Fact: A good NEO search would cost a small fraction of a manned mission to MARS. (BTW I am curious what kind of spending would you like to see on a NEO project?? I figure a startup cost of a few hundred million and a yearly budget of ~100 million a year over a decade would do the job pretty well...)

Fact: If the country got fully behind a mission to mars then NASA would get enough funding to be able to afford the NEO search with its spare change...When we decided to go to the moon that wasn't ALL NASA did, a lot of other projects came out of that race. Projects that would not have been funded if nasa wasn't getting support for the moon program.

Hypothesis: It seems that a manned mars mission project would be a boon for your neo project. Plus mars would serve as a near pristine record of impact events over the past billion years...I would think that a lot of scientists studying impact history would drool at the thought of studying Mars' impacts...

I honestly don't see why you have the hostility you do towards a mars mission.
Let me also state that I do not support manned mars projects just because of the "lifeboat" attitude...(though I think it is a good point), There is just so much to be learned there. My main reason for supporting it is that I believe that for humanity to reach its full potential we gotta get out there, and Mars seems like a good place to start...