The scandal-infested Bush administration

officials in scandal:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004951.php

scandals (293! Is that a record?):
http://www.netrootsmass.net/Hugh/Bush_list.html

Let's just zip through 2008 so we can get a new president and congress that much sooner.

yep, waterboarding is torture

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=448717

If it's not torture, then why do they use it? For enjoyment?

Food supplies dwindling, prices rising

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/17/europe/food.php

"Diouf blamed a confluence of recent supply and demand factors for the crisis, and he predicted that those factors were here to stay. On the supply side, these include the early effects of global warming, which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places, and a shift away from farming for human consumption toward crops for biofuels and cattle feed. Demand for grain is increasing with the world population, and more is diverted to feed cattle as the population of upwardly mobile meat-eaters grows."

* * * *

There's a strange confluence of things working against each other; rising oil prices, global warming, rising population, more wealth (meaning more who can pay for food), etc. This is going to take some smart people to figure out.

the US is not the US I grew up in

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/12/14/bashmilah/print.html?source=whitelist

We torture people now. The president supports it. Congress is too wimpy to stop it.
When I was growing up all the movies made it clear that it was the Enemy who tortured. Never us. That was one way you could tell we were the Good Guys.
Then my step father told a few things about his work as in intelligence specialist in the Green Berets in Vietnam and Laos. This was definitely torture. In fact, I'd say it was sadistic torture. So, maybe what the movies were showing was what we wanted to appear to be, not what we really were. It was at least our policy not to torture.
But now even our elected officials, and those running for office, support torture. They might not call it that, maybe they call it "enhanced interrogation methods" or something, but it's torture.
Things are changing for the worse in my country. I don't like it. I've gone to the streets to protest. And I'm trying to figure out what else can be done to change this de-evolution of the United States.

25% of Defense Dept. spending goes down a rat hole

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1rT4bszWg&eurl=http://benfrank.net/patriots/news/national/pentagon_missing_trillions

Oh well, what's a few billion dollars from taxpayers, anyway...

Alberta oil sands environmental disaster

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/553568.html

I didn't know that Canada sends the US 2 million barrels of oil a day! Or that the US burns 44% of the world's output of gasoline. We suck.

government debt clearly explained: $1 million a minute!

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/12/03/us.debt.ap/index.html

Every person in the US owes $30,000 in government debt. You can laugh at your grandchildren now...