Saturday, January 24, 2009

A New Look in Government Science

Chris Mooney had a good article on Slate a week ago. He wrote:
The "war on science" is over. Or at least it is in the sense that I originally meant the phrase: We're at the close of the Bush administration's years of attacks on the integrity of scientific information—its biased editing of technical documents, muzzling of government researchers, and shameless dispersal of faulty ideas about issues like global warming.
He cautions that the level of scientific illiteracy in the United States population is so high that we could easily see a return to anti-scientific pressures whenever scientific knowledge threatens the profits or ideology of some group in power.

Steve Benen's "Political Animal" column in Washington Monthly points out how very strong the Obama science team is, and how much emphasis he has given to science and technology. I am especially pleased by President Obama's apparent commitment to be sure that government scientists are allowed to present the findings of their publicly funded scientific work to the Congress and to the public without political censorship.

Here are President Obama's comments introducing the key members of his science team via ChangeDotGov on YouTube:

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