however, I think he left some important items out of consideration, and has grossly underestimated John Edwards draw.

Russ was spot on!! Why can't he be running..arggggg.

I absolutely agree about the space program.  The Bush legacy on space exploration, like many issues, may haunt us for years to come.  I strongly support the notion of a return to the moon, but the current vision for space exploration is effectively an unfunded mandate using Apollo era tech.  So it will all come at the expense of other NASA science programs.

That ad was an expensive one to make. Really expensive. The shoot out in the field had a massive lighting crew, and the computer-generated stuff mixed in to match the outside stuff ... A progressive group probably would decide that a more rational use of resources would be to do a less expensive ad and spend the money on getting that ad seen by more people. I can't say that'd be an irrational choice.

I'd love for progressive ads to look like that, too, but ...

In that he makes a solid liberal/progressive seem less nutty by comparison.

Re: campaign finance. the reason it is a pain in the ass is that it is a half-hearted baby step towards publicly funded elections. Just like medicare is full of annoying paperwork which would be streamlined by a nice easy single payer system.

Re: space. Returning to the moon without a good reason seems like a giant waste of money. It's going to take 20 years to do what apollo already did in 9. It doesn't inspire anyone to go back somewhere. Instead of spending countless billions on that, why don't we spend a few billion on useful science in an unmanned space program, and make our heroic and inspirational technology program, to spend countless billions on cleanly and renewably producing all our own energy by 2020.
Or we could rid the world of malaria and dysentary and AIDS.
(I bet for the price of one little war in Iraq we could accomplish all those goals, or at least suprecharge science education and American R&D in the effort)
I'm all for big inspirational science programs, but lets pick one that means something.

Re: FEC disclosure - Ah, quit whining you big baby.

Re: Moon base - I guess we'll pay for all this with the money we saved by not invading Iraq. ...Wait a minute.

take on massive projects and make the country better for it.  The technological legacy of the NASA programs of the 1960's is with us still.  It reminds us that government can be more than a referee between interests in society.

It can provide us all with a purpose larger than our own personal self interests to pursue.  It's that vison thing.

Feingold is really the most effective critic of the war in my opinion.  I hope we see more of him in the years to come even if he's not on the campaign trail to be Preident.

I can understand why Hillary and Obama have been placed in the top tier.  I assume that's due to the heavy press attention they've been getting and the name recognition they have.

But why should John Edwards get the same billing and not Wesley Clark?  Sure, he ran for v-p, but despite that my recollection is he's way down in the polling.  And Edwards has had a much rockier time in internet polls than Clark over the last year, only now showing more strength with the withdrawal of Feingold and Warner.  And even then, he doesn't really pull into any kind of lead over Clark.

In the 2000 election, in fact, Edwards outperformed Clark during the time that they were both running.  

So what's the story?  

There is no way to establish a permanent base on the Moon or go to Mars without the ability to create a self-sustaining ecology in an environment where people can't even breathe without assitance.

We're not even close to knowing how to do this, even though people have been trying to do so, even using a very simplified ecology--like just shrimp and algae.  Remember the one attempt to do this in the US?  They couldn't sustain O2 levels, were suffering from CO2 surplus and most of the living things died?

Now this one was run by idiots.  But that's because only idiots would try this.

Getting to Mars is even harder.  You have to be able to create this self-sustaining ecology in a rocket ship.  You have to come up with some kind of propulsion system so that you're not trapped at burn and coast.  You need that, first, to simulate some gravity and second, to make the trip in a period of time that people can arrive in one piece and sane.

Oh, and you've also gotta pick people who will plan to stay there indefinitely, because there's no way to get back.

We're at least 100 years away from being able to make a round trip to Mars. And it may well be impossible. It may well require an entire planet and hundreds of millions of years to create a self-sustaining ecology.

I've hated it since 1974. The rich find loopholes; the poor get fined. Today's PACs-legalized bribery-are a direct result of older so-called reforms.

My proposals: The Reps raise and spend whatever they can get their hands on, but give us mandatory voting, like jury duty.

God must have loved the Democrats because he made so many of them.

"Combine this with the talk of a permanent Moon base, and I growing excited."

Talk about health insurance for every American would be a lot more exciting. And until that's happened, and Halliburton's $2B/week boondoggle in Iraq is ended, talk of a moon base is just plain silly.