NONE of the wars are reasonable, of course ... but these articles are mainly about the Frozen 400,000.  The war on science ... the war on enlightened thought-process ... the war on intelligent conversation and debate.  Some of the articles are a bit snide ... it's sooooo easy to go there, these days, considering the thoughtless disregard for the living while the un-born get the highest priority.  

The simplistic Congressional focus on wedge issues in the last months [flag burning, marriage definitions, yadda] has the public unhappier than ever; important tasks are being "left behind" [pun, no pun] while the public frets their disingenuousness. It appears that the Pubs are worried that this ploy to bring the Faithful back into the fold isn't working, though.  Bush's tepid and humbling performance before the NAACP was designed, it's reported, as an opportunity to get those [very] few black votes needed in November ... the Pubs have a mere 10% of the black vote.  Then, Dub's stem cell veto -- reported as throwing a bone to his base -- has gone against the public grain ... it has a Terri Schaivo feel to it; backlash is brewing.

It's difficult to go to war on science -- science is the art of proving what things aren't, as much as what they are, Bible or no Bible.  The wedge issues that feed the passions of the christocrats may prove to be a terminal wedgy for the Republicans in November.

-- Jude
News Editor, Planet Waves

Tom Toles 'toon
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/uclickcomics/20060721/cx_tt_uc/tt20060721


Ben Sargent 'toon
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cx/uc/bs



The Passion of the Embryos
FRANK RICH, NYT
July 23, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/q5owu

HOW time flies when democracy is on the march in the Middle East! Five whole years have passed since ominous Qaeda chatter reached its pre-9/11 fever pitch, culminating in the President's Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

History has since condemned President Bush for ignoring that intelligence. But to say that he did nothing that summer is a bum rap. Just three days later, on Aug. 9, he took a break from clearing brush in Crawford to reveal the real priority of his presidency, which had nothing to do with a nuisance like terrorism. His first prime-time address after more than six months in office was devoted to embryonic stem-cell research instead. Placing his profound religious convictions above the pagan narcissism of Americans hoping for cures to diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes, he decreed restrictions to shackle the advance of medical science.

Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he's consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action - on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president's base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq's

marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.

The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush's Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran's ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America's own religious wars. The president's politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right's former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush's presidency. If we can't beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we're at least starting to rout them here.

That the administration's stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party's far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo's condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program's canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he's read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush's side.

The voting public has learned this, too. Back in 2001, many Americans gave the president the benefit of the doubt when he said that his stem-cell "compromise" could make "more than 60" cell lines available for federally financed study. Those lines turned out to be as illusory as Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: there were only 22, possibly all of them now contaminated or otherwise useless. Fittingly, the only medical authority to endorse the Bush policy at the time, the Houston cancer doctor John Mendelsohn, was a Bush family friend. He would later become notorious for lending his empirical skills to the Enron board's audit committee.

This time around, with the administration's credibility ruined by Iraq, official lies about science didn't fly. When Karl Rove said that embryonic stem cells weren't required because there was "far more promise from adult stem cells," The Chicago Tribune investigated and found that the White House couldn't produce a single stem-cell researcher who agreed. (Ahmad Chalabi, alas, has no medical degree.) In the journal Science, three researchers summed up the consensus of the reality-based scientific community: misleading promises about adult stem cells "cruelly deceive patients."

No less cruelly deceptive was the photo op staged to sell Mr. Bush's veto: television imagery of the president cradling so-called Snowflake babies, born via in vitro fertilization from frozen embryos that had been "adopted." As Senator Arlen Specter has pointed out, only 128 of the 400,000 or so rejected embryos languishing in deep freeze in fertility clinics have been adopted. Many of the rest are destined to be tossed in the garbage.

If you believe, as Mr. Bush says he does, that either discarding or conducting research with I.V.F. embryos is murder, then fertility clinic doctors, like stem-cell researchers, belong on death row. But the president, so proud of drawing a firm "moral" line, will no sooner crack down on I.V.F. than he did on Kim Jong Il: The second-term Bush has been downsized to a paper tiger. His party's base won't be so shy. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who led the Senate anti-stem-cell offensive and sees himself as the religious right's presidential candidate, has praised the idea of limiting the number of eggs fertilized in vitro to "one or two at a time." A Kentucky state legislator offered a preview of coming attractions, writing a bill making the fertilization of multiple eggs in I.V.F. treatments a felony.

Tacticians in both political parties have long theorized that if a conservative Supreme Court actually struck down Roe v. Wade, it would set Republicans back at the polls for years. Mr. Bush's canonization of clumps of frozen cells over potential cancer cures may jump-start that backlash. We'll see this fall. Already one Republican senatorial candidate, Michael Steele of Maryland, has stepped in Mr. Bush's moral morass by egregiously comparing stem-cell research to Nazi experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.

Mr. Reed's primary defeat is as much a blow to religious-right political clout as the White House embrace of stem-cell fanaticism. The man who revolutionized the face of theocratic politics in the 1990's with a telegenic choirboy's star power has now changed his movement's face again, this time to mud.

The humiliating Reed defeat - by 12 points against a lackluster rival in a conservative primary in a conservative state - is being pinned on his association with the felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who also tainted that other exemplar of old-time religion, Tom DeLay. True enough, but it's what Mr. Reed did for Mr. Abramoff's clients that is most damning, far more so than the golf junkets and money-grubbing. The causes Mr. Reed enabled through manufactured grass-roots campaigns (unwittingly, he maintains) were everything he was supposedly against: Indian casinos and legal loopholes that allowed forced abortions and sexual slavery in the work force of an American commonwealth, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry - older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn't some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right's most effective poster boy in mainstream America. He had been recruited for precisely that mission by Pat Robertson, who made him the frontman for the Christian Coalition in 1989, knowing full well that Mr. Reed's smarts and youth could do P.R. wonders that Mr. Robertson and the rest of the baggage-laden Falwell generation of Moral Majority demagogues could not. And it worked. In 1995, Mr. Reed was rewarded with the cover of Time, for representing "the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century."

Actually, the Christian Coalition was soon to be accused of inflating its membership, Enron-accounting style, and was careening into debt. Only three years after his Time cover, Mr. Reed, having ditched the coalition to set up shop as a political consultant, sent his self-incriminating e-mail to Mr. Abramoff: "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" He also humped in noncorporate accounts, like the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

By 2005 Mr. Reed had become so toxic that Mr. Bush wouldn't be caught on camera with him in Georgia. But the Bush-Rove machine was nonetheless yoked to Mr. Reed in their crusades: the demonization of gay couples as boogeymen (and women) in election years, the many assaults on health (not just in stem-cell laboratories but in federal agencies dealing with birth control and sex education), the undermining of the science of evolution. The beauty of Mr. Reed's unmasking is the ideological impact: the radical agenda to which he lent an ersatz respectability has lost a big fig leaf, and all the president's men, tied down like Gulliver in Iraq, cannot put it together again to bamboozle suburban voters.

It's possible that even Joe Lieberman, a fellow traveler in the religious right's Schiavo and indecency jeremiads, could be swept out with Rick Santorum in the 2006 wave. Mr. Lieberman is hardly the only Democrat in the Senate who signed on to the war in Iraq, but he's surely the most sanctimonious. He is also the only Democrat whose incessant Bible thumping (while running for vice president in 2000) was deemed "inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours" by the Anti-Defamation League. As Ralph Reed used to say: amen. ++



Right-wing wedges
GOP plans backfire, exposing gap between right and loony right
Ellen Goodman
07.20.06
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=21121

BOSTON -- So once more we reach into the right-wing toolbox, a political chest so spare that it holds almost nothing but a wide assortment of wedges. Who would have believed that the wedges used so successfully to divide America would end up dividing conservatives? That they would finally expose the differences between the right and the, um, loony right?

The latest of these wedge issues is stem cell research. But it's not the only one. Gradually, over the past year, we've begun to see daylight emerge between common sense and nonsense.

Wedge One: Abstinence or Death. Remember last October, when the vaccine against HPV -- the leading cause of cervical cancer -- was first announced? Pro-family groups were less than enthusiastic about this breakthrough. Cervical cancer was, after all, a mainstay of the abstinence-only miseducation textbooks. A vaccine, said the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, "sends the wrong message." The right message -- the far-right message -- was that losing your virginity could give you cancer.

Today, the FRC and its cohorts still oppose routine vaccination for girls. But after the sex-or-death brouhaha, even they were compelled to regroup and offer choked approval of a "tremendous medical achievement."

Wedge Two: South Dakota or Bust. In February, South Dakota showed the country what a pro-life America would really look like. The Legislature passed a law directly confronting Roe v. Wade, banning all abortions except to save the life of the pregnant woman.

This fulfilled the infamous views of Bill Napoli, the state senator who could publicly imagine only one rape victim who could qualify for an abortion: a religious girl, planning "on saving her virginity until she was married" who "was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated." A law like that may be too much even for South Dakota, where a measure to repeal the ban is on the November ballot.

Wedge Three: Plan B or Else. A cowed FDA has still not allowed emergency contraception onto the local drugstore shelf. Plan B could prevent thousands of unwanted pregnancies if it were available over the counter. But opponents argue that the morning-after pill would change the night-before behavior if it fell into the hands of young teenagers. They also claim Plan B could conceivably stop a fertilized egg from getting into the womb.

Go figure. Easy access to contraception that could prevent thousands of abortions is being delayed because of claims it could stop a fertilized egg from getting implanted ... and probably aborted? More and more people are hearing the loony tunes behind that logic.

Now back to the big one.

Wedge Four: The Frozen Embryo or the Seriously Ill. This week the Senate wrangled over a bill to expand federal funding for research using leftover embryos from fertility clinics. The heated debate was between the value of the potential life of an embryo and the actual life of a sick person.

Opponents of the bill brought forth "Snowflakes" in July, a handful of the 100-plus children born from donated frozen embryos. Proponents brought in patients who hope for cures and reminded people that 400,000 spare embryos would never find wombs. One side talked about the "innocent human life" of an embryo. The other talked about the "innocent victim" of disease or accident.

But then something unusual happened. Republicans and pro-lifers split. Orrin Hatch and John McCain voted for the bill. So did Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, famous for his craven behavior in the Terri Schiavo case. The Senate voted in favor of expanding the stem cell research by 63-37.

About 70 percent of Americans favor this research. But way beyond that, stem cell research has become an issue prompting people to draw new lines. Yes, between the right and the, um, loony right.

When the president surrounded himself with 18 families with "adopted" embryos and stamped this bill with his first-ever veto, he set back the science another year. Case closed. But when he described this research as "the taking of innocent human life," he placed the Oval Office on the far side of the new line.

Values voters, anyone? They may yet qualify as the most oversimplified, overused demographic of the 2004 election. But today there are a lot of Americans, secure in their own values, wondering: What kind of people would choose a leftover frozen embryo over a cure for my cousin's diabetes? Pro-whose-life?

Politicians have become accustomed to bowing to the right. Many, especially in red states, worry about their vulnerability to those values voters. Now we are looking at a subtly changing landscape. The right wing has performed its own incredible alchemy. They've finally turned a wedge into a double-edged sword.  ++



400,000 Frozen Embryos
But only 128 "snowflakes" have been adopted. Will the stem-cell veto hurt the GOP?
Eleanor Clift, Newsweek
Friday 21 July 2006
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13973858/site/newsweek/

    There's no daylight between President Bush and what any Democrat is saying about the Middle East conflict. Polls show that Americans sympathize with Israel but don't want us to get drawn into the fighting. The small band of neocons who beat the drums for war with Iraq are trying to goad Bush into doing whatever it takes to get rid of Hizbullah in Lebanon.

    "It reminds me of that old schoolyard taunt: 'You and what army?'" says Matt Bennett of Third Way, a centrist group founded to challenge liberal orthodoxy. The neocons have not lost their faith in American invasions even as the fallout from Iraq emboldens Syria and Iran and threatens to engulf the region in all-out war. What this latest outbreak of violence means for Bush's portfolio as he leads his party into the fall elections is anybody's guess. It could overshadow the mess in Iraq and serve as a distraction for Republicans, or it could help Democrats by reminding voters how everything seems to be coming apart on Bush's watch.

    If this were a normal news time, the big story this week would be Bush's veto of legislation to expand federally funded embryonic stem-cell research. Bush's defiance on the issue has the potential of being as big a political gift for Democrats as the Massachusetts gay-marriage ruling was for Republicans in the last election. "The public clearly sides with science on this issue," says Republican pollster Frank Luntz. But he adds that there are so many cutting-edge issues out there-Iraq, immigration, energy prices-that embryonic stem-cell research falls behind in comparison.

    Sixty percent of Americans support this research (according to a recent Gallup review of polls on the subject), and when they see Bush holding up adoption as an alternative to scientific study, they know it's a false choice. Most people understand intuitively that the overwhelming majority of embryos that are the byproduct of in vitro fertilization will not become babies, and real medical and scientific advances could be made if these embryos were available to scientists. Bush banned the media from watching him wield his veto pen, the first of his presidency; then he welcomed cameras as he explained his decision at a White House reception surrounded by "snowflake babies" and their grateful parents.

    There are 400,000 embryos languishing in storage tanks at fertility clinics; only a very small number are candidates for adoption. "Even with federal funding available to encourage adoption, the number [of pregnancies from these embryos] is 128, which makes it conclusive that these 400,000 embryos will either be used for scientific research or thrown away," said Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who supports expanded research. The legislation, which passed by wide margins in the Republican-controlled House and Senate but fell short of a vetoproof two-thirds majority, would only use embryos that would otherwise be discarded, and then only with the written consent of the couple that created them.

    The impact of the newly energized stem-cell debate is being felt in individual races. Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon, a toe-the-line conservative, surprised everybody by voting to overturn Bush's veto despite having voted against the legislation. His Democratic challenger, retired Navy vice admiral Joe Sestak, thanked him for his reversal, likening it to John Kerry's famous campaign faux pas, "I voted for it before I voted against it." In Weldon's case, he voted against it before he voted for it. Weldon is best known for believing that the jury is still out on WMD in Iraq. First elected in 1986, this is his first tough race. The last four Democrats who ran against him collectively raised $78,000, chump change. Sestak has raised more than a million dollars, even outpacing Weldon in the last quarter in part because of some pretty slimy personal attacks by Weldon that backfired.

    In a conversation with NEWSWEEK, Sestak said he decided to run while living in the oncology ward of Children's Hospital in Washington as his daughter, then 4 years old, was being treated for a brain tumor. "I've seen the other side," he said, explaining that in his daughter's room was a toddler diagnosed with acute leukemia whose parents were uninsured. Hearing their anguish helped crystallize his decision to seek office, as did his opposition to the Iraq war ("tragic misadventure," he calls it). Once he learned his daughter was in remission, he drove to the county in Pennsylvania where he grew up and declared his intention to run for Congress. Recently retired after 31 years in the Navy, he had always harbored an admiration for politicians and served as director of defense policy in the Clinton White House.

    Weldon accused him of being a carpetbagger because he was only renting in the district while his wife and daughter were still in the Washington area. When Sestak explained that his daughter remained in treatment, Weldon questioned why she wasn't being treated in Philadelphia or Delaware, closer to home. The upshot was an outpouring of campaign contributions, mostly from liberal bloggers incensed by Weldon's cheap shot. Sestak and his wife eventually posted a letter thanking everybody but asking that future donations in the name of their daughter, Alexandra, now 5, be directed to cancer-treatment centers. This is an unusually personal race, but that's what it takes to engage voters when so much else is going on. ++



The Chosen Frozen
Patrick Dall'Occhio
07.21.2006  
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-dallocchio/the-chosen-frozen_b_25549.html  <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-dallocchio/the-chosen-frozen_b_25549.html>

With the first veto of his presidency, President Bush discovered his "moral line" to spare innocent life. At his news conference, Bush explained this bill, using unwanted frozen embryos for stem cell research, was against his beliefs on the sanctity of human life. Bush was quoted as saying, "...crossing this line would be a mistake, and once crossed we would find it almost impossible to turn back.'' This is a breakthrough, for most lines between life and death are not so easily drawn but are like a series of curly-Q loops, much like a crazy straw.

Could this be the beginning of a president ascending to untangle other thorny moral issues and to spare more innocent life? Like the lives of Lebanese and Israeli civilians being snuffed out on a daily basis?

With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on hold for another week before diplomatic strategies can be implemented, the Israeli government and the Hezbollah militia are free to rack-up the body count in the region. But isn't Israel allowed to defend itself from terror with such overpowering force? Aren't the members of Hezbollah justified in meeting such force with continued bombing from the other side? And how many people need to die before Bush intervenes? Are we waiting for a magic number? Or maybe a magically distinct moral line? Perhaps the best way to stop the daily killings would be to send in the Chosen People - no, not those singled out by Yahwey or Allah - but the American human embryos - The Chosen Frozen.

If Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could enlist an army of frozen embryos to take control of the Lebanon-Israel border, Bush would have to halt the bombing. After all, the Chosen Frozen is a unique bunch of purely innocent, designed beings. Their special status elevates them above all life because they cannot feel, cannot think and cannot speak to defend themselves from extinction. They are truly helpless and in need of a heavenly father to protect them.

Imagine the border dotted with pink and baby blue balloons each one suspend by a nitrogen canister holding an American blastocyst. Symbols of American goodwill, they could be given as gifts to deservingly married (heterosexual) Lebanese and Israeli couples, respectively. Bush can spread freedom in the Middle East with fertilized seed. He could win the peace with Weapons of Mass Reproduction. Surely deploying American human embryos in this twisted haymaker would halt the fighting by taking both ends of the moral issue and pulling them into a crisp, taught line. Because our president believes only these truly innocent, unborn, unseen clusters of cells deserve unconditional mercy. Shouldn't such held sanctity for human life be everywhere?

Obviously, no one wants the death toll (or the price of a barrel of crude) to get too high. No one wants to find himself allowing the sacrifice of innocent life when they had the power, ability and the almighty authority to prevent it. Because that might be a line, once crossed, we would find almost impossible to turn back. ++



Right wing should adopt 400,000 frozen embryos
Because who cares about those little things more than them?
Bob Geiger
July 21, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/39321/

Now that George W. Bush, aided by Congressional Republicans and the Religious Right, has ruined immediate hope of meaningful progress on stem cell research, it's time for Democrats to tell them to put up or shut up on their strident claims that a child is born almost the minute two people even discuss conception.

One of the primary arguments against federal funding of stem cell research was the alleged viability of the 400,000 frozen embryos in storage at fertility clinics throughout the country.

Sam Brownback (R-KS), one of the Senate's major stem cell opponents, even went through the theater of holding a press conference showcasing children whose parents adopted them as frozen embryos from fertility clinics --the so-called "snowflake babies."

"What we're talking about in this debate is the use of embryos, young humans, as raw materials, raw material in research, raw material to exploit," said Brownback.

Bush himself made many similar statements and his spokesman, Tony Snow, even said that Bush considers it murder to conduct stem cell research.

"What the President has said is that he doesn't want human life destroyed. Now, you may consider that insignificant, but the President has said…. [he] believes strongly that for the purpose of research it's inappropriate for the federal government to finance something that many people consider murder; he's one of them," said Snow. "The simple answer is he thinks murder is wrong. The President is not going to get on the slippery slope of taking something that is living and making it dead for the purpose of research."

Senate and House Democratic leaders Harry Reid (D-NV) and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) need to call these guys on their pious claims and immediately propose legislation that would fund an adoption program for all 400,000 of the frozen embryos stored throughout America. The first people who should step up to the plate and adopt one of these microscopic entities are the 37 Senators who voted against the stem cell research bill on Tuesday and the 193 members of the House who refused to override Bush's veto of the bill yesterday. Heck, the Bush family alone could probably adopt a couple hundred of them.

That leaves only about 399,500 of the little cells to find homes for, which is where Bush can start a faith-based, Christian program and enlist the help of James Dobson, at the ultraconservative Focus on the Family, who called the stem cell bill "barbarous legislation" and lauded the veto, calling Bush "a man of his word and a champion for the pre-born."

With the 1.5 million listeners they claim for their daily radio broadcast and the combined circulation of about 2.3 million subscribers for their magazines, Focus on the Family alone should be able to provide cozy little Petri dishes for the remaining cells by the end of July.

But if, by any chance, they turn out to be a bunch of hypocrites who don't really see these as living beings or who just don't give a damn enough to help them, Bush can always hit up those God-fearing -- and science-fearing -- people at the Family Research Council (FRC).

"Rather than defend human dignity, for the first time in U.S. history a majority of Senators approved legislation to use taxpayers' money for research requiring the destruction of human life," said FRC Chief Taliban, Tony Perkins. "The President is absolutely right to veto this legislation."

With that kind of endorsement, Perkins should have no trouble getting his large, compassionate flock to adopt a stem cell or 10.

And think of what a win-win this is for everyone involved: The 400,000 cells will get a home with the people who claim to care about them the most. And the proud, new, exclusively-heterosexual "parents" will get an unprecedented amount of time to get the embryo's room ready, prep the other children for a new brother or sister and, of course, adjust the family finances for a new mouth to feed and a new family member who will need health care once they're bigger than the head of a pin.

I think this will work out just fine. Unless Congressional Republicans vote against it -- or Bush uses his second veto. ++

======

What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does.  Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there's one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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