Loyalty is a one-way street in Donald Trump’s GOP. Just ask Ronna McDaniel

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Like the party itself, McDaniel made changes and accommodations to aid and ally with Trump. Much has been written about her decision to drop her maiden name, Romney, at Trump’s behest. But the more consequential choice McDaniel made was to help move the party away from its establishment bearing — from which she herself came — into one that echoed Trump’s political fancies. She stood by him even after he threatened to form his own party, spread conspiracies about widespread fraud, lost the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn those results.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/08/ronna-mcdaniel-trump-step-down-00140291

Alabama Governor Signs Bill Protecting IVF Treatments

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Less than a month after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization treatment are children, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has signed a law protecting access to IVF treatment in the state.”

https://reason.com/2024/03/07/alabama-governor-signs-bill-protecting-ivf-treatments/

‘Somewhat terrified’: A key Biden official gets candid on Trump’s agenda

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Donald Trump’s return to the White House could be “catastrophic” for clean energy, particularly the still struggling offshore wind industry, a top Biden administration official says.
Eric Beightel, who is in charge of coordinating infrastructure approvals across federal agencies, told the POLITICO Energy podcast he is “somewhat terrified” that a second Trump presidency would be “catastrophic to our hopes and dreams of our clean energy transition.”

“What we saw during the last Trump administration is that offshore wind essentially stood still,” Beightel said during an interview for the podcast posted Thursday. “And what we’ve had to do since coming in was to pick that up.

“If we had to do that again, coupled with the previous supply chain issues that we’ve already had to reconcile, that could be a death knell to this nascent industry,” said Beightel, executive director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council.”

…

“Trump’s administration took action in line with the ex-president’s views: In 2019, it delayed the Vineyard Wind project — a 62-turbine facility planned for the waters off Martha’s Vineyard — by ordering more environmental reviews that critics said were intended to block its construction. (That project eventually passed muster with Biden’s regulators and recently started sending power to the electric grid.)

The prospect of a second Trump administration is emerging at a time when wind projects are caught in the middle of a struggle between Democrats and Republicans over how to rewrite federal permitting rules for energy infrastructure. Both parties agree on the need to approve energy projects more quickly — but the parties’ priorities remain far apart, as Republicans focus on smoothing the path for pipelines and natural gas export terminals while most Democrats emphasize electricity transmission projects to carry wind, solar and other renewable power.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/08/trump-wind-power-crusade-00140128

The US Navy has a missile problem in the Red Sea

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The US Navy has a missile problem. A shortage of its best SM-6 missiles – multipurpose weapons that can sink ships, hit targets on land and intercept aircraft and other missiles – could doom its fleet. Missiles are being expended at a high rate in the current Red Sea fighting against the Iranian-backed Houthis of Yemen. What good are the Navy’s 85 destroyers and cruisers if they can’t shoot?
A little industrial ingenuity could end the crisis, however. Defense firm Lockheed Martin is proposing to arm Navy ships with a missile that normally launches from land: the US Army’s Patriot.

The Patriot is a deadly accurate munition, as Ukrainian and Russians forces have learned. The hard way, in the Russians’ case. But its main advantage over the Navy’s best SM-6 missile is that Lockheed makes a lot of them.

On paper, the US fleet is a giant floating missile magazine. Each of 72 destroyers sails with as many as 96 vertical missile cells. A cruiser – the Navy has 13 of them – has 122 cells. Each cell can fire various weapons such as an SM-2 surface-to-air missile or a Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile. But the best weapon that fits in the so-called “vertical launch system” is the SM-6.

The 22-foot, 3,300-pound SM-6 is the Navy’s only omni-role missile. Thanks to its sensitive built-in radar, it works equally well against targets on the sea, on land and in the air out to a range of 150 miles or farther. It’s even able to offer a defense against incoming hypersonic weapons.

But the SM-6 is complex. For a decade now, the Navy has been paying Raytheon to build 125 of the missiles per year at a cost of slightly more than $4 million per missile; the fleet has around 600 in stock. The production rate should increase slightly in the coming years.

Even taking into account the fleet’s large arsenal of less-capable SM-2s, there’s a real danger it could get overwhelmed by enemy missiles, drones and warplanes during, say, a war with China over Taiwan.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-navy-missile-problem-red-134529869.html