James Watt Award nominee #1

From this morning's Washington Post comes a story datelined out of Seattle. After recent comments from employees ran counter to official administration salmon policy flim-flam, doubletalk and damnable lies the Washington office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has brought the whip down. According to the story, NOAA "has instructed its representatives and scientists in the West to route media questions about salmon back to headquarters. Only three people in the entire agency, all of them political appointees, are now authorized to speak of salmon, according to a NOAA employee who has been silenced on the fish."

Money Quote: The order was issued the day after an article appeared last month in The Washington Post quoting federal technocrats making positive statements about two recent decisions -- one by a federal judge, the other by federal scientists -- that challenged previous Bush administration policy about protecting salmon in the troubled Klamath River, which flows out of Oregon into California.