Besides redesigning the site, I added a few additional links, including a new blog (of sorts) featured on the website of the irreverant literary journal/publishing house McSweeney's: The Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush. Among some of the more notable items:
DAY 24:In February, 2004, President Bush proposed important new expenditures for education: $100 million for reading programs to help middle and high schoolers who still struggle to sound out basic words; $40 million to assist professionals in math and science make the transition to teaching; and $52 million to bring Advanced Placement classes to more high schools. Yet all of these programs combined would be eclipsed by the $270 million the president wants to devote to a school program promoting sexual abstinence. This despite there being little evidence that such programs reduce teen sex or pregnancies.
DAY 22:In speeches to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion in August of '01, Bush promised reforms and improvements to health care benefits for veterans.
However, in January '03, the Bush administration's Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it would reduce access to its health care system in order to block over 150,000 veterans from enrolling in that fiscal year, due to a backlog of vets still waiting to receive treatment.
In March '03, Bush's VA budget was passed. It included raised charges for primary care and drug prescription co-payments, raised enrollment fees -- which had never before existed in veteran's health care -- and complete blockage of care for what the VA considers lower priority vets.
DAY 14:In 2003 the Bush administration proposed changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that would eliminate overtime pay for 8 million workers. The proposal would reclassify workers as managers, administrative or professional employees so that they are no longer eligible for overtime pay. It would also add an income limit, over which employees cannot qualify for overtime pay.
DAY FIVE:The Bush administration states that the average tax cut for 2003 will be $1,126. They do not specify that the median household will receive $217, 53% of taxpayers will get $100 or less, 50 million will receive no benefits, and filers who make more than $1 million per year will receive $93,500. 83% of taxpayers will get less than the average cut stated by the administration.
I'm not sure how long McSweeney's plans to keep this up, but the mere fact that they're able to create such a chronicle speaks volumes about this administration. For, besides their major policy decisions - the Iraq War, the Tax Cuts, the Patriot Act - the Bush administration has made scores of minor decisions that, while they receive little attention, are just as blindly partisan and ill-conceived. In nearly every branch of government, at nearly every level, they are asserting their corporatist, Christian fundamentalist, ultra-Right wing agenda. A recent example not documented by this site (yet) is the revelation that they've removed information on Women's issues from government websites. Then of course, there was the charge, by a group of scientists - among them 12 Nobel Prize winners - that the adminstration is suppressing research that runs counter to its corporate sympathies. Slowly but surely, they are remaking every facet of government to fit their extremist vision.
OK, so maybe I sound a little paranoid. But honestly, it's hard not to be a little suspicious when an adminstration bothers to remove information as benign as a pamphlet on child care from a government web page. It may not be hyperbole, after all, to say that there are a million good reasons to get Bush and his cronies out of the Oval Office.
[Note: Thank you to my friend Kat, the coolest bird in London, for pointing this site out to me]
