Supreme confusion over checkoff
After the U.S. Supreme Court surprised both sides of the beef checkoff court fight May 23 by declaring the $80-million-per-year mandatory tax constitutional, opponents and proponents alike offered a dizzying display of spin.
On the road: WDC, Boston and old age
Somewhere along the 2,684-mile, mid August drive from central Illinois to Washington, D.C., Newport, Boston and back, I crossed an unseen line into old...
Autumn’s splendor restores my soul
Somehow a notice went out a week ago to all the blue jays in Illinois that the acorns on (what I think is) a...
Congress: Be sure to read it and then pay
On Jan. 5, 2011, www.gop.gov, the website for the “House Republican Majority,” trumpeted news that its members had acted on their “promise” to “ensure...
Patterns: Welcome back, foodie
We didn’t know it back then but everyone on the big southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth was a foodie.
Real ag agenda seems to be football and pheasants
In Congress, the House aggies aren't exactly tied up with policy debates to address, say, today's soaring food prices, the nation's perilously thin food stocks or a dysfunctional federal dairy policy.
School’s in session across Potomac
If you think schoolchildren dread summer school, consider the eight-week summer session agriculture's friends in Congress face.
Congress change means policy change
Leaving a backlog of work it clearly had no appetite for, a deeply divided, very worried Congress skedaddled out of Washington at the end of September to make its re-election case to an equally divided, equally worried electorate.
Silencing the circus we call television
A month or so ago, the manager of this one-dog farmette clipped the coaxial cable that linked our rural home to the yellers at...
The facts, numbers jumble: Go figure
Columnist Alan Guebert speculatees on the mystery of how identical facts and figures often lead people to draw different conclusions.
