DOES IT really matter that the Bush administration has tried to manipulate science in the service of its conservative political agenda? Yes, and here's why....

We pay with our health. The Bush administration is waging a campaign to alter, eliminate, distort or suppress any scientific evidence that doesn't support its policies or ideology. Here are but a few examples:

-- Abortion: To strengthen its anti-abortion agenda, the administration portrayed abortion as a risk factor in breast cancer, which it is not.

-- Environmental health: The Bush administration has suppressed evidence about safe levels of mercury emissions and lead. Mercury and lead contamination are linked to neurological and development impairment in children.

-- The environment: ... Bush has dismissed the dangers posed by global warming and has, by executive order, reversed or relaxed environmental regulations that have protected the American public from air, water and soil pollution.

-- Sexual abstinence: To support its abstinence-only sex education campaign, the government deleted important information from a Web site about how using condoms can help prevent HIV infection.

-- Stem cell research: The Bush administration recently replaced two eminent scientists on the Council on Bio-Ethics who disagreed with the administration's political opposition to embryonic stem-cell research.