Ah, so many Bushites "bite." Would that we could lop them all so easily.
How's this for wishful motto-gizing, after the late Johnny Cochrane :
"If they bite, you must indict."
BW
>
> Another totally inappropriate Bush appointee. This one bites the dust!
> Phyllis
>
> --
> February 8, 2006
>
> New York Times
>
> A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA
>
> By ANDREW C. REVKIN
> <http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ANDREW%20C.%20REV
> KIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ANDREW%20C.%20
> REVKIN&inline=nyt-per>
>
> George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told
> public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate
> scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every
> mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
>
> Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas
> A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his
> résumé on file at the agency asserted.
>
> Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the
> resignation.
>
> "Under NASA policy, it is inappropriate to discuss personnel matters,"
> said Dean Acosta, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs
> and Mr. Deutsch's boss.
>
> The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
> was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the
> public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA
> administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel
> public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in
> which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor
> discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration,
> particularly global warming.
>
> "As we have stated in the past, NASA is in the process of revising our
> public affairs policies across the agency to ensure our commitment to
> open and full communications," the statement from Mr. Acosta said.
>
> The statement said the resignation of Mr. Deutsch was "a separate
> matter."
>
> Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's
> public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President
> Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his
> résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.
>
> According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in
> journalism, Class of 2003."
>
> Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.
>
> "George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M University but has not
> completed the requirements for a degree," said an e-mail message from
> Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to
> a query from The Times.
>
> Repeated calls and e-mail messages to Mr. Deutsch on Tuesday were not
> answered.
>
> Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick
> Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree
> and has been writing a Web log on science policy,
> scientificactivist.blogspot.com <http://scientificactivist.blogspot.com>
> .
>
> After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an
> interview: "It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the
> line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody
> tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated."
>
> He posted a blog entry asserting this after he checked with the
> university's association of former students. He reported that the
> association said Mr. Deutsch received no degree.
>
> A copy of Mr. Deutsch's résumé was provided to The Times by someone
> working in NASA headquarters who, along with many other NASA employees,
> said Mr. Deutsch played a small but significant role in an intensifying
> effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of
> information to the public.
>
> Such complaints came to the fore starting in late January, when James E.
> Hansen, the climate scientist, and several midlevel public affairs
> officers told The Times that political appointees, including Mr. Deutsch,
> were pressing to limit Dr. Hansen's speaking and interviews on the
> threats posed by global warming.
>
> Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's
> credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue
> of political control of scientific information.
>
> "He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem
> is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what
> I'm really concerned about."
>
> "On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said.
> "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously
> means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> February 4, 2006
>
> New York Times
>
> NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness
>
> By ANDREW C. REVKIN
> <http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ANDREW%20C.%20REV
> KIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ANDREW%20C.%20
> REVKIN&inline=nyt-per>
>
> A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space
> agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on
> global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a
> sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness"
> throughout the agency.
>
> "It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an
> e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or
> adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical
> staff."
>
> The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the
> scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire
> consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit
> emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and
> intermediaries in the agency's 350-member public-affairs staff said the
> warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.
>
> Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and
> public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr.
> Hansen's case, there were several other instances in which political
> appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from
> the agency.
>
> They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news
> releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration
> policies.
>
> In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA
> headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word
> "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail
> message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The
> Times.
>
> And in December 2004, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
> complained to the agency that he had been pressured to say in a news
> release that his oceanic research would help advance the administration's
> goal of space exploration.
>
> On Thursday night and Friday, The Times sent some of the documents to Dr.
> Griffin and senior public-affairs officials requesting a response.
>
> While Dr. Griffin did not respond directly, he issued the "statement of
> scientific openness" to agency employees, saying, "NASA has always been,
> is and will continue to be committed to open scientific and technical
> inquiry and dialogue with the public."
>
> Because NASA encompasses a nationwide network of research centers on
> everything from cosmology to climate, Dr. Griffin said, some central
> coordination was necessary. But he added that changes in the
> public-affairs office's procedures "can and will be made," and that a
> revised policy would "be disseminated throughout the agency."
>
> Asked if the statement came in response to the new documents and the
> furor over Dr. Hansen's complaints, Dr. Griffin's press secretary, Dean
> Acosta, replied by e-mail:
>
> "From time to time, the administrator communicates with NASA employees on
> policy and issues. Today was one of those days. I hope this helps. Have a
> good weekend."
>
> Climate science has been a thorny issue for the administration since
> 2001, when Mr. Bush abandoned a campaign pledge to restrict power plant
> emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global
> warming, and said the United States would not join the Kyoto Protocol,
> the first climate treaty requiring reductions.
>
> But the accusations of political interference with the language of news
> releases and other public information on science go beyond climate
> change.
>
> In interviews this week, more than a dozen public-affairs officials,
> along with half a dozen agency scientists, spoke of growing efforts by
> political appointees to control the flow of scientific information.
>
> In the months before the 2004 election, according to interviews and some
> documents, these appointees sought to review news releases and to approve
> or deny news media requests to interview NASA scientists.
>
> Repeatedly that year, public-affairs directors at all of NASA's science
> centers were admonished by White House appointees at headquarters to
> focus all attention on Mr. Bush's January 2004 "vision" for returning to
> the Moon and eventually traveling to Mars.
>
> Starting early in 2004, directives, almost always transmitted verbally
> through a chain of midlevel workers, went out from NASA headquarters to
> the agency's far-flung research centers and institutes saying that all
> news releases on earth science developments had to allude to goals set
> out in Mr. Bush's "vision statement" for the agency, according to
> interviews with public-affairs officials working in headquarters and at
> three research centers.
>
> Many people working at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and
> the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said that at the same
> time, there was a slowdown in these centers' ability to publish anything
> related to climate.
>
> Most of these career government employees said they could speak only on
> condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals. But their accounts
> tightly meshed with one another.
>
> One NASA scientist, William Patzert, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
> confirmed the general tone of the agency that year.
>
> "That was the time when NASA was reorganizing and all of a sudden earth
> science disappeared," Mr. Patzert said. "Earth kind of got relegated to
> just being one of the 9 or 10 planets. It was ludicrous."
>
> In another incident, on Dec. 2, 2004, the propulsion lab and NASA
> headquarters issued a news release describing research on links between
> wind patterns and the recent warming of the Indian Ocean.
>
> It included a statement in quotation marks from Tong Lee, a scientist at
> the laboratory, saying some of the analytical tools used in the study
> could "advance space exploration" and "may someday prove useful in
> studying climate systems on other planets."
>
> But after other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory queried Dr.
> Lee on the statement, he e-mailed public-affairs officers saying he
> disavowed the quotation and demanded that the release be taken off the
> Web site. His message was part of a sequence of e-mail messages exchanged
> between scientists and public-affairs officers. That string of messages
> was provided to The Times on Friday by a NASA official.
>
> In his e-mail message, Dr. Lee explained that he had cobbled together
> part of the statement on space exploration under "the pressure of the new
> HQ requirement for relevance to space exploration" and under a timeline
> requiring that NASA "needed something instantly."
>
> The press office dropped the quotation from its version of the release,
> but in Washington, the NASA headquarters public affairs office did not.
>
> Dr. Lee declined to be interviewed for this article.
>
> According to other e-mail messages, the flare-up did not stop senior
> officials in headquarters from insisting that Mr. Bush's space-oriented
> vision continue to be reflected in all earth-science releases.
>
> In the end, the news release with Dr. Lee's disavowed remark remained up
> on the NASA headquarters public affairs Web site until The Times asked
> about it yesterday. It was removed from the Web at midday.
>
> The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential
> appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he
> was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election
> campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the
> public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public
> statements.
>
> In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA
> contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for
> middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be
> added after every mention of the Big Bang.
>
> The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote,
> adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration
> such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts
> intelligent design by a creator."
>
> It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious
> issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting
> one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to
> properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information
> the most."
>
> The memo also noted that The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual
> specified the phrasing "Big Bang theory." Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's boss,
> said in an interview yesterday that for that reason, it should be used in
> all NASA documents.
>
> The Deutsch memo was provided by an official at NASA headquarters who
> said he was upset with the effort to justify changes to descriptions of
> science by referring to politically charged issues like intelligent
> design. Senior NASA officials did not dispute the message's authenticity.
>
>
> Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to
> e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made
> to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no
> science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology
> and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.
>
> The only response came from Donald Tighe of the White House Office of
> Science and Technology Policy. "Science is respected and protected and
> highly valued by the administration," he said.
>
> Dennis Overbye contributed reporting for this article.
>
>
>
>
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