Current music:

peter gabriel, the last temptation of christ

some domestic issues, i.e. it's not just the war
I've tended to be writing only about the lies and damage being done by the Bush administration in the international arena, but there's plenty to say domestically too. E.g.:

THEN:
"I signed into law some of the toughest patient-protection laws in the nation [and] I support a patient bill of rights for all patients, similar to those already enacted in Texas."
- George W. Bush, USA Today op-ed entitled "I Will Build On My Record" 2000-08-17

(In reality, Bush didn't sign the law - he opposed it and let it pass without his signature after the legislature forced him to accept it)

NOW:
"Before the Supreme Court, the Bush administration opposed the Texas law, instead joining two managed-care companies, Aetna Health Inc. and Cigna HealthCare of Texas Inc. in their appeal of a federal appeals court's ruling that the Texas Health Care Liability Act and the federal law could coexist."
- NY Times, 6/21/04

Those two companies alone have given President Bush and the Republican Party more than $1.7 million since 2000.

As dailykos notes: "He opposes the Texas Patients' Bill of Rights, but it is passed by a veto-proof majority in the Texas legislature, so Bush lets it pass into law without a signature. Yet in a debate with Gore, Bush blatantly lies claiming he signed it. (The media was too busy calling Gore a liar to write about Bush's REAL lies.) Then, after Bush gets into office, he orders his Justice Department to fight the Texas law. Yesterday, Bush won. The Supreme Court has invalidated all state Patients' Bill of Right laws saying federal law supercedes it."

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Anyone who cares about the increasing environmental risks to our health or destruction of nature should check out Bush's various weakenings of environmental protections, often while lying about it and pretending to increase protections. The Sierra Club has been doing a good job of exposing this (and the latest issue of their magazine even has an article by a representative of Republicans for Environmental Protection who are also alarmed and outraged by Bush's environmantal record). E.g. they have a top 10 list, and a debunking of the misnamed "Clear Skies Act" and forest initiatives. And just as intelligence officials were pressured to come up with support for the Iraq invasion, environmental scientists are pressured to distort and rewrite their findings to fit the administration's anti-environmentalist agenda, and cutting funding and firing dissenters; this is actually frequently reported, e.g. by CNN (Union of Concerned Scientists raising a red flag) and The Nation.

A famous example was pressuring the EPA to tell New Yorkers the air was safe soon after 9/11. Yet none of this stuff sticks and they just keep getting away with it.

Science in this country is also suffering from our overzealous new Homeland Security laws that are preventing foreign scientists, researchers and students, from being able to easily renew their visas or enter for conferences; an astronomer friend of mine recently noted "Many of the best foreign students wind up staying in the US and we have benefited from a brain drain. We're losing it now, not for economic reasons, but because of the increased security and problems for foreigners. My postdoc got stuck in China for an unplanned 6 weeks with extra background checks. Pissed me off! There are cases where the US has let people hanging for nearly a year over a visa -- and these don't seem to be suspicious people, just unlucky ones."