I hesitate to publish anything on April 1, but the interview’s dateline was yesterday.

What I’m saying is I’ve become much more pragmatic about all of this. Washington is about politics, and Bush has an electoral base that want him to behave certain ways, but what matters is policy. People were saying there was a “Republican War on Science,” and I say, “What war are you talking about?” And they say, “Well, they’re suppressing stem cell research. Oh, and there’s the environment. And the Republicans are in bed with oil companies.” So I check those boxes and say, “Is there anything else?” Well, no, not really. The budget for the NSF went up. The budget for NASA went up. The budget for the National Institutes of Health that gives grants for health research went up. So it’s not really a war on science. It’s a resistance to things that interfere with their two political agendas: one religion-based, the other oil-based. There it is. It’s called politics.

The full interview is interesting, including a credible defense of Scientology.