Very likely the best Superbowl advertisement, and the one that will generate much discussion around the water fountain and on the talking head shows will be the Green Police advertisement for the Audi TDI (TDI stands for Turbo Diesel Injection).
Aside from the humor — good humor always has a bit of truth within it — Audi needs to be praised for starting a discussion that really needs to take place here in America. Why is it that everywhere else around the globe you can buy automobiles (not just heavy duty pick ups, big rigs and Class A motor homes) with diesel engines in them? California has all but banned diesel engines in cars and other states have done the same thing because of the false beliefs of the policymakers that diesel technology is dirty. That may have been the case years ago, but today’s diesel technology is clean and much more fuel efficient than gasoline. Even the hybrid technology we have today can’t compete with the fuel economy of some diesel automobiles.
For example, the VW Jetta, which now comes with a certified 50-state diesel engine — yes, there were states such as California that outlawed the sale of VW diesels in the past because policy makers deemed them dangerous to the environment — can get over 50 mpg on diesel fuel alone. That’s more than pretty much every other car on the market in America today. An acquaintance of mine purchased a VW Beetle a number of years ago after they came out with the turbo diesel model and he claimed to get 64 mpg on trips from Sacramento to Los Angeles. That’s less than 11 gallons of fuel, or about one tank of diesel, for his round trip.
The other advantage to the new TDI technology in cars can be illustrated in why diesel-powered pickups are so popular. Simply put, they have more horsepower, which makes the cars run more efficiently in terms of their fuel economy. Now your TDI Audi or VW isn’t going to tow a big trailer, but they certainly are going to have the power capable of running at freeway speeds over the Grapevine (I-5 in southern California) and up long uphill grades such as I-40 in Arizona and I-15 from Las Vegas to Cedar City, Utah without sacrificing fuel economy like their gasoline or hybrid counterparts do. Imagine, for instance, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, which is nearly all uphill over 250 miles of interstate, and it costing you about $15 in diesel fuel. Your hybrid isn’t going to get near that kind of fuel economy because you’ll be running much of that distance on the gasoline engine to power your small car up those grades. My all-gas compact car gets about 20 mpg or less up those grades (compared to about 30 on a level freeway with the cruise control set), whereas a good-running TDI car can get more than twice that fuel economy and not suffer the large swings in fuel economy between city, freeway and mountain driving.
If you didn’t see the commercial, which came on at the end of the game, watch it here and enjoy the humor. Besides the horror of what is coming to pass here in America that is illustrated in this commercial, try also to see the value in boosting the number of automobiles sold in America with TDI power-plants running them instead of blocks of batteries and a go-cart motor that will render the car totaled when the batteries die in a few years.
How are the policies and practices of the Democrats and their Republican accomplices helping the poor? Isn’t that the stated purpose of the Left?
How has the “Little Man” benefitted by the loss of over 1 million jobs in America since Barrack Obama was elected? How many private sector jobs have been created by Nancy Pelosi’s personal wealth or as a direct result of her ideas and policies? How many jobs have been made by making more people poor? How’s that war on poverty coming? Democrats have only been fighting that once since FDR almost 80 years ago.
Since the election in 2008 the Democrats took control of the White House and gained greater majorities in the Senate and the House. Until the election of Scott Brown a few weeks ago to the US Senate Democrats held a super majority in the Senate. With all that elected empathy for the poor able to write and pass laws why are we still so poor in America? How come things aren’t any better since we’ve all been told repeatedly that the Republicans are the ones who destroyed America?
Don’t get me wrong; the GOP have plenty of complicity in the mess we’re in, but they didn’t cause the halving of the stock market; they didn’t solely increase the national debt to numbers that nobody can fully comprehend. Certainly no Republican administration in the history of the United States has ever plunged this country into the kind of debt that we will never recover from.
Nevertheless the question remains why are things so bad when Democrats for so long have claimed that if given the power they’d make America into a utopia. Well guys (and gals), you’ve had over a year now to show that you can make things better. We’re not asking for overnight improvement — just show some improvement. Just so you know, millions of lost jobs and trillions of lost wealth is not an improvement.
All the discussions over free healthcare for all has neglected to remind voters that we already have free public education for all.
Education in America has become a “right,” and as such children are compelled (ironic, isn’t it?) to attend school on the taxpayer’s dime, although public education is not directly mentioned or addressed in the US Constitution. We spend billions of dollars a year to educate children so that they can grow up to become taxpayers (at least that’s been the goal — Obama has different plans) and contribute to the system that educated them. This education is sold as the pathway to helping people get jobs and become self-sufficient, in other words, not reliant upon government for assistance.
Education is billed as the pathway to a better way of life, including money, luxury, health care, etc. So why is it that government is trying to force taxpayers to foot the healthcare bill for everyone when public education is supposed to be the pathway to success and the ability to afford your own healthcare?
I have long argued that our battle over water for agriculture has much larger ramifications than the economy of California’s Central Valley. The cheap and ready access to irrigation water is not only vital to for the existence of farms and families in California, it’s imperative if we’re going to remain a sovereign nation.
Discussions over water have become a crusade here in Central California. The reason it’s become such an issue (again) is because the bureaucrats who control the flow of irrigation water believe that protecting the Delta Smelt, a tiny fish with no commercial value, is more important than growing the crops we eat and export.
Farmers have long been innovators in many ways. In fact farmers from around the world will gather next week at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, CA to consider the purchase of new technologies that will further make them more efficient. They’ve had to be more efficient. Profit and loss margins tend to be thin in agricultural production, and in most cases are reliant on things out of control of farmers: the weather and world markets dictate whether farmers will even have a crop and what those crops will be worth once they’re harvested.
It doesn’t help when bureaucrats and do-gooders looking for a cause change the rules after the bets have been placed. You could rightly understand the outrage people would have in Las Vegas if the house called for the bets, and after the bets were placed, the house completely changed the rules in their favor and swept the table clean. That’s what happens on a regular basis as the federal government repeatedly violates the contract it has with farmers to provide water in the Central Valley. These failed water deliveries and cutbacks always happen after predictions of water are made and farmers have borrowed money from the banks to plant their crops. But lately farmers have stopped planting in California’s fertile Central Valley because the predictions of water deliveries have continued to drop to levels unsustainable for agricultural production.
Agriculture has always been the lifeblood of our nation. Even after the industrial revolution moved people off the farm and into the factories, we’ve been self-sufficient when it comes to our food production. What’s even more remarkable is that fewer and fewer people continue to produce more than enough food for the rest of us here in the United States.
Ours isn’t a problem of a lack of water in California, but a lack of water when and where we need it. Much more water falls on California each year through rain and snow than we’re able to store. The ability to collect more of that water and make it available for agricultural and urban uses doesn’t take any water away from the Delta. In reality, it would stabilize flows through the Delta by giving us the ability to slow the runoff and release it in a more controlled manner. There’s another phrase for this: it’s called flood control.
Before Shasta Dam was built, much of the Sacramento Valley was uninhabitable during certain times of the year. Now with facilities like Shasta and Keswick dams, we’ve not only allowed agriculture to flourish in the Sacramento Valley, but we’ve allowed for urban development as the flood plains became livable thanks to the ability to control the flow of water down the Sacramento River. As an added perk, we created a whole host of recreational opportunities for people.
While we could do well to increase the storage capacity of lakes Shasta, Keswick and Oroville, we need similar storage facilities along the west slopes of the southern and central Sierra — facilities that would collect and store water for farmers and cities alike. Water that could even be used to restore the San Joaquin River.
We can do what it takes to build the storage and conveyance systems necessary to provide ample water for agricultural production and urban uses, or we can let a very loud minority have its way and kill agriculture in California. If this happens, we’ll cede our agricultural self-sufficiency to other countries that likely won’t have the best interest of the United States at heart when we go begging for food.
For all that American agriculture provides those who live here, particularly in the Central Valley, you’d think that people would be less ignorant about it. Then again there’s little wonder why Americans are so detached from their supply of food and fiber. After all, it’s so easy to go to the grocery store and pick through a dozen different brands of the same thing; fruits and vegetables are in plentiful supply, the dairy case is consistently stocked with a growing list of items and the remaining shelves and bins have even more choices.
Add to that the ever-decreasing list of people who make their living producing our food and fiber and it becomes a simple issue of numbers. The farmer does what he does in near anonymity. You may even know this farmer; you might go to church with him and his family, or you might shop the same local grocery store, but even then there’s a large disconnect between you and the farmer because you don’t buy your groceries from the farmer. He sells his produce, dairy products, meat, vegetables, etc. to someone who processes the raw commodities; that person likely sells them one more time before hiring someone to transport the finished product to the grocery store where they’re neatly stacked on shelves for you to buy.
That’s likely the root of the problem: farmers don’t sell their goods to the end-user; they don’t have the connection with the end user. That’s not necessarily bad, it simply illustrates a hurdle that the ag industry must overcome if it’s going to better promote itself. While it may be interesting to some, and useful in a sense for agriculture to promote itself in terms of dollars and jobs, the vast majority of the public likely doesn’t care much that American agriculture accounts for about 4 percent of the nominal gross domestic product, according the US Department of Agriculture, or that in California’s Central Valley, agriculture’s economic impact is recorded in the tens of billions of dollars.
While farmers have worked to educate themselves, have made strides in becoming more efficient in their practices, and have even joined forces to lobby their elected representatives, they’ve done little at best to educate their customers — the American public — about just what it is they do, how they do it, and why what they do is so important.
Farm Bureau promotes American agricultural products as the best and safest, but unless you’re involved with Farm Bureau in some way you wouldn’t know that. Somehow that “best and safest” argument has not permeated American culture to the point that it impacts agricultural policy from the federal to the local level. It’s taken for granted until an outbreak of disease-causing bacteria makes headlines and evening news broadcasts and even then it’s missed in the hysteria and hype that reporters can bring to the issue. In some cases those outbreaks can be directly traced to imported food — think tainted frozen strawberries from Mexico several years ago that made it into USDA school lunch programs. Still, other outbreaks may very well have come from U.S. produced food, such as more recent headlines that blamed spinach, lettuce and tomatoes. As detrimental to health and safety that those issues were, instances such as those are more the exception than the rule. Even so, issues such as this make an even stronger case for a more concerted effort of education and promotion by the American agriculture industry.
As cities continue to push their boundaries and pave over farmland and interest groups work to further legislate and restrict farming practices at the ballot box, we’re in danger of pushing our food production across the border and overseas. The end result will be the total abdication of our food production to nations that don’t have our best interests at heart. We have a tremendous land grant college system that puts university research on farms and ranches, helping American agriculture provide the best and safest food of any nation on Earth.
Our national sovereignty rests on our ability to feed and clothe ourselves with what we produce and export another large part of this production. A cursory look at America’s failed energy policy illustrates this point. How many more imported barrels of oil will it take before we completely forfeit our sovereignty? If we cede our food production to other nations, we will lose more than a safe and ample food supply.
American agriculture has a lot going for it. Instead of complaining that the public simply doesn’t understand, help us understand what you do, why you do it that way, and how those practices provide me with a safe and bountiful supply of food.
This information has been around, but it bears repeating because of its significance. Can you find the common denominator?
US Senator Bobby Kennedy is assassinated in 1968.
The kidnapping and murder of olympic athletes during the 1972 games in Munich, Germany.
The 1979 siege and take-over of the US embassy in Iran.
The kidnapping of numerous Americans from Lebanon during the 1980’s.
The 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut where over 200 Marines were killed.
The 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, where a 70-year-old man was killed and thrown overboard.
The 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in Athens where a US Navy diver was killed while trying to rescue passengers.
The 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland.
The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.
The 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Sept. 11, 2001, New York, Washington DC, Pennsylvania.
The War on Terrorism in Afghanistan
The 2002 kidnapping and beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl.
The 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, Texas.
The Christmas 2009 attempt to blow up a US airliner as it landed on American soil.
The simple answer is: Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40. In all these cases, young males with significant ties to radical Islam were behind all of these events.
While we allow people to fly into the United States unchallenged, in spite of knowing they were on a terrorist watch list, American TSA agents are “randomly” searching 80-year-old women in wheel chairs, infants in strollers, US law enforcement officers and Medal of Honor recipients in a veiled attempt to not be accused of profiling. So let’s see: when was the last time a Medal of Honor recipient hijacked a US airliner and used it as a missile to kill 3,000 Americans? How many 80-year-old, wheelchair bound women have ever overpowered US Marines to take over a US embassy? How many renegade infants are on the US terrorist watch list?
As for #15, the Christmas Day attempt by a lone traveler to blow up a jet in Detroit after boarding the plane in a foreign country, with no luggage and a one-way ticket that he apparently purchased with cash — this model citizen with ties to radical Islam is passed off by the President of the United States — a man who himself has ties to radical Islam and domestic terrorists — as “an isolated incident.”
It’s time we demand our government stop trying to insult our intelligence and do all in their power to protect this great country from the foreign and domestic enemies that seek to destroy us.
For all the hue and cry over bank executive compensation plans and the wonderful golden parachutes they receive, where’s the cry over compensation packages and severance packages for those in “Big Media?”
Conan O’Brien will receive $33 million, and his staff another $12 million in severance in the latest fiasco to replace current Tonight Show host O’Brien for the man he replaced, Jay Leno.
What makes these media readers worth millions? Diane Sawyer, for example, is reportedly paid between $12 million and $15 million per year to read the news on ABC News. Others big-name media members surely make commensurate salaries. Katie Couric on CBS reportedly makes approximately $15 million a year to read the news on that network.
Why?
Where’s the call to reduce their salaries and regulate their compensation packages?
Obama deserves more credit for uniting America than he’s getting. Media reports suggest he has conceded that he’s not united America like was promised a year ago when the crying throngs of ignorant masses hailed his inauguration.
In 12 months America has united against Obama’s Health Care Proposal, his economic stimulus plans, and pretty much everything else he’s proposed or said; we’ve united against the House and Senate to the point that poll numbers reflect the lowest public support ever recorded. And, we’ve united against being blamed for global warming while we dig out of record snows here in North America.
So please give Barrack Hussein Obama credit for uniting America against him, his cabinet and staff of felons and his plans to destroy this great nation.
Little did I suspect that my discussion on airport security would need to be updated so quickly, but the slapstick keeps coming.
Apparently the TSA folks are now doing pat-down searches of infants and toddlers and Canada is not allowing carry-on luggage for those flying into the United States. Neither of which was an issue in the most recent example of terrorist attacks and attempted attacks on America since Obama became president. Someone help me here, but were any of the terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center traveling with toddlers? What about the guy who was flying into Detroit — did he even have a carry-on? Word has he flew one way, paid cash, and didn’t have a carry-on. That’s three red flags right there!
This would be slapstick comical if it weren’t so dangerous.
Young men of Middle Eastern dissent commonly board airplanes with minimal security screening while mothers with toddlers are subjected to near strip-searches and the confiscation of sippy cups, and little-old-ladies in wheel chairs are forced to recite the Declaration of Independence backwards and forwards before white-shirt security agents with little more than a high school education drop their weapons and allow these low-risk customers to board the aircraft late, and sometimes in tears.
Didn’t we learn anything from the 9/11 report aside from how much ink it takes to produce a government report?
US Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano might have sounded tough in her words on television, but her actions and those of the employees under her command still don’t get it, or worse, refuse to get it. I’d argue that maybe we need the US Secret Service to take over airport security, but in light of the party-crashers at the recent state dinner, maybe they’re not anymore prepared than your average TSA agent.
I’ve seen it first-hand. The guy with no luggage and only his boarding pass walks unencumbered onto the aircraft while the child with his favorite teddy bear is run through layers of security that leaves the mother bewildered and the child in tears. I’ve had thousands of dollars of my own camera equipment dumped on a hard counter by TSA security, rather than methodically and carefully removed from my camera bag, while I produced press credentials and tried to calmly explain each piece that was in the bag, and where, before the agent arrogantly dumped everything out simply because he could.
All this is why I refuse to fly anymore. Not that I need to anymore, but because I simply don’t want to subject myself to arrogant TSA screeners and extra fees over-and-above the outrageous ticket prices that have dozens of layers of taxes attached. If I ever need to get from the Left Coast to the other coast, I’ll pack the car and drive. It might take 6 hours longer after I’ve had to wade through layers of security lines and airline delays, but the peace of mind in knowing that I’m more secure in my own automobile with my own security measures is priceless.
Todd Fitchette
