My Letter Stops Farm Bill!

Well, something did anyway...for now at least. There is also great video on the PBS web site for Now.

CHANTILLY, Virginia (Reuters) - Congress will not pass a new U.S. farm law until "the first part of next year," said the president of the largest U.S. farm group on Monday, referring to the $288 billion bill that has been deadlocked in the Senate.

It would be the third time in a row that enactment of a farm law comes months later than targeted. The 1996 and 2002 farm laws originally were expected in 1995 and 2001.

Farm bills are panoramic legislation that set the terms for crop subsidy, public nutrition, land stewardship, agricultural research, rural development and export programs. More than 60 percent of Agriculture Department spending is on nutrition programs such as food stamps and school lunch.

"I'm cautiously optimistic we will get a bill out of the Senate," said Bill Stallman, president of the 6 million-member American Farm Bureau Federation, during a speech to Virginia Farm Bureau members.

After that, negotiators from the House and Senate would write a final version of the farm bill and submit it to the White House. Stallman said "all of that will drag into the first part of next year."

The Senate bill would offer grain, cotton and soybean farmers the chance to enroll in a program guaranteeing crop revenue. A similar program is part of the House farm bill.

On November 16, Republican senators blocked majority-party Democrats from setting a 30-hour debate limit on the farm bill in a disagreement over which amendments would be eligible for debate.

"In an effort to complete Senate action on the farm bill this session, Senators and staff are working over the Thanksgiving recess to reach a deal that allows debate and votes on a limited set of amendments," said a spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid in an e-mail.

A spokeswoman for Agriculture Committee chairman Tom Harkin said on Monday the Iowa Democrat hopes to move the bill soon. Congress reconvenes next week for the final three weeks of its 2007 session.

The White House has threatened to veto the Senate and House farm bills. It says the bills include tax increases, unwisely increase support rates for some crops and use accounting gimmicks to disguise their costs.

In a statement, U.S. Cattlemen's Association said a two-year extension of the 2002 law "is not an acceptable resolution." A bill for a one-year extension has been filed in the House.

Bill Moyers on FDR and his Father

Even though I am beginning to feel I am only talking to myself here, I am going to keep right on talking. If anyone does drop by, I hope you will read these remarks recently made by one of our country's last real journalists, Bill Moyers. He made these remarks at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute where he was getting the Freedom of Speech Award. I only wish I had the power and intelligence to have crafted these remarks myself.

Thank you for this recognition and the spirit of the evening. Thanks especially for giving me the chance to sit here awhile thinking about my father. Henry Moyers was an ordinary man who dropped out of the fourth grade because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. The Depression knocked him off the farm and flat on his back. When I was born he was making two dollars a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never made over $100 a week in the whole of his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union on the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight elections, and he would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if both had lived that long. I once asked him why, and he said, "Because the President's my friend." Now, my father never met FDR. No politician ever paid him much note, but he was sure he had a friend in the White House during the worst years of his life. When by pure chance I wound up working there many years later, and my parents came for a visit, my father wanted to see the Roosevelt Room. I don't know quite how to explain it, except that my father knew who was on his side and who wasn't, and for twelve years he had no doubt where FDR stood. The first time I remember him with tears in his eyes was when Roosevelt died. He had lost his friend.

We can't revive the man and certainly we wouldn't want to revisit the times, but we can rekindle the spirit. There are 37 million people in this country who are poor; there are 57 million who are near poor, making $20,000 to $40,000 a year--one divorce, one pink slip, one illness away from a free fall. That's almost one-third of America still living on the edge. They need a friend in the White House. My father, with his fourth-grade education and two fingers with the missing tips from the mix-up at the cotton gin, got it when Roosevelt spoke. "I can't talk like him," he said, "but I sure do think like him." My father might not have had the words for it, but he said amen when FDR talked about economic royalism. Sitting in front of our console radio, he got it when Roosevelt said that private power no less than public power can bring America to ruin in the absence of democratic controls.

Don't think for a moment he didn't get it when Roosevelt said that a government by money was as much to be feared as a government by mob, or when he said that the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. My father got it when he heard his friend in the White House talk about how "a small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor--other people's lives." My father knew FDR was talking for him when he said life was no longer free, liberty no longer real, men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness--against economic tyranny such as this. And my father listened raptly when his friend the President said, "The American citizen"--my father knew the President was speaking of him--"could appeal only to the organized power of government."

So thank you for reminding us that liberalism is less about ideology and doctrine than about friendship and faith--the bond between a patrician in the White House and a working man on the Texas-Oklahoma border and their mutual belief in America as a shared project. Thank you for this reminder of how we might yet turn the listing ship of state. My father thanks you, too.

The Au Sable River

Marvin has suggested we go north in 2008 instead of west. The Au Sable in Michigan is a famous river that might be worth considering. Check out information on it in this link starting on page 158.

Gentlemen, Set Your DVR's!

This ought to be a great show...

Source: The History Channel(R)

'1968 with Tom Brokaw' on The History Channel(R)
Wednesday November 7, 11:34 am ET

GUIDED BY A LEGENDARY NEWSMAN, THE TWO-HOUR SPECIAL EXPLORES A PIVOTAL YEAR AND ITS LASTING IMPACT ON OUR COUNTRY TODAYWhat is 1968's true legacy?Brokaw - who was there - shares his own perspective along with new, revealing interviews and timeless footageWorld Premiere Sunday, December 9 at 9pm ET/PT on The History Channel(R)

NEW YORK, Nov. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Cities burned. Students marched. Idealism flourished. Drugs flowed. A nation mourned its slain leaders. It was a year both tragic and galvanizing. But was 1968 truly as revolutionary as it felt? Did its fury and pain propel us forward? Now a new, two-hour special on The History Channel explores the significance of 1968 and the ways it continues to affect the American landscape. The special "1968 with Tom Brokaw" premieres Sunday, December 9 at 9-11pm ET/PT on The History Channel.

Brokaw, author of the newly released book BOOM! Voices of the Sixties, Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today, shares the rich personal odysseys of people who lived through that chaotic time, along with the stories of younger people now experiencing its aftershocks. The special "1968 with Tom Brokaw" -- which marches to the drumbeat of the era's mesmerizing music -- includes archival footage and new interviews with rock stars, black power activists, political insiders, anti-war protestors and others.

A few of those interviewed include former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who was with Martin Luther King when he was assassinated and rushed to his side to try to staunch the wound; Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson, who wrestled Robert F. Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, to the ground; Stewart Brand, a pioneer of the counter-culture featured in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Tommy Smothers, former co-host of CBS's The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which ran afoul of censors by criticizing the war and the establishment; Jon Stewart, who traces the roots of his Daily Show to the Smothers Brothers; Arlo Guthrie, son of legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, and best known for his humorous, draft-mocking song "Alice's Restaurant"; Pat Buchanan, then a speechwriter for Richard Nixon; Robin Morgan, the political activist and feminist leader who organized the "braless" protest of the 1968 Miss America pageant; and musicians Bruce Springsteen and James Taylor.

"So much of who we are now, across a broad spectrum of interests, is rooted in the sixties and particularly 1968," said Brokaw, who is shown in the special as a young newsman reporting from the center of the hippie culture, Haight-Ashbury. "It was a profoundly eventful time, and the lasting effects are as vigorously debated as the era that produced them."

The special takes an immersive, unflinching look at the present-day impact of the black power and anti-war student movements and their turn to violence; the era's culture, fashion, and captivating and sometimes groundbreaking music, ranging from the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin to The Rascals; the "turn-on, tune in, drop out" drug culture; the women's movement; and landmark political events that include Eugene McCarthy's stunning near upset of then- president Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary and George Wallace's divisive presidential campaign.

"Why don't you learn some other four letter words like w-o-r-k, and s-o-a-p. You ought to learn those. You don't know those," Wallace says to protestors at a campaign event.

Adds Pat Buchanan in an interview for the special: "I remember when they had the riots at Columbia and Mark Rudd [also interviewed for the special] took over the campus. I wrote a statement [for Nixon] denouncing these over- privileged kids for what they were doing ... Let me tell you, they didn't have any support in Middle America."

Which brings us to one of the special's central questions: What have we learned since then? How have we changed as a society? As noted in the special, today's anti-war activity seems muted, compared to the Vietnam protests.

"If there was a draft, man, this would be a whole different game," notes Daily Show host Stewart. "And they know that. And that's why there's no draft."

A witness to history, Brokaw describes his personal memories of waiting for news outside a Los Angeles hospital after Robert F. Kennedy was shot, of losing one of his best friends in the Vietnam war, and of the mayhem at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Brokaw recalls that his own father was angered by the student protests at the convention. "At the end of the week, I went back to South Dakota to visit my working-class dad, a longtime Democrat, who was opposed to the war in Vietnam," he says. "But he was enraged by ... the behavior of the anti-war demonstrators, the way they had flown the Viet Cong flag and taunted the police. I knew then that the Democratic party was in real trouble."

Pulitzer Prize winner and conservative journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz believes the assassinations of Dr. King and RFK may have scarred an entire generation. "You can't underestimate the power that this had over a very depressed and shattered people," she says. "People would get up in the morning and say, 'What's going to happen now?' And ... children, it was noted at the time, didn't know that leaders actually died a natural death. They began to think everybody was assassinated. It was one of the dark, gothic, terrible jokes of the time that the children of that era saw that."

And yet Brokaw argues the traumatic time ultimately produced valuable lessons for this country and its people. "If there is one enduring lesson for me, it is that we survived as a nation and as a culture. We were altered radically in some areas of our national and individual interests, and little changed in others," he says. "1968 remains a watershed year in contemporary history, but the effect of it has neither been linear nor certain. It represents evolution more than it represents a separate and distinct path of development for American life."

On History.com, a minisite for "1968 with Tom Brokaw," will include a timeline of events of the year 1968, with video clips and photographs; information on topics such as the Vietnam war, Civil Rights, music, and hippies; short-form footage from the era; and a gallery of photos.

Quite a Change for the WSJ

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had this small article hidden in it:

A growing number of oil-industry chieftains are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day. Some predict that, despite the world’s fast-growing thirst for oil, producers could hit that ceiling as soon as 2012. This rough limit — which two senior industry officials recently pegged at about 100 million barrels a day — is well short of global demand projections over the next few decades. Current production is about 85 million barrels a day.

Sky-high crude-oil prices are fueling an economic boom here and in other oil capitals at the same time they are reigniting old divisions within OPEC and stirring fresh doubts about the future role of the world’s premier oil-supply cartel.

An industry selling environmental “passes” that let anyone from corporations to carpoolers claim they are helping to reduce global warming has established a set of standards to answer skeptics who say the system is rife with abuse.

Sizzling crude-oil prices have outpaced even gold’s heady rise this year, throwing the historical interrelationship between the two commodities out of kilter but not completely off track.

All I can say about this is NO KIDDING!?!? What a new day it is when WSJ starts meekly suggesting that the obvious might be true. Here is another newsflash - the same is true for other forms of energy...natural gas and electric power to name a couple. Growth of our consumption of all of our natural resources is going to intersect with our capacity to mine/produce them very soon. Is anyone planning a way for us to deal with this event?

A Note to Travelers

Yesterday we got to travel to Nashville to see Sesame Street Live. Ahem, we have a granddaughter. I could tell you a lot about this experience but the thing I came here to advise you of relates to using I-65 for travel south to Nashville. Don't.

Several miles of I-65 are now being reconstructed and widened between Bowling Green and Franklin. As a result, only mad dogs and Englishmen and 18 wheeler drivers are on that section of road. Don't even attempt it! If needing to go to Nashville from Glasgow, use 31E instead. We went with Bradley and he had brought a very nice 750i for us to go in, but even it was threatened several times to become the sandwich component of an 18 wheeler/concrete barrier entree. Holiday traffic will just make this worse. Just don't go there!

By the way. Click this link to go to a great BMW web site which might help convince you to go to a BMW Performance Driving School. Man, it sure would be nice if everyone were required to learn how to drive!

And Another Thing

In the same Thursday issue of the Courier Journal I came upon an ad from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth about an issue that should interest the members of the blog. It seems that our favorite administration is also looking to destroy some more of the streams that we hold most dear - the kinds of places where wild trout live. Check out this web site for more information link

Maybe we should all join this group. I think I will!

Only in the Commonwealth of Kentucky...

courier journal link

Why oh why do we have to continue to fulfill everyone's vision of folks from Kentucky? We have just as nice a state house as most any other state in the Union. We have democrats and republicans and a smattering of independents. We have plenty of well educated and intelligent folks. So why is our legislature packed with the sort of morons that can produce a hearing like this one? Who on the earth is Rep. Brad Montell, R-Shelbyville? Well, much to my embarrassment, he is a graduate of WKU!

Is there anything that can save us from cretins like this?

We Should All Become Locavores

Now link

Please click on the link above and watch a fantastic recent segment of Now on PBS. If you don't watch the program Now on PBS, you are missing some fantastic stuff. Of course, it was much better when it was run by Bill Moyers, but it is still pretty good. This recent version hits us right between the eyes relative to our review of Deep Economy and the idea of converting our local tobacco economy to a local food economy. Now this is the sort of thing I wish our local IDEA would work on. Do we all benefit exclusively by the addition of another industrial facility? Would we not also benefit from strong movement toward a sustainable local economy via identifying and encouraging local farmers to raise food for local consumption? I certainly think so.

At the same time, our Congress is contemplating the annual farm bill. As usual, it is loaded up with subsidies for corn and corn syrup and hydrogenated oils. Read more about this at link
then get mad and contact our Senators McConnell and Bunning and tell them not to dare vote for a bill full of such blatant subsidies for companies like Archer Daniel Midland and Cargill! Here is the note I sent them both:

Dear Senator McConnell-

Please show some leadership and oppose this $288 billion gift to the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill! We do not want cheap high-fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated oils! We want farmers to grow food for us to eat, not higher profits for the corporate farms that are poisoning our food chain!

Yes, I know there are a few token dollars in the bill to support farmer's markets and other local food initiatives, but they are only tokens. The real thing happening here is another chance to shovel my tax money into the pockets of the already wealthy. I am fully aware of this and will work tirelessly to make sure others do as well. At a bare minimum, you must support the amendment by Senators Dorgan and Grassley to cap annual payments to any one farmer at $250,000.

Please step up to this opportunity to reclaim our food supply from the clutches of corporate greed. We will all be watching.

Feel free to cut/paste/use this as you will to send them your own message. It is not easy to email our Senators today. They have disabled their public email addresses and substituted forms you have to use to email them. Of course we all know how they hate to be bothered by we plain constituents! Just Google "Senator Jim Bunning" and "Senator Mitch Mc Connell" and go to their sites where you can click on the "contact" link to get a message to them. I am certain that the lobbyists have a much more direct route to them, but, maybe we can change that too!

SICKO - or - The Corporatists do Health Care

I was anxious to see Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" in the theater when it was released. Alas, it did not grace a screen of our local cinema. With only 8 screens, classics like "Saw IV" and "Epic Movie" could not be denied their billing. However, through the wonders of DVD technology, I finally saw "Sicko" this evening in the company of my son, Miller.
As much as I already know,as a physician, of the current mess of the American health care system, I felt angry and frustrated by our current situation as exhibited in the movie. I deal daily with many of the problems highlighted in the film. I have read many books, especially recently, that present the problems and inequities of U.S. health care. The solution is elusive, but will require something like a federally mandated "universal coverage."
One can only feel a sense of shame at the inhumane system that has evolved here. Many are at fault, including physicians and especially their representation by the AMA ( I here submit that I proudly have never been a member of the AMA.) But most at fault is our hypercapitalistic system, courtesy of those who stand to profit most- primarily health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. Certainly hospital systems, home health providers, retail pharmaceuticals and others game the system and want their piece of the healthcare fiscal pie. But the major malefactors are insurance and big pharma and the legislators and occupiers of the executive branch who are heavily influenced by donations from the aforementioned.
I was especially beguiled by an interview by Moore with an elderly British labor party gentleman. He gave the history of the origin of the British National Health Service. It was formed in 1948, in the wake of WWII and in a mood of shared sacrifice for the common good after the devastation and deprivations of that war. (As I recall, there was a similar consideration in the U.S., defeated in large part by the AMA.) He made the point that citizens can be particularly controlled by two factors: fear and despair. In America, those in the lower socioeconomic strata are put in a situation of helplessness and despair, knowing that they depend on their employment for health insurance, and fearful of risking that employment and being at the mercy of a merciless system should they or a family member become ill. We see other situations in this country where fear and misinformation are used by politicians to manipulate the masses (ie. 9/11 and WMD, gay marriage and guns and abortion). He made the point that the only remedy is the vote, as , at least presently, our system is still democratic. He iterated (also a quote from the excellent movie "V for Vendetta") that people should not fear their government, government should fear the people. In Europe, the governments do have a healthy respect for the interests of their people, as there is true fear of the power of the vote. But as the "powers that be" in the U.S. control the media, voters cannot get the truth, and cannot then vote their interests.( A sticky situation to be addressed in a separate diatribe---- I mean entry.)
The bottom line, I believe, of Moore's movie is that, at our core, we Americans are a generous and good people. Powerful forces, motivated by greed and the maintenance of power, are preventing us from having a fair, humane and cost effective health care system in this country. Universal health care is accomplished in many other countries with less economic wealth, and with excellent outcomes and satisfaction.
The financial power and political influence of the "health care industrial complex" has contributed to their entrenchment in this country. They have a huge Washington lobby. Hillary Clinton- that old ex-health care reformer- has received HUGE campaign contributions from the health care lobby. All the major players in Washington (including W) have big debts to these people.
The odds are stacked against the citizens on this issue. The corporatists, as in most issues, have the upper hand. But the people have the vote. We must get past the jingoism of the day and yield influence as is our duty, in an organized fashion as urged by Edmund Burke. I fear that if the current inequities and inhumanities persist, we will see a deterioration in our democracy that could ultimately lead to severe unpleasantries.
Watching Sicko makes me feel that in many ways we live, humanistically, in a third world country. It is our duty as citizens to change this status quo.

"Burke on Why Men of Good Will Must Unite" (Harper's Magazine)

"Burke on Why Men of Good Will Must Unite" (Harper's Magazine)
Written in the 18th century- how appropriate for the American 21st century.
Citizens should not fear their government: government should fear the citizens.

Into the Wild

Mary and I went to Bowling Green on Sunday with the intent of seeing the movie Across the Universe. However, I got my information crossed and wound up at the theater on Campbell Lane instead of the correct one, next to Greenwood Mall. The only movie that was about to start at the time we were there (we clearly could not have made it across town to the right theater in time) was Into the Wild. Talk about serendipity. WmJ Travis had just told us about this book and movie a few days earlier so I was a bit interested in it, but it was a really powerful and emotional experience.

Like many of us, Chris McCandles sought out the wilderness in an effort to find a real relationship with the planet. He turned his back on materialism and his upper middle class family. He erased his old name and life and set out to wander North America as Alexander Supertramp. He took only the most minimal of items, mainly great works of literature, as his traveling companions. He felt he could prove that the right relationship with the earth would easily replace normal relationships with friends and family. He wound up in the Denali National Forest, alone, unprepared, and, in the end, learned this simple lesson (probably from Dr. Zhivago, one of his traveling companions)...Happiness is only real when shared.

It is one of those movies where you walk out in a different skin than the one you entered in, and it takes a while to even feel up to talking again. I highly recommend it.

Jeff Harned's favorite fly

One of the members of The Immaculate Cast staff is Jeff Harned. He is the clever fly fisherman who noted the amazing attraction of large rainbow trout to Purina Trout Pellets near the rear of a home on the Tuckaseegee River in North Carolina. Armed only with his memory of a brief sighting of the pellets, he was able to use his vise grip memory to start crafting these #2 pellet imitation pattern flies soon after his return to Glasgow. If you know of some domestic trout that need to be shockingly snatched from a river and into a waiting net, just hit the comment button under this post and place your order with Jeff.

Every Great Blog has to Start Somewhere

This is a test. See you at breakfast at 8!