Read House Bill H0224, the appointment of a state poet laureate, and you’ll see what I mean.

I sure hope time straightens out the race for the presidency, since I find myself unimpressed by the entire field. John Edwards has just moved to the bottom of my list of acceptable Democratic candidates, after Hillary Clinton (after Hillary! That’s pretty low) since he has just allowed Amanda Marcotte to resign. I am unimpressed by the lack of loyalty he’s shown to his employees; I’m not an absolutist on that point, since I think loyalty can be carried too far, to the point of stupidity (case in point: GW Bush). But what pisses me off is that he failed to support her in the face of genuinely vile, trumped-up slanders from his right-wing opponents, people who’d never vote for him no matter how much he sucked up to them. That’s gutlessness, an even more unforgivable sin in a presidential candidate than disloyalty. He got his first Swift Boat attack — actually, more like a slow, leaky canoe — and he collapsed like a frightened rabbit.

So now I look at the slate of Democrats, and to my dismay discover that Obama is currently at the top. How depressing.

What cheers me up, though, is looking at the Republican field. I am perversely looking forward to 23 February, when John McCain promises to address the Discovery Institute. Watching the ‘maverick’ rip out his brain and hand it to the theocrats as his oath of fealty will be entertaining.

One sign that the fading Bush administration knows that they’ve been on the wrong side of reality is that they’re now busy scrubbing the archives, trying to change what was said in the past. Chris Mooney catches a blatant attempt to rewrite the administration’s history on global warming.

Man, the GW Bush Presidential Library is going to be a real work of art, isn’t it? Maybe it should be called a “propaganda archive” rather than a “library”.

If this is true—that the Edwards campaign has caved to pressure from the right wing—he has lost my vote.

The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps — John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare’s Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan “anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots,” and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.

I’ll want to see some confirmation from the targets of this rumor first, but if it’s true that Edwards would rather heed the screams of right-wing sleazebags like Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue than the people he’s supposed to represent, then he has lost. We don’t need another timid Democratic candidate who flits away at every gust of noise from the Republican slander machine.

Zuzu says more, much more. Jebus, but I’m tired of craven Democrats.

Alan Sokal—who has a history of criticizing the irrational Left—and Chris Mooney—who has come down hard on the anti-science Right—have teamed up to write an op-ed that makes suggestions to keep both sides from falling into the same trap again.

I think the root cause of the problem is that we have a democracy in which education is an insufficiently high priority, and either party can succumb to the temptation of going for votes by appealing to the most uneducated segment of the electorate. The Republican party has thrived in the past by going the other way, and building its base in the wealthy elite (which, unfortunately, has no certainty of being coupled to reason and education); they’ve long since learned that religion is a handy bridge to get votes from the most irrational side of the population, and have ridden the crazy train to power.

Democrats have long been populists, but I suspect that the focus on labor has at least grounded the party in practical concerns. That focus is fading away fast, and I worry that in an attempt to rebuild a solid majority they are also going to cast a covetous eye on the religious masses (hence my reluctance to support Barack Obama) and get there in the wrong way.

Sokal and Mooney propose some top-down safeguards against the further encroachment of anti-science bias into government. These are good ideas.

To address this new crisis over the relationship between science and politics, we propose a combination of political activism and institutional reform. Congress needs to establish safeguards to protect the integrity of scientific information in Washington — strong whistle-blower protections for scientists who work in government agencies would be a good start.

We also need a strengthening of the government scientific advisory apparatus, starting with the revival of the Office of Technology Assessment. And we need congressional committees to continue with their investigations of cases of science abuse within the Bush administration, in order to learn what other reforms are necessary.

At the same time, journalists and citizens must renounce a lazy “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach and start analyzing critically the quality of the evidence. For, in the end, all of us — conservative or liberal, believer or atheist — must share the same real world. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria do not spare deniers of evolution, and global climate change will not spare any of us. As physicist Richard Feynman wrote in connection with the space shuttle Challenger disaster, “nature cannot be fooled.”

To avoid nature’s punishment, we must take steps now to restore reality-based government.

I’d just add that we also need more bottom-up preventive measures: more education. I want a reality-based government, and the best way to get there is to increase the pool of reality-based voters.

When will the Democrats learn? We are in an unpopular and failed war, and what a successful presidential candidate has to do is openly and uncompromisingly slam this unjust travesty and the incompetents who initiated it, yet Clinton and Edwards are enabling war fever, if not directly feeding it. Face it, war with Iran is off the table. It is not an option, unless we want to ruin our military and our economy; and the nuclear option is evil and unconscionable, and would utterly destroy our fast-fading moral standing. I wish we had a candidate who would just come out and say that.

I hate to say it, but Barack Obama seems to be one of the rare candidates thinking about doing something against the war. He could still win me over, especially if he continues to make specific proposals like that, but I’m still worried that any presidential race with him in it would turn into a “Who’s Holier?” piety contest, and we simply do not need more religiosity in American politics.

I might be willing to overlook that (for now) if we can just get a candidate who shows some real awareness and concern about policy, is unambiguously against war and torture, doesn’t use the prospect of terrorism to terrify the populace, and is pro-science and pro-education. An anti-George W. Bush, in other words.