The "dog days of August" 2002 will soon be just a memory. If you got rain on your corn and soybean fields, you can be happy. That is -- unless it came too late. I'll be on my Illinois farm next week and let you know what I find. We're all aware of the ups and downs of farming and ranching, but I can't help but be grateful that we live in the USA.

We may not be able to control the weather but we have laws and courts to give us another kind of protection. That's not the case in Zimbabwe. President…

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Here I find myself back from Montana -- not on a horse now but at my desk thinking about Washington, DC and government's influence on agriculture. We have our farm bill. That's Good. Trade Promotion Authority has passed. That's good. Those two actions lay the groundwork for the next step. The next step is up to President Bush and Trade Ambassador Robert Zoellick. The President has the authority to negotiate trade deals and he has the leverage of a strong U.S. farm bill to bargain with.

The plan…

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If my voice sounds different, that's because I'm calling this program in on the phone from Big Sky Country -- Montana. The sky is wide and blue, the forest green and, I think, the streams brimming with trout. I'm on a ranch and have been riding horseback every day, just enjoying the magnificent scenery. These United States of America so diverse. "Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. For purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain."

Our people are just as diverse as…

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New York maintenance worker Caesar Barber deserves a prize for stupidest lawsuit of 2002. Of course the prize he wants would be millions of dollars from four fast food chains -- McDonald's, KFC, Burger King and Wendy's. He ate too many Big Macs and got fat. He must have just stuffed himself with them. He loved gorging himself with fried food. And now -- now he says he didn't realize that 6 Big Macs, bacon cheeseburgers and triple fries might put on a pound or two. Now what happened? Did Colonel…

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