A Disturbing Thought

There is something disturbing going on in the State of Denmark. First let me stress that I strongly support President Obama and other Democrats. However, there are now a list of actions that I find objectionable:

- Expanding the useless and extremely wasteful war in Afghanistan.
- Keeping people in prison for years without any charges.
- Reinstating the unlawful "Military Commissions" of the dreadful Bush-Cheny years.
- Suspending Habeus Corpus.
- Continuing and even expanding (I think) warrentless wiretapping of US citizens.
- Failure to prosecute Bush and Cheny for illegal actions such as torture, rendition and warentless wiretapping.
- Failure to change the Senate rules to do away with the filibuster

I disagree with all these actions, but I will continue to support Obama because the Republican alternative is so frightening. However recently something appears to be happening that hits me close to home as a practicing scientist.  I noticed it soon after the oil spill began in the Gulf. NOAA was going along with everything BP was saying about the oil flow, the lack of underwater dispersed oil plumes, etc. And yet it has come out that BP probably knew all along that the rate of the spill was much higher than they were claiming. And at the same time, some independent scientists were providing rough estimates of the flow from the video that were much higher than that claimed by BP and NOAA. And then I realized that NOAA was not sending oceanographic research ships out in the Gulf to investigate the "plumes" and was actively downgrading the idea that these existed. And now I read in the media that a scientist from a local University had organized several research ships from places such as Woods Hole Oceanographic to begin this investigation as the oil was spilling so that they could  have a baseline. They had requested around $8 million to accomplish this but a normal grant request might take over 6 months to a year to go through normal channels. I believe that this has still not been funded on an emergency basis (but I may be wrong). And then it appears that BP (and Coast Guard people) were actively preventing reporters from photographing the spill or talking with the workers.

And now I read in the media that scientists employed by NOAA have been told not to talk with the media about the spill and not to divulge any data already obtained by NOAA research ships. This has a frightening  similarity to the previous Bush policies, such as not having let  Jim Hanson talk about climate change and having  non-scientist Agency heads actually modify his publications. This scares me more than all of the above actions since it appears that  science and reason are being replaced by political requirements. I can only guess that the administration wants to play down the effects of the spill for political reasons, but I truly  hope that this is not the case.

Please say it ain't so,  President Obama!