TOP TEN FARCES OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

* Money Laundering Muff: Bush and Ashcroft brag about how the feds' new surveillance powers will stop terrorist financiers. But the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control has ten times more agents assigned to track violators of the U.S. embargo on Cuba as it has tracking Osama Bin Laden's money.

* Attorney General John Ashcroft claims that federal agents have become far more savvy in defending America against terrorists. But last December, the FBI warned 17,000 local and state law enforcement agencies that people traveling with a World Almanac could be terrorist plotters.

* The Transportation Security Administration was disgraced last Fall by a 20-year old college student who smuggled simulated explosives onto airplanes and left them stashed onboard. The student sent TSA an email detailing his actions but the agency never bothered to read it. After the fiasco became public, a top TSA official angrily proclaimed: "Amateur testing like this does not in any way assist us or show us where we have flaws in our system."

* The TSA is imposing fines of up to $1500 on Americans show bad attitudes when passing through TSA airport checkpoints. But the feds have done little or nothing to rein in the arrogance and rudeness of TSA agents who seem to believe that browbeating grandmothers is the same thing as thwarting Al Qaeda.

*Bush is greatly expanding AmeriCorps, the bogus paid volunteer program. AmeriCorps members busy themselves organizing "Pink Prom" dances for gay teenagers, putting on puppet shows to persuade three-year-olds of the value of smoke alarms, and hoeing corn at tourist farms.

*Bush promised that his No Child Left Behind Act would permit children to transfer out of dangerous public schools. But states defined "persistently dangerous" schools to insure that almost no children can escape violence. A Colorado school with a thousand students could have more than 150 homicides in a single year and still not be classified as dangerous.

*In February 2003, when the U.S. was on orange alert, fearing terrorist attacks here before the invasion of Iraq, the Justice Department launched Operation Pipe Dreams. Twelve hundred federal agents conducted raids across the country, carrying out the biggest crackdown on bongs in American history. Famous comic Tommy Chong - part of the Cheech ‘n' Chong duo - was busted for shipping bongs across state lines. Chong commented, "I feel pretty sad,
but it seems to be the only weapons of mass destruction they've found this
year."

* Bush is committed to spending $10 billion on a new program to bribe foreign politicians not to steal foreign aid money. But at the same time that his Millennium Challenge Account is giving out buckets of money, other U.S. foreign aid programs continue to giving billions of dollars to some of the most corrupt governments in the world.

* The Bush administration initially estimated that the cost to taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq after a U.S. invasion would be only $1.7 billion. After the postwar costs to U.S. taxpayers soared over $100 billion, the Bush team "fixed" the problem by removing all traces of the earlier low estimate from government web pages.

*George W. Bush is the first president of the United States to attack and overthrow a foreign regime because of its elementary school policies. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Bush constantly bragged about Afghan girls going back to school. But most Afghan girls still do not attend school, and the U.S.-financed Afghan government recently expelled thousands of female students from high school.