a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZckZ-8naz0/SeoR7M1ERHI/AAAAAAAACiE/K8qb29LcEho/s1600-h/Cusick.jpg"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZckZ-8naz0/SeoR7M1ERHI/AAAAAAAACiE/K8qb29LcEho/s400/Cusick.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5326089218072790130" border="0" //aThe second portion of the a href="http://online.barrons.com/article/SB124000828983730469.html"Barron's editorial commentary/a contained this little nugget;br /br /span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 0);"The Congressional Budget Office reported that payroll-tax receipts will barely cover Social Security benefits next fiscal year./spanbr /br /To repeat a href="http://twitter.com/randomroger"my tweet/a from yesterday about this; uh-oh.br /br /Entitlements loom as a $50 trillion problem. The estimates about when it starts to run into trouble starts, I believe, in 2018 with some estimates call for it going under in 2042, if memory serves. Of course there are other folks who come up with much rosier scenarios. I don't know what is right all I can tell you is that I am not planning on having it--if I am wrong then all the better.br /br /I write about this ...

Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contarian Profits, says look no further than today’s Wall Street Journal if you want to fully understand why alternative energy will take decades to prosper.

A front page story in the Journal discusses the surge of interest in anticipation of President-elect Obama’s aggressive green agenda. But an inside story reveals that some of the very same people who embrace green are fighting it tooth-and-nail in the name of the environment.

How does this make sense?

Because the hype and greed of the green bubble blocks out the more practical issues of the local politics that can stop a renewable energy project dead in its tracks. The lesson here for investors is that alternative energy is highly politicized and regardless of how much due diligence you apply, a company in your portfolio can sink under litigation costs heaped on by communities and special-interest groups around the country.

While the Journal cites

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