The Republican Party continues its assault on science in the most insane way possible

Rss@dailykos.com (walter Einenkel)
Tuesday, October 21, 2014, 10:24 pm
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Meet Lamar Smith (R-TX). He authored the SOPA bill that everyone loved a few years ago. He's a climate denier with all kinds of science sense.
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While Smith admits to having studied some science in college, most of his science credentials come straight from Congress: he's already served on the science committee for the past 26 years. His votes reflect a pattern of opposition to climate change and alternative energy efforts, sympathy to large industry in matters of copyright and patent law, deference to law enforcement on privacy issues, and moral policing of the internet.
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Smith's record on energy and the environment represents one of his most controversial policy arenas. He voted to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, voted no several times on tax credits for renewable energy and incentives for energy production and conservation, voted against raising fuel efficiency standards, and rejected implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. Opponents of the appointment have observed in recent days that Smith, like his predecessor Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), have expressed skepticism about man-made global warming-a question that suffers no serious objection in scientific literature, but has become a contentious topic of debate after conservative groups cast it as a social problem in the 1990s.
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He continues his crusade to make America safe from science and its commie scientists. He's been sending staffers to pour through the National Science Foundation's (NSF) material related to projects that the NSF has funded over the past decade. They've been by 4 times this summer alone:
The visits from the staffers, who work for the U.S. House of Representatives committee that oversees NSF, were an unprecedented-and some say bizarre-intrusion into the much admired process that NSF has used for more than 60 years to award research grants. Unlike the experts who have made that system work so well, however, the congressional staffers weren't really there to judge the scientific merits of each proposal. But that wasn't their intent.
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The Republican aides were looking for anything that Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), their boss as chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, could use to support his ongoing campaign to demonstrate how the $7 billion research agency is "wasting" taxpayer dollars on frivolous or low-priority projects, particularly in the social sciences. The Democratic staffers wanted to make sure that their boss, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the panel's senior Democrat, knew enough about each grant to rebut any criticism that Smith might levy against the research.
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The most immediate problem with all of this is that Rep. Smith is threatening the NSF's promise to researchers that its peer-review process remains confidential. The fundamental principal of research is the ability to make mistakes, to follow theories, unabashedly, and then take the harsh reviews and critiques of your scientific community. Here's how Smith goes about it all:

How did things get to this point? For the past 18 months, Smith has waged a very public assault on NSF's storied peer-review system. He's issued a barrage of press releases that ridicule specific awards, championed legislation that would alter NSF's peer-review system and slash funding for the social science programs that have supported much of the research he has questioned, and berated NSF officials for providing what he considers to be inadequate explanations of their funding decisions.

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