Irregular Times: News Unfit for Print

It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.

More Evidence: How Bush Skews Science
Friday, July 09, 2004

In its new and meticulously-documented report, Scientific Integrity in Policy Making, the Union of Concerned Scientists has uncovered extensive evidence of the Bush Administration interfering in scientific studies, mandating skewed administrative and research interventions in the scientific process to result in findings or actions of benefit to the industrial groups that are contributing so mightily to Mr. Bush's re-election campaign. Let's review just a few:

In one such instance, J. Stephen Griles (a political appointeee to the Bush Administration's Department of the Interior) mandated that scientists preparing an environmental impact statement on mountaintop-removal mining were to "focus on centralizing and streamlining coal-mining permitting," and to cease consideration of environmentally beneficial changes to the mining practice.
Another instance of political meddling in the scientific process occured as the Bush administration made it clear it wanted to lump together fishery-raised salmon and wild salmon for purposes of establishing whether salmon should be protected under the Endangered Species Act. However, the National Research Council-approved Salmon Recovery Science Review Panel documented that there was a solid scientific basis for concluding that fishery-raised salmon and wild salmon were genetically distinct, and therefore should be counted separately for purposes of Endangered Species Act protection. The scientists constituting the Review Panel say that Bush Administration officials told them either to remove that conclusion from the report or to find their report shelved. The conclusion was subsequently removed.
Another instance of political meddling in the scientific process by the Bush Administration came as real estate interests pushed for permission to develop critical areas of the Florida panther's habitat. The Fish and Wildlife Service's (FWS) scientific review panel found that the Bush Administration's Department of the Interior mandated several faulty assumptions in order to inflate the apparent number of breeding pairs of Florida panthers in the wild. For example, every reported panther -- including the very young and very old -- was counted as a member of a breeding pair. Although the review panel informed Bush Administration officials of the problem and recommended a change in the practice, Bush Administration officials repeatedly declined to do so, to real estate developers' benefit.
Yet another skewing of the data for political purposes: In 2003, the Bush Administration was court-ordered to designate critical habitat protection for the bull trout of the Pacific Northwest. In a report associated with that plan, economists working for the Fish and Wildlife Service enumerated the financial costs of enacting habitat protection and the financial benefits of doing so. The section of the report detailing financial costs of enacting the protection was kept in the final version of the report released by the Bush Administration; the section of the report detailing the financial benefits of enacting that protection was deleted. Fish and Wildlife Service officials reported that "The removal was a policy decision made at the Washington level; it did not come out of Denver or Portland."
When William R. Miller, professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, was interviewed by the Bush Administration for a position as a scientific advisor to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, he was asked whether he had voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 elections. After his response, Miller's appointment was cancelled. In another interview for a position at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Claire Stark was repeatedly asked by a staffer at the White House whether she had voted for George W. Bush. Dr. Stark repeatedly refused to answer, noting that the position she would take was scientific rather than political. But the White House interviewer continued to ask for Dr. Stark's confidential and professionally-irrelevant voting record.
When Nobel laureate in medicine Torsten Wiesel was nominated to serve on the advisory board of the Fogarty International Center at the NIH, Bush Administration officials reportedly rejected Wiesel because he had written too many letters to the New York Times that were criticial of George W. Bush.

It is becoming painfully clear that the Bush Administration just cannot handle the emergence of unvarnished truth.

Posted by James Cook at 3:10 PM. # (permalink)

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