As if the rising price of gas isn’t bad enough, the price of tequila may be going up, too. Mexican land which once grew agave is being converted to corn production to feed the hunger for ethanol in the US, leading to a tequila shortage which may drive up prices.

From MSNBC:

Production of agave, from the lily family, soared in recent years as farmers cashed in on record prices brought about by a shortage of the plant at the start of the decade.

Despite rapid growth in tequila drinking, especially overseas, the over-supply of agave has driven prices for the plant to rock-bottom levels.

Many growers have started to abandon the crop in favor of corn, whose price has rocketed in line with massive growth in U.S. demand for ethanol after President Bush outlined targets last year to use the corn-based fuel as a gasoline alternative.

Agave supply is also being hit this year by disease in the fields, partly due to farmers caring less for the plants after prices dropped.

“The problem that we are going to see, perhaps by mid-2008, is that a lot of agave is sick,” Agriculture Ministry official Arnulfo del Toro said. “That will have to be taken out and production is going to drop a lot.”

Last week I paid $19.95 for a bottle of Cuervo Gold. I tried the cheaper stuff once and trust me, it didn’t end well. Even a price increase won’t drive me back to that nasty bargain liquor. It would likely have to go up quite a bit before I switch my drink of choice at home. Where I do expect to see immediate increases is in bars and restaurants. My favorite little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place serves a shot of Cuervo for $3.50, $4.50 for a margarita. I expect to see that go up a buck or more if a cutback in supply drives up wholesale prices.

When I’m paying $3.30 for a gallon of gas, I should at least be able to afford tequila to make the expense easier to swallow. Corn. Humph. Whatever happened to priorities?

I’ve made it a week plus. The cravings have mostly gone away, as well as the physical withdrawal symptoms, but the one thing that hasn’t disappeared is the newly arrived sans-nicotine anxiety. I’m starting each day with a major anxiety attack that runs until mid afternoon, and it’s wearing me down. I know that all I have to do it break it is to light up, but I refuse to do that. So I’m trying to tough it out and hope desperately it isn’t permanent. It was anxiety attacks that drove me back to smoking 2 years ago and I don’t want that to happen again.

Writing is still next to impossible. I feel guilty for abandoning the blog, but little updates like this is the most I can manage right now. For me ritual is a huge part of writing. That’s a good thing, for triggering the openness it takes to create. But it’s really tough when that ritual includes tobacco. I’m used to chain smoking at my desk, and I can’t do that anymore. My ritual is shot.

So I’m still here, still reading all of you — I just can’t put words on the screen right now. Please be patient with me. It will come back eventually.

Not blogging. Smoking, although it may look like the two are one and the same for awhile. It’s taking all my energy to Not Smoke, so blogging will continue to be light until I get my brain back. Hopefully the fog will clear up soon.

It’s day 5 ….

Storm, up close and personal.

Want to know how your legislator voted on a particular bill? There’s a resource from the Washington Post to give you the information. By state, select the senator or representative of your choice to see a complete listing of her/his votes bill by bill, as well as the official position of each party.

You can also scroll through complete lists to see who has missed the most votes. Of particular interest in John McCain, who has missed 89 roll calls, 49% of the total for the session. For comparison, Sen. Hillary Clinton has missed 3 votes (1.7%), and Sen. Barack Obama has missed 11 votes (6.4%).

There is a serious weirdness factor, though. You can track votes on specific bills by party, state, region, Boomer status, gender, and astrological sign. Do Geminis tend to be more liberal than Leos? Check and find out.

Weirdness aside, this is a great resource, well worth putting up with the mandatory site registration to access. Check it out.

That’s what 17-year-old my son told me the other day. The context was an hours long discussion of the presidential candidates and the issues up for grabs in the next election. Having, in my humble opinion, bought into the internet hype, he was trying to convince me that as a liberal I should be supporting Ron Paul for his anti-war stance.

The conversation got heated when I informed him that I could, under no circumstances, vote for a candidate who was not openly pro-choice. He argued that no president, even in her/his Supreme Court appointments, could have any affect on abortion laws. He held forth that any erosion of rights is the province of the states and that the president and the courts have nothing to do with it. He didn’t buy my belief that one of the roles of the Supreme Court is to protect us from the tyranny of the majority. It’s a “states’ rights” issue. He saw no connection between that and the fact that it took a Supreme Court decision to upend the “states’ rights” claim to force integration of our public schools. That had nothing common with abortion to him.

I wasn’t swayed. Call me a one issue voter, but there it is. I’m lucky that as a Democrat I won’t have to choose between pro-choice and opposition to the war this time around. I’m passionate about both.

That’s where he had the biggest problem with me — my passion on the subjects, hence the charge that I’m “no good at politics.” At 17 he doesn’t agree that the personal is political and the political is personal. Maybe it’s his youth; maybe it’s being male. Maybe it’s a combination of both. Maybe he’s just more objective than I am. He definitely has more faith in the system than I do.

He would like politics to be a coolly impersonal process, operating strictly on the intellectual level. Those passionately involved in the issue should not be able to influence decisions. On one level I can see where he’s coming from. He’s a moderate, though by community standards he’s a raging liberal. He’s upset by classroom discussions that get derailed and overrun by students spouting the Neo-Con line with no regard for logic. He wants intelligent discussion without ignorance playing a role and without appeals to emotion. I understand his frustration.

But politics happens to real people. Real lives are affected by the decisions of our government, and those who would lose or gain rights must have a place at the table. Yes, it’s messy, and sometimes it gets ugly. But I believe it’s vital to the process.

Being “too emotional” is a charge far more often leveled at women than at men, specifically on things that directly affect us, such as reproductive autonomy. We have to be passionate to keep from being overlooked by a society that would like us to quietly watch the process rather than participate in it. We’re emotional because it’s our lives at stake.

Yet I can see the downfall of passion. It allows the secretly bigoted to vote against Obama because of the color of his skin. It allows the hidden sexist to vote against Clinton because she’s a woman. It allows the mainstream Christian and those who believe religion has no place in politics to vote against Romney because he’s a Mormon. It allows those who would put fetal rights ahead of women’s rights to try to legislate their version of morality. Passion works both ways.

But we have to fight for what we care about, and we have to convince others to care, too, whether about women’s rights, the environment, or the futility of the war. Sometimes what’s right isn’t the consensus answer. That’s where the Supreme Court should come in.

How do you feel about it? Would we be better served by a dispassionate electorate? Would we arrive at better solutions is emotion was not a consideration? Should politics not be personal at all?

I’m really curious.

What happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas. Sometimes it hits Fark, then the whole world knows about it.

At a Nevada state chiropractic board meeting, Dr. Donald Miner, a governor’s appointee, unleashed the slur of all slurs, “one of the most offensive terms a man can direct at a woman”, according to LasVegasNOW, on Dr. Stephanie Youngblood because she had the audacity to call him to account for using a lobbyist retained by the board to investigate a bill regarding the development of some property in which he had a financial stake. That he said it isn’t particularly shocking; most all of us have been the target of the word at some time in our lives. What is of note is that he was stupid enough to do it in front of an open microphone.

From LasVegasNOW, Eyewitness News Channel 8:

Audio recording of Dr. Youngblood: “It has come to the chair’s attention that a member of our board is utilizing our lobbyist for personal matters. If this is true, then I would like this behavior to discontinue because it is not using proper discretion at the taxpayer’s dollars.”

Although Miner hadn’t been mentioned, he demanded to know if Youngblood meant him. She said yes. Miner then explained that he hadn’t used the lobbyist for personal matters but that he had talked to her about a bill.

Audio recording of Dr. Miner: “Thank you for bringing that up. Set the record straight.”

Dr. Youngblood: “Okay, good.”

And then under his breath, in front of a microphone, Miner added… ‘What a (blank).”

It was recorded on tape and overheard by others. When Youngblood and her vice president were told minutes later, Miner was still seething.

It stands to reason that the word wasn’t bitch. The paper would have reported that without hesitation. I won’t sidestep the issue, however. Refusing to name words give them more power than they deserve. I’m willing to bet he called her a cunt, the epitaph threatened men love to hurl at uppity women, reminding them they are nothing but a piece of meat.

This isn’t the first attack by Miner on Doctor Youngblood, who has the nerve to be female and a professional. A year ago, Miner wanted her to step aside as chair so he could be president of the board. He suggested in an email that she could serve instead as “sexytery”. She declined the honor.

Miner has since resigned from the board, citing the outrageous behavior of Dr. Youngbood as the reason, as well as the fact that an investigative team from Channel 8 knew about the slur and were reporting on it. Yup, it’s all her fault. No matter how much a woman achieves, or how high she rises, there are those who still want to drag her down into the dirt and remind her she’s unworthy of respect.

LasVegasNOW has the full transcript of the exchange, word redacted. Read it here.

From the Seattle Times:

California lawmakers are questioning whether an auditing company in which San Francisco investor Richard Blum, the husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has a major financial stake is rejecting Medicare claims at California rehabilitation hospitals to reap millions of dollars in profits at the expense of patient care.

The company, PRG-Schultz International, has a contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the overseer of the Medicare program, to check payments in California for mistakes. Its only pay is a bounty of up to 30 percent on the “overcharges” it identifies.

The California Hospital Association raised concerns in November that PRG-Schultz was targeting rehabilitation hospitals that cared for Medicare patients after knee- or hip-replacement surgery. The hospital association said PRG-Schultz has reviewed thousands of cases dating as far back as 2002 and has rejected nearly all as medically unnecessary.

Because everyone knows poor people and the elderly have the ends of their bones removed with a saw and replaced with metal just for kicks. Forget that rehab. Let them crawl.

My mother had two knee replacements, luckily before going on Medicare. Her outpatient rehab took 4 months and was only possible because my sister lived with her and was able to drive her to therapy every day. Even then her recovery was limited. Without inpatient services, where would those without live-in help be? Unable to walk. But what the hell - that would save money.

Turner Classic Movies is remembering Katherine Hepburn, who died in June 2003 at 96, by doing a film retrospective of her work. Too bad it’s occasion for a little bigotry as well.

From CNN:

Robert Osborne, the channel’s host, believes her appeal came from “her class and her oddity and her uniqueness. She was a wonderful role model for women, being independent, being her own person. She was one of those like Bette Davis, like Barbara Stanwyck — she gave license to women to be independent. I think that’s one of the great things she did.

“That was a different era then,” he added. “Even common farm women wanted to be classy. Today everyone wants to be unclassy — people show up in restaurants in major cities looking like hell. In those days, people came to New York and they brought their best clothes and they dressed up and went out. It’s so alien to the way they feel today. People loved Hepburn because she was so classy, she was somebody to aspire to.”

“Even common farm women wanted to be classy.” Substitute “African-American,” “handicapped,” or “gay” for “farm” and parse that sentence again. How does it sound?

Growing up in Iowa I knew a lot of farm women, and not a one of them was “common.” All the traits attributed to Hepburn–strength, independence, grit, and yes, class–they had in spades. It takes guts to farm, and it’s hard work. Farm women put in 14 hour days plowing, planting, cultivating, harvesting; they run feedlots and dairies, then often work a night job to make ends meet. They do it wearing boots from Tractor Supply and jeans from K-Mart because anything fancier costs too much and besides, it would just get ruined during calving anyway. Everything they work for could be wiped out by one hail storm or downturn in the market, but they do it anyway, because someone has to.

They do all this so we can just walk into a grocery store and plunk down our 89 cents for a loaf of bread or $2.49 for a pound of hamburger and never have to think about where our food comes from. They don’t expect so much as a thank you.

If that’s not class, I don’t know what is.