Gingrich Already Down, Now Romney

Well "She turned me into a" Newt "but I got better" Gingrich has already removed himself from any consideration that I might support him (with my vast audience that is rivaled only by your local book club for illiterates). Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who was already hanging on a ledge due to his defense of the state version of Obamacare, has completely shown he's willing to leap over logic in favor of power. Mitt "my soul is for sale for your vote" Romney has come out in favor of ethanol subsidies to appease the Iowa farmer crowd.

Let's talk about ethanol a bit. Let's ignore the issue of subsidies as generally being bad policy. Let's first note that the federal government mandates the use of ethanol in fuels. Ethanol eats up small engines, causing them to wear out early without a conversion kit. Oh, and apparently it actually harms the mileage of the vehicle it's used in. Call me crazy, but if you get less emissions but have to use more fuel, don't you just end up with roughly the same amount of emissions? That's an oversimplification But it doesn't just stop with the actual useless effects it has on cars.

Corn is notoriously poor at absorbing nitrogen from the soil. This nitrogen runs off in rain and irrigation into the local water table, eventually making its way down to the Mississippi (it's illegal to grow crops on the west coast due to environmental impact on small fish) and the Gulf of Mexico. When this nitrogen rich water reaches the Gulf, it dominates the oxygen rich waters, creating what is known as a dead zone, where nothing can live. An article on this study can be found here.

Now I don't know if you, like myself, eat, but there is an impact on this as well. There is a moral dubiousness to burning food as fuel as people starve (but in truth, we have been paying farmers not to grow crops to artificially inflate food prices for decades). Using corn crops for fuel instead of farmers growing less profitable food crops means that prices of food go up (read the first paragraph of the CBO report I've linked to, it's not like the government doesn't know this). YAY! Everybody wins! Wait, that's not right. Oh, and by the way, because corn is not the sole source of food, by lessening the supply of one source of sustenance, the demand for the other sources goes up, meaning ethanol drives up the prices of meat, eggs, milk, yogurt, etc.

So, on the basis of falsified data and a questionable hypothesis called anthropogenic global warming, as well as general environmental moronicism, we've decided to make it harder for people to eat. Mitt Romney is all for this, as long as it gets him the votes in the Iowa primary.

So scratch two people off my list of the Republican candidates to defeat the mistake that is our current President (and Mary, if you're reading this, I didn't like Bush or Clinton or Bush, Sr. either, you're right, it's a hard job, but if you can't do it don't run).