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Obama's war on Science
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."t's
We did not get the president we voted for.
The list of "unexpecteds" is quite long - and who can figure that out?
If there's one word that Obama ran on, it would be "change,"
but we've gotten very little of that while many Bush policies remain intact.
About a month ago, Jon Stewart ran a long piece where he played candidate Obama saying,
"This is a bad policy and it must stop and that must stop" followed by President Obama saying,
"There are reasons why those policies exist and we intend to keep them."
Now we're heading into the mid-terms and Obama has lost his base.
Many of his most ardent supporters, the ones who stood in the rain
and knocked on doors in cold weather to get him elected, feel betrayed.
Maybe there's a good reason for his refusal to change - but he has failed to clue us in.