Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Morons?

The science-free and expertise-free Bush administration.

Matthew Yglesias:

TPMCafe || Stopped Clock : How come the Bush administration never seems to have any good domestic policy ideas? Well, because policymaking has been near-totally outsourced to the business lobby. Sometimes, though, he dreams up a decent initiative like increasing science funding. How does that happen? Turns out "President Bush's proposal to accelerate spending on basic scientific research came after technology industry executives made the case for such a move in a series of meetings with White House officials, executives involved said Wednesday." Probably a good result this time around, but a pretty pathetic approach to running the country.

Kevin Drum:

The Washington Monthly : SWITCHGRASS FOLLOWUP....So where did the president's "switchgrass" reference in Tuesday's State of the Union address come from? David Roberts at Grist writes:You may be interested in what David Bransby, professor of energy crops at Auburn University, said Wednesday on NPR's All Things Considered. He has called and emailed regularly with the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). One of the last emails claimed, in Bransby's words, that switchgrass "was a last minute inclusion in the speech, and it was Senator Sessions that helped get it into there." Sessions' spokesflack later confirmed that Sessions had a heart-to-heart with Al Hubbard, the chairman of Bush's National Economic Council, last Friday.There you have it. Apparently the path was Sessions to Hubbard to Bush. Too bad there were no actual scientists involved.

Is there anybody, anybody at all who has worked for the Bush administration and emerged with their reputation intact?

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Ricard Cheney. Do it now.

Comments

[a different chris]

Wouldn't it be comical if the best genetically engineered microbe for the switchgrass process required a human gene??

[Bernard Yomtov]

Not sure I understand the complaint here. Didn't the information originate with Bransby? Does he not count as a scientist?

And what is switchgrass?

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/02/the_war_on_scie.html

The War on Science Continues
By Mark Thoma

The administration is up to its usual tricks on the science front, this time with health standards on soot and dust. Why worry about "thousands of more deaths" when mining and agricultural trade associations are opposed to the new rules?:

EPA Panel Advises Agency Chief to Think Again, by Janet Wilson, LA Times: In an unprecedented action, the Environmental Protection Agency's own scientific panel ... challenged the agency's proposed public health standards governing soot and dust. The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, mandated by Congress to review such proposals, asserted Friday that the standards put forward by EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson ignored most of the committee's earlier recommendations and could lead to additional heart attacks, lung cancer and respiratory ailments. ...

In December, Johnson proposed to slightly tighten the health standards that state and local governments must meet in regulating industries and other sources of pollution. But those standards, governing the smallest and most hazardous particles of soot, were substantially weaker than the scientists' recommendations. Johnson also proposed to exempt rural areas and mining and agriculture industries from standards governing larger coarse particles, and he declined to adopt the panel's proposed haze reduction standards. ...

Some panel members called the administrator's actions "egregious" and said his proposals "twisted" or "misrepresented" their recommendations. ... It was the first time since the committee was established under the Clean Air Act nearly 30 years ago that the committee had asked the EPA to change course ... "We're in uncharted waters here," acknowledged committee Chairwoman Rogene Henderson, an inhalation toxicologist. She said their action was necessary because "the response of the administrator is unprecedented in that he did not take our advice. It's most unusual for him not to take the advice of his own science advisory body." ...

Cal/EPA's air pollution epidemiology chief, Bart Ostro, charged during the teleconference that the EPA had incorporated "last-minute opinions and edits" by the White House Office of Management and Budget that "circumvented the entire peer review process." ... In an interview later, Ostro said he was referring to marked-up drafts of Johnson's proposals that showed changes by the White House budget office and language that was "very close to some of the letters written by some of the trade associations."

He said the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee's seven-year review of data on health risks of particulate matter had been replaced with inaccurate conclusions about the science that could lead to "thousands more deaths," especially from fine particulates that lodge deep in the lungs. ... Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote to Johnson on Friday afternoon requesting that the EPA provide her with documents related to the EPA's ... contacts with ... representatives of the mining and agricultural industries. "These changes benefit mining and agricultural interests at the expense of public health," she wrote. ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/science/04climate.html?ex=1296709200&en=485e8873aed34738&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

February 4, 2006

NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.

"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."

The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency's 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.

Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr. Hansen's case, there were several other instances in which political appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from the agency.

They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration policies.

In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.

And in December 2004, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory complained to the agency that he had been pressured to say in a news release that his oceanic research would help advance the administration's goal of space exploration....

[JR]

Yomtov is right: the second example suggests that a scientist got the ear of a legislator, who got the ear of the White House. Wish that sort of thing happened more often.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/business/02research.html?ex=1296536400&en=84faf625cb5962db&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

February 2, 2006

Behind Bush's New Stress on Science, Lobbying by Republican Executives
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — President Bush's proposal to accelerate spending on basic scientific research came after technology industry executives made the case for such a move in a series of meetings with White House officials, executives involved said Wednesday.

In his State of the Union message Tuesday evening, Mr. Bush called for a doubling within 10 years of the federal commitment to "the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences."

The president's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, said Mr. Bush would request $910 million for the first year of the research initiative, with a commitment to spending $50 billion over 10 years.

Computer scientists have expressed alarm that federal support for basic research is being eroded by shifts toward applied research and shorter-term financing. But in his speech, Mr. Bush pointed to work in supercomputing, nanotechnology and alternative energy sources — subjects that were favorites in the Clinton administration but had not been priorities for the current White House.

What was different this year, according to a number of Capitol Hill lobbyists and Silicon Valley executives, was support on the issue by Republican corporate executives like Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel, and John Chambers, the chief executive of Cisco Systems.

Industry officials eager to see a greater government commitment to research held a series of discussions with administration officials late last year that culminated in two meetings in the Old Executive Office Building on Dec. 13....

[Linkmeister]

Mr. Yomtov,

Behold switchgrass:
http://www.linkmeister.com/blog/archives/001746.html

[kieran]

I'd spoken with a scientist working on the very problem of biofuels, and he was pretty optimistic about switchgrass-based ethanol production long before Bush mentioned it. The idea is to use cellulase to break down the normally indigestible plant fibre, and use THAT to make ethanol. At that point, you don't worry about sugar-rich crops, just fast-growing ones, and switchgrass fits the bill.

Traditional etOH production still sounds like an energy looser, though.

[bakho]

This was just another WTF is he talking about moments.

The point is that the research on Switchgrass is already funded. It is not a new initiative. It is only one of many potential biofuels. This is not a Bush statement based on the best of a comprehensive new initiative. Bush was just blowing smoke. Most of the speech was a scam.

I suspect they originally planned to push health care but then the polls came back negative and they decided not to push. This left a large hole in the speech that needed to be filled. In fact, a lot of things Bush talked about are ongoing and not new. A corrupt government that is not working for the people has to hide its incompetence some way so the looting can continue.

Bush is not serious about alternative fuels research because he has been cutting the funding.

[Jim S]

The general attitude of this Administration is "Scientists? We don't need no steenking scientists. We've got lobbyists!!".

Well, that does that. Griffin is history. The only question is how much longer he'll last.

[Eli Rabett]

In my more optimistic moments I tell my friends at NASA to worry about whether the agency will be there in four years

[Gene O'Grady]

In answer to the repetition near the end of Professor DeLong's question about anyone who's worked for the Bush administration and emerged with an intact reputation, I think Dana Gioia might qualify. I don't personally know the guy, although we were at Stanford at the same time and share at least one mutual friend/ acquaintance. I didn't have a very high opinion of him when he took the job (head of NEA), but his initiatives seem to be sensible and useful, and when I've heard him interviewed he has handled himself well.

[Ralph]

Hillary Rodham Clinton said at her Masonic Auditorium speech in San Francisco that Bush turned over to Karl Rove command of the New Orleans reconstruction efforts. This policization of a vital national disaster priority project explains why it has been turned over lock stock and barrel to the private sector. The consequent lack of direction from the government also explains why so little has been done and why it appears that reconstruction of New Orleans has in effect been abandoned

[James Wimberley]

Switchgrass? Is that the weed usually known as bait-and-switchgrass?

[NinjaPlease]

Oh the irony...

The irony is that supercomputers are used for only a few purposes: mainly to simulate and explore possibilities for things that are very difficult to predict of which there are billions and billions of measurements: for example Weather Pattern analysis and prediction or the flight plans for space bound rockets, or more recently by a German company to try and predict economic patterns and come up with investment reccomendations.

The issue is that the administration does not care about the result: They're usual answer is that "we don't yet know enough about the subject, so let's keep doing what we're doing."

If weather patten analysis suggested that we need to do something about Global Warming, immediately, they would still claim "we don't yet know enough about global warming."

Obviously they don't yet know that the Tax Cuts have not helped the economy or standard of living for 80% of the country.

[CaptainVideo]

"Is there anybody, anybody at all who has worked for the Bush administration and emerged with their reputation intact?"

Yes! Ben Bernake

[CaptainVideo]

OOps! Typo

Ben Bernanke

[CaptainVideo]

"Obviously they don't yet know that the Tax Cuts have not helped the economy or standard of living for 80% of the country."

So what? They don't give a damn about those 80%. All they care about are the haves and have mores, and the rich have gotten richer as a result.