Life is...All wet

We’re supposed to see some rain today; well, a 60% chance of rain. And it’s also irrigation day and that means the orchard will get wet…no matter what!

I’m not all that enthused about irrigating at this time of the year. I really don’t like doing it in the dark and it will be another month before it’s light enough to clearly see all of the potential hazards where I have to walk up to the canal to open the gate that allows the water into our ditch. And with these cloudy skies, I won’t have the benefit of the moonlight either.

Some news…

Some in G.O.P. Express Worry Over ’08 Hopes
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JOHN M. BRODER
”Party leaders are concerned about dissatisfaction with the president and political fallout from the war in Iraq.”

Not to worry. The Democrats have at least a year or more to shoot themselves in the foot and they will; it’s guaranteed. And once again the electorate will be faced with a choice of tweedledum or tweedledee in 2008. They say that the ‘cream’ will naturally rise to the top…but that doesn’t happen in politics.

And something that caught my eye the other day. IBM has a little over 53,000 employees. In India. And they just moved their Purchasing department to China. Department head and all.

Something else. Who’s paying for the corn based ethanol? We are and we’re paying for it in the most unlikely of places. Since corn is replacing soy as the crop of choice in the Midwest, soy products are rising in price. So are beef and pork prices as corn based animal feed becomes more expensive. And let’s not forget the subsidies that help the corporate corn farmer (Think ADM) maintain the lifestyle that they are accustomed to. Politically; corn is king and it is American as apple pie. But, of all the possible plants to use for ethanol production, corn is the least efficient. One of the best? Sugar cane; as it’s already a sugar and doesn’t need to be converted as corn does.

Of course sugar cane grows best in the tropics and we don’t have a lot of that kind of climate in America. We could import sugar cane ethanol from Brazil, but we have placed a 70+ cents per gallon tariff on it, making it more expensive than corn based fuel. We don’t want no cheap ethanol!