Sen. Patrick Leahy doubts Bush aides

Lawyers: Bush can eject dissenters

DENVER - Lawyers for President Bush are arguing that the president's staff can lawfully remove anyone from the planet who expresses points of view different from his. "The president's right to control his own message includes the right to jettison people expressing discordant viewpoints from Earth," says the brief.

Saying "the desire to disagree is part of our character," President Bush Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan to allow people to disagree with him...from the moon, using the moon-mission as a steppingstone for a similar dissenter's colony on Mars soon after.

"I don't know where all this disagreeing with me will end, but I know this -- human beings will hafta head into the cosmos to do it," Bush said. "Dissenters will be sent to Mars for the same reason they were once sent across the open sea. They want to improve their lives, and gettin' them the hell outta here will lift our national spirit."

The president described this "new course" for our nation's space program in a speech at NASA headquarters, shifting the focus immediately from the space shuttle to an international space dissent-station and beyond that to the creation of a vehicle that can fly "disagreers" to the moon by June.