Mayor Bloomberg delivered a solid commencement speech and Johns Hopkins last week.
Today, we are seeing hundreds of years of scientific discovery being challenged by people who simply disregard facts that don't happen to agree with their agendas. Some call it "pseudo-science," others call it "faith-based science," but when you notice where this negligence tends to take place, you might as well call it "political science." You can see "political science" at work when it comes to global warming. Despite near unanimity in the science community there's now a movement - driven by ideology and short-term economics - to ignore the evidence and discredit the reality of climate change.
The speech goes well with a recent article in Seed Magazine on the American war on science, which points out that the US depends heavily on imported brainpower. The countries that typically provide a majority of our PhD students and high tech workers are growing more advanced, thus less people feel the need to immigrate here. Plus, even if they wanted to, backlogs at the INS have been huge after 9/11. The article mentions that's gotten better only recently.