The advent of science blogging in the early- and mid-2000s meant people needed things to write about - and people generally want to live in important times. That meant exaggeration, hysteria and hyperbole.

Journalism, in general, and science journalism in particular, has long been overwhelmingly partisan - a whole chapter in Science Left Behind was devoted to the death of science journalism, highlighting the unwillingness to ask the awkward questions regarding policy topics they personally favored, an inability to be trusted guides for the public and a desire to be cheerleaders for science rather than reporters about it.

Given that overwhelmingly political slant, it's no surprise the bulk of scientists and science journalists who got into blogging focused on Republicans.  The sitting President was a Republican and he made a decision to limit federal funding for human embryonic stem cells to existing lines - which thrilled the NIH, since they had never been funded before at all, but even most Republicans were against his decision until it became a clear political issue.

However, had blogging taken off in the 1990s not only would the focus not have been on Republicans, the media attention on science issues might have kept scientists in American academia from joining the journalists doing the framing in exiting the mainstream and becoming overwhelmingly Democrats. In the 1990s, Democrats were the ones in a war on science. After all, the Kyoto treaty was never ratified because President Clinton never submitted it to be ratified. He was happy to let his Vice-President, Al Gore, endorse it, just like the V-P endorsed ethanol, but he had no interest in ratifying it. Today, the spin doctors claim he never submitted it because it wouldn't have gotten ratified by Republicans - which is true, though also true the majority of Democrats were against it also.

In the 1990s, Democrats were anti-science, especially when it came to being anti-Republican. The Superconducting SuperCollider was the brainchild of the Reagan admininstration, so Clinton wanted that gone.  And the IFR, modern nuclear technology that couldn't have a meltdown, was scuttled by both Clinton and John Kerry even though it worked perfectly - there would have been no Fukushima or Three Mile Island.

Today, that anti-science legacy lives on. While Republicans are most against a global warming solution, and they are just about tied on evolution acceptance, on everything else Democrats lead the charge in being anti-science. They are against science in food, energy and medicine and the best advocates can claim is that those issues are "bipartisan" - bipartisan being if 53 Democrats and 2 Republicans in Congress want to put warning labels on GMOs or if one Republican in a horde of Democrats (including the President) say vaccines cause autism.

But there is at least some rationalization on being anti-science about biology ('we are anti-corporation, not anti-science') and medicine ('we are anti-corporation about medicine, not anti-science') when it comes to nuclear power they don't even do the Jane Fonda schtick of being anti-corporation or claiming that nuclear power has caused a "cancer epidemic", they just say nuclear power is wrong and that is all there is to it. No further explanation needed.

Senator Harry Reid is as anti-science as it gets.  While the science is settled on Yucca Mountain, and has been for decades, he has rigged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with anti-nuclear activists and is now trying to water down Filibuster rules - specifically so Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility can't be voted on.  Ironically, Reid refers to destroying filibuster rules as the "nuclear option". 

Meanwhile, the President claims that he wants to explore all energy options and approves loans for modular nuclear facilities - but then pulls the funding for half-completed projects like the mixed-oxide fuel fabrication program (MOX) at the Savannah River nuclear facility that would safely dispose of weapons-grade plutonium from our retired nuclear arsenal and convert it into safe, usable fuel for commercial power-generating nuclear facilities.

Then, the Department of Energy changed the "terms and conditions" for the loans they gave to build the first new nuclear plants in 30 years the President took credit for approving - something they never did to Solyndra or any of the other bankrupt solar companies that were pet projects of a $72 billion stimulus plan.

It's bait-and-switch, to claim to care about energy while showing Democrats they are still anti-science.