This almost makes me want to cry.Check out the web page for the Republican Party of Iowa. In particular:3.4 We support the teaching of alternative theories on the origins of life including Darwinian Evolution, Creation Science or Intelligent Design, and that each should be given equal weight in presentation.Anyone else know if this regressive disease is present in other state platforms?

From Yahoo:The Census Bureau projects that America's population will hit 300 million at 7:46 a.m. EDT Tuesday. The projection is based on estimates for births, deaths and net immigration that add up to one new American every 11 seconds.The estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. are included in official population estimates, though many demographers believe they are undercounted. The population reached its last milestone, 200 million, in 1967. That translates into a 50 percent increase in 39 years.During the same period, the number of households nearly doubled, the number motor vehicles more than doubled and the miles driven in those vehicles nearly tripled. The average household size has shrunk from 3.3 people to 2.6 people, and the share of households with only one person has jumped from less than 16 percent to about 27 percent."The natural resource base that is required to support each person keeps rising," Replogle said. "We're heating and cooling more space, and the housing units are more spread out than ever before."The U.S. is the third largest country in the world, behind China and India. The U.S. is the fastest growing of the industrialized nations, adding about 2.8 million people a ...

What does this sequence say about our country?

From the Star Ledger:Scientists at a world-renowned climate research lab in New Jersey say their discoveries are being hidden from public view because their conclusions on global warming differ from those in the Bush administration."What can I tell you? I was telling them something they didn't want to hear," said Richard Wetherald, a career scientist at the federally funded center. "But the public is not being informed when these things are zapped." Neither NOAA nor the White House responded to several requests for an interview. President Bush's science adviser, John Marbuger, was not available for this article. Tensions between the lab and officials in Washington first came to light last week when the journal Nature quoted Ants Leetmaa, the director of the Plainsboro center, as saying the Bush administration has squelched a public statement on hurricanes and climate change prepared last spring. The paper was the work of a panel of scientists Leetmaa headed. The problem started in 2001, he said, after Congress rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to restrict the amount of fossil fuel emissions. Shortly after Congress acted, he wrote a press release, he says, with the help of the NOAA press office, on ...

This issue will continue to damn our country until we substantially change course. It evokes incredible passion because it is so central to the notion of fair play, rationality, and reasoned law that have been the American brand worldwide for centuries. Now, we have traded that core value for a double standard, where the US executive branch can stand outside both US and international law, and deny due process to ANYONE arbitrarily. Imagine our founding fathers facing that sort of enviroment in Britain of the 18th century. Taxation without representation is mild by comparison.The liberal blogosphere is full of vehement disclaimers which, while extreme, certainly echo much of my own frustration and shame at the passage of the latest Bill.Here is one example from John Scalzi: I'm proud to be an American, but I'm tired of being ashamed of my government. I'm tired of having to count the seconds until this bilious waste of a president is shoved out the door in January of 2009. I'm tired of hoping that some members of the president's political party might actually put principle over political expedience, particularly when it concerns the Constitution. And I'm tired of waiting for ...

According to Paul Thacker at Salon: In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he'd been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link. At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters. When NOAA press officer Laborde was contacted to discuss the e-mails, he denied that interviews were subject to approval from White House officials. Confronted with his own e-mails, however, he said, "If you already knew the answer, why did you ask the question?"

NASA has just released the results of a new Global Warming study that was led by the notorious James Hansen of recent government censorship fame."The study, led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, N.Y. along with scientists from other organizations concludes that, because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels in the current interglacial period, which has lasted nearly 12,000 years. An "interglacial period" is a time in the Earth's history when the area of Earth covered by glaciers was similar or smaller than at the present time. Recent warming is forcing species of plants and animals to move toward the north and south poles."Because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels seen in the last 12,000 years. This color-coded map shows how temperatures changed on average from 2001-2005. 2005 was the warmest ranked year on record. Dark red indicates the greatest warming and purple indicates the greatest cooling. Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA Because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the ...

The new paperback version of Chris Mooney's New York Times bestseller sat on my night stand for a while before I managed to muster enough intestinal fortitude to wade into the battle. I had seen a few high-level reviews of the book, but almost all of the people touting it belonged to what the far right would term the liberal intelligentsia, and the very title itself led me to anticipate a rather partisan view of the situation. Moreover, due to my own intermittent brushes with THE WAR through friends in academia and the news, I knew in advance that if well done, the book would just piss me off.Sure enough, it did."The Republican War on Science" is an exhaustively researched and presented work of political AND scientific reporting. To Mooney's credit, while the political perspective is certainly skewed and occasionally tiresome in its repetitiveness, it becomes clear in short order that there is a reason for the obvious bias.Starting with the anti-intellectual Goldwater campaign for President, Mooney explores, through an extensive series of personal interviews and well-documented research, the implacable advance of a distorted and flawed view of Science that has grown to permeate today's Republican platform (though ...

If the science community in the UK is noticing the embarrassing state of our public science offices, something must be seriously wrong. Helen Pearson has published a scathing story about the politicization of science at the CDC in the UK's premier science journal Nature....But privately, CDC employees say they are demoralized by the reorganization because it has introduced extra bureaucracy, lowered the status of science and placed too much emphasis on 'spin'. They say these changes, and the new corporate management style, are ill-suited to an agency that is supposed to investigate and protect public health. "The message from the current leadership is that the important scientific issues are decided elsewhere; we just have to look good to the media and not challenge conventional wisdom," says one senior public-health researcher at the CDC. The sour situation is thought to be one reason behind a wave of high-level departures: at least eight directors of the former national centres of expertise have left since 2004. The repercussions are being felt both nationally and internationally, because the CDC plays a central role in coordinating public health across state and local health departments, as well as international responses to emerging infectious diseases. "Most ...

Jo Anne over at Cosmic Variance just posted a truly sad statement on our country's reputation, even within itself.from her post:I arrived in the San Francisco airport on Monday night, passed passport control, picked up my luggage, and went to hand in my customs form, which is the last step in the arrivals process. The customs agent stopped me dead in my tracks. He first asked, "Are you an American." Obviously I answered "yes" straight-away. Then he asked, "OK, then, what is the square root of 98?"So, after I gave my intelligent answer of "HUH," the guy burst out laughing and said, "Yes, of course you're an American. You don't know anything!" I wonder what would have happened if I had been awake. My normal, instantaneous response would have been "7 times the square root of 2". I wonder if I would have been arrested if I said that....