CONTENTS

14. CORRUPTION

1. BROKEN PROMISES

George W. Bush ended his four-year term having fulfilled only 46 percent of the promises he made during the 2000 presidential campaign. As a comparison, President Clinton fulfilled about 66 percent of the 160 commitments that he made during his first presidential campaign. Despite having Republican control of both houses, nearly one-third of Bush’s agenda stalled or died in Congress. (Knight Ridder, October 20, 2004)

Economy

1. Bush promised to pay down the national debt to a historically low level. As of September 30, 2004, the national debt stood at $7,379,052,696,330.32, a record high.

2. Bush promised to protect the Social Security surplus. As president, he spent all of it.

3. Bush promised to pay down the national debt to a historically low level. As of September 30, 2004, the national debt stood at $7,379,052,696,330.32, a record high.

4. Bush promised to protect the Social Security surplus. As president, he spent all of it.

Job training

1. Bush pledged to double the number of people served by the principal job training program. But he spent four years cutting funding for job training programs, and his 2005 budget proposed to cut job training and vocational education by 10 percent -- $656 million -- from what Congress pledged to those programs in 2002.

Education

1. Bush promised to increase funding for community colleges. But he cut funding for community colleges before he increased it. In 2003, the Bush administration proposed cutting the largest direct aid initiative to community colleges, the Perkins program for technical and vocational training, from $1.3 billion to about $1 billion. (Department of Education website)

2. Bush said he would fully fund the Pell grant program for first-year students by increasing the maximum grant amount by more than 50 percent, to $5,100. (Bush-Cheney 2000 - Education website) Yet, he froze the maximum Pell Grant at $4,050 in each of his budgets. (House Committee on Education and The Work Force, February 2, 2004)

Social Security

1. Bush pledged to strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account. But he failed to mention that the privatization scheme could cost $1 trillion or more over one decade, expanding already record federal deficits. Administrative costs could consume up to 40 percent of the funds placed in private accounts. (Washington Post, September 2, 2004)

2. Bush said the Social Security surplus needed top be locked away. (Social Security website) But in 2002, the first fiscal year for which Bush was responsible, he spent $159 billion of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus. (CBO Historical Budget Data)

Small businesses

1. Bush promised to offer a tax credit to encourage small businesses and their employees to set up health savings accounts, and provide direct help for low-income Americans to purchase them. But he did not mention that HSAs would likely drive up the annual deductibles paid by workers.

Labor laws

1. Bush proposed changing outdated labor laws to offer comp-time and flex-time. But while the proposals have attractive sounding names, they actually open the door for employers to pressure workers to accept time off instead of overtime pay. Even absent explicit pressure, employers would be free to channel overtime work to those who were willing to take comp- time. Moreover, employees would have to take their earned time off when it suits their employer rather than when it suited the employee. (Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2004)

Uninsured Americans

1. Bush promised that he would reverse the trend by “ health insurance affordable for hard- working, low-income families.” (Bush-Cheney 2000 website) In his four years, 43 million Americans were uninsured. That was four million more than when he took office.

2. In the first two years Bush was in office, the number of uninsured American increased by nearly four million. Since Bush took office, health insurance premiums rose by an average rate of 12.5 percent per year. (USA Today, April 25, 2004)

3. Bush promised he would establish the Healthy Communities Innovation Fund to provide $500 million in grants over five years to fund innovative projects addressing targeted health risks, such as childhood diabetes. Bush never established this fund. (Bush-Cheney 2000 website)

The Environment

1. Bush pledged he would ensure that the federal government -- the country’s largest polluter – would comply with all environmental laws. (Bush-Cheney 2000 website) However, the Department of Defense requested that Congress exempt it from environmental laws and regulations like the Clean Air Act of 1970. The exemptions were requested despite the fact that the EPA declined to apply the policies to the military training facilities in question. (Government Executive Magazine, April 6, 2004)

Welfare

1. Bush promised to provide states an additional $1 billion over five years for preventative services to keep children in, or return them to, their homes whenever safely possible. (Bush-Cheney 2000 - Child Welfare website)

2. Bush proposed allowing states to use the federal funds currently earmarked for foster care room-and-board payments to be used for preventative services. In exchange, states had to accept a spending cap on the amount of foster care funding they receive. (Philadelphia Inquirer, March 24, 2004)

Energy

1. Bush said he would expand the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) by seeking the release of $155 million to provide energy assistance to low-income households and address short-term supply threats. But he directed a portion of oil and gas royalty payments to the program, costing $1 billion over ten years. (Bush-Cheney 2000 - Energy website)

2. Bush's first budget, for the 2002 fiscal year, cut LIHEAP funding by $300 million as compared with the previous year, despite higher unemployment and a colder winter. (CBS, December 11, 2002)

The Judiciary

1. Bush promised to restore confidence in government, saying he would return civility to the nomination process. (Bush-Cheney 2000 website) But when Democrats objected to the nomination of William Pryor to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the White House stood by its allies who leveled charges of anti-Catholic bias at the Democrats. When Senator Patrick Leahy confronted Vice President Cheney about the impropriety of this charge on the Senate floor, Cheney civilly told him to "F*** off. (CBS, June 25, 2004)

Nuclear weapons

1. Bush promised he would ask Congress to increase substantially our assistance to Russia in dismantling as many of their weapons as possible, as quickly as possible. (Bush-Cheney 2000 - Foreign Policy website) Yet, despite repeated claims that he favored further expansion of the successful Nunn-Lugar program, Bush’s proposed budget for Fiscal 2005 cut funding for Nunn-Lugar by 10 percent and cut the Department of Energy’s Russian nuclear security funding by 8 percent. (Carnegie Endowment for Peace, March 30, 2004)

2. IRAQ

1. Bush’s policies alienated much of the world, leaving the United States with few allies in the global war on terrorism. Bush assailed the United Nations, then expected support for his initiatives when he made his once-a-year address. What did Bush fail to realize? It was not that the United States was asking the United Nations, or any nation, for a permission slip. Working with the United Nations gave legitimacy to international efforts. It was also in the nation’s self-interest, as it means United States taxpayers were not solely responsible for the bill for global endeavors.

2. Showing the depth of the alienation, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan condemned the war as “illegal,” since the Security Council never sanctioned the war. (The Guardian, September 19, 2004)

3. Bush provided misinformation to the American people about Iraq. He and his lieutenants turned the language of lying into a fine art, always leaving themselves a shred of deniability in case the truth caught up.

4. Bush’s preemptive war in Iraq left over 100,000 civilians dead after one year. Over 700 American soldiers were dead. Bush left the infrastructure of Iraq in disarray.

5. Bush lied when he claimed he had a true coalition to go to war. His father in the 1991 Gulf War brought together countries that paid for the vast majority of the war. But Bush Junior only gathered small support, while he had to supply 95 percent of the troops.

6. Only under pressure did Bush go to the United Nations for support. He promised that the Security Council that his resolution to go to war would go to a vote. But when Bush knew he would fail to get support, he withdrew the resolution in February – and he went off to war.

7. The Bush Administration said Iraqi oil would pay for the cost of the war and reconstruction. None did. By the end of 2004, nearly $200 billion on a war of choice had been spent.

8. Bush falsely claimed that he went to war because Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. According to the Bush administration’s handpicked weapon's inspector, Charles Duelfer, there was “no evidence that Hussein had passed illicit weapons material to Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, or had any intent to do so.” After the release of the report, Bush continued to insist, “There was a risk -- -a real risk -- that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons, or materials, or information to terrorist networks.” According to Duelfer, the United Nations inspections regime put an “economic strangle hold” on Hussein that prevented him from developing a WMD program for more than twelve years.

9. Vice President Cheney said that Iraq was “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” The bipartisan 9/11 Commission found that Iraq had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks and no collaborative operational relationship with Al Qaeda.

10. National Security Adviser Rice said that high-strength aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.” She warned, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” The government’s top nuclear scientists had told the Administration the tubes were “too narrow, too heavy, too long” to be of use in developing nuclear weapons and could be used for other purposes.

11. Bush falsely claimed that Iraq was operating a poison factory in the northeast.

12. Bush falsely claimed that Iraqi drones could disperse chemical and biological weapons on cities along the Eastern seaboard.

13. Bush boasted that democracy could be instituted in Iraq. Bush failed to recognize the schism among the country’s three major factions and the failure to introduce democracy throughout the history of Iraq. Bush’s promotion of democracy ran counter to American foreign policy. The United States supported Middle Eastern right-wing dictatorships: the Shah dynasty in Iran, Musharraf in Pakistan, Mubarak in Egypt, Hussein in Jordan, and the Sabah family in Kuwait. America supported repressive right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, the most notorious of whom were the Duvalier family in Haiti, the Somazas in Nicaragua, and Allende in Chile.

14. Bush sent troops into battle without adequate body armor or armored Humvees.

15. Bush ignored estimates from General Eric Shinseki that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq.

16. Vice President Cheney said Americans “will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” in Iraq.

17. During the Bush’s war in Iraq, more than 1,000 United States troops lost their lives and more than 7,000 were injured.

18. In May 2003, Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, stood under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” and triumphantly announced that major combat operations were over in Iraq. Asked if he had any regrets about the stunt, Bush said he would do it all over again.

19. Bush spent just $1.1 billion of the $18.4 billion Congress approved for Iraqi reconstruction.

3. TERRORISM

1. After receiving a memo from the CIA in August 2001 titled “Bin Laden Determined to attack America,” Bush continued his month-long vacation.

2. Bush failed to commit enough troops to capture Bin Laden when United States forces had him cornered in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in November 2001. Instead, they relied on local warlords.

3. Bush secured less nuclear material from sites around the world vulnerable to terrorists in the two years after 9/11 than were secured in the two years before 9/11.

4. Bush underfunded Nunn-Lugar -- the program intended to keep the former Soviet Union’s nuclear legacy out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states -- by $45.5 million.

5. Bush assigned five times as many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to track Bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s money.

6. According to Congressional Research Service data, the Bush administration underfunded security at the nation’s ports by more than $1 billion for fiscal year 2005.

7. Bush never devoted the resources necessary to prevent a resurgence in the production of poppies, the raw material used to create heroin, in Afghanistan -- creating a potent new source of financing for terrorists.

8. Vice President Cheney told voters that unless they elect George Bush in November, “We’ll get hit again” by terrorists.”

9. Even though an Al Qaeda training manual suggests terrorists come to the United States and buy assault weapons, Bush did nothing to prevent the expiration of the ban.

10. Despite repeated calls for reinforcements, there are fewer experienced CIA agents assigned to the unit dealing with Bin Laden now than there were before 9/11.

11. Before 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft proposed slashing counterterrorism funding by 23 percent.

12. Between January 20, 2001, and September 10, 2001, the Bush administration publicly mentioned Al Qaeda one time.

13. More than three years after 9/11, just 5 percent of all cargo -- including cargo transported on passenger planes -- was screened.

4. NATIONAL SECURITY

1. During the Bush administration, North Korea quadrupled its suspected nuclear arsenal from two to eight weapons.

2. Bush openly opposed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, undermining nuclear nonproliferation efforts.

3. Bush spent $7 billion in 2004 -- and planned to spend $10 billion in 2005 -- for a missile defense system that has never worked in a test that was not rigged.

4. Bush underfunded the needs of the nation’s first responders by $98 billion, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study.

5. IGNORING THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY

1. Bush opposed the Kyoto Protocol on the environment.

2. He opposed the International Criminal Court on global justice.

3. He rejected the Biological Weapons Treaty.

4. He rejected the International War Tribunals.

5. He rejected the Land Mines Treaty.

6. Bush illegally abrogated the 1972 SALT I Treaty with Russia.

7. In the 2000 campaign, Bush repeatedly denounced nation-building. Then he reneged on his promise and pursued that policy in Afghanistan, Haiti, and Iraq.

8. Bush dumped the policy of all previous American presidents who rejected preemptive attacks.

9. Bush sidestepped the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners, permitting the use of torture of suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq.

6. OBSESSED WITH SECRECY

1. Fearing that his administration would be damaged, Bush desperately worked to stonewall an independent investigation into the events leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. It was only the constant pressure by families of the 9/11 victims that led Bush to acquiesce and to agree to an independent commission.

2. Then the White House granted the 9/11 Commission $3 million to investigate the September 11 attacks and $50 million to the commission that investigated the Columbia space shuttle crash.

3. Bush lobbied to prevent the creation of a non-partisan commission to investigate the credibility of information that was used to justify his war in Iraq. He opposed an investigation into the legitimacy of the reasons he used as reasons to attack Iraq: WMD, Iraqi poison factories, an Iraqi-Al Qaeda link, and Niger uranium. But as a result of lobbying by the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill, the president was forced to support an independent probe.

4. Bush spent millions of dollars attempting to keep secret the members of Vice President Cheney’s energy task force. After several overtures by the GAO, a federal judge finally released the names.

5. Bush tried to conceal documents pertaining to dialogue between Enron officials and some White House staff members.

6. Bush issuing an executive order protecting presidential papers which, if scrutinized, might have exposed embarrassing and questionable documents that included Bush’s father’s involvement in Iran-Contra.

7. Bush refused to release twenty-seven pages of a Congressional report that reportedly detail the Saudi Arabian government’s connections to the 9/11 hijackers.

8. In 2003, the Bush administration spent $6.5 billion creating 14 million new classified documents and securing old secrets -- the highest level of spending in ten years.

9. The Bush administration spent $120 classifying documents for every $1 it spent declassifying documents.

10. The Bush administration -- reversing years of bipartisan tradition -- refused to answer requests from Democratic members of Congress about how the White House was spending taxpayers’ money.

7. THE ECONOMY

1. Bush promised to be a fiscal conservative and not destroy the surplus that had been created during the 1990s. He oversaw the worst budget deterioration in modern American history -- and misled the country about who would receive his tax cuts.

2. Bush said he would attack pork-barrel spending. (Bush-Cheney 2000 website) But he failed to veto a single bill, despite the enormous amount of pork that has crossed his desk. (Heritage Foundation, June 28, 2004)

3. Bush promised to “pay the debt down to a historically low level.” (Bush-Cheney 2000 website) By mid-2004, the national debt stood at $7,316,567,571,232.89, a record high. Furthermore, the Fiscal 2004 budget created a record deficit: $445 billion. (Reuters, July 31, 2004)

4. Bush’s top economic adviser, Greg Mankiw, said the outsourcing of American jobs abroad was “a plus for the economy in the long run.”

5. Bush turned a $236 billion surplus into a $422 billion deficit.

6. Bush renewed his calls to make his tax cuts for the wealthy permanent. But making the tax cuts permanent would be of great benefit to only very high-income households. Estimates based on data from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center showed that if the tax cuts were made permanent, the top 1 percent of households would gain an average of $58,200 a year in 2004 dollars when the tax cuts were fully in effect. That reflected a 7.3 percent change in their after-tax income. (New York Times, July 1, 2004)

By contrast, people in the middle of the income spectrum would secure just a 2.5 percent increase in their after-tax income, with average tax cuts of $655 -- a little more than one-ninetieth of what those in the top 1 percent would receive. Moreover, making the tax cuts permanent would increase the deficit and could destabilize the world economy. It would cost $2.2 trillion over the following 10 years, forcing Americans to give up important domestic programs or add to the $374 billion annual deficit. (New York Times, July 1, 2004)

7. Bush claimed income tax cuts would “benefit all Americans, but they are especially focused on low and moderate income families.” (Bush-Cheney 2000 - Taxes website) Bush claimed the vast majority of my tax cuts went to “the bottom end of the spectrum.” (George W. Bush, February 15, 2000) However, the top 20 percent of earners received 69.8 percent of Bush’s tax cuts. (The Nation, October 30, 2004)

Millionaires received an average tax cut of $123,000. Those in the bottom quintile of earners received an average tax cuts of $27. Those in the second to bottom quintile received an average cut of $317. (CBPP, page 17, April 23, 2004)

8. Bush implemented regulations that made millions of workers ineligible for overtime pay.

9. Bush crippled state budgets by underfunding federal mandates by $175 billion.

10. Bush was the first President since Herbert Hoover to have a net loss of jobs -- around 800,000 -- over a four-year term.

11. Bush gave Accenture a multibillion-dollar border control contract even though the company moved its operations to Bermuda to avoid paying taxes.

12. As major corporate scandals rocked the nation’s economy, the Bush administration reduced the enforcement of corporate tax law -- conducting fewer audits, imposing fewer penalties, pursuing fewer prosecutions, and making virtually no effort to prosecute corporate tax crime.

13. Bush increased tax audits for the working poor.

14. Bush proposed slashing funding for the largest federal public housing program, putting 2 million families in danger of losing their housing. Bush did nothing to prevent the minimum wage from falling to an inflation-adjusted fifty-year low.

15. Bush encouraged a corporate environment for the outsourcing of jobs where thousands of employees in the manufacturing sector lost their jobs.

8. EDUCATION

1. Bush underfunded the No Child Left Behind Act by $9.4 billion.

2. In 2000, candidate Bush promised to increase the maximum federal scholarship, or Pell Grant, by 50 percent. Instead, each year he was in office he has frozen or cut the maximum scholarship amount.

3. Bush’s administration’s Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, called the National Education Association -- a union of teachers -- a “terrorist organization.”

4. Bush cut federal aid for needy college students.

9.HEALTH CARE

1. While in violation of the law, Bush refused to allow Medicare actuary Richard Foster to tell members of Congress the actual cost of their Medicare bill. Instead, they repeated a figure they knew was $100 billion too low.

2. The nonpartisan GAO concluded the Bush administration created illegal, covert propaganda -- in the form of fake news reports -- to promote its industry-backed Medicare bill.

3. Bush stunted research that could lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, spinal injuries, heart disease, and muscular dystrophy by placing severe restrictions on the use of federal dollars for embryonic stem-cell research.

4. Bush reinstated the “global gag rule,” which required foreign national to withhold information about legal abortion services or lose United States funds for family planning.

5. Bush promoted a Medicare program that became a major windfall for American pharmaceutical corporations.

6. Bush authorized twenty companies that have been charged with fraud at the federal or state level to offer Medicare prescription drug cards to seniors.

7. Bush created a prescription drug card for Medicare that locked seniors into one card for up to one year but allows the corporations offering the cards to change their prices once a week.

8. Bush blocked efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate cheaper prescription drug prices for seniors.

9. At the behest of the french fry industry, the Bush Administration USDA changed their definition of fresh vegetables to include frozen french fries.

10. In a case before the Supreme Court, the Bush administration sided with HMO s -- arguing that patients should not be allowed to sue HMOs when they are improperly denied treatment. With the Administration’s help, the HMOs won.

11. Bush went to court to block lawsuits by patients who were injured by defective prescription drugs and medical devices.

12. Bush signed a Medicare law that allows companies that reduce healthcare benefits for retirees to receive substantial subsidies from the government.

13. Since Bush took office, more than 5 million people have lost their health insurance.

14. The Bush administration blocked a proposal to ban the use of arsenic-treated lumber in playground equipment, even though it conceded it posed a danger to children.

15. One day after Bush bragged about his efforts to help seniors afford healthcare, the administration announced the largest dollar increase of Medicare premiums in history.

16. The Bush administration -- at the behest of the tobacco industry -- tried to water down a global treaty that aimed to help curb smoking.

17. The Bush administration spent $270 million on abstinence – only education programs even though there is no scientific evidence demonstrating that they are effective in dissuading teenagers from having sex or reducing the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.

18. The Bush administration slashed funding for programs that suggested ways, other than abstinence, to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.

10. THE ENVIRONMENT

1. Bush gutted clean-air standards for aging power plants, resulting in at least 20,000 premature deaths each year.

2. Bush eliminated protections on more than 200 million acres of public lands.

3. Bush broke his promise to place limits on carbon dioxide emissions, an essential step in combating global warming.

4. Days after 9/11, the Bush administration told people living near Ground Zero that the air was safe -- even though they knew it was not -- subjecting hundreds of people to unnecessary, debilitating ailments.

5. Bush created a massive tax loophole for SUVs -- allowing, for example, the write - off of the entire cost of a new Hummer.

6. Bush put former coal-industry big shots in the government and let them roll back safety regulations, putting miners at greater risk of black lung disease.

7. Bush said that even though the weed killer atrazine was seeping into water supplies -- creating, among other bizarre creatures, hermaphroditic frogs -- there was no reason to regulate it.

8. Bush proposed cutting the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.

9. Bush broke his campaign promise to end the maintenance backlog at national parks. He provided just 7 percent of the funds needed, according to National Park Service estimates.

11. SOCIAL PROGRAMS

1. Bush eliminated child-care assistance for working mothers.

2. Bush ended housing for the poor and homeless.

3. Bush slashed benefits for veterans.

4. Bush promoted a Social Security program that benefited only the elite.

12. RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES

1. The Patriot Act was the largest blow to civil liberties since the 1940s. The Bush administration rushed it through Congress without debate in the House.

2. Attorney General John Ashcroft detained 5,000 foreign nationals in antiterrorism sweeps; none ever convicted one terrorist for a crime.

2. Bush ignored pleas from the International Committee of the Red Cross to stop the abuse of prisoners in United States custody.

3. In violation of international law, the Bush administration hid prisoners from the Red Cross so the organization could not monitor their treatment.

4. The Bush administration, without ever charging him with a crime, arrested United States citizen José Padilla at an airport in Chicago, held him on a naval brig in South Carolina for two years, denied him access to a lawyer, and prohibited any contact with his friends and family.

5. Bush’s top legal adviser wrote a memo to the president advising him that he can legally authorize torture.

6. At the direction of Bush, the FBI went door to door questioning people planning on protesting at the 2004 political conventions.

7. Bush refused to support the creation of an independent commission to investigate the abuse of foreign prisoners in American custody. Instead, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld selected the members of a commission to review the conduct of his own department.

13. FLIP-FLOPPING

1. Bush opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission before he supported it, delaying an essential inquiry into one of the greatest intelligence failure in American history.

2. Bush said gay marriage was a state issue before he supported a constitutional amendment banning it.

3. Bush said he was committed to capturing Osama Bin Laden “dead or alive” before he said, "I truly am not that concerned about him.”

4. Bush said we had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, before he admitted we Had not found them.

5. Bush said, “You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” before he admitted Saddam had no role in 9/11.

14. CORRUPTION

1. The Bush administration awarded a multibillion-dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton -- a company that was still paying Vice President Cheney hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred compensation each year. Cheney also had Halliburton stock options. The company then repeatedly overcharged the military for services, accepted kickbacks from subcontractors and served troops dirty food.

2. The Bush Administration told Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan about planned to go to war with Iraq before telling Secretary of State Colin Powell.

3. The Bush administration set up a secret Energy Task Force under Vice President Cheney. Then the White House relentlessly pushed an energy bill containing $23.5 billion in corporate tax breaks, much of which would have benefited major campaign contributors.

4. The Bush administration paid felon and Iraqi-exile Ahmad Chalabi $400,000 a month for intelligence, including fabricated claims about Iraqi WMD. It continued to pay him for months after discovering that he was providing inaccurate information.

5. The Bush administration installed as top officials more than 100 former lobbyists, attorneys, or spokespeople for the industries they oversee.

6. The Bush administration let disgraced Enron CEO Ken Lay -- a close friend of Bush who was given an office in the White House -- help write its energy policy.

7. Top Bush administration officials accepted $127,600 in jewelry and other presents from the Saudi royal family in 2003, including diamond-and-sapphire jewelry valued at $95,500 for First Lady Laura Bush.

8. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge awarded lucrative contracts to several companies in which he is an investor, including Microsoft, GE, Sprint, Pfizer, and Oracle.

9. Bush used images of firefighters carrying flag-draped coffins through the rubble of the World Trade Center to score political points in a campaign advertisement.