I've read that boric acid is effective against termites, and is safe to use. It is sometimes mixed with propylene(?) glycol, the safer form of antifreeze. No personal experience, but it sounds preferable to most treatments proposed by commercial companies. -- marinoni

Domestic termites are not nearly the pest that is the "import" model. Hawaii and much of the south of the U.S. (not California, but surprisingly Arizona) are plagued by the Formosan termite. The French Quarter may have been spared most of the devastation of Katrina, but it's being undermined by Formosan termites.

Heretofore, stick-framed houses in Hawaii used lumber and plywood treated with the recently banned CCA (this was, is in addition to below ground perimeter treating). It's been declared a carcinogen and is no longer allowed for wood that may come in contact with human activity (it is still allowed for commercial and ground contact use as is the even nastier ACZA). As toxic as these chemicals are, termites still ate lumber and plywood treated with them. Cooler temperatures seem to be the best defense, so far, against this non-native pest. (Upcountry Maui, most of Hawaii away from the coast, have cool enough night time and seasonal temperature that the termites have yet to adapt to.)

About five years, just before the CCA ban went into effect, water-borne borate treatment became more accepted. Boron/borax (think back to Ronald Reagan's career before politics) might make a human being sick to his stomach if he ate enough of it, though it's hard to imagine someone getting that far, but isn't poisonous. In any case, school paste tastes much better, but I digress.

Borate treatment has another advantage beyond making wood uninteresting to termites - it's smaller molecular structure allows it to penetrate wood much deeper (supposedly to the core of a 4x4) than CCA could. (It also gives lumber a degree of fire resistance.) CCA treatment never penetrated more than about 1/2" into the more common species of framing lumber. So, if a termite could get beyond that, most of a 2x4, let alone 4x or 6x material, was good eatin'.

Engineered wood products (glulam, parallam, I-joists), for the most part, still need to be treated with spirits-borne chemicals, which really aren't all that effective against termites, but do make material more rot-resistant, and aren't nearly as potentially damaging to lumber and plywood as water-borne treatment.

LP (Louisiana Pacific) has a line of OSB panel products where the borate is part of the manufacturing process. These seem to perform very well.

Of course, none of this does any good after the fact. It's a slow morning.

. . . liberals. You might find more "self-identified" Dems throughout the country this cycle, but few of these pendulum people are liberal and probably none of them are in Kentucky.

And, BTW, it's the other way around - the Dems didn't leave the blue collar vote behind. The blue collar vote has become increasingly conservative since the 1960s and pretty much crossed over to the dark side in the 1980s. They've never been socially progressive and ceased to be radical in the 1940s.

. . . pretty much wrong about everything he's ever written about the ME. He is neither an Arabic or Farsi speaker. He has spent little time in the region. So, if O'Hanlon's bestest buddy is wrong, then O'Hanlon's not only wrong but stupid.

. . . the real question, since it is her day job, is if she can act?

The American public. We've had thirty years to curb our appetite for oil. We've done next to nothing and so we are paying the price yet again.

Hallelujah!

Now if only Ford and Chrysler would follow suit, as well as stopping production of their largest pick-up trucks. Even fewer people have use for an F-350 than for a Chevy Tahoe.

Too bad they didn't have contingency plans to convert these plants to making hybrid or, better yet, electric vehicles.

Recession? What recession?

. . . the Hummer.

The Hummer isn't going away because it's the primary light duty vehicle for the the whole department of defense. It should never even have been offered as a civilian vehicle. IaintBacchus

The former is built for the military and is in no way related to the latter, which has a "Humvee"-like body on a Chevrolet truck chassis. AM General, part of Jeep-Chrysler, builds the HMMVV. The Hummer is built by a passenger vehicle division of GM. The original H1, no longer produced, was indeed a HMMVV with slightly gussied-up interiors. But the H2 and H3 are just run-of-mill, if over-sized, GM products.

In any case, the military has rather different vehicle needs than suburbanite commuters.

As the first poster on this thread noted, there are people out there who have legitmate needs for big trucks, and even SUV's. And from now on, they'll be the only ones buying them.-- Moondoggy

But it's probably less than 5% of the U.S. population, the majority or which lives in and around cities and is not engaged in a "blue-collar" business that requires a heavy-duty or even medium-duty truck/SUV, yet nearly 50% of car owning America drives a pick-up truck or SUV.

Also, we seem to be throwing the SUV baby out with the bath water. Not all SUVs are glorified pick-up trucks on heavy-duty chassis with leather interiors and rear seat DVD players. In fact, half the category are smaller 4-5 passenger vehicle powered by 4- and 6-cylinder engines with a few hybrids thrown in.

I'd had enough. I stood up and said, "Well, you know what they say ..."

"What's that?" he challenged.

"Big car, small dick."

He stopped dead in the middle of his Big rant. "Yeah, well what do you drive?"

I grabbed my crotch and growled, "Geo Storm."

-- Daniel Dvorkin