On January 13, 2005, Katrina vanden Heuvel posted her list in The Nation of "the Bush Administration's Ten Most Outrageous Scandals thus far uncovered by government investigators." :

Halliburton's Corruption
Iraq's Decline
Abu Ghraib Prison Torture
CIA Pre-9/11 Intelligence Failures
HHS Deceptive Ad Campaign
HHS Scully Scandal
Government-wide Accounting Problems
Sex Education Misinformation
CAPPS II Failures
Real Costs of the Iraq War

It was less than one year ago, on April 20, 2004, Thomas R. Asher, writing for Tom Paine, headlined with Losing Control" -- "Echoes of Watergate fill the air: a president is charged with misdeeds. He is besieged by plans gone awry, betrayed by underlings blowing whistles, harassed by a once-compliant press and barraged by querulous demands for data, documents and testimony."

"White House Props" .com.

Bush's Inner Circle

Interactive web page.
Bush's Cabinet
Shows links to Corporate America.

Shannan Jones, The Bush cabinet: a government of the financial oligarchy, wsws.org, May 16, 2001.

Rule by a powerful, privileged class of the wealthy and their dependents we clearly have, and we already have a name for it: oligarchy. But what about the rule of the stupid? Sot-archy? Perhaps our hybrid form of governance should be called sotoligarchy
Geov Parrish, Who's Who in the Bush Cabinet, AlterNet, January 16, 2001.

White House Cabinet

Alan Reynolds, The President's New Troupe: A Potentially Revitalizing Shake-Up in Bush Economic Team, Cato Institute, December 31, 2002.

William Safire, Behind Closed Doors, New York Times Op-Ed, December 17, 2003.

Matthew Harwood, Bush Administration Newspeak on Iraq, Common Dreams, December 17, 2003.

Bush Administration Proposes Fuel Economy Changes. New Weight-Based Proposal To Increase Pollution and Oil Dependence, Sierra Club, December 22, 2003.

Dana Milbank, Under Bush, Expanding Secrecy, Washington Post, December 23, 2003:

 "Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, says it is nothing less than a 'mutation in American politics' away from open government. 'There is an unwholesome change in the deliberative process unfolding before our eyes, 'he said. 'These are not technicalities. These are fundamental issues of American government that are now up for grabs.'"

Jason Leopold, O'Neill's Claims Against Bush Supported By 1998 'War' Letters to Clinton Signed By Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, liberalslant.com, January 19, 2004.

Linda O'Brien, How Many Degrees of Separation Between Bush and the People, Between Truth and Lies?, Common Dreams, January 22, 2004: "The Bush administration is filled with calculating people rather than with people who value truth. They are limited by that fact; it's impossible to hire honest people to fake compassion. So they don't know what genuine compassion cares about or how it should act and can't calculate forever what lies will be accepted as truth."

Let's see, I can think of about a dozen, but I'm sure I'm missing a few. In no particular order...

• Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force was investigated by the GAO and the case is currently pending at the Supreme Court.

• The Plame Game is under investigation by the Justice Department.

• Bush's Medicare scam and the circumstances that led the administration to lie to Congress about the cost of the legislation is under investigation by the HHS inspector general's office.

• The massive intelligence failure that led Bush to lie to the world about the Iraqi threat is under investigation by a congressionally-authorized independent commission (which Bush fought the creation of).

• Bribes offered on the House floor to Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) in exchange for his vote on Bush's Medicare plan are under investigation by the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department.

• Attorney General John Ashcroft was under investigation by the Federal Election Commission for violating campaign finance laws in 2000, and the FEC concluded that Ashcroft accepted $110,000 in illegal contributions.

• An investigation into House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's criminal fundraising schemes in Texas -- which allegedly used corporate funds to help state GOP lawmakers -- is already before a Texas grand jury.

• Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee were investigated for stealing thousands of confidential memos from Dem computers, a matter that has now been referred to the Justice Department for a possible criminal probe.

• Republican Connecticut Gov. John Rowland is under a criminal investigation (and an impeachment investigation) after he lied about prominent state contractors and several government aides paying for refurbishments to his lake-front cottage.

• Former Rep. Bill Janklow (R-S.D.) was under investigation for vehicular manslaughter, a crime for which he was later convicted.

• The Pentagon launched a formal investigation into well-armed evangelist and three-star General William "Jerry" Boykin, Bush's pick for deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and his record of extreme religious rhetoric.

• The circumstances that led to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 are under investigation by a congressionally-authorized independent commission (which, again, Bush fought the creation of and then later resisted cooperating with).

• And honorable mentions should go, of course, to investigations into Halliburton (Dick Cheney's former company) and Enron (George Bush's biggest corporate supporter).

If I'm missing any -- and I'm sure I am -- be sure to let me know and I'll update this list.

Update: One reader has alerted me to a helpful list of GOP ethics abuses that the Washington Post published yesterday. Only one of the nine on the list actually is under investigation right now, but they all deserve to be.

Second Update: Thanks to an outpouring of assistance from a variety of readers, here are four more GOP scandals that have been the subject of formal inquiries:

• California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was investigated for violating state campaign finance laws, a charge for which he was later found guilty by a state judge. The state has a $100,000 cap on candidate loans; Schwarzenegger loaned himself over $4 million in the closing days of his campaign. (Updated 3/21/04, thanks to reader Josh C. for the tip.)

• The forged documents that led Bush to inaccurately claim that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger are under investigation by a Senate committee and the FBI. (Updated 3/21/04, thanks to reader N.Z. for the tip.)

• John Korsmo, Bush's choice to chair the Federal Housing Finance Board, is the target of an ongoing Justice Department criminal probe related to his political fundraising activities and their subsequent cover-up. The scandal cost Korsmo his career; he was forced to resign from his position last week. (Updated 3/21/04, thanks to reader R.G. for the tip.)

• The Texas GOP's decision to seek assistance from the FAA to track down Democratic lawmakers fleeing the state to deny a legislative quorum was the subject of two formal inquiries -- one from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the other from the Department of Homeland Security. (Updated 3/21/04, thanks to reader Joe C. for the tip.)

Third Update: Make that 17.

* The General Accounting Office is investigating the legality of White House "video news releases" -- news-like proganda paid for with tax dollars -- which contain highly questionable claims about the alleged benefits of Bush's Medicare plan. (Updated 3/25/04, thanks to reader K.L. for the tip.)

Yet another: It's 18 and I like it.

* The Treasury Department's inspector general's office has launched a "preliminary" investigation into whether officials were misused to calculate data for GOP talking points on John Kerry's tax proposals. (Updated 4/7/04)

Wait, I'm not done: Numero 19.

* The Federal Election Commission investigated the National Republican Congressional Committee and determined that the GOP illegally transferred donations to outside independent groups for assistance in the 2000 campaign. The NRCC was fined $280,000. (Updated 4/9/04)

Bush officials suppressed and sought to manipulate government information about mercury contained in an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on children's health and the environment.

As the EPA readied the report for completion in May 2002, the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) began a lengthy review of the document. In February 2003, after nine months of delay by the White House, a frustrated EPA official leaked the draft report to the Wall Street Journal, including its finding that eight percent of women between the ages of 16 and 49 have mercury levels in the blood that could lead to reduced IQ and motor skills in their offspring.

... The finding provides strong evidence in direct contradiction to the administration's desired policy of reducing regulation on coal-fired power plants ...

...the new rules the EPA has finally proposed for regulating power plants' mercury emissions were discovered to have no fewer than 12 paragraphs lifted, sometimes verbatim, from a legal document prepared by industry lawyers.

In February 2005, the EPA's own inspector general reported that agency scientists had been pressured to change their scientific findings in order to justify the Administration's industry-friendly rules. The report recommended that additional analysis was needed before the rule was finalized. Days later, a Government Accountability Office report found that the EPA had distorted its analysis of the health impacts of mercury on brain development in children and fetuses.

When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a rule last week to limit mercury emissions from U.S. power plants, officials emphasized that the controls could not be more aggressive because the cost to industry already far exceeded the public health payoff.

What they did not reveal is that a Harvard University study paid for by the EPA, co-authored by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists had reached the opposite conclusion.

...top agency officials ordered the finding stripped from public documents, said a staff member who helped develop the rule. Acknowledging the Harvard study would have forced the agency to consider more stringent controls, said environmentalists and the study's author.

. . . in his Sept. 10 submission to the budget office, Mr. Ashcroft did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators.

Mr. Ashcroft proposed cuts in 14 programs. One proposed $65 million cut was for a program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants for equipment, including radios and decontamination suits and training to localities for counterterrorism preparedness.

Under Mr. Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, the department's counterterrorism budget increased 13.6 percent in the fiscal year 1999, 7.1 percent in 2000 and 22.7 percent in 2001.

On Aug. 9, a chart titled "Strategic Plan -- Attorney General Priorities" was distributed inside the department. This listed the same seven goals [reducing gun violence and drug trafficking; helping states with anticrime programs; reducing racial discrimination; securing the nation's borders and cutting the immigration backlog; reducing overcrowding and drug use in prisons; securing the rights of victims of crime and strengthening internal financial and computer systems] and 36 objectives under them. Thirteen of the objectives were highlighted in yellow and explained as "Highlight=AG Goal," including reducing gun violence, cutting the immigration backlog and strengthening internal financial systems. One of the 36 items referred to intelligence and investigation concerning terrorists, but it was not highlighted. A Justice Department official said this was a preliminary document and the eventual version, issued on Nov. 8, made counterterrorism "the No. 1 goal."