It's a Win/Win Scenario...

For everyone except the taxpayer. From The Whiskey Bar:

I suppose they're probably still trying to figure out how to cut Halliburton in on the action. You'd think $89 billion in Iraq would be a big enough pork barrel for anybody. But maybe Cheney's trying to engineer a stock split.
Now this was supposed to be a joke -- not a very good joke, I know, but the best I could come up with at the time. When you're competing with the this administration, it's tough to get a laugh.

But -- and I probably should have seen this coming -- it turns out to be no joke at all. Or rather, the joke is on us simple-minded taxpayers. An alert reader passes along the following item from Petroleum News:

NASA Ames Center looks at problem of drilling on Mars

Dr. Geoffrey Briggs, director, Center for Mars Exploration at the NASA Ames Center, told “Meet Alaska” that NASA is looking at ways to drill on Mars to look for water — and the life it might contain.
Briggs said NASA has been working with Halliburton, Shell, Baker-Hughes and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to identify drilling technologies that might work on Mars...

Halliburton and Baker-Hughes are working on some very advanced systems, Briggs said, some so advanced they aren’t willing to talk much about them. He said the NASA Ames Center relies on working with people in the industry who “really understand the problems and make us face up to the realities …

The cost plus nature of the contract plus the inevitable overruns would cover not only the asbestos claims from Cheney's disasterous purchase of Manville back in the 90's, it would offer enough sop to cover the Veep's deferred compensation for the next "X" years with the spare change.

The Bush Team has no sense of shame.

Of course, the idea of a manned mission to Mars, or even the Moon, is ridiculous at present. Either would be an outrageous expense--unless you want to seriously cut the bloated military budget--and the former would be an unbelievable risk. But, hey, when there's money to be made, why let reality get in the way?

My feeling is that the Mars mission will be the equivalent of the latest "Star Wars" projects that will never provide a space based defense against a missile attack. Just another fiscal sinkhole brought to you by the REAL welfare queens: the defense contractors.