Administrative Wrongdoing?

As Bush's approval ratings plummet to 34% in the latest CNN poll, and three out of every four U.S. soldiers in Iraq say we should pull out within a year, see here, Americans may finally be fully absorbing the extent to which this Administration has kept secrets, distorted facts, grabbed power, disregarded science, and bent over backwards to accommodate industry at the expense of the safety and well-being of ordinary Americans.    Here's just a sampling of the kinds of things we have to think about.

Back in October of 2005, the CNN News Poll showed that only one in ten Americans believed that the Administration did nothing illegal or unethical in connection with the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity.   Thirty-nine percent thought government officials acted illegally.  Another thirty-nine percent thought government officials at least acted unethically.  See this story.  Fully forty-eight percent of Americans thought that the Bush Administration has poor ethical standards, down from a high seventy-five percent in 2002.  Id.

Because of a spate of recent mining deaths, Americans' attention was drawn to the records of safety violations and apparently ineffectual enforcement actions by the administrative agency charged with mine safety.  Now, the New York Times reports, here, that the Bush Administration has had an active policy of "cooperation" with mineowners, which has resulted in fewer citations and lower fines.  Fines that are not collected within 180 days are supposed to be turned over to Treasury, but an agency spokesperson indicated that they had not been, because of a computer problem that apparently has no fix in sight. 

Environmental protection ranks high on most ordinary Americans' agendas for the country.  We treasure our national forests and want to protect the trees and the wildlife they shelter for future generations.  Yet it appears that this Administration is primarily interested in easing the way for the big timber companies to harvest wood.  An Oregon State University peer-reviewed study has suggested that the Administration has ignored science to let big companies rush in and clean up logs in national forests after big fires.  Such fire logging accounts for 40% of the timber cut on public lands.  See this Blaine Harden story in the Washington Post.  The peer-reviewed study was published in spite of attempts by some professors at the university's College of Forestry (which gets considerable funding from timber companies) to halt its publications.  Those professors had done an earlier study, not peer-reviewed but praised by the Bush Administration, that had praised post-fire logging.   The study will also continue in spite of the Bush Administration's Bureau of Land Management's attempt to cut off funding for the final year of the grant--it was cut off, and then restored after Democrats complained about government censorship and the politicization of science.  At a congressional hearing on the matter, a highly regarded forest ecologist warned Congress that it shouldn't prescribe salvage logging for every forest fire.

"Salvage logging and replanting can often succeed...if the intent is to turn a scorched landscape into a stand of trees for commercial harvest.  If, however, Congress wants to promtoe the ecologically sound recovery of burned federal forests ... the overwhelming weight of scientific research suggests that 'salvage logging is not going to be appropriate.'" Id. (citing Jerry Frankling, University of Washington College of Forest Resources).

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