Monday, February 06, 2006

New York Times on Deutsch

The New York Times has a pretty effective summation of all the hankey-pankey going on in the public affairs offices of NASA. I seem to remember the Soviet Union being held in contempt for its heavy reliance on "political officers." President Bush's close relationship with Russia's ex-KGB head honcho, Vladimir Putin, is starting to make more sense.
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.

The next thing you know, U.S. school children will be learning Lamarkian biology rather than those pesky, flawed "Mendel squares."

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2 comments:

  1. 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.

    NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness (Feb. 4, 2006) 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 resume on file at the agency asserted.

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  2. This is, of course, fantastic news. Not that Deutsch resigned (although that's worthy of celebration), but rather that he never graduated. My journalism degree no longer feels debased.

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