Your Federal tax dollars at work.
I was gratified to hear Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress yesterday in which he called for cuts to Social Security spending as the most critical element of a deficit-elimination process. This is the only sensible approach to a problem which will presently balloon entirely out of control--spending on the elderly (Social Security and Medicare combined) already amounts to more than one-third of the total federal budget, and matters will only get dramatically worse from here as the Baby Boomers retire and health care costs continue to spiral out of control. Luckily I have devised a solution to both problems, which--posturing by the Democrats notwithstanding--has plenty to make everyone happy.

But, in order to present it in a credible and comprehensive manner, a few numbers would be in order. These will also serve to allow me to confirm for myself that the plan works before dispensing a bunch of facile platitudes on the subject which sound pretty as long as they're kept to generalities. Facts are good and are our friends. We'll leave the facile platitudes to the politicians, since they are almost universally incapable of doing any justice to any problem of even moderate complexity, which the current situation certainly is.

Remember the annual muted hooplah surrounding the release of the President's budget proposal? I saw a bunch of stock shots of a guy pushing a hand truck with stacks of budget documents on them, each one shrinkwrapped individually and about the thickness of four telephone books, and said to myself "Gotta have it." Yes, accountants can be such dorks sometimes, but the whole notion of having that many actual numbers to run my fingers through and see just how bad things really are--as measured with numbers, not volume of rhetoric--presents a really exciting opportunity to see what all this budget deficit fuss is all about and how it can be fixed. So I found myself wishing I could have my own copy, not just the fat cat members of congress, none of whom naturally read it anyway.

It occurred to me about that time that as a taxpaying citizen of a free republic, I by all rights should have a copy of the budget, at least if I wanted one, which I did. So I wandered off to the Office of Management and Budget website to commence making inquiries.

I already knew I could download much, or most, or theoretically all of it, from OMB's FY 2005 Budget page. But the ability to do so is rather theoretical, since in addition to the obviously named Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005 (which itself contains some 33 chapters, each of which can be downloaded individually); there's also some supporting documents such as Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005; a whole fascinating collection of Historical Tables, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005; and an Appendix which contains a further 35 chapters. And other stuff too. For some of it it isn't immediately obvious what overlaps with what, if in fact it does at all. It's a little overwhelming to try to look at online, even though it is in fact all there.

So the accountant in me decided that the thing to do was to get one of those really pretty shrinkwrapped bound hard copies all the cool kids in Washington are toting around these days. Hard copies are just so much easier to work with. So I followed OMB's link to the Government Printing Office's page to buy these very documents, and found out that sure enough they are available to buy for any schmo who wants one, provided that schmo has $250 he doesn't mind parting with to get his own pristinely geeky hard copy of the US budget and its various supporting documents. Which I don't, in fact, have, living as I do on a budget where American Express doesn't grant the same sort of consideration for deficit spending that Congress enjoys.

So, being cheap, I ordered the CD-ROM which contains all the budget documents and costs just twenty bucks. Which, yes, gets me right back where I started, having only electronic copies I'd have to print myself (just like the internet version), but at least I wouldn't have to download seventy-odd individual files, create a little file directory system for them, get bored and give up halfway through, etc. But it's here that things got funky.

First of all, twenty bucks is a bargain compared to the $250 they're asking for on the hard copy, but--again--for taxpaying citizens of a free republic, the feds ought to practically force everyone to take one of these, just so we can all play the role of informed voter debating from the facts. Instead they sell them, charging what seems to me kind of a steep price for a CD containing nothing but data which is in the public domain. I can buy fifty blank CD-ROMs from Office Depot for about $15, and churn out fifty copies of whatever is on that disc in the matter of a few hours. An additional two dollars each (let's be generous) for jewel case and printed liner notes, assuming these are inlcuded, plus fifty cents to mail the final product, and the government's actual cost is about $4 apiece, including labor. Perhaps the other sixteen dollars I paid is my gift to reduce the Federal debt and should be included on my IRS Schedule A as a charitable contribution. I could buy a disc from the thieving RIAA for less. Note to potential IRS inquisitors: I will not include any such thing on my Schedule A, the information on which really is entirely legitimate and painfully honest.

Next problem is that every clown in the country who cobbles together a weblog for his own amusement probably went through some of the same process I did, and these CDs must have sold like hotcakes because I ordered my copy only one day after it was released, and ten days later got a postcard informing me that my budget document was out of stock and should be available in another four to six weeks. Hmph. Given the modest difficulty of burning a disc and mailing it, I'm struggling to comprehend the possibility of facing a month and a half delay. Which, after all, represents a delay in receiving a one-year document which is nearly 12% of that year. I hope it's still relevant by the time I get it.

Adding insult to injury, I discovered today that GPO then proceeded to charge my credit card twice for the same order that I still haven't received. Grr.

So, the short form of all this is that while I have developed a scheme to save the country from the sure economic ruin which our present inertial course will eventuate in, I don't yet have the numbers to do fact-checking and so forth. So you'll all have to wait. But it's coming, eventually, just like my alleged CD-ROM is.

And, since you've all been dying to know, we come finally to discuss John Kerry.
I've been watching the Democratic primaries with mixed feelings, which response is hard to avoid with such a bunch of vitriol, puerile taunting, demagoguing, and generally behaving poorly being broadcast with such alarming constancy by the news networks. I've been pulling for John Edwards as the best of the electable bunch (I have a lot of respect for Joe Lieberman, but primary races for either party tend to be really ugly affairs which reward campaign behavior which isn't Joe's strong suit). I don't think I agree with John Edwards on many things, and I know I didn't agree with Howard Dean on some things (Iraq, his current economic policy) though I agreed with him on others (gun owners' rights, and the fiscal moderation and discipline he demonstrated while he actually governed). I have no idea whether John Kerry and I agree on anything, because I have concluded that John Kerry believes in nothing. Except, naturally, for his desire to beat George Bush and propel himself to power. Which I don't agree with.

If you look up at the top left corner of this page you'll see my own little political axiom, which at its simplest is that all politicians are basically venal. I'm sure Howard Dean had more than a little fancy for the Oval Office, and I disagree wholly with his take on the Iraq war, but I believe him when he says he believes these things. And there's no doubt that what George Bush says is more than a little colored by the fact that he'd rather keep his job than lose it, but there's little doubt that what he represents as his core beliefs are genuine.

But I think John Kerry is the very worst sort of politician in this regard, one who is actuated solely by his venality, and is devoid of any real beliefs of his own. His rather tortured attempts to change his story and expain away his votes on the Iraq war resolution suggest that nothing he says or votes can be taken at anything like face value. It's worth noting that he voted against the 1991 Iraq war, despite its having UN approval, though he now explains that that was so President Bush 41could build more domestic support for the effort. And he voted for the current war, which he now says he opposed, and which war can be blamed on George Bush and Halliburton. (Come on. He's on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He's privy to all the intelligence the President reads, both during the Clinton administration's Operation Desert Fox and in the run-up to the current war. Saying that he only supported the war because of faulty intelligence--so it's not his fault and he can't be blamed for it--but then condemning George Bush for doing the same is absurd, and any thinking person knows it. I'm frankly insulted he expects that to fly, and more than a little appalled that so far, in fact, it is.)

And he voted for the Patriot Act, which in fact he co-authored, and which he now virulently opposes for, essentially, its "chilling effect." Tip to astute listeners: the supposed chilling effect, which you will hear cited as a basis for opposing all manner of Republican legislation, is only cited in the face of an utter absence of real and specific problems with the policy being criticised, and it means that not only have no actual abuses surfaced, that it's difficult even for educated critics to even imagine specifically what might go wrong.

Kerry voted for the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, making regime change for Iraq the official position of the United States, though evidently not with any real seriousness of purpose, according to what he's been saying lately about how wrong it was for us to actually depose him. And, every Democrat's pal, Bill Clinton, signed this bill calling for regime change, so why all the Democratic angst when it comes time to actually do it? The same liberals who always wore FREE TIBET t-shirts in high school should have loved our kicking of a murderous oppressive tyrant from power, though in fact they were the loudest to oppose it for some reason.

Lest I digress into an analysis of the state of American Liberalism, which is perhaps a subject worthy of some attention but which would take us rather too far afield, let us return to John Kerry. I started to notice his yea on the Iraq war becoming but Bush assembled a "fraudulent coalition" and I didn't expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did once Dean's consistently strident opposition to the war had made him (Dean) the temporary front-runner. Which vulgarity, in that Rolling Stone article, was an especially nice touch for the man who would be leader of the free world, as it nicely encapsulated not only that the way he actually votes shouldn't be held against him, but that he was also too angry to talk about it without having his grammar explode. Yale-educated three-term United States Senators have fully sufficient savvy and self-awareness to avoid any accidental embarassing choices of diction, and I haven't heard Kerry dropping F bombs on Tim Russert and Brit Hume, so I can only attribute this particular choice of language as a carefully considered maneuver to position himself favorably in whatever particular idiom he thinks the readers of Rolling Stone should view him in order for him to garner the support of another subsection of a demographic. Taken together, I must confess that I just don't buy it. He's faking it, and he doesn't even have the decency to be convincing about it.

So what? My problem with all this is that John Kerry is just Bill Clinton, devoid of charm and probably less likely to philander. His every policy focus-group tested, governing according to the latest opinion tracking polls, and always choosing what's momentarily most advantageous--not for the nation, but most advantageous to John Kerry's gaining and continuing in power. This habit was obvious and annoying, though slightly amusing, during the Clinton administration, when the economy was booming and the nation was generally at peace. Matters are rather more serious now, and as a consequence we don't have the luxury of playing silly posturing games with our policies or indulging leaders who just want to make everyone like them so they'll be re-elected. Because the easiest and most dangerous policy which Kerry will end up selling us before this is over is that we're not really even at war anymore.

The reason he'll sell this, and why I fear a dangerous number of Americans might buy it, is because it offers the easy path. It's much easier to say, and for a listener to hear, we're not really at war anymore, than to listen to George Bush say that we're at war; it will be long and difficult; there will be setbacks and men will die; and sacrifice will be needed from all of us. Which, if you've been listening, is pretty much what George Bush has been saying all along. It's the hard path, and it makes even a great wartime leader vulnerable in peacetime. It's why no less a leader than Winston Churchill himself was voted promptly out of office in the first election after the danger was past. No one wants to hear about sacrifice and toil and endurance, or vote for someone who offers nothing but.

None of which has anything whatever to do with whether we're really at war right now. We are. The absence of major attacks in the US since 9/11/2001 is significant and gratifying, but it does not mean our enemy has been beaten or has given up. For all the comparisons the Iraq war draws to Vietnam, I maintain that the overall War on Terror is much more like World War II than Vietnam, for it is fundamentally an existential conflict against a deranged enemy who will stop at nothing to see us wiped off the very face of the earth. Hitler and Hirohito had their armies and navies of hundreds of thousands of men to try to accomplish this; all the terrorists need is one major breach in nonproliferation security and they may be able to develop or acquire a nuclear weapon. Or, possibly worse, an enhanced strain of smallpox. Either one would be at least two orders of magnitude more deadly than 9/11 was, and would have the potential to cause the utter economic collapse of our civilization. That's what we're up against here, and it's every bit that serious.

This is not a game. I don't care exactly about the Nigerian yellowcake, or whether Saddam had actually tricked us into thinking he still had weapons he had really destroyed (which, really, does seem incredible). I really don't care whether "Mission Accomplished" was an arrogantly premature celebration of a victory not yet achieved, or was really meant just for the crew of one carrier who had served admirably and honorably. I really don't care whether George Bush's dental records prove he was at a meeting in Alabama for the ANG in the '60s, and whether the one meeting he missed was optional or supposedly mandatory. All that kind of quibbling is silly kid's stuff, and the fact that the Democrats are obsessed with it all shows just how profoundly unserious they are about winning this war, or even recognizing and admitting that it is a war and not just an elaborate law enforcement excercise. Right now we don't have the luxury of indulging silly politicians who want to pretend that the war is over, and we won, and we can all come home and disarm and celebrate the new Peace Dividend. Because right now that sort of thinking from the elected leaders in our highest offices has the ability to get an unseemly large number of us killed.

I can only say that I wish more Democrats still had the spirit of John F Kennedy, not John F Kerry, as we prosecute this long and shadowy war.

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." John F Kennedy, Inaugural address, 1/20/1961.

Since I'm on this little science kick of late, here are a couple other things you might have missed.
NASA, rather disappointingly, has decided to forego the final scheduled shuttle mission to service the aging Hubble Space Telescope, which was to have taken place next year. Evidently, NASA chief Sean O'Keefe has considered all the input from Hubble supporters as to its ongoing value, and the assessment of risk inherent in the mission from the astronauts' office, and has concluded that on balance it's not worth saving.

If you've never seen the famous Hubble Deep Field photograph, you should go check it out before even proceeding with the rest of this discussion. The Deep Field is a view nearly all the way to the end of the visible universe, in an average slice of sky near the Big Dipper which is no wider than the apparent size of a pencil eraser held at arm's length. And, for context, you might consider this comparison between the best ground-based photograph of the colliding galaxies NGC 4038/4039 and an image of the same from Hubble.

O'Keefe's decision is disappointing, of course, given all that Hubble has allowed us to learn over the past decade. With a fresh set of batteries, new gyroscopes for pointing and a new camera, HST could continue producing effective scientific research for another decade. Hubble never was expected to last forever, of course, but its replacement--formerly known simply as the Next Generation Space Telescope, now the James Webb Space Telescope--won't be ready for launch until 2011 at the soonest. And, as the new space telescope project will cost an unholy fortune, and with NASA now pinching pennies so as to enable the moon base and Mars shot (both discussed here previously), it is far from certain that the Webb Telescope will ever actually see first light. I can readily see a scenario, with the inimitable logic of government, where NASA is told on the one hand that this new Webb Telescope is far too expensive, what with us preparing to go to Mars and all, while HST is still operating; and on the other hand, that upgrading Hubble is an expensive and unaffordable luxury what with the Webb Telescope coming shortly online and all. It's possible we could talk ourselves into a situation where we are without any space telescope operating at visible light wavelengths at all, just a Mars program. And as excited as I am about the Mars program, orbiting telescopes allow some really fantastic science to be done and are just indispensable.

This decision to allow HST to kind of wither on the vine is also somewhat controversial, as a couple of NASA engineers have leaked an anonymous report to CNN arguing that a Hubble service mission is no riskier than any of the remaining 40 scheduled Shuttle missions required to complete the ISS. O'Keefe has asked for a second opinion, which he no doubt hopes will affirm his original decision (otherwise he's in no less an ambiguous situation than he's in now). There's been something of an outcry among interested members of the public, which I guess I'm contributing to here, even among non-scientists impressed by the fantastic images gleaned from HST over the years. The website SaveTheHubble.org claims over 18,000 signatures on their online petition to Congress and NASA not to scrap the telescope. Check it out and add your own if you'd like.

In happier news, as we expected, JPL has announced that the Spirit rover is back in business. Evidently its computers had some sort of Windows 95-era memory management issue, and Bill Gates was able to talk them through how to fix it. With two healthy rovers scrounging on Mars, we should be getting some exciting results from the missions.