This Is Boring

But it's possibly a great story for the Messenger. There is a great, infuriating, and very long story in today's Washington Post. It's about drought relief the feds gave out to ranchers who didn't need it, some of whom live in North Texas. An excerpt: No state did better than Texas. In the end, all 254 of its counties qualified. Ranchers in counties without droughts collected $45 million in 2003, on top of the $67 million that had flowed to the state in 2002. In northern Texas, Cooke County ranchers qualified for $906,000 in 2003 on the basis of an ice storm that hit the area more than two years earlier. Tim Gilbert, former head of the USDA county office, recalled that "there was no damage in Cooke County to the crops or livestock. Maybe a few pine trees got knocked down." I wonder how Wise County did? Skip, get after it.