Joe Canason at Salon is starting to sound a lot like the nuts at Democrat Underground.

When President Bush inspires us onward and upward to Mars this week, his political calculations may be more earthly. Expanding space exploration is a wonderful aspiration for America and humanity -- and also quite promising for the Houston economy, the national aerospace industry, and one company in particular that has long pondered exploration of the red planet: Halliburton.

Canason has it all wrong. For Mars, the real money is not in the oil, but in building the pipeline.