It looks as if the Republican presidential candidates, at least most of them, will be participating in a YouTube debate after all. The forum is now set for Nov. 28.
Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have signed on, according to CNN, which will broadcast the event. CNN said it had not heard from Mitt Romney, who has been critical of the format, in which the general public poses questions via videos sent to YouTube.
So, even if Congress mandated that all of America’s corn be turned into ethanol, it would yield only about 28.3 billion gallons, far less than the mandated volume. And, clearly, most of America’s corn is still going to be used for animal feed, family barbecues, and high-fructose corn syrup.
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In May 2006, former CIA Director John Deutch, who’s now a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he claimed that producing enough ethanol from switch grass (a fast-growing plant that’s native to North America) would require vast amounts of acreage. Deutch estimated that producing enough cellulosic ethanol to replace 1 million barrels of oil per day—roughly equivalent to 22 billion gallons of ethanol per year—would require planting 25 million acres of land in switch grass. That’s an area about the size of Kentucky, or about 5 percent of the 440 million acres of cropland in the United States.
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So, what about using more ethanol from sugar cane? Well, the United States could, at least in theory, grow more cane. But that wouldn’t make much sense, given that Brazil can produce it at far lower cost. And, thanks to pressure from farm-state senators, Congress has effectively limited the use of Brazilian ethanol with its $0.54 per-gallon tariff on foreign ethanol.
NPR ran a series of stories about the War on Drugs recently. The main idea being that the War on Drugs has failed because there has been too much focus on the supply and not enough focus on the demand.
They went through a number of different reasons why the focus is on the supply, and chief among them is that it’s simply easier to point at the tons and tons of drugs you’ve seized, and much harder to make a case for the drug addict that you’re helping wean off heroin. Makes sense from a marketing standpoint sure, but it seems people in government are actually getting serious about working on the demand side of the equation.
Another big topic of conversation lately has been immigration. First of all, I find it pretty hard to be “anti-immigration”. Give me your tired, weak and hungry! America is the place, always has been. I’m not sure what would’ve happened to my family had they not been allowed to stay. Or worse yet, how would my Great-Grandparents have liked getting forced back to their home countries, leaving their newly created families behind.
As I heard President Bush on the radio today, trying to turn syllables into words and sentences, I drew a parallel between the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Immigrants”. Continue reading ‘The War on Immigrants’ »
Okay, sorry. 1 more political post for this weekend. When will the outrage on Fox News begin in the mainstream? Anytime I’m in a public place that has a TV tuned to Fox News, I change it.
I found this amazing blurb in the latest issue of The Atlantic:
"… rich people in poor states are much more likely to vote Republican than rich people in well-off states… as a state’s average income rises, the correlation between being wealthy and voting Republican disappears. In Connecticut, for example, there is almost no connection between income and voting behavior: both the poor and the rich tend to vote for Democratic candidates."
Maybe it’s just me that finds that a bit amazing, but I think it says a lot about the platforms of the two major parties.
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