Bush has you surrounded, come out with your priorities up

Air, you won't miss it until its gone. Natural resource issues seem a remote concern to many urban and suburban Americans. But consider how at first the war seemed distant and bearable to its supporters. With each coffin and each day's deterioration in Iraq, the war comes home to main street America...and the closer it gets, the fewer its supporters. Those with misplaced revenge fantasies or a preexisting hard-on to exercise American military might are all the support the war has left. Well, that and the sorry class of people who can simply never own up to a mistake. There are many fronts on which the republican administration, listening only to its friends in industry, have degraded what was not theirs to spoil. A bit of overshadowed news today serves to remind that there are many counts to bring against the administration, many wrongs to prioritize and deal with.

While you were all distracted with botched wars, cover-ups of fudged intelligence ops and "massacres" of prosecutors who were either getting too close to a republican or failed to respond to hints they should drum up cases against Democrats, (certainly enough to keep your attention), the bush league have been giving away national heirloom resources that should have been community property of US citizens for generations to come. And they had to muzzle quite a few scientist to do it.
In today's NYTimes, there is a report of Bush appointees silencing scientists who were trying to protect your forests and wildlife even though that is exactly what the scientist's were hired to do. The article reminds of us of similar clumsy censoring of climate science at NASA last year. The bush league has mounted a steady assault on resources, environment and the people who study them. NRDC cataloged the repealed protections, exploitative grants to industry and suppression of science in 2003 and 2004: it takes 100 pages just to list the damages done. Perhaps biologists should be next to go on the endangered species list since they seem, by trade, to be stationed between environmental hen house and the republican foxes. It was this way back in the reign of Bush the 1st [I am amazed such controversial old e-mails still exist on the web]. For a contrast, consider that in the middle of the Clinton administration, US Forest Service employees were [a] recounting the coercion of their former Bush I bosses and [b] writing their own whistle blower guidelines.

The words "scientific integrity" would essentially be a redundant pairing were it not for the Bush administration and all the similar oppressors of factual inquiry back to those who silenced Galileo.