Business Items :: Remember the NFL Tonight

{ 2008 11 13 }

Remember the NFL Tonight

Palin - Since losing her bid for the vice-presidency, Sarah Palin has hit the metaphorical party circuit, doing guest appearances on everything from The Today Show to Larry King Live. I suppose this was inevitable, but both the voters in Alaska must be wondering who’s been left to watch the store. She’s now been campaigning outside the state for roughly 7% of her term as governor.
What’s a bit more disturbance than the neglect of her job is the way she appears to have believed her own line of campaign nonsense. In at least two clips yesterday, Palin either questioned whether Obama understood that terrorists are a security risk or directly mentioned how distraught she is by his connection to Chicago educator Bill Ayers. Apparently someone forgot to cc her on the “Lose with dignity and try not to cause civil unrest” memo.

Gasoline - The gas station nearest my home is currently selling regular unleaded for $1.95/gallon, which makes it substantially cheaper than milk. If only the human body could digest octane, soup kitchens and homeless shelters would become substantially more flammable. That’s not my only point.
How are we supposed to encourage sustainable energy development if global recession continues to drive gas prices down? Personally, I’m starting to come around on the idea of some sort of government-set price floor, as advocated by the unnecessarily annoying Thomas Friedman. Artificially high gas prices would provide the populace with material motivation to conserve while affording the government a lucrative supply of revenue, which could then be distributed to sustainability efforts.
[Note: While this forum may occasionally agree with Mr. Friedman, such should not be assumed as its default position. Sure, he's a good leftist, but he tends to go off book-writing a bit half-cocked, and his unending attempts to bring phrases of his own coinage into the popular lexicon are unbearable, at best.]

Colbert - My stance on marriage is pretty simple: Best of luck to anyone fool enough to do it. The opinion of not-so-young Americans voiced by Dan Savage during his segment on The Colbert Report is shared, I suspect, by more people than might say so in mixed company.

Pickens - During his appearance on The Daily Show, T. Boone Pickens did much to make me think he’s less of a crackpot than his backwoods name might imply. Not long ago, I was railing against The Pickens Plan because moving from petroleum to natural gas as the prime source of motive power diminishes our current petroleum-related problems without taking any steps toward eliminating them while creating problems of its own. In the above-linked clip, however, you’ll notice that Pickens proposes shifting heavy transportation, such as tractor-trailers and buses, to natural gas while continuing to move consumer transportation, such as cars and motorcycles, toward electricity, which could then be derived from sustainable sources. The amount of sense that makes does much to assuage my fears that America was under intellectual attack from an immensely wealthy idiot.