Reasons to Vote George Bush Out of Office

George Bush might be the worst president in U.S. history. (Nobel Laureate George Akerlof has an opinion on that assessment.)

This page gives a detailed list of just why the Bush administration is so awful. As many items as possible are backed up by cites, so this page has lots of links.

A disproportionate share of the references on this page are to N.Y. Times articles. These are generally available free for a week after they appear, then you must pay for them. You must also register to use the Times Web site. However, similar references can generally be found in the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, or Los Angeles Times, which have varying registration and archiving policies. Some items will be reported on by the Wall Street Journal or The Nation, to take rather different ends of the political spectrum.

Do you know of a good a reason to vote GWB out of office, one that's not on this page yet? If so, and if you can provide a citation, send me mail and I'll put it up here. Please take a look to see if the reason is already here, and please do include a citation.

The New York Times endorses Kerry and damns Bush.

This page is divided up into the following general sections:

Other Resources to Help Vote GWB Out

I'm not the only person to have had this idea. Here are other pages you might consult:

Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader is a reason we're in this mess in the first place. George Bush "won" Florida by a heavily-disputed 537 votes. More than 93,000 votes were cast for Nader. Now Nader is running again, and he's accepting money from Republicans, who see him as taking votes from Kerry.

A vote for Ralph Nader is a vote for George Bush. Don't waste your vote on Ralph Nader.

Defeat George Bush. Vote for John Kerry and John Edwards.

George W. Bush and His White House

 George Bush was not much of a student and not much of a businessman, but he made a lot of money anyway, thanks to his friends and his father's friends. Here's some information on GWB, his family, and his administration, including references to books about the Bush admin:
  1. Investors in his oil companies lost money, but not George.
  2. The Bush family is very friendly with the House of Saud, rulers of Saudi Arabia. Could this be why we're in Iraq instead of pressuring our "allies," the Saudis, about conditions in their country that give rise to terrorism? Read some excerpts from Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud in Salon. (You might have to be a premium member, but you can get a free day pass.)
  3. Read about the corrupt Riggs Bank and its connections to both the Bush family and the House of Saud.
  4. The NY Times wasn't thrilled with House of Bush, House of Saud, however.
  5. Read about how four generations of the Bush family have profited by manipulating American foreign policy, in Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.
  6. Sometimes you have to laugh at it all anyway.
  7. The Bush administration plays hardball with any former officials who aren't loyal to the death. Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson, Richard Clarke: watch the smear campaigns.
  8. Bush administration won't declassify all of Richard Clarke's testimony. Instead, they're going through it with a fine-toothed comb declassifying selected sections - for partisan purposes and to smear Clarke.
  9. Bush has spent nearly 40% of his time in office at one presidential retreat or another.
  10. Unlike George Bush, Hans Blix wanted evidence about WMD in Iraq.
  11. Read about Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies and Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, both of which are critical to understanding failures in intelligence in the Clinton and Bush White Houses.
  12. The Republicans really don't want you to vote. Read about voter intimidation tactices.
  13. Where was George? Lots of stories emerge about his military service:
    1. George Bush didn't go to Vietnam, and he didn't do much of a job of fulfilling his National Guard duty, either.
    2. Read an analysis of GWB's military records.
    3. Nicholas Kristof notes that credible witnesses now say Bush didn't serve in Alabama.
    4. Various documents suggest that Bush got special treatment in the National Guard.
    5. Bush's former business school professor says he was a dunce.
    6. The Nation find that it's likely Bush left his Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 for reasons pertaining to his inability to continue piloting jets.
    7. U.S. News & World Reports can't figure out how Bush got an honorable discharge.
    8. Salon's Eric Boehlert has looked at the documents in question.
  14. Some information about how Christian fundamentalists are trying to create a Christian republic.
  15. Graydon Carter on what we have lost under this administration.
  16. The L.A. Times wonders about Bush's intellect and ability to lead.
  17. An NPR report on the systematic exclusion of dissenters from Bush campaign speeches and other tactics that sound like something out of the 1930s or 1984.
  18. Ron Suskind on how the Bush White House does it.

The Stolen 2000 Presidential Election and Potential Issues with the 2004 Election

  1. The Orland Sentinel has the definitive report on 2000.
  2. The United States Commission on Civil Rights believes that thousands of African-Americans were systematically deprived of their right to vote in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, when George Bush's "margin" of "victory" was under 600 votes.
  3. Nobel laureate and former president Jimmy Carter thinks the 2004 Florida general election may not meet international voting standards.
  4. Bad stuff continues to go on in Florida.
  5. Overseas voters may not get to vote.
  6. Electronic voting machines are problematic. There is a lot of information out there about them. Start with Bev Harris's site, Black Box Voting.
  7. Want to do something about this? If you're a nerd...er, technical profession, try Verified Voting's TechWatch. If not, just go to Verified Voting's main page.
  8. Voter suppression, Republican style, or, Have They No Shame?

Environmental Issues
  1. BushGreenwatch keeps tabs on the environmental record of the Bush administration.
  2. Bush administration opens an additional 300,000 acres of Tongass National Forest, Alaska, to road-building, a possible first step to more logging.
  3. New Bush plan lets regional directors of the Forest Service open forests to logging without even conducting an environmental impact study.
  4. Bush administration's proposal to eliminate the Roadless Area Conservation Rule in national forests. (Bad environmental protection and also bad economics: roads are built to subsidize the timber industry, which pays less in user fees than the government spends on the roads.)
  5. Support for drilling in ANWR
  6. Using forest fire prevention as an excuse for more logging in national forests.
  7. Rollback of allowable arsenic levels in drinking water
  8. Rejection of Kyoto accords
  9. Overruling stricter CA environmental laws
  10. Foxes guarding the henhouse: here's a good rundown on Bush's anti-environment, environmental advisors.
  11. More foxes "guarding" the henhouse: The L.A. Times reports that lobbyists for coal-fired power plants wrote the new regulations regulating mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.
  12. Appointment of Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, the "Garden State" as EPA head. Subsequent blocking of her every decent instinct, resulting in her early departure.
  13. Gale Norton, former Colorado AG and formerly serving under James Watt, as Sec'y of the Interior. "Norton began her private legal career as a staffer at the anti-environmental Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation where she spent four years before being elected to two terms as Colorado's attorney general. Other Mountain States Legal Foundation alumni include Anne Gorsuch, Reagan's controversial EPA head who was forced to resign amidst scandal..."
  14. The Summitville Mining Co. disaster, a disaster both ecologically and financially. An instructive lesson on the dangers of allowing companies to police themselves, and it all happened when Norton was AG in Colorado. The New York Times reports that "Even some Republican groups have expressed concern over Bush's choice to make Norton responsible for managing nearly half a million acres of federal lands and enforcing laws that protect threatened and endangered species."
  15. Increased development in national forests: In an interview at his ranch, Bush said he was reviewing (i.e. sturing the possibility of abandoning) regulations that protect roughly 60 million acres of nation forest from development.

  16. The White House blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from warning homeowners about the dangers of asbestos-contaminated insulation.

    The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that "The Environmental Protection Agency was on the verge of warning millions of Americans that their attics and walls might contain asbestos-contaminated insulation. But, at the last minute, the White House intervened, and the warning has never been issued.

    The agency's refusal to share its knowledge of what is believed to be a widespread health risk has been criticized by a former EPA administrator under two Republican presidents, a Democratic U.S. senator and physicians and scientists who have treated victims of the contamination."

  17. The Bush administration claims to favor states' rights, but that states rights suddenly become irrelevant when states try to protect the environment. Elizabeth Shogren of The LA Times reports:

    WASHINGTON — No recent president has been quicker than George W. Bush to embrace the virtues of state and local control. But when it comes to the environment, William Becker discovered, that commitment can evaporate when state regulation would be tougher on industry than federal rules.

    Becker, who represents administrators of state air-pollution programs in Washington, met with White House officials last month to appeal to them not to weaken the Clean Air Act.

    He used the administration's own rhetoric about the value of local decision making to support his case. Surely, he said, the administration would not stand in the way of states that wanted to enforce tougher clean-air rules on utilities and major polluters.

    Wrong.

    More: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-states29dec29001506,0,743959.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dnation.

  18. Loosened EPA air pollution standards for oil refineries and manufacturing plants, which allows them to modernize their facilities without installing pollution-control equipment—a rule change that could actually increase the level of dangerous pollutants emitted into the air. A spokesman for the NAM, which fought for the change, called the new rules "a refreshingly flexible approach to regulation." [In general, "flexibility" is code for "less enforcement."]
  19. Moved to renew thirty-six oil company leases of land off Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties for possible future development, arguing that the California Coastal Commission had no authority to restrict oil drilling in coastal waters. Bush's move was blocked by a three-judge panel, which ruled in early December that the state has the authority to review potential effects of oil drilling along its coast—a ruling the Bush Administration is likely to appeal.
  20. Allowed logging companies to cut down old-growth trees in our nation's forests under the guise of reducing the risk of forest fires.
  21. Rolled back safeguards, opposed by the American Forest and Paper Association, that protect fish and wildlife from logging in 155 national forests with 192 million acres of public land in forty-four states. It removed a Clinton-era regulation requiring comprehensive environmental impact statements whenever the Forest Service revises its forest management plans. The Bush plan, instead, will give each forest manager discretion in deciding whether and how to assess environmental impacts; a move that the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife said would allow "reckless logging by timber-industry profiteers and the destruction of habitat for many species of wildlife."
  22. Reversed a Clinton Administration rule banning snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.
  23. Approved the drilling of two new natural gas wells in Texas's Padre Island National Park adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico—which lies along the nation's longest stretch of undeveloped beach and which is home to eleven endangered species.
  24. Allowed Calpine, a private utility company that contributed to the Bush campaign, to construct of a forty-eight-megawatt geothermal power plant in the Modoc National Forest in California. The Clinton Administration had blocked this proposal because of concerns by environmental groups and by Indian tribes that consider part of the area sacred. In approving the project, the Bush Administration rejected a recommendation by the Advisory Council on Historical Preservation, a federal agency.
  25. Changes in dolphin-safe tuna identification, December, 2002
  26. Administration order takes 200 million acres of federal land out of wilderness category, opening it to development.
  27. The Bush administration allowed timber industry lobbyists to dictate a five-point plan that will allow more logging in Pacific Northwest national forests.
  28. EPA relaxes rules on sale of sites contaminated with PCBs
  29. EPA decides to drop investigations into 50 power plants for past violations of the Clean Air Act; instead, cases will be judged under the new, less stringent new-source-control rules.
  30. Courts overturn the Bush administration's attempt to roll back Clinton-era rules on air-conditioner efficiency.
  31. The Bush administration is trying to revamp rules protecting watersheds and streams from being destroyed by the strip-mining technique called "mountaintop removal."
  32. The EPA's job is now promoting energy, not protecting the environment.

  33. Bush administration changes the rules of the Northwest Forest Plan, easing rules on logging and species protection.
  34. The Bush administration has quietly undone 30 years of progress on clean air.
  35. The head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy lost his job for blowing the whistle on the Bush administration's whitewashing of a major ecological disaster.
  36. Scientists say that White House staff members played down the environmental and health hazards of mercury while working with the EPA to draft new regulations.
  37. Bush administration proposes rolling back Clinton-era regulations on logging and road-building in forests.
  38. Bush administration's attempt to change rules on dolphin-safe tuna are ruled purely political, with no science involved.
  39. National Park Service to allow up to 720 snowmobiles per day in Yellowstone National Park.
  40. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has written a book, Crimes Against Nature, about how the Bush administration has undermined environmental protection.
  41. If you think global warming isn't real, perhaps you should visit Alaska.
  42. The Sierra Club has a list of 300 Bush administration crimes against nature.

Other Scientific Matters
  1. Bush administration proposes a very strange variety of "peer review," most likely to tie up environmental and health regulations under a crushing burden of evidence.
  2. The House of Representatives has an ongoing investigation of how politics is affecting science under the Bush administration.
  3. Bush administration challenges a World Health Organization study and recommendations concerning obesity.
  4. A group of sixty scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, believes the Bush administration has "deliberately and systematically" distorted scientific fact in service of policy goals. (For more information see the Union of Concerned Scientists' Web site.
  5. The Bush administration has lied about stem cell research as much as about WMD.
  6. Want research into cures for diabetes, Alzheimer's, and other devestating chronic illnesses? Too bad the most promising current area involves stem cell research, which is opposed by religious conservatives to whom the Bush administration panders.
  7. Union of Concerned Scientists cites more instances of Bush administration manipulation of science to fit policy goals.
  8. How Science Became a Partisan Issue under GWB.

Money, Finance, Economy
  1. Cash bonuses for political appointees restored.
  2. Planned privatization of up to 850,000 federal jobs. This is worse than it sounds at first sight. For the employees it means the loss of union protection. For the rest of us it means network of private/public contractors that owe their livelihood entirely to Republican patronage.
  3. Admin kills mass-layoff report as of December 1, 2002
  4. Bush's abysmal job-creation record: worst since record-keeping began.
  5. Federal deficit reaches $455 billion for fiscal year 2002-2003, 50% higher than predicted in Feb. 2003.
  6. Two million jobs lost under Bush.
  7. Problems in extending unemployment benefits

  8. Stunning fiscal irresponsibility. The deficit under Republican governments:

    Deficit graph from Reuters, using CBO data

    (The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has a Web site with lots of worthwhile information about the budget.)

  9. Huge deficits (a consequence of huge tax cuts and a crashing economy) make tough choices.
  10. Paul Krugman on The Tax Cut Con, Sunday NY Times Magazine, September 14, 2003.
  11. Even the International Monetary Fund thinks the ballooning deficits and current tax policy of the United States are terrible for the world economy.
  12. Ousted former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill blows the whistle on the Bush tax cuts: even Alan Greenspan thought they were irresponsible.
  13. White House projects deficit of more than $500 billion this year; the recently-passed sop-to-the-drug companies will cost about 1/3 more than originally projected.
  14. The Bush administration may have threatened to fire the chief Medicare actuary if he disclosed to Congress his calculations on the cost of the Medicare drug benefit legislation.
  15. Then-Medicare administrator Thomas Scully may have forced the chief Medicare actuary to keep his calculations secret.
  16. The Bush Administration has planted propaganda as fake news stories in praise of the new Medicare laws.
  17. The new Medicare law, covering prescription medications, knocks seven years off Medicare solvency.
  18. The Bush admin. claims 308,000 jobs were created in February, 2004, but 47,000 of those jobs were "created" because the CA grocery workers' strike ended.
  19. It's the dishonesty, stupid, says Paul Krugman: in the way the Bush administration talks about Bush's National Guard service and about the deficit.
  20. Corporations are paying less taxes than ever, thanks to the Bush tax cuts.
  21. Bush's tax ideas probably would raise your taxes and mine while lowering those of the rich.
  22. It's the economy, stupid: only 96,000 jobs created in September, 2004.

The Hyperpoliticization of Policy

John DiIulio observed, first-hand, the lack of policymaking in the administration: "everything is political". Note that this is an administration that's both hyperpolitical an hypersensitive: the administration accuses Democratic politicians of "politicization" merely for attempting to debate administration actions.

  1. The Boston Globe tells you all about how the Republicans in Congress are undermining the democratic process:

Appointments
  1. John Ashcroft (afraid of calico cats; covers century-old statue with fabric fig leaf; odd view of Constitution and Bill of Rights; etc.)
  2. John Ashcroft's 2000 Senate re-election campaign committee is in hot water over campaign finance law violations.
  3. Judicial appointees (multiple problem nominees; opponents of abortion, disability rights, etc.)
  4. Convicted Iran-Contra criminal Elliot Abrams (pardoned by Bush 41) as Middle East guy in the White House.
  5. Attempt to appoint of Henry Kissinger to head 9/11 investigatory panel
  6. Appointments of Iran/Contra veterans John Poindexter, John Negroponte, and Otto Reich to responsible positions in the administration.
  7. People like Gale Norton and Christie Whitman to environmental areas
  8. David Hager, FDA Womens' Health committee chair believes in Christian healing (Hager was appointed to committee but not as chair)
  9. Alberto Gonzalez, White House counsel and possible future Supreme Court nominee

  10. Starr team takes over the White House counsel's office.. These are the people who brought you the impeachment of Bill Clinton:

  11. The Environmental Working Group has a good rundown of Bush's anti-environment, environmental advisors.
  12. Judge appointed by Bush says GAO has no right to know which people helped develop energy policy: he says the GAO has no standing to sue Cheney.
  13. Replaced three ruling-class members of his economic team (SEC chairman Harvey Pitt, a lawyer for the major accounting firms; Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa; and chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, former Federal Reserve Board governor) with three other ruling-class members (John Snow, chief executive of CSX Corporation and former head of the powerful Business Roundtable, to the Treasury post; investment banker William Donaldson to the SEC job; and Stephen Friedman, former chairman of investment banking firm Goldman Sachs and current director of unionbuster Wal-Mart, as chief economic adviser).
  14. Former Treasury Secretary O'Neill has a low opinion of President Bush, it seems.
  15. Charles Pickering nominated for court appointment, rejected, renominated after 2002 elections.
  16. Charles Pickering rejected again, then installed by Bush in early 2004 during the Congressional recess. Bush termed "unprecedented" the Democrats' blocking of 4 of his judicial nominees, apparently forgetting that the Republicans blocked 114 of Clinton's nominees.
  17. The right-winging of the Federal judiciary—not just the Supreme Court, which gets attention, but all levels.
  18. Miguel Estrada, nominee without a record: the Bush administration would not release his writings as assistant solicitor general, claiming this would be "unprecedented," even though Bush 41's administration was willing to release such material written by Robert Bork. (Estrada withdrew in September 2003.)
  19. The Houston school district, from which education secretary Rod Paige hails, falsified the number of assaults in the district by failing to report crime in the district to the Texas Education Agency.
  20. The Houston school district also falsified the number of dropouts to make their programs look better and provide support for unproven changes in education policy that the Bush Administration wants. (This was a story during July and August 2003.) To quote the article cited above, "Houston, however, has been held up as a pillar of the so-called Texas miracle in education, though it was battered earlier this year by disclosure of false school statistics: a state audit found that the authorities had failed to report properly thousands of school dropouts, giving the district an impressive-looking but fake dropout rate of just 1.5 percent."
  21. Families of new nominees to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting made huge donations ($800,000) to Bush.
  22. The newly-appointed Special Counsel removes job protections for gay and lesbian federal employees.

Education
  1. Buried in the No Child Left Behind Act is a provision requiring secondary schools to provide contact information on students to the military or face loss of funding. This legislation is also full of educationally disastrous provisions—part of the right's desire/plot to destroy public education. See the NY Times's education columns for lots of information about this.
  2. No Child Left Behind Act — underfunded, turns successful schools into "failing schools."
  3. Pell Grant formula changed; 84,000 students won't get them, hundreds of thousands more will have reduced grants.
  4. No Child Left Behind Act crowds existing classrooms and disrupts good schools without improving supposedly bad schools.
  5. Bush administration refuses to add money to budget for federally-funded meals for school children, , which was proposed to help improve the quality of food served and reduce vending machines with junk food in the schools. Instead, administration will try to weed out the ineligible.
  6. The No Child Left Behind Act requires developmentally disabled kids to meet the same milestones as nondisabled kids, thereby turning more good schools into failing schools.
  7. Student loan lenders cost taxpayers hundreds of millions while the Dept. of Education claims it can't do anything.

Energy

Information from a friend on the Well who is involved in energy policy. Note that this is mostly speculation about bad things that might happen under this admin. If you're interested in discussing this with him, I'll be happy to provide his email address:

Let us consider what the world might look like in 2003:

Here's what the administration has already done:

  1. Failure to act when Enron & other traders were putting CA through energy hell. From Fox News: "Commenting on the ongoing energy crisis in California, Bush said California will have to dig itself out of whatever hole it is in."
  2. A good site on "deregulation" policy: http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/powering/
  3. Drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge: From the New York Times article Norton Confidently Makes Case for Alaskan Oil Drilling (1/20/01): "Ms. Norton told a Senate committee that the energy shortages gripping California were just one indication of a "very long and serious problem" that demanded an effort to begin tapping the vast oil reserves believed to lie beneath the refuge's coastal plain."
  4. Connections to Enron and supppression of attempts to investigate same
  5. Refusal to reveal with whom Cheney met during development of energy policy
  6. Judge appointed by Bush says GAO doesn't have standing to sue Cheney to get list of people who helped develop energy policy
  7. WSJ reports 12/6/02 that potential appointees to OSHA were asked who they voted for for president in 2000 and where they stand on abortion.
  8. More info on the politicization of science: a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Criminal Justice

From the San Franicisco Chronicle:

Criminal justice experts say they have become increasingly concerned that the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft is moving to exert political control over previously independent agencies within the department that collect crime statistics and grant crime research awards.

At stake, they say, is the integrity of statistics about whether crime is increasing or decreasing and the findings of scholars about what causes crime and the best ways to reduce it.

...

The agencies, created by Congress, have long been independent of the attorney general and in the past were allowed to release reports or make research grants without clearance by the attorney general's office, former directors of these offices said.

But a number of employees in those agencies as well as former officials and leading scholars said in interviews that over the last year and withincreasing speed recently, political appointees under Ashcroft have worked to undermine that independence.

Passage of the USA PATRIOT act

Creation of the Homeland Security Department

Civil Liberties
  1. "This would be a heck of a lot easier if this were a dictatorship"

  2. New Cabinet Level Agency Proposed Panel recommends sweeping national security changes (CNN, 1/31/01)

    WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A blue-ribbon commission unveiled a detailed report on national security Wednesday, calling for sweeping changes in the way the government handles what it calls a "significant and growing" threat of terrorism on U.S. soil. One of the panel's main recommendations is for President Bush to create a new Cabinet-level National Homeland Security Agency to handle prevention, response and recovery to terrorist incidents. (Note: this was pre-WTC.)

  3. Secret detentions of US citizens
  4. Roundup of immigrant men by INS, December 2002
  5. TIPS program
  6. "Total Information Awareness" (TIA)
  7. Anti-terrorist legislation used for other things: North Carolina methamphetamine producer charged under state law prohibiting production of weapons of mass destruction. (Admittedly a state case, but...) http://www.mountaintimes.com/mtweekly/2003/0717/meth.php3
  8. Bush calls for broader police powers to fight terrorism. Translation: broader powers of search and seizure; greater use of the death penalty.
  9. Bush wants federal agents to be legally allowed to have access to private records and compel testimony without a judge's approval. Even Republicans like Senator Arlen Spector are concerned about these provisions.
  10. Do you think we have the right to protest? George Bush's people make sure he never sees protestors and make sure protestors get arrested for the content of their protest signs.
  11. Do you think we have the right to protest, revisted? The FBI has instructed police to keep tabs on those opposed to the Iraq war, and federal prosecutors issued grand jury subpoenas to the student chapter of the National Lawyers Guild at Drake University after the NLG conducted a seminar about stopping the occupation of Iraq.
  12. Revisting the right to protest yet again: There's more spying on dissenters by the FBI, in the name of "fighting terrorism."
  13. The Bush administration says that Federal law does not recognize a patient-physician privilege and patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential." This is a change from past administration statements, and it's all because of abortion.
  14. The Republican National Committee is prepared to harrass TV stations airing MoveOn's ads.
  15. The FBI is preemptively questioning political demonstrators to forestall protests at the Republican National Convention.

Disclosure and Secrecy

The Bush administration decides to refuse information requests from Democrats.

From a column by Al Martin (1/31/01):

What will it be like with George Bush Jr. as president?

It will be a return to the "Bush" form of government -- namely a government of shadowy cliques, secret commissions and de facto star chambers.

The new Bush Administration will probably accelerate the pace of re-arming China to make China the new boogeyman because nobody makes any money unless there's a boogeyman.

The Bush Administration will then use that as an excuse to pump up defense spending, to wit, all defense contractors have given very generously to the Republican Party. Consequently, years later, a new Bush Administration will institute tax cuts for the wealthy and try to eliminate estate taxes which Bush has talked about in the past.

By the end of the first term of a new Bush Administration, all the surplus which is supposed to be used to reduce the national debt and repay the money his father swiped from social security would in fact be absorbed in new spending and tax cuts. [Note that this is true; the surplus is gone and the federal government is going to be in very big trouble in around 2010, a couple of years past what may be a second Bush term.]

From The New York Times:

Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records
By ADAM CLYMER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — The Bush administration has put a much tighter lid than recent presidents on government proceedings and the public release of information, exhibiting a penchant for secrecy that has been striking to historians, legal experts and lawmakers of both parties.

Attorney General Ashcroft won't talk to print reporters.

Health
  1. US attempts to block endorsement of condom use to prevent AIDS at UN 2002 population conference in Bangkok and tries to strike a "reproductive health services" and "reproductive rights" endorsement because those include abortion.
  2. Material on condom use, HIV prevention, breast cancer/abortion removed from HHS/CDC Web sites. (NY Times, Nov. 26, 2002)
  3. Abortions don't cause breast cancer, according to a new University of Oxford study,but that's some of the material removed from HHS/CDC Web sites.
  4. Administration continues to follow conservative agenda instead of good public health practice regarding condoms and AIDS.
  5. W. David Hager appointed to ( FDA Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs.
  6. Clinton-era ergonomics standards repealed
  7. The Eli Lilly clause in the Homeland Security Act, relieving the company of responsibility in any thimerosol-related lawsuits; request on Ashcroft's part to seal documents related to existing claims.
  8. Lowered product-labeling standards, allowing food makers to list health claims on labels before they have been scientifically proven. National Food Processors' Assoc. lobbied for this.
  9. The war on women and abortion.
  10. US reneges on contributions to family-planning funding because of fake China issue
  11. Nicholas Kristoff on women and children dying or ill in Africa because of the family-planning and women's health cuts.
  12. Relaxation of rules requiring hospitals to provide emergency care
  13. At the request of top Bush administration official, the Dept. of Health and Human Services played down significant health disparities among different racial groups. A number of members of the House of Representatives are up in arms over this.
  14. Bush administration goes to court to block lawsuits by consumers who say they have been injured by prescription drugs or medical devices, contending that consumers cannot recover damages for such injuries if the products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
  15. OSHA needs to be more business friendly, so no new regulations to prevent TB, etc. in the workplace.
  16. Newly-proposed regulations would bar HIV-prevention education materials from mentioning condoms.

Women's and Minority Rights
  1. Bush declares a national Sanctity of Human Life Day on January 19 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
  2. Bush and the Republican Party are out to ban abortion, whittling away the right to choose, bit by bit. To start with, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division will prosecute doctors who perform late-term abortions.
  3. On Martin Luther King's birthday, Bush denounces affirmative action.
  4. George Bush supports writing discrimination into the Constitution.
  5. Bush expected to sign the "Unborn Victims of Violence" Act, further undermining Roe v. Wade.
  6. Department of Labor removed reports on women's inequality in the workplace from its Web site.
  7. Under Ashcroft, voting rights may be treated very differently from in the past.

Dick Cheney
  1. "He doesn't tell Bush what to think," says a White House adviser and Cheney friend. "It's a process. He lays it out. He guides Bush's thinking to a conclusion. But he knows the conclusion going in."

  2. US wrecks cheap drugs deal—Cheney's intervention blocks pact to help poor countries after pharmaceutical firms lobby White House.

    By Larry Elliott + Charlotte Denny/The Guardian

    Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, last night blocked a global deal to provide cheap drugs to poor countries, following intense lobbying of the White House by America's pharmaceutical giants.

    Faced with furious opposition from all the other 140 members of the World Trade Organisation, the US refused to relax global patent laws which keep the price of drugs beyond reach of most developing countries.

  3. Giant, noncompetitive rebuilt-Iraq contracts awarded to Halliburton, Cheney's former company
  4. Cheney's continued financial ties to Halliburton, a legal conflict of interest.
  5. Halliburton's off-shore subsidiary - the one that can legally do business with terrorist countries such as Iran and Libya - has no off-shore offices and is not staffed entirely by non-US nationals, in violation of the law. In fact, its mail is all forwarded to the US and its address is a bank. This was set up while VP Cheney was an official of Halliburton.
  6. The director of Central Intelligence testifies that he has had to privately correct the publicly stated views of the President and Vice-President.
  7. Halliburton unable to account for where $1.8 billion went.
  8. The Canadian Broadcasting Company has shown an expose of Cheney and Halliburton.

War on the poor, middle class, and working classes
  1. Tax cuts for the rich. Read about how Bush and Greenspan disagreed.
  2. Bush admin proposes 50% cut in tax on dividends, with 10 year cost to Treasury of $100 billion dollars or more and tax benefits (overwhelming to the richest taxpayers. ).

  3. Editorial: 'Class warfare' / Who's victim, who's aggressor?
    Published Dec. 20, 2002
    ED20

    "Waging class warfare" is an accusation often and easily thrown at people who object to federal tax and spending policies that favor the wealthy. Sometimes that accusation has the ring of truth, but sometimes it better fits those who make it than those it is meant to describe. Now is one of those times. Consider these recent developments and then decide: Who is waging class warfare on whom?

  4. $300 million cut from program that provides heating subsidies to the poor
  5. Homeland Security department has a free hand to bypass civil service rulesi n promoting and firing workers and allowing the President to exempt unionized workers from collective bargaining agreements in the name of "national security."
  6. American companies may win government contracts even if they have moved offshore to evade corporate taxes (Homeland Security Act rider)
  7. Pay raise cut for 1.8 million Federal workers
  8. Refused to support an extension of unemployment benefits to about 750,000 American families whose benefits would run out three days after Christmas, until pressured by Congressional Democrats a week after front-page headlines announced that the nation's unemployment rate had reached 6 percent (an eight-year high) and that each week an additional 95,000 workers will lose their benefits.
  9. Proposed changes in rules covering employee pensions that will save companies money but threaten the retirement funds of older workers.
  10. The push to privatize Social Security
  11. Bush tries to change the definition of who is eligible for overtime pay, reducing the number eligible by up to eight million works; six Republicans cross the aisle to block the legislation.
  12. New overtime rules go into effect; up to six million workers who currently get overtime wages may lose them.
  13. Census bureau reports that 1.3 million more Americans are living in poverty and 1.4 million more Americans lack health insurance.
  14. The Bush administration wants to cut rent subsidies for poor families in NYC and New England. (They subsequently backed down.)

Outsourcing and Deregulation
  1. Possible outsourcing of Park Service jobs
  2. Possible outsourcing of air traffic control jobs. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put it, "The next time you're taking off or landing in the Seattle area, will you be comfortable with the notion that some of the airspace is being managed by a company that won the job by submitting the lowest bid?"

The Overall Bush Credibility Gap

As brought to you by House Democrats.

Not to mention the NY Times, which tells you about the ways the Bush campaign is distorting the facts.

September 11
  1. Pattern of blocking full Congressional investigation of how it happened (widely documented)
  2. Administration wants the Thomas Kean-headed investigation over and done with by May 27 - well in advance of Election Day.
  3. Initial appointment of Henry Kissinger, who would not disclose his customer list, as chair of the Federal investigation committee (widely documented.
  4. Censoring of eventual investigation because of information about Saudi government and its ties to Bush family.
  5. EPA Inspector General finds EPA and White House suppressed information about air quality in NYC following September 11 attacks.
  6. Bush administration falsely associates Saddam Hussein with September 11 despite there being no evidence of his involvement; high percentage of Americans think Hussein was responsible.
  7. Why do we know so little about what happened on September 11?
  8. Lots of info on discrepencies in the details of the events of September 11.
  9. Condi Rice won't testify before the 9/11 committee. What aren't you allowed to say?
  10. Former Clinton and Bush administration counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke recounts Bush's focus on Iraq the day after 9/11 and the difficulties he had setting up a meeting about Al Qaeda.
  11. One week before 9/11, Richard Clarke urged the Bush administration in writing to consider how they would feel if hundreds of Americans were killed in a terrorist strike.
  12. Despite an unprecedented number of warnings on terrorism in the summer of 2001, the Bush administration had little sense of urgency, according to director of central intelligence George Tenet.
  13. The White House is suppressing thousands of pages of Clinton Administration documents relating to September 11.
  14. A number of White House counterterrorism officials left after September 11 because of the Bush Administration's obsession with Iraq.
  15. Bush was warned on August 6, 2001 that Osama bin Laden planned an attack on the US that involved hijacked planes.
  16. Read about how Bush has screwed New York City since September 11, 2001.
  17. Senator Bob Graham thinks the Bush administration has covered up Saudi Arabian involvement in the September 11 terror attacks.
  18. The FBI is sitting on 120,000 hours of terrorism-related recordings that have not yet been translated, yet this same FBI has fired about a dozen translators because they are gay.
  19. The White House is blocking a damning CIA report until after the election.

War on Iraq
  1. The war has changed our allies' view of the U.S. and not for the better.
  2. Bush finally tells us something about what the war might cost as he asks for $87 billion more for Iraq.
  3. Paul Wolfowitz admits that he was wrong to claim that Al Qaeda and the remains of Saddam Hussein's government were working together against America.
  4. There are virtually no controls on U.S. spending in Iraq.
  5. Still no weapons of mass destruction. The NY Times editorial pages ask Colin Powell about this.
  6. Secretary of State Colin Powell tries to wiggle out of his 2001 statements saying that Iraq had not developed "any significant capacity" in weapons of mass destruction.
  7. A group of businessmen with close ties to the Bush family forms a company to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq.
  8. Did the Bush Administration start planning the Iraq war immediately after September 11 even though there was no evidence of a link to Iraq?
  9. A government task force said that the Iraqi oil industry was in bad shape, but the Bush administration lied publicly and said that Iraqi oil could finance the reconstruction.
  10. David Kay's report say that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed in the first Gulf War and subsequently, but Bush claims the report vindicates the war.
  11. A year-long State Department study accurately predicted the current (October, 2003) problems with the occupation of Iraq, but the Pentagon ignored it.
  12. Iraq contact the US and tried to make a deal to avoid a war, but the US wouldn't deal.
  13. Bush wanted to oust Hussein from the start of his presidency, according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
  14. Guess what? The "intelligence" that was the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction was badly flawed.
  15. Kenneth Pollack, who supported the war (see his book The Threatening Storm), discusses the lies that got us into Iraq.
  16. David Kay, former lead U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, says the weapons of mass destruction were gone long before the U.S. invaded.
  17. Bush administration denies that it said what it said about Saddam as an imminent threat.
  18. A terrorist the Bush administration knew about but did nothing about.
  19. The war in Iraq removed from Afghanistan special forces who had spent months establishing trust with the Afghans and looking for Osama bin Laden.
  20. Expect a civil war in Iraq because of our invasion.
  21. Just where ARE those billions going, anyway? Not to take care of our soldiers: U.S. ground toops are buying their own body armor to use in Iraq.
  22. Secretary of State Powell admits that the evidence he submitted to the U.N. as justification for the war may have been wrong.
  23. News about the bungled occupation, from an eyewitness.
  24. Even many loyal Republicans are looking askance at the Iraq quagmire.
  25. Business Week says Blame Bush for What Came After September 11.
  26. It's not going well in Iraq and the future is bleak, according to a secret memo of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
  27. Jeffrey Record's book Dark Victory explains why the war in Iraq has made us less safe.
  28. Read an interview with Jeffrey Record.
  29. The Bush administration isn't going to hold anyone accountable for Abu Ghraib.
  30. Abu Ghraib detainees were hidden from Red Cross inspector by the Army at the request of the CIA.
  31. The National Intelligence Council is pessimistic about the outcome of the Iraq war.
  32. The National Intelligence Council's prewar assessment of Iraq predicted that an American-led invasion would destabilize Iraq.
  33. A number of military experts say the war in Iraq is lost, it's helping Al-Qaeda, and there is no good way out.
  34. And plenty of people think Republicans are ill-equipped to fight the war on terror.
  35. The British ambassador to Italy says that George Bush is the best possible recruiter for Al Qaeda.
  36. The BBC News wonders How bad can things get? and makes it clear that the answer is "very bad."
  37. That organ of the liberal media, Military Week, thinks Bush/Cheney provide incompetent leadership.
  38. A soldier currently deployed in Iraq discusses why we can't win.
  39. CBS killed a story about how Bush made a deceptive case for going into Iraq.
  40. A representative of Bush's re-election campaign helped draft Iraq PM Iyad Allawi's speech to Congress last week.
  41. The New York Times reports in great detail about how the Bush administration turned dubious intelligence into a justification for the war.
  42. J. Paul Bremer - remember him? he used to run Iraq for the U.S.? - says that he had doubts from the start about whether there were enough U.S. troops in Iraq to establish security.
  43. The top American weapons inspector in Iraq reports that Iraq destroyed its WMD within months of the 1991 Gulf War and the last Iraqi factory capable of producing militarily significant quantities of such weapons was destroyed in 1996.
  44. Dick Cheney says the above report justifies the war. What? Peace is war!
  45. George Bush agrees with Cheney.
  46. The Times reports on Catastrophic Success in Iraq, where our strategy didn't foresee the current situation.
  47. Pat Robertson reports that Bush said there would be no casualties in Iraq.

Other Weird Stuff
  1. Faith-based national parks: the National Park Service removes gay rights demonstrations from the films at the Lincoln Memorial and allows creationist information to be sold in the Grand Canyon book store.

Last edited: October 20, 2004, but note that this sometimes changes daily and I forget to updated the date.

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