A Global Goring 

Cane farmers burn off at a cane farm near Sertaozinho, about 200 miles north-east of Sao Paulo. Brazil, the world’s largest producer and exporter of sugar and ethanol, is a pioneer in the use of ethanol made from sugar cane to power cars.
The apostles of biofuels would have us believe that the congested streets of Sao Paulo offer a glimpse of a better future. There, traffic jams are made of flex-fuel cars that run off a growing menu of bio and fossil fuel mixtures and all filling stations offer “alcohol” and “gas” at the pump.

It was the city that George Bush visited last year to unveil a package of incentives to developing nations designed to spur the creation of a cartel of biofuel producers soon dubbed the “Opec for ethanol”. Read more »

Damn, that Alaskan broad  really used both barrels last night, eh? No wonder, too, with a gazillion Photoshopped babies like the one to the left being spread ’round the country faster than word the McCain/Palin is a bomb ticket. Girl just can’t get no respect.
We therefore fully sympathize with Ms. P’s perfectly lip-lined—and glossed—mouthiness. I mean, take that nastyass heathen Campbell Brown over at CNN, for ince. The newscaster cutie had the temerity to ask a McCain campaign spokesperson just what experience, exactly, Sarah Palin has with foreign policy, opinions or statements of any kind? Does she have any records, voting or otherwise, besides destroying her local homeland’s environment?

As punishment for Brown’s outlandish question, McCain cancelled all further dealings with CNN, damn straight. What is this, grade school? I mean, let’s not ask a potential vice-presidential nominee about how she might deal with the world, should she be president. Instead let’s just get her heavily made-up mug out for more photo ops.

A MoveOn.org Political Action ad plays the partisan blame game with the economic crisis, charging that John McCain’s friend and former economic adviser Phil Gramm “stripped safeguards that would have protected us.” The claim is bogus. Gramm’s legislation had broad bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Clinton. Moreover, the bill had nothing to do with causing the crisis, and economists – not to mention President Clinton – praise it for having softened the crisis.

A McCain-Palin ad, in turn, blames Democrats for the mess. The ad says that the crisis “didn’t have to happen,” because legislation McCain cosponsored would have tightened regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But, the ad says, Obama “was notably silent” while Democrats killed the bill. That’s oversimplified. Republicans, who controlled the Senate at the time, did not bring the bill forward for a vote. And it’s unclear how much the legislation would have helped, as McCain signed on just two months before the housing bubble popped. Read more »

“As Alaska governor, Sarah Palin actively promotes the brutal and unethical aerial hunting of wolves and other wildlife,” the ad’s announcer says. “And Palin even encouraged the cruelty by proposing a $150 bounty for the severed foreleg of each killed wolf, and then introduced a bill to make the killing easier.”

Palin supports the aerial hunting of wolves as part of a state-sponsored predator-control program intended to increase the number of moose and caribou in several areas of Alaska. Rural residents, who rely on hunting to survive, had complained there wasn’t enough game to hunt and eat.

The program began under her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, and continues with her support. Private citizens are permitted to shoot wolves from the air or conduct land-and-shoot hunting of wolves in five rural areas of the state. More than 700 wolves have been killed since the program began almost five years ago, state officials say.

Last year, Palin’s office announced the state would offer cash to kill wolves. Incentives included offering volunteer pilots and aerial gunner teams $150 for turning in the forelegs of freshly killed wolves.

The state said the legs could help biologists determine a wolf’s age, while the money helped hunters and aerial teams pay for gas and expenses. A Superior Court judge later blocked the payments after conservation groups argued the money amounted to an illegal bounty.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who touts her state’s proximity to Russia as part of her foreign policy experience, has not met with Russian leaders or delegations, negotiated any Russian issues or visited the country, according to an Associated Press review of records from the governor’s office.
The review showed that the Republican vice presidential candidate has negotiated with only one country, Canada, and until last week had met with the leader of only one other, tiny Iceland. Her portfolio expanded last week when she went to New York and met seven foreign leaders attending the U.N. General Assembly.

Governors who run for national office often are criticized for lacking the international experience that, for example, someone from Congress or the president’s Cabinet might have. But Palin’s foreign policy adviser Steve Biegun, on leave as vice president of international governmental affairs for Ford Motor Co., said that’s not a handicap. Read more »

Filmmaker Michael Moore released his latest documentary for free on the Internet on Tuesday, marking a first for the maverick director who aims to encourage young people to vote — preferably for Democrats — in November’s U.S. presidential election.

“Slacker Uprising,” a feature-length film documenting Moore’s tour of swing states during the 2004 presidential election year, was made available for a free download instead of being released in movie theaters.

By The Associated Press

 ON THE ISSUES

Even Clinton supporters solidly trust Obama more than McCain to handle just about all the top-tier issues. One exception: Those backing Clinton say McCain would do a better job than Obama on terrorism by a narrow 32 percent to 25 percent. All Democrats would rather see Obama handle terrorism, 38 percent to 22 percent.

 A THIRD BUSH TERM?

Most Clinton supporters think that’s what McCain would bring - 69 percent of them say McCain would continue President Bush’s policies. Eighty percent of all Democrats think the same. But just 35 percent of Clinton supporters still opposing Obama say McCain would follow in Bush’s path.

—

The AP-Yahoo News poll of 1,740 adults was conducted Sept. 5-15 and has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. It included interviews with 502 people who in AP-Yahoo News polls in January and April identified themselves as supporting Clinton in one or both of those months, for whom the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4.4 points.

The survey was conducted over the Internet by Knowledge Networks, which initially contacted people using traditional telephone polling methods and followed with online interviews. People chosen for the study who had no Internet access were given it for free.

The apostles of biofuels would have us believe that the congested streets of Sao Paulo offer a glimpse of a better future. There, traffic jams are made of flex-fuel cars that run off a growing menu of bio and fossil fuel mixtures and all filling stations offer “alcohol” and “gas” at the pump.
It was the city that George Bush visited last year to unveil a package of incentives to developing nations designed to spur the creation of a cartel of biofuel producers soon dubbed the “Opec for ethanol”.
Biofuels are almost irresistible to politicians ruled by concerns over energy security and eager to look busy on climate change without calling on voters to change their consumption habits. Read more »

Putative CO2-induced global warming has long been predicted to turn boreal and tundra biomes into carbon sources extraordinaire.  Until just a few short years ago, it was nearly universally believed that higher soil temperatures would lead to the thawing of extensive regions of permafrost and the exposure and subsequent decomposition of their vast stores of organic matter, thereby releasing the soil’s tightly-held carbon and allowing it to make its way back to the atmosphere as CO2, from whence and in which form it originally came.
Associated tendencies for improved soil drainage and increased aridity were also envisioned to help the process along, possibly freeing enough carbon at a sufficiently rapid rate to rival in aggregate the yearly amount of carbon released to the atmosphere as CO2 by all anthropogenic sources combined.  The end result was claimed to be a tremendous positive feedback to the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content, which would produce a greatly amplified atmospheric greenhouse effect that would lead to catastrophic global warming.  In a slight variation of a well-worn theme, however, the scenario was just too bad to be true. Read more »

It would be fitting, after just reporting on a recent appearance by Former Vice President Al Gore (ref. Al Gore and Innovation), to review his latest book “The Assault on Reason.”  The premise of the book is that modern mass media constitutes a relentless march towards “one way conversations,” where money and power dictate what radio, then television, have force-fed into the minds of vulnerable and impressionable human psyches.  Gore then offers hope that the internet and the Democratic party can reverse this trend.
Gore’s concerns about mass media are certainly not unfounded, but what struck me again and again when reading the book was how easily you could substitute the canards he accuses his Republican political adversaries of manipulated the media into brainwashing into the body politic, with Gore’s own canards.

“Our systematic exposure to fear and other arousal stimuli on television can be exploited by the clever public relations specialist, advertiser, or politician.”  -  Al Gore Read more »