February is still here

The town/village of Potsdam continues to provide me with lots of entertainment. The current brouhaha concerns Canton-Potsdam Hospital's plans to expand, which involves removing several residences in the area of the hospital to provide space for their expansion plans. To accommodate the hospital, the town/village has rezoned the property from Residential to whatever category is necessary. You may recall that they would not rezone a piece of property on Market Street to allow Dunkin Donuts to build a new bistro. I suspect that some members of whoever controlled the zoning board had a conflict of interest in whatever competition the new business would generate, but I had better keep off that subject to protect my legal status. Anyway, any attempt to change anything in Potsdam is guaranteed to produce an uproar. In the hospital case a local resident with a really big mouth (anti-change) proceeded to call a meeting to discuss the situation, obviously expecting a huge turnout of folks who agreed with him. To his chagrin, it seems that the majority of the crowd was in favor of the hospital expansion - far from the response he expected. In a classic case of Democracy in Action, he threw out all of the people who did not agree with his position, and finished the meeting with the 7 or 8 souls who were left. Not a really good start for the opposition. I have been a patient/client of Canton-Potsdam hospital several times, and I think it is one of the best managed institutions I have ever entered. Although I am not allowed to participate in the final decision, my hope is that the hospital prevails.

In his continuing attempts to balance the New York State budget (ain't gonna happen), one of the Gov's suggestions is a huge increase in the excise tax on Beer. I am gonna tell him that the idea of increasing the cost of beer is like the third rail (Medicare) in national politics. The Feds know what is so unpopular it might cost someone an election, and run like dogs when anything detrimental to medical is proposed. Our Gov might take a lesson from them and leave New Yorker's beer alone.

I keep reading how the price of a barrel of oil is steadily falling, but I fail to see any corresponding drop when I fill up my car. I have seen several explanations for this seeming anomoly, none of which I understand, and more importantly, none I believe. At its very simplist senario it seems to me that if the cost of the raw material of something drops, there should be a corresponding drop in the finished product. One excuse I read was that we are up to our butts in crude oil in storage, but don't have the pipeline capacity to move it to the refineries. The oil companies say they can't afford to build these pipelines because of the uncertainty of the price of gasoline. As far as I can see, they are pretty well dictating the price of gasoline now, so what the hell is the problem. I see that Exxon made something like a 45 Billion dollar profit in the last quarter - how much do those pipelines cost anyway?

The uproar continues over that lady who recently gave birth to 8 babies. She was a National Hero for a couple of days due to the medical miracle she produced, but as a single mother with 14 kids, she seems to be running a little short of money. Well, duh, what is the big suprise? This poor gal is apparently soliciting donations to feed her brood and this is absolutely outrageous to some folks, who are raising hell with the idea that she might ask for welfare. Where do we draw the line? Is it OK for a destitute family with 4 or 5 kids to get welfare but not this person with 14 kids? The most prominent complaint is that she had all of those kids on purpose - where in hell do they think the kids in smaller welfare families came from -- immaculate conception? I have always believed that kids should not be allowed to go hungry or be cold, regardless of their social status and I see no reason to change my opinion about this situation. If our governments can spend millions on a vast variety of hairbrained schemes, feeding kids should be in there somewhere.