Scientists allege White House pressure
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. scientists felt pressured to tailor their writings on global warming to fit the Bush administration's skepticism, in some cases at the behest of an ex-oil industry lobbyist, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday.
"Our investigations found high-quality science struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
A survey by the group found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years, for a total of at least 435 incidents.
Not even science is sacred enough to be safe from the strangling grip of Bush. When is way more than enough going to be enough to get rid of this guy? He has lost all trust. He has ruined our good standing in the world. He has hurt our ecology. He has hurled us into trillions of dollars of debt. He lied us into a long, expensive, unethical, and deadly war. He has been wrong about EVERYTHING.
And he has been trying to discredit science. SCIENCE! And why? For polictics. For greed. And he is shameless about it all. For the past six years of his presidency and beyond that, Bush has denied global warming as a fact and denied that humans were the cause.
Now, this week, we are expecting a report from 2,500 scientists from all over the world on global warming and the damage it will do for the next 1,000 years, and Bush in his State of the Union address merely mentioned "climate change." He mentions it now that the effects of global warming are being seen and seven-tenths of Americans say global warming is a "serious issue." Kicking and screaming all the way, he mentions it. A mention is no where near the apology he should give or the actions he should take.
This is the same modus operandi with all of Bush's mistakes: Deny, deny, deny, and then, late in the game, when overwhelmed by public opinion, admit a mistake or two, but never apologize or rectify.
Here is another issue that liberals and progressives have been talking about for a long time that the mainstream media is finally reporting:
Investigators: Millions in Iraq Aid Wasted
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.
The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion and left the region near civil war.
[...]
According to the report, the State Department paid $43.8 million to contractor DynCorp International for the residential camp for police training personnel outside of Baghdad's Adnan Palace grounds that has stood empty for months. About $4.2 million of the money was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool, all ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior but never authorized by the U.S.
U.S. officials spent another $36.4 million for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that can't be accounted for. DynCorp also may have prematurely billed $18 million in other potentially unjustified costs, the report said.
(Read the whole article for more outrages like how the previous, Republican-controlled Congress tried to prevent reports like this by firing Bowen.)
The point is: Bush is a loser. He ran three Texas oil companies into bankruptcy, and he is running our country in to bankruptcy as well. He lost the popular vote in 2000, and only became president because the Supreme Court stopped the recount in Florida. He lost Osama bin Laden. He is losing in Iraq. He was the first president since Hoover to lose more jobs than create jobs during his first term. He is losing the middle class. He is losing his popularity in the polls, and the only reason he had any popularity to lose was because of the solidarity that followed 9/11. He would have lost his re-election in 2004 if it was not for 9/11. He lost his party's control over both houses of Congress in 2006. He lost on social security reform. The man is such a loser, he could be a cooler in Las Vegas.
He is such a loser that I cannot understand how anyone can take him or any of his ideas seriously anymore. Obviously, I think he needs to go... now. He should resign or be impeached. If neither occurs, then we need to listen to all of his ideas and then just do the opposite of whatever he suggests because, president or not, we should not be following this loser.
Let us start with what he said yesterday:
Bush promotes his free trade initiatives
EAST PEORIA, Illinois: With U.S. Democrats making the case that his economic policies have benefited the rich more than the middle class, President George W. Bush struck back on Tuesday, in the first of back-to-back speeches promoting what the White House characterizes as 41 consecutive months of economic growth.
Bush came here to East Peoria, home to Caterpillar, the world's biggest manufacturer of earth-moving equipment, to advance his free trade initiatives and press Democrats to make his tax cuts permanent. On Wednesday, he heads to New York's financial district to deliver a more formal "State of the Economy" address at Federal Hall, where he is expected to ask Congress to extend his authority to negotiate trade agreements that cannot be amended.
Right there, bad ideas. We need to do the opposite of those suggestions. To begin balancing the budget, we must let the tax cuts expire, and we definitely should not give him the power to negotiate trade agreements especially when they cannot be amended.
"The temptation is to say, well, trade may not be worth it, let's isolate ourselves, let's protect ourselves," Bush told a friendly audience of Caterpillar employees, standing against a backdrop of gigantic tractors in the company's familiar colors of yellow and black.
Okay, that is not a suggestion, but it is still incredibly stupid.
No one, I repeat, NO ONE is tempted to say "trade may not be worth it" or "let's isolate ourselves." That is just an asinine statement and a strawman argument.
"Americans wonder, can you compete in a global economy?" Bush said, before answering himself. "My answer is, darn right, you can."
Again, this is not a suggestion, but, again, it is incredibly stupid so I feel compelled to say something.
Americans do not wonder if we can "compete in a global economy," and Bush must be an idiot if he really believes that we do. The reason that we do not wonder if we can "compete in a global economy" is because we compete in a global ecomnomy EVERY DAY as we have done since our inception.
The Decider or the Decision Maker or whatever he is calling himself now decided to drive one of Caterpillar's tractors while he was in East Peoria.
While the president was busy driving, the freshman Democrat who represents the district next door was busy issuing a press release arguing that Bush was ignoring the financial condition of his constituents. The congressman, Representative Phil Hare, who worked as an aide to his predecessor before winning election in November, pointed to another Illinois community, Galesburg, where he said free trade treaties "drove 1,600 good-paying Maytag jobs" to Sonora, Mexico.
Ah, and therein lies the reason why Bush is wrong on free trade. NAFTA was passed because of lies. It was a lie that NAFTA would protect American jobs. It is a lie that free trade is good for everyone. It is not. It is good for the rich and bad for the poor (which is what Bush seems to base his policies on).
Fair trade is the right alternative. It is good for everyone. It is fair to everyone. It does not make the insanely rich grotesquely richer while exploiting the poor. It lifts everyone up. It is the American ideal.
And Bush is against fair trade, so we should be 100% for it so that we do not make the mistake of allowing Bush to make more mistakes.
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