I Hope They Didn't Actually Plan That Pose With the Halo for Obama

OK, fair title. Before I clicked on this I was wondering what the hell you were up to.

We have been to the moon, unless there is overwhelmingly compelling economics reasons to go there I see no reason to spend the money. Besides, the Chinese are having a go at it, maybe when and if they set foot on it we could revisit the idea. And I love how adding 6 billion to NASA constitutes a cut. The other stuff you mention is nickle and dime, but you gotta start somewhere. The only real viable solutions are to raise the hell out of the Social Security age and single payer modeled off of any advanced OECD country (you know the places that spend 9% of their GDP on health care with better results than our 16% and 50 million uninsured), but neither will happen, so we will muddle through and go from being a fantastically rich country to just a rich one.

Like nobody recognizes the Vulcan 'Circle of Power'! Please consult the Federation Starfleet guidebook to major galactic cultures -- it's all explained in there.

Regarding the headline, who is this "they" Marty refers to? Is it the same "they" who nefariously conspired to prevent Obama from praising Israel's Haiti relief team the day before said team actually arrived in Haiti? They're sneaky bastards, "they."

Anyway, bitching about tiny individual program cuts like this is the worst form of 1970s-style liberalism (and also one of the more despicable traits of modern conservatism). If not the moon program, then what would Marty cut? If not the C-17, then what? Are U.S. soldiers stranded anywhere for lack of air transport? My only complaint with the items Marty lists is that it makes no sense to cut the moon program but keep the rest of the manned space program. If we're not going to go all in and attempt to establish permanent scientific outposts on the moon and someday Mars, with a very-long-term goal of facilitating potential settlement, then there's no justification for the expense of sending humans into space at all.

Since the end of Apollo, we've done nothing more than drive a truck the distance between Houston and Dallas, straight up. Though near-earth space travel (really, upper-atmosphere aviation) has provided some technological benefits, the rewards are scant compared to the cost. Even the science being done on the space station could be done with unmanned systems, except for a limited range of human physiological experiments whose only potential use is in exactly the kind of long-term deep-space missions that the Obama budget cuts. The word "exploration" has not applied to the manned space program since Apollo 17 left the moon in December 1972.

So the only problem in the NASA budget is not that Obama cut the moon program. The problem is that he didn't make even further cuts to the manned program, which ought not exist at all in the absence of a robust moon program. I think we ought to go to the moon; I'd be willing to sacrifice other things to fund a robust moon program devoted to President Bush's vision of establishing the equivalent of the Amundsen-Scott Station on the moon. (Highway safety education grants to the states, to name a program I'd be willing to zero out to fund other priorities.) But in the absence of a lasting commitment to such a mission, shut the whole thing down.

Go out to Google and enter the keywords "Bush" "halo" and "photo" and you'll get more than one random image. I won't even try to guess if these were planned -- although they originated around the time the Bush team was pushing the Top Gun "Mission Accomplished" nonsense and the new profile at Mount Rushmore photo op, so maybe there was a cadre in the Bush White House pushing the saintly image too.

About cutting seemingly unnecessary programs: We have food labeling when we eat to try to improve our health, energy ratings for appliances, Motion Picture Ratings, crash test ratings, and so on with the intention of altering the way we do business. How about labeling every government expense by its impact on jobs?