Bush's Record - The First 100 Days

-CTF Editorial: May 10, 2001

-On his first day in office, he cut off funding for any organization providing counseling that presents abortion as an option to pregnancy in Third World countries. Because that's just what the Third World needs more of - mouths to feed. Of course this means the lack of funding will also reduce or eliminate their capacity to provide all the OTHER women's health services like prenatal care, child development education and parenting classes, child immunization, contraception distribution and family planning, disease prevention and treatment, AIDS testing, mammograms, etc. Bush knew he couldn't take the right of reproductive choice away from rich white women in this country without getting his penis Bobbited, but he figured he could get away with taking it away from poor women of color in developing nations.

-Reversed a campaign promise to require that electric-power plants reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which is considered a major contributor to global warming.

-Proposed to open more federal land, including 1.5 million acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, for oil and natural-gas drilling.

-Relaxed pollution rules on blending corn-based ethanol with gasoline to expand the fuel supply.

-Decided to delay a ban on road construction and logging in a third of all federal forest land.

-Rescinded new standards for arsenic in drinking water, because that water is just "clean enough". It's POISON you ass....

-According to the Shrub Administration, apparently women who work for government contractors are suddenly paid equally to their male counterparts in the same jobs. This, despite a 1997 report from the same government agency to the contrary. But then, that report was made under the Clinton Administration, so it MUST be wrong.

-Even though literally the entire industrialized world has come to an agreement on how to fight global warming, the Shrub Administration has decided that it the agreement "moves too fast", and so refused to sign the Kyoto Agreement. Apparently that hole in the ozone just isn't quite big enough.....

-Proposed to cut wind and solar energy research by 50%.

-The Shrub's policy of "talking down" the economy (heretofore clipping along at a healthy rate) he nuked the stock market, shattered the promise and hope of the internet by needlessly causing the destruction of thousands of burgeoning new businesses that were driving the new economy, and caused the reactive layoffs of hundreds of thousands of workers (GE laid off 75,000 in one day just to boost it's stock price) - all this in order to TRY to pass a fiscally unsound tax plan (which has yet to make it through Congress). Question - what good is a tax break if you have no job with which to pay taxes in the first place?

-Refused to take ANY action whatsoever to hold down the price gouging being committed by the power suppliers in the West, primarily because he himself is profiting from it. As a major stockholder in the Enron Corporation (one of the big four power suppliers on the West Coast), and someone who has received over $100,000 in campaign contributions from it's CEO (not to mention a $10,000 donation to the Bush Legal Fund to help disenfranchise black voters in Florida), I guess the Shrub just doesn't feel that all that worried about a power crisis that is causing energy bills for individuals and business to go up by between 300%-800%.

-America, it seems, does not see space as a global commons, but as American territory. And now the Shrub seeks to arm it. The renowned science writer, Arthur C. Clarke told the UNispace 82 conference, such a missile defense system is "Too inherently impractical since it would cost trillions of dollars to build and launch, and would always be vulnerable to cheap and easy countermeasures." (A bag of nails launched into reverse orbit would destroy even the most advanced system.) Star Wars was and is, a striking example of US contempt for the United Nations claim that space should be maintained as a global commons. Reagan's call for nuclear powered laser weapons in space came without so much as a phone call to any other nation. The UN was never consulted or informed, even though such space weapons would violate the ABM (Anti Ballistic Missile) Treaty, and create a de-facto illegal anti-satellite weapon system that would threaten the entire international civilian space enterprise. It was, as former US Defense Secretary Harold Brown said, "the most irresponsible single act by an American president this century." The Shrub heeds not the advice of such learned men as Clarke however, for despite universal contempt for the notion of transferring our hatred, fear, and paranoia to the New Frontier, despite all the scientific minds who have concluded it's unfeasibility, despite it's total disregard to our allies and their wishes not to escalate the world's weaponry, he's going forward with a nearly 20 year old bad idea. Now that's leadership. Bush and Cheney will now lead the world into a spiffy new arms race to threaten the planet with.

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May 13, 2001

The United States, for the first time since 1947, failed to win re-election on Thursday to the key Geneva-based Human Rights Commission that probes rights abuses throughout the world. In yet another embarrassment for our country, the Shrub dragged his feet in getting key foreign policy officials confirmed, including a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations expected to be John Negroponte. If he'd actually been paying attention, he should have seen it coming because there has been a growing resentment toward the United States' insanely lame votes on key human rights standards, including opposition to a treaty to abolish land mines and to the International Criminal Court and making AIDS drugs available to everyone. The commission was created in 1947 and the United States, Russia and India had served on the body ever since. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the first U.S. delegate to the commission, which issued the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Also elected to the human rights commission on Thursday were Bahrain, South Korea, Pakistan, Croatia and Armenia. Chile, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Togo and Uganda won uncontested seats. Countries whose candidates failed to get seats were Iran, Saudi Arabia, Latvia, and Azerbaijan in addition to the United States. Now thanks to the Shrub we're sharing the company of such "pristine" countries as Iran, and spiffy places like Uganda, the Sudan, Croatia, and Pakistan are surpassing us.

The Shrub administration announced today it will try to revise a Clinton-era ban on road-building and most logging in a third of the country's national forests to allow decisions to be made locally on a forest-by-forest basis. The Clinton ban, which covered 58.5 million acres, will remain in place until a new rule is "devised". By the Devil himself, no doubt.

May 14, 2001

And the results of the Shrub's crap are in! The nation's unemployment rate shot up to 4.5 percent in April, the highest level in 21/2 years. Businesses slashed their payrolls by the largest amount since the last recession in 1991 - when the Shrub Sr. was in office. Coincidence? I think not.

May 17, 2001

U.S. gasoline prices - led by jumps at the pump in the Midwest and West - reached an all-time unadjusted high over the last two weeks. Overall, U.S. gasoline prices increased 8.58 cents over just the last two weeks, according to the Lundberg Survey of 8,000 service stations nationwide. And since practically every member of Bush's Cabinet and in fact he himself, have profound ties to the oil industry by either serving on the Board of Directors, being major stock holders, or receiving major campaign donations, or acquiring legal defense funding from said industry, I doubt very seriously that the price at the pump will be acted upon in any real way by this Administration. After all, why would they destroy their cash cow? Especially when the companies actually start naming those nifty big oil tankers after you like they did for Ms. Rice!