Dark Ages Ahead for Science and Technology in Congress?
A Science and Technology Challenge for Congress, Roll Call
“When the 114th Congress convenes, it will find it has lost something of significance: much of its institutional memory about science and technology. And with the rest of the world making a strong play to topple America from its perch atop the innovation pyramid, that’s very troubling. … Together, the six former House members logged a total of 140 years of legislative service. That’s a lot of experience to lose in any field, but it is especially true in the arcane arena of science and technology policy.”
The House has already started its efforts to roll back the influence of scientists and their pesky scientific evidence. The next few years will not be banner years for science in the US.
http://www.salon.com/2014/1…
I guess Frank Wolf is not such bad guy after all?
Surely you jest.
And quit calling me Shirley…
When you religious zealots vote they tend to elect religious nut bags as a result.
Bingo! I absolutely agree with that conclusion, next thing you know we’ll be praying for design and having candle light vigils before every launch.
Nothing to do with religion or zealots… unless you are talking about the zealots who worship at the unholy altar of SLS and her daughter JWST.
Wattch it buddy! Don’t talk about the SLS Spaceflight Church like that! You know it is the only way to the heavens. All hale the great bird!!!!
Our insatiable desire to build the SLS is not based on religion. It is based on lust.
2014
SLS Spaceflight Church
Year in review
We are under attack! They have finally done it. They have made a rocket booster walk on water.
T
This feat must be belittled. Call it a stunt, a cheap trick.
What will become of our great Catherials? Churches may have to closed.
We are the way to the Heavens! The peasants must not be allowed to know that there is another faith that will enable them to get to heaven on their own. Flight to heaven is dangerous, expensive We must maintain control!
Look, already they are getting a percentage of our take. This must be stopped. Use our influence with the king to protect the church.
Use our resources to mount a great show for the peasants. We will send a great bird to heaven to show our great power. Call the scribes, gather the people at the square let them watch and wonder.
Funny how history seems to repeat itself.
Vulture4 I find those that d
are you suggesting the disenfranchisement of the religious?
I think he was describing a fact, not a prescription.
Its Republican governors and legislators who actively engage in deliberate disenfranchisement and voter suppression, not we simple blog commentators.
LOL
well, it’s easy to see which side of the political spectrum you fall on.
Well, I am an JFK/LBJ-style domestic progressive/international hawk, but am being purely factual objective on the voter suppression tactics.
HAHA!!
well that’s twice you’ve made me laugh now.
“purely factual objective” my sweet patootie.
go ahead and show me where voter suppression is happening. i’ll wait, but i know you can’t because it’s not happening.
Just do a google search on it. I am not trying to be partisan on this. I am deeply disturbed by it – regardless of party. It is, however being caused exclusively by one party.
I value our democracy beyond all wealth. The US is a beacon and leader to the world, whether they acknowledge it or not, and I see some filth debasing the core and it angers me beyond words.
“Just Google It” ah, the recourse of people who have no evidence to support their claims…
well, if you’re talking about articles about how very little voter fraud is happening, and how getting ID is difficult for some people, i already know all about those, but let me tell you, way before this issue became a political hot point i noticed that there’s a very distinct lack of security at polling places. i just walk in, say “my name is X and my address is X,” i sign the voter registry list, they give me a ballot, and i vote. it would be ridiculously easy to commit voter fraud and get away with it without anyone being the wiser, so if it is happening, i suspect there’s little to no way to know about it.
asking for ID is not voter suppression, just as asking for ID for purchasing alcohol or cigarettes is not smoking or drinking suppression – that’s just an obstacle for underage people acquiring those things, and asking for ID would be an obstacle to voter fraud.
I think asking for ID and using it to verify name and/or address before voting is a perfectly reasonable and common-sense thing to do.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
OH BOY!! A YOUTUBE VIDEO!!
YOU MUST BE RIGHT FOR SURE!!!
Well, having the head of the PA legislature take specific credit bragging about the passing of a law that delivers the state (wrong) for Romney seems pretty straightforward. This was not because the plague of voter fraud all going to Obama. (there are records of 31 incidents in the US over 14 years out of 1 billion votes. ( http://www.washingtonpost.c… )
It was because it suppresses Democrats
What specifically do you require as evidence?
i’ll gladly take any evidence at all of “Republican governors and legislators who actively engage in deliberate disenfranchisement and voter suppression” that you’re talking about. youtube videos don’t count lol. i can show you you all manner of youtube videos purporting to prove crazy things.
obviously the evidence of voter fraud is thin. as i noted earlier, it would be laughably easy to do and get away with, so lack of evidence of fraud is hardly a compelling argument, and it is not the point. you’re saying that there’s widespread voter suppression going on. i’m asking for evidence of that.
Back when dishonest dairies would water down the milk, Thoreau said: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
That video that you minimize is a rather large trout.
i can show you hours upon hours of youtube videos which claim to prove NASA never landed men on the Moon, that 9/11 was a false flag attack so the US could invade the middle east for its oil, Monster energy drinks are satanic, the Queen of England is a lizard, Obama is a muslim, and the Earth is flat.
a 13 second youtube video which lacks any context whatsoever is worthless.
a politician making an offhand comment of exuberant optimism that a candidate will win a state doesn’t prove your point. the video shows only a short segment of a much longer speech about the accomplishments of the Republican party. it’s not evidence that they were engaging in voter suppression.
again, your partisanship is showing. you’re not being factual or objective, as you claim.
your move, mr. severely-lacking-in-evidence man.
I think it has been shown that voter restrictions (that reduce turnout) are a detriment to Democrat voters more than Republican voters, for most restrictions that have been discussed (voter ID, registration period, limiting voting hours and dates). Republicans can claim they just want to reduce voter fraud or something, but we can see what the results would be.
it has been shown? by who? Please present evidence that a voter ID law has reduced the turnout of a political party. Yales is claiming that Republican lawmakers in the upper echelons of power are “actively engaged” in disenfranchising and suppressing Democratic voters, and rather than hearing more speculation that this is the case, i’d like to see the evidence of that happening.
http://www.washingtonpost.c…
GAO report: http://www.gao.gov/assets/6…
USC study (goes further than I did):
Revealing Discriminatory Intent: Legislator Preferences, Voter Identification, and Responsiveness Bias
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3…
University of Delaware study (not exactly related but eye opening):
http://www.udel.edu/cpc/res…
Now I don’t have a problem with the basis of voter ID, it makes sense, as long as implementing it includes getting everyone what they need from the beginning so it’s no more difficult for anyone to vote than before.
the GAO report is mentioned in the article i posted to Yales. http://www.politico.com/mag… they compared voter turnout in a Senate-seat election year to a year when no congressional seats were up for election. voter turnout in those years is always lower. when compared to the previous non-congressional election cycle, the voter turnout was the same.
Oh, i heard about that USC study on NPR. it’s not directly about voter suppression, but it IS really interesting in showing inherent racial bias. they sent identical letters about Voter ID requirements to congresspersons, where the only change was the name of the sender. in virtually all cases, regardless of party affiliation, letters signed by a stereotypical minority name were responded to less frequently. a really fascinating study. it looks like the University of Delaware study is similar.
The whole speech is available. The context was his bragging to a republican group about the benefits the Republican legislative majority brought to the party – specifically how the voter bill would move the state’s Presidential election results to the Republicans.
Also, as a sampler..
http://www.palmbeachpost.co…
http://www.post-gazette.com…
LOL, yet again. thanks for providing me with some amusement, at least!
an offhand remark in a pep-talk type speech is a really, really, really unsteady foundation for your house of cards. the voter ID law was NOT the focus of the speech lol.
so i’m still waiting for you to come up with something better.
your partisan bias is clouding your judgement on this whole issue. trying to work out ways to get more of your voters to the polls and less of your opposition’s voters to the polls is basically what political campaigns are all about. it’s the foundation of all democratic systems. you might as well consider all political actions to be variations on voter suppression.
i rebut your articles (which are both blatantly politically biased) with a better one that actually has some numbers that show voter suppression isn’t happening.
http://www.politico.com/mag…
You are making 2 errors.
1) an offhand remark in a pep-talk type speech is a really, really, really unsteady foundation for your house of cards. the voter ID law was NOT the focus of the speech lol.
The law was not written with the preamble “To Suppress Votes of Likely Democrats”. It was to a group of Republicans were the leader of the legislature BRAGGED that they accomplished (Done!) the goal of passing a law that would (as I pointed out actually failed) swing the state to Romney.It would have been less astonishing if it were “an offhand remark“, but it was unbelievably in a prepared speech! And so what if it were only one in a list of bullet points?
2)” i rebut your articles (which are both blatantly politically biased) with a better one that actually has some numbers that show voter suppression isn’t happening.“
It does no such thing. The article showed that in half the cases the suppression did not work, not that it was not intended to kill Democratic votes. The voters withstood horrible waiting lines, trashed voting lists, shortened hours, threatening billboards, etc, to still exercise their rights.
That is why the barriers are being constructed, the Blue Wall (<- worth a read from a GOP commentator “GOPlifer”) that makes Democratic Presidents almost inevitable for the foreseeable future.
It is off-year elections that do have the possibility to work for these corrupt politicians. Democratic turnout is much lower and suppression can shift just enough votes, such as in Kansas.
http://www.washingtonpost.c…
sheesh, another post full of your political bias.
i thought you were supposedly purely factual and objective?
you’re obviously not objective, your political bias oozes out of every sentence you write, and may i emphasize this –
WHERE ARE THE FACTS????
all you’ve got is one overblown comment made in a speech. that’s it.
and in your second tirade, you have shoot yourself in the foot!!
“The article showed that in half the cases the suppression did not work”
by your own admission, these laws are not suppressing votes.
I think we have beaten this horse to death so let’s just agree to disagree.
I was going to let it go, but I noticed that you had replied while I was still editing my long post. You didn’t see my link to the quite astute article in the Houston Chronicle by long-time Republican activist, Chris Ladd (known as “GOPlifer”).
Brief bio: Chris Ladd is a Texan in exile. After growing up in Beaumont and working for more than a decade in Houston, he moved to suburban Chicago, where he is a Republican precinct committeeman.
He has a day job that he loves in the software industry. In his free time he has written for David Frum’s blog, the Washington Times Communities, the Houston Chronicle, and the Huffington Post.
Back in Texas he interned at the Legislature, worked on numerous state and local Republican campaigns, and volunteered for a statewide PAC. Chris graduated from Beaumont’s Central High, earned a degree from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas (the Harvard of Williamson County) and received his JD from the University of Houston.
In his article about how the Republicans LOST! the November elections, one of his points was: “– Vote suppression is working remarkably well, but that won’t last. Eventually Democrats will help people get the documentation they need to meet the ridiculous and confusing new requirements. The whole “voter integrity” sham may have given Republicans a one or maybe two-election boost in low-turnout races. Meanwhile we kissed off minority votes for the foreseeable future.“
Beyond the bullet point, the whole piece is fascinating: http://blog.chron.com/gopli…
Sorry to have re-opened the thread. Just trying to tie up a point that got skipped by me still editing.
Sheesh, yales, all you’ve got is a video of the accused bragging about the crime to his fellow conspirators, a bunch of eye-witnesses to the crime describing in detail what happened, and a bunch of expert analysis all testifying to the nature and reality of the crime. Hug Doug wants the
FOXFACTS!FakeFox News:http://thecolbertreport.cc….Give it up, Yales. Screaming from the right about so-called ‘voter fraud’ when there’s none has resulted in these suppression activities. The state of Ohio has a sordid history in this regard.
And don’t even start on state reapportionment.
Showing a PA legislator should have closed the argument.
Locating polling places in democratic areas to create long lines.
http://www.thenation.com/bl…
Shorten the time you can do early voting after huge democratic early turnouts.
http://www.thenation.com/bl…
http://mic.com/articles/183…
Despite many instances of electoral fraud internationally, in the U.S. a major study by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 showed of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and of those few cases, most involved persons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility.
This is OT but asking for voter ID is voter suppression unless the government provides such identification at no cost. This could easily done by simply providing a photo on the voter registration card or free (voluntary) access to the I-verify biometric database, which could easily be done from the polling place. Many of the poor people I know who are registered voters don’t have licences or equivalent ID which all are (to them) quite expensive or difficult to get (like a concealed weapons permit, which is acceptable). while ID they might have (like a state-issued college ID) is rejected under the laws passed by our state legislature.
Why do you think it is voter suppression unless the ID is free? IIRC the state has to have a free ID available but the ID used doesn’t have to be the free one.
The state does not have a free ID available, at least in Florida. If a free ID is not available the citizen must pay to vote. This constitutes a poll tax. Poll taxes have traditionally and very effectively been used to prevent poor people and minorities from voting. At one time only men with property were permitted to vote; there are those who preferred this system.
the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that requiring an ID to vote is constitutional, and therefore is not a poll tax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
Thanks for providing the reference. Here is a quote from it:
“Because Indiana’s cards are free, the inconvenience of going to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering required documents, and posing for a photograph does not qualify as a substantial burden on most voters’ right to vote, or represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.”
The court ruling clearly only applies to states which provide identification credentials at no cost. Florida could do this, in fact it could simply make the voter registration card an acceptable form of identification, They don’t. In fact it is very hard to do without such things as utility contracts, which poor people often do not have. What the Rick Scott administration has done is purge thousands of minority voters from the rolls based on similarity of their names to convicted felons, with no attempt to determine if they were the same person. Now THAT’s voter fraud.
i don’t read that as “it has to be free ID or else it’s a poll tax”
either way i don’t think calling it a poll tax is accurate. even the dissent didn’t call it a poll tax.
i personally think everyone should have ID anyway, there’s quite a lot of other activities that require ID.
I agree wholeheartedly. However if everyone should have an official ID, then we should not charge for it. In fact, we don’t charge for social security or voter registration cards. Why not upgrade the documents to make them acceptable as identification? Or provide online ID as we already do with E-verify and US-Visit? It’s a simple and inexpensive solution.
The question is not one of religion, or even zealotry. There are people who are religious who support both science and voter rights. Charles Darwin himself was a man of strong religious faith, and he saw no conflict between his Christian religion and the science of evolution. The problem is with people who confuse religious faith with scientific observation.
I think that Chris specifically limited himself to zealots, not to most people whose religious feeling do not blind them.
An aside about Darwin…
Darwin was religious as a youth but that dropped away.
He described himself as “an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”
Further he wrote: “For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”
In later additions of the Origin of the Species he added a bit of vaguely religious coloration the the last paragraph, but that was for his deeply religious wife who was troubled by his work.
I agree that he drifted away from religion in his later life, but I feel this may have had more to do with the “problem of pain”. He could not reconcile the death of his innocent 6-year-old daughter (from tuberculosis) with the existence of a loving god. All his primary discoveries and the development of his theory was accomplished during the voyage of the Beagle, at a time when he himself writes that his views were quite orthodox. At one point he relates an epiphany, on discovering 50 species of beetles in South America. He asked, “Why would God create so many species when one would be enough?” This led him to the idea that the source of all these species might be a set of natural processes by with they would all evolve. He did not see this as being contrary to religious tradition, provided one permitted a metaphorical interpretation of the Bible.
All this is simply to say that there are many people who see religion and science as serving different roles which are not in conflict, while others use religion as a rationale to reject science.
He actually was originally headed for divinity school, but life took other directions.
The differing roles of religion and science was an important theme for one of my Superheros, Stephen J. Gould. He received a lot of pushback.
http://skepticaljew.blogspo…
Additionally, there are many who believe that all truth comes from God, and because science uncovers truth, then there is no conflict.
I heard someone once say – Science discovers How, Religion discovers Why.
Maybe we can now have some real science now just politically correct bs.
You may wish to provide examples of each, since there are wide differences of opinion as to which is which.
The author neglected to mention former House Science chair Ralph Hall, who led the Committee as both a senior conservative Democratic member and, later, as a Republican. He served on House Science for 34 years.
I am more concerned that a district that has a major NASA center and prides itself in science and technology, would elect Bill Posey, who is fighting to eliminate climate science because he does not “believe in” one of its major scientific conclusions.
“believe”, “think”, and “feel” are words that should never be used in conjunction with science or engineering
The anti-science crazies are in charge now. Loons that either operate under the fog of religious fanaticism, corporate whoredom, or, in most cases, a putrid blend of both.
For those of you who voted Republican in November, thank you, very, very little. (BTW, lets hope you don’t have a pre-existing medical condition).
It will most likely be OK if they have pre-existing conditions because the Republicans don’t really want to repeal Obamacare, they just want to use it as an issue to attack the Democrats.
True in general for the 85% receiving Obamacare protections and benefits outside of the exchanges. The real losers will be the 15% most vulnerable and needy and are not part of their “base”, thus expendable.