Alaska Brewery Plans To Use Beer As A Source Of Green Energy

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Photo Credit: Associated PressJUNEAU, Alaska – The Alaskan Brewing Co. is going green, but instead of looking to solar and wind energy, it has turned to a very familiar source: beer.

The Juneau-based beer maker has installed a unique boiler system in order to cut its fuel costs. It purchased a $1.8 million furnace that burns the company’s spent grain — the waste accumulated from the brewing process — into steam which powers the majority of the brewery’s operations. Company officials now joke they are now serving “beer-powered beer.”

What to do with spent grain was seemingly solved decades ago by breweries operating in the Lower 48. Most send the used grain, a good source of protein, to nearby farms and ranches to be used as animal feed.

But there are only 37 farms in southeast Alaska and 680 in the entire state as of 2011, and the problem of what to do with the excess spent grain — made up of the residual malt and barley — became more problematic after the brewery expanded in 1995

The Alaskan Brewing Co. had to resort to shipping its spent grain to buyers in the Lower 48. Shipping costs for Juneau businesses are especially high because there are no roads leading in or out of the city; everything has to be flown or shipped in. However, the grain is a relatively wet byproduct of the brewing process, so it needs to be dried before it is shipped — another heat intensive and expensive process.

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Obama Says U.S. Needs Revenue Along With Spending Cuts

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Photo Credit:Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg President Barack Obama said there is “no doubt” the government needs new revenue from closing tax “loopholes” and limiting deductions, along with enacting spending cuts, to reduce the federal deficit.

There’s “no reason why we can’t have really strong growth in 2013,” the president said in an interview with CBS television yesterday before the network’s Super Bowl broadcast. He cited a recovering housing industry, strong manufacturing and rising car sales.

Revenue could be raised through an overhaul of the tax code, he said, “and we can do it in a gradual way so that it doesn’t have a huge impact.”

“There is no doubt we need additional revenue, coupled with smart spending reductions in order to bring down our deficit,” he said. “I don’t think the issue right now is raising rates.”

Two reports last week suggested worrying signs about the economy. The Commerce Department said Jan. 30 that the gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced, dropped at a 0.1 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, the worst performance since the second quarter of 2009, when the world’s largest economy was still in the recession.

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Voter Fraud Group Sues Over Allen West Recount (+video)

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesTrue the Vote, a watchdog group dedicated to protecting against voter fraud, on Monday filed suit against the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections in Florida, demanding the release of “all records pertaining to the recent 18th Congressional District election and subsequent recounts between Rep. Allen West and Patrick Murphy be reviewed in order to perform a comprehensive third-party audit.”

Here’s True the Vote president Catherine Engelbrecht explaining what the group hopes to accomplish from the lawsuit:

As Engelbrecht notes in the video, the group does not expect to overturn Rep. Murphy’s narrow victory over Allen West. Rather, True the Vote wants the election board’s recount process to be made public so that similar debacles can be avoided in the future.

“This dramatic recount was an extraordinary example of how our elections can suffer systematic failure,” said Engelbrecht.

“We run the risk seeing episodes like this becoming ordinary if citizens do not demand answers and hold election officials accountable. The American people own the voting system — we have the right to ask tough questions when we witness the failure of one of America’s core functions,” she adds.

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University Allegedly Kicks Christian Club Off Campus Over ‘Non-Discrimination Policy’

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Photo Credit: Asian InterVarsity/Todd StarnesClashes between Christian clubs and college campuses have been heating up across the country, with numerous schools telling evangelical groups that they cannot require their members and leaders be believers. The latest debate is erupting at the University of Michigan, where the college is being accused of booting an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter off campus for requiring its leaders to be Christians.

According to Greg Jao, InterVarsity’s field director, the university gave the Asian chapter of the group two options — either reverse its constitution to be in compliance or leave campus. The problem apparently began last December when group members were brought before officials to discuss a problematic part of the Asian InterVarsity group’s constitution. The document required club leaders to sign a statement affirming their Christian faith — something the university said was a violation of its non-discrimination policy.

While students were given an option to submit a new constitution that complied with these rules, they decided to refrain from doing so and to stick with their values. From a practical standpoint, it is understandable why a faith-based club would want its leaders to share theological values, something that a statement of faith would ensure.

“The university is sending the message that religious voices are suspect and should be marginalized,” Jao told Fox News’ Todd Starnes. “I think it sends the message that the university does not understand the nature of religious beliefs and the convictions of religious students.”

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Karl Rove Declares War On Tea Party

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The battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party has begun. On one side is the Tea Party. On the other side stand Karl Rove and his establishment team, posing as tacticians while quietly undermining conservatism.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the “biggest donors in the Republican Party” have joined forces with Karl Rove and Steven J. Law, president of American Crossroads, to create the Conservative Victory Project. The Times reports that this new group will dedicate itself to “recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party’s effort to win control of the Senate.” The group points to candidates like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Richard Mourdock in Indiana as examples of Tea Party primary picks going sideways in major Senatorial battles.

But it is American Crossroads and its ilk that have run the GOP into the ground. Spending millions of dollars on useless 30,000-ft. advertising campaigns during the last election cycle, training candidates to soften conservatism in order to appeal to “moderates,” blowing up the federal budget under George W. Bush as a bipartisan tactic – all of those strategies led the party to a disastrous defeat in 2012. The Tea Party, which may nominate losers from time to time, also brought the Republicans their historic 2010 Congressional victory. If Tea Party candidates lose, it’s because they weren’t good candidates; if GOP establishment candidates lose, it’s because they weren’t good conservatives. The choice for actual conservatives should be easy.

But it isn’t. The Bush insider team that helped lead to the rise of Barack Obama insists that they, and only they, know the path to victory.

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Why Is Government Stockpiling Guns, Ammo?

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Photo Credit: WNDIs the U.S. government getting ready for a war we don’t know about?

And, if that’s why Washington is stockpiling massive amounts of ammunition (hollow points, by the way), why is Homeland Security doing the buying instead of the Defense Department?

I have some theories.

Many of you will remember a story I broke a long time ago – about presidential candidate Barack Obama’s little-noticed announcement that, if elected in 2008, he wanted to create a “civilian national security force” as big, as strong and as well-funded as the Defense Department.

Here’s what he actually said at a campaign stop in Colorado July 2, 2008: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

See video:

Could what we see happening now in the Department of Homeland Security be the beginning of Obama’s dream and our constitutional nightmare?

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Sign Of The Times: Congressional Appropriations Assignments Are No Longer Coveted

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As the story goes, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 asked Sen. Kenneth McKellar, then the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, to quietly provide $2 billion for a secret weapons lab, the Tennessee Democrat had a brief and quick response.

“Mr. President, I have just one question. Where in Tennessee do you want me to hide it?” McKellar said, according to congressional lore about Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a key part of the Manhattan Project.

It was just one instance among countless cases on Capitol Hill where appropriators — the lawmakers who hold the prized positions closest to the federal purse — found a pressing national priority fitting in neatly with local interests for economic development and the jobs that come with it.

From the funds longtime appropriator John P. Murtha, a Democrat, funneled to his hometown of Johnstown, Pa., by locating the National Drug Intelligence Center there to the federal dollars Harold Rogers, a Republican and now the House Appropriations chairman, steered toward the anti-drug nonprofit Operation Unite, which he helped found in his southern Kentucky district, the appropriations story has been one of political clout executed through the federal spending process.

That’s why legislators such as McKellar and Murtha would have been shocked at the decision Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, made at the start of the 113th Congress, when he gave up the chance to move up the seniority ladder on Appropriations for a seat on the tax-writing Finance Committee.

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Lawsuit Forces Chicago To Accept Anti-Jihad Bus Ads

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Kiichiro SatoThe Chicago Transit Authority has agreed to display plain-spoken anti-jihad ads on city buses, following a lawsuit by the American Freedom Law Center.

City officials initially rejected the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s anti-jihad ads, even after the city accepted bus ads that advertized a sanitized portrayal of jihad as exercise and education rather than warfare. The ads will be attached to 20 buses for $10,000.

Each ad includes a tagline “That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?”

The tagline is a direct response to a series of bus ads posted by a group of people affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Their December 2012 “MyJihad” public-relations campaign portrays Islamic war — jihad — as a peaceful exercise.

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The Ayatollah’s Goal

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Photo Credit: APIranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei believes his primary job “is to set Israel on fire,” according to Spain’s former national security adviser.

Khamenei made the controversial comments during a 2001 breakfast meeting with Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and Rafael Bardaji, Aznar’s former national security adviser.

Anzar, Bardaji, and several other Spanish officials pressed Khameini to explain his role in the Iranian government during the breakfast meeting.

“My job is to set Israel on fire,” Khamenei said.

Bardaji and his colleagues were shaken by the comments, which suggest that Khamenei’s anti-Israel bluster is more than just a rhetorical tactic.

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NRA Chief: Public Cannot ‘Trust’ White House On Gun Control

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Photo Credit: DUCKofD3ATHThe head of the National Rifle Association (NRA) said Sunday the public should not trust the White House to pursue limited changes to gun-control laws.

Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the NRA, accused the Obama administration of wanting to seek more restrictions on guns than they currently are saying, arguing that the White House was similarly deceptive on the president’s healthcare law.

“I think what they’ll do is they’ll turn this universal [background] check on the law-abiding into a universal registry on law-abiding people,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

When pressed by host Chris Wallace on the fact that the White House has said nothing about a universal registry, LaPierre responded, “And ‘ObamaCare’ wasn’t a tax until they needed it to be a tax. I don’t think you can trust these people.”

LaPierre was referring to the administration arguing the healthcare law amounts to a tax before the Supreme Court — an argument the high court agreed with in upholding the individual-mandate portion of the law as a valid use of taxing power.

Read more from this story HERE.