Can "Institutional Inertia" Save the EPA from Scott Pruitt and Donald Trump?

In Trump World, an example of unsound science (source: National Academy of Science)

by Gaius Publius

Is it an emergency yet?

Trump's plans for changes to and at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been leaked to a site called "Axios" and outlets like New York Magazine are treating the information as viable. We will as well.

From NYMag's writeup (my emphasis throughout):

Anyone laboring under the impression that the new Trump administration will be all bark and no bite when it comes to overturning long-established bipartisan policies should watch Team Trump’s assault on the Environmental Protection Agency closely. Aside from appointing Scott Pruitt, who is mainly familiar with EPA as a hated adversary in court, to be in charge of that agency, plans for an initial regulatory wave and budgetary policies amount to a 180-degree turn in environmental enforcement, as reported today by Axios. They include the complete elimination of climate-change programs; a half-billion-dollars in funding cuts for EPA grants to state and local governments; an immediate halt to Clean Air Act regulations affecting new and existing power plants; an about-face on auto emissions standards; and a general defanging of EPA’s crucial ability to overrule federal and state regulations that pose environmental dangers.

That’s probably just the beginning, because these plans were formulated by Trump’s EPA transition director, Myron Ebell, mostly famous as a climate-change skeptic, but more generally active as a policy wonk at a very prominent libertarian-ish think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, financed mostly by a rogue’s gallery of fossil-fuel industries and right-wing foundations.

That's quite a wish-list.

From the Axios article by Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen (bolded emphasis mine):

We got a sneaky look at the Trump transition team's EPA "agency action" plan. It's the guiding (aspirational) document written by Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. One of the striking aspects of the document was its language about the agency's use of scientific research and economic analysis to justify its actions. A section titled 'Addendum on the problems with EPA science' leads with this paragraph:

EPA does not use science to guide regulatory policy as much as it uses regulatory policy to steer the science. This is an old problem at EPA. In 1992, a blue-ribbon panel of EPA science advisers that [sic] 'science should not be adjusted to fit policy.' But rather than heed this advice, EPA has greatly increased its science manipulation.

The document goes on to recommend what can be done to "improve the use of science by EPA":

• EPA should not be funding scientific research

• If EPA uses scientific data for regulation, that data must be publicly available so independent scientists can review it

• EPA's science advisory process needs to be overhauled to eliminate conflicts of interest and inherent bias

• Science standards need to be developed and implemented to ensure that science policy decisions and epidemiological practices are based on sound science

If you look again at the italicized paragraph (quoted from the leaked document), you can see the Orwellian "up is down" basis for the statements in the bullets, the unsupported assertion that the EPA engages in "science manipulation." From that "given" follows the rest: The first bulleted item is plain, no more science for you, EPA. The second hinges on the word "independent" (refer again to the quoted paragraph to see what kind of "independence" Trump's team is looking for). The third turns on the meaning of "inherent bias." The fourth turns on the meaning of "sound science" (as determined by the Administrator).

One person's "overhaul" is another person's "gutting." Looks like the EPA is headed for a gutting.

Institutional Inertia

I asked a person I know who was formerly high up at the EPA, a career civil servant, not a political appointee, about the effect of Pruitt on the EPA. This person advised me that it takes more than 20 months (almost two years) to overturn rulings and programs in an organization as big and complex as the EPA, which oversees laws, regulations and processes that are themselves very complex. I call that slow rate of change "institutional inertia."

Can institutional inertia save the EPA, at least for a while? We'll see. The writers at Axios are asking the same question and turned to a "tipster" for some context:

A tipster gives us three important contextual points regarding the executive orders:

• They may be able to implement some of them administratively, but there will be discomfort amongst some Republicans and it will cost the Administration political capital.

• It is not a binary process. In other words, they can't just overturn them, it may take some time if they are already in the process of being implemented and opponents will have legal recourse to challenge some of the actions.

• There are huge, entrenched bureaucracies at these agencies, and especially at EPA, which is filled with true believers on the environmental movement, climate change, clean water and air. These thousands of people will dig in and make it very difficult for the thin layer of political appointees atop these agencies to move quickly to undo their years of work to put these things in place.

Take the prejudicial description — "true believers" — as showing the tipster to be a climate-denying Republican source. As to people "digging in," I suspect they'll do more than that. The "thin layer of political appointees" is very thin indeed, with extremely experienced career employees heading up each of the arms of the huge agency, with nothing but career employees beneath them. Will they revolt by pouring virtual molasses into the already-slow-moving gears of change? We'll see.

If they do, Trump and Pruitt are likely to respond by developing enemies lists within the organization — civil servants and career employees they want to fire for (trumped up) cause. Or they may do this anyway, proactively. This could very well spark retaliation on the part of the rest of the employees. In other words, war, of a bureaucratic sort.

Stay tuned — as a spectator sport, this should be interesting. And as a spectacle with huge environmental and climate implications, read "interesting" in the sense of the Chinese curse.

Also, watch what happens at NASA and NOAA, agencies also deeply involved — as you've seen here many times — in both responding to and creating the science around climate change. I'm sure they're next to be "overhauled," if that isn't happening already.

Is it an emergency yet? If it is, what do you suggest we do to prevent it? Don't despair; humans are resourceful. I'm sure someone will come up with an response.

GP
 

Trump Takes Office Following the Three Hottest Years in Recorded History

A chart of global surface temperature anomalies, meaning changes from a baseline, for the 2016 calendar year. Here the baseline is 1951–1980 (source: NASA). For the most part, the globe is a mask of red, and the Arctic is a sea of dark read, virtually "burning up."

by Gaius Publius

Nature bats last, and when it comes to global warming, nature is three-for-three during 2014, 2015 and 2016. For the third year in a row, global temperature has been the warmest in recorded history. Global temperature in 2014 surpassed all previous years; 2015 temperature surpassed that, and 2016, the year just ended, was the hottest of all.

In addition, "this is now the fifth time that the temperature record has been shattered in the current century (along with 2005, 2010, 2014, and 2015), and it’s the 40th consecutive year featuring an annual temperature above the 20th century average. All 16 years of the 21st century rank among the seventeen warmest on record, with 1998 being the eighth warmest" (Gizmodo).

This is worrisome enough, but it's clear that temperature rise is accelerating as well, though not necessarily on an every-year basis (2017 may be a bit cooler than 2016 due to the La Niña effect, but no one knows for sure). 

In general, expect more change, and expect it to occur more rapidly than anyone wants or expects. Also, expect more and faster consequences, both trivial-but-noticeable and deadly.

The Arctic Is "Burning Up"

The phrase "burning up" is meant figuratively, of course, but only because the Arctic is so cold to start with. As I wrote late last year, the North Pole was 50 degrees warmer than normal in December — that's the winter month of December — warm enough in fact to melt winter ice. You can see warming that reflected in the chart at the top. The darkest red on the chart is around the Arctic. The summer with no Arctic ice is fast approaching, perhaps this year or next will see it, and the winter with no Arctic ice is on the horizon as well. Many alive today will see the last Arctic ice in human history.

Why is the Arctic so much warmer than, say the Antarctic? Because the northern hemisphere is where almost all the industrial activity is. Take a look at the GIF image below.

The animation shows a time sequence of greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants. Notice the circulation flowing north and east on lower and upper air currents, and none to the south. Now picture the same for Europe, Russia, India and China.

The northern hemisphere is awash in daily CO2 emissions from industrial and consumer energy use of fossil fuels (coal, oil and methane). That rate is increasing, not slowing. Tick, tick, tick.

If Trump Won't Stop This Disaster...

Which brings me to my real main point, which I'll pose as a question for now. Let's assume Donald Trump and his cabinet-level band of climate destroyers — Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, EPA director-designate Scott Pruitt and others — are determined to make the climate disaster worse, and to make it arrive sooner than it otherwise would.

What are the choices left to us besides laying down and taking it?

That's the question. There are answers. Americans are a resourceful lot, not much given (usually) to laying down and taking it. It will be interesting to see what the American people come up with when they know that help from their government will never come.

Watch for it. Because they will do something.

GP
 

The Relentless March

Click to enlarge.

by Gaius Publius

Just a reminder, now that we're sending U.S. crude oil to other countries — so that other countries can count our carbon extraction against their emissions totals, to their climate blame and our financial gain — time does indeed march on.

As do global temperature increases. The valuable Greg Laden has the story:

Global Warming In November

The NASA GISS global temperature anomaly for November has been published. ...

The huge uptick we saw during the last part of the current year is the result of global warming, which has been pushing temperatures up, and the current El Nino, which probably started to affect these measurements in late September. Over the next few months or so, El Nino proper will start to decline, but the surface temperatures will remain elevated by El Nino (there is a lag). After that, we should see monthly temperature readings being to drop, but the overall trend is likely to continue.

The graphic at the top of the page is the 12 month moving average from the NASA GISS data base, up through November. Notice that since the 1960s there has been a very steady upward trend, with some variation. Most of the big upward spikes you see are El Nino years, and the lower troughs are typically periods with one or more La Nina events. These variations reflect the interaction between surface (air and sea surface) and the ocean, mainly the Pacific.

2015 is currently the warmest year on record, and 2014 is the second warmest year. It is virtually impossible for 2015 to drop below warmest once December values are added in. Likely, the spread between warmest and second warmest year will increase. 

Two small points about the graph. First, as Laden notes (my emphasis), "This is hundreds of a degree C anomaly, the standard number used to report, off of a baseline. The baseline in the case of NASA GISS is 1951-1980, which does not represent pre-industrial levels." This means that on the Y-axis, the change in temperature from "0" is measured from temperatures in the 1960s, not the 1880s. If you look at the whole range expressed by the chart, you're seeing a temperature change of about –0.4°C to about +0.8°C — a range of 1.2°C. Except for a few post-war decades, this is indeed a relentless march.

Second, Laden tells us that the big changes this year are partly due to the recent El Niño, something that comes and goes. The trend, however, won't change:

The huge uptick we saw during the last part of the current year is the result of global warming, which has been pushing temperatures up, and the current El Nino, which probably started to affect these measurements in late September. Over the next few months or so, El Nino proper will start to decline, but the surface temperatures will remain elevated by El Nino (there is a lag). After that, we should see monthly temperature readings being to drop, but the overall [upward] trend is likely to continue.

The relentless march. Feeling lucky?

GP

The Republican Rapture-- Guest Post By Nicholas Ruiz III

As you probably know, Nicholas Ruiz is the first congressional candidate endorsed by Blue America for the 2012 cycle. He's running against a right-wing fanatic and egregious hypocrite, Sandy Adams, in FL-24. Yesterday we looked at Jerrold Nadler's analysis of the GOP push to wreck the social safety net. Since the well-being of NASA, one of the victims of the GOP spending jihad, is so critical to the economic recovery in Broward County, the heart of FL-24, I asked Nicholas if Adams was at least going to stand up for her own constituents on this matter. I had a feeling I knew the answer. Nicholas' guest post:

Never mind that the Arctic Sea ice and arctic snow are at the lowest levels recorded-- ever. Never mind that the year 2010 (tied with 2005) was the hottest world year recorded-- ever. And the ten hottest years ever recorded-- have all occurred within the last ten years, or so.

This is a result of a process science reveals as global warming – and it’s why research of the phenomenon is justified, desirable, and deserving of continued, if not expanded funding. It’s also why we need to pursue solar power, wind power, and other avenues of green energy policy in order to reduce the usage of a potent contributor to global warming: fossil fuel.

Apparently, Republicans like Sandy Adams (FL-24) and Bill Posey (Fl-15) don’t believe in global warming. Sort of like the way Republican Darrell Issa (CA-49) may not believe in the EPA or the USDA. If he did, why the quest to deregulate the Earth, the Sun and the Moon? If they do, why would they try to defund NASA’s global warming research?

Adams in her recent press release of Feb. 8, 2011:

“…[I]t is imperative that we ask ourselves: What is the future of NASA? …it is time to refocus NASA’s mission towards space exploration…that is why I am encouraging Chairmen Rogers and Wolf to reduce funding for climate change research, which undercuts one of NASA’s primary and most important objectives of human spaceflight.”

In the same press release Posey says:

“NASA’s primary purpose is human space exploration and directing NASA funds to study global warming undermines our ability to maintain our competitive edge in human space flight.”

Nonsense. NASA is a leader in global warming research and space exploration. And that is why other federal agencies frequently collaborate with NASA on global warming research projects. Here is a link to NASA’s climate work.

There is no reason to believe that NASA’s climate work need come at the expense of its space work; in fact, the two go hand in hand. The visionary thinking that fuels NASA’s eyes on the Earth is of the same source that NASA utilizes to research space. Much of NASA’s satellite technology developed over the past few decades has helped to research myriad phenomena from global warming and El Niño to atmospheric aerosols to sea and ice levels, hurricanes and the effects of solar radiation.

In 2010, Howard Dean told ABC News:

“One of the most disturbing things about the Republican Party over the last couple of decades is that just they don’t believe in science any more. And that is not an approach that is likely to generate any kind of creative thinking. Or any serious thinking about the future. People that use a snowstorm as an example of why global warming doesn’t exist don’t understand the science and they just don’t care.”

In 2010, NASA spent less than 10% of its budget on global warming and climate change research. Hardly excessive. Why in the world would Republicans seek to strip it from NASA’s budget?

Because the less we know about global warming the better? Or perhaps, because according to a 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center, greater than 80% of Republicans don’t believe that human activity causes global warming. Astonishingly, of those that identify as Tea Party Republicans, 70% do not think the Earth is warming at all! But such is the state or experience of a Republican Party being carried away by overwhelming emotion and underwhelming logic. Call it the radicalization of the American right.

Think about that the next time you consider the ‘merits’ of Republicanism.

At any rate, we move forward, with or without them. If the Republicans are eager to defund NASA, or defund Social Security, or defund healthcare initiatives, and strip workers of jobs, wages, rights and dignity-- Democrats need not let them. And we won’t-- but we need your help. Support progressive Democrats.

Defunding NASA’s global warming research is not the answer to saving and reinvesting in America. And pitting NASA’s space exploration against its global warming research is a false choice that only serves to defund knowledge itself. The Republican quest to defund, deregulate, depress and distort truth and social justice, will truly only materialize an America defined by a hollow. And that is the hallmark of a politics and philosophy of decay.

There are plenty of ways to save and reinvest in America’s projects, from space exploration to social welfare-- like cutting corporate tax loopholes, and reenacting New Deal era progressive taxation, and raising the minimum wage while tethering it to the consumer price index, so that perhaps, not so many households would require two full-time workers to make ends meet.

Or I guess we could leave it all in Republican hands-- since they’ve done such a remarkable job with healthcare. But as we recently learned and were reminded of-- they don’t believe in that either:



UPDATE: The Public Balking At Drastic Budget Cuts

Brevard County hasn't been polled about the cuts to NASA Sandy Adams and Bill Posey are demanding. But a poll was just released by Pew that shows the public is against this drastic-- and wrong-headed-- approach to fiscal stability.

Conservatives are fighting amongst themselves about how deep spending cuts should be this year. But they seem blithely unaware that there is little public support for spending cuts, much less deep cuts... At some point you’d think conservatives would realize that they and the public are not on the same page when it comes to cutting government spending. But that would require looking beyond ideology to actual realities.

An out right majority or a plurality want to see increases in areas being targeted by Republicans, such as public education, veterans benefits, college financial aid, aid to the needy, healthcare. When it comes to scientific research 73% of Americans want it either increased or left alone. Only 23% agree with Adams and Posey that it should be cut. The numbers were exactly the same on energy funding.

Will Martian Sheen Save Humanity... Well I Mean Rock Varnish, Not To Be Overly Cute

Bamako is the largest city and capital of Mali and Timbuktu is the most famous place in the country. It wouldn't surprise me if Robert Wexler (D-FL), Howard Berman (D-CA), Brad Miller (D-NC), Gary Ackerman (D-NY) or even Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) or Ron Paul (R-TX), all members of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, could tell me where to stay in Bamako and possibly even Timbuktu. But when I was planning a trip deep into the heart of Mali's inaccessible interior, I knew there was only one member of Congress I could turn to for advice on where to stay in Bangiagara and Sangha: Alan Grayson, who isn't even on Foreign Relations but is the most well-traveled member of Congress and one of the most intellectually curious. (He told me no matter where I stayed in either place to bring my own sheets because there would be no escaping the bed bugs. I took his advice.)

Today I was working out an as yet unwritten post on the history of the Hutus and the Tutsis and I recalled learning that the tall, light-skinned Tutsis had moved south into Hutu country in around 1400 and conquered and enslaved the smaller, darker Hutus (who had arrived 300 years earlier and conquered the even smaller Twa pygmies). The Tutsis were the cattle-owning aristocracy and the Hutus were the food growing peasants. My interest was stoked because Christiane Amanpour did a tear-jerking special on the Rwandan genocide yesterday and my sympathy turned to thoughts about not really feeling very sorry for Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy when I read how they were guillotined. Actually, truth be told, I cheered. Didn't feel much sympathy for the Romanovs either. And if I were to read that a bunch of Wall Street Masters of the Universe went to their Maker prematurely... I don't drink but I might make an exception. This line of thought made me start thinking about one of my favorite scenes in a Hemingway book, the one where the people in a small town lock the abusive, oppressive priests in a church-- long the enforcers for the landed aristocracy in the area-- and set it ablaze. But which book? Which town? And the phone rang. It was Grayson. He wasn't sure either, like me figuring it was probably For Whom The Bell Tolls. But he thought I should stick to using A Tale Of Two Cities for my literary analogy.

But he was eager to tell me that there are alternative theories and I should look into it more thoroughly. I knew he had spent some time in Rwanda and, sure enough, he had been to the Kigali Memorial Center, a museum of the genocide. There, they push the theory that Tutsis and Hutus are one big happy genetic family and that the colonials-- they had Germans and then Belgians there-- had created artificial definitions to play the old divide-and-conquer routine. Obviously, this isn't what the congressman had called to talk to me about.

Nor did he know that I've been worried sick over what I'm reading everyday in Thom Hartmann's latest book, Threshold. It was bad enough last week when I found out all the fish will be gone by 2048 but now I'm in the part of the book about air-- and that doesn't look too promising either. Quoting a startling paper, widely considered the "smoking gun" identifying man with global warming, by James Hansen, the top climate scientist for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hartmann paints a very dismal picture of what kind of world we are creating-- just in case that End of Days fairy tale that nuts like Michele Bachmann, Mike Pence, Virginia Foxx, Trent Franks, Heath Shuler, John Boozman, Randy Forbes, Marsha Blackburn and Zach Wamp are always pushing, somehow doesn't turn out to be reality. Some of the paper sounds technical (meaning it involves arithmetic):

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm... If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

You can see why Grayson caught me in a funk. Hartmann rubs it in, by emphasizing that we're "near the point where our use of carbon-based fossil fuels could throw the planet so out of balance that eventually the oceans will heat up to the point that they're uninhabitable for complex current life forms and much of the complex life as we know it will vanish." And some of the stuff Hartmann quotes isn't even that abstract-- like Hansen's conclusion:

Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the ear beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

But Grayson had no way of knowing I was dwelling on any of this stuff. He had just called with some good news, an article he had read in New Scientist that he thought I should take a look at Martian Sheen. It seems to offer a glimmer of hope that if we screw this planet up badly enough, we could just like Michele Bachmann and Dick Cheney and all the conservatives to reap what they've sown and... move the rest of humanity to Mars!

When NASA's Viking landers touched down on Mars, they were looking for signs of life. Instead, all their cameras showed was a dry, dusty-- and entirely barren-- landscape.

Or so it seemed. But what the 1976 Viking mission, and every subsequent one, saw was a scene littered with rocks coated with a dark, highly reflective sheen. That coating looks a lot like a substance known on Earth as "rock varnish," found in arid regions similar to those on Mars. The latest evidence hints that rock varnish is formed by bacteria. Could there be microbes on Mars making such material too?

Rock varnish has long been something of a mystery. It is typically just 1 to 2 micrometres thick, but can take a thousand years or more to grow, making it very hard to discover whether biological or purely chemical processes are responsible. If it is biological, though, the race will be on to discover whether the same thing has happened on Mars-- and whether microbes still live there today.

Future missions will be better equipped for the hunt. The next rover to land on the Red Planet will be NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, due to arrive in 2012. MSL can detect rock varnish, says Roger Wiens, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who will run a new instrument on MSL called a laser-induced breakdown spectrometer. This will fire laser pulses at the rock coatings, and the wavelengths of light emitted as the coating atomises will tell Wiens what elements are present.

NASA is also working with the European Space Agency on the ExoMars programme, which will send two rovers in 2018, in part to hunt for evidence of life on rock surfaces. A subsequent ESA mission, Mars Sample Return-- pencilled in for 2020-- might finally get the definitive answer, as for the first time the mission will bring Mars samples back to Earth.

If the cave varnish and the Mars varnish turn out to be the same as rock varnish, then Mars Sample Return might actually be bringing Martians to Earth.

If the Bush regimistas would just quit, admitting they've waged an 8-year war of lies and deceit, we wouldn't have to prove all the lies one by one

Do we really have to keep proving, agency by agency, inspector general by inspector general, congressional inquiry by congressional inquiry, how the Bush regime turned the entire federal government into a vast right-wing propaganda machine for its catastrophic extreme ideological agenda?

"The significance of [Scott] McClellan's book is that his detailed recounting of what he saw from the inside vindicates pretty much all the central pillars of the Bush critique that have been chronicled here and elsewhere for many years now."

--Dan Froomkin, in his washingtonpost.com column yesterday,
"Vindication for the Bush Critique"

It isn't even front-page news anymore when the Bush regime is caught in another web of lies and deceit. On page A2 of today's Washington Post:

Climate Findings Were Distorted, Probe Finds
Appointees in NASA Press Office Blamed
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.

James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government's lead agencies on climate change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases."

And so on and so on.

In public, Chimpy the Prez would say that we need "more study" of the climate-change issue. In private, the storm troopers of the regime were using every available resource to stifle all those inconvenient truths.

I've been saying since the revelations from poor Scotty McClellan's book broke that we weren't likely to gain much knowledge, since all we were likely to get was insider confirmation of what we've already managed to find out. And as much as I normally esteem the judgment of washingtonpost.com's Dan Froomkin, I didn't even bother to read his above-referenced column yesterday. The point -- "vindication of the Bush critique" -- seemed so obvious as to be hardly worth belaboring.

Note that the story of NASA's wholesale rigging of its scientists' research findings isn't new. As the story indicates, it was all aired pretty thoroughly back in 2006 -- and even then, was anyone really surprised? For years now, we've been hearing the same story, agency by agency, about how the managers of the Bush regime distorted or even shut down the agency's rightful functions to turn it into yet another tentacle of the propaganda machine. All that's new is the IG report (at least something about NASA's role in the climate-change issue finally got studied

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe in fact we need more of these reports, or something to show the American people that the dissatisfaction they're registering in Chimpy the Prez's ghastly poll numbers isn't based on stuff just happening. Their onetime hero didn't just make a bum decision or two along the way, with unfortunate consequences. The regime to which so many Americans for so long showed such unshakable loyalty was always a festering fraud. It was always a hotbed of ideological hooliganism, in cahoots with corrupt corporate profiteers, advancing an extreme right-wing agenda through a combination of secret stealth and public propaganda, including blatant lying.

The job of rebuilding a trustworthy federal government is so enormous, so overwhelming, and it has to be done at the same time as so many ongoing crises have to be managed, that I don't see how we can have much hope of success unless the country faces up to the dimension of the challenge. How can we hope to make progress with the mess in Iraq, for example, as long as anyone takes seriously anything said by anyone involved in the regime's all-deception-all-the-time policies there?

I think back to events as recent as the 2004 presidential campaign, when most of the groundwork was laid for the regime's spectacular fall from public grace, but there were still few visible signs of what was to come. Back then anyone who spoke ill of Chimpy the Prez was still dismissed, even by the so-called mainstream media, as a "Bush-basher." Back then supposedly respectable media types were still insisting that no proof existed that Chimpy had ever "lied" -- the magical "L" word.

I'm not really angling for an apology, though I wouldn't mind one from the hordes of dimwits who jeered at every attempt to penetrate the nation-choking jungle of Bush propaganda as "Bush bashing." But what would be nice would be an acknolwedgment that anyone who wasn't "Bush-bashing" was at very best deluded.

So maybe we do need more independent verification of the truths we've known for years about the Bush regime's commitment to untruth. And in that spirit I've gone back to what Dan Froomkin had to say yesterday. Here's the start:

Vindication for the Bush Critique

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

As the response to former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book enters its second week, the focus has shifted to the messenger rather than his message.

McClellan is a flawed vessel for any serious communication. From behind the podium, he made a mockery of the press and the public's right to know, most notably by repeating non-responsive and sometimes ludicrous talking points. He has yet to persuasively explain his change of heart. And his insistence that self-deception rather than a conscious disregard for the truth was behind what he now describes as the White House's consistent lack of candor is spectacularly self-serving.

But the significance of McClellan's book is that his detailed recounting of what he saw from the inside vindicates pretty much all the central pillars of the Bush critique that have been chronicled here and elsewhere for many years now. Among them:

* That Bush and his top aides manipulated the country into embarking upon an unnecessary war on false pretenses;

* That Bush is an incurious man, happily protected from dissenting views inside the White House's bubble of self-delusion;

* That Karl Rove's huge influence on the Bush White House erased any distinction between policy and politics, so governing became about achieving partisan goals, not the common good;

* That Vice President Cheney manipulates the levers of power;

* That all those people who denied White House involvement in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity were either lying or had been lied to;

* That the mainstream media were complicit enablers of the Bush White House and that its members didn't understand how badly they were being played.

By coming back again and again to the CIA leak story, McClellan also validates a key theme of the Bush critique: That the Plame case was a microcosm of much that was wrong with the way the Bush White House did business.

This is no way to run a country, and it's one of those routine cliches to say that America deserves better. But maybe America doesn't deserve better. At least not as long as we don't own up to the real-world consequences of what we do.

#

HOW SAFE IS IT TO FLY?

Not very-- at least not according to a reluctantly-released (some would say "covered-up") $8.5 million survey of thousands of airline pilots by NASA in 2005. But the results were never released and it took the Associated Press until now to squeeze them out of the Bush Regime (by filing a Freedom of Information Act request). Although there's been a lot of back and forth and embarrassed bureaucrats and denials on the political level, it looks like the survey was covered up because NASA thought the release would frighten the flying public and have a negative impact on the bottom line of the airline companies.

Release of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-related, could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey.

Do you think the Bush Regime would put the financial safety of the airline companies ahead of the public's right to know if flying was safe? According to the NY Times our old pal, Rep Brad Miller, chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology, someone I would certainly trust far more than any cronies of anyone in the Regime, intends to find out.

The chairman of Brad's committee, a pro-business, conservative Democrat from Tennessee, Bart Gordon, was aghast. "This is like a drug manufacturer finding out through trials that there are problems with a drug and not making the public aware because they don't want to reduce the sales of the drug or scare the public. It could be enormously helpful in a wide range of areas in trying to understand mishaps."