Taking on the ethanol lobby in Iowa …

Ted Cruz is under attack in Iowa because he doesn’t support the ethanol subsidies. Iowa’s Republican governor even came out and told caucus goers to vote for anyone else but Cruz.

Forget for a moment that except for the caucuses and college football, nobody in their right mind outside of Iowa gives a rat’s ass about what happens inside Iowa.

The entire population of the state is just a tad more than three million. More people live in Los Angeles than in the entire state of Iowa.  The largest city in Iowa – Des Moines – only has a population a bit over 200,000.  There’s nobody home. 

Yet here we are again breathlessly awaiting what a miniscule part of that tiny population thinks about the people running for President. That’s after candidates have dropped millions of bucks and spent countless hours trudging from door-to-door or meeting in greasy spoons with people wearing biballs and John Deere gimme caps.  It’s all to generate a “ground game” to convince groups of volunteers to show up at their local caucus station and line up on one side or another.

Yeah, that’s the science involved.  Pretty sophisticated, huh? 

However, somebody somewhere takes this farce seriously. Mainly the media and political consultants. Politicians promise anything to win votes in Iowa, as they do everywhere else.  Except some hot-button issues important to Iowans are hardly what’s important to the rest of the country.  Chief among these are the ethanol subsidies.

You can thank Chuck Grassley and other farm-state politicians for the fact that there are ethanol subsidies in the first place.  You can thank them as well for driving up the cost of food in general, hurting our trade deficit, and forcing oil companies to blend low-performance ethanol into their gasoline making a less efficient fuel. Oh, and also for increasing greenhouse gases; even the Sierra Club and other environmental groups oppose ethanol production. 

Rarely can you find a government-subsidized boondoggle that fails so miserably on so many points, was sold through on laughable reasoning, and rewards so few at the expense of so many. And now that supply and demand has changed the energy landscape, ethanol no longer makes any economic or strategic sense at all. In fact, it never did.      

Everybody in Congress knows this, as does every candidate running in the Iowa caucuses. But they are too nutless to address this fiasco. Then along comes Ted Cruz, never known for his tact. Ted said he opposed the continuation of the ethanol subsidies – a mortal sin in Iowa. Actually, Ted also said he opposes any subsidies for any energy form, including solar/wind, biofuels, and of course oil and natural gas because Washington shouldn’t be picking winners and losers.

Good for Ted; someone needed to say it.

This was immediately seized upon by the other jackals in the race who pledged their undying support for ethanol subsidies. Not to be outdone, Iowa’s governor claimed that ending the subsidies would cost 75,000 Iowans their jobs and set back the state’s growing ethanol production industry.   

To which I say:  so what? Live by the subsidy, die by the subsidy. 

Now after all this reading you may be wondering exactly what the ethanol subsidy is?  There’s not just one subsidy; there are a variety of subsidies tied to ethanol, including tax credits for producers and blenders, tariffs to keep out cheaper foreign ethanol, mandated use, and more.

The one that hits consumers directly in their wallets is requiring oil companies to blend a certain percentage of ethanol into their gasoline. That creates a mandated demand for ethanol – right now estimated at 18 billion gallons a year. That in turn rewards farmers for turning food and cattle-feed crops into ethanol – which now has a guaranteed market. That causes a shortage of grains like corn which forces prices up rewarding those same farmers while raising costs of all related food products for the rest of us.

But that’s not all. By diverting food crops we traditionally exported, into ethanol oil companies are required to use domestically, we hurt our balance of trade.

And by law, the EPA is required to continually up the mandated percentage of ethanol in gasoline which only promises to aggravate the situation further. I also forgot to mention that the same farm-state politicians have effectively blocked the importation of cheaper foreign produced ethanol, such as from Brazil (which more efficiently produces ethanol from sugar).

Meanwhile, it's already estimated to have cost U.S. drivers across the country as much as $83 billion since 2007.    

The original pitch for ethanol subsidies was that it would reduce our dependence on foreign oil.  In reality it actually increased the amount of gasoline we used to drive the same number of miles.  Now the world is awash in oil – it’s below $30 a barrel on the world market and we may soon be an oil exporter – supporters of continuing the ethanol subsidies have an even weaker case. 

But hey, it’s created jobs in Iowa and made farmers – actually agribusiness conglomerates – there richer.  Isn’t that worth it? 

Nope it’s not.  I may not like Ted Cruz all that much, but I have to give him credit for this one.

The ethanol industry wouldn’t exist without government regulations and rules.  It shouldn’t exist at all.  Those theoretical 75,000 people who could lose their jobs will find other work, maybe planting and harvesting food crops again, for example. 

Their loss is a small price to pay for helping the hundreds of millions of other Americans who would benefit.  So kudos to Cruz – we need more politicians with the balls to stop this nonsense.   

Hey black America – you can’t have it both ways …

So it’s okay for there to be a black-only BET awards show and a black-only Image awards show, plus a Black Caucus in the House and Senate, and a Black Lives Matter movement, but because no black actors or black directors were nominated for an Oscar again this year, that’s racist.

Hmm. 

The majority of players in the NBA are black. Is that racist? The majority of players in the NFL are black, but the majority of NFL quarterbacks and head coaches are white.  Is that racist? 

Many blacks think there’s nothing wrong with the racial disparities in the NBA. But they are quick to jump on the racial disparities in quarterbacks and head coaches in the NFL.

You can’t argue both sides.       

Chris Rock once joked that he never heard anyone arguing for quotas to insure that whites are equally represented as men’s room attendants; so why should there be quotas for white players in professional sports?  Yet whenever a coaching opportunity arises in college or professional sports there are highly public calls for adding more black coaches. However, when colleges are recruiting players, or pro teams are drafting players, race for some reason isn’t an issue.     

Well folks – black, white, Asian or whatever – some things are decided by merit and talent alone. That’s just the way it is. Talent allowed Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball; if he hadn’t been a helluva ball player he wouldn’t have made it. The reason why there are so many more black professional basketball players than whites is not because they’re black, but because those specific individuals are better at the game than anyone else of any color.

And the reason there are more white head coaches in the NFL is most likely only because those head coaches have a better track record of winning. If any white coaches in any sport lose too often, they get fired just like any black head coaches who lose too often. And if they win a lot it makes no difference if they are black, white, Asian, Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist or whatever.    

Regardless of race, in college or professional sports is you don’t win you lose your job. If someone is better at winning than you, they’ll get your job. It’s the ultimate meritocracy.

The entertainment industry is the same. If you make movies that don’t make money for the studios, your race or ethnicity is irrelevant.  If people aren’t willing to pay enough to see you perform – or they don’t like you or your act for whatever reason – it doesn’t matter where you’re from, how unfair it may seem, or what point you’re trying to make. You still lose.

Performance is always open to fair comment and opinion.  Some years there are black Oscar winners because the voters thought they were the best.  Some years movies that feature a lot of black actors and black themes win Oscars, again for the same reason. Some years white performers like Taylor Swift win the Grammys; other years black performers win.

When white performers and directors don’t win, you don’t hear them playing the race card. Yet you do when black artists and directors don’t win. You can’t have it both ways. 

Nor can you expect a quota system that insures a certain percentage of black movies, artists, actors and directors win.  Not when you have BET and Image awards shows that exclude everyone who isn’t black from winning those awards.  Will there now be a quota for non-blacks? 

You can’t discriminate based on race for some things without opening yourself up to charges of racial discrimination on a whole host of others. 

Either you want a merit-based system for everything – sports, entertainment, acceptance into schools, academic advancement, employment opportunities – or you don’t. If you think you can mix some quotas and some merit-based systems, it doesn’t work.  All our years of setting artificial preferences and quotas for everything from college admissions to institutional diversity have failed.    

Be careful what you choose.  There’s no middle ground. If blacks choose quotas over merit there are consequences black America won’t like.

New York values …

When Ted Cruz accused Donald Trump of having “New York values” the media went nuts.

That’s because Cruz was attacking them as well as Trump. 

Trump countered Cruz by playing the 911 card.  You know, how much New York suffered, the bravery of the people to rebuild and go on, the heroic first responders, yada yada yada. 

The media ate that up. How dare anyone criticize New York after all it’s been through? That’s been the standard theme New York – more specifically New York City and New York politicians – has been using for more than a decade to squeeze more and more out of the rest of the country.

911 was more than a decade – and billions of dollars in Federal aid – ago.  Millions went to the families of the people who had the misfortune to be in those buildings that day. Millions more went to provide additional health services to first responders and others who claimed to have suffered lingering health issues from the attack.  Millions went to help the “economic revitalization” of lower Manhattan.  And on and on.  The total was more than $20 billion. 

And you know what – New York politicians continue to complain and demand more.     

There’s no doubt that it was tragic so many people died in the World Trade Center. But the same day people also died at the Pentagon.  And in Shanksville, PA.  However, the only thing that matters to the media is what happened in New York. 

Ted Cruz backpedaled a bit and tried to make this about liberal values. Too bad.

Intentionally, or unintentionally, Cruz hit on something that was a dog whistle to a lot of people in this country, me included. 

New York values -- to me -- have less to do with “liberal” values in general, and more to do with the arrogance and condescending attitude the media and others in New York continually display toward the rest of us.

To them, the United States is essentially the New York City metro where they work, Connecticut where they sleep, Massachusetts where they vacation, DC where they grovel, and parts of California striving to emulate New York City. The rest of the country is filler, with frontier outposts of civilization here and there – usually where some Democrat mayor is driving a city further into the ground, or where college students and academics outnumber the rest of the local population.   

If they were to draw a map of the country every place outside those outposts would be labeled “There be monsters here”; meaning of course that this would be where the unenlightened live. 

That would be the rest of us. 

You know, the ones who simply want to be left alone to live, work and worship as we wish as long as we don’t physically harm others.  The ones who don’t want our taxes used to support policies we find intrusive, unwarranted, and frankly stupid. The ones who don’t want to work our asses off only to have our money taken away to be given to people who refuse to work at all. 

And the ones who believe in our right to protect ourselves, the government’s responsibility to protect our borders and our interests here and abroad, and politicians’ and the courts’ responsibility to follow the Constitution. 

Much to the chagrin of those with New York values, we still believe in helping ourselves and others in need, rather than expecting government to fix everything.  We are courteous to others, unlike them, too.  We also believe there is a right or wrong; breaking the law and getting away with it is not to be admired, but admonished.  We take responsibility for our own actions and can’t understand those who refuse to do the same. 

I guess all that makes us the unenlightened.

New York values have nothing to do with being pro-choice or pro-life, opposed or in favor of gay marriage, or being a liberal or conservative.

It has more to do with arrogance, an attitude of entitlement, and a belief that the end always justifies the means no matter what. People with New York values are by their nature bullies; they try to intimidate into submission anyone who disagrees with them.

When Cruz accused Trump of having “New York values” he was probably closer to the mark than he realized.  The shoe fits.

The reaction by Trump and the media also shows their New York values, as well.  The media really don’t understand the rest of the country; they don't comprehend that much of the rest of the country doesn't live in awe of all things New York. I'm not sure Trump does either -- he keeps bringing up how rich and successful he's been by being a tough negotiator.  

The media are obsessed with Trump because they have a love/hate relationship with him. They love Trump because he says stupid stuff and his supporters still cheer, confirming for the media that Republicans in general are ignorant, racist, bigoted and uncultured. They hate him because every time they point out his stupid, mean-spirited comments, or he attacks the media, his apparent popularity rises.

Trump is everything New York values are all about.  The media simply do not know how to deal with one of their own successfully whipping up the unenlightened using the same playbook.

It’s more than a bit scary to them. 

However, the more Trump defends his New York roots, the more he distances himself from the values of the rest of the country – you know, that place between New York and California, and outside the decaying big cities.

There are a lot of people out here in the wastelands. And we might vote.