It definitely feels like summer this morning... Early summer at least. It was 76° when I woke up this morning. Humidity had fallen the double pained windows in the house. According to the prognosticators the projected high for the day is 86°. The really funny thing in the forecast is…
Well, this isn't the back porch, and my coffee cup is in the cupholder in the car out in the parking lot. I had one cup before leaving home, and just a bit more as I worried my way thru the early morning traffic driving in to Houston. Boy that's…
A school day, laundry day, early voting day... I'll be busy today. Since it is a school day, I'm on the back porch before the eastern horizon began to color. It's cool, but it's not that cool... so the ceiling fans are on chilling my hair still damp from my…
Well, they did it... Now I start dealing with my Republican Senators. As far I'm concerned my Repugnant Representative will have one very pissed of old hippy doing everything I can to see that he has to go back to fixing air conditioners.
Yes it does... Mitt Romney may have joked yesterday that the White House was “not sleeping real well” last night. But a lot of people tonight and in the future will sleep a lot better for this result. Young people, people with pre-existing conditions and mainly people who through the…
To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.
It's understandable the drugmakers would want a roll-call accounting of who their friends and enemies are, considering the size of the investment they are making on Capitol Hill: in the first six months of this year alone, drug and biotech companies and their trade associations spent more than $110 million…
Eating a hamburger should not be a death-defying experience. Too often it is. via Editorial - Toxic Hamburgers - NYTimes.com. This is where Food Policy and Health Policy come together. And the American people get taken for a ride by the corporate penny pinching policies and the lack of enforcement…
"We as a party have spent the last six months, the greatest minds in our party, dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote on health care reform. I want to remind us all that Olympia Snowe was not elected President last…
Churchill's argument was this"I have heard it said that the government had no mandate such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate!" And there is the essence of what this is. What, on the eternal list of priorities, precedes health?…
The insurance industry, of course, loves the Baucus plan. Need we say more? via Paul Krugman - Baucus and the Threshold - NYTimes.com.
I grew up with a strong support for the power of technology...But the abuses perpetrated in the name of technological advancement of agriculture in the past few decades have left a foul taste in my mouth. It appears I share that distaste wit Verlyn Klinkenborg... There is no disputing the…
Something I keep pushing in the healthcare reform debate...Agriculture is key to real reform. Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as…
I keep reading how this reform is dead. We have Texas Republicans in Congress claiming if the Dems pass a plan they will be back in power and repeal it. Yet, the only alternative they seem to have to offer is Health Savings Plans...Call me stupid, but exactly where do…
Nicholas Kristof, writing in his column, had what I think is probably the best definition I have ever seen of the state of our agriculture... I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics…
...the public — struggling with the worst economic downturn since the 1930s — is looking on with great anxiety and confusion. If the drug companies and the insurance industry are smiling, it can only mean that the public interest is being left behind. Bob Herbert said it today, I've been…
There are times my hometown newspaper makes me proud...This is one of them. In an editorial yesterday they laid out the argument for health care reform and touched many of the reasons that what is being argued in Congress is just BS. These three paragraphs tell the story... but you…
Leave to a youngish mind in a middleaged, out of shape body to discover the hard way (always the hard way) that he cannot still do everything he once did. Yesterday I decided, at long last, to finish the distruction of our dog pen that Ike had started. Bearing in…
