journalists-from-arizona

"It’s fair to say that if news sites were people, most would be diagnosed as clinically depressed right now."

"No one in Congress senses the need for science in their daily lives."

"Many decisions about science policy are made not through decision or analysis but on ideological and political grounds."

"Whereas good science is rewarded for being painstaking and nuanced, politics is the enemy of subtlety."

"In part, the divorce of science and politics can be explained by the very different worldviews that inform each field."

"The scientific case for rejecting such bad science (or non-science) is indisputable. But that doesn’t make it persuasive to creationists or other religiously motivated evolution skeptics."

"The success of science depends on an apparatus of democratic adjudication—anonymous peer review, open debate, the fact that a graduate student can criticize a tenured professor. These mechanisms are more or less explicitly designed to counter human self-deception. People always think they’re right, and powerful people will tend to use their authority to bolster their prestige and suppress inconvenient opposition. You try to set up the game of science so that the truth will out despite this ugly side of human nature."

"But it is only half the story. If powerful religious commitments lead to politically driven abuses of science, so does an unswerving commitment to the bottom line."

"The Right’s war on science also spreads a massive amount of misinformation, and sometimes even fosters outright ignorance. Consider the creationist quest to thwart the teaching of the theory of evolution to public school children. Science has managed to answer one of the most profound questions around—where does the human species come from?—but religious conservatives don’t want anyone to know about it. And with the spread of ignorance and pseudoscience comes a decline in critical thinking—a lapse in our collective capacity to cut through all the lies and distortions and determine which ideas we should trust."

"When pressed, ideological appropriators of science will rarely relinquish a cherished idea no matter how many times it has been convincingly debunked. They seek to adopt the veneer of science, but not the critical rigor that should accompany it."

"“Healthy skepticism is an essential and treasured feature of scientific analysis,” Gibbons added. “But willful distortion of evidence has no place at the table of scientific inquiry.”"

"“You can’t prove what’s going to happen in the future,” explains Naomi Oreskes, who has written extensively on the uses of modeling. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a rational basis for action.”"

"But when they don’t like what science has to tell them, those wielding political power of the have another option besides running away from the truth: suppression."

"To be sure, it remains up to policymakers to decide whether the economic costs of such preventative measures outweigh the benefits. But that key question isn’t even being properly debated. Instead, climate change has become an issue on which conservatives have elected to fight over science at least as much as over economics, relying on stunning distortions and a shocking disregard for both expertise and the most reputable sources of scientific assessment and analysis. If this situation is maddening, it is also tragic. There may be no other issue today where a corruption of the necessary relationship between science and political decision-making has more potentially disastrous consequences. And together, James Inhofe and the Bush administration have made that corruption systematic and complete. Not only do they strive to prevent the public from understanding the gravity of the climate situation, but in sowing confusion and uncertainty, they help prevent us from doing anything about it. And this—this—is what the Right calls “rational, science-based thinking and policy-making.”"

"As three of Meyer’s scientific critics have noted, “‘An unknown intelligent designer did something, somewhere, somehow, for no apparent reason’ is not a model.”"

"To be sure, the intelligent design movement does not claim an animus against science. Science abusers never do. Rather, the movement seeks to redefine the very nature of science to serve its objectives."

"From acid rain to global climate change, from “creation science” to “intelligent design,” conservatives had been meddling with science for years, largely on behalf of their pro-industry and religiously conservative supporters."

"Such flagrant misrepresentation goes far beyond mere dishonesty. It demonstrates a gross disregard for the welfare of the American public, whom Bush represents, and for the population of the entire globe, whose fate depends in large measure on the behavior of the American behemoth."

"When politicians use bad science to justify themselves, rather than good science to make up their minds, we can safely assume that wrongheaded and even disastrous decisions lie ahead."

"In a famous October 2004 New York Times article on the Bush administration, journalist Ron Suskind described his encounter with a “senior adviser” to the president: The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.”"

"Policymaking by ideology requires that reality be set aside; it can be maintained only by moving towards ever more authoritarian forms of governance."

"Journalists should treat fringe scientific claims with considerable skepticism and find out what major peer-reviewed papers or assessments have to say about them. Moreover, they should adhere to the principle that the more outlandish or dramatic the claim, the more skepticism it warrants."

"But if we care about science and believe that it should play a crucial role in decisions about our future, we must steadfastly oppose further political gains by the modern Right. This political movement has patently demonstrated that it will not defend the integrity of science in any case in which science runs afoul of its core political constituencies. In so doing, it has ceded any right to govern a technologically advanced and sophisticated nation."

"“We have learned from encounters with such ventures as ‘creation science,’ which purportedly refutes the theory of evolution, that we must be sceptical when nonscientist advocates offer purported analyses of scientific data to reinforce conclusions that they have already reached on nonscientific grounds.”"

"Today this country is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles."

"For a very long time, American scientists have found themselves pitted against both our businesslike, can-do attitudes and our piety."

"Without the Internet, the modern vaccine-skeptic movement probably wouldn’t exist, at least not in it current form."

"And then there’s religion, the source of the deepest fissure in the science-society relationship."

"A change in administration doesn’t automatically fix the underlying problems, which include the corporate media’s marginalizing of science, ongoing divides over science and religion, and an American culture that all too often questions the value of intellect and even glorifies dumbness."

"In 1957, he appointed the first official presidential science advisor, MIT president James Killian, and launched the distinguished President’s Science Advisory Committee. As Eisenhower would later put it, “this bunch of scientists was one of the few groups that I encountered in Washington who seemed to be there to help the country and not to help themselves.”"

"The emergence of the religious right onto the political stage in the 1970s—motivated in part by its adherents’ resentment of the nation’s intellectual and scientific elites—was also a major factor in curtailing the role of science in public policy."

"As perhaps the chief public face of American science during this period, Carl Sagan wasn’t merely a popularizer but a fierce advocate for the proper use of science in the real world. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan necessarily became his chief foe, for Reagan brought anti-science into the American political mainstream as never before."

"At the same time (i. e., 1994), the Republican party continued to define itself in adulation of Reagan and in opposition to mainstream science."

"Media coverage tends to be episodic and event-driven, always in search of the dramatic and the new."

"They didn’t even understand the science they presumed to criticize."

"One of the witnesses before the New York grand jury described how he led a crew of eight individuals from polling place to polling pace to vote. Each member of his crew voted in excess of 20 times, and there were approximately 20 other such crews operating during that election. This extensive fraud could have been stopped if New York required voters to authenticate their identify at the polls, and there had been poll watchers making sure that election officials were verifying voters’ IDs. The grand jury explained that ‘the ease and boldness with which these fraudulent schemes were carried out shows the vulnerability of our entire electoral process to unscrupulous and fraudulent manipulations.’ As a recent, thousands of fraudulent votes were cast in New York legislative and congressional elections."

"Voter ID might also help prevent double-voting by someone who is registered in two states. In 2004, a comparison of the voter registration rolls in North and South Carolina by the Charlotte Observerfound more than 60,000 people who were registered in two states, at least 180 of whom were listed ‘as having voted in both states in either the 2000 or 2002 general election.’"

"A similar investigation by the New York Daily News of voting rolls in New York City and Florida found 46,000 individuals registered in both states, 68 percent of whom were Democrats; 12 percent were Republicans, and 16 percent didn’t claim a party. Between 400 and 1,000 individuals voted in both states in at least one election—this in Florida, where the presidential election was decided in 2000 by 537 votes—and some of the registered voters double-voted in multiple elections."

"The double-voting problem was illustrated, to the great embarrassment of the League of Women Voters, by an amicus brief the League filed in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Indiana voter ID case. One of the Indiana voters highlighted in the League’s brief was used as an example of someone who had difficulty voting because of the voter ID requirement. But when and Indiana newspaper interviewed the voter, it discovered that her problems stemmed from her trying to use a Florida drivers’ license to vote in Indiana. Not only did she have a Florida driver’s license, she was also registered to vote in Florida, where she owned a second home and had claimed residency by filing for a homestead exemption on her property taxes, normally only available to state residents. So the Indiana law worked as intended: It prevented someone from voting twice who might otherwise have done so illegally without detection."

"Actual election results in Georgia and Indiana confirm that suppositions about voter ID hurting minority turnout are wrong. In 2008, in the first presidential election after their voter ID laws went into effect, both states saw turnout increase more dramatically in both the presidential preference primaryandthe general election than turnout increased in some stateswithoutthe photo-ID requirement."

"The California secretary of state reported in 1998 that two to three thousand of the individuals summoned for jury duty in Orange County each month claimed an exemption from jury service because they were not U.S. citizens, and 85 to 90 percent of these individuals were summoned from the voter registration list, rather than DMV records. While some of those individuals may have simply committed perjury to avoid jury service, this represents a significant number of potentially illegal voters: 24,000 to 36,000 noncitizens summoned from the voter registration list over a one-year period."

"Absentee-ballot fraud in particular is difficult to control. It is ‘the tool of choice’ for those who are engaging in election fraud,’ as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded in its investigation of the 1997 Miami mayoral election. The results of that election were thrown out because of massive fraud involving more than five thousand absentee ballots, andThe Miami Heraldwon a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for its innovative investigation into the voter fraud. With the increasing use of no-fault absentee voting and all-mail elections, there is the real risk that fraud will affect more election results and potentially wipe out voting rights hard won by the civil rights movement."

"The Alabama voter fraud described by former Congressman Davis, which occurs in predominately black, poor counties, is vividly illustrated by a criminal prosecution that occurred in the 1990s in Greene County, Alabama, when local citizens, reform political candidates, federal and state prosecution, and a hometown newspaper banded together to fight absentee-ballot fraud in the county, one of the poorest in Alabama. Unfortunately, liberal groups including the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked equally hard to undermine the effort, as they have worked to undermine voter ID requirements and other reforms intended to ensure the integrity of elections… But in the end, justice prevailed, with the conviction of 11 conspirators who had fixed local elections for years… The Greene County case proves that absentee-ballot fraud is real, and not a cover story for an imagined voter-disenfranchisement conspiracy."

"Two of the biggest barriers to the prosecution of voter fraud are the misapplication of resources within the Justice Department and the political and ideological bias of too many of its lawyers."

"The 93 offices of the U.S. Attorneys located throughout the country share responsibility for prosecutions with the Election Crimes Unit. But given their many other responsibilities, vote fraud is not high on their priorities, particularly because they are well aware of the enormous criticism prosecutors receive from the civil rights community when they pursue election cases, as happened during the Bush administration. There is a Designated Election Officer in each office, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, who is supposed to deal with election crimes. But the vast majority have never investigated or prosecuted a voter-fraud case, and have no experience or interest in doing so."

"A veteran Justice Department prosecutor told one of the authors that while there was never an official memorandum delineating the Clinton administration’s policy on [voter fraud], the unofficial word had come down from the Clinton political leadership to the career prosecutors that there was ‘no interest’ in pursuing voter fraud cases."

"The NPV plan strikes at the Founders’ view of federalism and a representative republic—one where popular sovereignty is balanced by structural protection for state governments and minority interests. It like would violate the Constitution’s Compact Clause. In an age of perceived political dysfunction, effective policies that already are in place—especially successful policies established by this nation’s Founders, like the Electoral College—should be preserved."

"It was the day of Washington, D.C.’s presidential primary, April 3, 2012. A 22-year-old white man with a beard entered a polling place in the District, carrying a hidden camera. He walked up to the check-in desk and asked a poll workers if an Eric Holder was registered there. He gave U.S. Attorney General Holder’s address, which he had gleaned from public records. The worker began to hand him a ballot, at which point the young man said that he wanted to show his identification. ‘You don’t need it,’ the poll worker replied. ‘It’s all right. As long as you’re in here, you’re on our list, and that’s who you say you are, you’re okay.’"

"Attorney General Holder is a staunch opponent of laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls to improve ballot security. He calls them ‘unnecessary,’ and has blocked their implementation in Texas and South Carolina under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, citing the fear that such requirements would discriminate against minorities."

"In New Hampshire, three of [ James O’Keefe’s ] assistants visited precincts during the state’s January 2012 presidential primary. They asked poll workers whether their books bore the names of several voters, all deceased individuals still listed on voter registration rolls. Poll workers handed out 10 ballots, never once asking for a photo ID. The ballots were immediately given back, unmarked, to precinct workers. New Hampshire Governor John Lynch James , who had vetoed a state photo ID bill, sputtered when asked about O’Keefe’s videos, focusing on the messenger, rather than his message—that polls are dangerously vulnerable to fraud. ‘They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they’re found guilty of some criminal act,’ he roared."