I’m filling in from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. today on the Moon Griffon Show. My show, the Joe Cunningham Show, airs 3-4 p.m. every weekday on NewsTalk 96.5 KPEL. The daily show notes offer you a look into the topics of the day and the links to the top stories and my own writings on the state of politics in Louisiana and around the country. Follow me on Twitter at @JoePCunningham and Like the Joe Cunningham Show on Facebook. You can also subscribe to the Joe Cunningham Show podcast on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Amazon.
Propping Up the EV Industry
The Wall Street Journal has a scathing editorial out this morning on the electric vehicle industry and how the Biden administration is propping it up.
Congress’s ethanol mandate offers a case study in the political difficulty of weaning industries off government support—and how regulators can revamp programs to serve new political ends. Politicians of both parties rallied around the renewable fuel standard (RFS) in 2005 as a way to boost U.S. energy independence and reduce CO2 emissions. It has done the opposite.
The RFS requires refiners to blend increasing amounts of biofuels into their products. Refiners keep crashing into the so-called blend wall—the amount of ethanol U.S. vehicles and energy infrastructure can handle. Ethanol blends higher than 10% can corrode engines and gas-station tanks. As vehicles have become more fuel efficient, it has become harder for refiners to comply.
Large refiners have started producing “advanced” biofuels while smaller ones must buy credits known as Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs). Increasing compliance costs have driven several small refiners to shut down. A refining shortage, especially on the East Coast, is a major reason prices for gasoline and diesel shot up early in the summer far more than for crude.
The Biden EPA’s back-door EV subsidy will compound these problems. EPA is proposing to increase the overall RFS to 22.68 billion gallons in 2025 from 20.63 billion this year. The cellulosic ethanol component—which EPA in the past has repeatedly revised down because production has fallen far short of its ethereal mandates—will climb to 2.13 billion gallons from 630 million.
The whole scheme should, as the editorial puts it, “win a Rube Goldberg award.” The way bureaucrats have to write rules in order to make their plans work always helps pet industries, like the EV and clean industries, but ultimately hurt American consumers.
JBE Screws Over State Employees, Small Pharmacies
In a move that has bipartisan opposition, John Bel Edwards and Jay Dardenne have sided with CVS, allowing the major pharmacy chain to have a contract with the Office of Group Benefits that would take state employees’ business from smaller pharmacies.
The problem is with the reimbursements through state insurance. The new contract reduces those reimbursements, which is fine for a major corporation like CVS Caremark, but cripples smaller, independent pharmacies.
Louisiana State Senator Heather Cloud will join me at 9:30 a.m. to talk about the issue.
Katie Porter Fires Staffer Over COVID
This might be the worst thing out of a U.S. Congresswoman’s office in quite some time. Rep. Katie Porter of California fired one of her staffers for giving her COVID. But, we’re also not sure who gave COVID to who. On Thursday, leaked messages showed Porter texting the staffer, letting them know they were fired. But the story got so much worse when new information came out last night.
Later, it was revealed the person Porter had treated like absolute dirt was Sash Georgiades, a Wounded Warrior Fellow who was operating as a veteran liaison inside the congresswoman’s office. According to Georgiades, after Porter chastised her and banned her from the office, the two never interacted again.
But while all that was bad enough, a resurfaced video has managed to make this story much worse. In it, Georgiades appears with Porter, with the latter proclaiming that “we need to be backing up our gratitude for veterans with action.” The biggest problem? The video was was published two weeks after Georgiades was blamed for giving Porter COVID-19 and viciously banned from the office.
When you put all this together, it’s pretty grotesque. Porter treated Georgiades like garbage, kicking her out of the office permanently and claiming the staffer gave her COVID-19 (something Porter couldn’t possibly know). Yet two weeks later, Porter put up a previously-filmed video with Georgiades bragging about the congresswoman’s supposed concern for veterans.
Headlines of the Day
The Left Has Learned Nothing in the Biden Era (New York Post)
Trump Tax Returns Released by House Democrats (New York Times)
Democratic Congress Was Disappointment for Immigration Activists (The Hill)
Memo to House GOP: It's All About the Policy, Stupid (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
A tiny paper broke the George Santos scandal, but no one paid attention (Washington Post)
The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise (TIME)
DHS Releases 1363 Illegal Alien Convicts From Custody Into US Communities—in 3 Months (RedState)