WanderRust

Somehow, this parody re-mix of the "2012" trailer has taken me off of the fence, and I'm actually looking forward to seeing it more.

So for the past two days I've been trying to follow what is going on in Iran, and have found many helpful resources on the internet like here and here...and Twitter has exploded with updates from the Iranian people themselves, who are otherwise completely shut off from the outside world.  Still, while the various reports, photos and youtube clips have been plentiful this weekend, I still found myself thinking "Man, I wish I had my cable back so I could flip over to CNN or MSNBC to check it out live..."

...Uh, no.  It turns out I didn't miss a goddamn thing by not having cable.

So, I'm trying to find out something about what's going on in Iran, and on CNN I can watch a rerun of Larry King interviewing several gentlemen without shirtsleeves who apparently assemble choppers. On Fox Mike Huckabee is trying to explain why Jesus hates credit card relief. MSNBC is rerunning something about a prison in New Mexico. CNBC is evaluating whether college students should be able to afford Chanel tote bags.

Media fail.

That's a rerun of Larry King inteviewing the cast of "American Chopper", mind you.  Of all the 24-hour cable news stations, CNN has been getting hammered the worst, and deservedly so, in my opinion.  CNN is the television granddaddy of breaking international news, from Tiananmen Square to the initial bombing of Baghdad in the First Gulf War.  It's so well know for breaking international news coverage, it's even an iconic fixture in movies and TV shows that require exposition of an international event from a conveniently placed TV set; they occasionally even use the official CNN anchors and graphics instead of obvious fictional doppelgangers.

It will be interesting to see what the cable news talking heads will say once they come back on Monday.  If these weaksauce tweets from self-appointed "media watchdog" Howard Kurtz is any indication, they'll just steamroll ahead like no sins of journalistic lethargy were ever committed.

Boy, CNN sure has come a long way from the days when the lead CNN anchor, Bernard Shaw, was broadcasting from a Baghdad hotel while bombs and missles were falling all around him...in the middle of the night.  Keep this in mind the next time Kurtz, or any other mainstream-media blowhard waxes paternalistic about all those lowly, amateur blogs out there.

UPDATE:
A more recent Howard Kurtz tweet:

Not that I "miss" watching commercials, but it is a handy barometer on the memes that flow throughout the popular culture.  For years my bugaboo has been the often repeated theme of a family presented with a hip, attractive, intelligent, full-of-common-sense mom with two adorable toddlers and a fat, balding, jeans/t-shirt/ratty flannel shirt clad, moron of a husband who is every bit as helpless as his kids - in effect, the 3rd child the super mom has to care for.  It wasn't just one commercial like this, there were tons.  It's not that I take the insult to my whole gender for that portrayal, it's just that I can't figure out how these two ever got hooked up in the first place.  It's kind of a double whammy to the whole idea of getting married as well - how many guys would want to get married if it means handing over your balls and being led around like a big dumb ox?  How many gals would want to get married if it meant immediately becoming a single mother to a helpless, overgrown child who also has access to the checking account before you even considered having any real kids of your own?

Today, I found a youtube clip of a new commercial I never would have gotten to see otherwise, and it's much worse than the dumb-ox dad ads I mentioned before.  Here it is:


What makes this worse is that I don't detect the presence of an ad exec pushing stereotypes in a ham-fisted attempt to flatter one group over another - Instead, I see this as a vignette into the real life of the ad exec and his/her college-aged, spoiled rotten kid.  Seeing that kid immediately made me think of this Kurt Vonnegut line:


(HT: Dvorak Uncensored)

Of course, maybe this commercial will do more good than harm.  Unlike the cheesy stereotyping of the other ads, this ad might just be a little too authentic - a little too close to home, with the result being that the viewer will watch and come away with the lesson that all the touch-screen communication devices in the world won't compensate for bad parenting.

...in just the last 10 years.  This picture really brought it home for me.

Mommy Comes Home

I used to listen to a lot of sports talk radio when I was in college.  I mean A LOT of sports talk, for hours a day, national and local.  To this day, If Guns 'N Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" comes on the radio, I think the Jim Rome show is coming back from a commercial break.  In retrospect, I don't think it was about me being so much of a sports junkie as it was my fascination with the punditry; from the pregame predictions to the post game arm-chair quarterbacking.  I think it had a hold on me because, more than any other endeavor, sports are the best crucible to test every assumption and statement that flows from the mouths of the talking heads on radio and TV.  Every sporting contest is a scientific experiment, in which, sooner or later, every hypothesis is put to the test, repeatedly.  A couple of years following the links between box score reality and pundit fantasy turned out to be good training as I became more engaged in understanding the larger world around me.  So, even as I started tuning out ESPN's feigned conniption fits about Terrell Owens doing push-ups in his driveway, I was already hip to the games being played by political pundits on FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc.  Sadly, politics moves at a snails pace compared to sports...imagine if the NFL only played one game every 2 years, and you had to listen to Sean Salisbury and Peter King bloviate about the potential outcome for 2 years prior...eesh!

There is, however, one flavor of pundit I'm not all that familiar with; the financial pundit.  I've caught a few minutes of Jim Cramer's "Mad Money" on occasion, but beyond the novelty of watching a guy hollering at the top of his lungs, pacing around like he's hopped up on Red Bull laced with crystal meth, smashing comically oversized buttons with wacky sound effects, I really had no idea what to make of all the sound and fury.  Not that I don't understand how the stock market works, it's just that I'm not a day trader, and have no reference (i.e. a stock portfolio) from which to judge whether or not this guy knew what the hell he was talking about.  Instinctively, I suspected his show was based on the same premise shared by every other pundit based show: It's not about whether you're right or wrong, but how aggressively and loudly you make your case.  And pundits can succeed on this premise because any past performance is irrelevant; they hit the reset button, and go on to pontificate about the next game or the next election.  They are never held to account for any predictions they got wrong.

Well, almost never...


(I encourage you to watch the whole show if you haven't already, or better yet, watch the uneditied interview directly from Comedy Central)

Cramer wanted to come on the show, offer up a few mea culpas about some bad calls in the past, share a few make up laughs and call it a night; Jon Stewart didn't let him off the hook.  I've often been annoyed by pundits, and have indulged in a little schadenfreude when they're proven wrong, but I've never been truly angry at any pundit before...because until now I've never considered that they could have a profound impact on our lives.  Sports hacks have no impact whatsoever on anyone's life of course, but even political hacks don't have much of an impact beyond receiving and distributing talking points to an audience that is more often than not a self-selected echo chamber.  But Cramer and the rest of the CNBC crew is different.  It's not the idea that people may have lost money on his stock picks that angers me (I mean, have you seen his show?  Would anyone even admit to losing money based on stock picks that came from that TV circus?) it's that Cramer really isn't just another dart-throwing buffoon.  He used to be a hedge fund manager, who had intimate knowledge of the inside game played at the expense of everyone with an e-Trade account, a mutual fund or even just a 401k. 




He knew better, but decided to join in with the rest of the cheerleaders.  And now he's forced to grovel in a vain attempt to save his pundit cred; "vain" because Stewart's widely publicized interview has already exposed him as something far worse than your typical clown pundit...an accomplice to fraud.

Long time, no posts.  I've been in super-sponge mode for the past 3 months, trying to learn and absorb as much information as I can during this economic crapfest.  Here's the most concise explanation I've come across to explain how it all got started:


I've tended to gravitate to heavy topics like this in the past, but right now I'm just overloaded, so I expect I'll ease back into this blog with some quick, light stuff for a while.

It went as I had hoped; a landslide victory for Barack Obama.  And to top it all off, he met the boorish onslaught of hate and derision from the Rovian Right with quiet grace and dignity, executing a jujitsu that has sealed much of the Rightwing Noise Machine's arsenal with a complete and long deserved discreditation.  I should have felt at least as elated, if not more so, than many of the people around me who cheered as Obama walked up to the podium in Grant Park to give his victory speech. It was a beautiful speech, it's essence distilled to so much of what I yearned for when I first began following his campaign over a year ago.

But instead I remained seated, with a mixture of relief and melancholy.

I wish I could have been as ecstatic as I thought I would have been,  but I couldn't; I'd been mugged.  Back around the middle of September, Americans were slapped in the face by a financial crisis that shook the financial sector to the core.  It could be said that the housing bubble, with it's toxic mortgages were the root of the problem, but that's actually looking at the whole problem backwards.  As bad as the housing collapse was, the damage would have been contained (allowing for residual effects on the economy) to the borrowers and lenders of those toxic mortgages, where it not for the creative packaging of those bad mortgages with good mortgages into securities that were subsequently sold and resold many times over.  Who owns the bad mortgages?  Everybody with a mutual fund, everybody with a 401k.  Nobody knows the real "value" of these securities at this point, so they're valued at zero.  The short of it is a lot of wealth was just destroyed, and the effects of that wealth disappearing continue to effect the financial markets today and is beginning to effect the rest the economy as a whole, cementing what was already thought to be the start of a recession.   

The beginning of this financial crisis basically ended the Presidential contest.  It neutered all of the shallow culture war bullshit flowing from the Right and brought both candidate's responses to the crisis into crisp focus, with McCain's flailing stunts only serving to accentuate his erratic personality (and Sarah Palin's abject ignorance certainly didn't help either).  Americans noticed Obama was the adult in the room, and everything that followed for the next month and a half was just political pageantry, as the polls steadily widened the lead for Obama..  I knew he was going to win, but so much of the joy and hope of that prospect had been drained out of me. 

This problem is too pervasive and systemic for any President to fix.  Whatever the merits of the government $700+ Billion bailout may or may not be, it is that much more in taxpayer dollars that won't be available to Obama and the Democratic Congress to fulfill their agenda.  Obama will be hamstrung.  He will be stuck with a nation short on credit.

I can't help but feel Obama came too late, that the best he can do is delay the inevitable.  I hope I'm wrong.  I hope the people who voted for him understand that if there truly is going to be any change, they have initiate it themselves; that their responsibility didn't end at the ballot box last Tuesday.  I fear most people in this country think things will get better just because we've replaced one of the worst Presidents in our nation's history with someone of a demonstrably finer quality; but much of the hardship that lays ahead of us didn't spring forth from George W. Bush, and it won't disappear when he leaves office.

In the end, I don't so much wonder if Barack Obama is up to the challenge; I wonder if we are up to the challenge.

There's a lot I need to write about Obama's election, considering all of the posts on this blog concerning the subject (to the point where It's become an almost exclusively political blog).  I don't have all of my thoughts collected yet, but when I do I'll try and put a cap on all of this public and personal drama, and restore some balance to my attentions.

No, really...I promise.

What?  Why are you looking at me like that?

When watching the Presidential Debates, it might seem more civically minded, more responsible, to focus on the issues and not the personalities, but that would actually be misguided.  The "issues" each candidate appear to debate each other about never get beyond the rhetorical phraseology crafted for them by their campaigns, never into a true policy wonkish point-to-point argument over each fact or premise.  There are many reasons for this, but principle among them is that the vast majority of Americans watching do not possess advanced degrees in finance, law, foreign policy and the like, and they don't want to sit through the 6 or more hours it would take for two candidates, who themselves aren't experts, to attempt to faithfully recite and channel the points and counter-points of their respective campaign experts.

But even if we were to assume a complete review and comparison of the positions and plans for every issue could be known by everyone, it still wouldn't matter what positions each candidate stated.  Every President has to negotiate with Congress.  Every President has to adapt to changing conditions.  As Mike Tyson once put it, "Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth."  So don't stay up late going over both health care plans with a fine tooth comb - it is absolutely assured that if a health care plan is finally agreed upon, it won't look anything like either posted on McCain's or Obama's websites; even a filibuster proof majority in Congress will haggle with an Obama administration over the details.

To put a finer point on this topic, let's assume, for example, that (like me) you strenuously disagree with the Neo-conservative vision of an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy.  If you went by "the issues" discussed in debates and campaign speeches, the candidate who said the following would resonate strongly with you:

And if, like me, you recoil at the divisive, 50+1 base pandering tactics of Karl Rove that infect not just campaigning, but governing as well, then you would also like this particular candidate's stand on the issue:So, based on "the issues", you might go ahead and vote for this candidate, assured that he will go on to govern in such a way as to promote these particular views that you agree with him on.

Well, congratulations, you just voted for George W. Bush in 2000. (link and link)  How did that work out for you?

So what are we left with?  We're left with a general knowledge of the ideas and history of their respective Parties, which is relevant to predicting the views held by the people that will get hired by their respective administrations.  But ideology and party affiliation alone can't account for the lack of competence and general buffoonery displayed by the likes of Mike Brown, Alberto Gonzalez and Monica Goodling.  For that, you would need a more specific and personal judgment of the man doing the hiring.  "Psychological Analysis" would be a sophisticated way of putting it, but at the end of the day, you would be doing what everyone else watching those debates are doing - judging behavior, comparing personalities...you know, all that egregious "non-issue" stuff an informed voter isn't supposed to do.  But that's exactly what a voter should do...judge their temperament, assess their character.  Personality and character will always beat out position papers and campaign speeches as predictors of future behavior and decision making.

If there is to be a debate, it should probably be among voters over which aspects of personality and character are most important to determining someone's fitness to lead.  I, for example, don't happen to think that George W. Bush being "the guy you'd rather have a beer with" is relevant to Presidential leadership, but would be inclined to agree that Barack Obama's "calm, centered demeanor" can say a lot about how he would govern.

So feel free to judge the mannerisms of the man or woman at the podium.  It's actually the responsible, civically minded thing to do.

After many hours on many nights researching the topic, I still have no coherent take on the proposed (and just rejected by the House) bailout bill and the impending doom that will/won't befall use if we do/don't act.  So instead, I'll offer up a shocking and disturbing youtube video depicting the brutal and bloody murder of...irony.


...and, oh yes, it really is Banned Book Week.

My first ever blog post (on MySpace) was 2 years ago, in which I was partly inspired by the anniversary of 9/11 to write about language and the "war on terror".  It was the result of pent up frustration that finally found expression in composition.  This unleashed in me a desire to express and deconstruct other issues that have built up in the past couple of years, as I have found myself intensely politicized since that milestone day of September 11, 2001.  A year later I posted another blog concerning 9/11 more directly, on how it has affected our public psyche.

Now, 2 years later, I'm presented with another opportunity to uphold a tradition of my own making; to post a blog about 9/11.  So what do I have left to say about it 7 years later?  Apparently about as little as everyone else does.  Most of the news outlets today are more concerned with the manufactured outrage of taking a "lipstick on a pig" metaphor out of context than dwelling on this anniversary.  The only 9/11 story that really caught my eye actually happened last week during the Republican National Convention, when Keith Olbermann made a point of apologizing on behalf of his network for the 9/11 tribute video shown between speeches at the convention (prior to the primetime tv coverage I and most people watched).  You can view it for yourself:


While I share Olbermann's sentiment, I don't share his outrage.  Not because exploiting 9/11 for nakedly partisan political purposes isn't outrageous, but because at this point, if you don't get it, you never will.

I have run out of thing to say about 9/11.  For me, it is a historical milestone for the United States, not because terrorists killed 3000 people on U.S. soil, but because of all that we have and have not done in response.  Our response has been a blight on our national character, something Republicans seem unwilling or unable to understand.  We forfeited our "American Exceptionalism", and I'm not sure if even an Obama administration can earn it back.  I do know McCain would not, for he, like too many Americans, believe our exceptionalism to be the result of military might.  The British Empire thought so too, as did Ottoman Empire and, most aptly, the Roman Empire upon which much of our national government was modelled after by the Founding Fathers.  Hadrian's Wall, in Great Britain, is the husk of Rome's "permanent bases", which they abandoned when the Roman treasuries could no longer support them. Our increasing reliance on what are euphemistically called "private contracters" was mirrored by Rome's increasing reliance on mercenaries to maintain their hegemony.  Blackwater USA is now our Praetorian Guard.  History has a damning verdict for all of these unexceptional expansionist empires - downfall.

Another reason I don't share Olbermann's outrage is simply that I am utterly spent emotionally.  The images I see in that video are now just a symbolic, desensitizing blur...a collage of imagery blunted by the mounting emotional baggage of a nation that is slowing losing it's mind.

So the Republican National Convention is over.   I've learned that the best way to rally a bunch of Republican delegates is to mention drilling for oil, and the best way to angry up their blood is mention those dastardly "community organizers".  And I learned John McCain was a fighter pilot who was shot down and made a P.O.W during the Vietnam War, a fascinating bit of biography that was largely unknown to everyone until several noted speakers mentioned it in their speeches...repeatedly...with accompanying video on the biggest TV screen I've ever seen (seriously, how awesome would it be to watch football on that bad boy!).

The highlight of the show, was also the biggest suprise for me: Vice Presidental nominee Gov. Sarah Palin.  I was expecting a positive and inspiring speech from her, especially since she was preceded by what I thought was a great set-up man in the red-meat dishing, vitriol spewing "bad cop" routine of Rudy Giulianni.  But instead of being the "good cop", she extended the dripping sarcasm and spent most of her speech dishing out red meat of her own.  In the sense that it thoroughly energized the crowd at the Xcel Center that night, her speech was a home run.  Her speech was exactly what you'd expect from the fill-in-the-blank VP pick: be the heavy, attack your opponent, fire up your base.   The problem is, I think the GOP needed her to be an inspirational breath of fresh air, to reach out to independents; instead she affirmed her hard right bonafides, coming across slightly arrogant and very, very sarcastic.  I was underwhelmed, and therefore a bit relieved.  Of course everyone (not just Republicans) is saying her speech was a rousing success, and I don't technically disagree, I just disagree with the parameters that define "successful" for this speech.  In the Karl Rove, rally the base, 50+1 political landscape of 2000 and 2004, this would be exactly what the GOP needs, but in 2008, that strategy results in something more like 40+1.

I wasn't all that bowled over by the DNC in Denver, but I've had to massively raise my grade on the curve set by tepid tone of the RNC for all the speakers not named Sarah Palin...and yes that includes John McCain.  McCain broke out a lot of his best hits from his Maverick, Straight Talk Express campaign back in 2000, back when he ran against the guy whose mess he now inherits: George W. Bush.  It was a lot of honor, duty and country, which the crowd responded to, but also a lot of centrism and bipartisanship, which seemed to bore the crowd into a near coma.  I'm a little at a loss as to explain why, of all things, offshore drilling is the topic that brings the most enthusiastic approval from the crowd of delegates, but there it is.

So after all of that, I'm back to thinking Obama wins narrowly, just like I thought before the conventions.  Next up, the debates.  But until then, I'll sit back and enjoy the hypocritical contortions the Fox News types are forced into because of Sarah Palin.  Here's a sample:

So I figured the advantage of this blog was that I didn't have to wait until I had some coherent thesis before I posted something, that I could just post random thoughts more casually, but I haven't even been able to do that lately.   The classic "glass half full or half emtpy" definitions of optimism and pessimism don't really apply to me; I tend to consider the best and worst possible outcomes equally likely in nearly every scenario.  As such, that means double the amount of pondering for me.

This Presidential election has me in a whirl.  I found the Democratic Convention to be "meh, whatever" most of the time, but then I'm probably too deeply immersed in politics right now to guage how it would have appeared to people who are just now paying attention to this stuff.  There weren't any gaffes by any of the speakers and Obama's speech was more meat-and-potatoes than I expected, but still pretty good.  Oddly enough, I'm a little more confident of an Obama win after hearing about Gov. Sarah Palin's pick as McCain's Vice Presidental nominee, which completely destroys the "experience" meme of the McCain campaign; Palin hasn't even finished half of her first term as Alaska's governor, and her experience prior to that was as mayor of a small town of about 8,000 people.  The fact that McCain had only met with Palin once prior to this selection cements a transparently, politically strategic move.  It's just so...gimmicky.

Still, I consider this whole thing a coin flip at this point, and I'm psyching myself up to suffer through the fear, loathing and patriotic pornography that constitute today's Republican party during their convention in Minnesota.  Here a pic of what the stage at the RNC will look like:


...must...resist...temptation to...break...Godwin's...Law...

I'm hoping I'll have a better feel for this whole thing afterwards, but there are so many different groups of Americans, with so many different persepctives and levels of political engagement, that I'll probably end up doing what most people do; fill the informational void with my hopes and/or fears and get the prediction wrong. 

Or get the prediction right for wrong reasons.

So it was pointed out to me that my comment settings were for "registered users only".  I've remedied that situation by setting it to "anyone".  So now I'll sit back and let the flood of outside attention wash over my otherwise invisible blog.

;-)

The entire music video is made up of 3D scannning data.
(if you go to the youtube source, you can view it at a higher quality)

And yet Thom York's essence comes through.  I'm sure there's a Platonic "Allegory of the Cave" point to be made about all of this, but rather than some bright line between "real" and "fake" imagery, I just see degrees on a continuum.  All of those little data points are just a sparse, primitive version of how the retinas of our eyes capture millions, billions, trillions and more points of light reflecting off of the matter in the space around us, for as far as our eyes can see.

It's all data.

I don't find the correlation base or demystifying; rather I extend the sense of beauty and wonder in the other direction, toward the science that some regard in cold, inhuman terms.  It is only so if we do not regard or consider it; if we do not put it in the context of ourselves, and more importantly, that which is outside of ourselves.

It's all art.

Among other things, inane babble from barely conscious cable news puppets.  Warning:  the abject stupidity you are about to watch will cause synapses in your brain to shrivel and die.


Well sure, it all makes perfect sense now...you know, I should just go ahead and run up my credit card.  After all, it's not "real" money, and refraining from spending it is not going to "save" me any money.

Spending money you don't have isn't necessarily a bad thing.  If it enables you to earn more money in the future, then it's an investment.  Developing alternative energy solutions and reforming our infrastructure is an example of such an investment.  What has our "investment" in the Iraq occupation garnered us so far?  Lower gas prices?

Would that more Americans realize that July 4th isn't just "Flag-waving American Patriot Day", but the day that commemorates a group of colonial British citizens signing a formal Declaration of Independence from the British Monarchy, which was the very opposite of patriotism.  it was, in fact, an act of treason which was punishable by death, so Ben Franklin's famous aphorism about "hanging together or hanging separately" was more than a metaphor.  This means that our country was founded on principles that supercede mere patriotism, mere tribalism.


Human Liberty.  Inalienable Rights.  Equal Justice.  Even from the outset, the United States of America has struggled to live up to those ideals, but the United States of America has improved and refined itself with each passing generation.  Recent events have put our values to the test, pitting our patriotism against our own sense of value for liberty and justice.  I continue to be dismayed at how many people value the false sense of security promised by our government over their own liberties.  "How is any of this FISA or Gitmo crap really affecting my daily life?"  By the time you notice how it affects your life, it will already have been too late to do anything about it.  It will have been a gradual 5 or 6 steps ago, and long since regarded as the status quo.  They ask you to be vigilant, to watch out for terrorists lurking behind every bush and tree;  you would be wise to be more vigilant about your rights and freedoms.

In a free society, you MIGHT be attacked by a terrorist (or struck by lightning, or run over by a bus...)

In a secure society, you WILL lose your freedoms.

George Carlin, a comedy legend, died of a heart attack yesterday at the age of 71.  He wasn't the most "laugh out loud" comedian out there, just the most brutally honest, and the keenest observer of our society.  He was always conscious of the use of language and how it affects the zeitgeist.  I'm sure most of the canned TV "remembrances" will focus on his famous "7 words you can't say on TV" bit, but I think this clip sums up his thought process better:
[Parental Alert: Carlin uses...(ahem) "language" in this bit about language]


George Carlin, the enemy of euphemisms, may you rest in peace.

(...and don't sweat the atheism thing, if God exists, you're on his favorites list.)

It was the first thing that came to mind when I heard about the toilet breaking on the international Space Station (Cousin Eddy from "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation"?  Yeah, these are the ABC's of me).  Fortunately, the International Space Station equivelent of a plumber arrived with the right part to repair it.  It's funny and serious; it's seriously funny!  But when you're done laughing, it's still serious, because that suction toilet is among the barest of amenities on that space station that allows human being to survive outside the bounds of planet Earth.  It highlights the problem of preserving the lives of astronauts (or cosmonauts, if you prefer) for the duration of each space mission.  They need an ample supply of oxygen, heat, water, and food.  They need protection from the copious amount of radiation that is no longer screened out by the Earth's atmosphere when in high orbit.  They need monitoring for the effects zero gravity has on them (muscle mass entropy, lowered bone density).  All of these problems are magnified when talking about a manned mission to Mars.



A manned mission to Mars must be taken for what it really is; an extreme human survival experiment.  There isn't any exploratory experiments that a astronaut in a bulky space suit can do there that isn't already being done by those little robotic rovers we've already sent over (including the one we have over there right now).   Not only would this require a spacecraft capable of supporting a sparse crew for such an extended voyage, it would have to be capable of returning them to earth, which isn't an issue when sending over over-sized RV-cars in one-way capsules.  Even with the extra funding proposed by President Bush for such a mission, the budget would strangle all of the other existing exploration programs currently running to focus solely on Mars.

I am of two minds on this.  I do think a man or woman setting foot on Mars would be an extraordinarily historic achievement, but merely in a symbolic "milestone" view of history.  Remember we set foot on the surface of the moon in 1969, but haven't been back since the Apollo missions were canceled a year later.  I am not one of "those guys" who bitches about NASA getting taxpayer dollars when we have so many problems here on Earth now.  NASA's budget is a mere fraction of a percent of our total Federal budget, and the return on investment in scientific knowledge is more than adequate to the expense, in my opinion.  But the question of how NASA prioritizes it's budget does concern me.  Is the decade long derth of scientific exploration as NASA focuses all of it's resources on sending a few astronauts to make a footprint in the Martian soil worth it?  I suppose in the long, long, long view, it is a necessary "first step" to eventually colonizing Mars, but there is so much more research and development that needs to take place in order for a human being to survive indefinitely on the Martian surface (don't forget the radiation either) that still would not be ready for us to go forward after 2015 or 2020, or whenever we do end up on taking a brief hop on Mars.  So I would offer a counterproposal of sorts: let's focus on figuring out how to sustainably live on Mars before we start sending people over there.  The interesting side benefit would be the whole "sustainably living" discoveries along that way, that would help the rest of us humans living down here on Planet Earth, which is having it's own "mechanical failures" recently.