Two weeks ago, Congressman Loebsack joined with Rep. Steve King to lead 118 bipartisan members of the House of Representatives in calling for the extension of the Production Tax Credit for wind energy. Earlier this week, he joined Sens. Grassley and Udall and Rep. King in authoring an op-ed entitled "Don't Pull the Plug: Wind Energy Empowers America" to continue to call attention to the need to extend the PTC, which will provide the needed stability for the wind energy industry.

Loebsack has been a longtime proponent of the wind energy industry, including being named a USA Wind Champion by the American Wind Energy Association for his ongoing support of wind energy in Iowa and his work to extend the PTC. He has visited wind energy plants across Iowa to see firsthand the need for stability that an extension of the PTC would provide and has repeatedly urged the House and Senate leadership to protect these good Iowa jobs. 

A copy of the op-ed follows.

Don't Pull the Plug: Wind Energy Empowers America  

By Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Mark Udall, Rep. Steve King & Rep. Dave Loebsack  

April 1, 2014

Momentum is building to extend expired tax provisions that lapsed Dec. 31. Of the 55 expired tax breaks on the table, wind energy incentives are among those left hanging. The industry faces instability and uncertainty caused by the expiration of the investment and production tax credits.  

We're working to build bipartisan, bicameral and regional alliances to secure a victory for America's 21st century clean energy policy. So far, 144 lawmakers have stood with us and hard-working families in our effort to support onshore and offshore wind energy developments in the tax extenders package.  

Specifically, we are pressing leaders in the House and Senate to prioritize extensions of the job-creating investment and production tax credits for wind energy. This federal tax policy has helped to launch a carbon-free energy source and diversify America's portfolio of homegrown, alternative sources of energy. The tax credits have helped to support 85,000 U.S. jobs; trigger $105 billion in private sector investment; reduce the carbon footprint by displacing carbon-emitting energy with clean generation wind energy (U.S. wind power capacity of more than 60,000 megawatts avoids 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of taking 17 million cars off the road); and, harness an inexhaustible source of affordable, domestic electricity for consumers. 

   

Opponents of wind energy tax incentives argue the industry doesn't need any government support, yet there are plenty of tax policies for various industries that have been on the books for decades longer than those for wind. If one measure is on the table for potential removal, all of them should be on the table. Everything deserves consideration on its merits, and wind energy stands up to scrutiny.  

   

Technology, tax incentives and private investment work to strengthen the renewable energy sector's position in the free marketplace and power America's carbon-free energy policies forward. Consider that 72 percent of a wind turbine's value today is made in the United States, compared to 25 percent in 2005. Over the past few decades, wind energy in the United States has changed the economic and energy landscape with nearly 900 utility-scale wind projects on the nation's electricity grid and more than 550 wind-related manufacturing facilities.  

 

Wind farms and/or factories have cropped up in all 50 states, putting people to work in good-paying jobs, diversifying farm and ranch income with an organic, drought- and weed-resistant cash crop, revitalizing rural communities and creating pollution-free electricity for millions of homes and businesses across the country.

Under one estimate, if the United States reaches 20 percent of wind-generated electricity, carbon emissions by the electricity sector would fall by up to 25 percent. That's the equivalent of taking 140 million vehicles off the road. In fact, at 27.4 percent, Iowa leads the nation, powering the equivalent of 1.3 million homes - Colorado is not far behind, powering roughly a million homes.

Critics looking for additional proof that wind energy tax incentives make good policy and good politics need to consider that wind energy is good for consumers, constituents and taxpayers. Wind energy projects operate in 70 percent of congressional districts. They require no oil spill liability fund to clean up environmental disasters. The U.S. taxpayer doesn't have to pay for catastrophic insurance as with nuclear power.

But despite its successes in the last two decades, the still-emerging wind industry is working to rebound after setbacks from the uncertainty of expiring tax policy. It suffered 4,500 job losses in 2012 within its manufacturing sector as orders and investment dwindled. Investment dropped from $25 billion to $2 billion.

And this debate is not taking place within a vacuum. A failure to renew wind energy tax credits not only jeopardizes U.S. manufacturing and our pursuit of energy security, but it also threatens U.S. leadership in the global energy race. If Congress pulls the rug out from under wind energy firms, other places like China are more than willing to step into the breach.

The United States can't afford to pull the plug on wind energy tax incentives that foster responsible environmental stewardship, encourage entrepreneurs to innovate clean-energy technologies and investors to finance the job-creating infrastructure that delivers clean electricity to America's homes and businesses.

Grassley is a Republican from Iowa. Udall is a Democrat from Colorado. King is a Republican from Iowa. Loebsack is a Democrat from Iowa.

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DAVENPORT, IA - February 28th, 2014 - Small businesses have been drawn to VoIP technology because of the substantial cost savings they gain when making the switch. However, as VoIP has continued to evolve over the years and moved into the "cloud", small businesses have begun to leverage VoIP in new ways to gain competitive advantages in their respective industries. The growth of virtual companies and remote workforces has brought everyone to the same playing field and customers across every industry are looking to work with credible, prestigious, large companies. Here are some ways in which cloud voice can make your business look bigger than it is today.

Your Office Just Got a Receptionist You Don't Have to Pay For  - Cloud based phone systems today include features that completely eliminate the need for a receptionist. Systems can be configured in order to route calls directly to the intended employee via a unified auto-attendant. Also, if your office doesn't have a receptionist, systems can distribute incoming calls among specific groups. This goes beyond simply sending sales calls to salespeople and admin calls to support employees. For example, you can use Caller ID to send specific accounts directly to the CEO's cell phone. Or if none of the salespeople answer an incoming call, it goes to the Sales Manager's cell phone.

Unlimited Locations, 1 Office Number - With the rampant growth of startups and virtual companies, many businesses need to have a communications system that supports both in-house and remote workers while maintaining a professional image across the board. With cloud voice, calls to the main office can be sent out anywhere simply by asking the customer to dial an extension, just like how large corporations are doing.

Seamless Conference Calls and Lightning-Fast Voicemails - Conference calls or online meetings are often a source of frustration for most companies. This is due largely to the tendency to bolt-on collaboration tools in the hopes that things will work smoothly during the meeting. However, they rarely ever do. Cloud voice solutions enable businesses to host conferences during meetings so you can be "face-to-face" even when you can't be in the same location. Furthermore, all technology is hosted through a single solution so when it's time to host a meeting, businesses can rest assured that the technology will perform as promised. Another way in which cloud voice accelerates collaboration is through its ability to convert voicemails into MP3 files, which can be sent as email attachments. Additionally, voice calls can be converted to text and vice versa for easier retrieval and communication.

Collaborate on the Fly. - Today's employees need to be constantly connected. Collaboration can't always be planned out in advance and when a good idea strikes, everyone needs to be in the loop. Cloud technology has made it easy for employees to see from their desktop what their co-workers are doing and how to best access them (e.g. instant message, voice, or email) so communication can happen immediately.

There are many advantages to moving a company's using cloud voice. For small business, the rewards are plentiful because they can utilize the same technology as large enterprises for a fraction of the cost and make them look just as big.

ABOUT MIDLAND COMMUNICATIONS

Midland Communications began more than 60 years ago in 1946 as the Worldwide Marketing Arm of Victor-Animagraph Projectors. In 1977 a communications division was formed due to a partnership with NEC America. Today, As a distributor of NEC America, for 33 years, Midland Communications has a customer base of more than 3,000 satisfied customers that include general businesses, government agencies, Universities, colleges, hospitals, and hotels.
Midland provides a wide range of communication services including VOIP, PBX and key systems, Wide Area and Local Area networking, computers, Computer integration, voice mail, CCIS, and video conferencing and paging systems. Our philosophy is simple, provide quality products at a fair price, backed by an average emergency response time of twenty minutes, and the best service in the industry. For more information on Midland Communications, call (563) 326-1237 or visit www.midlandcom.com.

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By: Marsha Friedman

If you want to be visible in today's marketplace, you absolutely must have a presence on social media.

But there are so many from which to choose nowadays! In addition to the biggies like Facebook and Twitter, we have lots of newcomers, including Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. Additionally, some of the older platforms have undergone major changes in recent months, which affect how effective they are for different functions.

How to know which platforms will best meet your needs?

I asked Alex Hinojosa, our vice president for media operations at EMSI Public Relations, to share some tips for helping you decide.

First, he says, if you plan to handle your social media marketing yourself, try different platforms and use ones with features you enjoy. That will help ensure you stick with it, and may lead you to create inspired content that's more likely to be shared.

Be on at least two platforms, he says. (If one's mostly personal stuff for family and friends, it doesn't count!)

Here's Alex's rundown on the advantages and disadvantages of the four most popular platforms:

• Facebook: This works best if you're an individual interacting on a personal level, as opposed to a business. Artists, authors, public speakers and certain other professionals may benefit from having potential customers get to know them on a more personal basis.

A downside to Facebook is that, in an effort to make money for shareholders, it has begun requiring users to pay for the potentially unlimited visibility that used to be free.

• Twitter: Posts are limited to 140 characters - about the length of a headline - and can include a photo or link to a website. This is a great network for getting to know people without sharing a lot of personal information. Plus, you can follow whomever you want, and anyone can follow you.

"It allows you to easily connect with prospects and potential associates, so it's great for businesses," Alex says. "People use it primarily as a source of news, which makes it easy to interact with people you don't know - you have something to talk about."

Twitter is now aggressively cleaning house of "robot" followers - dummy accounts sold for cheap that make it look like the buyer has a huge following. Even if you don't buy robots, you may end up with some as followers.

"Don't buy followers and delete any of your followers that don't appear real. Twitter limits how many followers you can have, so you don't want to waste them on 'bots," Alex says.

• LinkedIn: The social network for professionals is a good place to find and meet people within and outside your industry. People can easily see your credentials and endorse your skills. The background information on your profile page - where you went to school, other companies you've been associated with - provides great fodder for finding common ground with strangers and building relationships.

• Google+: The Google search engine favors anything posted on Google+, which is great for SEO. It also combines the best features of Facebook and Twitter, including photo sharing and categorizing content using hashtags (#).

"Right now, Google+ can be anything you want it to be," Alex says. "It's still new, just more than 2 years old, so it's still defining itself. I think it will be the next social networking giant."

As Alex suggests, if you plan to handle your social media marketing yourself, take into consideration the modes of networking that you enjoy along with the best platforms to meet your needs.

If you have limited experience in social media, jump into the platforms that seem to best align with your goals. You'll have a learning curve, but a little practice goes a long way. And you'll soon wonder why you didn't get more involved a long time ago!

About Marsha Friedman

Marsha Friedman is a 24-year veteran of the public relations industry. She is the CEO of EMSI Public Relations (www.emsincorporated.com), a national firm that provides PR strategy and publicity services to businesses, professional firms, entertainers and authors. Marsha is the author of Celebritize Yourself and can also be heard weekly on her Blog Talk Radio Show, The PR Insider. Follow her on Twitter: @marshafriedman.

by Kara Kerwin

For being the U.S.'s most-watched live event ever, Super Bowl XLVIII was pretty uninspiring.

What was inspiring, however, was the uplifting ad Microsoft ad featuring former NFL safety and ALS patient Steve Gleason, along with other people with disabilities, using innovative new technologies to make life easier. Gleason's use of a Microsoft product called the Surface gave him the ability to provide voicing for the commercial in heart-rending fashion.

The ad opens with a simple question on the screen as Gleason (in tech-aided voice-over) asks: "What is technology?" As the answers come, "...it unites us..." "...It inspires us..." "...It has taken us to places we never thought we would go..." emotional scenes of tech in action are shown, including a child running on a pair of prosthetic legs, a deaf woman excitedly using an implant to hear a doctor, and a elderly man once blind now able to use a computer efficiently, exclaiming, "Now I can do whatever I want!" The ad concludes with a simple tagline: 'Empowering us all.'

It's an effective promo. Even though a vast majority of us don't know the technological workings of helping a blind man see, who can argue with the ultimate outcome? It's common sense, really.

As I add another view to the two million the video already has on YouTube, I catch a classroom?pause, rewind, and instant replay. It must have been just a millisecond's worth of a clip, but it's there. A classroom full of students ecstatically shares a lesson with another group of their peers remotely through video chat. "Wow,"I think to myself. "That's common sense too, right?" Sadly, America doesn't treat it as such, at least not in implementation. The concept is agreeable and runs seamlessly with the rest of the ad's message. For all the first-down tech innovation we apply to our lives' every facet, we fail to take the education of our nation's children with us to the end zone. Each generation of our students will have lives more immersed in tech than the last. America's first-graders were born after the iPhone was released.

"What can it do?" the commercial asks.

Ninth-grader Vincent Zhou, the 2013 U.S. Figure Skating Junior Men's National Champion, is an online student who one day might be a part of the same Olympic games that are happening now in Sochi, Russia. Vincent is also among the three hundred thousand U.S. students who attended school online last year, and he knows full well what it can do. Vincent goes to Capistrano Connections Academy in California. Young athletes like Vincent are interested in digital learning, whether wholly online or blended, so they can balance a busy training schedule, just one of many reasons families around the country make the decision to take an alternative approach to education.

Online public schools mix typical class structure with the ease of online learning. With no tuition requirement for most online schools, over thirty states offered full-time online schools in multiple districts, respectively, at the end of 2012. Some online schools belong to a local school district, like Appleton School District in northern Wisconsin. Through online schooling, a student can attend school in Appleton despite living over 100 miles away. No wonder over 60 percent of Americans support digital and blended learning.

Students who graduate from the Ohio Connections Academy, a school authorized by the Ohio Council of Community Schools, receive the exact same diploma as their traditional school peers. Connections is one of a growing number of national educators providing online resources and curriculum to public and private schools across all community demographics. At Connections, parents and teachers work together to provide several lines of support at home and elsewhere. Schools like Connections provide online portals and digital tools to help students stay organized with everything they need at their fingertips.

Nexus Academy, a blended learning educator with locations across multiple states, uses daily online lectures as students do most of their schoolwork independently, meeting regularly to discuss progress and set unique goals with teachers and parents, through face-to-face meetings and video calls.

Construction for a brand new Wheaton High School is underway in Silver Spring, MD as part of Montgomery County's new plan to infuse "new innovative strategies" into students' education. But the innovation that Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr defines as "embracing the new" is in stark contrast to the common sense applications from that Super Bowl commercial. The recognition for the need is there. Will we continue to build new housing for old, tired methods, or will we make education adapt to our students, what they need, and the lives they will live beyond schooling?

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Kara Kerwin is President of The Center for Education Reform, a K-12 education policy and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC.