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The [government] subsidization of alternative fuels—non-petroleum fuels—has already added a great deal of cost for gasoline consumers here in the U.S.

To further mandate these uneconomic sources that cannot compete—even with heavy subsidy—would make gasoline prices higher and hurt consumers. When the market is ready—if it ever is—for such fuels, then they will not need subsidy. Meanwhile, the much heavier use of ethanol in the United States is affecting world prices—not only U.S. gasoline prices, but world prices for those consumables that use corn. And the planting of so much more corn here has displaced planting of other crops, so that there are other indirect effects. And they’re all negative.

[…]

The use of tax money to prop up these uneconomic sources of fuel is itself a negative for consumers. ... The use of ethanol, despite all that subsidy, makes gasoline prices higher than they otherwise would be, through the difficulty of achieving EPA regulations and the final gasoline product, and through the requirement from the 2005 energy bill that minimal volumes of ethanol are sold. ... It’s even been shown that the cost of tortillas in Mexico has been affected by our new government-mandated consumption of ethanol, which has raised the cost of corn.

Sadly, the green media aren’t interested in sharing such opinions about ethanol. Nor are they willing to tell the truth about the following:

I think that there has been friendly as well as unfriendly brainwashing taking place. And when I say friendly and unfriendly, I’m talking about decades of extremist views that have now achieved mainstream acceptance. And the No. 1 item among those affecting current oil politics in Washington is the boogeyman, also known as global warming.

I don’t accept it as established fact, nor do I accept that it would be caused by petroleum consumption, nor do I accept that the human species should not affect its environment. So even if it were someday to be shown to have some small effect on the environment, I see no crime. In fact, taking into account the many, many millions of people around the world that envy our way of life, it would seem more humanitarian to wish them the kind of plentiful petroleum products and vehicles ... that we enjoy ... to lift themselves out of [a] backward, poor way of life.

In reality, there are many international economists that share Lundberg’s view on this issue. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to hear their voices over the media’s manmade global warming din.

Read the whole thing.

Enough said.  Generally speaking, something that requires subsidies ends up costing us more than it returns to us.  In other words, it’s a bad investment.

I want to start with the premise that roughly a million Nader voters caused Gore to lose the election.  They saw what the rest of us see now--that Al Gore was a non-charismatic puppet of the Corporate Whore that was and is the Democrat Party.  The Noam Chomsky’s on the radical left chose to support Nader.  Their grassroots people and A-list Celebs like Eddie Vedder campaigned and raised funds for Nader, not Al Gore.  These folks voted against Mr. Inconvenient Truth for the “GREEN” Candidate.

So let’s look at the Utopia that could have been if not for the Nader voters:

1.  We would sign Kyoto and the world would be 2 degrees on average cooler now because we would have cut greenhouse emissions.
2.  The economy would have continued upwards on the Clinton trajectory and the Dow would be at 20,000 instead of 14,000.
3.  9-11 would not have happened because Al Gore would have listened to his advisors unlike Bush.
4.  OBL would have been killed with a cruise missile instead of an invasion of Afghanistan.
5.  Saddam would have been toppled by several cruise missiles or would have stopped taking OFF money and stopped his weapons programs voluntarily.
6.  The Israelis and Palestinians would have continued to meet at Camp David and Gore would have continued Clinton’s legacy of world peace.
7.  Because of the above, the invasion of Iraq and the 3,500 American Servicemen would never have died.
8.  Gore would have been an incumbent in 2004 and the resulting wave of prosperity and giddiness from the economy rolling along would have swept him into a second term and given the Dems back the House and Senate in 2002.
9.  Because the Government would not have had taxcuts for the rich under Bush, the gap between rich and poor would be narrowed leading to prosperity for all.
10. No Patriot Act.

I am downright pissed that the folks at Daily Kos and DU that supported the radical left agenda of Ralph Nader destroyed my Utopian America by keeping us from completing all of the Above.

Clearly the loathing for Bush should be self loathing for their own support of Nader as well as for their lack of understanding just how Green and great Mr. Inconvenient Truth and Mr. Live Aid is. 

If every problem in America and the world is our cowboy Boy King Chimpy McHitlerburton idiot Godbag from Texas, I would simply hold a mirror to the faces of the most radical and far left voters that cast a vote AGAINST Al Gore, Kyoto, and the Democrats in 2000.

An item from Fox News ... coming soon to a school board near you:

A teenage girl banned from wearing a chastity ring in class lost a legal challenge against her former school at Britain’s High Court Monday.

Lydia Playfoot, 16, had argued that the ban at the Millais School in Horsham, about 40 miles south of London, was an “unlawful interference” with her right to express her Christian faith…

Playfoot wears a ring as a sign of her commitment to abstinence from sex until marriage. Many Christian teenagers worldwide wear the chastity rings, which were inspired by “The Silver Ring Thing,” an abstinence program launched in the United States in 1996.

As bad as this sort of idiotarian policy might seem, here’s the real shocker in all this politically correct bigotry:

The school had said the ring fell outside its uniform policy… (a policy) which makes exceptions for Muslims wearing head scarves and Sikhs wearing steel bracelets.

In his syndicated column, Robert Novak details how congressional Democrats attack those who try to hold them to their public promises about “draining the swamp” and “reforming” the congressional earmark process… especially if the target is an insolent, young, Southern Republican with the audacity to think that Democrat leaders should actually live up to their commitments.

The reason House members voted to deprive a colleague of pork for his district is the identity of that colleague: Rep. Patrick McHenry, a second-term Republican from Cherryville, in the western Piedmont of North Carolina, who at 31 is the youngest member of the House…

The new Democratic majority’s leadership, which routinely supports earmarks, cracked the whip against this one, apparently in the spirit of political revenge. A conservative firebrand, McHenry had immobilized the House and humiliated the Democrats by leading GOP parliamentary maneuvers to force transparency regarding earmarks, previously hidden by both parties…

Demonstrating the cynicism of their pretensions toward earmark reform, Democrats also got even with the bumptious McHenry.

Novak then goes on to list some of the earmarks brazenly approved by the House.  Leading the parade is the Democrats’ “King of Earmarks” Congressman Jack Murtha, followed closely by Democrat Alan Mollohan, currently under FBI investigation for corruption and misappropriation of taxpayer funds.

Read the whole sorry thing.

ANGIE CHUANG

The Oregonian Staff

Picker puts steel in immigration debate

Labor - A mechanical grape harvester could be the answer to a shortage of farmworkers in Oregon’s vineyards

Surrounded by shiny new tractors, Carl Capps spends most days talking about horsepower, hydraulics and transmissions. He paid little attention to anti- and pro-immigrant-legalization activists who marched at the state Capitol.

Then the immigration debate came to him last fall, after he sold a quarter-million-dollar machine that harvests wine grapes—the first in the Willamette Valley.

The New Holland Braud grape harvester can do the work of 40 handpickers in a fraction of the time.

Advertisement





Suddenly, vineyard owners were calling Capps to schedule demonstrations, saying they couldn’t cope with worsening worker shortages—or immigration raids. Their concerns were heightened after a U.S. Senate immigration bill that would have offered legal status for up to 900,000 undocumented agricultural workers failed, and immigration officers detained nearly 200 workers at a Portland produce processing plant.

Oregonians for Immigration Reform, a restrictionist group, touted the European machine as a beacon of a future without illegal labor.

“As soon as word about this got out, the immigration issue was the first thing that came up,” Capps said. “The bloggers are all over it. They’re saying, ‘Finally, see? We told you that you could get by without all this immigration.’ “

The harvester is a powerful and controversial symbol as Oregon and the nation struggle with the economic realities of immigration. As public pressure drives a border crackdown and increased enforcement, farmers nationwide face labor shortages as high as 30 percent to 50 percent during harvest. Further complicating matters, large numbers of former migrant laborers have switched to construction jobs for the higher pay and year-round stability.

The high-tech machine—which uses “shaker rod” technology to coax grapes off the vine into molded silicon rubber collection baskets—may herald a future of all-mechanized agriculture.

“Oregon doesn’t have the scale or the research to make an immediate leap,” said Brent Searle, special assistant to the director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture. “But in farming, it’s always taken a crisis to make big changes.

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Read the whole thing. Free registration required to view entire article.

The so-called “cheap labor” provided by the invaders is actually expensive; it prevents progress in mechanization, which leads to long term inefficiency. If “cheap labor” is so important, why don’t we still have slaves picking cotton? Cheap labor isn’t really cheap.

Here’s something to ponder:

Public Approves of Faith in Politics

There are two things about this that bother me immensely.

First off, since when is the liberal left interested in religion unless they’re just trying to pander to a base of people who they’re seeking the vote from? I mean, after all, what part of the democratic platform works well with religious people? Are the dems willing to stand before the Christians and tell them how abortions and evolution have nothing to do with religion?

Second off, would a story like this even have been printed if the democrats weren’t involved? After all, isn’t the usual rhetoric from the left that church and state should remain separated? If the democratic candidates weren’t out there trying to appease the religious crowd, would there have been a story at all?

It’s all very hypocritical. I’m not even religious and I’m still irked by the whole thing. If any of these democratic candidates could stick to their guns without constantly flip-flopping all over the place while they try to appeal to every voting base out there, I might have speck of respect fore them...Well, maybe anyway.

In the Democrat Party’s rush to lose the war in Iraq, let us not forget how they used to talk.

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Friday, January 20, 1961:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Saying such a thing would nowadays would get him drummed out of the party. And that’s a damn shame.

Is it just me? Or is there a cottage industry in cranking out self-promoting quasi-political music videos this year?

So, the top headline of my RSS feeds reads:

“Japan quake causes nuke plant leak, fire”

Which to me sounds pretty ominous. After all, wouldn’t a leak and a fire at a nuclear power plant be a really bad thing? Well, apparently that is what the media wanted us to feel, because the truth was much less ominous than the headlines…

Apparently the leak released one-billionth the legal limit of radioactive material and the fire was actually a transformer that started on fire - not part of the reactor assembly.

I know we all know that the media bias is out of control and that they thrive on panic… But at times like this it seems that they take it way too far.

I think she is what made it funny to me
Please note that this kid has a 6 point harness on which is more than race car drivers wear. HE IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE! Besides, he is fine but I get the feeling that this adult with him has had prior experience with him being a ... well, just watch it

Kid Almost Falls Out of Ride - Watch more free videos

Noel Sheppard

Americans are likely not familiar with Sir Antony Jay, but may become so soon given the knighted Brit’s just-released book entitled “Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer” in which he explains why media are liberally biased.

An excerpt of the book was published by Britain’s Telegraph Sunday, and, much like Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” gave a first-hand account as to what makes a television network lean so strongly to the left.

In fact, in an era when liberals are carping and whining about conservative talk radio, Jay’s book should be required reading (h/t Hot Air, emphasis added throughout):

[...]

It is of particular interest to me because for nine years (1955-1964) I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Macmillan’s premiership, and I do not think my ex-colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters. But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it.

[...]



In Jay’s opinion, media members “look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed,” and “see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.”

[...]

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world. We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. Some people called us arrogant; looking back, I am afraid I cannot dispute the epithet.

We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say ‘’Tesco’’ to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, “Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers”. The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers every day does not show up on the media liberal radar.

For those unfamiliar, Tesco is the leading grocery chain in Great Britain, and, in fact, is the fourth largest retail outlet in the world behind Wal-Mart, Carrefour of France, and Home Depot. As such, substitute Wal-Mart for Tesco in the above paragraph, and it is virtually the identical sentiments that American media have for that retailer.

[...]

We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism - and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible.

[...]

It is not so much that their ideas and arguments are harebrained and impracticable: some of their causes are in fact admirable. The trouble - you might even say the tragedy - is that their implementation by governments eager for media approval has progressively damaged our institutions. Media liberal pressure has prompted a stream of laws, regulations and directives to champion the criminal against the police, the child against the school, the patient against the hospital, the employee against the company, the soldier against the army, the borrower against the bank, the convict against the prison - there is a new case in the papers almost every day, and each victory is a small erosion of the efficiency and effectiveness of the institution.

Amen.

Read the whole thing. It is a perfect description of our own Dems, who, as I never tire of saying, are no longer a Party of the US, but are a Party that represents the ideology of Eurosocialism.

Adhahn’s death will not bring back Zina. That is not the point. Does a message need to be sent that we will not tolerate this type of violence in our community and others? Should we announce to those that commit capital crimes do so knowing that they too will face the death penalty?

A study came out recently proving that the death penalty saves lives. The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations — pointing out flaws in the justice system — has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.
“Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”
A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”

Should those murderers who confess, admit, and prove guilt be executed?

Update On Zina’s (suspected) Monster
Terapon Adhahn is a child killer!
“I disgraced myself and my mother deserves a better son than me.”
Terapon Adhahn said those words 17 years ago, during treatment for a sex offense he admitted committing. He is a sex offender, convicted of violent incest in 1990. There are conflicting reports of his citizenship.
He received a 60-day jail sentence and a 60-month regimen of sex offender treatment.
During the course of the criminal case, Adhahn was diagnosed as a pedophile. A counselor, Michael Comte, assessed him as “a devious, manipulative, aggressive and over-controlling personality with clear-cut power needs,” and added that he was “a disturbed individual who has constant difficulty acknowledging his problems.”
Another counselor, Daniel DeWaelsche, spoke positive about Adhahn at the end of his sex offender treatment. “He continues to demonstrate that he is using the skills and techniques, gleaned in treatment, to avoid high risk situations which could lead to recidivism,” DeWaelsche wrote. Adhahn completed the required treatment by 1997, and was classified as Level 1 – the category deemed least likely to reoffend. The counselor praised his efforts at rehabilitation, according to court records. “It has been a pleasure working with Terapon,” DeWaelsche wrote.

On July 12, 2007 Adhahn informed the investigators where to the find the body of 12-year-old Zina Linnik, missing since July 4.
Terapon Adhahn is a child killer!

Some unsolved slayings/missing cases within 20 miles of Adhahn’s residence

Zina Linnik, 12 Body found: July 12, 2007, undisclosed location
Adre’Anna Anita Jackson, 10 Body found: April 4, 2006, in a vacant lot in Lakewood
Anna Lee Chebetnoy, 14 Body found: Sept. 17, 1991, near Enumclaw
Kimberly DeLange, 15 Body found: Aug. 21, 1988, near Enumclaw
Shannon L. Pease, 15 Body found: April 4, 1988, in a field in Lakewood
Michella Welch, 12 Body found: March 26, 1986, in Tacoma’s Puget Park
Jenny Bastian, 13 Body found: Aug. 28, 1986, in Point Defiance Park
Teekah Latres Lewis 2 1/2 Missing from: Tacoma Jan. 23, 1999
Lenoria E. Jones, 3 Missing from: Tacoma July 20, 1995
Misty D. Copsey, 14 Missing from: Puyallup Sept. 17, 1992
Wallace Guidroz, 2 Missing from: Tacoma Disappeared: Jan. 10, 1983 (disappeared from Point Defiance Park)

REST IN PEACE SWEET ZINA ... and all the children of violence.

I’d like to introduce you to someone today, in case you aren’t yet acquainted.

His name is Ted Rall. Perhaps you’ve heard of him: he’s one of the most well-known cartoonists (and op-ed writers) alive today. He’s also one of the most vile, despicable, hateful, bigoted, unhinged people alive. However, don’t consider him on the fringe; the bio from his website shows just how celebrated he is (emphasis mine):

... Rall’s cartoons were signed for national syndication. He moved to Universal Press Syndicate in 1996.

His cartoons now appear in more than 140 publications, including the Philadelphia Daily News, Aspen Times, Hartford Advocate, Newark Star-Ledger, Los Angeles Times, Wilmington News-Journal, San Diego Reader, Village Voice, Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News, Las Vegas Review Journal, Washington City Paper, Tucson Weekly, Sacramento News & Review, San Jose Mercury-News, Lexington Herald-Leader and New York Times.

In 1996, he was one of three Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He was one of the New York Times’ most reprinted cartoonists in 1997, 1999 and 2001. He also did color strips for both Time Magazine and Fortune Magazine from 1998 to 2001. He was awarded the 1998 Deadline Club Award by the Society of Professional Journalists for his cartoons. Rall received first place in both the 1995 and 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for Cartoons. The award, founded in 1968, recognizes distinguished work on behalf of disadvantaged Americans.

Ted Rall has shown appalling hatred towards our troops and America time and time again.

He’s accused our troops of being murderers for Halliburton (emphasis again mine):

There was a time when service in U.S. military was honorable and professionally rewarding. But because of politicians who use the military to pump up corporate profits instead of defending us, that was a long time ago. Americans with personal integrity should boycott the volunteer military and discourage everyone they care about to do the same. “They come from parts of the country where jobs are hard to find,” an acquaintance condescendingly excuses the enlistees. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? I’d rather sleep under a bridge, eating trash out of a Dumpster, than murder human beings for Halliburton.

If we’re attacked by a foreign power, as we last were in 1941 at Pearl Harbor, Americans will line up to volunteer. World War II, won six decades ago by a storied generation of draftees and volunteers, was fought to defend American freedom. But we haven’t fought an honorable war since.

He likened terrorists such as Osama bin Laden to our Founding Fathers:

Whether or not I am a patriot is for others to judge. I do love this country, however, and I’m fighting my damnedest to remind my fellow Americans of our core values, those we all learned as children, and to stop the Hard Right from revolutionizing us into a neofascist nightmare. (By the way, I don’t recall labeling myself. And another by the way: since when are socialists anti-patriotic?)

...

And I might think better of you when you stopped using loaded rhetoric like refering to resistance fighters (a clearer and more neutral term) as “terrorists.” Unless, of course, you also consider George Washington to have been a terrorist, in which case we’ll let it go.

He’s most known for mocking fallen hero Pat Tillman as an idiot and a sap. Pat Tillman was the man who gave up a multi-million dollar NFL contract to enlist in the Army and fight for his country. Rall drew the following cartoon (click for larger image):



And now, Ted Rall is at it again: slandering our troops in the worst way, mocking everything that makes them honorable.

As Michelle Malkin put it,

Now, all in one cartoon, he shows his naked contempt for the very traits of the American soldier that helped give birth to this country and secured it for 231 years: willingness to sacrifice, faith, courage, respect for the commander-in-chief, and determination to complete their mission.

Here is the newest, and possibly worst, cartoon (click for larger image):



How many times can Ted Rall slander our military and our country without getting called out on it? Well, I take that back—conservatives call him out. But liberals, with their “moral authority” stay silent. What a double standard, huh? If Ann Coulter does so much as mock what Bill Maher says on HBO, she’s called out on it and castigated in the media for weeks. It’s front page news. Ted Rall does it on a weekly basis, and nothing. Nada. Not a peep.

And not only is he not called out on it, but he’s given awards. Liberal publications heap respectability on him and embrace him as an outspoken, prolific “neo-traditionalist” who is launching a “vehicle for change”.

But still—all politics aside—how dare he slander and smear the very people who give him the right to slander and smear them? He has the right to think and say whatever he pleases—thanks to those he so gleefully attacks—but decent Americans everywhere should be outraged. And just because he can think it, and say it, and draw it, and write it, does not mean that he should, or that Universal Press Syndicate has to continue to syndicate him, or that supposedly respectable institutions, such as the New York Times, have to publish his vile cartoons.

If liberals had any decency in them whatsoever, they would shun this despicable excuse for an American. But instead, he is welcomed, lauded, praised, rewarded—for slandering the very people who give him the freedom he loves to take advantage of.

So what can we do? We can contact the Universal Press Syndicate and demand that he is dropped from syndication:

Universal Press Syndicate

4520 Main Street

Kansas City, MO 64111-7701

(816) 932-6600

If the paper you read carries his cartoons and/or op-ed columns, contact them and demand that they remove his material as well.

Just because he has the right to draw and write whatever he pleases thanks to the Frist Amendment does not mean he can escape accountability.

accountability:

noun

responsibility to someone or for some activity

I’m not asking for him to be censored. I am asking for him to no longer be embraced and revered, for he has crossed the line too many times. For the sake of decency, and for our heroes fighting overseas whom he so easily mocks and bashes, we must stand up against him in protest. Contact Universal Press Syndicate. You can even contact Ted Rall himself. However you choose to do it, speak out against him.

This kind of hatred should not be embraced any longer.

Oh, and to close, some lovely hypocrisy from Ted Rall, in a Universal Press Syndicate interview, in which he proclaims he doesn’t like hateful responses or vitriol (imagine that—someone who spouts hate so often doesn’t like hate!):

Hateful responses get under my skin, death threats obviously more so. But there are other jobs for people who are afraid of extreme reactions to their political or other points of view: Dog catcher. Computer programmer. Centrist Democratic Senator. As someone else said, it’s not about not being afraid; it’s about what you do when you are afraid. I worry about the vitriol but I can’t let it stop me. Besides, for every reader who hates my stuff are many more who like it!

Cross-posted at Cassy Fiano's blog

Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin