"Are seeing people interested in space:

Fail to see a difference between missions lasting a few days with one lasting almost 2 years and labeling real long term science missions as flags and footprints."

Mission duration has nothing to do with whether something is "flags & footprints"

"Dismissing space base camps capable of supporting people for almost 2 years on Mars as insignificant steps towards permanent living facilities. They could even be be permanent facilities from the start."

I guess I must have slept through this discussion- thank goodness.

"Thinking it makes sense to spend more fuel to go somewhere to refuel than to just go to the destination desired."

Hundreds of millions of people do this when they take their cars to a gas station.

"Mistake physical closeness as the over riding factor in determining practicality rather than the engineering standard of cost effectiveness. Space is hard and expensive. Failure to spend money wisely increases the odds of failure due to cancellation or cost scrimping ala ISS."

Ala Shuttle, Apollo, Big Dig, or practically every govt project. The simple fact is: sending crew to the Moon is easier than sending crew to Mars. One Saturn V stack could send a crew to the lunar surface and get them back, whereas no Saturn V stack could get a crew to Mars surface and get them back.

"Expect a moonbase to Mars scheme that has failed twice to somehow miraculously succeed when its main flaw (huge cost) is still there."

Pres Bush has given some details for the *direction* of NASA. There is yet any specific plans of how we will explore the Moon. The announced increases in NASA budget is mostly due to the nuclear program which at the moment is mostly related to outer planet exploration and Mars than specifically related to Lunar exploration.
I would also imagine that ISS will end up with more funding so that it can actually do serious work towards studying the affects of long duration space travel (manned Mars), rather than doing the cheaper handwaving excercises pretending that biotech industries are vaguely interested in these kinds of experiments.
The idea the Lunar exploration will have huge costs is mostly due to your imagination and/or perhaps you being spun by reporters even more clueless than yourself. I can also imagine that a lunar program could have a huge price tag, but I haven't seen any indication coming from the President or NASA which points to this (yet).