Senator William Proxmire, a great Democratic hero, made a career out of publicly ridiculing things like this, issuing his famous "Golden Fleece Awards" to a lot of science research projects, including SETI.

In the space field, his name became a verb--a science project would get "Proxmired." He was not popular with my crowd back then, but looking at the bigger picture (go down the list of his "awards") you get the idea that if more Senators paid attention to this sort of thing, our budget might be in better shape.

This kind of thing is complex. There isn't a single government-supported science project out there that isn't considered to be absolutely essential to humanity by those participating in it. Not all of them are, by any stretch of the imagination.

On the other hand, Proxmire often glossed over the details in his attacks. It's easy to make fun of a study of a certain kind of mud worm, and forget to mention that it has a cellular structure that tells us a lot about how cancer works (I made that up, but there are plenty of things like that).

On the gripping hand, multiply that $3 million study by thousands, especially if you start folding in other fields like social science and pretty much any academic lusting after taxpayer money, and it starts to add up.

You can cut through a lot of this by pointing out that this isn't the kind of thing that's supposed to even get near the President's desk. Take it up with Congress. If I were McCain, I'd stick to the big problems.