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Politics : PRESIDENT JOHN FORBES KERRY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (110)	3/4/2004 2:23:42 AM
From: zonkie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1017

One small step toward re-election; another big payday for Halliburton. By Mick Youther President Bush had barely announced his bold new vision of building a permanent Moon base to serve as a launching pad for a manned mission to Mars before he was attacked from all sides. Democrats, conservatives, scientists, and just about everyone who had ever had to live within a budget weighed in with their criticisms of his bold new vision. • “Until the federal government brings the record deficit back down to earth, it should not launch expensive new space programs of questionable scientific value.”-- Tom Schatz, head of Citizens Against Government Waste, 1/14/04 • “I think fiscal conservatives will be disappointed in a call to go to the moon because certainly it's going to cost money and at a time of budget deficits and soaring spending, it remains to be seen whether this is a real national priority,”-- Brian Riedl, budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, quoted in the Orlando Sentinel, 1/9/04 • “…George W. Bush is said to have felt the need to demonstrate he has a quality his father once derided as ‘the vision thing.’ So he has reportedly embraced an ambitious, long-term and stupefyingly costly (some estimates run as high as a trillion dollars over the next few decades) program for manned exploration of the moon and Mars.”-- Frank J. Gaffney Jr., The Washington Times, 1/13/04 • “Former Ohio Sen. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, has said that before deciding to race off to the moon or Mars, the nation needs to complete the international space station and provide the taxi service to accommodate a full crew of six or seven.”-- Scott Lindlaw, AP, 1/9/04 • “It is unclear whether science will benefit by or be destroyed by this new proposal.”-- John Bahcall, physicist and adviser to NASA, quoted in The New York Times, 1/15/04 • “[Lawrence H. Kuznetz, a scientist who conducts research for NASA says Bush’s plan] could become ‘a bottomless pit of misdirected targets’ and ‘suck up NASA's budget faster than a black hole sucks up light.’”--William J. Broad, The New York Times, 1/15/04 • “With the state our union is in, we must not squander billions to boldly go where man has gone before.”-- Holly Sklar, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 1/19/04 It would be easy enough to dismiss this plan as just another of Bush’s grandiose announcements that sound good, but are never funded and are soon forgotten. I think this one is different. This plan came straight from the top—President, er...I mean Vice President Dick Cheney, and he knows a good plan when he sees one. • “Guess who benefits the most from Bush’s newfound interest in space? If you said defense and aerospace firms, you win the prize. Guess which firm helped with the proposal and would benefit? If you said Halliburton, take another prize.”--The Left Coaster, 1/19/04 • “[Halliburton] -- fabled beneficiary of no-bid multibillion-dollar military contracts and high-priced provider of Kuwaiti oil -- is determined to drill on Mars and the moon....no matter what worthy motivations lie behind the president's policies, he and Cheney always appear to be shilling for their corporate clientele.”--Joe Conason's Journal, Salon.com, 1/12/04 • “Administration officials scoffed at the idea that Halliburton had anything to do with the development of the space policy.”--The Washington Post, 1/16/04 • “[Halliburton] has long supported funding a Mars plan because it is good for its drilling technology business (it was also Cheney who spearheaded the Mars plan inside the White House)…And the payoff could be big: Citizens Against Government Waste notes that, despite the White House's initial lowballing, legitimate ‘cost estimates for the new program range from $550 billion to $1 trillion.’”--The Progress Report, 1/15/04 Trust V.P. Cheney to come up a plan that helps Halliburton develop new drilling technologies they can then use to drill for oil on earth—and the best part—American taxpayers pick up the tab. You can’t beat a plan like that, unless it happens to include the deployment of a few space-based weapon systems. We have to protect our men on the Moon, don’t we? You may have noticed that President Bush’s State of the Union speech failed to mention his bold new vision for space exploration. Don’t let that fool you. If they want to do it; they’ll do it. They know “What’s Good for Halliburton is Good for America.” • “As long as President Bush is willing to go to the moon I think we should send him.”-- viewer’s comment to Texas Cable News after Bush’s announcement Posted January 24, 2004 Mick Youther is an Instructor in the Department of Physiology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL. You can email your comments to Mick@interventionmag.com interventionmag.com