It seems that Jewish voters are switching their support from Barack Obama to McCain. With Obama’s unclear stance on Israel, some Jewish Democratic donors are pledging their much needed financial support to the GOP. PoliPundit has more on this here.
A Boston Globe article today claims that such a phenomenon could exist.
“Barack Obama is no conservative,” Bacevich starts his article. “Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives — and the state of the conservative movement — they could do worse.
“The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home,” Bacevich continues. “The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate.
“So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.
“For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one,” Bacevich concludes.
What? I can’t see how a conservative would be willing to trade in every other issue just to get us out of Iraq. Sure McCain is going to try to tax us on the Global Warming phenomenon but Obama would be worse. In fact, for a conservative, Obama is worse in everything.
McCain may not be a “true conservative” but he certainly isn’t the most liberal senator of 2007. Come on conservatives, we aren’t going to be happy with whatever the election results are but at least McCain has the potential to do something right once in a while.
In a recent poll conducted by CNN, Nader received 6%!
Ralph Nader’s campaign is trying to capitalize on his showing in a new national poll to argue that he might be on the stage for presidential debates and to seek more money needed to get on ballots.
In the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted June 4-5, Democrat Barack Obama had 47 percent, Republican John McCain had 43 percent, and Nader had 6 percent — “with virtually no mainstream national press coverage,” the consumer activist’s campaign told supporters today. (Without Nader in the race, Obama leads 49 percent to 46 percent.)
The 6 percent is an important threshold, Nader’s camp notes, because most debate organizers require at least 5 percent to invite a candidate.
Why is this such great news? Well it means that Nader could possibly be invited to several presidential debates which would boost his popularity even more! More votes for Nader would most likely mean less votes for Obama!
Another added benefit would be that we get a Ron Paul-esque candidate in the debates to spout out crazy ideas while the other two candidates completely ignore him. I might actually watch the debates if he is in them.
On Saturday, I wrote about some of the reasons corn-based ethanol is wrong for the country in both the economic and environmental sense. In this article, I talked about how the ethanol sector gets outrageously large subsidies and that I believe that we shouldn’t be giving them these. Well, it seems that McCain agrees with me on this. (my emphasis)
Sen. McCain argues that many of the steps are little more than subsidies that enrich special interests. He has long called for scrapping the federal ethanol tax credit, saying America’s corn-ethanol industry can and should stand on its own. He has also voted against requiring electric utilities to boost their use of renewable energy sources, preferring to let cities and states set their own targets for renewable energy.
At a roundtable with business leaders in Washington state last month, Sen. McCain expressed reluctance to support government incentives such as tax credits for wind and solar energy. He compared his stance on the matter to his position on corn ethanol. “I’m a little wary — I have to give you straight talk — about government subsidies,” he said. “When government jumps in and distorts the market, then there’s unintended consequences as well as intended.”
Those are pretty much my feelings about the whole giving subsidies in general. In the corn-ethanol case, it is arguable that the government subsidies has contributed to the rising price of corn.
Well, I had two polls going. One asking who would win in an Obama/McCain matchup and the other asking who will win in a Clinton/McCain matchup. This wasn’t meant to be a “Who would you vote for” thing but rather an honest answer on who you think the country would pick if they were matched up against eachother. Even though everyone didn’t vote in both polls, the results are still fairly interesting.
| Head to Head: Who would win? | ||
 |
||
| Selection | Votes | |
| Barack Obama |  48% |
24 |
| John McCain |  52% |
26 |
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|
| 50 votes total | ||
| Head to Head: Who would win? | ||
|
||
| Selection | Votes | |
| Hillary Clinton | 56% |
20 |
| John McCain | 44% |
16 |
|
|
|
| 36 votes total | ||
Now you have to remember that this poll has been going on during the past couple of weeks. A lot has happened from Hillary pledging to stay in the race as long as it takes to her voicing her support for Obama yesterday.
In all honestly, this poll probably doesn’t mean anything because I kept it up too long. However, it is still interesting to see that according to this flawed poll, Hillary is more electable than Obama.
Remember a couple years ago when everyone was all excited about the prospects of ethanol production as the newest and greatest biofuel? Well I hope everyone has wised up to the reality that ethanol fuel is probably one of the worst things we could do from both an environmental and an economic standpoint.
First, lets give you some background about ethanol. The most common version is made from corn, one of the most important grains produced in the United States. To understand how it is made, you can visit this website that explains its production and includessome graphics. Now, having to process corn to create ethanol isn’t the problem because, as you well know, we have to refine crude oil to create gasoline and such. The problem comes when you look to see just how much energy it takes to create ethanol.
According to some studies, it can takes roughly 1.29 gallons of fossil fuel to produce just 1.0 gallon of corn-based ethanol fuel. Now, when one of the main reasons to use biofuels is to decrease CO2 emissions, this figure just makes the whole process seems outrageous. Those people who think they are saving the environment by buying “Flex-Fuel” are potentially harming it more than those with regular fossil fuel cars. Ironic, isn’t it?
The sad thing is that this same study found that corn was the most efficient biofuel. For example, switch grass was found to need 1.45 gallons of fossil fuel to produce 1.0 gallon of biofuel (one study has it as better than corn) and wood biomass needed 1.57!
Nevertheless, one must also take into account another environmental impact caused by promoting biofuel production. According to basic economics, the more of some product that is demanded, the higher price that product fetches in the marketplace. With higher potential to make money, more suppliers will then enter into the market in order to supply that product.
Now, what does that mean in our case? Well what we are seeing now is that since corn prices have risen, more people are starting to produce corn. Just last year we had the largest corn harvest here in the United States. Of course some of that was due to good crop conditions but a lot had to do with an overall increase in corn production.
Now, what this means from an environmental standpoint is that farmers are going to have more incentive to plow under land to produce corn. This might be tracks of forest on their properties or just land that, at previous corn prices, wasn’t economically feasible to plow under. For you environmentalist out there, let me break down what this means for you: Less forested land and natural habitats = less biodiversity and less CO2 sequestration = very bad.
For folks like me who tend to care more about the economic side of the issue, corn ethanol still looks like a total waste of money.
One of the major things to keep in mind is that this whole corn ethanol business is very heavily subsidized. For example, in 2006, the ethanol business got $7.0 billion to produce just 4.9 billion gallons of ethanol. That comes out to being about $1.45 per gallon of ethanol. In my opinion, that is a completely outrageous amount of money for such an impractical solution to our energy needs.
More importantly, because of these subsidy, corn prices are kept at an artificially high level. A high price of any other commodity might not be too bad but since it is corn, the results can be an increase in almost all food prices. The reason for this is that the price of corn basically controls the price of every single staple we eat in America. Don’t believe me? Well let me break it down for you.
Cereal? Made from corn.
Beef? Chicken? Pork? Fed corn.
Milk? Produced by cows that have been fed corn.
Cheese? Yogurt? Made from milk that was produced by cows that have been fed corn.
Those little fruit cups you put in your kid’s lunches? I guarantee that they are made with high fructose CORN syrup.
Funny how our lives can be so dependent on the price of just one product.
Here are some statistics you can throw around:
So why am I writing all about this? Well it is just to help you understand one of the reasons why ethanol is a bad choice that is contributing to the raising food prices worldwide. So whenever you hear a politician talk about ethanol, remember to be wary if they seem to fawning over its production. Not only is corn ethanol production wasting your tax dollars through government subsidies, it isn’t helping the environment at all.
According to a CNN article, Obama is accused of having ‘hijacked’ his own press followers. (My Emphasis)
What seemed to be a routine evening waiting for Barack Obama aboard his campaign plane turned into anything but when the cabin doors closed and the passengers were informed the aircraft would be taking off immediately — without the candidate.
The first sign something was amiss on the Thursday flight came when the pilot told those aboard — about 25 members of the media, a smaller group of Obama staffers and only a handful of Secret Service agents — that everyone was on board and that the plane would be departing for Obama’s hometown of Chicago, Illinois, momentarily.
The press soon noticed there were far too few people aboard for a standard campaign flight. Something was different. It’s fair to say that the term “everyone” was used a bit loosely — especially when the presumptive nominee appeared to be missing.
As the plane taxied, communications director Robert Gibbs admitted that Obama was remaining behind because he “wasn’t going to be back in D.C. for a while” and had “scheduled some meetings” before he left.
Obama staffers, including Gibbs and Linda Douglass, a newly appointed senior adviser and campaign spokeswoman, didn’t ask the reporters on board if they’d prefer to wait on the runway in Washington until the meetings concluded. They were going to Chicago. Without Barack Obama.
Personally, don’t think ‘hijacked’ was the best choice of words. Kept in the dark, yes. Intentionally misled, yes. However, ‘hijacked’ seems a little to harsh plus has some very negative overtones in light of September 11th.
With all the rumors about Obama being a Muslim and such, I don’t think reporters should be throwing around the word ‘hijacked.’
Then again, if Chris Welch was on the plane, he might just be pissed enough to compare his situation to being hijacked. Just a little way to get back at Barack for keeping those who can either be your best friends or your worst enemies in the dark.
Another climate change bill seems set to fail in the US Senate and who do liberals pick out to blame? Well when you can’t face the reality that the Senate Democrats can’t get anything done, the only thing left to do is blame a Republican. Take a look at this:
The Republican presidential nominee backed away from this year’s debate to focus on his campaign, ceding his sponsorship role to Virginia Republican senator John Warner.
Despite McCain’s qualified statement of support for the climate bill, his absence from the pivotal vote today gave Democrats an opening to hammer him as no different from George Bush, who promised to veto the measure.
“We saw this morning yet another example of Bush-McCain Republicans refusing to address one of the most important issues of our time,” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said.
“Senator McCain says global warming is one of his top issues, but when he has the chance to do something about it, he doesn’t even show up to work.”
Neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton attended the vote, signalling that Democratic leaders anticipated the bill’s failure.
Hmmm…McCain misses a “pivotal vote” while both Clinton and Obama didn’t attend because they knew it was going to fail anyways. Harry Reid is just bitter that he can’t get anything done and isn’t getting any help from his own party (Obama and Hillary).
Democrats: Stop shifting the blame for your inability to pass your legislation. You basically have control of of both the Senate and the House of Representatives and if you can’t even get your legislation on the President’s desk so he can veto it.
I must have just caught this right before they changed it but nevertheless, I still think it is funny.
That picture is supposed to be labeled as a new X-Ray technology they have at some airports. The corrected caption is:
UPDATE: 10 airports install body scanners; Devices can peer under passengers’ clothes…
