Whipped Cream Difficulties

In my family, there’s a running joke: you know it is a slow news day when the local paper runs a story about the timeless, changeless ways of the Amish.

The NYT covers the sudden Federal interest in changing Amish farming practices. Specifically, cattle runoff from the Amish and Old Order Mennonite farmers around Chesapeake Bay is destroying the bay’s ecosystem; the Feds are trying to persuade the farmers to implement practices that would reduce runoff, and even offering government grants to farmers. Of course…

Persuading plain-sect farmers to install fences and buffers underwritten by federal grants has been challenging because of their tendency to shy from government programs, including subsidies. Members neither pay Social Security nor receive its benefits, for example.

In other news, William Grimes (author of Straight Up or On the Rocks and no slouch on the cocktail front himself) covers the reissue of Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto.

(That reminds me: has anyone out there read Chasing the White Dog yet?)

Instead, because Congress allowed the tax to lapse for one year and gave all estates a free pass in 2010, Mr. Duncan’s four children and four grandchildren stand to collect billions that in any other year would have gone to the Treasury.

Yes. I am sure Mr. Duncan arranged his death with the favorable tax consequences to his children in mind.

Oh, guess what? David Lee Powell has filed a new appeal!

Houston attorney Richard Burr said in a 53-page application for a writ of habeas corpus that Powell has been a model inmate, that he poses no threat to society and that to execute him would violate his constitutional rights prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.