Max Baucus, Dennis Rehberg, and Jon Tester all deserve a boot in the fanny for recent conduct and statements unbecoming.
Tester wants to exclude small farm operations from Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) Food Safety Act, SB-510.
Flathead Beacon reporter Molly Priddy’s story provides this wonderful paragraph in which Tester makes a statement he can’t possibly support with science:
“The folks with me here today know firsthand that food-borne illnesses don’t come from family agriculture,” Tester said in a statement after a visit with Missoula farmers in September. “As we do the vital work to make sure the food on our kitchen tables is safe, we’ve also got to make sure we don’t treat small producers the same way we treat big corporate farms. That’s exactly what my amendment will fix.”
Senator, the microbes that generate the illnesses thrive everywhere, in dirty small operations as well as in dirty big operations. This amendment doesn’t protect consumers. It subordinates food safety to the economic concerns of small farmers. You know better.
Rehberg, appearing at a panel on wolf management at Flathead Valley Community College on 6 October, said, in effect, that when two groups of scientists disagree, their differences should be resolved not by consultation and collaboration and peer review and the normal process of refining scientific knowledge, but by turning to Congress:
Brian Peck of Columbia Falls was one of a few wolf advocates who spoke Wednesday. He told Rehberg that Molloy rigidly followed the rule of law in his decision and he asserted that the decision to delist wolves was driven by politics and there is “no science” to support the decision.
In his concluding remarks, Rehberg addressed that claim head-on, saying that the goalposts for what wolf advocates consider to be adequate science will constantly shift.
“There are those in society who aren’t going to be satisfied with the science,” said Rehberg.
Because there will be two camps of science supporting or opposing delisting, “ultimately, it is going to be a political decision,” Rehberg said. Daily InterLake, 7 October 2010.
Spoken like a true Republican anti-intellectual yahoo. Karl Rove and W. would be proud.
There he was, in Kalispell, in the Sonju family’s weapons works, Montana’s senior Democrat, Max Baucus, holding an assault weapon he’d just assembled. Baucus was on his monthly work day, this time doing a job for Jon Sonju, the Republican candidate for Senate District 4 — and just by being there and getting his photo taken, doing a job on fellow Democrat Mary Reckin, his party’s candidate for Senate District 4. Could Baucus not have waited until after the election to dabble in military gunsmithing and thus have avoided embarrassing and undercutting Reckin?
He’s certainly old enough to know better. And maybe that’s the problem. Now 68, Baucus will be 73 at the end of his current term. He gives every indication of planning to run again. Perhaps like Robert Byrd he believes that a supreme being wants him to die in office, which translates into an intent to serve forever, for old Senators never expect to die. But men who are hale at 73 tend to be less so six years later. He would do well to follow the example set by Paul Sarbanes.