This is depressing.

T. Boone Pickens said it best on MSNBC recently.

"With 42 Senators from Farm states, how do you think that they will vote".

Hey! This is me dying of surprise over here. Well, not, actually.

It's the Synthetic Fuels Corporation.

This is also going to drive up food prices. Lovely!

With 42 Senators from Farm states, how do you think that they will vote?

If people in this country weren't so persnickety about simply writing checks to people who live in low population states, we wouldn't need to find proxies like whether or not they're farmers and distort the economy to give them federal money. Think of it as the biofuel payoff to allow the other $30 trillion of Federal spending over that period to be in the the vast majority of the population's interest--or at least their representatives'.

As always with politics; "Follow the Money".

With 42 Senators from Farm states, how do you think that they will vote?

I may be misinformed, but doesn't that leave the majority of Senators, 58 if memory serves, to vote against it. Or do 42 Aye votes trump 58 Nays on Biofuels votes in the 21st century?

It's no wonder the country is in trouble. Nobody can count anymore.

Steve: any legislative strategist would kill for a reliable bloc of 42 as a starting point for horse trading to get the next 8+.

What's truly depressing is that the comparative drawbacks of ethanol from corn are far from "new news." They've been well known during the long nap between 1970s energy preoccupation and today's -- but because the rest of us weren't paying much attention, the bipartisan Midwest mafia has been able to work up a head of steam (or is that Mazola vapor?)

OTOH, for those whose blood pressure is at risk contemplating pork & parochialism in space policy, it's a nice change of pace to look at agricultural policy and see how the real pros do it. Consider the impeccable logic of subsidized food aid to countries whose farmers can't sell into our market because of ag tariffs. Accelerator + brake + the sound of ADM chuckling -- there's a twisted brilliance to it.

The little part that irritates me, on top of everything else, is that the "traditional" small family farms barely see a dime out of it--"farm aid", subsidies, and protections have a tendency to flow right past the small guys and wind up somehow magically in the pockets of the multi-million-dollar big farms and multi-billion corporations, who nevertheless hide behind the image of the poor, vanishing independent farmer to further their rent-seeking.

I'm curious to hear what folks think about Robert Zubrin's proposal (which should be covered in detail in the new book "Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil") that suggests a madate that all new U.S. vehicles be flex-fuel, by which he means supporting gasoline, ethanol, AND methanol. He thinks that ethanol support by itself isn't enough (politically, as well as not enough land, etc), but supporting ethanol and methanol (on top of gasoline) would be enough to get the alcohol gas pumps to spread out of the Midwest.

I don't have the background to judge the merits of the proposal; I'm just curious to hear what folks think.