In Defense of the Deer Eating Sunflowers

In the State of Colorado a farming consortium has decided to grow sunflowers to turn into biodiesel fuel. The sunflowers are attracting deer and elk to the farm and in the infinite wisdom of officials in the State the pesky critters are going to be gunned down. This consortium is closely connected to Colorado Wild, an organization that has harassed both Telluride and Purgatory ski resorts because they believe expansion of the resorts will hurt wildlife populations in the San Juan Mountains. So let’s get rational here...

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California- Berkeley study.

"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable." The report on this is published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).

Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. They found that sunflower plants require 118 % more fossil energy than the fuel produced - at 118 % they take much more fossil energy than corn (29 %), switch grass (45 %) and wood (57%).

Costs are incurred in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer, running farm machinery and irrigating, and grinding and transporting the crop). Additional costs are incurred, such as federal and state subsidies that are passed on to consumers. And how do we measure the costs associated with environmental pollution and degradation? That includes killing of wildlife outside of a hunting season.

In this modern era of computer modeling it is not necessary to destroy wildlife and degrade land for experimentation. And for those who believe that computer modeling does not give accurate predictions perhaps you should tell that to the folks using their computers to tell us the planet is heating up.

Why Are Some Calling Republicans Racists?

Why is it that Republicans are being called “racist” by people who should know better? After reading the comments in the Wahington Post and Wall Street Journal of Ms. Carol Swain that Republicans were racist I have to pause and wonder what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a Republican, would say? Ms. Swain knows well the history of racism in this country, being a political science instructor at Vanderbilt University, so why would she use such inflammatory words in connection with Republicans? Could it be to promote a myth for political purposes or could it be she actually doesn’t know the history of racism in the U.S. or she does not care? One thing even she must agree on is that Dr. King couldn’t have been a Democrat since the Democrats were the people who he was fighting against. Historically Republicans were the anti-slavery party and Lincoln, Democrats were not.

Here are some high points of Democrat Party policies in the United States. Democrats created the Fugitive Slave Laws to keep blacks on the plantations, instigated the Dred Scott decision that said blacks were property, started the KKK in 1866 to attack blacks and whites who stood in the way of white ‘Democrat’ supremacy, created the Black Codes and the Jim Crow Acts. Democrats voted in the Repeal Act of 1894 that overturned civil rights legislation passed by the Republicans including the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. It took Republicans almost 6 decades to finally achieve passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950’s and 1960’s (LBJ signed a bill created by Eisenhower and written and fought for by Senator Everett Dirksen, a Republican).

Republicans started the NAACP in 1909 on Lincoln’s 100th birthday and started the Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s). The first black American to head the NAACP was James Weldon Johnson, a Republican. In the modern civil rights era, the era of Dr. King, we had a Democrat Governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox, chasing blacks with ax handles to keep them out of his restaurant and Governor George Wallace of Alabama, also a Democrat, who in 1963 denied black children entry into a school they wanted to attend by standing in the doorway. It was a Republican President – Eisenhower – that sent the National Guard to the school so that the children could enter.

And currently the Democrats in government that are shouting that Republicans are racists with no proof have a figurehead amongst them that they recently called the “conscience of the Senate.” As we know Senator Byrd was a former “Keagle” in the KKK and once said, and I quote verbatim, “I would rather die a thousand times and see old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than see this beloved land of our become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen of the wilds.”

Dr. King would be a Republican today. He would not embrace the secularist, socialist policies of the Democratic Party. He was guided by his faith and his Republican Party principles in his struggle to gain equality for blacks. My question, and the question countless others have asked and written about, black and white, is why do blacks currently vote as a block for Democrats?

The School System Monopoly

In an interview with Brenten Miniter South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford, a Democrat, said recently that he saw the inside of a jail cell 73 times, he did so to make a point. He was referring to the arrests that occurred during the civil right’s protests of the 1960’s. Today this African-American Democrat says the new civil-rights struggle is about the quality of instruction in public schools, and that to receive a decent education African-Americans need school choice. He wants the President's help. "We need choice like Obama has. He can send his kids to any school he wants."

Mr. Ford now advocates tax credits and scholarships that parents can spend on public or private schools. He has studied, over the past three and a half years, how school choice works and he's now advocating what some call a ‘voucher’ system. And he is not the only Democrat to think so.
In Economics a monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. It has long been frowned upon in the U.S. except in certain cases – the public school system being one of those cases.

Teacher unions have the exclusive right to represent teachers and to negotiate teacher contracts with school boards in 90 percent of American schools. To put this in economic terms, they enjoy a near-monopoly of teacher supply in the education market. This gives them enormous power to raise the price of teacher services—and in effect to divert spending from better education to better pay and conditions for their members.

So what do we end up with as parents? More money being thrown into the educational systems K-12, but not with better educated children, but higher teacher incomes and more teachers doing less work for more money. And what keeps all of this monopolistic activity continuing: A public school system with too many administrators and the knowledge that there is no competition for the education tax dollars coming in to the bureaucracy. No one is forced to be accountable.

I know about this from personal experience. My husband and I lived in Tucson Arizona at the time and our son was part of the grand ‘busing’ experiment that failed miserably – he was a 3rd grade student. We lived in an area of town that included a junior high school and a high school and elementary school but our son was bused out of our area to another part of town. We attended meetings with angry parents that were concerned that their children were being bussed out of the areas where they lived, spending countless hours on buses and fracturing their ‘neighborhoods’ in the process. These were parents from all areas of town, including low, middle and high income families. No one cared about the parents, no one listened, certainly not the school district or the elected officials of Tucson. They were going to bus children to a central holding facility and then re-distribute them out to schools everywhere.

When our son started 3rd grade I volunteered as a reading instructor in his class two mornings a week. You learn a lot about what goes on in a classroom when you volunteer, by the way. The classroom was in constant motion with none of the children remaining seated at their desks, all of them talking to each other and not listening to the teacher, and certainly no education was going on. My reading group, which included my son, had to move to another room to have the quiet necessary for studying. The teacher in that classroom was an overpaid babysitter, a babysitter who no one could fire due to incompetance since she had been on the job long enough to have tenure, the most evil word in the public school sysem.

Then the school asked me if I would like to help them improve the education for all of the children by helping to turn the school into a magnet school. We as a committee worked for hours and days and weeks on the project and as the project wound down I felt that the school would become a good educational experience for all of the children, our son included. That is when I was informed that my son would not be attending the school but would be bussed to some other school. When I asked which school they couldn’t tell me. Our son was being used in some grand scheme known only to the bureaucrats. We pulled our son out of the public school and placed him in a private school. We didn’t want any further ‘experimentation’ using our son as a guinea pig.

Public schools charge people for educating their children even when they send them to private or parochial schools. And since very few parents can afford to pay twice for their children's education, they are effectively compelled to use the public schools and to pay, through various forms of taxation, for the inflated salaries and low productivity negotiated by the teacher’s unions. And since these parents cannot go elsewhere, they have no leverage to compel the public schools to raise their performance.
Overall, therefore, the education market, like all monopoly-dominated markets, is inefficient, uncompetitive and marked by low innovation, poor standards and high prices.

The Ivory Tower Background's of United States Supreme Court Justices

In a speech given yesterday by President Obama he was extolling the virtues of Judge Sotomayor and that, to paraphrase, it would be great to have someone on the Supreme Court that didn’t grow up in an ivory tower. Of course Clarence Thomas immediately came to mind but let us take a closer look at Justice Thomas as well as some of the other Justices of the United Stated Supreme Court, and what ivory tower beginnings they had:

Clarence Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia, a small, impoverished African American community. His family are descendents of African American in the American South. His father left his family when he was two years old. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother Myers were taken to Savannah, Georgia, where their mother worked as a domestic employee. Thomas' sister Emma stayed behind with relatives in Pin Point.
When Thomas was 7, the family moved in with his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, and Anderson's wife, Christine, in Savannah. Anderson had little formal education, but had built a fuel oil business that also sold ice. Thomas calls his grandfather "the greatest man I have ever known." When Thomas was 10, Anderson started taking the family to help at a farm every day from sunrise to sunset. His grandfather believed in hard work and self-reliance; he would counsel Thomas to "never let the sun catch you in bed."

Ruth Joan Bader Ginsberg was born March 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, and was nicknamed "Kiki" by her family. She was the second daughter of Nathan and Celia (née Amster) Bader. The family belonged to the East Midwood Jewish Center, where she took her confirmation seriously. At age thirteen, Ruth acted as the "camp rabbi" at a Jewish summer program.
Her mother took an active role in her education, taking her to the library often. Ginsburg attended James Madison High School, whose law program later dedicated a courtroom in her honor. Her older sister died when she was very young. Her mother struggled with cancer throughout Ruth's high school years and died the day before her graduation.

An only child, Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey; his mother, Kathy Panaro, was born in the United States, while his father, S. Eugene, a professor of Romance languages, had immigrated from Sicily. Five years later, the family moved to the Elmhurst section of Queens, New York, during which time his father worked at Brooklyn College in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Scalia started his education at Public School 13 in Queens. A practicing member of the Roman Catholic Church High School in Manhattan. He graduated first in his class and summa cum laude with an A.B. in History from Georgetown College in 1957. While at Georgetown, he also studied at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and went on to study law at harvard Law School, where he was a Notes Editor for the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law in 1960, becoming a Sheldon Fellow of Harvard University the following year. On September 10, 1960, Scalia married Maureen McCarthy, an English major at Radcliffe College. Together they have nine children—

John Paul Stevens was born on April 20, 1920, in Chicago Illinois, to a wealthy family. His paternal grandfather had formed an insurance company and held real estate in Chicago, while his great-uncle owned the Stevens department store. His father, Ernest James Stevens, was a lawyer who later became a hotelier, owning two hotels, the La Salle and the Stevens Hotel. He lost ownership of the hotels during the Great Depression. His mother, Elizabeth Maude Street Stevens, a native of Michigan City, Indiana, was a high school English teacher. Two of his three older brothers also became lawyers.

David Souter was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, September 17, 1939. He is the only child of Joseph Alexander Souter (1904–1976) and Helen Adams Hackett Souter (1907–1995). After moving from Melrose at the age of 11, he spent most of his childhood and adolescence at his family's farm in Weare, New Hampshire. He attended Concord High School in New Hampshire.
He went on to Harvard College, from which he received his A.B. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and earned an M.A. from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1963. He then entered Harvard Law School, graduating in 1966.

Stephen Breyer was born to Irving Gerald Breyer and Anne A. Roberts, a middle-class jewish family in San Francisco, California. Breyer's father was legal counsel for the San Francisco Board of Education. Both Breyer and his younger brother Charles, who is a federal district judge, are Eagle Scouts. In 2007, Breyer was honored with the Distinguished Eagle Svout Award by the Boy Scouts of America.

In 1955, Breyer graduated from Lowell High School. After graduating from Lowell, Breyer went on to receive a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Stanford University, a Bachelor of Arts from Magdalen College at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B) from Harvard Law School.

John Roberts was born in Buffalo, New York in January 27, 1955, the son of John Glover (Jack) Roberts, Sr. (1928-2008) and Rosemary, née Podrasky. All of his maternal great-grandparents were from Czechoslovakia. His father was a plant manager with Bethlehem Steel. When Roberts was in second grade, his family moved to the beachside town of Long Beach, Indiana. He grew up with three sisters: Kathy, Peggy, and Barbara.
Roberts attended Notre Dame Elementary School, a catholic grade school in Long Beach then La Lumiere School, a Catholic boarding school in LaPorte, Indiana and was an excellent student and athlete. He was known for his devotion to his studies. He was captain of his football team (he later described himself as a "slow-footed linebacker"), and was a Regional Champion in wrestling. He participated in choir and drama, co-edited the school newspaper, and served on the athletic council and the Executive Committee of the Student Council.
He attended Harvard College graduating with an A.B. in history summa cum laude in three years. He then attended Harvard Law School, and was the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated from law school with his J.D. magna cum laude in 1979.

Samuel Alito’s father, a long-time employee of the New Jersey state legislature, was a first-generation Italian American. During his confirmation hearings, Alito stated that the stories his father told him about being discriminated against for his nationality and Catholic religion and about having to build a comfortable life from humble beginnings had made him more disposed to treat everyone who came before him with respect. These statements were made in response to criticism that, as a Circuit Court judge, Alito had consistently ruled against the poor and minority litigants who came before him.

Anthony Kennedy might be the closest to an 'ivory tower' upbringing, growing up in Sacramento, California as the son of a prominent attorney. As a boy he came into contact with prominent attorneys such as Earl Warren. He served as a page in the California State Senate as a youngster. Kennedy graduated from C. K. McClatchy High School in 1954. He was an undergraduate student at Stanford University from 1954-58, graduating with a B.A. in Political Science, after spending his senior year at the London School of Economics. He earned an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1961.

So there we have our ‘ivory tower’ Supreme Court Justices. Perhaps President Obama was speaking of the ‘ivory tower’ at Harvard University Law School and that Judge Sotomayor comes from lowly Yale Law School?

Rationing Health Care

Writing in salon.com former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich noted:

“According to the Congressional Budget Office, taxing all employee health benefits would yield a whopping $246 billion every year. Even limiting the tax to higher-income employees would go a long way to funding universal healthcare. Employer-provided health insurance is the biggest tax break in the whole federal income tax system...The President will need to tax employer provided health benefits in order to finance universal healthcare… Many in Congress and in the White House are convinced it's the only good option.“

The government also believes that given the choice families will gravitate towards the new health care system rather than paying the higher taxes for coverage. “Most middle-class American families rely on their current insurance programs and won't want to give them up even if a new universal system becomes available. Among those are organized labor who rightly considers these benefits among the union movement's proudest achievements,” says Secretary Reich.

So why is the government so intent on providing all of us with health care? Supposedly it is to make sure that the people in our country that can't afford medical treatment are taken care of. The government also wants to control prices within a medical system where prices are skyrocketing.

Will universal health care bring better medical treatment to everyone equally? According to economic theory it will not. In a government mandated universal health care system prices are not permitted to ration demands, which brings us back to an earlier economic concept - scarcity - we want more than we have. In a world of scarcity some form of rationing must be inevitable. In the free market system rationing is done by prices. Under current government-mandated health insurance programs around the world rationing is done by waiting, because people are forced to wait for weeks and/or months for whatever level of medical care is offered to them.

Canada is often touted as having a wonderful health care system. They use time to ration treatment (numbers provided by Government Accounting Office - GAO):

Orthopedic 10-25 weeks

Opthamology 8-22 weeks

Internal Medicine 4-6 weeks

Cardiovascular 12-17 weeks

Neurosurgery 10-17 weeks

General Surgery 6-9 weeks

Gynecology 5-9 weeks

We do have a form of univeral health care in this country, the Veteran's Hospitals - run by the government. According to a veteran being interviewed by the GAO about the VA Hospitals, Retired Army Major Elmer Erickson said, "Be prepared to spend the day there. Bring a book and pack a lunch. You eventually will see a doctor."

Is this what we want for our children and grandchildren?

And Speaking of America's Pasttime and I Do Not Mean Political Discourse

If Lou Gehrig were not so well known for his consecutive games played and the disease that cut short his life, more people might remember him as one of the greatest hitters of all time. His lifetime batting average and lifetime slugging average are both higher than those of anyone who has played since 1960.

What the Heck?

SHANGHAI (AP) May 13, 2009-- General Motors Corp. plans to begin exports of vehicles made in China to the United States within two years, ramping up sales to more than 50,000 by 2014, reports said Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for GM in China did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reports, which were said to be based on a company recovery plan given to U.S. lawmakers.

GM intends to sell 17,335 made-in-China passenger cars in the U.S. market by 2011, the Shanghai Securities News and other reports said. By 2014 exports would triple to more than 51,000, it said.

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So let me get this straight - in order to cut costs General Motors is going to China to build cars that GM will ship at major expense back to the U.S. for sale at higher prices then its competitors who build cars in the U.S. (Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc.) with GM not even entertaining the idea that perhaps they shouldn't go to China for workers but pay their workers here less so that they don't price themselves out of the competitive auto industry which they are going to do anyway by moving to China and having the extra expenses involved with moving finished products - automobiles - back to the U.S.

And this is how they are going to save themselves? Or perhaps our tax dollars will again go to subsidizing stupidity?

There is a term that refers to building a product in a location that you plan on selling it to cut down on the huge expense of moving the product across oceans and/or continents. It is why Toyota builds cars here in the U.S. and why Coca Cola is manufactured worldwide. It is called smart business practices.