Here’s a phenomenal suggestion you can promote to the Obama administration: shut down the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It’s a huge boondoggle, a fat earmark for low-quality pseudoscience, and it’s money that would be better spent on real science and medicine. Sign up at change.gov and vote it up!

The Buffalo Beast’s 50 most loathsome people of 2008 list is out. Don’t worry, the viciousness is bipartisan.

I was startled to see that John McCain hasn’t been retired to the WaxWorks Museum of Irrelevant Political Figures yet — he’s still making speeches. Could somebody tell him that he’ll never, ever have a shot at the presidency again?

Anyway the subject of his speech was to sneer at fruit fly research again, and mock lobster research. What’s with the hatin’ on invertebrates, Mr McCain?

At least we don’t have to care what he says anymore: he is officially nobody, a washed-up politician who let himself get upstaged by his airhead running mate.

Short summary: unimpressed.

But then what else could you expect from a running dog reactionary old guard supporter of bourgeois ideology?^*

^*Let us not linger over the uncomfortable fact that I actually agree with him in this case.

Thankfully, these are the waning days of the awful, incompetent, no-good Bush/Cheney presidency, years we will try to forget in the decades to come. What will help is that we don’t have a good name for this decade — The Oughties? Bleh — and we’re just going to have to refer to them as the years with a couple of zeroes in the middle.

This odious administration is not going out gracefully, however, but is instead leaving with a flurry of last-minute knifings of our country. Some are exploitive efforts to pay back interests to whom the conservatives are beholden, such as the stripping of environmental protection laws (which the next administration may be disinclined to roll back). Others just seem inexplicably arbitrary and petty, the work of small-minded tyrants who want to get in one last poke while they can.

Here’s one such example: the Department of Justice is redefining “service animal”. They’ve redefined “animal” to mean “dog”! I’ve got nothing against dogs, but there are people who use non-canine animals as service animals, and suddenly they are going to be stripped of the legal rights associated with service animal use.

Don’t ask me why. I think it’s just because they can.

It looks like Obama has picked Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general. He seems a bit of a lightweight, to me — he’s mainly known as a congenial talking head on television news. He’s also an apologist for US health care, which does not give me any confidence that we can expect the slightest effort towards health care reform. I suspect Obama has just picked a pleasant smiling face to act as a placeholder, and that disappoints me.

We’ll have to see how that ol’ conservative, Orac, reacts to this news.

The state canvassing board certified the results this afternoon; Al Franken is our senator, by 225 votes. Also, the Minnesota supreme court has denied Coleman’s request to reconsider some rejected ballots, but of course he’s going to sue.

Forget all that, though, and welcome our new senator. Not many can do this:

This is the day the Canvassing Board will announce their decision in the Minnesota senate race, and since he is ahead by 225 votes, that means Al Franken will be declared the victor.

Expect 5-alarm histrionics from the right wing, howls of outrage on talk radio, and the wing nut blogs to go ballistic. Also expect the Coleman campaign to charge the state supreme court and demand to be handed the office. It will be very entertaining. The freakout is only warming up.

Get out there and vote on this recommendation to Obama to create nationally required science standards. This is your last chance; it needs to be bumped up to 3rd place to make it into the next round. All it needs is a few hundred more votes!