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June 19, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
June 19, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #2
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You know, I really probably shouldn't take any delight in somebody else's misfortune.
Divorce is a terrible, miserable thing.
But this is funny.
The uh, you know, the Segalane, the babe that was running for uh to be the king of France or whatever they call them over there, what do they call it?
They are they presidents or prime ministers, what do they actually have in France?
Segolaine Royale, she was expected to win, and the right winger Sarkazy actually won.
This is a lesson for all of you to feed us about 2008.
We can't win, we're unpopular.
If a conservative can win in France, this is not a lost cause.
Anyway, Sarkozy won the election.
Segeline Royal did not.
They just held parliamentary elections.
The Socialist Party did reasonably well in those, and a day after, she decides to announce that she's splitting up with her husband, who is the leader of the Socialist Party.
His name is Francois Hollande.
He's the leader of the party, and she has been, she was the candidate, the party's candidate for prime minister.
He says that it is an amicable split and they've decided to go their separate ways.
She says that he made the choice to do things that she isn't going to tolerate anymore.
Not only is she ditching him, she kind of wants to be the head of the socialist party herself right now.
So the leaders of the socialists in France, two major politicians in their own right, are bickering over who should be in charge of things, and it's fracturing their marriage.
Any other nation where the socialists have a couple that in the meantime, a judge in Vermont is ruling in a child custody case involving two women who had been married in a civil union.
Vermont is one of those states that allows gay people to engage in civil unions, which are not marriages but the sort of marriages, they're whatever they want them to be.
This couple had a baby.
One of the women was artificially inseminated so that they could have a child.
This occurred in 2002.
The couple had gotten together in 2000, and they had a civil union sometime after the fact.
They've now broken up.
And they are having a bitter dispute over who gets the child.
The woman who actually gave birth to the child says, Look, this is my baby.
It's not her baby.
It's not the other one's baby.
The other woman said we had this child jointly, obviously.
Only one of us could give birth, but we were both parents of this child, and that I should have equal custody, and we ought to share in the raising of our daughter.
This has been complicated by virtue of the fact that one of the women has moved to Virginia, so you have dueling cases, one in Vermont, one in Virginia, and both women are trying to fight their cases out there.
The uh judge in the case in Vermont has ruled in favor of the woman who gave birth to the child, saying that she has sole custody of the baby, however, is granting visitation rights to the other woman.
As we see more and more states sanctioning civil unions, and as these Rosie O'Donnell style adoptions become more common, you're going to see a lot of cases like this.
And while on its face it seems funny, the thing that strikes me in all of these is that these children are being raised for the purpose of the mothers.
And it's almost entirely women.
I'm sure there are some cases out there of two men trying to raise a child, perhaps by adoption, but the vast majority of them are female gay relationships in which they want to raise a baby.
We're seeing a lot of cases like this.
And what you the what happens when the relationship ends is you have a fight literally between two Mothers.
Can a baby have two mothers?
It's a mothers.
It's a new concept for us.
And I'm not sure it's an especially healthy one.
First of all, it demeans the entire notion of fatherhood, implying that a father is an absolute irrelevancy, a concept that has destroyed many black families, the idea that we simply don't need to have any male role model in the life whatsoever, but more to the point, knowing the potential of what can happen when the relationship ends.
And watching this particular case, I mean, there is a child here.
There is a child who is going to have to decide which mother is her mother, or are there both their mothers?
And the desire to have these kids is almost entirely premised on I want to have a baby.
We want to have a baby.
Not, are we in the best situation to be able to raise a child?
And I think it comes down to just pure selfishness.
And that's what it's all about.
As for the decision to award visitation rights to the woman who didn't give birth.
Let's imagine the situation did not involve a couple of gays.
Guy and a woman, unmarried.
The woman is artificially inseminated and has a baby.
It's not the biological child of her boyfriend.
When they break up, does the boyfriend expect to have any kind of visitation rights?
Well, what's the difference?
Now, those who support gay marriage would argue that's exactly the point.
It does not allow us to engage in relationships in which in which we can jointly be able to raise a child and have equal parental rights.
Straight people have the ability to get married.
If the guy wants to be able to be involved in the child's life if they split up, well then he should have married her in the first place.
Gays don't have the right to do that, so their argument goes.
But the larger point is whether or not society needs to facilitate people's desires to raise children any way they feel like raising them.
If we're going to sanction the parental rights of both people in a gay relationship, do we have to sanction the parental rights of a three-way relationship?
Let's imagine that a woman and a man have a baby.
And the woman later decides to hook up with a female partner.
Do they all get rights?
And are we going to base every single decision on the basis of what these parents who are choosing alternative lifestyles want, or are we going to start to think about what's in the best interest of the child?
Cranston, Rhode Island headline, state states face decisions on who is mentally fit to vote.
This is from today's New York Times.
Behind the barbed wire and thick walls of the state mental hospital here are two patients who have not been allowed to live in the outside world for 20 years.
Both were found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.
Still, they have voted in elections nearly every two years, casting ballots by mail.
Now, however, election officials are taking steps that could ban them from voting, arguing that state law denies the vote to people with serious psychiatric impairments.
Rhode Island is among a growing number of states grappling with the question of who is too mentally impaired to vote.
The issue is drawing attention for two major reasons, increasing efforts by the mentally ill and their advocates to secure voting rights, and mounting concern by psychiatrists and others who work with the elderly about the rights and risks of voting by people with conditions like Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
So apparently a number of states are considering restrictions on voting by the mentally ill.
This is a serious threat to the Democratic Party.
If mentally ill people can't vote, you're taking away a huge segment of the Democratic voting base.
If you're talking about denying the insane the right to vote, I mean Hillary loses five percent right there, doesn't she?
In the meantime, Michael Bloomberg, the can the mayor of New York is positioning himself to run for president next year as a third-party candidate.
Here's my prediction.
The beauty of being a guest host is, since I'm not here every day, I can make these predictions, and if they're wrong, none of you are going to remember them.
If they're right, I can come back three months later or whenever my next stint is and say...
see, I told you I was right about that.
It's absolutely beautiful.
Admit it, you don't remember any of my wrong predictions, do you?
On the other hand, there are this you're you're not going to.
You hardly ever hear me.
You're going to remember when Rush is wrong about something because chances are he's going to say it more than once or on more than one occasion, it will stick in your mind longer, and the audience will remember it.
Guy like me, I can come in and throw any dart on the wall I want.
If I'm right, I can bounce back in and say, you know, the last time I was here, I geniusly prognosticated.
So I'm just going to start throwing throwing them out all over the place.
Don't any of you bother to write these down.
I don't want that.
Don't worry.
I'll keep track of them.
My prediction is that Michael Bloomberg is going to run for president.
He will run as a third party candidate and he will enter the race sometime in the middle of next year.
Both the New York Post and the New York Times over the last couple of days have done major stories on whether or not Bloomberg is running.
For those of you not familiar with him, he's the guy that succeeded Rudy Giuliani as mayor of New York.
He was elected as a Republican, but he's very liberal.
He's also worth a gazillion dollars.
He and his family operated the Bloomberg News Service since sold, made an absolute fortune.
It's the major financial news operation.
I think it's now affiliated with Reuters, but uh Bloomberg's net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
He may be a billionaire, as a matter of fact.
So he has almost unlimited resources to put together a presidential campaign.
I think he's going to run.
I think he's in the race.
He's running all over the country right now giving speeches.
There's no reason for him to be doing that if he was simply content with being the mayor of New York.
Everybody presumes that if a third party candidate gets in the race, it's going to be Ross Perrault all over again and it's going to harm the Republicans.
There are many people who think the reason Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States first time around is because Ross Perot got into the race and screwed everything up.
I don't know if that's right or not, but I think it's pretty clear that Perot probably hurt Bush, Bush I, more than he hurt Clinton.
I don't necessarily think that's the case with Bloomberg.
I'd kind of like to see Michael Bloomberg get into the race because I think he would hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans.
I'll tell you why when we come back in the next segment of the program.
Also an alert.
I run this major risk of alienating some of you who are farmers.
It's going to happen on today's program.
I've been on best behavior.
I haven't hacked off anybody in any great number yet, but I fear it's going to happen sometime before the yellow result.
So I'm just giving you that warning right now.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on EIB.
All right, let's imagine right Michael Bloomberg gets into the race for president next year.
Here's the way it'll work.
May June of next year.
Remember, both parties' nominees are going to have nailed this down by early February.
Almost all the delegates for both conventions are going to be chosen by the middle of February.
This is going to happen real, real fast.
The Republican nominee, whomever it is, is going to be known.
The Democratic nominee, whomever that is, is going to be known.
You're going to have the longest campaign ever.
We're talking about for nearly a full year, both the Republican and Democratic candidates being known quantities.
People are going to be sick of them.
It will create an opening for a new face to come in, and that's what Bloomberg is counting on.
In terms of getting attention, well, he is a billionaire.
He's going to be able to buy as much time as he wants to get his face out there.
While a Republican and someone who would run right at the middle, it's my belief that this would not be a repeat of Perot, but could be a disaster for the Democrats, especially if the Democratic candidate is Hillary Clinton.
Here's why.
Where's Michael Bloomberg's strength?
I think it's mostly in blue states.
First of all, he'd probably do fairly well in New York.
Well, who would that take votes from?
If Michael Bloomberg gets in the race as a third party candidate, he puts New York right there in open contest for the Republicans to be able to get.
New York City is a huge part of Hillary Clinton's base.
If Bloomberg can take half the votes in New York City, those are all straight out of the Hillary line.
I think it would put a number of other states up for grabs as well.
I don't think Bloomberg would be particularly strong in the so-called red states, the Republican states.
A mayor of New York, who is a taxer and fairly liberal, isn't going to sell in Georgia, not going to sell in Florida.
It's not going to sell anywhere south of the Mason Dixon line.
I don't think he'd be especially strong there.
Well, those are the areas that the Republicans are likely to win, and I don't think that Bloomberg would get in the way.
But in some of these northern states, especially in the Northeast, and maybe even in California, he might have some appeal.
If Bloomberg spends $150 million on a presidential campaign and does at least as well as Perot did the first time around, you might even talk about putting California into play.
Because I think that the votes that he takes would be from moderate to liberal people who are uncomfortable with the Democratic candidate who they simply think that that person is too far out there to the left.
So I think a Bloomberg entry would hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans.
And you know how I know I'm right.
Even E.J. Dion believes what it is.
E.J. Dion is a left-wing columnist for the Washington Post.
He's got a column out today.
He writes, given how tarnished the Republican brand is, the GOP's best strategy is to bring Democrats down with them into the murky depths of public disapproval.
This might build support for a third-party candidate in 2008, which could help Republicans by splitting the anti-Bush anti-system vote.
It's still early, but not too early for Democrats to worry about this prospect and to brace themselves for some ugly politics for the rest of the year.
That brings me to my larger point, and that is that a lot of people have simply written off 2008.
They're obsessed with what happened in November of 2006, and my argument is that it was a total aberration.
First of all, you can go back a century, an entire century, and the last two years of a two-term president's term are always a disaster for that political party.
It's happened again and again and again and again and again.
The party that controls the White House after six years always gets clobbered in the congressional elections.
It happened this time, but it's always happened this time.
Secondly, you have a very, very unusual issue out there with regard to this war.
It's the first time we've fought a war like this.
It isn't even like Vietnam.
We're not fighting against a conventional enemy.
We are fighting against a motley group of insurgents from three different sides.
It's wearing on the patience of the American people, and they are angry with their president over it, or at least the majority of Americans are.
I think that just hung over the entire 2006 elections.
If you take a look at the approval ratings right now of President Bush, while they are low, they're still higher than those of the Democrats.
The approval rating for Congress right now is lower than that of Bush.
Well, who runs the Congress?
The Democrats run the Congress.
Secondly, if you follow any issue that's going on out there, the Congress isn't passing any bill on it.
Congress isn't solving anything.
All they're trying to do is obstruct President Bush, and they're not going to gain any popularity by doing that.
So I don't think that we are automatically looking at a Republican bloodbath in 2008.
With the right set of candidates and the right set of issues, Republicans can easily go on and win.
I think it's at least 50-50 that the Republicans can not only regain at least one of the two houses of Congress, but can win the presidency next year.
Especially if the Democrats choose...
a bad candidate with a lot of baggage, like the woman who is their front runner right now.
You give me Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson against Hillary Clinton, and my money is going to be on the Republicans regaining the White House, and there's way too much doom and gloom out there among Republicans over their prospects for next year.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for Rush Lamar.
Government just came out with this inflation report last week.
It's a crock.
They call it core inflation.
And they always say this is the number that the Fed is watching the most that decide if it's going to tighten or ease the money supply.
Core inflation excludes food and energy.
How can you exclude food and energy from inflation?
What do they think we spend our money on?
Food and energy is like everything.
There are some people that the only bills they have are for food and energy.
And food and energy are going up.
So I think that we mislead ourselves by looking at some of these numbers and say that somehow core inflation is an indication of any kind of a reality.
It may be a better way of judging bills for corporate America.
Corporate America obviously isn't concerned that much about food, although they are concerned about energy.
But for most Americans and the way they live, food and energy have an enormous impact on their lives.
So this number's bogus.
And I bring it up because I want to lead into something, and it is one of my opportunities to say I told you so.
I honestly probably would tell you about a prediction I've made while sitting in for Rush that turned out to be wrong, but I honestly don't think I've made one yet.
Nothing comes to your mind, does it?
No.
I think I'm batting 100%.
I predicted about a year and a half ago that the price of food in America was going to go through the roof because of our insane obsession with ethanol.
Now, I warned you in an earlier segment that this is going to anger some farmers.
I'm not going to apologize for what I have to say though, because it's what I believe, and I think it's almost undeniable.
Our government's decision to subsidize the bejeezers out of ethanol and mandate its use is the dumbest thing that we have done in 15 years of major public policy.
It is crazy.
And we are paying the price for it all over the board, and it's going to get worse.
The price of almost every commodity right now is going up.
And while I'm not going to blame ethanol for all of it, it is the biggest single contributor to it.
Let's deal first of all with fuel.
The perfect fuel to run our cars on would be something that didn't pollute at all and had no other use.
If you could run a car on garbage, and that garbage didn't pollute at all, that would be the perfect fuel.
Well, they haven't really figured out a way to run cars on garbage yet, and I'm sure garbage wouldn't be carbon neutral.
Nonetheless, garbage would be a great fuel.
We're taking something we would otherwise be throwing in the landfill, and we're able to run our cars on it.
The reverse is what's the worst possible thing you could use for your fuel?
It would be something that you are presently using for something else.
We are using our food to run our cars.
That is crazy.
It's absolutely crazy.
We have been selling this to people on the notion that we need to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, which ethanol doesn't even do.
And wouldn't you rather give the money to the American farmer than some Middle Eastern oil baron?
Well, my answer is no.
This has been a windfall for farmers, but only certain farmers.
The biggest problem is that the ethanol not only comes from a food product, it comes from the food product that is the absolute basis for the Amer entire food chain in America.
We run on corn.
Never mind how much corn people themselves consume.
Almost everything that we eat, almost every animal is fed corn.
Cattle, hogs, chicken.
They're all eating corn.
And you know what's happened to the price of corn?
It's gone through the roof.
And it's showing no signs of slowing down.
I have in front of me today's Wall Street Journal.
The uh by the way, you know they've ruined the Wall Street Journal.
Yes, they've ruined the Wall Street.
The Wall Street Journal used to have the listing of every stock and mutual fund in it every morning and every commodities price, and I always knew where to find it.
And they well, you know, you can go find that on the internet now.
I don't want to find it on the internet.
It was always right there for me.
They do, however, have a listing of the current futures contracts for just about every commodity that is that is traded on any of them.
Chicago Board of Trade Mercantile Exchange, uh Kansas City Board of Trade, and so on.
Corn futures for July, and that's only a month away, are right now trading for about four dollars and twenty cents a bushel.
That's nearly triple what they were only a couple of years ago.
Triple.
You may have noticed if you've been to the grocery store, that a lot of food prices are going up, particularly for meat.
The reason for that is is that the cattle producers and the hog producers are seeing significant increases in their costs, and the biggest cost they have is for feed.
Then look at all the other uses that we have for corn that humans use.
Soft drinks, they're filled with corn syrup.
Tacos, the taco shells, they're made out of corn.
Everything is corn.
And we are using that for our fuel and for what purpose?
I'm taking a look at all of these futures out there.
Pork bellies, way up, hogs, way up, live cattle way up.
Even the price of milk has gone through the roof.
Milk's now on the futures market over $4 a gallon.
That isn't entirely because of corn.
There's been a lot of things going on in the milk market, but what do you think they feed the dairy cows?
It's corn.
What we have done is we have taken a product that is in limited supply, corn grown in America, and forced it into this other use.
And any time you've got an increase in demand for a product, you are going to drive up the price of that product.
So here we are with ethanol in our cars, and in a lot of parts of the country, the gasoline is now watered down with 10% ethanol, and you're seeing inflation across the board with almost every other commodity that is out there.
It's crazy.
But we feel good about it because it's reducing our reliance on foreign oil.
No, it's not.
If somehow the use of ethanol would save oil, you might argue that there'd be a benefit to that.
But I think it's just the opposite.
First of all, we have to use a whole lot of oil in order to get the ethanol.
Ethanol cannot be shipped via pipeline.
Because ethanol has water in it, it evaporates if you put it in a pipeline.
What you have to do is you have to truck it.
So first of all, we're planting all this corn, then we're fertilizing the corn.
That's always done with tractors, which are running on regular old gasoline or diesel fuel.
Then we've got to take all the corn to the grain elevator.
That's by truck.
Then you take another truck, a bunch of trucks and you take the ethanol to the ethanol processing plant and you convert it into ethanol, and then you have to take the ethanol to the tank farms where it's mixed in with the gasoline.
You're trucking that stuff all over the place.
How much gasoline and how much oil-based fuel are you using in the process?
Add to that that ethanol is extremely inefficient, miles per gallon, way lower than gasoline, you're not saving anything.
In fact, a lot of people believe you're actually using more oil in producing ethanol than you're saving by putting the ethanol in the gasoline.
As for the so-called cleanliness of burning ethanol, well, ethanol doesn't is indeed lower on carbon emissions, it's actually higher in other emissions given the nature of how it burns.
The policy is nuts.
And as for the impact in the American farmer, while indeed the corn growers are loving this, every other kind of farmers hacked off.
The cattle ranchers are being killed here.
The biggest single cost a cattle rancher has is feed.
Their feed costs are through the roof.
The dairy farmers are being killed.
The only ones who are benefiting are a specific kind of American farmers, and it's occurring at the expense of just about everyone else.
This is terrible public policy, and it is one that we can blame both political parties for.
President Bush has been drinking the ethanol Kool-Aid.
The Democrats have been buying into it.
The environmentalists are finally coming around to the notion that there isn't any reduction in pollution on the basis of ethanol, but they were partly responsible.
If we would have used simple common sense, we would have realized the mess that we are creating by forcing Americans to put their food into their cars.
1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number at Russia's program.
Agree or disagree?
Let's go to Jackson, Michigan.
Morris, it's your turn on EIB.
Hi.
Hi.
I um wanted to make a point.
I was just doing some research on gasoline additives on the internet recently, and uh there's overwhelming evidence that shows that um ethanol, any sort of alcohol, uh robs the lubricity of your engine's ability to take the gasoline into the combustion cylinders and makes it run worse, number one, and number two, it um holds on to water.
Ethanol does hold on to water.
That's why it has to be shipped via truck rather than by pipelines.
You've got it in the engines.
I mean, in my part of the country, we have a mandate to use 10% ethanol gasoline.
It has killed a lot of small engines, the ones that aren't uh as efficiently built as the big automobile engines, lawnmowers, small boat uh outboard motor engines, they've all run terribly on it.
It's a bad fuel, aside from the fact that by using it, we are driving up the cost of everything else.
If we got the ethanol from some of the other sources that they say could produce it like this switchgrass or other uses, it wouldn't be as bad.
It still wouldn't be good.
It wouldn't be as bad.
But what we're doing is we're taking an inferior fuel, mandating it on the American public, and driving up the cost of everything else in the process.
It's just absolutely crazy.
It is terrible public policy.
And for those out there who actually care about free markets and making markets work, when government steps in and says, you must use this product, you've got to increase this product and put it into the American supply.
You're not making the same decisions that would be made if this is a market-based decision.
If government wasn't subsidizing the price of ethanol, it would be way too expensive to use as a fuel.
If government wasn't handing out all sorts of grants to these developers, they wouldn't be building the plants.
And if government wasn't saying that we've got to have a certain percentage of ethanol in the fuel supply, the oil companies wouldn't be buying into it.
This is all being driven by government.
If we had market-based solutions, you not only would see better alternatives to gasoline that are out there, but you wouldn't be having this impact all over the entire economy.
And whenever government metals in the economy, there are unintended results of that, including the fact that the price for all of our food is going through the roof.
And if you don't believe me, go out and try to buy a gallon of milk this afternoon.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
We're talking right now about ethanol, which is not only subsidized by the government at all levels, the production level and the price level.
It's mandated every year, the oil companies are required to increase the amount of ethanol that's in the American fuel supply.
You've got almost pure ethanol, E 85, which is selling in some parts of the country, but most cases, what they do is they take about 10% of the gasoline and they replace it with ethanol.
And they're required to do this in order to meet these mandates, and it's just nuts.
What you're seeing is is much of the corn is being forced out of the food supply Because there's this incredible need by the oil companies to get enough ethanol product to meet these federal mandates, and that's driving up the prices of almost every kind of food that we have because corn is the basis of the entire American food chain.
Morristown, New Jersey.
Jim, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, hey Bill Mark.
I'm great, thank you.
Just an interesting little comment here.
I'm in the uh the wine and spirits business, and we've gotten a heads up.
Tequila is made from a plant they grow in Mexico called an agave plant.
Takes about six to eight years for one of those plants to mature uh in order to produce tequila.
Mexican farmers have been looking at our our corn you know planting, and they're saying to themselves, why do I have to wait six, eight years?
I can plant and get two crops of corn uh and be highly profitable in in one year.
That's going to create shortages of the agave, then, right?
Exactly.
And you watch the tequila prices spike and you watch just the law of unintended consequences, how you know they're they're thinking short term they want to make money, and they're gonna do it.
You know, I was prattling on about Jim, I was prattling on about this, the impact on all these products out there, and the staff of Russia's show was yawning.
The moment you mentioned the tequila might go up in price, these guys got up and armed.
You're still you're standing.
HR is standing, he's now standing, he was seated.
This is the biggest reaction.
What?
Tequila's going up?
Yep.
Well, at least I now know where the priorities of the audience are.
You're exactly right, though.
Whenever government butts in to the private market, there are going to be consequences all over the place.
Liberals don't understand that, and I think unfortunately right now, a lot of conservatives aren't understanding that, that if you're gonna go in and say, we must take this product and apply it for something else, that it's going to have an impact on just about everything else that that you do.
Now you're mentioning that the product that you sell, tequila, could have to go up in price because the base product for the manufacture of the tequila isn't going to be as common because all the Mexican farmers are going to start planting corn.
These kinds of things are rippling all over the economy right now, and it's what happens when you take something out of its major use, which is food, and apply it for something else.
Exactly.
Thank you for the call.
To Topeka, Kansas, and another gym, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mr. Belling, how are you doing?
I'm great.
Well, I wanted to let you know was, and something everyone needs to know.
The American farmer has been land bank soil for years, and the government's been paying them to do it.
The truth is they can take that land and they can start growing more corn.
We're not on a limited amount of corn.
We actually only have to look at what we can do in the future.
Well, you are right about that.
You are right about that.
One of the every aspect of American farm farm policy is crazy.
From all of the price supports that we give, which is nothing more than glorified welfare for farmers, to the paying farmers not to put uh cropland into production.
You're right that some of that could be converted to corn, but the ethanol mandate would overwhelm that.
If we were to hit the targets that the government has set in the energy bill that was passed in 2005, the ethanol targets for 2015, it would mean that every single acre of corn currently in production would have to be devoted to ethanol.
That is preposterous, yet that's the target that we're going after.
Just seeing the increase in price that we've seen in the last year, nearly 100%, is an indication of the impact that this has had on the market.
And I don't think that you can replace that by taking out into production all of the land that we're currently paying farmers not to put in, although obviously it would help.
Thank you for the call, Jim.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
EIV, my name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I was here yesterday.
I'm here today.
For those of you tired of this, Roger Hedgecock's going to be here tomorrow.
We're talking about ethanol, the government's mandate and subsidizing of it, which I believe is the dumbest public policy decision that we've made, as I said, in about 15 years.
Let me put this in perspective.
Let's just wipe the slate clean and pretend that we could start with no fuel existing, but we had a number of products available that could be converted to fuel.
Take oil out of the equation, ethanol, everything.
If you had to go out and decide what the absolute worst product you could think of would be to run our cars on.
Worst possible thing.
You'd probably pick corn.
Because corn is used for more things than any other product that we have.
Not only is it not a good substitute, it is the worst possible product that we can possibly be using to run our cars, yet that's the one that we are mandating, and that is crazy.
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