I read today in the Center for American Progress Action Fund's daily report that "[t]he inspector general of the Department of the Interior found this week that Julie MacDonald, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks and a senior Bush political appointee, 'has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions.'"
So what else is new? It's been apparent for some time that this administration has no use for science, as long as it gets in the way of some contributor's profits. This has been most obvious with the question of global warming, where government scientists have had reports changed, observations changed to hypotheses, and have generally been forbidden to talk about the subject in any way that the administration didn't like.
If this administration were to be around long enough (perish the thought!), we all know what the results would be — the first time ten thousand Americans died in an unprecedented summer heat wave (as happened in France two or three years ago), the administration would immediately turn to the scientists, hoping that they would find a solution. But scientists don't find solutions — they find explanations. We would be in a sad situation indeed if we were to depend on science to solve our problems. It won't. Now technology, maybe ...