Inquisitive minds may want to know what NASA’s budget looks like now, since Bush proposes redirecting 11 billion dollars of the budget to a moon mission (original). I’m way into the moon mission; I just wanna know where the money is coming from. I found 2004 budget information here (original). This is not an exhaustive examination of the budget, it’s just a summary based on their request. That said, onward. Hm, this is long — follow the link for the bulk of the discussion and information.

About the belief that we invaded Iraq for the sake of civil rights: Iraq’s Interim Governing Council is in fact regressing on civil rights. Protests ensued (original). Note that this would not be a regression if marriage was a purely religious institution, with civil unions functioning as the political equivalent. However, since the spiritual institution of marriage has legal force, it’s pretty harsh.

Note on the below — “NetNewsWire”: already produces OPML that tags feeds as type “rss”. Reverse compatibility nearly requires others to follow suit; I’m sure NetNewsWire is not the only application that does this. However, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good idea to distinguish between multiple feed types. I would like to know if a feed is Atom or RSS before I grab it. Saves time, saves CPU on both ends of the transaction, saves network, and so forth. ...

According to the usual anonymous sources… Bush administration officials say regime change in Iraq had been U.S. policy since 1998, when President Clinton was in office, and insist removing Saddam by force was a last resort. This will come as a surprise to John Bolton, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz — some of whom, I believe, have a role in the Bush administration. They may even be Bush administration officials. If they are to be trusted, Clinton “failed to provide sound leadership” and was “unwilling either to adopt policies that would remove Saddam or sustain the credibility of its own policy of containment.” In fact, he “placed us on a path that will inevitably free Saddam Hussein from all effective constraints.”

Obscure technical quibble of the day follows. Warning: technogeeking ahead. Dave Winer’s OPML sharing guidelines (original) are a little wonky. Point 1 says: If an element is pointing to a feed, set its type to “rss”. Do this even if it’s not an RSS feed. Nope. Set the type to “rss” if it’s an RSS feed. Set it to “atom” if it’s an Atom feed. If you want a generic type name for a feed, I’d suggest “feed”.

The killer combo is the War College report on the foolhardiness of war on Iraq plus the unsurprising revelation that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq from day one. The first story confirms that Iraq is a distraction from the dangers of Al Qaeda. The second story explains why Bush would allow himself to be distracted. It’s time to give up on the claim that Bush knows things we don’t about Iraq’s danger to the United States. ...

I’m not a big reality show guy, although I watched the first couple seasons of Tough Enough. However, my TiVo enables all kinds of degenerate behavior, including reality TV addiction, so I figured I’d watch a couple of episodes of The Apprentice. The basic setup is simple; Donald Trump brings in 8 men and 8 women to compete for a job with him. They split up into two teams, men versus women, and every week they have a different competition. At the end of each show, Trump fires someone from the losing team. ...

For your contemplation, I offer a letter from a soldier in Iraq (original).

Say what you will about Dean’s mythical temper (Real Video, will likely go away soonish), but I can’t see how he was out of line here. You get up at a Democrat’s stump speech, you call the candidate pompous and mean-mouthed, and then you try to interrupt him when he responds to you — perhaps just maybe you ought to expect to be told to sit down.

L’il Bolt’s training is coming along nicely, but I fear he lacks the fire necessary to — Oh, sorry, wrong kind of sidekick. I’m still pretty happy with this Sidekick, with some caveats. The software bugs which prevent it from ringing when Keyguard is enabled are annoying. The battery life is short enough so that I have to recharge it every night without fail. Also, my thumb wheel broke and I had to get the entire unit replaced. All in all, I’d say it’s about 85% of the way there and I still recommend it for people like me who don’t mind being early adopters. Danger is currently claiming that a software update to address known bugs will show up sometime in March, but that’s not a firm date.