There are several other examples of the administration rewriting scientific announcements. You can find them as easily as I.

And yet this has never happened. Even the NYT article body’s claims are much weaker than the headline: for example, that like other NASA employees, his public statements were supposed to be reviewed. Even the NYT article admits that he continued and continues to give talks and write funny emails about gorillas.

If this is the best example of republicans or bush blocking work to improve the environment, the environment has little to worry about.

As Nathan says, one scientist who speaks out means at the very least dozens who were effectively silenced.

The problem with the money is not that it must be spent, it’s that different people would end up with it. Right now the money (e.g. for energy) goes to present billionaires, and they’d rather keep it coming their way. Until they can find where else it must go instead and get control of those capital flows, they will stall action. The process is similar to why Americans can’t get 100Mb broadband; if we had got it years ago, as technically we could have (and as everybody already has in such advanced places as Romania), the “wrong people” would be getting the money.

The Bush administration is the culmination of forty years of Republican planning, going back to Goldwater and the John Birch Society. At the time those people were considered extremist loonies. Now people who express the same goals control the executive and judicial branches, and are well along to cutting loose from any control by the congress. It’s politically necessary these days for GOP candidates to distance themselves from Bush personally, but we’ve seen no repudiation of any of the attitudes or policies that led to his predictable disasters. “Conservatism can never fail; only individuals can fail conservatism.” Bush himself is its highest expression; it’s only his, and its, failures that some Republicans distance themselves from.

I would argue that Republicans (and to a lesser extent, machine Democrats) are opposed to efforts to reduce environmental degradation to the precise degree that they are obliged to cater to corporations. Public corporations are forbidden by law from acting as would a responsible citizen wherever such action might reduce immediate profits. The Republican party has aligned itself to maximizing profits of corporations and those who control them, so naturally it parrots shortsighted corporate priorities.

What ought to be mystifying is that those acting on behalf of corporate charters have children and grandchildren too. Evidently any of them who act in their grandchildren’s interest are easily replaced. I wonder if those SF stories from the 50s about robots and aliens taking over the planet were really meant to be warning us about corporations. If so, it’s too late. They’re made out of us, but they aren’t us.

The enormous concentrations of money that corporations wield are an important part of how they control politicians, but corporate control of mass media is at least as imporant. Removing money from the political process could only help if one side didn’t have overwhelming support from those who control the instruments of communication. The blogs are a thin hope to place against the combined mass of corporate sponsored punditry.

Try posting some specific examples to help find an answer.