What’s more important - military golf courses or space exploration? [View all]

[n2doc]

On Thanksgiving day, Comet ISON, which many astronomers dubbed the "Comet of the Century," swept about 730,000 miles above the sun's surface. NASA scientists had pretty much de-clared ISON dead, predicting the icy snowball wouldn't survive its brush with the sun, but over the weekend, signs appeared that the comet actually emerged from the sun's grasp.

The damaged comet, limping away from the sun, seems to me to be a perfect celestial analogy of our space program, and the current state of NASA.

You see, Republicans hate two things - science and spending money. Whenever they run for office, they always cry and bemoan the debt while browbeating us with climate change denial and anti-evolution nonsense. They tell us taxes are too high and that important choices need to be made - except when it comes to military spending. Calls for cutting the budget of our bloated, oversized military are drowned out by cries that any cut, no matter how small, will cost American lives

Just to put things into perspective, from 2011 to 2012 1,624 Americans were killed as a result of severe weather (often as a result of the climate change Republicans claim doesn't exist). In that same time period, just four innocent Americans were killed as a result of foreign-inspired terrorism. More people in the United States were killed by dogs from 2011 to 2012 than by foreign-led terrorists bent on destroying our way of life.

Yet we treat our military budget as sacrosanct, despite all the evidence to the contrary about its overblown need in the world. The U.S. spent more on defense in 2012 than the next 13 countries with the highest defense budgets combined. Twenty percent of the entire federal budget was spent on defense in 2011, and since 2001, the base defense budget has soared from $287 billion to $530 billion (and that's not in-cluding base costs in Afghanistan and Iraq).

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