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!

They have a vision. They have a dream. They know what shape they want America to take. And they have formed an “organization inspired by the principles of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the Evangelical and Christian Reconstruction movements”. And completely oblivious to the irony, with no hint that they understand the associations it will inspire, they have named this organization…the PALIBAN.

2012 is going to be so much fun.

And by “fun”, I mean “loaded with despair and exasperation and disappointment in my fellow citizens.”

(Read their blog and you might suspect a Poe, though. It’s just a little too all that.)

Another casualty in the War on Drugs: an enthusiastic science student, of the sort that would normally go on to be a scientist, is arrested for having a chemistry lab.

A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab – and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism.

Lewis Casey, an 18-year-old in Saskatchewan, had built a small chemistry lab in his family’s garage near the university where he studies. Then two weeks ago, police arrived at his home with a search warrant and based on a quick survey of his lab determined that it was a meth lab. They pulled Casey out of the shower to interrogate him, and then arrested him.

A few days later, police admitted that Casey’s chemistry lab wasn’t a meth lab – but they kept him in jail, claiming that he had some of the materials necessary to produce explosives. Friends and neighbors wrote dozens of letters to the court, testifying that Casey was innocent and merely a student who is really enthusiastic about chemistry.

Errm, having the “materials necessary to produce explosives” is an awfully low bar to set. If we’re going to go that route, let’s round up and arrest all the farmers — they’ve got fuel oil and fertilizer in bulk, and are a far more serious danger.

Don’t criminalize reagents. Monitor them, sure, but instead target the products of criminal chemistry. Anything else is going to have lots of false positives and is going to damage science education.

We’re learning more about what Obama is actually going to do in office, and while there are some negatives, right now the positives outweigh them.

Let’s get the bad decisions out of the way first.

Rick Warren, professional homophobe, bigot, and smirking airhead, will be prominently promoted in the invocation at the inauguration. This is a symbolic slap to the face of rationalists and GLBT citizens of our country, and is not a good sign.

The man who will be the Interior Secretary, a position which should be concerned about conservation of the country’s natural resources and which has been typically filled with vultures and exploiters from industry by Republican presidents, is going to be more of the same: Ken Salazar, who will almost certainly promote mining and ranching interests.

Both of those are real disgraces, and it’s not as if Obama was boxed in or lacking alternatives. They’re also incomprehensible. Warren is a sneaky little creep who already got more respect than he deserves by hosting one of the presidential debates, and he’s also a guy who is anti-Democratic policies — you know he did not vote for Obama. So why throw him another bone? Salazar just sounds like a lazy choice, somebody who was picked to appease industry…but he’s not a steward of the environment.

The bads are awful, but I’ve got to say that his good decisions are very, very good.

The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be John Holdren of Harvard University, a professor of environmental policy who takes a hard line on global climate change — he was an advisor to Al Gore on the movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

Jane Lubchenko is a professor of marine biology at Oregon State University. She’ll be in charge of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key appointment in climate change policy.

Co-chairs of the Council of Advisers on Science and Technology will be Harold Varmus, who won a Nobel for his work on viral oncogenes, and Eric Lander, a very big name in genomics research.

Another Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, will be the Secretary of Energy. Chu has also been outspoken about climate change and is a strong promoter of alternative energy sources.

If these good people are actually listened to by the president, expect to see major improvements in energy policy and biology research, and some serious attention paid to carbon. This is, overall, a net plus for science and a real strike against anti-science in the White House, a huge change from the last 8 years. Salazar is troubling, some people are concerned that NASA will suffer, and sucking up to the odious Rick Warren still makes me wonder what atavistic social policies might be nestled in Obama’s mind, but there is some hope on the horizon, at least. Now if only he could do even better.