Bastards

Chimpy's new budget guts funding to proposed scientific missions, in spite of new director Michael Griffin's vow that "not one thin dime" would come out of NASA's scientific budget to fund bush's "Mars Bitch!" inititiative. (One wonders what false promises the administration made to him when they got him to accept the job.) The NYTimes has the details: Budget Cuts Back Much- Promoted NASA Missions:

The cuts have alarmed and outraged many scientists, who have long feared that NASA will have to cannibalize its science program to carry out the president's vision of human spaceflight.

The new cuts, they say, will drive young people from the field, ending American domination of space science and perhaps ceding future discoveries to Europe.

"The bottom line: science at NASA is disappearing — fast," said Donald Lamb, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and chairman of a committee on space science for the Association of American Universities.

~snip~

"We're getting ready to fire all the people we've built up," said Dr. Beichman, who is the project scientist for the second of the two spacecraft missions, once scheduled for about 2020. Once those scientists have found other jobs, he said, they are not likely to come back.

"What I feel bad about is turning away a generation," Dr. Beichman said, explaining that planet-finding has been one of the hottest fields in science lately, attracting, in particular, young scientists into astronomy.

Read the whole thing. It's pretty clear- TAX CUTS GOOD!! SCIENCE BAD!!!! OVERTHROWING IRAN GOOD!! SCIENCE BAD!!!! BLOWING UP BROWN PEOPLE GOOD!!! SCIENCE BAD!!!!

Incidentally, the photo is an artist's rendition of an X-Ray sattelite called NuStar that is being cancelled after several years of development.

Republicans, penny wise, and fucking pound foolish.