Politics

Days after Mitt Romney’s campaign announced his opposition to extending the wind production tax credit, Romney campaigned in Colorado, a swing state that supported 4,000-5,000 wind jobs in 2011. He included one gratuitous mention of renewable energy in his speech that ranked energy as his top priority, saying “I like renewables.” How he plans to grow renewables is unclear, since the production tax credit supports up to 37,000 wind jobs, and is set to expire at the end of 2012. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad had harsh words for Romney’s anti-wind position, which would affect the state’s 7,000 wind jobs: “It needs to be continued, not forever, but it does need to be continued for a while and the result is it’s been a very good thing for Iowa in terms of 20 percent of our energy is now generated by wind,” Branstad said. “We have a lot of farmers that receive rent from having wind turbines on their property and we have a lot of jobs associated with it.” [...] Branstad blamed “confusion” in ...

Now that Mitt Romney’s campaign has officially declared the candidate’s desire to kill tax credits for wind while maintaining tax credits for the mature oil and gas industries, Midwestern Republicans are not happy. Iowa Republican Representative Tom Latham said Romney’s decision “shows a lack of full understanding of how important the wind energy tax credit is for Iowa and our nation.” And Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the man working behind the scenes to get an extension of the tax credit for wind, said he thinks “people that didn’t know what they were doing said it.” In an interview with Radio Iowa today, Republican Governor Terry Branstad also had strong words for Romney’s campaign, saying they “need to get out here in the real world and find out what’s really going on” before abandoning support for the industry. The wind industry supports 7,000 jobs in Iowa and makes up 20 percent of the state’s electricity. Branstad said he’d like to speak with Romney personally about t...

That the Republican Party refuses to give up on its fight to maintain the high-income Bush tax cuts shows that the party’s ideology is divorced from economic evidence, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (D) said Tuesday. Despite the fact that the GOP’s trickle-down policies have led to stagnant wage growth and skyrocketing levels of inequality, ballooning debt, and weak job growth, Republicans cling to the belief that next time will be different, defending the Bush tax cuts from expiration at the end of the year and promising even larger unpaid-for tax cuts for the rich in the future. Republicans ignore the failures of “trickle down economics,” Strickland said in an interview with ThinkProgress, because they are “wedded to an ideology that is divorced from the real world”: WALDRON: Why is the Republican Party still attached to these policies even though we’re going on now three decades of evidence that they aren’t helping the middle class? STRICKLAND: Well, I think it’s being wedded to a...

Meteor, the company behind an application development framework of the same name, today announced $11.2 series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, with Matrix Partners also contributing. The investment follows Andreessen Horowitz’ record breaking $100 million investment in Github. The Meteor framework is free and open source and can be used for creating rich, Google Docs style applications in the browser. A preview was released last April. The company plans to monetize the product by selling enterprise support and services. Meteor was founded by ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis, MixApp co-founder Nick Martin and early Asana employee/MixApp co-founder Geoff Schmidt. David Greenspan, who co-founded AppJet (the company behind EtherPad) and went on to work on Google Wave, is another early employee. These are guys who know how to build richly interactive, real-time web apps. And they know painful it can be to develop modern, desktop-like apps for the browser. It takes a lot of work to b...

One day, you’re sitting at home enjoying a glass of wine by the fire. But you can’t completely relax — not when that blank wall space above the fireplace mantle continues to taunt you, begging for a piece of fine decorative art. Suddenly, a breakthrough! You’ve discovered the perfect solution to that dull, white wall space: a painting of a sloth, curled up in his tree with a bag of Cheetos. And you know the perfect place to commission such an outstanding piece: Etsy. Comprised of creative, crafty and often kooky shop owners, the ecommerce platform houses nearly any handcrafted item you could possibly imagine. SEE ALSO: 10 Weirdest Things for Sale on eBay Whether you seek a wig inspired by My Little Pony or a dinosaur transformed into a cactus planter, Etsy most surely has what you’re looking for. And if not, a handy Etsy seller is most certainly willing to create it for you. (Make sure that sloth has four claws, please. ) Scroll through the gallery to learn about some of Etsy’s most f...