So I guess 2016 claimed its biggest victim yet - America

Surely you meant to say the Truthseekers and Inquisitors of His Royal Highness, Donald J Trump, as I believe they’re officially titled.

So the Center for Disease Control can’t use the word “vulnerable,” as in someone might be vulnerable to a disease? WTF? And fetus? Why that? Because instead they want “child” or “unborn child” used?

I supposed instead of evidence based they can simply say evidence. Same with science based. Just say science concludes or something like that.

Hillary was right when she referred to them as deplorables. Except they are worse than that.

Also, where is this coming from? It’s not like Trump would come up with this. He might rubber-stamp it, but he’s too dumb to even come up with this list. Who is behind it?

He has a word whisperer. He gets the best words.

Ha ha. And then he garbles them.

Still allowed: susceptible, earned-benefit, heterogeneous, non-gender-limited, zygote, observed, and truth-tested.

Sure, any of this can be worded differently to get around it. I’m more concerned about what this indicates about how brazenly and widely the CDC’s work will be interfered with. They already have or have had restrictions on hot-button left vs. right issues. For example, I believe there’s still a law against them spending any personnel or funding on looking into how gun violence influences public health. However, even under Bush Jr. I don’t think they tried to interfere with science agencies really outside of the hot button issues of guns, environmentalism, and abortion. This seems broader and could get into things like vaccines, given Trump’s anti-vax tendencies. What’s next, pushback on research into how to improve public health for and around migrant communities (or has that already happened)?

Just a little liberal red meat from the indefatigable Charles Pierce:

In what passes for a genuine scoop, Tim Alberta and Rachael Cade broke the news in Politico on Thursday that Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, may well be hanging them up at the end of the 2018 midterms. Of course, Ryan—and various People Who Are Familiar With His Thinking—has a number of deeply pious, and unquestionably phony, reasons for his departure.

Charlie’s so great.

Of all the fucked up things this administrations done, this one scares me the most for some reason. Just straight up ideological censorship in a way that endangers public health. That is some straight up… Fuck, I don’t even know the word for it. It’s not Fascism or authoritarianism but it’s not something you’d ever expect to see in the United States, or any democracy for that matter.

It’s censorship. And it’s Orwellian.

Yup, it’s basically a form of Newspeak.

The worst part is what they want used instead of “science-based” or “evidence-based”:

CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.

Makes it pretty clear that they want to override the science and evidence based on the judgment of the agency’s political appointees.

And that’s bad enough on its own but what really scares me is the naked disregard for the public interest or the norms and values that define who we are as a nation. With tax reform or the net neutrality repeal, there is at least a fig leaf of bullshit to hide behind. This is just a flagrant assault on democracy

Subordinating science to politics has a name: Lysenkoism.

Not so fast:

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/plan-to-forbid-words-at-trumps-fda-withdrawn-after-after-report-of-new-cdc-policy-draws-outrage/

The hypocrisy of people who spend so much time bitching about political correctness banning scientific terms is off the charts.

These kinds of thought crime enforcements will still go on, they will just be done more quietly and handled by the middle managers so it doesn’t make a media splash.

According to that article it sounds like the CDC banned word list is still in effect but they decided against a similar ban for the FDA.

My ‘not so fast’ should have applied to me…