This New England

I'd guess that most people think that Vermont has long allowed "gay marriages.'' In fact, though it was the first state to permit civil unions between people of the same sex, it hasn't yet gotten around to allowing out-and-out (so to speak) marriages.

But a bill to do just that has been introduced in the legislature, and will probably get enacted. Vermonters care a lot more about the diving economy this year anyway than such social "wedge issues.''

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Will former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who backed civil unions for homosexuals when he ran the state, be chosen as U.S. health and human services secretary? He is a physician and does know a lot of about health-care reform. (Vermont has a good health system, by U.S. standards.) His wife is a doctor, too. And he was a good governor.

But Dr. Dean has a reputation for cantankerousness that might not work well considering he'd presumably be the point man for working out health-care reform legislation with an always difficult to handle and narcissistic Congress.

So it probably won't happen.

-- NOAA photo

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Now, this is terrifying. A symposium Friday at the Moakley Courthouse in Boston heard warnings from experts that New England could start losing its shellfish in the next few decades because of the growing acidity of the ocean caused by greenhouse-gas emission increases. Life without oysters, scallops, mussels and clams would be intolerable.

Consider the economic impact: 80 percent of the region's $1 billion fishing industry is from shellfish.

Further south, coral, which are also calcium machines, would die off.

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New Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo's suggestion that lawmakers bring back a limit of four two-year terms for the job might goose public confidence in the position a tad. But then citizens will remember how three recent speakers have left under an ethical cloud and that most speakers rarely make it to eight years. The chamber has too many carnivorous creatures.

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The Boston Pops (part of the Boston Symphony) and the Boston Red Sox are getting together on a CD of baseball music. Sounds cute, and a great publicity stunt, but to put a nonprofit and a hyper-profit together like that always give me pause.

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See Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law, by Philip K. Howard. He also wrote The Death of Common Sense.

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 Tags  Boston Pops Boston Red Sox HHS; Vermont gay marriage; Robert DeLeo Howard Dean Life Without Lawyers Philip K. Howard

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