The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

Here’s Scientific American:

You’re not supposed to kick a guy when he’s down.

Of course, in reality, when he’s down is the perfect time to kick him. He’s closer to your feet, for one thing. But the particular kicking I have in mind should be thought of as tough love. These kicks at the freshly defeated McCain-Palin ticket, as I write in early November, are an attempt to knock some sense back into the group of my fellow Americans who seem determined to ignore or even denigrate valuable scientific research because it’s something outside the realm of Joe the Plumber’s daily activities.

Then came the coup de graceless. On October 24 vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin took on what looked through her designer eyeglasses like silly pork-barrel spending by the U.S.: “Some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes, these dollars, they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” Never mind that fruit-fly research has brought us modern genetics and molecular biology. The particular earmark in question was some $211,000 to a laboratory in Montpelier, France, with long experience studying ways to protect olive trees from fruit flies. And the little pests are threatening California’s olive crop—with a retail value estimated in 2005 at $85 million. So this money might be looked at by anybody with business savvy as an investment. I kid you not. Oh, and strike three.

Strike three – as in, the article starts off with two strikes before the one I quoted.  I thought this was the most dramatic one, so its the one I picked.

We need to go a lot further though – we need to make it s that Joe the Plumber gets it why science is important.   And who better to bring that idea to the foreground than a president who is unafraid to be a spiritual human being AND a fact-based one?

QT

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