I'M CURIOUS, WHAT DO BUSH AND CORN HAVE IN COMMON?

I don’t know about you but I’m really, really tired of the media, politicians and various causes using skewed statistics to get our attention and to nudge us into changing our lifestyles. Now, I’m not afraid of bad news, but I want accurate, researched bad news and I want it from easily accessible sources, such as the network news programs and the more popular print media (nor do I want sensationalized bad news…bad is bad). I shouldn’t have to go practically underground to get facts and straight-up unbiased information. I’m not naïve enough to believe that bias can actually be eliminated in reporting. One unbiased approach would be to admit it’s human nature to add bias to just about anything that’s reported, through inflection and body language, not to mention the natural tendencies to write with a bias since word formation is going to come from a brain that is washed in whatever the person owning it has a tendency to wash it with. Everything is bound to be said with a slant of some sort. I just wish the “mainstream” whatever, would just admit it like so many of today’s talking heads do. Say what you ‘are’, or try to avoid being ‘it.’ But please, at least try to present facts as they exist, not how you’d like them to be. Please look into your sources’ sources.

Ethanol. There’s a seven letter word if I ever heard one. The moment I heard President Bush tout the merits of ethanol during his State of the Union Address, I knew the price of gas would go up. The press has jumped on this issue, and the supposed merits of ethanol, nauseously. A gasoline additive that is made primarily from corn, one of the most heavily subsidized crops in the United States, ethanol is poised to become one of our most original tax scams. Hmmm…who could possibly benefit from this seemingly expensive proposal? Was the President misinformed? If he was, there’s no excuse for it, he was supposed to be telling us the State of the Union, for God’s sake! Is he pandering? Let’s see, two words….Iowa Caucus! Gee, I can’t imagine a politician promoting the use of such a highly subsidized crop in a state like…IOWA! What political party wouldn’t benefit from that?! Corn is subsidized in so many ways that one of the more original methods is for the government to grant a 52 cent a gallon tax break to businesses that use…you guessed it…ethanol! It is currently more expensive to produce ethanol than it is to produce gasoline. Yet ethanol is supposed to save us by reducing our dependence on foreign oil. American farmers cannot produce enough corn to supply us with the amount of ethanol that is mandated now. Hard to believe a politician could sell our best interest for his own interests, or that of his Party. Come to think of it, a few days after Archer Daniels Midland Chairman, Dwayne Andreas, gave the Democrats a check for $100,000, President Clinton ordered 10 percent of the country to use ethanol. You don’t think Bush could have….no, can’t imagine. Welfare Queen, ADM, is one of the worlds largest corn pushers, uh, corn product producers.

I’ve got an idea for reducing our dependency on foreign oil, how about producing our own oil! If China can drill for oil off our coast, in Cuba, why can’t we? How about we sink some wells in ANWAR? Could it be the Caribou don’t want us there? I don’t believe anyone has asked them. I’m sure it’s not because of a possible backlash from the tourism industry. If you guess that maybe a thousand people visit that extremely remote region of our planet every year, that’s only one six millionth of the world’s population. That’s .0000006.

That’s enough for today. We can visit that one again and again, and we just might. Goodness knows there is plenty to say!

Senator Harry Reid, esteemed Democrat from Nevada, said the war is lost. I’ve got to know…if the war is lost, then who won it?! Please tell us the rest of the story, Harry!

JD