Back in spring, Obama set up a special advisory science panel of scientists to find out exactly how cool it would be for NASA to send astronauts into space, like to Mars maybe. The panel’s findings indicate that this would be “pretty fucking cool,” or “quite brilliant, really” in metric units. Fantastiche! NASA will now be needing $3 billion a year on top of the $18 billion a year it already gets so it can send a guy or a clever monkey with a touching and uncanny capacity for human emotion to Mars. MORE »

In the early 1800s, a nice nerdy Democrat gal named Laura “Matt” Welch was attending a “common backyard barbecue” in Texas when this drunk slob, George W. Bush, started grabbing her boobs and vomiting all over her. Bush made Ms. Welch become a Republican, if she wanted in on the family money, and this arrangement worked out alright until just now, when Laura Bush said a nice thing or two about Barack Obama and his commie speech to the schoolchildren. MORE »

“WASHINGTON – Former President George W. Bush took a step closer Thursday to establishing an ‘action-oriented think tank’ alongside his future presidential library by naming James K. Glassman, the longtime journalist and former administration official, as its founding executive director.” This post is complete. [NYT via Matt Yglesias]

• GEORGE BUSH SR. SIMPLY WILL NOT ATTEND THIS FUNERAL: George H.W. Bush, an evil oil baron and son to a Nazi financier, will not make it to Ted Kennedy’s funeral in Boston Saturday, even though every other living president will be there. A spokesperson says that the old coot “feels his son’s presence would ‘amply and well represent’ the family Saturday.” COLD. [AP/Raw Story]

A number of you have been sending us this amazing thing out of the blue — Ahh, it was on Sullivan this morning, GOT IT — about a secret chat between French queer Jacques Chirac and American dynamo George W. Bush before the Iraq war, the details of which Chirac has supposedly confirmed: “Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.” MORE »

Oh man, Newsweek. We were all prepared to just ignore this, to make it die, because JESUS, but the copy editors closed the deal nicely with this subhed: “Peace Partners: Bush and Obama could play good-cop, bad-cop with Israel.” OH COME ON. Fine, here’s a quick mockery of your broke magazine’s pornographic web-dung. MORE »

You know what else went to Hell during eight long years of George W. Bush? The nation’s teen-aged girl children! Perhaps influenced by the ghetto trash Bush Twins, America’s gals reversed a decade of progress in the reduction of sex diseases and teen pregnancy. Oh, just kidding about Jenna and Barbara — this was actually the direct result of Bush Administration anti-sex-education policy. MORE »

Jeb Bush, the slightly less odious brother of former President George W. Bush, delighted the nation when he revealed he wouldn’t be running for Florida’s open Senate seat because huzzah, an election without Bushes! But even if he’s skipping the rounds for 2010, might he have bigger ambitions in mind for 2012? MORE »

One fellow on the Internet is very upset that greatest hero ever George W. Bush charged hundreds of dollars for tickets to his “rodeo speech” in some wingnut Oklahoma town on July 4, but whatever, money is cool. Your Wonkette, however, is very disappointed in Junior for something else, his biggest mistake since Iraq and Harriet Miers combined: he won’t stop telling this same exact joke about picking up Barney’s dog shit and how it is beneath him. MORE »

ALUMNI REPORT: Original Wonkette editor Ana Marie Cox (Class of ‘04-’06) and editor-after-that Alex Pareene (Class of ‘06-’07) have exciting new programming you should know about: Ms. Cox now hosts the Air America radio show The Inside Story (Saturdays at 9AM and Sundays at noon) while Mr. Pareene is now the curator of Everyone Is Trying To Kill You at True/Slant.

Known magazine TIME reported earlier in the day that Barack Obama, who hasn’t been to church since quitting Jeremiah Wright’s mosque last year, has chosen as “his primary place of worship” the “Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David,” where other congregants include local forest creatures such as rabbits and donkeys. George W. Bush also “chose to worship” there, at the president’s secret Maryland lair, because if there are no cameras then you don’t actually have to go. But the most interesting thing about this TIME report is that it is WRONG and Barack Obama still hates Mister Jesus. MORE »