He Still Can't Spell

I've always heard a contractor had a third grade education, a pickup truck and a backhoe. Apparently that's too high of expectations for this guy...

Loyalty Oath

From the Washington Post:

Voters in Virginia's Feb. 12 Republican presidential primary will have to sign an oath swearing loyalty to the eventual GOP ticket. But there is no way to enforce it, because a voter's actions in a booth are secret.

The State Board of Elections has approved a state Republican Party request that all who apply for a GOP primary ballot vow in writing to vote for the Republican presidential nominee next fall.

Voters in Virginia do not register by party. Since the mid-1990s, the state's Republicans have fretted that Democrats might meddle in their primaries, which are open to all registered voters.

A little further research finds that the oath will be as follows: “I affirm that I intend to vote for the Republican candidate in the general election."

This is surprising and disturbing to me. It seems to me this is aimed as much at Social Conservatives who won’t vote for Giuliani in the General Election as it is at Democrats creeping over for the Primary. I realize there’s no way to “enforce” this, but I might remind the Washington Post that some of us like to actually keep our promises. A novel concept inside the Washington Beltway to be sure, but still… All this is going to do is have the effect of reducing social conservative participation in the primary, and maybe that’s the point. I fully understand the concern of a “split party” should Giuliani become the nominee. I don’t think it would serve anyone’s interests for a social conservative like Ron Paul to run on a third party ticket splitting votes from the Republican nominee and handing the election to whoever the Democrats put forward. Even as a staunch Social Conservative I’ll take Giuliani over Hillary or Obama any day… That being said, I really think trying to bully and intimidate those voters before it even becomes an issue runs the risk of alienating them over a potential non-issue, not to mention the fact that I think it’s just plain wrong…

English Just Wasn't His Subject...

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m skipping town tomorrow and heading south to Puerto Rico to spend Thanksgiving with my parents and sister.  To everyone out there, Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.  We truly have so much to be thankful for. 

Mark Steyn had a good article on some of the things we should be thankful for…

“Three hundred and 86 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.”

The Chavez-Hess Connection

Back last year when Hugo Chavez, the Marxist President of Venezuela, started making his anti-American statements, there was a large outcry over how CITGO was a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). What I don’t understand is why nobody is saying a word about Hess Stations. The Hess Corporation also owns HOVENSA, “a joint venture between a subsidiary of Hess Corporation and a subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA)”. PDVSA owns a 50% share of HOVENSA, which has a crude oil processing capacity of 495,000 Barrels Per Day (BPD), making it one of the largest refineries in the world. HOVENSA is located in St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, 550 miles from Venezuela. So guess where HOVENSA gets its crude? You guessed it; Venezuela. So not only does Chavez get money from refining the oil at HOVENSA, he also gets money selling the oil to HOVENSA to refine. Then that gasoline (over 175,000 BPD) gets shipped to the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and sold in more than 1,300 Hess locations from New Hampshire to Florida. I understand that you can’t track every drop of oil to make sure it doesn’t come from PDVSA, but it seems to be pretty simple to figure out that Hess Oil is really PDVSA oil and PDVSA oil is money in the coffers of an anti-American, Marxist government.

Just another reason to get off oil and find alternative sources of fuel, like nuclear power…

EDIT: All of this information may be verified on Hess Oil's Website.

Friday Headlines

Just some great stories I ran across today…

Tip to Parents: If your car’s about to be repossessed, don’t leave your children alone in it…  Now I don’t know much about the repo business, but do they normally stalk you to the grocery store and grab your car while you’re grabbing a bag of hot dog buns and a paper? 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard, reinforces the belief that they’re populated by nothing but nut jobs… They shut down the Boy Scouts’ Care Package Drive for American Soldiers because it was a “political statement”.  Apparently the local Boy Scout troop had set boxes at local polling places on Election Day to collect supplies for Care Packages to send to Soldiers in Iraq.  Not so fast my friend…  Obviously, supporting the troops is an implicit endorsement of Republicans (surely this wasn’t supposed to be a benefit to the Democrats, but I don’t know) and so would constitute campaigning, which is not allowed at polling places.  I always thought you could support the troops, but not the war.  No?

And from Howstuffworks.com (in the interest of full disclosure, my sister works there), the 19^th of this month is World Toilet Day.  So please, this weekend, clean your toilet.  You wouldn’t want it to be dirty for World Toilet Day…

Finally, it’s a sad day for baseball, as Joe Nuxhall has died at the age of 79.  Mr. Nuxhall first played in a Major League game in 1944, at the age of 15, making him the youngest player ever in a MLB game.  He started doing Reds’ broadcasts in 1967 and in 1974 teamed up with Marty Brenneman, with whom he spent the next 28 years doing broadcasts.  Having lived in Lexington, KY, I used to pick up the Reds games on 700 WLW and always enjoyed Joe and Marty.  To me, they’re what sports casting should be…  It seems so many of these old broadcasters are either hanging it up or dying and it’s really sad.  There’s something about that familiar voice on the radio when you’re teams playing.  “This is the old left-hander, rounding third and heading for home…”

Bonds, Perjury and Politics

So baseball superstar Barry Bonds was indicted for perjury yesterday. For those that haven’t followed the story, Bonds has been suspected of taking steroids for some time. A couple of years ago, he was called before a Grand Jury to testify and said that he had never knowingly used performance enhancing drugs. So 18 months ago, the Feds started investigating Bonds for perjuring himself before a Grand Jury. Now whether or not Bonds took steroids isn’t a major concern of mine. I do think that the pervasiveness of performance enhancing drugs in sports is a dangerous thing and a bad example for the youth who look up to these athletes. But to a large extent, Barry Bonds is just a figurehead in the fight against steroids. And steroids aren’t really the point of this post.

I was listening to ESPN radio last night on the way home and of course they were discussing Bonds’ indictment. Former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent was on and was talking about the seriousness of perjury. He said if people come in to testify and lie under oath our entire justice system breaks down. The entire system is based on truthfulness and honesty. We cannot tolerate those who will lie and distort the results of justice. To me, the example of lying under oath is far worse than the example of taking steroids. It doesn’t matter what you’re lying about, whether it’s steroids or sex. Oh wait, that sounds familiar…

Lieberman on Iraq

Finally a Democrat telling the truth about Iraq. If there were more Democrats like Lieberman, we might could get along with them. (Emphasis Mine)

Over the past nine months, American forces have begun to achieve the kind of progress in Iraq that, until recently, few in Washington would have dared to imagine might be possible.

Working together with our increasingly capable Iraqi allies, U.S. troops under the command of General David Petraeus have routed al Qaeda in Iraq from its safe havens in Anbar province and Baghdad — delivering what could well prove to be the most significant defeat for Osama bin Laden's terrorist network since it was driven from Afghanistan in late 2001.

As al Qaeda has been beaten into retreat in Iraq, security conditions across the country have begun to improve. Iraqi civilian casualties are dramatically down. IED attacks have plummeted, while mortar and rocket attacks are at an unprecedented twenty-one month low. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in action has fallen for five
straight months and is now at the lowest level in nearly two years. And as a result, U.S. commanders on the ground have begun a drawdown in the number of U.S. forces in Iraq.

According to the BBC just this weekend: “All across Baghdad... streets are springing back to life. Shops and restaurants which closed down are back in business. People walk in crowded streets in the evening, when just a few months ago they would have been huddled behind locked doors in their homes. Everybody agrees that things are much better.”

Unfortunately, congressional opponents of the war have responded to the growing evidence of progress in Iraq not with gratitude or relief, but with unrelenting opposition to a policy that is now clearly working.

Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, anti-war advocates in Congress have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of retreat and defeat in Iraq — reluctant to acknowledge the reality of progress there.

Rather than supporting General Petraeus and our troops in the field, anti-war advocates in Congress are instead struggling to deny or disparage their achievements — and are now acting, once again, to hold hostage the funding our troops desperately need and to order a retreat by a date certain and regardless of what is happening on the ground.

It bears emphasizing that none of the progress we see today in Iraq would have happened, had these same anti-war activists prevailed in their earlier attempts this year to derail General Petraeus' strategy.

In fact, throughout the past nine months, anti-war advocates in Congress have confidently and repeatedly predicted that General Petraeus' strategy would fail, and that the war in Iraq was ‘lost.’

It is now clear they were wrong.

Rather than another ill-advised, misguided attempt to cut off the funding for our troops in the field, it is time for anti-war forces to admit that the surge is working and stop their futile legislative harassments.

It is deeply irresponsible for anti-war forces in Congress to hold hostage the funds that our men and women in uniform need to continue their successful efforts. Congress should support our troops in Iraq, not undermine their heroic achievements by imposing a formula for failure.

Plato's Guardians

With the presidential season in full swing, my mind has turned to politics of late. Personally, I’ve always had an interest in running for office and obviously I think I’d make a darn good Congressman or President. So I’ve pondered it some and lightly researched it. How could I, as a normal guy with a family, run for political office? Basically there are only four offices that I see (Governor, US Representative, US Senator and President) that would allow me to support my family without working another job. But you typically don’t start out in one of these offices. What job do you have where you can walk in to your boss and say, “Listen, I’m going to need the next 60-90 days off to go to Tallahassee for the next legislative session”? How do you live on the $30,000 salary that you make as a Florida State Congressman? This is to say nothing of all the time that must be spent “paying your dues” to the party before you could ever hope of getting the support necessary for a nomination. So just how’s a guy to make it?

I want to be very clear here. I got married young and had a family young. These are decisions I do not regret, though these decisions obviously “hamstrung” me in certain respects (as all decisions do, to some extent). In addition, great pursuits require great risk. A pursuit of public office should require a single-mindedness of purpose. My question is, are we evolving to being governed by a class not unlike the Guardians of Plato’s Republic? And with the rising cost of political campaigns, is this class, instead of consisting of those educated from birth to be the most effective rulers, composed of the well off and those who inherited wealth, allowing them to work for peanuts without having to worry about sustaining a family on $30,000 a year? It seems to me that most of our politicians are “out of touch” with “Average Americans”. Is this because you can’t be an “Average American” and get elected? To be sure, there's something to be said for a politician not being dependent on winning the next election to make their mortgage payment, like Mitt Romney was taught. But at what point does an "exclusive class" entered only by the persistent and those who desire it strong enough to make the necessary sacrifices, become an "exclusive class" dedicated only to those with enough money to buy their way in, to the exclusion of your "Average Americans"?

Isn't it Fairly Obvious?

This morning out of Detroit, we have this little gem...

NORTHVILLE TOWNSHIP, Mich. — The Detroit News and Free Press are reporting that a burned and beheaded body found by a utility crew is that of a convicted sex offender.

A single fingerprint from the victim's burned hand has allowed Michigan State Police to identify him as 26-year-old Daniel Gene-Vincent Sorensen.

The print reveals that Sorensen had been a registered sex offender in Illinois. Northville Township sewer and water department crews found the body at the end of a cul-de-sac about 20 miles northwest of Detroit about 9:30
a.m. Thursday.

Sorensen's head has not been found.

A cause of death has not been determined.

Maybe it's just me, but when the head is missing, I'm gonna go with that every time...

Selling Carbon Credits - Unethical?

So the capitalist in mean was wondering… As a "non-believer" in Global Warming, would it be unethical for me to sell carbon offset credits?

Here’s the numbers. According to www.Terrapass.com, my carbon footprint is approximately 80,835 lbs. Now according to www.carbonplanet.com approximately 5.33 trees are required to mitigate 1 metric tonne of Carbon. I, and my family, produce approximately 37 metric tonnes of Carbon per year. Using 6 trees per metric tonne, 222 trees would be required to totally mitigate my carbon footprint. Based on a planting rate of 600 trees per acre (seemed to be a low end of my brief internet search) it would take approximately 1/3 of an acre for mitigation.

Now Carbon Planet would charge me approximately $64.51/month to mitigate my carbon credit. TerraPass would charge $420 yearly. Taking the lower number, I could make roughly $1,200 per acre per year selling offsets. Now, if I had two-hundred acres, I would make $240,000 per year. Now, I couldn’t do this on my own. I’d need a Certified Arborist or Tree Dude of some sort. So there’s a salary of $80,000. Here’s this property on www.realtor.com. About the right size and $350,000. Monthly mortgage payment with a $15,000 downpayment and a 6% interest rate would be $2,008, putting annual debt service at $24,000. Now that leaves me with $136,000 to advertise, invest and live off of. Of course this doesn’t count other income such as hunting leases (the conservation easement would only be on the trees, not anything else, including wildlife), promotional merchandise (nothing looks better than your carbon neutral bumper sticker on the back of your Prius), etc. And as I get money and/or investors, I can obviously expand the acreage. Me and my Tree Dude can manage the forest to increase the carbon capacity, freeing up more credits. And I can invest in alternative fuel sources that would also reduce carbon impacts (this is what TerraPass does). This is the sweetest of all possibilities. Basically, you take other people’s money and invest it in companies that you hope will make a handsome profit for you. Sounds great, huh?

So, as you can see there’s good money to be made here. Is it unethical to separate suckers from their money? There’s nothing wrong with growing trees, right?