We Are The Champions!

The Boston Red Sox finished their sweep of the Colorado Rockies yesterday, and it was glorious. Although never in doubt because the National League is awful and could be beaten by the Pawtucket Red Sox, or maybe even the Brockton Rox. Despite all that, I still watched every game through a combination of adreniline and wonderful caffine. It's a great year to be a sports fan in Boston. Red Sox, Patriots, hell even the Celtics are looking good and BC's ranked #2 (although they shouldn't be.)

Maine, home of rednecks, houses without running water, and now middle schools giving out condoms!

Up in hicksville, eleven year olds at the King Middle School can get condoms and birth control pills simply by going into the nurse's office and asking. First of all, I'm surprised Maine knows what a condom is, but that aside this is ridiculous. I am personally against abstinance-only sex education but giving condoms out like candy is like telling sixth graders "If you want to commit statutory rape, do it safely." Why don't you just hand out silencers to gangbangers in Compton?

It's Just Plain Dumb

It’s a depressing ritual. As children of the corn prepare to cast the first votes in the presidential-primary season, candidates descend on corn-covered Iowa and discover the miraculous properties of ethanol. The latest convert is Fred “The Actor” Thompson, who voted against ethanol subsidies when he was a U.S. senator but now says that ethanol is “a matter of national security.” What he means is that he supports increasing federal assistance for ethanol production, on the grounds that this will reduce American dependence on oil from the Middle East. But, like most arguments for ethanol subsidies, this one is just plain dumb. First, even the biggest of proposed ethanol supports — an increase in mandated ethanol consumption from 7.5 billion gallons a year to 15 billion gallons a year, as called for in the energy bill Congress is currently debating — would barely dent America’s oil consumption, which is approximately 150 billion gallons annually. We could plant corn from New York to California and still not produce an equivalent amount of ethanol.Second, only around 5 million automobiles in America are “flexible-fuel vehicles” — cars that are equipped to run on a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline (known as E85). That’s out of 135 million registered passenger cars in the United States. Moreover, as the Dallas Morning News reported last year, the owners of almost all of these flex-fuel vehicles tend to fill them up with regular gas, owing to a scarcity of gas stations that sell E85. Simply mandating greater ethanol consumption won’t change that. A more drastic intervention — for example, requiring gas stations to sell E85 — would also be necessary. Some liberal groups have called for just that. Does Thompson agree with them? GOP voters should hope not.Thompson has cited high oil prices to defend his about-face on ethanol: “When I was in the Senate, I think oil was at $23 a barrel,” he told the Associated Press. But this is another red herring. Petroleum is a major input in the manufacture of ethanol — it is required not just to make ethanol, but to transport it to points of sale. In fact, there’s good evidence that making ethanol requires more petroleum than making gasoline does. So if high oil prices should make us want to use less oil, that’s an argument for diminishing our ethanol consumption right now, not boosting it. None of this is to deny that there’s a legitimate market for ethanol. All gasoline is required to contain additives known as “oxygenates,” and ethanol is one of them. Gasoline blenders have turned increasingly to it since MBTE — another additive — was found to contaminate groundwater. But the momentum behind federal support for ethanol militates toward production of far more than the market can absorb. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which enacted the initial ethanol mandate of 7.5 billion gallons a year, encouraged the ethanol industry to increase production dramatically. Now, reports of an ethanol glut suggest that the industry has overproduced — something that tends to happen when companies make production decisions based on government mandates rather than market signals.The ethanol glut is inefficient, but it’s bad in other ways too. The diversion of corn from use as food to ethanol production has led to higher food prices — a side-effect that has finally gotten Congress’s attention. As farmers grow more corn in hopes of selling it to ethanol makers, they also threaten to disrupt the water supply in some regions. That’s because farmers are both planting new corn on formerly uncultivated soil, and converting acres already under cultivation toward corn and away from other, less water-intensive food crops. To put the current expansion of corn production into perspective, consider that we have more corn growing on American soil right now than at any time since World War II, when the farms of Europe had been devastated by war and America was feeding two continents. There is no excuse for Congress to bail out the ethanol industry again by doubling a mandate that should not exist in the first place. If any major 2008 presidential candidate aside from John McCain opposes this heavy-handed dirigisme, he or she has yet to say so. McCain, for his part, deserves credit for taking a clear-eyed view of ethanol subsidies — even as he jokes that he drinks “a glass of ethanol every morning.” That position on ethanol is quite possibly the most sober in Washington.

Note: For the computer stupid, the underlined links can be clicked on to uncover sources for the information mentioned in this post.

Smackdown: British Court Bitch-slaps Al Gore.

The British government decided that it would be a good idea to send copies of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to all schools, with then Environment Secretary (now Foreign Secretary) David Miliband declaring that “the debate over science is over.” Well, it may be, but not in the way Gore portrays it. A truck driver and school governor, Stuart Dimmock, took the government to court, alleging that the film portrays “partisan political views,” the promotion of which is illegal in schools under the Education Act 1996.
The judge has decided that Mr. Dimmock was correct and that the Government’s guidance notes that accompanied the film exacerbated the problem. For the film to be shown in schools, therefore, several facts would have to be drawn to students’ attention:
In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that
1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument.
2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination.
3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.
The inaccuracies are:
* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.* The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.* The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.
This is a far better result than refusing to allow the film to be shown at all. It requires that students be told by teachers that Al Gore is factually inaccurate, misleading and - in one case - making things up. These inconvenient truths for the former Vice President have been covered up or obscured by the hype surrounding his film. Students will now realize that there are significant shortcomings and inaccuracies in the way the global warming scare has been presented to them. This is a victory for honest debate, a victory for science and a victory for education.
The comprehensive guide to Gore's innacuracies is, of course, Marlo Lewis' "Al Gore's Science Fiction."

Sourcing: Taken in part from the National Review website.

He Should Be Ashamed

Rush Limbaugh has joined the ranks of MoveOn.org and other wacko groups who attack American servicemen in Iraq, people who are risking there life everyday. On his radio show Limbaugh called servicemen who are opposed to the war in Iraq “the phony soldiers.” This is worse then the attacks on General Petraeus, at least Petraeus is a public figure in a leadership position, the soldiers Limbaugh attacks are ordinary men and women fighting for freedom in a country halfway around the world.
This is nothing new for Rush Limbaugh, someone who I will never listen to, even though we agree on many things. He said that said Democratic congressional candidate, marine Major Paul Hackett had gone to Iraq to “pad his resume.” When I pad my resume I don’t do it by getting shot at by nutjobs who think killing an American is a way to have sex with 40 virgins in heaven and I doubt Paul Hackett put his life on the line to get elected.
Hopefully, Limbaugh’s slander will get the same amount of press and outrage as MoveOn.org’s.

Wacka-Patraeus: This Time from the Right

Moveon.org has been joined in calling Gen. David Petraeus a traitor by none other than conservative columnist Pat Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative. The difference is that Buchanan's mag does the dirty deed more skillfully.
The cover story of The American Conservative's Oct. 8 issue, by Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, is titled "Sycophant Savior." Bacevich, a West Point grad and Vietnam veteran, has been vocally opposed to the Iraq War from the start. This summer he lost his son, a soldier serving in Iraq, to a suicide bomb attack there. He has long used his clout as a military historian to grind his anti-war ax. This time, though, he has shown that when he cannot convince people by force of argument he is perfectly prepared to stoop to the treason charge.
Bacevich questions the strategy Petraeus outlined in his recent testimony to Congress. But instead of just questioning the general's military judgment, Bacevich asserts that Petraeus has implemented a losing strategy that will kill countless American soldiers solely so he can keep his job.
"There is only one plausible explanation for Petraeus's terminating a surge that has (he says) enabled coalition forces, however tentatively, to gain the upper hand. That explanation is politics -- of the wrong kind."
Petraeus' plan for Iraq "serves to placate each of the various Washington constituencies that Petraeus has a political interest in pleasing," he writes.
Bacevich concludes that Petraeus "has broken faith with the soldiers he commands and the Army to which he has devoted his life."
This is a cleverer way of calling Petraeus a traitor than Moveon.org devised, but it is no less despicable. Pat Buchanan and American Conservative editor Scott McConnell have shamed themselves and their magazine by trumpeting this outrageous smear. A maganize that I read every week has joined the ranks of Moveon.org, congressional Democrats and other anti-war zealots who are so invested in the anti-war cause that they almost hope for an American failure in Iraq just so they'll be proven correct. Americans should denounce this hatchet-job as strongly as they denounced Moveon.org's; it is no less reprehensible.

SCHIP of Fools

Bush's veto yesterday of a Democratic health-insurance bill is variously being described as "heartless," "irresponsible" and a bid to deny "health care to millions of low-income kids in America."
"With the stroke of a pen, President Bush has robbed nearly 4 million uninsured children of the chance for a healthy start in life," hyperventilated presidential candidate Hilliary Clinton.
That's nonsense, in spades.
If anything, the veto will help poor, sick kids and their struggling families.
The bill was a bid to expand the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which, for those readers who don't watch news that isn't ESPN, was created to provide health insurance to children too poor for private coverage yet, marginally too well-off for Medicaid.
But a drive is on to pervert SCHIP's original intent, making it a vehicle for expanding government-run health care for all. As Bush noted yesterday, "New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Illinois and New Mexico spend more money on adults in the SCHIP program than they do on children."
Democrats would put this evolution into overdrive. Whereas Bush seeks to expand the program's funding by 20 percent, or $5 billion, Democrats want a $35-to-$50-billion expansion. If they succeed, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, 2 million kids now using private insurance will switch into government-run health care.
The bill would also scrap an administration rule that requires states to enroll most eligible poor children before signing up middle-class kids. Yet Democrats are lambasting Bush's veto as tantamount to kicking the crutches out from Tiny Tim's frail arms.
In reality, the Democratic bill would expand SCHIP eligibility to families earning as much as $83,000 a year.
An earlier version raised the eligibility threshold to 400 percent of the poverty level - indicating where Democrats are headed. Ironically, some 70,000 families of the families who'd then be eligible for SCHIP would also be subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax - which officially targets the "richest" taxpayers.
In other words, the same "poor" families Democrats are vying to cover through SCHIP are already viewed by the U.S. tax code as affluent.
Meanwhile, eight governors - New York's Eliot Spitzer included - are suing the feds for the right to expand their SCHIP programs further.
Far from robbing "uninsured children of the chance for a healthy start in life," as Clinton put it, Bush sensibly seeks to put a stop to efforts to transform SCHIP into an unaffordable middle-class entitlement and re-focus the program on its original intent: insuring poor kids.
What's so "heartless" about that?

Friday Stock Picks: The Results Show

Last week I picked four stocks I thought would increase in value during the week, I also picked two I thought would decrease in value. I did pretty good.

ADR, which I recommended, increased from 86.22 to 95.97, for an increase of 9.75.

GG, which I recommended, increased from 30.56 to 30.86, while GG didn't do that well, it did go up 0.30 points.

WMT, which I recommended, decreased from 43.65 to 45.37, a decrease of 0.28.

BBT, which I recommended, increased from 40.39 to 42.13, an increase of 1.74.

UA, which I encouraged selling, decreased from 59.82 to 58.55, a decrease of 1.27.

XOMA, which I encouraged selling, increased from 3.41 to 3.97, an increase of 0.56.

Now, if someone bought one share of all the stocks I recommended to buy, and sold one share of the two stocks I recommended to sell, they would have made $12.22.