Advocating for children and adults with disabilities, this blog began during the 2008 presidential campaign to track the candidates' positions and records. Citizen advocacy for people with disabilities and their families is critical, and not just during election seasons. Don't let your elected officials play politics with your children and loved ones. They deserve better.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
The Secret Life of Fruit Flies
Read "Palin Wants to Help Special Needs Kids By Doing Away With Science." In Palin's recent speech, she mocked research on fruit flies and said that money could be spent on autism research. Turns out, fruit fly research has been instrumental in helping improve our understanding of autism. In fact, research on fruit flies is no more unusual than research on mice and rats. Oops.
On Countdown, Newsweek senior White House correspondent Richard Wolfe called this the "most mindless, ignorant, uninformed comment we've seen from Gov. Palin so far....If you give your first major policy speech of the campaign and make this kind of basic error, you either don't have a scientific advisor or you don't have a speechwriter who knows what they're saying." Watch the video here.
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2 comments:
thanks for taking the time to expose this woman's lies and ignorance!
Palin's comment fits well within what I identify as anti-intellectualism. In the last decade as college tuition has sky rocketed education is perceived to be useful for one thing--a well paying job. Complex questions are discouraged in the campaign, in politics, and among the general public. Palin's ignorance thus highlights a much larger problem: the lack of value placed on education.
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