Feb 24, 2015

The Anti-Science Party (GOP) 2 - The Childhood Diseases Vaccination Debacle Is Just The Latest Symptom Of The GOP's Dangerous Anti-Science Attitude

Background:
The Anti-Science Party (GOP) 1 - Ebola; The Perfect Example Of How The GOP Is Reacting Out Of Fear Rather Than Through Reason & Science


The GOP & the anti-vaccine movement - As the U.S. battles its worst measles outbreak in 20 years, Chris Christie and Rand Paul are defending what they call parents’ right not to vaccinate their children.

The doctor Fox News promoted to help parents understand the Vaccine menace...

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The other compassionate blonde who promoted Jenny Science...

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GOP politics gets weirder...



MSNBC: The next phase in the war on science

For supporters of modern science, the prevailing political winds have to be discouraging. For example, congressional Republicans not only reject climate science en masse, but each of the incoming GOP senators are climate deniers.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) likes to mock NIH research as a punch-line. Republicans spent weeks balkingat the science of the Ebola virus. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) doesn’t want to say whether he believes in evolution – and he was a biology major. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is poised to take over the Senate panel on science, and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) will chair the Senate Environment Committee.

It’s been several years since my friend Chris Mooney wrote a terrific book called, “The Republican War on Science,” and I’m starting to think it may need a sequel. Michael Hiltzik reported yesterday:

Nothing is easier, if you’re a political philistine playing to an audience of anti-intellectual rubes, than to ridicule scientific research projects by caricature.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who frighteningly enough is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, appears bent on polishing this methodology to a lustrous glow. As detailed in a thoroughly unnerving report by Science’s Jeff Mervis, Smith has his staffers compiling a spreadsheet of National Science Foundation grants vulnerable to being lampooned as, in Mervis’ words, “silly, obvious, or of low priority to society.”


Not surprisingly, officials at the National Science Foundation and the Association of American Universities aren’t pleased and have begun pushing back. They warned yesterday that the inquiry pushed by Smith and his colleagues “is having a destructive effect on NSF and on the merit review process that is designed to fund the best research and to remove those decisions from the political process.”

Republicans spent a year responding to questions about the climate crisis by saying, “I’m not a scientist.” But when it comes to evaluating the validity of research, suddenly they are scientists?
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