Further evidence that the American political system is broken: Ted Cruz has been made chair of the committee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness (one of the things in that list of three does not belong…and why is “Space”, a small subset of science’s compass, given such a prominent spot?). Marco Rubio is chair of the subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard (another hodge-podge!). This is as insane as putting James Inhofe in charge of environmental policy.
All of them are global warming denialists. They’ve all been evasive or confused on the issue of evolution. These are among the very last people who ought to be setting science policy…but when the Republicans have a majority, and your appointments have to be drawn from that talentless talent pool, these are the abominations we’re stuck with.
Lawyers in charge — not unlike Uncommon Descent.
I don’t even understand how this can happen. How are committees about space, oceans, atmosphere and science led by non-scientists?
If it’s not a big deal, then why does the surgeon general have to be a physician? They should at least be consistent.
How many hospitals’ oncology departments are headed by non-physicians?
Well, I doubt you’d want him in the committee for Time, Superstition and Cooperation. Or any committee for that matter. Or most preferably, not doing anything horrible to anybody.
Science AND Competitiveness? If Cruz’s committee can claim jurisdiction (ha ha of course he will anyway), my guess is his first order of business will be shutting down Net Neutrality. Welp, it’s been a nice Internet, America.
After this week, satire is really dead.
Space is named because NASA represents a significant fraction of the budget under its jurisdiction, and because not all of NASA is properly encompassed by the word “Science”.
Marco “I’m Not a Scientist, Man” Rubio?
What’s the problem? Cruz leads his party’s policy on science (hate it), space (love it as long as there’s bombs involved), and competitiveness (hate it).
Will he also lead budget issues?
One easy way for party leaders to keep on top of things is to appoint incompetents as underlings. I think it’s standard procedure in every political party.
The Chinese, the Japanese and the major European competitor nations are laughing their asses off. The dumb Mericans are about to self-destruct.
.
“One easy way for party leaders to keep on top of things is to appoint incompetents as underlings” -which is what happened in Nazi Germany after “the night of long knives”. That did not work out well in the long run.
It will be interesting to see how much these appointments effects science policy. I admit its hard to find a decent candidate amongst the repubs. but these two clearly clamored for the spot. I expect interference with climate research and some health science policy issues like gun deaths research almost immediately – the donors will demand it. I don’t immediately expect problems with science policy on say vaccine effectiveness or ‘fruit fly research in Paris’. Yet. I do worry that a larger budget will be moved to ‘science’ that creates problems like high velocity explosive delivery rather than science that tries to solve problems.
You put Colonel Sanders in charge of the chickens… not because you care for chickens… but because you like chicken.
How!? Why!?
As a Texan, I once again apologize for my state providing Cruz.
I hope this is a case of illusion of power to shut up the minion rather than actual power. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with “civilian” (i.e. lay person) oversight in principle. That’s not the problem. The problem is that these people are known denialists and irrationally hostile to the very government functions they are supposed to be overseeing. It’s the classic Republican strategy of sabotage by mismanagement.
I think some of the “Hodge Podge” effect may be an attempt to bundle issues together that appeal to the same type of constituency, so that committee membership has the most bang for the buck. One could imagine a Representative from a coastal state being very interested in all three of ocean, fisheries and Coast Guard. Atmosphere is thrown in because of NOAA bundles atmosphere and ocean, and also possibly because of how hurricane prediction and tracking is organized?
I think it is once again pertinent to thank all those who chose not to vote in the last election because “both parties are the same”. It is precisely why idiocy like that puts idiots like this in charge.
@16…bazactly.
QFT!!!
There you go. If you didn’t vote and find yourself appalled, just look in the mirror.
po8crg,
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/10k-papers.html
The Hubble Telescope has racked up ~500 papers per year since it was launched. That is one NASA mission among dozens that are active, but then you wouldn’t know that, you fricking cretin.
Going to be a long, ugly 2 years. The first thing the GOP did was attack disabled people. I suppose one of them added disabled people to their long list of hate targets.
1. Republicans cut funding for SS Disability, starting in 2016. This effects 11 million people and the cut will be 20%.
2. This is pretty vicious. The average for a disabled worker is $14,000 a year. For many of these, this is their entire income.
3. I know two people on SSDI. Despite the GOP’s claim that this is a racket, both are severely disabled and have limited mobility, hard to treat medical conditions, and bleak lives. That SSDI barely covers subsistence level existence.
Oh well, this at least takes some cleverness. The christofascists hate so many groups of people, I thought they had gotten everyone. I forgot about people with disabilities. Next up, the final frontier; babies, the mentally challenged, and cats.
FWIW, you can’t blame the christofascists/GOP for any of this. They are what they are. Dogs gotta be dogs and christofascists gotta be christofascists.
It’s the voters who elect these clowns.
In a worst case but not implausible scenario, the US voters have decided to be lemmings and run over a cliff. If enough decide that, the rest of us are along for the ride, no matter what.
Here’s some more nonsense from Ted Cruz. It’s only indirectly related to his new job as chair of a science committee in that it demonstrates his inability to deal with facts. He is not on the reality train.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-train-wreck-only-ted-cruz-can-see
Raven @#21, you said it.
To all the US citizens who proudly displayed your purity halos by not voting last November because, “The Dems are just as bad”, thanks for this. Hope it was worth it for you.
The subcommittee for Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard makes perfect sense: the first three items define the mandate for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and most of the work of NOAA is carried out by the Coast Guard.
As for the larger committee, it was Science, Space and Technology in the last Congress. Committees are constituted by the Speaker of the House and usually remain constant from one Congress to the next, but they can change to reflect the priorities of whichever party holds the majority. I find it rather chilling that science has been demoted in the name, and technology dropped entirely. Unfortunately, this is no surprise: the Republicans have already declared that all federal science funding for science will be eliminated, except where researchers can prove that there will be an economic gain for the country.
Ok, I’m a bit confused. The Science, Space and Technology committee I mentioned above is the House committee. Cruz is in the Senate. The list of Senate committees still lists last year’s committees, and the subcommittee for Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard is part of the former(?) Commerce, Science and Transportation committee. So either the UPI got the name of the committee wrong or the committee has had its name changed.
Republicans: The party that insists that government can’t do anything right, try hard to prove it, and want your vote.
We’re well and truly fucked for a while. It could potentially take decades for the harm these clowns do to be undone. And that’s a major problem, 2 years of republican control will take 5 times as long to correct, then the cycle starts over again.
The optimistic side of me wants to think that it’s going to be so crazy in the next couple of years that people will realize what they’ve done, but the pessimistic side of me thinks that it’s going to take at least 6 years because people won’t see what direction it’s going until it’s so bad that the world falls apart.
I live in Texas, so it’s going to be especially bad here with new Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. The LG pretty much runs the Senate here and controls the budgeting process. The main thing they want to accomplish here is to lower property taxes and raise sales taxes so that the poor pay a larger share of the bill, cut public school funding by transferring funds to private schools (hey, we’re 46th out of 50, and that’s too high!), reduce the number of Democrats who head committees in the Senate (up until now, miraculously, committee chairs have come from both parties), and to effect legislation that appeals to upper-middle-class suburbanites, meaning city dwellers and rural folk are out in the cold. They plan to start by getting rid of the 2/3 rule in the Senate which allows the minority party to block particular repulsive legislation.
Hopefully, that last thing is their downfall, because there are enough Republicans in the Senate from rural areas who already realize that the city Democrats are actually their allies.
Being a suburbanite myself, this won’t hurt me personally in the short term, but it’s hard not to worry about what looks like a huge step backward for this state and for the country. Texas has been taking steps backward for years, and now we’re going to start taking bigger steps.
Ted Cruz being in charge of science? Same thing.
Hard to believe we once started construction on the Super-conducting Super Collider in this state. At first it was a boondoggle to most people, but then they realized it was intended to help us understand the universe and people got upset.
I’ve seen a number of Australians apologize for giving us Ken Ham. On behalf of reasonable Texans, I’d like to apologize for sending Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert to Washington, and for the role our state plays in putting errors in your childrens’ textbooks. I’m trying my best to change it! I vote! I send money to the Texas Freedom Network, and I contributed to Wendy Davis’ campaign and to Battleground Texas! I know I need to volunteer to register voters, but I’ve been lazy in that regard because I’m a middle-class suburbanite who just likes to help by throwing money at things.
In an odd way it might be a good thing that things like this happen. Insisting that someone is incompetent and does not know what they are doing because they don’t have the right background when it comes to a topic is one thing. Demonstrating incompetence in a field that you have been put in charge of puts a leader on a whole new level.
the good thing , the silver lining, about this and the Reactionary tea party being in charge is it is only 2 years until the general election in which we will elect a president and a number of senators and other major offices.
The campaigns is already starting to make noise it will not be too long when even less will be done in Washington.
If there was ever a time when the president should take off the gloves and stop trying to make the GOP look like it is a reasonable party and push issues that will inflame them to say things and propose things even more ridiculous then they have so far it is now. There strategy has always to try and sound like reasonable politicians who are on the side of the “common citizen” all while being ignorant lackeys of the powerful and fraudulent demagogs to the people spouting hollow platitudes of rights and freedom.
“Barry” should keep coming out swinging he has got nothing to loose
uncle frogy
Remember, this is being done by the same party that put Michelle Bachmann on the House “Intelligence” Committee.
Larry Kearney #16
Thank you! I was thinking the same thing.
Saad #2
A committee isn’t the one doing the research, but rather is responsible for allocating public funds, directing and supervising the institutions that fall under its scope. This is how democracy works – anyone can influence a consensus about how they should be ruled. The alternative is a technocratic dictatorship.
The Surgeon General personally leads 6500 doctors and health personal and is ultimately responsible for their actions. The politicians may change the funding for SG, increase or restrict SG’s responsibility in various fields, but it is the SG’s job to implement these decisions to the best of his or her ability. The difference is that politicians have to consider many problems outside the health field, even if they serve on a health committee. They might, as some Republicans would claim, see the economic or any other situation as a greater threat and may reduce, wrongly or not, health spending to avert what they see as a greater calamity. Alternatively, they may put restrictions on the SG to express the moral view of their constituency.
The SG, on the other hand, must think how these rules would affect his or her personal and their work, and establish practical procedures to comply with new political orders. Think of SG as a kind of middle management; whatever the political priorities are, the SG must do with what s/he is given.
Saad
The equivalent of the surgeon general in this case would be the head of NASA. Congressional committees are a whole different animal; they’re not directly administering anything, they’re advising the general Congress on legislation. This doesn’t justify putting total incompetents in charge of the committee, of course, but the committee members don’t have to be experts themselves, just smart enough to listen to actual experts.
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space, I think you misunderstood po8crg:
–emphasis mine. I don’t read that as an attack on NASA or its science. Surely some of what they do comes under the heading “technology” rather than science.
At last, someone who will stand up to the experts…!
I worked at NASA (though technically not “for” NASA: because the GOP is so excited about saving money by making the private sector do it, NASA paid 7% plus overhead to a contractor to hire me).
What I was doing wasn’t science, it was engineering.
If you want an even more fun conflation of things, consider that the VA-HUD appropriations bill is the bill that funds NSF and NASA. What do NSF and NASA have to do with veterans’ affairs and housing and urban development? Absolutely nothing! VA and HUD are both social programs, so at least there’s that connection to each other.
numerobis
Oh, don’t even get me started on this ‘public-private partnership’ bullshit.
AlexanderZ and Dalillama,
Thanks for the explanation. I should have known better. The Surgeon General comparison was off.
loop, #34
Hah, good one.
Consolidate all the things, and then call it ‘effeciency’ because they all occupy one vast office (on paper at least), no matter the inefficiency of how it actually runs.
Precisely in parallel to how the current arch-Tory government is assigning ministerial portfolios here in Australia. A bullying sociopath was Minister for Immigration through 2014 and effectively wiped his arse with the UN refugees agreement Australia is a signatory to (UNHCR), indefinitely imprisoning asylum seekers, including children, offshore, in camps where people have been denied legal access and abused by staff; that sociopath has now been given Social Services in a cabinet re-shuffle and is determined to punish pensioners, the unemployed, the disabled and anyone else who might require government assistance, however temporarily. Similarly, Ministers for environment, health & education have been resolute in dismantling environmental protections to enable profiteering and gutting our free/low-cost healthcare and tertiary education systems. Our Treasurer, busily fulfilling a wish-list given him by Murdoch, mining CEOs and corporatist lobby-groups, is a cigar-chomping sack of crap who went on record last year as saying that poor people don’t have cars, or don’t drive as much as rich people, so wouldn’t be as badly affected by higher fuel taxes. The PM appointed himself “Minister for Women” and, when asked on live TV, said his greatest achievement in that role was scrapping the carbon tax because the cheaper utility bills made it easier for women to manage the household budget.
Oh – we don’t even have a science portfolio. Our world-famous national science institute, the CSIRO, recently had its funding gutted, leading to the redunancy of a fifth of its staff, including a Nobel-nominated researcher who came here as a refugee from Vietnam 40 years ago.
This is our world on conservatism.
/rant
Competitiveness:
you just need to convince him that them rooskies is purty far head of us in [whatEHver] and the funding will come rolling in.
@16, Larry Kearney
Well, gee, as long as we’re handing out toxic bouquets, how about giving at least a mention to the Democrats for enabling the Republicans in this kind of nonsense ever since Newt Gingrich? You know, back in 2008, I was listening to your kind of “We Have To Stop The Republicans Because They’re Scary And Ebil!!!!1!” rhetoric, and so I went and voted for a bunch of Democrats. And what happened? They. Did. Nothing. They spent the next two years flogging a fucking dead horse over health insurance reform — something which has been attempted repeatedly since the 1960s (Richard fucking Nixon was talking about it) and never succeeded — an item absolutely guaranteed to fail, and suck up all the time they had. When I wrote to my Senators and Representatives or talked to my local Democratic Party reps saying things like “how about a little action on the banking crisis?” or “isn’t it time to consider shutting down Gitmo?” I always got the same fucking response: “we’ll do that when we’re done with healthcare reform.”
And not only did healthcare “reform” turn out to be a massive clusterfuck — let’s be serious, here, the ACA should have been called “the Health Insurance Industry Protection Act” — all those Democrats in Congress spent their time rolling over to please the Republicans. For all the good it did to vote for Obama, I might as well have voted for McCain. I would have gotten the same policies, but at least then the Republicans would have taken the blame. As it is, we got more military expansion (62% of the 2012 discretionary budget was military and “security” funding), more “faith-based initiatives”, “clean coal” advocacy from the president, the executive branch defending the NSA in court, more “signing statements” on bills passed into law, Chelsea Manning in prison, Snowden hunted to the best of our ability, a “budget supercommittee” deliberately loaded with as many austerity partisans as possible, and a continuous stream of policy shifts to the right in the name of “bipartisanship”. If I had stayed home through all those elections, I would at least have had the consolation of knowing that the fuck-ups in the Democratic Party hadn’t been put into office with any of my support.
If you are really serious about how we need to get this kind of idiot out of office, then the burden isn’t on the voters, it’s on the Democratic Party — you have to give us candidates who aren’t just a bunch of right-pushing rubber stamps for anything the Republicans put up, which is what pretty much all the national-level Democrats are these days. If I’m going to be fed a crap sandwich no matter who I vote for, then there’s no incentive to vote, and no amount of bloviating like you’re doing here is going to change that.
Hank_Says @39, Don’t forget our Human Rights Commissioner, Tim Wilson, who doesn’t believe the human rights commission should even exist. Plus, he’s a self styled “Freedom Commissioner”, who believes that protesters should have hoses put on them. His focus is more on the “freedom” to sell cigarettes, not pay tax, trash the environment, and be a racist….. quite the humanitarian. Oh, and Abbott is also in charge of indigenous affairs, while being a massive racist. It’s Dracula in charge of the blood bank all the way down.
I think in Australia it primarily comes down to the influence of right wing think tanks and lobbyists, who’re essentially writing the policy for conservatives. Backed up by a conservative media, the general population will just vote based on the information they have at hand, Murdoch decides who runs things. So, we get deregulation and privatisation and intentionally trashed public services and institutions, because that serves the interests of big business. I think the story is essentially the same in the US. Anyway, rant over.
That’s assuming that the Rethugulans don’t manage (as usual) to pin the blame for everything on the Democrats.
gjpetch@42: don’t forget that Labour had a leader who wanted to be leader in place of the prime minister, and succeeded at it, just in time for an election. That rather helped put the tories in power.
For decades now the democrats have been moving rightward in an attempt to court the republican base while at the same time telling the democratic base that if they don’t vote for their right wing candidate, the republican right wing candidate will win. The policies will be more or less the same regardless, except the republican will be proud of the policies while the democrat will just shrug and say it had to be done (passive voice motherfuckers).
Then the democrats are shocked when they fail to get republicans to vote for them and their natural base stays home.
Obama won because he promised something different. He lied of course, but the anointed democratic candidates aren’t even promising even more.
A pox on both their houses.
There was a little action. Dodd-Frank is largely ignored on the left but the banking sector sees it as the second coming of the Messiah in a bad way: throwing-over-tables-in-the-temple style.
Say what? Obamacare passed last I checked, and health care access is much improved — particularly in states that expanded medicaid. Said states are overwhelmingly run by a party that is supposedly indistinguishable from the other party whose states overwhelmingly did not expand medicaid.
I agree that both Democrats and GOP are parties that are out to help the rich get richer. Where they differ is that the Democrats want to make the rich richer in absolute terms, whereas the GOP want to make them richer in relative terms. This theory explains why the Democrats are willing to do stuff that helps the poor: doing so grows the economy, and makes the rich richer. The GOP isn’t willing, because it shrinks the gap between rich and poor — so long as the gap grows, they’re even willing to make the rich poorer in absolute terms!
Obamacare is a heritage foundation solution to the U.S. Healthcare crisis that leaves the source of the crisis intact. Obama kicked all the left wing solutins to the curb before negotiations started and pushed a republican solution only to be pilloried by the republicans for doing their dirty work.
Obamacare is the dumbest system ever, except for the system it replaced.
It is the same system only with no way to opt out of said system and some government subsidies for those were priced out of said system. Nothing fundamental is fixed or changed. Obama burnt all his political capital trying to save the system that is fucking us over.
Pertinent essay publish today
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/13/taking-a-meaningless-progressive-stand-in-congress/
The Vicar #41
numerobis #46 has already replied to your main argument. I’d just like to add that you don’t get to have all your pet policies implemented by voting once every four years (or every four years, at best, as it seems). The best you can hope is to avert a disaster, which you did. If you want to actually affect policy you’ll need to get involved in the political process yourself by becoming part of a local Democratic party. Yes, it’s hard work, but grown ups understand that one needs to do hard work if they want to have a better result.
You’re replying to a two-line comment with more words than in the original post. First take a beam out of your eye.
Christopher #49
Nothing fundamental, aside from millions of people getting healthcare for the first time in their lives. Yes, it could have been better. It always can be better. However, the facts of the matter are that this is the first significant reform to US healthcare in the past forty years. That alone is a great achievement and should tell you something about the feasibility of the kind of reform you wanted instead.
Christopher @ 45:
Yeah!
And all the people who actually live in the house – fuck ’em!
Not worth your time and effort, amirite?
whom