Posted on 07/11/2010 1:52:17 AM PDT by thecodont
Reporting from Washington When he ran for president, Barack Obama attacked the George W. Bush administration for putting political concerns ahead of science on such issues as climate change and public health. And during his first weeks in the White House, President Obama ordered his advisors to develop rules to "guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch."
Many government scientists hailed the president's pronouncement. But a year and a half later, no such rules have been issued. Now scientists charge that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reverse a culture that they contend allowed officials to interfere with their work and limit their ability to speak out.
"We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration," said Jeffrey Ruch, an activist lawyer who heads an organization representing scientific whistle-blowers.
[...]
But interviews with several scientists most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation in their jobs as well as reviews of e-mails provided by Ruch and others show a wide range of complaints during the Obama presidency:
In Florida, water-quality experts reported government interference with efforts to assess damage to the Everglades stemming from development projects.
[...]
In Alaska, some oil and gas exploration decisions given preliminary approval under Bush moved forward under Obama, critics said, despite previously presented evidence of environmental harm.
The most immediate case of politics allegedly trumping science, some government and outside environmental experts said, was the decision to fight the gulf oil spill with huge quantities of potentially toxic chemical dispersants despite advice to examine the dangers more thoroughly.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
It took them that long to know he was a phony?
Government grants for studies are as second nature as breathing, and as long as these folks are allowed to work, they pretty much trundle along in their world of chemicals, calculations and formulae that hopefully result in something for the benefit of mankind.
It appears they're just the latest to get mugged.
In a dictatorship, educators and eggheads go first.
Obama’s hostility toward American scientists is as surprising and unexpected as his hostility toward all other Americans. In other words, not at all surprising. All of us are tools for Obama’s agenda, in his mind, but there is only one person in the world who matters to him.
Lies lies and more lies.
Anyone who actually believed a single word coming from this maoist got exactly what they deserved.
Too bad the rest of us are suffering too.
To buck the expectations of the unelected, permanent government of bureaucrats and apparatchiks is to become a little Gallileo to the government church.
They hold the strings, they pull the strings, scientists dependent upong grant money jump. It’s been that way for decades. The nature and direction of scientific endeavor is altered by these expectations, as are the conclusions reached.
If there’s been a mugging, it’s taken a long time for the scientific “consensus” to form. Science in service to a foregone conclusion is not so much science as propaganda backed up by one-sided research.
In service to private industry, it’s well and good, and serves a productive end. In service to political ideology, however, it’s a different matter entirely.
You are being very charitable. Like all people, each has good and bad qualities. The reality though is that scientists tend to be academic liberals who think the democrats will fund them at a higher rate. The sobering truth is that with the kind of deficits that the government has spent us into, there will be less and less money for research. It's already happened, as the percentage of successful grant submissions has dropped significantly.
Also, there has been wider support for Obamacare in academic circles, including scientific circles, than in the general populace. What they will unhappily learn is that the deficits that are inevitable under Obamacare will divert more and more money away from basic research, and more into ‘health outcomes’ studies and social science. They will be very unhappy.
One more group with buyer’s remorse apparently.
I saw Newt on TV recently saying he expected obama to be more moderate than he’s turned out to be. Why? Why would Newt and all the others think this? There was NOTHING about obama that screamed moderate except his campaign rhetoric - NOTHING! What on earth were these people expecting???
Yep. Article should have sub-head: “Useful Idiot Alert!”
Environmental scientists... are NOT scientists... they are political hacks with an agenda, and a worthless degree equivalent to African American studies.
So the high priests of the humanist religion are whining about their Pope not just forking over trillions for esoteric and useless research on snail darter reproduction or super massive black holes. I heard a guest on George Noory’s Coast to Coast show a couple of weeks ago, a former pharma CEO I think at Eli Lilly. He made a statement that I think two weeks later remains unrefuted. Of all the universities, all the billions gone into research, all the Noble prizes awarded there has not be ONE disease cured in the last 50 years, not a one. Sure they have managed to design drugs and treatments for alleviating symptoms but no one disease has been permanently cured by their “research”. Most of what is called science now is a joke, it’s mostly scientists wasting billions in a desperate attempt to keep from getting a real job or research to buttress secular humanism and how G*d must not exist. I think the oil spill has outed the collective brilliance of the elbow patches crowd.
The should be no such thing.
He lies about W while he makes EVERYTHING political. Say one thing and then do the opposite.
0bama supports the reinstatement of Trofim Lysenko.
Silly people...science is politics by other means; especially government science.
They were expecting politics as usual. They thought zerO and his advisers were simply spouting the hard left mantras to get elected, but that, once elected, they would triangulate toward the center in order to get re-elected.
This tells us volumes about all the so-called right-wingers who kept reassuring the electorate that zerO wasn’t frightening. They all lie, on both sides, while cutting deals to benefit themselves and, incidentally, a few of those who supported them. They used to keep their contempt for the electorate tightly controlled, in public. Now, most don’t even bother to pretend it is about anything other than their own power to impose an agenda upon us while taking payment from special interests.
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