President Bush said: “Because HIV/AIDS brings suffering and fear into so many lives, I ask you to reauthorize the Ryan White Act to encourage prevention, and provide care and treatment to the victims of that disease.”

FACT: Two years ago, President Bush promised to spend $3 billion per year to “turn the tide against AIDS” abroad. Congress approved $2.9 billion to fight HIV/AIDS and other diseases in 2005, but it cut the U.S. pledge to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to $350 million — almost $200 million less than last year’s donation. “The administration is also blocking the Fund from receiving $88 million that Congress appropriated in the 2004 fiscal year.”

FACT: “Although Bush quoted prices for generic versions of AIDS drugs in his announcement, in fact the first round of US grants under its PEPFAR program does not authorize the use of generics, instead favoring drugs from Western pharmaceutical companies at prices at least four times higher than the lowest-cost generics.”

FACT: The U.S. government completely ignored or hid research warnings that showed severe flaws in a study of the use of the antiretroviral drug nevirapine. President Bush then devoted $500 million to send the drug to Africa, authorizing its administration to thousands of African mothers and babies.

President Bush said: “Soon I will send to Congress a proposal to fund special training for defense counsel in capital cases, because people on trial for their lives must have competent lawyers by their side.”

FACT: Bush held up the Innocence Protection Act, which provided funding for higher-quality defense counsel, even after it passed the House with overwhelming support. His administration wrote a 22-page letter saying the bill was the end of the world. He eventually signed it after it was badly diluted.

FACT: As chief legal counsel for then Gov. Bush in Texas, attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales was responsible for writing a memo on the facts of each death penalty case — Bush decided whether a defendant should live or die based on the memos. An analysis of these memos by the Atlantic Monthly concluded that “Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.” In the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded 33-year-old, Gonzales’s memo “failed to mention that Washington’s mental limitations, and the fact that he and his ten siblings were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts, were never made known to the jury.”

The President’s staff has tried to invoke President Clinton’s record on Social Security to sell President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security.

I was there in the Clinton White House. Let me tell you what actually happened. President Clinton enacted fiscally responsible policies that strengthened Social Security and kept it solvent for more years than anyone thought possible. He made it very clear to the Congress and conservatives there who wanted to send surpluses on tax cuts that we had a moral obligation to “save Social Security first.” That’s what we did.

President Bush has pursued the opposite policy: raid Social Security first. In the first term, he squandered two trillion dollars of the surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy. Now he wants to take us two trillion more dollars into debt to pay for the dismantling of Social Security.

As President Clinton himself was fond of saying — “Mr. President, that dog won’t hunt.”

President Bush said: “Now we need to focus on giving young people, especially young men in our cities, better options than apathy, or gangs, or jail.”

FACT: In the 2004 budget he presented in 2003, President Bush proposed eliminating all funding for Youth Opportunity Grants, a program that gives job training to young people. In 2002 that program was funded at $225 million, in 2003 he proposed funding only $45 million ($43.5 million was actually funded) and in the 2004 budget, he proposed its elimination. Congress accepted his recommendation and funding has been eliminated.

FACT: Two federal banking agencies headed by Bush appointees are trying to change laws that would cripple the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination by banks against low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

President Bush said: “As President, I have a constitutional responsibility to nominate men and women who understand the role of courts in our democracy, and are well qualified to serve on the bench – and I have done so.”

FACT: President Bush has nominated Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes IV for a second time. Haynes led the group of attorneys responsible for the memos contending “the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.”

FACT: Bush is determined to install California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rodgers Brown to the federal courts. The New York Times described her record as a “war on mainstream legal values that most Americans hold dear.”

FACT: Bush also renominated Alabama Attorney General William Pryor. His confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench would be a huge blow for women’s rights. Pryor considers Roe v. Wade to be “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our nation’s history.”

Progressives often talk of retirement security as a three-legged stool – Social Security, personal savings, and private pensions.

Listening to the speech, it occurs to me that President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security offers an entirely different a three-legged stool – an additional two trillion dollars in debt, big cuts in benefits and risky privitization carve-out accounts.

Important safety tip: don’t try sitting on President Bush’s stool.