Controversy continues over the cost and schedule of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Congress seems supportive even in this environment of budget cutting mania. But some NASA scientists are split over whether JWST is worth it or not:

But the astronomy community as a whole isn’t sure this is good news. Some now fear that the behemoth telescope, which is 7 years late and vastly over budget, will end up devouring money allocated to other planetary science and solar physics projects. When JWST, the heir apparent to the Hubble Space Telescope, was named a top priority for NASA astrophysics in 2001, it was supposed to cost $1 billion and launch by the end of this year. It is now expected to cost at least $8.7 billion for launch and operations and to launch no earlier than 2018, a dramatic overrun that prompted Congress to propose axing the telescope.

Meanwhile, a new addition planned for Paranal Observatory in Chile already housing the sharpest optical telescopes on earth could rival the JWST in resolving power and undercut the cost of the space based telescope by billions of dollars:

When it is completed in 10 years, it will be the most powerful eye on the sky anywhere in the world. The size of a football stadium, its main mirror will be 138 feet wide. That is four times bigger than the mirrors on any existing telescopes anywhere. … The telescope will cost about $1.5 billion, weigh over 5,000 tons and will be made to withstand major earthquakes, a serious consideration in Chile. Astronomers say the images it produces will be 15 times sharper than those sent to earth by the Hubble.

Of course in a sane nation we’d be willing to pay what it costs us to fund Bush’s asinine Iraq War for a few days to put a next generation infrared telescope into space. But given our budget priorities and the argument raging today about whether or not teachers and police officers should pay a higher tax rate than billionaires, it’s pretty clear we do not live in a sane nation. Fortunately this addition to the Paranal should be able to do some of the same science JWST would be capable of, and for a fraction of the cost.

A Baptist theologian from the neoconfederacy (Where else?) writes about the two schools of thought on Islam and then:

[G]ives his own reasons why Islam is a bad religion doomed to ruin: “When you start with an adulterous warrior-profit, who is literally anti-Christ (though touting a non-biblical version of Jesus), mix in generous helpings of totalitarianism and the marginalization/persecution of women and non-Muslims, and cultivate tribalism, legalism, and victimism, you have a recipe for disaster.”

I might have had more respect for the author if he or she just wrote “My religion is better than your religion, neener neener neener.”

It brings up a good topic of discussion though, because I sometimes find myself conflicted when it comes to Islam. On the one hand it’s a colorful and historically significant collection of primitive supernatural myths starting in the Bronze Age about magic invisible sky wizards and super heroes, and anyone who actually believe that stuff today is as good a target for pity and skepticism as any other. The same could be said for Christians beliefs of course, and yet that’s exactly where some of the best (And by far the worst) criticism for Islam originates.

I’m sure if I lived in Saudi Arabia or Egypt I would fear right-wing Muslim bullies, they would represent the dominant mythical madness after all, but I don’t live there, I live in America, so I fear right-wing dominionist bullies. So like many of you reading this, I find myself sticking up for Muslims when they’re being bashed from time to time even though their religion is as implausible to me as any other, and even though some of the fundamentalist regimes based on it frankly give me the creeps.

President Obama is scheduled to speak at the White House in an hour on his new deficit reduction plan:

Mr. Obama will call for $1.5 trillion in tax increases, primarily on the wealthy, through a combination of closing loopholes and limiting the amount that high earners can deduct. The proposal also includes $580 billion in adjustments to health and entitlement programs, including $248 billion to Medicare and $72 billion to Medicaid. Administration officials said that the Medicare cuts would not come from an increase in the Medicare eligibility age. Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on some of the details of Mr. Obama’s proposal said that the plan also counts a savings of $1.1 trillion from the ending of the American combat mission in Iraq and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

Republicans, who have been feigning hysteria over deficits ever since Obama took office, are now switching gears and pretending to be outraged by the idea that Paris Hilton might have to pay slightly more in taxes. Already the usual suspects led by the dreamy manly Paul Ryan have been on the attack. Which brings up a good question: Do scumbags like Ryan know they’re scumbags and just not care, or have they managed to convince themselves that stealing from the middle class and poor to give to the billionaire class is somehow noble?

It looks like Americans have finally relinquished our beloved cars as the number one accidental cause of death in the United States. The new leader:

Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States, a Times analysis of government data has found. Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Data like this will fuel the drug war hysteria, perhaps result in even more Draconian prison sentences and obstacles for people suffering severe pain or other easily treatable maladies. And none of it will do a damn bit of good either, just as it hasn’t in the past. Short of shutting down international commerce, managing web access like China, and violating every amendment in the Bill of Rights, there’s nothing federal or local governments can do about this. Nor should they try. Some things come with risk. Drugs can kill you just like cars or fatty food. We accepted that risk with cars for decades, now that drugs have taken the lead expect an episode of collective amnesia followed by senseless over reaction.

The Dawn Spacecraft is slowly spiralling in, closer and closer, to the surface of Vesta. In the image taken above the spacecraft was about 1500 km from the asteroid’s surface (Click the image to rebigulate at the Dawn homepage). A year from now Dawn will be making the closest approaches of the mission, as low as 175 km, increasing resolution by a factor of almost one-hundred.

But Dawn won’t be done then, it has another trick up its sleeve. Thanks to the revolutionary ion rocket engines, the spacecraft will be able to break orbit around Vesta, and head of for a rendezvous with the mysterious dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. For now our best images of Ceres, such as the one right taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, show almost no detail at all even though it is the largest asteroid in the main belt.

The plucky little spacecraft is blazing a trail in more ways than one: Dawn may be the prototype of a new kind of spacecraft that do much more for way less. If such probes were mass-produced rather than built one at a time, the price could be lower still. In 20 years it’s possible we could have a fleet of a dozen or more ion-powered spacecraft ranging through the solar system for decades on end, all for less than the cost of a single decent-sized tax cut for billionaires.

One of my colleagues in progressive rabble rousing, known to readers simply as Hunter, has an interesting essay out at Daily Kos that brings the pain to presidential hopeful Dr. Ron Paul. It turns out Dr. Paul’s own campaign manager, Kent Snyder, who had raised millions for the enigmatic Texas congressman, died from pneumonia. The 49 year-old Snyder was uninsured — reportedly because a preexisting condition rendered private health insurance unavailable — despite raising millions of dollars for Paul as a full-time staffer.

It was in that context that Paul was asked by moderator Wolf Blitzer if the uninsured should ‘just die’ at the Republican national debate last week. This was when Paul muttered something inane about freedom and was explaining how churches and communities could raise the dough, and audience members screamed out “Yes,” let them die.

Paul indeed tried to raise money to pay Snyder’s mounting $400,000 medical bills, but fell far short at $35,000. Here’s a taste of where Hunter’s post goes from there:

For a long time, a solitary glass jar sat on the counter of our local convenience store, seeking donations towards the medical expenses of a much-loved longtime resident whose own unexpected tragedy had left an impossible financial burden. Barbecues, church socials, yard sales, bake sales or whatever else can be cobbled together; a town of any size will have something like that every weekend, if you follow the flyers or the signs, all dedicated towards raising just a few hundred dollars here and there to put a dent in the hundreds of thousands needed. Cancer, heart disease, or an accident; a husband, a mother, a child, a best friend.

You cannot live in America without seeing it. So does it work? Do churches contribute a hundred thousand, here and there? When was the last bake sale you attended that raised $50,000? The last yard sale? Just how much change can fit in a glass jar on a countertop, once you count it all up?

The Michigan House of Representatives has passed a bill barring state agencies and related offices such as universities from offering benefits to same-sex partners. The bill is predicted to pass the Republican controlled Senate and be signed into law by Governor Rick Snyder, all before October 1st when the benefits would have started:

The bills, HB 4770 and 4771, prohibit any government entity – including universities and city governments – from providing such benefits and prohibit unions from including them in collective bargaining agreements.

Here the Teaparty Republicans have scored a twofer. They played into bigotry and handicapped unions. The latter is just as important as the first in revealing conservative dishonesty. The first item in the Bill of Rights, the Very First Inalienable Right the founders wrote down, was that the federal government could never make it against the law to freely assemble and petition the government in pursuit of individual or collective interests. Which is exactly what public sector unions composed of police or professors or firefighters do.

 The usual suspects will drone on about how the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to states. What kind of whiny little armchair lawyer fuck would hide behind that flimsy excuse? You either believe in that freedom as a core universal civil liberty or you don’t, and the extreme right loves to preach on about how much they believe personal liberty trumps everything else. They claim to hold the Founding Fathers in almost religious reverence. They wring their hands and worry the government is too big, or too powerful, or too intrusive. The government has run amok they say, and is violating people’s rights with impunity. But here they’ve made it illegal for constituents to even talk to the government about changing public employee policy. And they’re proud of it.

Of course this just illustrates the not so hidden agenda: Teaparty conservatives don’t give a shit about the constitution or state’s rights or the nation, except when they think it might help them win power and force their peculiar religious practices on everyone else by force of law. They’re a bunch of ignorant fundamentalist megalomaniacs who hate democrats in general for winning elections, with a sub-bunch of good old-fashioned racist assholes who hate Obama specifically for winning while black.

It has been known for more than a decade that some dinosaurs had feathers. Particularly the Dromaeosauridae, better known as raptors, which could almost be described as an early clade of flightless birds. Some of these birds just happened to be big enough to take on a pride of lions and were armed with big pointy teeth and razor-sharp semi-retractable claws. Now, dino feathers beautifully preserved in amber found in Canada (Abstract) hint at the dazzling diversity and breathtaking beauty of these extinct creatures:

Scientists have posited that feathers developed first as single, hair-like protrusions meant for insulation. Then they began to grow in clumps before evolving into increasingly complex structures, each branching off from a central shaft. They were probably used for other purposes, such as attracting mates, before becoming essential for flight.

The preserved feathers are a big deal for two reasons. They’re so well preserved color can be observed in some and inferred in all of them. And they represent the leading theory for how feathers evolved and diversified from simply hair-like filaments to complex flight feathers. It’s clear from the new find that dino feathers were likely as diverse as those found on modern birds today. Since dinosaurs existed for over 150 million years and dominated every continent it’s fair to speculate there would have been feathered dinos so well endowed color and plumage they would have given peacocks a raging case of feather envy.

So much for Rick Perry’s jobs miracle in the Lone Star State:

The unemployment rate in Texas rose to 8.5 percent in August, putting the state in the middle of the pack nationally and undercutting GOP presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s argument that he is the best job-creator of the governors nationwide. The numbers were released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.

When cornered by the inconvenient facts Perry’s office blamed it all on Obama but that should come as no surprise: Rick Perry’s jobs miracle is a fraud from beginning to end. What little difference there was between the national employment average and Texas was the direct result of a 1) state government hiring binge fueled by federal stimulus funds Perry happily accepted and then bashed, and 2) luring low paying employers from other states by turning Texas into the equivalent of an Asian labor camp.

Fortunately the facts and the national media are starting to catch on to his schemes with a vengeance and with plenty of time left to prevent Perry from screwing the nation like he has screwed the people of Texas.

House Speaker John Boehner is worried about the growing communication gap between Republicans and Democrats. Heavens to Betsy:

And while we have a good relationship sometimes the conversations that we have would be like two groups of people from two different planets who barely understand each other. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but there is a reason why you have two major political parties with big disagreements.

Really? I mean, REALLY? Democrats and Republicans are just not communicating well enough? Let’s run with that.

Democrats were upset that Republicans invaded Iraq while bin laden was still on the loose and blew a trillion tax dollars on rebuilding Iraqi schools, bridges, and oil fields with nothing to show for it except a bunch of dead and injured Americans. Republicans are upset that Barack Obama and family engineered a massive international plot to fake his birth certificate while he was in utero so that he would be eligible to be President 50 years later.

Democrats are angry that conservatives crashed the economy, transformed a budget surplus into a 7 trillion-dollar hole in the deficit, and required a trillion-dollar bailout for the richest people on earth. Republicans are angry Barack Obama won’t mindlessly continue exclusively using those same conservative policies to fix the catastrophic consequences of those conservative economic policies.

Democrats are disillusioned with Obama for presiding over the largest tax cuts in history as measured by dollars. Republicans are furious with Obama for raising taxes more than any other President in the 6000 year history of the world.

Democrats are worried the conservative ideology is too control freaky, obsessed with deeply personal decisions such as who can marry who and forcing 12 year-olds to bear the children of their rapist. Republicans are worried the government is forcing hundreds of thousands of people into FEMA concentration camps and creating death panels designed to knock off grandma.

Democrats are frightened of the security state created by conservatives where citizens can be tortured in secret prisons without due process, where warrantless wiretaps are the norm and energy policy is decided in secret meetings by oil company executives appointed to positions of great power. Republicans are frightened the government has run amok in violation of the Bill of Rights by vaccinating children against cancer.

I could go on like this for quite a while, juxtaposing the laughably inaccurate caricature Republicans have created out of whole cloth against the empirical facts of recent history the rest of us use, but hopefully the point is clear. This isn’t an innocent communication gap, it’s a product of the GOP intentionally prying their base away from reality by fabricating bizzare stories and creating a fake history and fake science. Democrats seem angry over events that have actually happened and caused immeasurable harm, or items the GOP is publicly working hard to bring about. Republicans ignore their serial documented failures, when not trying to pawn them off on opponents, and the base is constantly kept whipped into a frenzy of hatred and fear over non-existent fringe conspiracies and tabloid plots. The two don’t speak the same language because they don’t occupy the same rung on the ladder of reality and any person, personality, celebrity, or media venue that pretends otherwise is not credible.