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GM filed nine new trademark applications with the USPTO on October 27 for Electra E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6, E7, E8 and E9 names. Buick will launch its first electric vehicle in 2024 as part of the brand's plan to offer a fully electric lineup by 2030. The first-ever Buick model to feature a battery-electric powertrain will carry the Electra name, but it looks like all future EVs from the GM-owned brand will also get "Electra" in their names. GM Authority discovered nine new trademark filings with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for Electra E1 through...

European Union leaders failed Thursday to back a plan to make the bloc’s economy carbon neutral by 2050 in spite of promises to protesters across the continent to fight harder against climate change. Ahead of a U.N. meeting in the fall, the proposal was relegated to a non-binding footnote in the final statement of Thursday’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels. “For a large majority of Member States, climate neutrality must be achieved by 2050,” the footnote read. However, for the change in approach to become an official target, all 28 EU countries need to back the change. The non-decision...

California residents working for companies like Lyft and Uber would get the rights of employees entitled to a minimum wage and workers compensation under a law the state Assembly passed on Wednesday. The sweeping bill, which now goes to the Senate, carries new standards defining whether workers are employees or independent contractors, upending how workers are treated in industries from trucking to the burgeoning gig economy. Under those standards, for example, workers could only be classified as independent contractors if they are free from the control or direction of an employer and they do work outside a company’s usual course...

President Obama has categorically ruled out a constitutional challenge to the US debt ceiling since I wrote yesterday’s blog. Spokesman Jay Carney said the White House cannot invoke the 14th Amendment, which stipulates that US federal debt “shall not be questioned”. “It’s not available. The Constitution makes clear that Congress has the authority, not the president, to borrow money and only Congress can increase the statutory debt ceiling. That is just a reality,” he said. Obama had previously been vague about this, saying White House lawyers were “not persuaded that is a winning argument”. It is a revealing turn of...

For far too long, American conservatives have become accustomed to "blaming" the destruction of American jobs (rightfully) on unions and lawyers. It's all true, but while it's true - America is falling apart. Blaming those who caused the problem won't prevent the destruction of our great nation.

Future Fuels: Our secretary of energy pushes bio-refineries and windmills to oil executives at an energy conference as the administration announces a three-year offshore drilling ban. This is a policy for economic suicide. They don't qualify as an official group of victims, but carbon-Americans, as they have been called, did not have much to cheer about last week, when Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed CERAWeek 2010, a premier industry conference hosted by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. With an economy struggling to regain sound footing, Chu advocated a starvation diet devoid of additional fossil fuels that are to remain under...

You Lie. Two days ago Barack Obama told the American public that trimming the budget deficit was as important as creating jobs. This was after he tripled the budget deficit in 2009.video here But that was Saturday… Today Barack Obama proposed a record budget that will increase the US budget deficit by at least $100 billion dollars. Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget will cause the deficit to skyrocket to a record $1.6 trillion. President Barack Obama will propose on Monday a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011 that projects the deficit will shoot up to a record $1.6 trillion this year,...

While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president. In 2000 and 2001, while Barack Obama served as a board member for a Chicago-based charitable foundation, he helped to fund a pioneering carbon trading exchange that is likely to fill a critical role in the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme that President Obama is now trying to push rapidly through Congress. During those two years, the Joyce Foundation gave nearly...

The head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America reported that 40 positions may be cut as the denomination struggles financially. "These have been very painful days in this organization," ELCA Presiding Bishop the Rev. Mark S. Hanson told the Church Council Friday, according to the ELCA News Service. Lutherans are looking to reduce their 2010 budget by 10 percent due to decreased giving over the past 30 years, the economic downturn, and the decision by some congregations to withhold funding. Several congregations have decided to cut all funding to the ELCA following the controversial vote in August by the...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

Climate Change: Channeling King Canute, G-8 leaders agree to wreck the world's economy, and ours, by pledging to prevent temperatures from rising more than 4 degrees by 2050. What if the Earth has other plans?Canute was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. He was The One of his time. He once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. As the story goes, he was exercising his ego when in fact he was giving his followers a dose of reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. We were...

Tektronix said this afternoon that it plans to export unspecified Oregon production work to Shanghai, China by the end of next year, the latest in a series of upheavals as Tek adapts to a new owner and the withering economic downturn. It's another blow for Oregon's faltering high-tech sector, which employs fewer people today than at any point in the past 13 years. Though Tektronix did not specify how many Oregon jobs it will eliminate, employees said that more than 400 currently work in Building 19, the main manufacturing facility at Tek's headquarters campus near Beaverton. Gov. Ted Kulongoski's office...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Vice President Al Gore, a leading voice on climate change, urged lawmakers Friday to overcome partisan differences and pass legislation to curb greenhouse gases. [snip] Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the committee's ranking Republican, argued that the proposed "cap-and-trade" system to cut greenhouse gases would cost tens of billions of dollars a year. "How in the world can we have a (pollution) trade system that doesn't cost jobs and doesn't cost the economy?" he said. "I think the cost of energy will come down when we make this transition to renewable energy," countered Gore. He predicted...

GOVERNMENT'S unceasing recourse to one economic destruction measure after another belatedly forces an inevitable conclusion that, albeit for some inexplicable motive, it is resolutely determined to destroy the Zimbabwean economy in its entirety. No one can be that stupid as to resort to one catastrophic economic policy after another to the extent that the Zimbabwean Government has done over the last 11 years, unless it is with the deliberate intent to achieve a total implosion of the entirety of the economy. With actions ranging from extreme profligacy, governmental spending being continuously at astronomic levels beyond the nation's means, to the...

The folly of Kyoto National Post: Editorial Published: Saturday, February 10, 2007 Pablo Rodriguez, a Liberal MP from Quebec, has a private member's bill proceeding through the House of Commons that has the backing of all three opposition parties. If it passes, as appears likely, the resultant Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act would require Ottawa to honour Canada's Kyoto commitments and reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third over just the next five years. Note: this illustration ran on the front page of today's paper,with an accompanying article, effectively heralding this editorial. Working Canadians and taxpayers...

(AP) AKRON, Ohio -- Workers at 16 Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plants in 10 states and Canada went on strike Thursday after the world's third largest tire maker and the steelworkers union failed to agree on a new labor contract. The union said the company's latest proposal would have included two plant closings. "The company left us with no option," said Ron Hoover, executive vice president of the United Steelworkers of America, which represents the Goodyear workers. "We cannot allow additional plant closures after the sacrifices we made three years ago to help this company survive." The old contract...