Geez, Phil...
All we have to go on are reports based on leaks, and at the time I posted, only the one UPI report. It could be that all the fuss is about poor wording in that one article.
Nevertheless, the sentence
Other research programs not involving humans would be terminated or curtailed.
is hard to misunderstand, and so I have to ask if you're not letting your love of all things Bush blind you.
One thing that all the later reports agree on is that NASA's budget would be increased only a small amount, and that the new initiatives would have to be funded by "reallocating" resources. That means cancelling programs. The two items together hint strongly that it's going to be the science that gets the ax.
Sure, there will still be robots to the Moon the pave the way for landing there again, and robots to Mars to scout landing sites. But all the omens suggest that non-human-specific science missions will be killed. No more Mariners to Mercury, Venus, and Mars. No more Pioneers and Voyagers to the outer planets. No more Galileos and Cassinis. No more Grand Observatories. Even in the case of Mars probes the science will take a back seat to engineering considerations (think Surveyor scouting Apollo landing sites). Nothing that doesn't serve the political goal of "space leadership" as defined in calculated political terms that the masses can easily grasp: Footsteps and flags.
And that disturbs me. It's an election year, and I fear that a meaningful program of space exploration on all fronts will be sacrificed to allow Bush to make a pretty Kennedy-esque speech solely to score political points.