Chris Mooney

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist — or “Bill Frist, M.D.,” as his Senate Web site proudly proclaims — is on the defensive lately. In recent days, Frist has been skewered for delivering a Senate floor speech in which he challenged Florida doctors’ careful diagnosis of Terri Schiavo’s “persistent vegetative state,” a reinterpretation that Frist apparently […]

On matters of environmental protection and regulation, free-market conservatives have two chief principles to which they claim to adhere: “sound science” and “cost-benefit analysis.” As John D. Graham, cost-benefit guru and director of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has put it, “The Bush administration supports federal regulations […]

In science or in economics, one occasionally comes upon a “natural experiment” — a real-world event or confluence of events that fortuitously allows for the testing of one key variable. In a sense, “natural experiments” occur within the realm of politicized science as well. You might say that we witnessed one recently when the Bush […]

You won’t believe it until you read it. With its recently released report titled “Mercury in Perspective: Fact and Fiction About the Debate Over Mercury”, the GOP leadership of the House Committee on Resources has brought scientific debate on an already politicized issue to a new low. The 33-page document, issued by anti-environmentalist committee Chair […]

When it’s your job to serve as the president’s in-house expert on science and technology, being constantly in the media spotlight isn’t necessarily a mark of distinction. But for President Bush’s stoically inclined science adviser John Marburger, immense controversy followed his blanket dismissal last year of allegations (now endorsed by 48 Nobel laureates ) that […]

Today — Wednesday, February 16, 2005 — marks a date that some hoped would never arrive. The much-reviled Kyoto Protocol, which U.S. businesses have spent a fortune to defeat and which President George W. Bush summarily rejected in 2001, now enters into force without American participation. While glad to be spared from this new regulatory […]

In political speechifying, what goes unsaid can count just as much as what gets blurted out. So when President Bush blatantly ignored the topic of embryonic stem-cell research in his recent State of the Union address, it’s no surprise that advocates considered his silence potentially significant. Launching into a discussion of medical research with his […]

It’s official. With recent news of lawsuits over the teaching of evolution in both Georgia and Pennsylvania, even Time magazine now considers the fight over Charles Darwin’s theory a live issue again. The New York Times and The Washington Post have both come out against the new anti-evolutionism, while on FOX News, a braying Bill […]

We all have our favorite Bushisms, the top one-liners uttered by our recently reinaugurated president that seem to summarize his view of the world. For some, it’s George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” line. For others, it’s his “Wanted, Dead or Alive” remark about Osama bin Laden (a comment that even Bush now regrets). For […]

The U.S. Senate’s leading abuser of science has struck again. Not content with calling the notion of human-caused global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (as he did in a July 2003 Senate floor speech), last week James Inhofe returned with an “update” on climate-change science. In his latest speech, timed […]