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The path to heaven
Somewhere in my parent’s home exists a photograph of them standing stiffly on either side of my oldest brother, Rich, in front of a flaming yellow, full-bloom forsythia bush outside the big, brick Lutheran church of my youth.
My mother (I think I’m remembering this correctly) wears a stylish dress she likely made herself and a round, white hat that, if turned upside down and used as a bucket, could easily hold a half-gallon of wild raspberries. Dad wears his Sunday uniform: suit, tie, easy smile.
Farm groups: Let’s not get fleeced again
While the White House, Congress and the shouters, doubters and pouters tie themselves in knots over health insurance reform, our good friends at the banks aren’t even breaking a sweat in their effort to buy a nonreform banking bill.
And here’s the sweet part of this non-reform reform purchase: they’re using our money to do it.
USDA-DOJ workshop better work
The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, better known as NASCAR, often brags that it’s the only sport in the world to begin every new season with its allstar game, the year’s biggest, richest race, the Daytona 500.
Operating numbers raise eyebrows
A quick peek at many of today’s operative numbers in American agriculture should raise rural eyebrows and maybe a few Capitol Hill curiosities. The latest cattle figures from U.S. Department of Agriculture illustrate what I mean.
January brimmed with coincidences
Like Henny “Take my wife — please” Youngman, Steven Wright has built a comedy career on one-line jokes. A classic Wright one-liner unblinkingly and unsmilingly asks: “Twenty-four hours in a day, 24 beers in a case — coincidence?”
And now, all that’s left is to be good until Christmas
Of the many memories I have of Christmas on the farm, I don’t have a single memory of ever telling Santa what I wanted for Christmas.
I do remember being told innumerable times that I had better be good or Santa wouldn’t bring me what I wanted. How could he, was my sassy reply, when I hadn’t told him what I wanted.
Opinion: Take it to the non-bank bank
It was more a wavering nonwaiver than another government oldie-but-goodie, a nondenial denial.
Still nothing in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Dec. 1 delay to grant the ethanol industry’s request to boost the current 10 percent ethanol limit in gasoline to 15 percent suggested it won’t happen — and soon.
Recent cattle proposal doesn’t really add up
If you asked unimpeachable sources such as St. Peter or former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee why so many pretty average people often choose journalism for a career over, say, rocket science or particle physics, the simple, one-word answer you’ll likely get is “mathematics.”
Only the land lasts forever
The final Saturday in October swept me three hours south for lunch with my parents and nearly-new grandniece and, later that Halloween afternoon, backwards about 40 years for visits with some ghosts on the farm of my youth.
More Astro-turf on global warming war
If the generals and admirals within the concentric walls of the Pentagon — hardly a bastion of greenie weenies — view global warming as a “serious threat to national security,” exactly who does the American Farm Bureau Federation view as the enemy in its latest astro-turf war against climate change legislation?
Columns
GUEBERT: Land prices reach nutty levels
How long will this all last? About 10 minutes longer than the end of mandated ethanol use.
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: Enough fiddling around -- time to fire things up
Come March 31, 90 days into 2013, the House will have spent a backbreaking 35 days in their legislative sweatshop; the Senate almost half-again as many, 50.
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: US exports have soared under Obama
Outgoing U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk is a mostly unsung, hardly ever mentioned and still pretty much unknown bureaucrat, serving from 2009 to 2013.
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: Health care about care, not politics
How this plays out carries bigger consequences for rural Americans because “out here” we’re older, poorer and more dependent on government-supported health care than our urban counterparts.
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: Seed patents before US Supreme Court
The stakes for farmers and Monsanto are enormous: Bowman seeks to overturn lower and appellate court judgments against him for violating plant patents held by Monsanto when he bought, and later planted and harvested, Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans from a local elevator.
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: No trust in antitrust
In his second inaugural address Jan. 21, President Obama once again committed his administration to antitrust enforcement by noting that “a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” Exactly. So, when?
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: A Capitol walk
I take my time because this may be my last long walk in Washington, D.C., for a while and I want to savor it.
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: State's abandoning public universities, research
A troubling trend leaves an ever-shrinking pool of available dollars for public institutions like land grant universities to address an ever-expanding list of new problems facing farmers and ranchers
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: Ag Committee member pastes Boehner over farm bill
Collin Petersen: “I see no reason why the House Agriculture Committee should undertake the fool’s errand to craft another long-term bill if the Republican Leadership refuses to give any assurances that our bipartisan work will be considered.”
RELATED CONTENTGUEBERT: Cliff walking in clodhoppers
In an almost endless stream of post-vote analyses Jan. 2, Capitol Hill pundits focused mostly on who the political winners and losers were in the Christmas-to-New Year’s Grinch-vs.-Grinch brawl to “save” the nation from a “fiscal cliff.”
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