Australia are Big Daddies (another gratuitous cricket post)

Just curious. We are getting the Big Oil blitz to fight ethanol. The corn-taco fear effect has been expanded to spotlight the growing cost of all food.

The first question I have concerning this propaganda driven market analysis is that it seems absent a comprehensive cost discussion. The high cost of all products petroleum based have a huge impact on farm to table cost of food. Thoughts?

The news is full of pictures of hogs in a confinement shed. This method of production produces amazing amount of methane. Methane conversion to a viable alternative energy source is very possible and actually minimizes other negatives inherent to this method of production. Will we see a push to capitalize on this 'green' source?

Packaging of all food products is extremely costly and in many cases environmentally detrimental. Is there any movement to use biodegradable plastics in this area?

Justin, I'm glad you're writing about cricket because, while I know little about it, my longtime grad school roomate was a titanic Australia cricket fan, so it's nice to be able to get a dose of it while trolling for political and economic info.

Can I ask you another question, since you're often nice enough to answer them? Is Time magazine _supposed_ to be a conservative magazine, like Weekly Standard or National Review, but less so? Looking over the general tone of coverage -- the fact there are no liberal columnists and a few who are quite far to the right (Kristol), the fact that there is no coverage of the Attorney scandal, the generally worshipful coverage of Bush -- isn't that different from the National Review.

Man, Tom T, you and your questions! (And yet I answer, because you're just so darned neighborly about it.) I don't make the decisions around here about anything but my blog and my column, but I'd say Time is a magazine with a conservative tradition (Henry Luce hated them commies!) that tried after Luce's death to toe a pretty centrist line and is trying to do the same now without being quite so dull about it. I don't think the reportage in the magazine is right-leaning at all. Our priorities appear to differ from those of the lefty blogosphere (and I'm not saying we're always right), but to say current coverage is "worshipful" of Bush is to say that you must not have been reading the magazine.

As for the political columnist roster, which thanks to The Dread Alterman's efforts has become such a big deal, I dunno. Klein and Kinsley are both liberals by any reasonable accounting, but they're both quirky, unreliable liberals whereas with Kristol and to a slightly lesser extent Krauthammer you always know which side they're on (I haven't quite figured out where Beinart fits in). But Klein and Kinsley have been in the magazine far more frequently than the other Ks. And I gotta say, as someone who is not one of the political columnists, who the *&^$% cares about them anyway?

"Klein and Kinsley are both liberals by any reasonable accounting."

You're kidding, right? I'd put them put both somewhere between neoliberal and neoconservative. They both have open contempt for liberals. Seriously, there is no way you could call Klein a liberal and Kinsley is doubtful as well.

How about someone who openly opposed the war?

"And I gotta say, as someone who is not one of the political columnists, who the *&^$% cares about them anyway?"

Fair enough, I just brought them up because they seemed like the most indisputable evidence of the magazine being essentially Republican. But, also, Stengel, who runs the magazine: openly conservative, no? Or just prone to saying dumb things on morning talk shows? (I have a hard time distinguishing these days).

You're nice to engage with me on these questions -- I realize that have nothing -- zippo -- to do with you, who seems to be a smart, fair writer.

I think you're confusing Klein's temperament with his political views. He's just really feisty, and since most of the criticism he gets comes from the left (because I imagine that most of those on the right have written him off as a lost cause), that's who he gets in fights with.

Seriously, I'm pretty certain that if you had Klein do one of those liberal/conservative matrix questionnaires he'd come in well to the left of center (and to the left of Kinsley and, for that matter, me).

Oh, and by the way, in answer to the first commenter here, I really don't believe that most of the concerns you've been hearing lately about ethanol and food prices are oil industry propaganda. Corn-based ethanol is a deeply problematic fuel source, for a bunch of reasons (it's inefficient, corn isn't what you'd call an environmentally friendly crop, and yeah, we make food out of it). I definitely think there's a future in hog flatulence, though.

You may be right about Klein. I've often suspected that. But I do think he's also trapped in a time warp where hippies still rule the Democratic party and that that makes him likely to lash out at the "extreme left-wing" in a way that only makes sense to someone who lives in Berkeley or Burlington (and even then, probably not, unless they live near People's Park or the Burlington equivalent thereof).

Are you trying to say the hippies AREN'T in charge in Rochester?