Deutsch speaks!

What ties? What worst-case scenario? What a whiner!

Good thing Deutsch didn't have any Republican ties, otherwise him saying that would make him a hypocrite.

You can listen to the interview at http://wtaw.com/

The interview is kind of sad. He's in way over his head, has little grasp of what he speaks, yet can't stop spewing boilerplate partisan talking points. It does have an unintentionally hilarious moment when he says that, while his resume may have been misleading, he himself never misled anyone.

NYTimes article linked by that blog posting

Mr. Deutsch said he resigned of his own volition because he was unhappy with the negative publicity he and NASA were receiving in the news media. "I was just sick of it," he said. "I was being smeared. My integrity and credibility was being questioned. And as a human being, as a human being, I just could not take it anymore."

His credibility was being questioned, just because he got caught lying about his background. The nerve of those inquisitors!

"resigned of his own volition". Uh-huh. I believe that. Sell me a bridge.

"I would really like to clear the air and defend my integrity and my good name."

Too late - "Big Bang is theory, not fact" destroyed both integrity and good name beyond recovery. He should probably think of finishing his studies instead - in some other subject.

He said that anyone who disagrees with Dr. Hansen "is labeled a censor and is demonized and vilified in the media and the media of course is a willing accomplice here."

No, Deutschbag, you're not a demon.

Just another lying retard.

And ... just maybe ... a self-identifying Christian ...? Just ... maybe ...?

No, Deutsch-bag, your integrity and credibility weren't questioned.. because they are non-existant.

I think there's a phrase missing in that article: "In the interview, former Bush campaign official Mr. Deutsch said that Dr. Hansen had partisan ties "all the way up to the top of the Democratic Party,""

"[U]nhappy with the negative publicity he and NASA were receiving in the news media" eh?

Might I suggest that a good way to avoid such negative publicity would have been for him to do his job properly. Also? To actually be qualified to do that job.

Good god, I listened to it. Deutsch sounds paranoid, and it sounds like he's just quoting the party line when it comes to global warming. On top of that, I think that if he ever gets quoted on this site, he should get the Gumby background. Obviously, his brain hurts.

Speaking not as a member of a large well-known national space agency, but solely as a private citizen, I have to point one thing out here. Somehow, somewhen, someone with scientific integrity snuck into the West wing, and is quietly injecting tiny bits of reason into the White House.

First thing of course, was appointing an actual Scientist/Engineer to be Administrator of NASA. The question remains whether the agency can pull out of its long nosedive without tearing its wings off or intersecting the surface of the Earth, but damn if Michael Griffin wasn't the best choice.

Now the WH appears to be, if not precisely backing Mr. Griffin, at least allowing him to not only get rid of Deutsch, but actually review the PAO policies with an eye to making them less restrictive.

And as much bad stuff there is in the budget, NSF at least is getting a hefty increase.

It ain't much, and I have little doubt that the mole causing these policy decisions will be found out and removed from power before long, but for now there's some sky in the clouds. Not much, but at this point even a sliver of lining is cause for joy.

No doubt he's hoping to become some sort of "free speech martyr" and get a conservative pundit career off the ground based on that (it worked for Mike Adams). But it's not looking good - the wingnut media machine seems to be studiously ignoring him.

y'know, i wonder, WHERE DOES BUSH GET THESE REFERRALS?

"Praise the Lord" meetings perhaps?

And Deutsch knows that Hansen is overstating the risks and realities of global warming...exactly HOW, again?

I suppose he re-ran all those models and accounted for the effects of aerosols and water vapor.

Or maybe he read a few posts over at TechCentralStation...

The youngster needs learnin'! Want to give a go at educating him in science? Either that or send him to his room but take away the PS2. Just let his think about what he did while listening to Linkin Park.

Poor Deutsch...HE's the real victim...must be a conspiracy.

y'know, i wonder how widespread this pattern of appointing good ole lads and lassies who worked for W during campaigns throughout government was and is in BushCo's administration.

in fact, i wonder if they weren't and aren't simply adopting a device used in the Soviet Community Party from its early Bolshevik days: each military unit has, in addition to its commander, a "political officer" who makes sure the unit's practice is consistent with "party ideology".

the appropriately named Deutsch(bag) is nothing more than a government-appointed whore.

oh, wait, he's a man, so he can't possibly be a whore, can he?

Score one for bloggers in the Find the Brownie game!

Maybe Deutsche will take this opportunity to finish his degree - if they'll let him back into school.

Mr. Deutsch said that Dr. Hansen had partisan ties "all the way up to the top of the Democratic Party,"

Pot, kettle...

Oh, and Bush sure finds some real characters for his administration. For every scandal there is at least one blatantly incompetent hack in over his head. It's kind of depressing actually, to think that a guy like this gets priority over actually qualified people who have worked their whole lives in the field - and that this guy is probably set for life because of his political connections.

FYI for some trepid science blogger...

The San Francisco Chronicle today [Thurs., 2/9/06], on page 3 of the print edition in a "digest" section, carried a four paragraph story headlined, "Controversial NASA press official quits".

It's mostly a summary put graph 2 & 3 I found interesting--

"NASA press secretary Dean Acosta declined to say on Wednesday why Deutsch left his job.

"Acosta denied the Deutsch's resignation was prompted by recent allegations that Bush administration political appointees were trying to censor agency scientists, in one case threatening dire consequences against an outspoken climate scientists. 'NASA ensures and supports full and open communication,' Acosta said."

Come again?

Whoops -- for some intrepid science blogger.

ekzept, all you had to do was have your r�sum� on file at the Heritage Foundation and you could get a good job with the CPA in Iraq:

When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience.

[snip]

For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.

He said that anyone who disagrees with Dr. Hansen "is labeled a censor and is demonized and vilified in the media â and the media of course is a willing accomplice here."

Yeah but what about the one where Mr. Deutsch said that the big bang is just a theory that "discounts intelligent design by a creator"? A short lesson in some thoughtful scientific reasoning for Mr. Deutsch: It's entirely possible that an hypothetical intelligent designer could have designed the big bang, ERGO: Mr. Deutsch is a big ol' booby-head goofball.

...someone with scientific integrity snuck into the West wing, and is quietly injecting tiny bits of reason into the White House.

First thing of course, was appointing an actual Scientist/Engineer to be Administrator of NASA. The question remains whether the agency can pull out of its long nosedive without tearing its wings off or intersecting the surface of the Earth, but damn if Michael Griffin wasn't the best choice.

Let's be careful not to spread too much love to Michael Griffin. He cut his teeth as the Deputy for Technology for Reagan's SDI program, which managed to flush about $30B (see Bob Park's column), and he's a certified, board-membered Mars-o-phile. As in, he wants to flush more money on a dubious at best project, at a time of national financial crisis.

Having said that, he did issue of stay of execution for the Hubble Telescope, raising it at least to indeterminate status. This is a huge issue. If he goes the right way with this --last I heard, his decision is coming in May -- he will have earned the label "reasonable". If he goes the wrong way, he will have earned a lifetime of scorn.

His actions with Deutsch are simply necessary for keeping NASA career scientists from revolting. Bush would rather eat one of his young than deal with the PR fallout.

had partisan ties "all the way up to the top of the Democratic Party,""

Somehow when I heard that line I got this mental image of Joseph McCarthy waving around his little piece of paper and ranting about how he had the names of 205 Communists in the State Department. Funny how it's now accepted practice to imply that connections to the Democratic Party are somehow sinister.

I'd like to think this will sink the little shit's career once and for all, but I just know he'll turn up as a political appointee somewhere else in 6 months.

in fact, i wonder if they weren't and aren't simply adopting a device used in the Soviet Community Party from its early Bolshevik days: each military unit has, in addition to its commander, a "political officer" who makes sure the unit's practice is consistent with "party ideology".

Dead on.

Most amusing, but you guys don't seem to get -- ekzept especially -- that the goofier this guy is, the less credible Professor Myers' original assumption that Deutsch had been appointed a 'Political Officer' to control the scientists.

For that to work, we have to be able to imagine a meeting of Bush and Rove that went something like this:

ROVE: Now, Mr. President, in our overall strategy to take over the world, we have to deal with those pointyheaded interleckshuels at NASA.

We could do it by appointing a good Republican with an interest in cosmology and some experience in raising money. Ken Ham, perhaps.

But I suggest a more subtle approach. We put one of our boys in the PR office as a covert Political Officer. I have just the boy, too. He went to Cow College and he's only 'bout half-bright, but he's a good Republican. He'll do. After all, what are those guys anyway, rocket scientists?

Shit, Harry, where'd you get this idea that all other things being equal, the Bush administration picks competent people? Or that competent people do the choosing?

Because everyone knows the "right" thing to do is only pay attention to the best case scenario, then pretend that's all that could possibly happen. You may take the meaning of 'right' in that sentence several ways... Of course @@$@#$$% scientists are going to argue for the worst case. Its like claiming that its OK to tell something, "I am sure you will be lucky and walk away without injury, that wall is probably not that thick!", when they just got through telling you they planned to drive their car into it at 80 miles and hour. Or maybe he would prefer, "Some people are going to die from floods and famine because of this, but we here in the US will be fine!"?

Let's be careful not to spread too much love to Michael Griffin. He cut his teeth as the Deputy for Technology for Reagan's SDI program, which managed to flush about $30B (see Bob Park's column), and he's a certified, board-membered Mars-o-phile. As in, he wants to flush more money on a dubious at best project, at a time of national financial crisis.

True, he is a bit gung-ho for my taste. And yet, there is a certain point to doing things that excite the public. Which the current NASA centerpiece (the International Space Station) certainly does not. The optimist in me looks at the Exploration initiative as a face-saving way to deep-six the station (literally) and the shuttle (figuratively, one hopes). If we spent the same amount on exploration as we currently do on those two heaps of bling-bling, we might actually accomplish something interesting (in the general round-the-water-cooler hey-this-science-stuff-is-pretty-cool sense). And Griffin makes no bones about the fact that both Shuttle and ISS are a waste of money and lives.

Furthermore, for now at least a huge portion of the Exploration budget is going to robotic exploration. (At least, what's left after paying for the Shuttle's senescence, and various overruns like James Webb Space Telescope.)

Also there are any number of exquisitely stupid initiatives which have, under his administatorship, been shelved or quietly ignored. I s'pose maybe it's just a reaction to 3 years of being run by an accountant whose major accomplishment was to install an accounting system that is so badly broken that its bottom line differs from congress' by 2 billion-with-a-b dollars (out of 16). After that, anyone with any engineering smarts would be a relief.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: going to A&M to study journalism is like going to Caltech to study dance. Deutsch should have just taken his tuition and run it through a tree mulcher: it would have embarrassed the school that much less.

I have come to the opinion that the difference between the scientific spirit and the ideological one is that the ideologue stops thinking when her head hurts, whereas the scientific one takes the hurt as a symptom of growth.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: going to A&M to study journalism is like going to Caltech to study dance. Deutsch should have just taken his tuition and run it through a tree mulcher: it would have embarrassed the school that much less.

They were no doubt the best local school that accepted him.

I have come to the opinion that the difference between the scientific spirit and the ideological one is that the ideologue stops thinking when her head hurts, whereas the scientific one takes the hurt as a symptom of growth.

This reminded me of a theory I heard that the reason Iranian pistachios supposedly taste superior to American pistachios is that due to poor growing conditions, the Iranian trees are 'stressed', and that makes them taste better.

A parable in there somewhere, I'm sure.

All I can say is that Hansen must have been desperate indeed to go to the NY Times with his grievances. The man is certainly no fool. He HAD to know the kind of backlash this would engender from the Bush administration.

It is realy hard to escape the conclusion that going to the Times was a LAST resort (certaintly not the first) and that he had probably tried -- and failed -- to get NASA administrators (perhaps even NASA Chief Michael Griffin himself) to do something (ANYTHING) about the problem.

Are we really to believe that people like Griffin had ZERO inkling before the NY Times piece of what Hansen and several others have said was going on at NASA?

This is simply too much to swallow.

From what I have read on other science blogs, I think people are giving Griffin WAY too much benefit of the doubt in this case. It is NOT sufficient simply to send off a flurry of emails re-iterating NASA's "commitment to openness".

What Griffin SHOULD have done by now is set in motion an UNBIASED investigation of Hansen's allegations -- by a team of university scientists who are completely independent of NASA and the US government.

ALL of those who are found to have engaged in the political interference (not just Deutsch) should be unceremoniously shown the door. If Griffin himself knew what was going on and did nothing, he should resign.

I would add that, given the notoriously short attention span of the US news media and the notoriously long memories of the Bush mafia, it will be interesting to see what happens to Hansen in a few months, after the spotlight is off.

I would add that, given the notoriously short attention span of the US news media and the notoriously long memories of the Bush mafia, it will be interesting to see what happens to Hansen in a few months, after the spotlight is off.

Or, to see what new job Deutsch is quietly given later this summer. Some committee to help the GOP with the midterm elections?

George, where did you see me say that the Bush administration picks competent people?

All parties reward eager beaver young, inexperienced, unqualified campaign helpers with nothing jobs like Deutsch got. At a higher level, Brown was exactly what you expect in agencies that are seldom called upon to do any work.

If you want to find the highest concentration of zeros in government, call a meeting of state civil defense directors and adjutant generals of the National Guard.

Most young Deutsches are just barely smart enough not to imagine they've been put in charge of running NASA, though.