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Surgeon General Describes Censorship From Bush Administration
UniversalVM writes "The NY Times is reporting that the former Surgeon General in damaging testimony given to the senate describes how he was repeatedly censored by the Bush administration while speaking out about topics such as global warming, Stem cell research and so on. The effort was to 'water down' or weaken reports on important issues to suit Republican Agenda. He describes how he attended one meeting where Global Warming was being described as a 'Liberal Agenda' and being dismissed. He tried to intervene thinking that the people there did not understand the science so he set about explaining it to them, the result? He was never invited back."
I can't wait until Bush has to get a tattoo on his back that reads: "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING! Election of this individual may result in death and will increase the risk of the rest of the world hating you."
My work here is dung.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
On a more serious note, even if you think that global warming is a pile of horse manure, why would anyone object to the measures that are being suggested? Unless they owned a coal mine of course...
There's a lot of sense in heavy investment in nuclear, solar and wind power plus hybrid, diesel and electric vehicles even in a situation where the world isn't going wrong. Same with switching to CFLs and generally improving efficiency of resource usage etc... it's not like there are people who find clean air offensive... or at least I hope not.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Science should never bow to political pressures. Bush is guilty of this, obviously...This is hardly the first evidence.
But, especially in the area of health care, he's far from the only one who has gotten involved in a negative manner. Reagan tried to squash talk about AIDS, Clinton poo poo'd needle exchange programs, Bush Jr. jumped on everything just as part of the administrations obsession about managing information.
This stuff really needs to be separate and non-partisan...I am so freaking tired of this or that issue being batted around because of peoples inborn prejudices. A reputable expert with actual facts puts together a well thought-out, scientific report, and they get defunded, their speeches are edited and pre-reviewed. People from within the administration work to discredit their testimony. It's just ridiculous, and there is no way good science or good policy is coming out of it.
Hell, while they're at it, they should add a scientist general, and do the same damn thing. This stuff isn't about opinion. There is a right answer.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Try explaining anything scientific to your friends -- you soon won't have any.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
> Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.
Absolutely breathtaking!
These are the methods of a tin pot dictator, not the leader of a great and worthy nation.
That Bush & Crew would put their own puffed up egos ahead of the health and well-being of their own countrymen says it all. Sigh.
Is it fascism yet?
- Malaria and other diseases
- heatwave deaths
- water quality
It sure would have been helpful to have talked about them over the last seven years.After World WarII, several Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not everyone wanted to do that. Winston Churchill, for example, just wanted to execute those Nazis. But the USA insisted on fair trials, saying that it was important to establish the principle of the rule of law.
Back then, the USA had leadership that demonstrated to the world how even the most heinous crimes (particularly the Holocaust)—in which many millions of people died—can and should be handled according to law and principle.
Compare that with what George W. does today.
Going to war with a country that was not a threat....CHECK!
Lying to the country....CHECK!
Claiming Iraq had WMDs....CHECK!
Censoring the SG....CHECK!
Firing attorneys....CHECK!
It's astonishing that people who claim to be so preoccupied with morality would be so quick to abandon any semblance of morality for political ends.
You're like whiney little kids. You saw one kid shoplift a candy bar and instead of going to jail, he was sent home to his parents. So you decided you could rob a bank at gunpoint, and cry "foul" that, once caught, you're not simply being sent home as well.
Pathetic, really.
medreport 3.12.06 reporting gw globalwarming doubleplusungood refs unthings rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
The problem is not with Americans--you'll note that somewhere in the neighborhood of 78% of them are displeased with George II. The problem, I'm afraid, is a number of traits of the American electoral system.
1) Plurality voting (and stacked plurality voting, even worse) essentially guarantees having only two parties, and that those two parties will actually be very structurally similar to one another. Of necessity, the two parties differ only minorly on a few of their positions, and any third party cannot be adequately served by the electoral system. Third-party candidates in fact act only as spoilers for the major-party candidate who is closer to their positions, and thus there is a strong disincentive for them to even try.
2) Gerrymandering has successfully been used to turn the overwhelming majority of legislative positions into "safe seats". ie, that that party which will win that seat is absolutely certain. This means that the only real election of significance is the primary that will choose the particular member of that party who gets the seat. Given that primaries are voted in only by members of that party, this means that the most extreme and partisan candidates are the ones who have the greatest chance of success.
3) Legislation that passes with 50%+1 of congressional support is exactly as much a law as legislation that passes with 100% support. This, unfortunately, incentivises those two parties being an intentionally divisive as possible. Reaching across the aisle and finding compromises does not strengthen your bill, it only weakens your ability to campaign as an extremist next time around. Legislation is therefore frequently given radioactive riders that make it intentionally diffcult for members of the opposing party to support it. For example, the bill that created the Department of Homeland Security was intentionally saddled with some aggressive union-busting provisions, to discourage Democrat legislators from voting for it; this allowed Republicans to brand Democrats as anti-security, and served their purposes far better than actual bipartisan cooperation would have.
Unfortuately, changing these fairly fundamental structural things about the American electoral and legislative systems would require action by exactly the set of people who have figured out how to profit from the current broken systems. So we're deadlocked.
Erm.
(And I don't even know what's meant by "unnatural" here--that's not the sort of word that would make sense in a scientific hypothesis. If you mean "occurs in nature"--since when are people not part of nature? Or is it just homosexuals that aren't part of nature? (That'd be circular reasoning if I've ever heard any.) And if by "natural" you mean "occurs in animals other than humans"--lots of other animals have homosexual sex.)
So, yes, the statement that "homosexual intercourse" is "unhealthy and unnatural" suggests someone that puts their personal prejudices ahead of any sort of clear-headed thinking about health.