Columns

Humans and animals often have similar health problems. One example of this is Congenital Heart Disease. Congenital Heart Disease refers to a problem the animal is born with. There are multiple types of Congenital Heart Disease: valve malformations or dysplasia, valve narrowing or stenosis, abnormal openings between the heart chambers or septal defects, and patent ductusarteriosus.
Patent ductusarteriousus is the most common among dogs, said Dr. Ashley Saunders, assistant professor at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.
“There are anumber of diseases that your dog can be born with, patent ductusarteriosus is the most common in dogs,” she said.
PDA is caused when the ductusarteriosus, an arterial connection between the aorta and pulmonary artery, doesn’t close properly after birth, Saunders said. This results in blood being pumped back through the artery instead of through the rest of the body.
Saunders added that different breeds such as German shepherds, miniature poodles, cocker spaniels, Pomeranians, collies, and Shetland sheepdogs are more susceptible to the disorder. Female dogs are also predisposed to the disorder.
Most dogs with PDA have a heart murmur that the veterinarian will hear upon routine checkup.

SANTA FE — What should we expect from New Mexico’s 2013 Legislature? Our chosen leaders have promised to work together but the chances don’t look good.
Former Gov. Bruce King’s campaign slogan was “Working Together,” But Bruce had been on the county commission, was a former House speaker and a three-time governor. He knew how to make it work.
Today we are faced with more than 30 of our 112 lawmakers being new to their jobs and a governor whose experience is as a prosecutor — a job not known for working together.
Add to those problems new leadership in both the House and Senate. House Speaker Ben Lujan retired and Senate President Pro Tem Tim Jennings was beaten in a bitter battle. So we have no steady hand of longtime leadership plus a number of first-time committee chairs.
And it doesn’t end there. The recent elections were the most expensive ever -- and probably the dirtiest. Everybody claims dirty elections but this is the first time we have had GOP money being used to defeat Republicans in the Republican primary and Democrats in the Democratic primary. And it was the governor’s PAC that was behind it all.

Mr. Pawlak’s recent column demonstrates a common approach to gun control among those of a utopian pacifist persuasion and others who cannot accept that there really are evil people in the world that will kill with a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, a car or any other tool they can get their hands on.
That approach is simple, when they can’t argue the facts or logic; they resort to name-calling, insults, derision, and worst of all exaggeration and misrepresentation.
Let’s start with Mr. Pawlak’s blatantly dishonest exaggeration and misrepresentation. The NRA did not recommend that we:
“Convert public schools to firearms depots.”
“Arm all the teachers with guns.”
“Patrol the hallways with a few mercenaries.”
“Have a couple of Humvees equipped with Browning .50 cal machine guns ride protective circles around the school playground.”
What Wayne LaPierre and Asa Hutchinson of the NRA did recommend can be read by anyone honest enough to seek out the truth at nraschoolshield.com.
You can see for yourself that the actual transcript of the December 21, 2012 press conference and The National School Shield program doesn’t resemble Mr. Pawlak’s assertions at all.

The recently passed bill to “solve” the Fiscal Cliff economic crisis should not have been passed. It is a bad bill and a worse law. But not because it is too liberal or too conservative.
The Fiscal Cliff bill passed jointly by Republicans and Democrats will now turn the United States into a perpetual borrowing nation.
This nation has real debt and deficit problems. We haveaccumulated a $16.4 trillion national debt from decades of spending beyond the taxes and fees the government receives.
And each year for the last five years, the nation has run a national deficit, or annual loss, of more than $1 trillion.
That amounts to the U.S. borrowing 40 cents for every federal dollar spent each year.
The above said, the problem is not due to one party overspending, or to the 2008 banking disaster and resulting Big Recession, or the government choosing to do jobs that it should not be doing.
The reason we have a national borrowing addiction is because of two primary factors: the President Bush tax cuts since 2001 have starved the U.S. Treasury of at least $700 billion a year in tax revenues from all sources, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded through borrowing, rather than cutting spending elsewhere or raising more taxes, or both.