Iowa is a great place to be if you are at all interested in national politics. Case in point: last Thursday I found myself in the same place as presidential hopeful Joe Biden. He was at the University Bookstore signing copies of his book, "Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics". The line wasn't very long, and I consider Joe to be one of my top three candidates this year. So I ponied up the $27 to buy a copy so that I could get him to sign it and throw a few questions at him.I introduced myself as a Biology Professor and asked him about his thoughts on basic science funding. Without hesitation, he said that he would support a doubling of the NIH and NSF budgets. When I asked if I could post that comment on my blog, Biden agreed. He also was keenly aware that the although funding for both has increased in recent years under the current administration, it has not been effective at increasing basic science. I don't know how much of that was just telling me what I wanted to hear, but I was pleased.
He signed my book "Keep the faith. Keep on teaching" I don't know about the former....
On a related topic, check out the following link that matches your views to those of the current presidential candidates.
Just wondering if your calculations include this news--Ron Paul comes out in favor of gay unions:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/70276/
Bennett:
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what gay unions have to do with science funding, but I'm glad to see that Ron Paul is favor of them (as am I). I disagree with RP on many other issues. I simply don't know where he stands on science funding. Will he partcipate in a Science Debate?
http://www.sciencedebate2008.com
Obama and Biden are the lesser of all the evils at this point. I had actually planned to vote for McCain ( My husband is an AZ boy and respected McCain as governor ) but after his choice of Sarah Palin for running mate, I'm beginning to wonder if his elevator still goes al the way to the top floor.
ReplyDeleteIf he wanted a female running mate, I'm sure he could have found a better candidate for the position. Picking Palin out of the multitude of those who are actually qualified is a direct insult to the American intelligence! (oxymoron?)
On one hand, I have funding for scientific advances and research, not to mention tax breaks for companies that want to develop green / renewable energy, and on the other I have two candidates that seem to regurgitate everything Bush currently believes in. (=stagnation)
More oil won't solve our problem-- it will only lead to crippling us if some natural disaster should come along and wipe out pipelines-- but green energy could be developed virtually anywhere.
And, as someone who has worked with children who have parents with crap for insurance, I am 100% on the universal healthcare bandwagon
Obama/Biden '08
~Sorry I rambled a little bit~
"The experience she comes from is with what she has done in the government, and also remember Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia so it's not as if she doesn't understand what's at stake here."
--Cindy McCain on Fox News defending the fact that Sarah Palin has no National Security experience.