Spring is a time for looking ahead -- new hopes, new beginnings.
But it is also a time for spring cleaning. Time to rifle through the junk drawer and see what falls out.
Here's what fell out of mine:
Whatever happened to...
OSAMA BIN LADEN'S MONEY?
Remember the first couple of weeks after the attacks? The government was getting ready to go into Afghanistan and get OBL personally (speaking of which... whatever happened to
him?)
But in the meantime they did a great job, we were told, of freezing untold gabillions in bank accounts. Without his money, OBL couldn't operate.
Whatever happened to that money? Is it still frozen? Did it become property of the US? Was it just added in to the national treasury? That seems weird. What happened to it?
Whatever happened to...BUSH'S DOCTOR EXAM?
Remember back in the campaign, Bush wouldn't go in for his physical? We had all kinds of theories on what he was hiding... some pretty interesting diagnoses!
Has the guy been to a doctor since then? Does the President have anyone looking after his health at all? (Shouldn't he?) Whatever happened with that?
Whatever happened to...THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE?
Maybe I'm just a big nerd, but I was very upset when they cut the funding and cancelled the repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most productive and wonderful inventions of the last 20 years, after Bush announced in his State of the Union that he wanted a manned mission to Mars.
One of the Congresspeople from Maryland (the HST is run out of Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore) stepped in and saved the Hubble from total destruction... the last I heard it was in a sort of limbo. Whatever happened to the HST?
Whatever happened to... BIOETHICIST LEON KASS?
Remember this guy? Again, just me being a nerd, but Bush's head bio-ethicist Leon Kass was the go-to guy for newspapers to quote when they needed to excuse Bush's foolish dismantling the nation's science program. Kass helped gut NIH funds and halt financing of stem cell research. He is in charge of making sure the country's scientists don't do anything to mess with the Bible.
But where was he during the Schiavo debacle? Don't bio-ethicists care about end-of-life decisions?
And where was he today when, faced with a total vacuum of leadership from the government, the group of scientists known as the National Academy released their own ethical guidelines to help researchers working with stem cells?
Dr. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the academy's guidelines.
Whatever happened to Leon?