Month: August 2008

Why I’m not watching the Olympics; and why it doesn’t have anything to do with the repressive ChiCom regime.

It’s these sports activities.

Rowing, for example; how the hell is that a sport? Row, row your boat gently down the steam…

And consider this fact: these Olympics are scheduled to be the last Olympics where baseball and softball will be played.

Why is that?

Would it have anything to do with the fact that the sport is dominated by the United States and other nations in the Western hemisphere, plus democratic nations in Asia such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan?

Instead of baseball and softball, you can watch the interesting sports activities of table tennis (that’s ping pong by the way), badminton, water polo (a bunch of doofuses throwing a ball around in a pool), and handball!

And yes, I had to look those up on Wikipedia to see what they are.

Oh, and by the way, if there’s a lot of talk about how many medals the ChiComs end up with consider this: The host nation doesn’t have to qualify to participate in the events; they get an automatic qualification! Anyone else think that might make it easier to win a medal?

And I’ll be waiting for the 2010 Winter Olympics so I can watch hockey, snowboarding, and bobsledding. I’m curious, does anything in the Summer Olympics go 80 mph like a bobsled does?

Hmm…I wonder if the Jamaicans will be fielding a bobsled team in 2010…

Forget about investigating “Big Oil”; you know who we should investigate? Big Corn.

From The Corner on National Review Online (they’re quoting “Kim Strassel’s Wall Street Journal article on the Senate’s ‘Gang of Ten.'”) [emphasis mine throughout]:

… it was probably too much to assume every Republican would work out that their side was winning [the energy] issue. And so, last Friday, in stumbled Sens. Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Saxby Chambliss, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson — alongside five Senate Democrats. This “Gang of 10” announced a “sweeping” and “bipartisan” energy plan to break Washington’s energy “stalemate.” What they did was throw every vulnerable Democrat, and Mr. Obama, a life preserver.

That’s because the plan is a Democratic giveaway. New production on offshore federal lands is left to state legislatures, and then in only four coastal states. The regulatory hurdles are huge. And the bill bars drilling within 50 miles of the coast — putting off limits some of the most productive areas. Alaska’s oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is still a no-go.

The highlight is instead $84 billion in tax credits, subsidies and federal handouts for alternative fuels and renewables. The Gang of 10 intends to pay for all this in part by raising taxes on . . . oil companies! The Sierra Club couldn’t have penned it better. And so the Republican Five has potentially given antidrilling Democrats the political cover they need to neutralize energy through November.

There’s one word that explains why these five Republicans are selling out: Biofuels. The gang’s “compromise bill” contains billions in subsidies for research into biofuels, and for the manufacture of ethanol-burning cars.

Thune is from the corn-producing state of South Dakota and has always been a big advocate for corn ethanol. The flagship university in Corker’s home state of Tennessee houses a major biofuels research center, specializing in cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass. Chambliss is the ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. He and Isakson both represent Georgia, where they are trying to figure out how to turn Georgia peanuts into fuel. And Graham — well, Graham just seems to have a mania for joining bipartisan gangs.

The worst part — as Strassel points out — is that the gang would raise the money for these new ethanol ventures by repealing tax provisions that allow oil companies to write off the cost of expanding refinery capacity. Whatever this bill is, it’s not a cheaper-gas bill. In fact, despite its meager drilling provisions, it looks a lot like the opposite.

Why, isn’t this just brillant, let’s waste more money on ethanol and other bio “fuels”.

Here’s a few facts about ethanol:

Ethanol pollutes the air more than gasoline does (CBS News, NPR, FOX News).

Ethanol provides fewer miles per gallon than gasoline does (AP via Newsday).

It takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than that gallon of ethanol provides! That makes ethanol a net loser when it comes to energy.

And switch grass, wood biomass, soybean, and sunflower bio “fuels” are even worst than corn ethanol according to researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley (Green Car Congress):

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, their calculations determined that:

  • Corn requires 29% more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  • Switch grass requires 45% more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  • Wood biomass requires 57% more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:

  • Soybean plants requires 27% more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  • Sunflower plants requires 118% more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

The World Bank has stated that the use of ethanol as a fuel source has increased food prices by 75% world wide (The right-wing liberal).

So, because Americans are using corn as a fuel source instead of a food source, people in developing nations are starving to death because they don’t have money to pay for the massive increase in food costs.

This ethanol bull@#$% is required as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Care to guess which Presidential candidate voted against the bill four times in the United States Senate?

John McCain (Roll call vote 152, 158, 212, 213).

Care to guess who voted for the bill four times and is now complaining about it? (The right-wing liberal again, different link)

Barack Obama (Ibid).

Care to guess whom I’m going to vote for this year?

(Read more at The right-wing liberal too.)

Caroline County Sheriff’s Office helps to take down 17 drug dealers in Westmoreland County.

From The Journal:

Seventeen indictments have been issued as a result of a large drug bust in Westmoreland in the Colonial Beach and the Oak Grove areas of the county. It involved 100 officers in a task force which had been in operation for the past four months.

That operation which culminated in the arrests, started Thursday morning at approximately 2:00 a.m. and involved officers from NCIS, King George, Westmoreland, Caroline, the State Police, FBI, Department of Corrections, ABC enforcement, Colonial Beach police, the state aviation med-flight helicopter, and staff from the regional jail, among other units. Arrests involved felonies and misdemeanors for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, possession of prescription drugs and marijuana.

By 4:00 p.m. 15 people had been arrested and processed. Names were to be announced shortly, according to officers in the Westmoreland Sheriff’s office.

Is “Total Information Awareness” back?

Looks like it’s time for me to join the conspiracy theorists (CNET):

The whopping housing bill that President Bush signed into law last week does far more than merely address the nation’s real estate woes. Some sections have raised serious privacy concerns.

Tucked in near the end of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act is a requirement that banks and online payment networks annually collect and report to the IRS electronic payments made to online merchants. It takes effect in 2011, and will affect what information companies like PayPal collect from their sellers and could raise privacy and auditing complications.

The housing bill also finalized the SAFE Mortgage Licensing Act. As CNET News.com previously reported, the provision creates a national fingerprint registry of “loan originators”–essentially anyone involved in the mortgage industry. While intended to curb predatory lending, the measure has come under fire for being potentially ineffective and unnecessarily invasive.

For the uninitiated, the term “total information awareness” comes from the mission statement of the supposedly-defunct DAPRA organization — the Information Awareness Office — which reads: “imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness” (The New Yorker).

Note the use of the term “supposedly-defunct”, here’s what the American Civil Liberties Organization (ACLU) said in March 2008:

The American Civil Liberties Union responded today to a stunning new report that the NSA has effectively revived the Orwellian “Total Information Awareness” domestic-spying program that was banned by Congress in 2003. In response, the ACLU said that it was filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for more information about the spying. And, the group announced that it was moving its “Surveillance Clock” one minute closer to midnight.

“Congress shut down TIA because it represented a massive and unjustified governmental intrusion into the personal lives of Americans,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the Washington Legislative Office of the ACLU. “Now we find out that the security agencies are pushing ahead with the program anyway, despite that clear congressional prohibition. The program described by current and former intelligence officials in Monday’s Wall Street Journal could be modeled on Orwell’s Big Brother.”

The ACLU said the new report confirmed its past warnings that the NSA was engaging in extremely broad-based data mining that was violating the privacy of vast numbers of Americans.

The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program was a mammoth data mining program that envisioned programming computers to trawl through an extensive list of databases containing personal information about Americans – including communications, medical, travel, education and financial data – in an attempt to detect supposedly “suspicious” patterns. Congress shut down the program amid bipartisan objections that it was the most far-reaching domestic surveillance proposal that had ever been offered.

H/t: Virginia Coalition of Open Government listserv

Another myth about Barack Obama destroyed.

International Herald Tribune:

In an effort to cast himself as independent of the influence of money on politics, Senator Barack Obama often highlights the campaign contributions of $200 or less that have amounted to fully half of the $340 million he has collected so far.

But records show that a third of his record-breaking haul has come from donations of $1,000 or more – a total of $112 million, more than the total of contributions in that category taken in by either Senator John McCain, his Republican rival, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in the Democratic primaries.

Behind those large donations is a phalanx of more than 500 Obama “bundlers,” fund-raisers who have each collected contributions totaling $50,000 or more. Many of the bundlers come from industries with critical interests in Washington. Nearly three dozen of the bundlers have raised more than $500,000, including more than a half-dozen who have passed the $1 million mark and one or two who have exceeded $2 million, according to interviews with fund-raisers.

While his campaign has cited its volume of small donations as a rationale for his decision to opt out of public financing for the general election, Obama has worked to build a network of big-dollar supporters from the time he began contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate.

He tapped into well-connected people in Chicago before the 2004 Senate race, and, once elected, set out across the country starting in 2005 to cultivate some of his party’s most influential money collectors.

[…]An analysis of campaign finance records shows that about two-thirds of his bundlers are concentrated in four major industries: law, securities and investments, real estate and entertainment. Lawyers make up the largest group at about 130, with many working for firms that also have lobbying arms. At least 100 Obama bundlers are top executives or brokers from investment businesses – nearly two dozen work for financial titans like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. About 40 others come from the real-estate industry.

The biggest fund-raisers include people like Julius Genachowski, a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission and a technology executive who is new to big-time political fund-raising; Robert Wolf, president and chief operating officer of UBS Investment Bank; James Torrey, a New York hedge fund investor; and Charles Rivkin, an animation studio head in Los Angeles.

Read the whole thing as they say.

H/t: Matt “threat to democracy” Drudge

2-1 odds of heck breaking loose.

By “heck breaking loose”, I refer to a certain Supervisor whining and complaining.

Press release:

Dear Chamber Members,

This year, the Chamber has been on the move in many ways —– next week we’ll add another!

On August 7, the Caroline Chamber of Commerce will relocate to a new office at 18067 Jefferson Davis Highway in Ladysmith. We are doing this primarily because we needed more room for meetings and daily operations and it seemed, with the many negotiations going on right now for County space, that we would not get the Office of Economic Development’s former office on South Main Street as promised.

We are sad to leave the Town of Bowling Green — home of the Chamber for so many years — but optimistic about the new office space and its possibilities for growth. Thank all of you for your continued support in our programs and events – we’ve met so many of you at Chamber functions and hope to meet many more in the future!

Please continue to drop in and see us in Ladysmith – more details of any changes to phone and fax numbers will be sent by the Chamber office later today.

Sincerely,

L.J. Moyer
President
Caroline Chamber of Commerce

So, not only is the Department of Economic Development moving out of the county seat (Bowling Green) but also is the Chamber of Commerce!

The Department of Economic Development is going to the visitors center at Carmel Church.

So much for the whole premise of a “county seat”.

Well, at least they didn’t move the Virginia Cooperative Extension Office out of the Community Services Center, or else you would have to essentially travel to Hanover County to get there.

Of course, the Cooperative Extension Office might be getting the soon-to-be former office space of the Economic Development Department; hence the Chamber of Commerce won’t get it.

I thought the former Union Bankshares Building — the soon-to-be County Administration building — was supposed to provide the space needs of the county for the next 20 years… (The Caroline Progress)

Hell, it only cost $3,700,000.

Missing Elderly Male Sought

From the Caroline County Sheriff’s Office:

According to Sheriff Tony Lippa, at approximately 6:36 p.m. last night the Caroline County Sheriff’s Office was notified of a missing elderly person. The staff at Bowling Green Health Care Center reported that Richard Robertson, a 71 year old white male, had walked away from the facility located at 102 Anderson Avenue in the town of Bowling Green.

Robertson is described as a white male, 5′ 10″ tall, weighing 150 pounds. He was last seen wearing blue jeans and a gray short sleeved shirt. Robertson also had rubber gloves in some of his belt loops. He was last seen about 5:00 p.m. walking away from the nursing home. There has been one report of Robertson walking west on Route 207 about 6 pm yesterday evening.

Members of the Caroline Sheriff’s Office, Caroline Fire and Rescue and Fort A. P. Hill Fire responded. Assistance was requested from the Virginia State Police aviation and canine units as well as deputies from the Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office. An extensive air and ground search was conducted from 7pm last night and continued until 3am this morning. An activation page of the Caroline Alert system was sent to alert those citizens participating in the program of the missing person.

Robertson suffers from dementia and is in need of medication for a number of medical issues. If anyone has contact with Mr. Robertson, please call 911 immediately. His photograph appears below. Please be aware that when he departed, Robertson was clean shaven.

Weekly News Media Briefs – Week Ending August 2, 2008

From the Caroline County Sheriff’s Office:

On July 25, 2008, Deputy C.M. Garnett responded to Ruther Glen for a domestic disturbance. After further investigation, Barry B. Briggs, 44, of Ruther Glen was charged with Domestic Assault, Abduction and Prevent Another from Summoning Law Enforcement. Deputy F.L. Brennan arrested Briggs on July 26, 2008. He was ordered held without bond and has a pending court date.

On July 27, 2008, Sgt. R.L. Hixson stopped Ernest C. Burruss, 60 of Ruther Glen for a traffic violation. Upon further investigation, Burruss was charged with Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, 2nd offense. He was held on a $2,500 secured bond and a court date of August 6, 2008 was set.

On July 27, 2008, Deputy C.A. Heywood stopped Kyle P. Yushchak, 29, of Ruther Glen for a traffic violation. Upon further investigation, Yushchak was charged with Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, Reckless Driving and Eluding. He was held on a $2,500 secured bond and a court date of August 6, 2008 was set.

On July 27, 2008, Deputy C.M. Polliard stopped Harold A. Nelson, 48, of Ruther Glen for a traffic violation. Upon further investigation, Nelson was charged with Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol and refusal to Submit to a Test. He was released on a $1,500 unsecured bond and a court date of August 1, 2008 was set.

On July 27, 2008, Deputy D.W. Mundie encountered a suspicious vehicle in Ruther Glen. After further investigation, Justin M. Higgs, 19, of Ruther Glen was charged with Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor and Underage Possession of Alcohol. He was released on a summons for both charges and court dates of August 5th and 6th 2008 were set. A juvenile passenger was also charged with Underage Possession of Tobacco and has a pending court date.

On July 28, 2008, Deputy C.A. Heywood responded to Ruther Glen for a larceny. After further investigation, Patrick J. Eiken, 27, of Fredericksburg was charged with Obstruction of Justice, Giving False Statements to a Law Enforcement Officer. He was held on a $1,000 secured bond and a court date of August 8, 2008 was set.

On July 29, 2008, Deputy B.N. Doucet encountered a vehicle in the Lake Caroline subdivision. Upon further investigation, David L. Dobbins, 41, of Ruther Glen was charged with Giving False Information to Avoid a Summons, Drive Without a License, Operate an Uninsured Motor Vehicle, Improper Registration, and No Vehicle Registration. Dobbins was also served an outstanding warrant out of Culpeper County for Intent to Defraud or Destroy Rental Property and an outstanding warrant out of Stafford County for Embezzlement. He was ordered held without bond and a court date of August 1, 2008 was set.

On July 30, 2008, Deputy C.M. Polliard stopped Richard E. Hockaday, 22, of Ruther Glen for an equipment violation. Upon further investigation, Hockaday was charged with Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol. He was released on a $1,500 unsecured bond and a court date of August 1, 2008 was set.

On August 1, 2008, Deputy W.M. Jones responded to Woodford for a domestic disturbance. Upon further investigation, Garnett E. Davis, 65, of Woodford was charged with Domestic Assault. He was held on a $1,000 secured bond and a court date of August 7, 2008 was set.

On August 1, 2008, Deputy C.M. Polliard responded to Woodford for a domestic disturbance. After further investigation, Vincenza E. Trum, 46, of Woodford was charged with Felony Assault of a Law Enforcement Officer (2 counts) and Obstruction of Justice. She was ordered held without bond and a court date of August 6, 2008 was set.

On August 2, 2008, Deputy T.P. Connolly responded to Milford for a domestic disturbance. Upon further investigation, James K. Young, Sr., 39, of Milford was charged with Domestic Assault. He was ordered held without bond and a court date of August 5, 2008 was set.

On August 2, 2008, Deputy B.N. Doucet responded to Ruther Glen for a disturbance. After further investigation, Kenneth M. Madison, 24, of Ruther Glen was charged with Brandishing a Firearm. He was released on his own recognizance and a court date of August 8, 2008 was set.

Caroline County Sheriff’s Office Wrap Up

According to Sheriff Tony Lippa, Caroline Deputies made 3 drug arrests, 2 DUI arrests, 14 domestic violence arrests, and 48 other criminal arrests during the past week. The deputies served 219 civil papers, issued 340 traffic summonses, handled 7 motor vehicle crashes, responded to 68 alarm calls, and dealt with 12 juvenile offenders. The Sheriff’s Office Communications Center dispatched 502 calls for service and handled 970 telephone inquiries. The CCSO also logged 40 calls assisting outside agencies and had 235 self-initiated calls.