In a word: Moof

More depressing political news. The white house issued a statement about the appropriations bill H.R. 3093, which includes NASA’s budget. Here’s their comments:

The Administration supports the House’s full funding for NASA’s Exploration Systems and Space Shuttle. However, the Administration does not endorse funding in excess of the request for Aeronautics, Education, and Science, where increases for near-term support would create unsustainable outyear funding requirements. The Administration also strongly objects to reductions to the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite Continuation Project that would reduce the future system availability of critical space communications capabilities for NASA and other partner agencies.

So the white house and the upper NASA administration don’t like congress giving them more money for aeronautics, education, and science, since that will make it more difficult to cut those areas in the future and redirect the money to some Moon/Mars lunacy. Seriously, why don’t we make NASA a “rocket club” already and throw out the science altogether.

(via Steinn. Quote from an Office of Management and Budget report, via LexisNexis)

I really do dislike political debates, but I feel compelled to read some of the transcripts after the debates are over. In my perusal of the transcript from Monday’s democratic debate, I picked out some choice quotes. Unfortunately, they are all terribly depressing. That is to be expected, at least to a degree, since there’s no good thirty-second answers to these issues. Many of the questions are outright ridiculous anyways. Especially when the questions are nothing but cues to pander to religion, or to use the words troops, america, freedom, and democracy in a sentence without conveying anything. Or they demand a contradictory answer, such as the question about public schools. The premise of the question demanded that the candidates both say that the schools are awful as a result of the “no standardized test left behind” act, and that they think that the schools are wonderful enough for them to send their own children there.

Don’t think that I’m blaming the democrats though. The republican debates are orders of magnitude worse. Seriously, I can’t imagine a more depressing political situation than three presidential candidates saying they “don’t believe in” evolution. I really can’t think of anything more depressing than that, except for perhaps all of them agreeing. Anyway, here are some quotes:

COOPER: Is anyone on the stage for reparations for slavery for African-Americans?
KUCINICH: I am. The Bible says we shall be and must be repairers of the breach.

I really don’t care what the issue is, using the bible to justify any political position is ridiculous.

EDWARDS: It’s not. I mean, I’ve been asked a personal question which is […] do I believe and do I personally support gay marriage?
The honest answer to that is I don’t.

And he gives no reason for this, none at all. Maybe he’s trying to appeal to the swing-vote gay-haters (???), maybe he’s just latently homophobic. Either way, what a dumb statement to make.

BIDEN: Religion informs my values.
BIDEN: My reason dictates outcomes. […] You know, look, I don’t think they’re inconsistent. I don’t find anything inconsistent about my deep, religious beliefs and my ability to use reason. I think the coin’s [”in god we trust”] got it just right. I think I have it in perspective.

Right, another one of these “I see no conflict” religious types. Does he find anything inconsistant in Sam Brownback’s religious beliefs and “ability to use reason”? Biden, and for that matter all of the candidates asked this question, have done nothing to distinguish their religiosity from any of the Republicans, other than to say they won’t let it influence them. Not good enough.

Bill Moyers interviews Bruce Fein and John Nichols about impeaching Bush and Cheney. It’s a great discussion, something which has been lacking from news media for a long time. I’m going to have to watch this show more regularly. Hooray for PBS. Here’s a transcript of the best part:

BILL MOYERS: That was a great moment when Sara Taylor said, “I took an oath to uphold the president.” Did you see that?

BRUCE FEIN: Yes. And that was like the military in Germany saying, “My oath is to the Fuhrer, not to the country.” She took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I did, too, when I was in the government. There’s no oath that says, “I’m loyal to a president even if he defiles the Constitution.”

JOHN NICHOLS: Ever.

BILL MOYERS: Just this week Harriet Miers, the president’s former counsel, did not show up to testify before the congressional hearing. What do you make of that in regard to this issue of power?

BRUCE FEIN: Well, it shows how far we’ve come from even the mon– monarchical days of Richard Nixon where he didn’t have the audacity to tell John Dean, “No, you can’t testify before the Watergate committee about conversations you had with me about obstructing justice or otherwise.”

BILL MOYERS: John Dean was his counsel–

BRUCE FEIN: White House counsel–

BILL MOYERS: –just as Harriet Miers–

BRUCE FEIN: –is to President Bush. Yes.

BILL MOYERS: And Nixon said to Dean, “You must go up there and testify”?

BRUCE FEIN: No. He didn’t attempt to impose any objection at all. And Dean, of course, broke the Watergate story that led to Nixon’s impeachment and the House’s judiciary committee–

BILL MOYERS: And look what–

BRUCE FEIN: –and resignation. And now we have a comparable situation where a Harriet Miers could perhaps expose things regarding President– Bush’s knowledge of the electronic surveillance program or the firing of U.S. attorneys, which seems to contradict what Alberto Gonzalez has said about White House involvement. And yet President Bush is saying, “You can’t talk, Harriet Miers, because I don’t want any of that political or legal embarrassment.” And unlike John Dean who brought the Constitution forward with his testimony, Harriet Miers still is silent.

I’m too lazy to write out something original, so I can at least just supply some interesting news.

The most impressive story is the detection of water in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet. The planet is slightly more massive than Jupiter, and has a greater orbital radius, but its orbital period is only 2.2 days. Insanely fast compared to Jupiter’s 11.9 years. Distance to the star from the sun is ~300 light-years. Overall, we knew there must be water on some extrasolar planets, but to have that confirmed is amazing. Especially since the first spectrum from an extrasolar planet was just obtained in February 2007.

There’s a report of Spontanious altruism in chimps and young children in PLoS Biology. The chimps handed a unfamiliar human a stick that was just out of reach of the person, even when the chimps had to climb 2.5m to retrieve the stick. A similar experiment was conducted with small children, and found nearly the same results. No bible was involved in the experiments, no stone tablets were handed down to the chimps, and no sermons were given. This is just more evidence that humans don’t acquire their morality from a magic man or a special book.