A report we recently touched on, a work sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and which found that online townhalls boost both citizen engagement and politicians' approval ratings, has become the target of ire coming from the right side of the political spectrum. If you're wondering how a rather dry study of e-participation entered into partisan crosshairs, the deal is that Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, whom you might know is an OBGYN, doesn't think political science is an actual, you know, science science. (Or as he prefers to call it, political "science.") And so Coburn has been leading the charge from the Senate against the $9 million that NSF spends on political science research a year.

Coburn picked up on the National Science Foundation-sponsored report, and tweaked it for its focus on helping politicians confront bad approval numbers rather than helping patients confront bad diseases. Being a political scientist, David Lazer, the report's lead author and director of Harvard's Program on Networked Governance, tracked from there how his report became public enemy number one, and his look at how information travels and morphs across the web is fascinating. 20/20's John Stossel, for example, added an extra bit of partisan zing by suggesting that the partly taxpayer-funded report on online townhalls was a way of helping politicians avoid the unpleasant face-to-face confrontations seen during this summer's health care public forums. Check out Lazer's take for a deeper reading of how a study on e-participation got caught up in partisan political battling.