Now this is a shock: Obama manipulates science for public ends

The New Scientist has the tale.  But they continue the slur that the Bush administration 'manipulated' science inordinately.  It's just that the media hated W so much that anything was fair game as a weapon against the despised "BushHitler".  Of course compared to The One W is looking better an better every day.

A US government report on a pressing environmental issue is edited to falsely imply that scientists had peer-reviewed and supported the central policy recommendation. Almost 1 in 4 government scientists working on food safety say they have been asked by their bosses to exclude or alter technical information in scientific documents during the past year.

These incidents sound as if they come from the dark days of George W. Bush’s presidency, when complaints about political interference in government science reached a crescendo. But in fact, both refer to the behaviour of the current US administration, led by a president who famously promised to “restore science to its rightful place” in his inauguration speech of January 2009.

Of course when science gets most of its money from the state it is predictable that those that control state will call the tune. Perhaps science should gain its independence by becoming less greedy. Oh, and science routinely makes outrageously inflated claims of wisdom and morality based upon it's 'scientific' method. At a minimum stories like this remind us just how fallible the 'famed' scientific process' is.

Scientists are like anyone else and have no claim to special moral or intellectual status. They're just as big a wieners as the rest of us.