This, from the Associated Press: In a triple setback for conservatives, South Dakota rejected a law that would have banned virtually all abortions, Arizona became the first state to defeat an amendment to ban gay marriage and Missouri approved a measure backing stem cell research. Perhaps the voters are expressing…
Why is the White House afraid to show Bush's 2003 aircraft carrier "Mission Accomplished speech" in its full glory? Why has the video available on the White House site been so obviously hacked? Maybe the answer is best shown through statistics: At Mission Accomplished Since Mission Accomplished U.S. Troops wounded 542 21,077…
I know this is offbeat, but some of these photos are compelling. I hope the photographers are OK.
Andrew Sullivan uses a Barack Obama's interview on the meaning of religion as a launching point for a recent post. Here are Obama's words: "I think this is the historical moment we're in — we have come to define religion in absolutist, fundamentalist terms. So to be a believer is to be…
Go ask one of those opponents of stem cell research why it’s OK to donate a kidney. They’ll look at you like you’re nuts. They’ll tell there’s a person who’s about to die and another person with an extra kidney, and it’s all that simple.
In 2006 you won’t hear any protest that kidney donation is something Frankenstein would do. Stem cell research opponents won’t assert that the extra kidney constitutes a “human life” even though it is alive and human. They won’t tell you that kidney transplants are morally wrong. They won’t claim that a kidney has an invisible soul.
Instead, they will reassure you that a spare kidney is not a unique human being. They will tell you that kidney cells are only “potential” human beings (reproductive cloning, illegal in most countries, could accomplish this). As icing on the cake, they will assert that kidneys don’t feel any pain.
At that point you’ll need to jump in. For starters, you might remind the stem cell research opponents that blastocysts (from which stem cells are harvested) are clumps of about 150 cells small enough to fit inside Roosevelt’s eye on a U.S. dime.
You might then add that blastocysts are only five days old when the stem cells are harvested. At this point in time, the stem cells are pluripotent: they can develop into all the different cell types in the body (except the placenta), but they have not yet developed into any specialized type of cell. …
