Jindal's Fruit Fly

Our favorite Exorcism loving anti-science wingnut, Bobby Jindal was tapped by Republican leadership to critique President Obama's stimulus plan on national television yesterday.

I'm skeptical of the stimulus plan but I think that something had to be done. The stimulus plan, for better or worse, is our only hope to paraphrase Leia.

One thing that does hearten me though is that Bobby Jindal had nothing to do with the plan. If Jindal typifies what the Republican response would have been, we are absolutely better off with Obama's stimulus.

Jindal made an amazingly ignorant Palin-esque fruit fly statement when he questioned the addition of $140 million for "volcano monitoring". The problem with this misstatement is not just inherent in the phrase "volcano monitoring", geological monitoring is just part of a number of projects under this funding program which Jindal failed to mention.

The second and more ironic issue with Jindal's comments is the fact that monitoring volcanic activity is a very effective way to predict natural disasters. Katrina was predicted in just this fashion, as seen in the Nova episode Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City, and their findings were mostly ignored due to the scientific ignorance of Republican and Democrat leadership.

Jindal is not a Conservative, he is an ignorant fundementalist and ID lackey. The Republicans need to win their party back from these terrifying neo-cons.