midwestdoc's Comments (45)

“Agreed.”

“Right- vaccines do not promote resistant strains. Antivirals, on the other hand, do lead to resistance strains, in exact analogy to antibiotics. They shouldn't be used except when needed.”

“You've misunderstood my point. I take antibiotics when appropriate. I'm just saying that there's a long-term bad public health effect to consider.
The rate of evolution of new viruses, in contrast, is probably slowed by vaccines. The main public health effect is herd immunity, a very strong plus.”

“This is a surprisingly long-winded and fact-free post from a guy as sharp as Maher. It's full of red-herrings. Sure, the people who are hit hardest are usually ones with some other condition. Lots of people have some other condition, sometimes without being aware of it. Sure we need to consider the evolutionary effects of any medical measure. For antibiotics those are bad, hastening the development of resistant strains. For vaccines they tend to be good, shrinking the pool of viruses in which nasty new mutations and combinations can occur.
It would be good to see the same length of article used to discuss the actual pros, cons and uncertainties of vaccines in serious, quantitative terms.”

“I get it. With $92k/yr income and very low expenses, this guy was able to get 2 handguns and ammunition only thanks to international terror networks operating out of Pakistan. Makes sense.”

“The Fourth Crusade is reborn.”

“Hey, you're off by about 3700 years or so on Tut.”

“Bravo Rep. Slaughter. I wish half the Congress had half your brains.”

“Toles is available on NYT.”

“Seriously? A rocket scientist can't take sqrt(142) and figure out that this is a 7 sigma effect? Doesn't know that the principle non-random error in the early studies (tendency of higher SES patients, more at risk for this paradoxical disease, to volunteer for the vaccine) cause underestimation of its efficacy.

Really dangerous crackpottery.”

“The name (PLST, without vowels) goes back to some northern Sea Peoples who unsuccessfully invaded Egypt and were settled in what's now Palestine as colonists by the Egyptians. So the biblical Philistines were not so directly ancestors of the current 'Palestinian' Arabs, who probably trace ancestry mostly to semitic groups. Of course these other groups (the Canaanites, Amurites, ...) also fought with the Hebrews over land, so your basic point is still right, regardless of the history of the names. Can the US play Persia, and get everybody settled down? Not easy.”

“Your claim that the court decided Bush v Gore "precisely because Florida's recount procedures varied dramatically by county, and thus did not treat all voters and ballots equally" buys into a transparently bogus rationalization. The different voting systems in FL already had dramatically unequal rates of failing to count votes. The recount would have significantly reduced those disparities by examining votes for clear intent. It's very cute and post-partisan to pretend that the decision was something other than a power grab.

In the case of MN, it's hard to believe that there's any serious chance that including some more absentee votes would give Coleman a win. If there was, his lawyers would have prepared something like a rational argument about why that was possible, and made some effort to explain specifically why those individual further votes were wrongly excluded. One of the more Republican MN SC judges noted a remarkable failure to even attempt those sorts of argument. Since, overall, MN absentees seem to have been significantly shifted toward Franken compared to election-day votes, what Coleman really needs (but knows he can't can't get) is a very rigidly exclusionary standard applied retroactively.”

“whoops: release, not 'realize'”

“@calinitative- It sounds profound to say that we don't know whether CO2 causes heating or vice versa, but actually a great deal is known about this. The mechanisms are based in very well-understood chemistry and physics, and born out by detailed records. BOTH effects occur. However, the realize of CO2 from heated oceans is a very long-term process, while tyhe heating from infrared trapping by CO2 occurs relatively quickly. Both effects are included in the climate models. The bottom line is that it's a very bad idea to keep adding to CO2.

@Laurie- The role of climate change in particular weather effects, like tornadoes, is a little more complicated than the role of CO2 in climate change. So people who express a little uncertainty might be sincere.”

“Some people here are writing about how Burris is a good man. They have short memories. When he was IL AG and trying to run for Gov, he tried very hard to have a man (Cruz) whom he knew to be innocent executed. The Asst. AG in charge of the case resigned in protest, but Burris kept going in order to not seem soft on crime. There was very little ambiguity about this case. Burris knew what he was doing. He's not a good man.

That said, if he somehow ends up winning the primary, I'd vote for him rather than a republican.”

“Why dump on all the politicians equally? A year ago we had two very good senators here, and we till have one. We could get someone much better than Burris.
That said, if Burris wins the primary I'll still vote for him, because his votes so far look ok and no Republican's votes would be.”

“For somebody who's into 'fax' you sure have trouble with 'facts'. The 400 non-counted absentees were NOT 'agreed' to be improper. After Coleman turned down Franken's offer to count all 1350, Coleman started unilaterally vetoing ballots, as was allowed by a peculiar MN SC decision. Franken responded in kind. So far as I know, not one of those ballots was excluded by agreement. For either side to get some of these ballots counted does not require 'changing their mind' since they were excluded unilaterally by the other side.

As for Coleman's list of 600+, election judges have gone over about 100 so far and found exactly one which seems likely to have been excluded improperly. Is 1% 'most or all' by your definition?”

“As it happens those assertions aren't right. The disputed ballots seem rather evenly distributed over DFL and R counties, no obvious large advantage either way. You can check that on a STrib site, which shows the counties which have separated the uncounted absentees.

The reason it's thought that Franken has the advantage is that there was a major DFL absentee push and there was one poll that showed F doing marginally better among absentees than overall. That's good evidence, but not overwhelming.

They are in envelopes, but the only ones that have a chance to be counted are in SIGNED envelopes. Both sides have good lists of voters by party. So they have a very strong idea of who each vote will be for.
That's why the process set up sounds unworkable.”

“"Ron Kirk and Hilda Solis...jauntily sparring over free trade with Colombia"?
Yeah, such trivie. Try Googling "Columbia trade-union killing". From the first item:
"In Colombia, 445 trade union members received death threats and 99 were murdered ". That's the issue they 'jauntily' disagree about.

Politics is all about life and death questions. You may be right on Warren (although it could play the other way) but it's hard to listen when you devalue everyone else's lives.”

“"influence the morays of our culture." ? They have important eels in OH?
Is that Blackwell's word or his transcriber's?”

“me too”

“wjousts- You don't get it. I agree that the procedures of democracy can be ultimately more valuable than the particular outcomes, even life-and-death outcomes. What I'm saying here is that the procedures of democracy should be followed. What you're advocating (dropping the procedures because you're bored) could only make sense for a candidate who didn't believe the results were important for real human issues. Who'd want a candidate like that anyway?

mh01 at least agrees that the policies followed by a government matter, although putting what seems to me a perverse religion-based emphasis on one of the issues.”

“The headline is misleading. We really don't know what's in those absentee ballots, or even whether there are about 250 of them or about 750. A decision will be made on Friday which may affect the election results. Despite the spins of the campaigns, we aren't sure which way it will affect the results, and we certainly don't know whether it will be decisive.

On another question: somebody here has proposed that Franken drop out of an election which he may have narrowly won "because he's the bigger man". This assumes that elections are about the sort of things Rod B thinks they're about. Most of us (and I think this includes Franken) think this senate vote matters because it will decide things like how many children are left to die due to our terrible health care system. Pretending that doesn't matter and dropping out of the legitimate process to look high-class wouldn't be being a "bigger man". It would be being a self-interested coward.”

“Chu's obviously a good scientist and his positions on the key issues are good. He does have a snotty way of treating peers, and a tendency to pretend to have deep thoughts on topics he doesn't know much about, so he might not be the best possible department head.”

“Aren't you leaving out the biggie? The $500k + home built by 'contractor friends' in Wasilla? Reportedly the same friends who built the big ice-rink boondoggle and just happened to have $1.1 Mil over-runs approved by Palin in the process.
If the reported facts are accurate, this is much more blatant than what Stevens was convicted for.”