Remembering the priorities outside the beltway
We are two months into the New Year, and I hear Congress and the White House are finally - finally! - getting close to an agreement on spending that will keep the government running for another two weeks or so.
Which means that in two weeks, they can have the same argument again, or I guess they can.
Frankly, I tuned out, and went to Houston to see something more interesting last week than the Washington back-and-forth.
People in Houston were raising money for the Texas Children's Hospital which leads the fight against children's cancer.
They don't mess around in Houston. They put on a dinner and raised just over $4.5 million.
One dinner, one night, $4.5 million.
And there was even more. A man named Lester Smith and his wife Sue said they would match whatever the dinner brought in. So he wrote a check for another four and a half million, which brought the take for one night to $9.1 million to fight children's cancer.
Even better was the afternoon I spent at the cancer hospital, where Dr. Zoann Dreyer gave me some even more astounding numbers: She told me that in 1965, the survival rate for children with leukemia, the leading cancer among children, was just five percent.
Today, it is 85 percent that survive.
Now that makes you proud, but when she told me why it's so important to keep private contributions flowing into cancer research, that is because government funding continues to shrink, especially for children's cancer - Yes, I said "especially for children's cancer" - I didn't find much to be proud of there,
But it did remind me it was time to get back to Washington, where the priorities may get out of whack, but the argument never ends.
