"This court has never, in its 24 years, reviewed a record of agency action that contained such a compelling portrait of political meddling."

These are the words written by U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson in his August 10 decision that the Bush administration cannot change the standards commercial fisheries must meet before the tuna they catch can carry the "dolphin-safe" label.

Judge Henderson went on to say that Commerce Secretary Donald Evans not only failed to conduct the scientific research required to relax existing labeling laws, but engaged in "a pattern of delay and inattention" to build support for his position.

The plan was to allow banned Mexican tuna back into the country under a phony label, and in order to carry it out, the Bush administration--once again--had to ignore its own scientists' findings. How anyone can work as a scientist in this administration is beyond me. Scientific evidence about everything from condom use to cancer to global warming to stem cell research to dolphin traps is routinely ignored in the service of either huge corporations or fundamentalist churches. And since those corporations control the news media, the American public is left uninformed.

Of course, the American public isn't exactly turning over rocks looking for facts, and millions of Americans are perfectly happy to ignore scientific evidence. These Americans believe that homosexuality is contagious and that evolution never occurred.

Sometimes it seems like it didn't.