Author Archives: Dick

Disinformation?

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The White House is on a mission to clarify what it calls “disinformation” about what they call health care reform and I call two trillion dollars of new taxes.

The president went to in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 11 to sell his plan to the voters. He had a great crowd. Unlike the House member “Town Halls” that Nancy Pelosi says Republicans pack with “un-American” hooligans, ABC noted the Democrats packed the President’s gathering with yes-men while outside was packed with the (disenfranchised) nay-sayers.

In selling his plan, President Obama said, “the American people will be glad we acted to change an unsustainable system.” Too bad the news reports refuted that.

Nobody in Washington — not even the President — listens. “The problem is people become frustrated because they can’t get their voices heard,” Corey Lewandowski, of the activist group Americans for Prosperity said. The President apparently still believes even the frustrated people will be glad.

In selling his plan, President Obama said, “We have the AARP on board” to endorse the bill. Too bad AARP refuted that statement.

“Indications that we have endorsed any of the major health care reform bills currently under consideration in Congress are inaccurate,” an AARP statement said.

In selling his plan, President Obama said, “Under the reform we’re proposing, if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. If you like you health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” Too bad our experience in Vermont refuted that claim, too.

ABC News aired a periodic “Fact Check.” It didn’t dig deeply enough to see the expectation (born in Vermont) that insurance companies would flee.

Reporter David Wright supported the president. “Opponents of health care reform claim that the proposed changes would put private insurance companies out of business,” he reported. “That’s false.” Wright went to the bill itself to to show that insurers will continue in business. Section 102 of the current House bill actually says “Insurance companies have five years to comply with new government standards.”

They won’t.

See, Vermonters have a little experience with voluntary compliance with government standards. In 1992, then-Governor Howard Dean signed into law a program to force universal health care on Vermont by 1995. (Governor Dean opposed a competing single-payer plan as too expensive. “Their package would have cost $500 million in a state with a total budget of $1.3 billion,” Governor Dean said at the time.) His new law banned “cherry picking” and enacted many of the rules present in the current House bill.

Strangely, insurance companies did not flock to Vermont.

In fact, Vermonters found just the opposite happened.

In 1990 the state had more than a dozen companies writing health insurance for Vermonters. By 1995, the state had three companies writing health insurance for Vermonters.

The current House bill also includes tax breaks and mandates to keep employers from exercising their free market right to drop existing (expensive) insurance plans. Mandates may make good sound bites; they don’t work if no one sticks around to obey them.

What have we learned today?

Maybe, just maybe our trust that our politicians could tell the truth should match our expectation that used car dealers ever tell the truth.

Like Mom Used to Make

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While rooting around in a kitchen cabinet this morning, I found my mother’s flour sifter. Way in the back. A little dusty. A bit forlorn.

My mom was a terrific cook. She never trained at Ecole du Cordon Bleu, the oldest international cooking school in Paris, or the Ecole Ritz Escoffier although she did make a mean Peach Melba. She learned to cook and bake from her mother on a coal stove in the big kitchen of our Pennsylvania farmhouse. She later trained in the School of Irma.

Irma, of course, was Irma S. Rombauer, author of The Joy of Cooking, one of the world’s most-published cookbooks. That book has been in print continuously since 1936, the year my mom was graduated from high school. A staple of so many kitchens, I have hoarded three of them — one the 1946 edition my mom received as a wedding present, one a duplicate I bought, and one a “modern” 1962 edition I gave to Anne when we married.

I don’t remember not having an electric stove when I was tagging-toddling along in that kitchen but I do remember the last day the coal stove operated in earnest. Back in the olden days before the advent of automatic ignition in pellet stoves, all solid fuel appliances had to simmer all the time. If you let the fire go out, it simply took too long to bring the stove back up to temperature to cook. We kept that fire going winter and summer not only to cook but also to heat the household water; the stove had a modern coil and a hot water tank attached. I filled the coal scuttle twice a day in the cellar and carried it up the stairs to the kitchen.

You can imagine the sheer joy of keeping a fire going through a humid Pennsylvania summer.

A wood or coal fired oven does bake the best breads and cakes, though, because the temperature remains constant. Our coal stove had a warming oven that meant we never, ever ate from a cold dinner plate.

My mom baked cakes from scratch, first in that coal stove and later in an electric oven. By hand when I was a kid, but she very quickly discovered the joy of an electric hand mixer.

She refused to use a cake mix. “A cake should be just dry enough and just sweet enough to complement its frosting and the ice cream you serve with it,” she said.

Cake mixes, particularly the boxes with “pudding in the mix,” are sweet. Although they have no high fructose corn syrup, sugar shows up as the number one ingredient by weight or volume. I think Americans crave way too much sugar.

We don’t bake cakes from scratch any more. I guess we deplore all that sifting. Even my mom had started using Mr. Hines’ (the author of Adventures in Good Eating, not the Confederate spy) varieties although she always complained that they were too sweet and too moist.

I fibbed. We do still bake one cake from scratch — the pineapple upside down cake. Every yellow cake on the market overpowers its sweet pineapple topping. Or is it bottoming? It requires a good, heavy, cast iron fry pan of which we have several. They were my mom’s too.

ONE EGG CAKE
2 Cups Flour, sifted
1 Cup Sugar
1 Egg
1/2 Cup Butter, beaten until soft
3/4 Cup Milk
2 Tsp. Baking Powder

Resift all dry ingredients, then mix together with the blended butter and liquids. Pour over the goopy, caramelized pineapple. Bake for 40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

I wonder if there is any market for a cake like mom used to make instead of a cake mix like Hostess used to make?

Is It Murder?

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Two area men denied their role in the fatal alcohol and drug overdose of a Vermont teen last month. The men, one from Sheldon Springs and the other from Highgate, each pled not guilty of manslaughter for the death of 19-year old Jeremy Chapple. who died after guzzling the booze and Lorazepam they sold to him in an apartment in Swanton Village.

Local police know that apartment as a juvenile gathering place.

According to the St Albans Messenger, one of the men charged “only has one forgery conviction on his criminal record.” The judge released that man without bail or curfew although he can’t leave Franklin County without court permission.

The second man is currently serving house arrest for armed robbery. The Corrections Department is unlikely to release him now.

Lordy, Lordy™.

The paper reported that the first defendant sold four tablets of Lorazepam to Mr. Chapple for $1 each. The other defendant bought him a jug of Jack Daniels. Depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend, Mr. Chapple consumed them in a couple of hours.

Sad story. Sad ending.

But it might not be manslaughter.

It might be murder.

“The death of Jeremy Chapple on June 8 is a tragedy of the highest degree — in other words, an avoidable tragedy,” Franklin County Caring Communities, Rural Partnerships, and the Grand Isle County Clean Team, the primary drug and alcohol coalitions of northwestern Vermont, said in a statement after the court proceedings. “Those who think the only danger that comes from underage drinking is an alcohol-related crash need look no further than this case to see otherwise. Those who believe that supplying an underage individual with alcohol will not lead to trouble for themselves can also learn an important lesson from this. Finally, this death should serve as a clear need for swift action in all our communities when it comes to prescription drug abuse.

“It is our sincerest hope that today’s arraignments will be an important step down a path that helps our whole northwest Vermont community learn important lessons about teens, alcohol and prescription drug abuse, and the need to be ever-vigilant in the protection of our children and young adults. The story of Jeremy Chapple is a story every parent should pay heed to and use as an opportunity to discuss such issues with their children in age-appropriate ways.”

Learn important lessons?

That politically correct statement is too long on hand holding and education and too short on responsibility.

Contrast those semantics with the actions of crusading Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice who charged a drunk driver with murder. “He had a completely depraved indifference to human life,” she told 60 Minutes, “because he acted so recklessly others were likely to die.”

Drunk driving kills more than 13,000 Americans every year despite the publicity, the education campaigns, and the apologetic hand wringing by drug and alcohol coalitions.

7-year-old Katie Flynn was a flower girl at her aunt’s Long Island wedding three years ago. That beautiful day ended in tragedy when a 24-year-old insurance salesman with a blood alcohol content more than three times the legal limit drove three miles the wrong way on the highway before crashing head-on into the Flynns’ vehicle. He killed their driver and tore little Katie’s head off.

The same year Katie Flynn died, Forbes Magazine named Nassau County “the safest region in the United States, with the lowest crime rate.”

District Attorney Rice charged the insurance salesman with Murder, Vehicular Manslaughter, Aggravated DWI, and some lesser included charges. The jury decided that that drunk driver didn’t need hand holding. The jury decided he didn’t need education. The jury decided he needed to take responsibility for decapitating a 7-year old child while he was drunk. Convicted, he got 25 years to life in prison last week. For murder.

Mr. Chapple was an avid outdoorsman who loved hunting, fishing, trapping, four-wheeling, dirt bike riding and playing basketball. And, apparently, alcohol and drugs.

Were the Vermont defendants any less indifferent to Mr. Chapple’s likely fate than the drunken salesman was to Katie’s?

Who will take responsibility for his death?

Full Disclosure: I helped found, chaired, and still volunteer for the local Franklin County Caring Community chapter. I strongly endorse its mission but I also know there can be no learning without accountability.

Milk Duds

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Milking cows is a faster way to lose your shirt than building boats. I should know. I’ve done both. At least boat builders aren’t mandated to sell their boats for less than it costs to build them.

Etienne Desmarais has a dairy farm down the road a piece. It costs him about a buck and a half to make a gallon of milk he can now sell for a buck even. We used to dip our milk out of the bulk tank from Dory Simon’s dairy farm on the other side of us; 30 years ago we paid him a buck a gallon for the freshest, sweetest milk around. Dory sold his herd to Etienne some years ago because the production costs were bankrupting him. Etienne still rents his land.

The economics of farming haven’t gotten any better since we were dipping the bulk tank.

New England dairy farms produce 20% of the country’s milk and employ about 145,000 people. Vermont has 1,045 dairy farms today. A few are like Etienne’s, milking more than 300 or 400 head. Many milk less than 100. Vermont lost about six dairy farms last month alone. Guess why.

Uncle Sam essentially sets the milk price that farms receive through the 2008 Farm Bill (the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008) and its MILC (Milk Income Loss Contract) Program. That USDA program “provides direct counter-cyclical style payments to milk producers on a monthly basis when the Boston Federal Milk Marketing Order Class I price for fluid milk falls below the benchmark of $16.94 per hundredweight (cwt).” Milk prices have been a political cow pie since the first Farm Bill set a benchmark decades ago.

  • Somehow I’m thinking $11/hundredweight (about a dollar a gallon) is below the benchmark.
  • I’m also thinking three bucks or more is a lot to pay in the store for a bottle that cost one dollar at the farm.

Roger Allbee, the real Vermont Agriculture Secretary, just returned from Washington, D.C., where he asked for emergency money via increased payments through the MILC program.

This (latest) decision is expected to take months.

I have to wonder why we should pass the two trillion dollar health plan tomorrow when it takes months (or years) to fix milk prices.

“We’re from the government. We’re here to help.”

Hmmm.

Here’s an interesting progression for the reader’s further consideration:

Since the same Federal Government that mandates milk prices will now set car prices at Government Motors, I reckon your next new Chevrolet or GMC pickup truck will cost the same as I paid for one in 1988. About $10,000, right?

Cool.

I don’t know what to do about the price of milk, though.

Get a Backbone, Dodd

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The AP reports that, “Facing the toughest re-election fight of his nearly 30 years in the Senate, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) boasts about snubbing lobbyists.” That hasn’t stopped him from cashing their campaign checks and schmoozing them at fundraisers and party gatherings.

I gotta tell you, Senator, if you took my money in the bedroom and lied about me on the street, it would be the last time you got any from me.

Take a lesson, politician. It is time to put your mouth where your money is.