Hubble's successor: doomed or saved?

The James Webb Space Telescope is planned to be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It will have a 6.5 meter (21 foot) mirror (Hubble's is 2.4 meters, or 8 feet), and will look at the Universe in the near- to mid-infrared, where cooler objects like planets, dust clouds, and ancient galaxies glow brightly. Its fate also hangs by a thread. Originally planned to cost under a billion dollars and already be launched by now -- NASA has currently spent about $3.5B on the mission with a launch date no sooner than 2018 -- delays and cost overruns have hit the project hard, prompting the US House of Representatives to axe the budget for JWST, essentially killing the entire project in their proposed 2012 Federal budget. I wrote about this when the news broke, basically saying this was a dumb idea. The JWST cost overruns have been widely claimed ...