Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Above: "President" Bush announces his plan for NASA to put an astronaut on the moon again and then Mars -- and beyond. Unsurprisingly, The Associated Press notes that "it would be for Bush's successors to figure out how to finance the costliest part of the plan." It's like buying your kid very expensive Christmas gifts with a credit card in his name and expecting him to regard you like Santa Claus. Below: A chimpanzee that NASA employed in the 1960s. (Not to be confused with the chimpanzee at NASA headquarters in the photo above.)     To the moon! Besides the obvious thoughts -- such as how I wish we would send the smirking chimp to the moon and "How the fuck are we going to pay for that?" -- "President" Bush's announcement today at NASA headquarters that he'd like to see NASA return an astronaut to the moon by 2020 and then put an astronaut on Mars reminds me of the October 1988 vice-presidential debate between Dan Quayle, King George the First's vice president, and Michael Dukakis' running mate Lloyd Bentsen, in which Quayle stupidly compared himself to John F. Kennedy (who announced in a 1961 speech that the United States would put a man on the moon before the decade was over). Bentsen chewed Quayle up and spit him out again, saying: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Mr. "President," you're no Jack Kennedy. You're a Dan Quayle. And even he at least was elected. I also find it astounding to what lengths the Bush regime will go to distract the American people -- who, admittedly, have the attention span of a gnat on crack -- from the United States' mounting domestic problems. I guess that Iraq wasn't enough; now the Bush regime has to divert Americans' attention to outer fucking space. (House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi correctly remarked of Bush's space plan: "We have serious challenges here on Earth.")   Meanwhile, as MoveOn.org's winning anti-Bush television commercial reminds us, it is future generations that are going to have to pay for the Bush regime's "re"-election stunts, such as the United States' colonization of Iraq and now, the moon.    11:20:49 PM    Comments []

Carol Moseley Braun is expected to announce tomorrow that she is abandoning her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, leaving behind a field of eight men. The field topped out at 10 in September.  And then there were eight Finally, one of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination is dropping out, reducing the field of candidates to a slightly more manageable eight. (Retired Gen. Wesley Clark joined an already-crowded field of nine candidates in September, making it 10, but the following month Florida Sen. Bob Graham dropped out, reducing the field back to nine.) The Associated Press reports that former ambassador and former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, "whose Democratic presidential campaign never got off the ground," will formally drop out tomorrow and, in order to be different from everyone else, will endorse Howard Dean. (Really, people are endorsing the man only because up until the last 24 hours or so -- when the most recent poll in Iowa showed a three-way race between Dean, John Kerry and Richard Gephardt, according to pollster John Zogby -- he was the apparent front-runner and people like to go with the apparent winner. People endorse Dean based not upon his record or his character, but upon his fundraising and organizing ability. Dean isn't as much a candidate as he is a fad. People, I think, like the idea of Howard Dean more than they like the actual man, who is damned near impossible to get to know, as he morphs himself according to his immediate political need.) So I'd say that Braun, who was the only woman and one of only two non-whites in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, is going out with a whimper. The AP notes that "Braun never broke out of single digits in national surveys, didn't qualify for several state ballots and ran up thousands of dollars in campaign debt. Even her own campaign manager, Patricia Ireland, had said publicly there was no way Braun could win the nomination. She leaves the race after making no impact on it, except for some bright moments in the presidential debates." It's too bad that a stronger female candidate -- or candidates -- didn't go for the Democratic presidential nomination. (Except for Hillary Clinton. Is it too early to start an "Anybody But Hillary" movement?) I remember that as a high school student I was pleased that Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate back in 1984. I had thought that it marked the beginning of change, that it wouldn't be long before we would see a woman running for president, but it's 20 years later and since Ferraro, our presidential and vice-presidential choices have remained white men.  Anyway, I'm glad that (not counting Graham, of course) one of the nine candidates has dropped out because now it will be easier on the egos of the other candidates who also don't have a snowball's chance to drop out. As the candidates drop like flies, the debates should improve, being less crowded, and the more viable candidates who remain in the race should pick up more campaign contributions.  I will miss Dennis Kucinich when he goes, though; he is the only candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who actually is what Howard Dean claims to be. 10:31:58 PM    Comments []