donations to the Bush-Cheney campaign and to other Republican causes. He was one of the nation’s leading donors to the Bush campaign. And second, they point to his powerful brother-in-law: Trent Lott. …

     Here’s one scenario, which two senior law enforcement figures in Mississippi told me was “more than simply plausible.” The FBI had secured warrants to monitor Scruggs’s phone calls early in the course of the case, during the summer or early fall. In some of those conversations Dickie Scruggs asked for his brother-in-law’s help in fighting off Judge Acker’s attempts to have him prosecuted. Trent Lott picked up the phone and spoke with a few friends in the Justice Department–or perhaps even directly with a U.S. Attorney or two in Alabama, or a senator from Alabama–and asked them to lay off his misbehaving brother-in-law.

Wednesday Morning Immigration Blogging

— SEIU Local 26 President Javier Morillo-Alicea discusses Dick Day’s hanging out with known racist anti-immigrant jerkwads The Minutemen.  Of course racism is a good thing for Day’s GOP base, so this won’t bother them one little bit.

— Speaking of racist anti-immigrant jerkwads, guess how Tom Tancredo avoided serving in Vietnam? 

He’s a flame throwing supporter of the Iraq War and demagogic opponent of “illegal” immigration (as in Mexican immigration, not white people immigration). As a college student, he also was a rabid enthusiast for our war in Vietnam.

But Tom Tancredo, the congressman who invites guests over to his Colorado mansion to watch John Wayne movies, was given a 1-Y deferment from serving in Vietnam. Why? Because he claims that he was treated for mental illness while in high school.

[…]

A “Rocky Mountain News” article recounts:

It was reported that in 1970, after Tancredo’s student deferments ran out, he appealed his 1-A draft status, which would have put him at the top of the list for draft eligibility during the Vietnam War.

Tancredo said he didn’t remember it that way. But he said he was given a 1-Y status, which put him at the bottom of the list, when he reported that he had been treated for mental illness as a teenager.

Tancredo said he was diagnosed with depression when he was 16 or 17 and received medication for five years for panic attacks and bouts of anxiety and depression….

So panic attacks kept him out of ‘Nam? Well, golly gosh gee, setting aside the big fat ironic contrast with Tancredo’s John Wayne worship, I somehow doubt that your typical inner-city black kid would have got away with trying to change his 1-A status this way. Nope, they would have laughed and sent him off to boot camp, and then to the war.