Remember this story about worthless douchebag Scott J Bloch? As the newly appointed director of the Office of Special Counsel, which is supposed to protect whistleblowers and other federal employees from retribution, this subhuman sack of satanic dingleballs removed references to sexual orientation from the anti-discrimination information provided by his department. Not long after that, he blithely announced that gay federal employees could be fired without recourse on the basis of their sexual orientation.

It seems that Shifty George and his Uptight White Christian Right Junta liked that idea just fine, so now they're doing the same thing to women's issues. The National Council for Research on Women has released a report (available here) detailing the multitude of ways in which Shrub's Morlocks are undermining the body of reliable public scientific and sociological information. From the report's Executive Summary:

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fact sheet that focused on the advantages of using condoms to prevent sexually transmitted disease was revised in December 2002 to cast doubt on the effectiveness of condoms, calling evidence on condom use and transmission of HIV and other STD’s “inconclusive.”

Contrary to broad medical consensus, information on the National Cancer Institute (NCI) website was changed in 2002 to state that studies about the link between abortion and breast cancer were inconsistent. After an outcry by members of Congress, the NCI posted the panel’s actual finding: abortion is not associated with an increased breast-cancer risk.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has charged that officials distorted the CDC’s science-based performance measures to test the effectiveness of sex education programs to prevent HIV and other STDs and used “measures designed to obscure the lack of efficacy of abstinence-only programs.” [That's not all the UCS has charged, either. --s]

A valuable Department of Labor publication on the rights of women workers once distributed by the Women’s Bureau, Don’t Work in the Dark—Know Your Rights, is no longer available.

A much-used Department of Labor Handbook on Women’s Workers is scheduled for re-release, but as of March 2004, no date was available for its publication.

The Census Bureau touts the ratio of women’s earnings as compared to men – 76 cents for every $1 – as “an all-time high.” In reality, the disparity in wages has remained nearly constant with less than 1% change in the ratio in recent years, and was characterized in 2000 as a lack of pay equity.

Only extraordinary public outcry prevented the appointment of Dr. W. David Hager to chair the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drug Advisory Committee. Hager is known for prescribing prayer as a treatment for premenstrual syndrome and refusing to prescribe birth control pills to unmarried women. He remains a member of the committee.

The Title X funding appropriation bill for fiscal year 2004 allows the Health and Human Services department to collect the names of health providers that offer abortion services with their non-Title X dollars

There's a lot more where that came from. Removal of reliable information from the public domain is a favourite tactic of repressive regimes everywhere, and it is now clear that the Bush II administration has adopted it wholeheartedly. My answer to nearly every problem is, at least in part, "more information!", so I find this slimy methodology particularly repugnant. (I'm trying to back off politics, since I started this blog to talk about science and my RSS blogroll (over on the right there) is a better source for political information than I will ever be, but this story really chafed my scrote.)

(Props to Jeanne of Body and Soul, who has been all over this issue.)