Scott Brown is the senator elect from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
-30 to +5 in three weeks…
I cannot describe the kind of a change this is… Ted Kennedy held this seat from November 7th 1962, until his death in 2009… Almost 47 years…
The democrats have been calling this “Ted Kennedys seat” since his death… This is NOT Ted Kennedys seat, it is the seat of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
I have a personal connection here. I am a native of Boston, born and raised until I went to college (with some diversions into New Hampshire). Even deeper though, I come from a Massahusetts political family. My grandfather was politician in Boston, as was my great grandfather (a state rep, and delegate to the 1924 democratic election).
In 1976 my grandfather ran against Kennedy, as a conservative democrat, and of course lost. Soon after, he switched his allegiance to the Republican party.
My grandfather recognized then, that the politics of Kennedy and Carter were harmful to this country; and he made a principled stand, that essentially ended his political career (and many of his personal friendships; because he grew up in the streets, an Irish, democrat, union kid).
Today, 33 someodd years later, a man who believes… essentially as my grandfather believed in 1976 (excepting his pro-choice stance; my grandfather was a pro-life catholic ’til his death), is to be the junior senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I can honestly say, I did not believe I would live to see this day.
I think this calls for a nice bottle of Taittinger.
Mr. Brown, I raise my glass to you…
May you have the wisdom, the intelligence, the courage, and the strength of will; to go to Washington, and do right by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the people of Massachusetts, and the American people.
I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.
Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra
Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson and his wife were leaving dinner at a new pizza joint near their home in Omaha one night last week when a patron began complaining about Nelson’s decisive vote in favor of the Senate’s health care bill.
Other customers started booing. A woman yelled, “Get him the hell out of here!” And the Nelsons and their dining companions beat a hasty retreat.
“It was definitely a scene in there,” said Tom Lewis, a 41-year-old dentist and registered Republican who witnessed the incident. A second witness confirmed the incident to POLITICO.
Now it’s time for me to go back to work on reminding Americans why there are 99 other Senators deserving this treatment.
I regularly read the Science Based Medicine Blog since it is an interesting combination of intelligent, rational examination of medicine and the naive monstrous morals of a toddler.
As usual, the medical and regulatory communities are tasked with making sense out of chaos – with implementing bottom-line recommendations in the face of inconclusive evidence. While there remains legitimate dissent on the role of salt in vascular health, the current consensus is something like this:
Most of the world, including Americans and those in industrialized nations, consume more salt than appears to be necessary.
In the US most of that salt comes from processed or restaurant food (while in other countries, like Japan, most salt intake is added while cooking).
There is a plausible connection between excess salt intake, hypertension, strokes and heart attacks.
There is evidence to suggest that reducing overall salt intake will reduce the incidence of these health problems, but the evidence is not yet conclusive and longer term and sub-population data is needed.
Given all this it seems reasonable (from a scientific point of view – and ignoring the role of political ideology) to take steps to reduce the amount of salt in processed and restaurant food, while continuing to study the impact of such measures. But we also have to consider unintended consequences. Part of the reason salt is added to processed food is because it helps preserve it – give it a longer shelf life. People also develop a taste for salty food, and a sudden decrease in salt content may be unsatisfying, leading people to seek out higher salt foods. But these are technical problems that can be addressed.
It should also be noted that salt requirements and tolerance may vary considerably from individual to individual – based upon genetics, and certainly underlying diseases. Therefore recommendations from one’s doctor should supercede any general recommendations for the population.
In any case it seems that the War on Salt has begun. I only hope this is a war we choose to fight with science.
The last sentence left me gobsmacked. A war fought with science? Does he understand what exactly it means when a government wages war?
The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Let’s take, for example, the war on (some) drugs. 150 years ago, if I had described the government proscribing the growth of hemp, sowing poison on illicit fields in an attempt to kill marijuana smokers, sending paramilitary forces into homes with orders to shoot first and ask questions later, and setting up checkpoints where people with large amounts of cash would have it confiscated on the grounds it must be involved in this illicit trade, it would have beggared belief. Those who lobbied for its outlawing would have denied wanting to do those things, they merely wanted to protect white women from being seduced by black jazz musicians and to preserve the social order against uppity darkies.
And once the stuff was outlawed, once the law enforcement apparatus started to wage its low level guerrilla campaign, and faced resistance the government naturally escalated, flooding the media with propaganda to buttress its position, until the war became an end to itself, with otherwise sensible people saying things like “I am a fan of freedom but we must protect the citizenry against the scourge of drugs”
I am curious why the good Dr Novella thinks that a war on salt will turn out any better than the War on Gold, the War on Sucrose, the War on Opiates, the War on Miscegenation or any of the other social crusades little petit tyrants enlist the government to engage in?
If I were to propose a War on the North Korean Government, I would imagine that Dr Novella might be a little reluctant to support it, given the large number of innocent people who would inevitably die having been propagandized into fanatically defending the state that looted and brutalized them so thoroughly.
But here, we get nary a peep of condemnation, only a pious desire to have “science” inform the strategy of the war on a common cooking ingredient, which will really be a war on people who use to much salt (according to the government) in their food preparation.
Dr Novella’s blindness it encoded in an assumption in the first sentence I quoted:
As usual, the medical and regulatory communities are tasked with making sense out of chaos – with implementing bottom-line recommendations in the face of inconclusive evidence.
Why are they tasked with this? Sure, doctors are asked to give advice on questions where there is no clear answer, much like any other profession. They have the power to say “I don’t know”, however. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with doctor’s giving advice. The act of making a suggestion does not actually harm anybody.
The regulatory apparatus, on the other hand, is dangerous. When it acts, people get hurt, they go to jail, they have their finances ruined. If we assume such an apparatus should exist, then we should use it only when the harm it does is worth the benefit. Otherwise, the regulatory apparatus need do nothing! Especially where there is no overwhelming evidence to justify regulation. It’s not as if salt causes an epidemic like cholera! The notion that people with vascular disease drives up health care costs requiring such regulation is laughable. Dr Novella has never, in all the essays he has authored that I am familiar with, shown much concern with the major reasons why health care costs are so high. If anything he supports the measures that are the primary drives of the high costs.
It is a shame that otherwise rational people fail to learn the lessons of history. Their blindness would not be so bothersome, if it weren’t for the fact that their hands are helping aim the guns pointed at us.
I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.
Warren, the blogger and small businessman behind Coyote Blog, does business in a number of states. Alabama, which is a relatively new state for him (6 months), just sent him a notice that he was being audited for his business over the last three years in Alabama. He called to clear this up, and was told:
But here is the part that really pissed me off. When I asked him why I was being audited after just 6 months, he said he knew the audit was senseless but his office is desperately trying to keep everyone employed during recent budget cuts so that no one would lose their job. Also he said is was good training for him. Great. I have to do 6 hours of extra work so that later I can pay higher state taxes to support more government workers. What a deal.
Foes of government “stimulus” scoff at the idea that government should employ people counter-cyclically doing things like digging holes and then filling them up…
…but I think Coyote would have preferred that to wasting his time.
I suspect we’ll see a corresponding shift in the rhetoric. Instead of Obama saying the stimulus “created or saved X million jobs”, he’ll say the stimulus “put X million Americans to work.”
When the White House unveiled its nearly $800 billion stimulus package last year, it promised not only to create and save 3.5 million jobs but also to open the books and prove it. But counting jobs turned out to be a lot harder than lining up a work crew and tapping hardhats.
Now, the White House says it will no longer keep a cumulative tally of jobs created and saved by the stimulus. Instead, it will post only a count of jobs for each quarter.
And instead of counting only created and saved jobs, it will count any person who works on a project funded with stimulus money—even if that person was never in danger of losing his or her job.
The new rules came out last month in a little-noticed memo (PDF) sent to federal agencies by Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. OMB said it changed the guidelines to prevent the kinds of errors and confusion that occurred when the first job counts came out in October.
I’m sure the administration knew all along that they’d get skewered for whatever number they put out, especially when recovery.gov started showing money going to non-existent Congressional districts*. But I think this change shows that they just don’t care about justifying the funding any more.
