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Capital Eye: Health Care Cheat Sheet

Legal Schnauzer: Karl Rove did NOT deny involvement in the Siegelman case

h+ Magazine: The Salk Institute for Biological Studies has proven that genetic diseases can be cured by combining gene therapy with stem cells.

TreeHugger: North Carolin Senate bans moutaintop wind turbines. Too ugly!

3 quarks daily: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting

This is such good news - for those people who will be able to afford the treatments that will eventually result from this research. But let's not lose sight of the prize: health care for all!

President Obama is planning to sign an executive order on Monday rolling back restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, according to sources close to the issue.

Although the exact wording of the order has not been revealed, the White House plans an 11 a.m. ceremony to sign the order repealing one of the most controversial steps taken by his predecessor, fulfilling one of Obama's eagerly anticipated campaign promises.

The move, long sought by scientists and patient advocates and opposed by religious groups, would enable the National Institutes of Health to consider requests from scientists to study hundreds of lines of cells that have been developed since the limitations were put in place -- lines that scientists and patient advocate say hold great hope for leading to cures for a host of major ailments.

"Opposed by religious groups?" There are plenty of religious groups who don't oppose embryonic stem cell research - but I guess the Washington Post is so used to having Pat Robertson on speed dial, they think religion is synonymous with GOP talking points.

Yesterday’s announced breakthrough on stem-cell research is obviously good news for medicine, public health, and scientific advancements. The Bush White House, which has stood in the laboratory door for seven years, suddenly feels justified.

[N]ow that scientists in Japan and Wisconsin have apparently achieved what Mr. Bush envisioned, the White House is saying, “I told you so.”

Indeed, presidential aides were so proud of themselves yesterday, they insisted that Bush drove the breakthrough experiments by claiming some ambiguous moral standard. “This is very much in accord with the president’s vision from the get-go,” said Karl Zinsmeister, a Bush domestic policy adviser. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the president’s drawing of lines on cloning and embryo use was a positive factor in making this come to fruition.”

Look, we should all be really pleased by yesterday’s news, and the scientific advancements offer hope for life-saving medical research. But for the White House to suggest that Bush deserves some kind of credit for the progress is nonsense. In fact, the opposite is true.

One of the researchers involved in yesterday’s reports said the Bush restrictions may have slowed discovery of the new method, since scientists first had to study embryonic cells to find out how to accomplish the same thing without embryos.

“My feeling is that the political controversy set the field back four or five years,” said James Thomson, who led a team at the University of Wisconsin and who discovered human embryonic stem cells in 1998.

Jack Cafferty points to a recent Colorado Supreme Court ruling allowing an anti-abortion group to collect signatures for a ballot measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person and asks his viewers to weigh in on it.

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The court approved the language of the proposal, rejecting a challenge from abortion-rights supporters who argued it was misleading and dealt with more than one subject in violation of the state constitution.

If approved by voters, the measure would give fertilized eggs the state constitutional protections of inalienable rights, justice and due process.

Is a fertilized egg a person? What do you think of an issue that has the potential not just to outlaw abortion, but could affect a woman's right to in-vitro fertilization and birth control, not to mention stem cell research, being decided by a referendum?

Watch this short segment about Bush's veto of the stem cell bill on Hardball and then you'll understand why our country is so divided. The press allows people like Deroy, who won't tell the truth and knows that they won't tell the truth to deceive and cloud important issues to this nation....Deroy Murdock of the NRO actually uses the "Snowflakes Project" as an argument against research...I mean, he is insidious.

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Murdock: But I don‘t think the way to address that disease and others is through the destruction of human embryos. These embryos are not destined to be thrown away. In fact, there is an organization called Snowflakes Adoption Agency in Orange County, California, and they have placed these embryos, which they have actually implanted in utero. And about 120 or 130 or so kids have been born and are alive and well, and are out playing hopscotch ---Well, there are 400,000. What I think we should do is encourage more of them to be adopted. The idea that these are going to be thrown away is not so—

See how easy that was? Notice the way Deroy delivers his false talking points? He would have made an excellent conman back in the good old west--selling bottles of "youth tonic" to unsuspecting settlers. They say the same things over and over again....You don't need a calculator to know the ratio factors between 120-130 and 400,000. The Christian community is not interested in adopting "snowflakes."

Going to the C&L archives, Bush used these Snowflake kids in a photo op back in '05 .Tony Snow called the research "murder" and Josh Bolton was on MTP to explain...A lot of federal money is being invested in the Snowflake Project since it was started with hardly any takers...

And Jon Stewart takes a look back at Bush's first veto on stem cell research and Tony Snow...

Following up on John's item from yesterday on Bush's stem-cell veto, I found Tony Snow's defense of the White House policy rather alarming.

“The President also has never declared it against the law to engage in embryonic stem cell research — he simply thinks it involves, as do many other people, the taking of a human life.”

See? Bush hasn’t banned murder, he’s just blocked some funding for taxpayer-subsidized murder. Privately-funded murder is still fine, and entirely consistent with the president’s values and commitment to a culture of life. Snow added:

“To the extent that there is embryonic stem cell research, it’s being done not because Bill Clinton made it possible, but because George W. Bush made it possible.”

Yes, moments after describing the research as “taking of a human life,” Snow bragged about Bush’s support for the research.

Is a little coherence too much to ask?

Here's a brief clip of Michael J. Fox talking to Cooper about Stem Cell research.

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Fox: I have just one message and it's bi-partisan---and it's non-partisan, and it's just about hope. It's just about giving hope a chance.

Reuters AlertNet:

The Democratic-led U.S. Congress defied President George W. Bush on Thursday and gave final approval to legislation to roll back his restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research.

But the 247-176 vote by the House of Representatives on the measure already passed by the Senate was short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a promised veto by Bush, who rejected a similar bill last year.

"If this bill were to become law, American taxpayers would for the first time in our history be compelled to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos," Bush said in a statement. "Crossing that line would be a grave mistake."

Thirty-seven of Bush's fellow Republicans joined 210 Democrats in voting for the bill.

In related news: Scientists use skin cells to create stem cells

This is unbelievable. Remember this ad?

Sen. Claire McCaskill, who had been invited to speak at her daughter's Catholic high school commencement, was told last week that she was no longer invited because of church policy rejecting her positions on abortion and embryonic stem cell research.[..]

McCaskill's camp, however, puts the blame for the decision on Archbishop Raymond Burke.[..]

The disinvitation of McCaskill comes less than a week after Burke resigned from the board of the Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center Foundation because singer Sheryl Crow - an outspoken supporter of embryonic stem cell research - was scheduled to headline the annual fundraiser and concert.

I do think that the school has the right to have whomever they wish as a speaker. But the part that irks me is that the students asked for McCaskill and the school had already invited her. I'm confident that McCaskill would not be mentioning abortion or stem cells during the course of her speech. This just seems like an unnecessary injection of politicization at the expense of the students.

...but Bush will veto it. Again.

WaPo:

For the second time in nine months, the Senate today passed a bill that would loosen President Bush's restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research, but once again falling short of the 67 votes needed to override a promised veto.

The Senate voted 63 to 34 to pass the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, which would allow federally funded studies of stem cells isolated from embryos slated for destruction at fertility clinics. Read more..

UPDATE: Roll call is here. I'm particularly surprised at Bob Casey (D-PA). The final vote was 63 YEA with three Democratic Senators not voting, which means we need only one NAY defector..