Radical Reformers

Target Cow Burps

Radical Reformers have gone from Never Trust Anyone Over 30 to Never Trust A Cow, which will strike ordinary folk as odd, but for Radical Reformers isn’t much of a plop.

It turns out that cows, in addition to providing dairy products, meat and hides – things already seriously suspect to Radical Reformers – cows, well. . .OK, no holds barred here, cows burp. They’re ruminants, which means they chew their cud and have specialized stomachs.

This will not come as a revelation to those acquainted with cows, but it was news to the Radical Reformers, and when they discovered that cow burps contain methane, their horror knew no bounds.

Methane is one of the gases that cause climate warming. Climate warming is bad. We have this on no less an authority than Al Gore, who has transferred his expertise on winning elections to the climate debate – the pay is better, the lifting is lighter, and by the time he’s proven right or wrong, all concerned will be long dead.

So cows burping methane into the atmosphere clearly had to be addressed along with natural gas production, landfills, coal mining and the like. The Environmental Protection Agency said ruminant livestock accounted for 28 percent of global methane emissions from human-related activities,

Burping cows are a special challenge. After all, they spend most of their time just being cows, not reminding themselves that they should burp into a special collection device, which in any case hasn’t been invented.

Not to worry. In the craziness of the current environmental discussion, paying a tax to cause environmental harm is somehow better than causing the same harm without paying the tax. Never mind that the harm goes to the environment in any case while the tax goes to the government. Government needs your tax dollars, and you trust your government, don’t you?

The American Farm Bureau Federation took a dim view of the possibility that the EPA might tax farm animal burps, noting in March that “it could cost farmers and ranchers $175 per dairy cow, $87.50 per beef cow and $21.87 per hog. The fees were arrived at using publicly available government data.”

That observation caused a stir in the farm states. Farm state politicians who know a threat of having to seek gainful employment when they spot one were pretty uniform in saying it was a lousy idea. Horse trading continues in Congress, and a bill without a cow-burp tax may not be approved until later.

What should be disapproved from the git-go is discussing cow burps at all. Cows are ruminants, ruminants burp. If that’s the issue, what about the 30 million or so deer that not only eat our tulips but burp brazenly after doing so? If we think ruminant burping from about 94 million head of cattle is a problem now, what about when an estimated 90 million American bison roamed the continent, burping at will? Not to mention all those deer, antelope, African and Asian buffalo, giraffes and camels?

That might require some thinking, but that’s not the strong suit of Radical Reformers. Having declared something a sin, they will oppose it in all its forms, even if it winds up with them tagged with a cow-burp tax.

If by some quirk Congress approves any nonsense of this sort, the first herd to be taxed should be the one corralled in the United States Capitol.

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Strange Washington Signals – Things Getting Done

Something out of the ordinary is almost always a sign that trouble may be afoot. That scratchy feeling in your throat, the car that chugs instead of purrs, the clothes dryer that sounds like The Incredible Hulk – all are signals experience has taught us to handle.

But there’s something extraordinary happening in Washington lately, and it’s so strange that most of us have no idea what to do. Difficult as it is to believe, it must be said in the open:

Washington is getting things done.

Now that’s not supposed to happen, of course. Washington in general and Congress in particular is where good ideas and citizens go to languish and fade. It is supposed to be a place of bitter partisan strife and naked personal ambition where duty and expediency are synonyms.

So how did it happen that the United States Senate passed a bill allowing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco at last, giving it broad powers over the product that kills 400,000 Americans a year? The bill is expected to be accepted by the House, which passed a similar measure earlier. President Obama, himself a struggling sometimes smoker, is eager to sign it.

This 79-17 Senate vote ends more than four decades of malign neglect after the first warnings that smoking cigarettes could kill you. And it happened in Washington.

That’s the same place where Congress and regulatory agencies nodded complacently while corporations floated all sorts of financial balloons and paid lavishly for the executive hot air that filled them. Or it was until the balloons popped. Now Washington is into regulation, whether by public law or public shame, to curb the worst excesses.

Corporate fat cats coughing up compensation hairballs are only part of the picture. Washington seems determined to do something about the national health system.

Started by employers trying to compete around World War II wage freezes, employer-provided health insurance became an assumption for most Americans – except those who didn’t have it.

As the have-not numbers increased and American health standings fell to a par with former Soviet republics, insurers and doctors wrapped themselves in the banner of free enterprise and fought off all attempts at change with the mighty club of “socialized medicine.”.

Now Washington is not talking about whether we will have health care reform, but what it will look like – an earthquake change in assumptions. “Socialized medicine” is now not so much a club as one of several proposals. That overdue earthquake follows economic legislation and other action that happened with a speed and sense of purpose not seen in Washington in decades.

Since any president’s administration takes lumps for things it couldn’t have controlled and accepts bouquets for being just plain lucky, it’s too soon to hand laurels for this change of tone and pace to an Obama administration yet to celebrate its first anniversary.

But it’s not too soon to say that a Washington where more problems are solved than are caused could get to be a pretty comfortable thing.

Let’s see if it continues.

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