I Thought You Were Already There, Mike

It looks like the “aw, shucks” Repug presidential candidate is at it again, based on this other excerpt from the presidential debate last night.

Sure, the notion of “sending Hillary Clinton to Mars” was a clever line to work wingnuttia all into a froth, and then of course, Huckabee got all serious…

"Whether it's the medical technologies that saved many of our lives and the lives of our families, it's the direct result from the space program," he said. "We need to put more money into space and technology exploration."

Um…OK, Governor “Razor Blades” (Huckabee does at least offer a smiling face to his lockstep right-wing orthodoxy, though, as Hendrik Hertzberg notes here in this week’s issue of The New Yorker).

The problem, Mike, is that the head of your party refuses to properly fund the agency (as noted here), with Dem Senator Barbara Mikulski and Repug Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and Richard Shelby trying to secure supplemental funding.

As the story tells us…

"Based on current projections, we will not be able to meet the 2014 milestone originally called for when President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration," (NASA Administrator Mike) Griffin said during the first of three hearings held last week on NASA's 2008 budget request.

The White House is seeking $17.3 billion for NASA for 2008, or a 6.5-percent increase over the agency's current budget, which is the same amount it was in 2006. When compared to what NASA was expecting to get for 2007 before Congress decided to keep most non-defense programs funded at their 2006 levels rather than tackle a pile of unfinished spending bills, NASA's 2008 request represents a 3.1 percent increase.

Regardless of how NASA's budget request is framed, congressional Democrats, and even a few Republicans, said last week that it is too small to cover all that NASA needs to get done.

"NASA has too many responsibilities and not enough resources to accomplish them all," said Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W. Va.), chairman of the House Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee. "Although the administration gave you a reasonably high budget request compared to many other domestic discretionary programs, it really is not sufficient."

House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) said during his committee's NASA hearing March 15 that the U.S. space program is "headed for a train wreck" without additional money. "I will not kid you that it's going to be easy to get the funding you are asking for in this year's request, especially if the White House remains disengaged," he said.

…

While Griffin did not point out that the White House also has failed to increase NASA's budget at the pace it promised back in 2004 forcing the agency to make unpopular cuts to its aeronautics and science programs, several lawmakers did.

"I think it's clear we have a budgetary situation that bears little resemblance to the rosy projections offered by the administration when the president announced his Vision for Space Exploration three years ago," Gordon said.

Oh, and regarding Dubya’s “Vision For Space Exploration,” more information is available here (reflecting his usual lazy “commitment” to just about anything including the recent farce in Annapolis, pretending to be engaged just long enough to generate a photo op or two; his problem and ours, though, is that we saw through this long ago).

Update: Paul Krugman posted this on Huckabee earlier and weighs in on the Repug debate here (Actually looking for common sense? My God, man, whatever would "the base" say about that?).