The Politics of Stem Cell Research

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed a bill that expands the federal presence in embryonic stem-cell research.

As you can see in the report by Christina Bellantoni the Democrats believe that they have a winner on this one. 

“We have a moral obligation to provide our scientific community with the tools it needs to save lives,” said Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. 
The bill states that the research would be done under “strict ethical guidelines” and that funding would only apply to stem-cell lines from embryos that “would otherwise be discarded by fertility clinics.”

No question, the stem-cell debate has been helpful to the Democrats as a wedge issue.  It paints Republicans as bigoted opponents of saving lives.  And celebrities like presidential son Ron Reagan and Michael J. Fox have given the issue emotional impact.

It doesn’t matter that conservatives have pointed out again and again that embryonic stem cells have not yet shown to be effective in fighting degenerative disease, whereas adult stem cells have.  Our friends in the MSM have been remarkably reluctant to differentiate the two types of stem cell.  But you would expect that.

In recent days, of course, there has been a startling announcement on the stem cell front.  According to Karen Kaplan in The Los Angeles Times:

Researchers have found that some stem cells in human amniotic fluid appear to have many of the key therapeutic benefits of embryonic stem cells while avoiding their knottiest ethical, medical and logistical drawbacks, according to a study published Sunday.

Er, which demonstrated therapeutic benefits would that be, Karen?

Columnist Charles Krauthammer reminds us that the stem-cell question is not just black and white.  We have to draw the line at harvesting human life somewhere—don’t we?

There is also the rather difficult question about embryonic stem cells.  They often turn cancerous.  Amniotic stem cells seem likely to be more safe, according to Krauthammer.

Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell — not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore more “pluripotential” in the kinds of tissues it can produce.
If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.

But then it wouldn’t be such a useful political issue.

Bush Admits Mistake, but Strategy Stays The Same

President Bush admitted last night that he should have increased the troops in Iraq last year, according to Joseph Curl and Stephen Dinan in The Washington Times. 

Mr. Bush yesterday said he was wrong both in his decision-making and in his assumptions.

"Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," he said. "The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people — and it is unacceptable to me."

But by pushing for an escalation, Mr. Bush runs smack into Democrats, the new majority party in Congress, who say they reflect American voters’ desire to begin bringing troops back home.

And it will be interesting to see how the Democrats play this.  Up to now they have criticized the president without offering an overall strategic appreciation.  It’s worked so well for them that we should not expect any changes.

The president announced, in fact, a change in tactics at what the Germans used to call the operational level.  The goal still appears to be to “stand up” the Iraqi government so that it can succeed as the sole monopoly of force in Iraq.

Maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t.  The point is that, win or lose, the strategy in the Middle East appears to be unchanged.  It is to preserve Israel and contain the aggressive intentions of Iran.

The bigger question is whether Islamic radicalism is a global threat to democratic capitalism or whether it is a wildfire that will eventually burn itself out.  Obviously the response depends on how seriously you take the threat.

Whatever the actual threat, it seems unlikely that 300 million Europeans, a billion Chinese and a billion Indians—let alone 300 million North Americans—will just sit down and let a rich-kids’ Islamic teenage gang take them out.

But you never know. 

Is Bush's Troop Surge All For "McNaught?"

Last night President Bush announced a troop surge for Iraq, and all Americans wish him well.  But everyone is bound to ask: Is the moment auspicious for a change in strategy?  Is victory in the stars?

I’m glad you asked.  It just so happens that Comet McNaught is in the evening sky right now.  In fact the best time to see it is this weekend, according to Britain’s Daily Mail.  Says astronomer Nick James: 

“You will need a clear western horizon and should start looking as soon as the sun sets. The comet should be obvious and the tail will be pointing almost straight up from the horizon.”

But that doesn’t really tell us what to expect in Iraq.  And the trouble is that even if the troop surge succeeds in pacifying Baghdad, what then?  Do the Iraqis feel enough of a sense of “Iraqiness” to unite under their unity government? 

Anyway, according to the mainstream media it’s all doomed to failure.  “Most Americans oppose President Bush’s call to send additional U.S. military forces to Iraq,” reports Jon Cohen in the Washington Post.

Most worrying of all is the name of the comet.  It’s called “NcNaught” after the Scot Robert McNaught who discovered the comet, his 31st, from a telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Does that mean that Bush’s new policy will amount to “NcNaught?”

Happiness Needs a Sense of Control

Everyone worries about happiness these days, and in Britain, Tory leader David Cameron calls for attention to the General Wellbeing (GWB) rather than Gross Domestic Product.  But Minette Marrin worries that you can’t expect people to be happy unless they are in control of their lives. 

Yet not just in charity but in almost everything else the individual is losing that sense of control or hope for the future. We live in a democracy, yet more and more people feel that they are not represented, their wishes are ignored and they can do absolutely nothing about it.

When everything is run by the nanny state then people don’t have control and responsibility for their own lives.

Illegal and criminal immigrants stay here with impunity yet at the same time ordinary people’s civil liberties are being eroded. Stealth taxes have gone up without the promised reforms. The auditing of schools is shown to be pretty much useless, maniacally exhaustive though it is, and our children are being betrayed. National Health Service hospitals are diseased and debt ridden. Nobody can think what to do about the Asbo set. Labour’s youth employment schemes, hugely expensive, have been a total failure. Pensioners are driven to despair by tax and neglect.

In other words, government doesn’t work and it is making us miserable.  But does that stop the nannies?  Certainly not.  Jonah Goldberg compiled a little list today from the NY Post.  It’s the list of all the things that New York City banned last year.

1. pit bulls;
2. trans-fats;
3. aluminum baseball bats;
4. the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; f
5. oie gras;
6. pedicabs in parks;
7. new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers;
8. lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency;
9. vehicles in Central and Prospect parks;
10. cell phones in upscale restaurants;
11. the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute;
12. mail-order pharmaceutical plans;
13. Candy-flavored cigarettes;
14. gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily;
15. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus;
16. Wal-Mart.

People need control over their lives, but instead we have the nanny state prescribing in ghastly detail what kind of fat we may eat.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons.

Yeah.  So what are we going to do about it?

We could take back control of our lives from the state.  Then we will be freer, and probably happier.

Chavez. What Planet is He On?

You have to wonder.  After a century of socialism, thug dictators are still extolling its virtues.  As reported by Theresa Bradley and Alex Kennedy, socialism is going to be the salvation of the country.

"Building Venezuela's way to socialism, that's the only way to redemption and salvation of our country," Chavez, 52, said in his inaugural address to the National Assembly this morning in Caracas.

Oh yeah?  reported by Juan Forero the financial markets had other ideas. 

Financial markets from Buenos Aires to Caracas reeled on Tuesday following Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's announcement that he plans to nationalize some private companies

Well, we know what is going on.  Chavez is a populist.  He appeals to voters in Venezuela who think that they are poor because others are rich.  Whatever Chavez really thinks about the path to prosperity, he isn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  If he can get away with assembling all the power in Venezuela into his own hands, why not?  It didn't do Fidel Castro any harm, after all.

Or maybe the ideas of Douglas North, the rational expectations guru, apply.  Reported by Arnold Kling, North and his collaborators claim that the natural order of political power is a "limited access" order.

Limited-access orders are societies that provide meaningful political and economic rights only to narrow elites... [North] argue[s] that limited-access orders are the "natural state:" they are stable, they resist economic progress, and they only rarely make the transition to open-access orders.

Maybe a limited-access order is better than disorder.  But in the twentieth century many of these limited-access orders went straight down the toilet.

Are the Democrats for Real

What is it that really worries Republicans and conservatives as we lick our wounds after November?  It is the nagging fear that the Democrats didn’t just win because it’s an off year election and the voters are in a foul mood.

Not that the voters don’t deserve to be a foul mood, mind you.

But what if the Democrats were executing a secret plan, a grand strategic concept, a new approach to politics and we right-wing foot-soldiers didn’t have a clue what hit us?  That is what keeps us awake at night.

Fortunately an evil Republican spy has come up with the answer.  She sneaked into the Pelosi victory party with all the heavy hitter Democratic contributors. 

And everything is ok.  There’s no "there" there in the new Democratic Congress.

Writer Lisa Schiffren talked to a contributor, a real-estate developer, at the party. 

I asked the real-estate developer what he thought of Pelosi. “I spent a lot of time with her. She told me she could win. She said she had a plan.” What was the plan? “The idea was that they would just criticize whatever plans the Republicans put out there”. They would tear them down -- like they did with Social Security -- and not put out their own plans. They have been very disciplined.” Indeed. No stray substance at all -- and this sharp businessman had forked over $25 grand in support.

So that’s all right.  That six point plan was just what it seemed to be, a lot of nothing.

Of course, the assembled party faithful had some interesting things to say.  Take a load of this.  Here’s what Schriffen’s real estate developer had to say about the issues.

“All the wealthy people I know, they only care about having their taxes cut. I don’t think that’s right.” “What are the issues you really care about?” I asked. “Rich and poor in this country. It’s not right,” he said, as if it was obvious what that implied.

OK, conservatives, stop laughing and get back to work.  When are you going to come up with the next brilliant conservative idea to reform the Democrats’ corrupt and unjust welfare state? 

You can’t beat nothing with nothing, you know.

AJAX and The innerHTML Problem

Here at Road to the Middle Class we are nothing if not modern.  That means that the site ought to be LAMP compliant, using Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP, and so it does.  But now, according to The Economist and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, it appears that a truly modern site should use AJAX as well.  AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and Xml) is the technology that Google uses on GMail.

Well, how hard could it be?

The standard demonstration of AJAX on W3Schools.com shows how to use an AJAX setup to update text hints on the fly.  You press a key to enter a character in a text box and every time you release the key your page requests a new text hint from the server with an HttpRequest.

When the response comes back from the server you update the text hint element like this:

document.getElementById("txtHint").innerHTML =xmlHttp.responseText

And everyone is happy.

But there’s a problem.  The best use of AJAX here at Road to the Middle Class is to fold/unfold blog entries.  We conserve real estate by showing only the first 50 words of a blog and allow you to click a link to get the whole article.  But that means that the content coming back from the server is going to include HTML markup.  What happens if the responseText isn’t just simple text but includes embedded HTML? 

Good question.  It turns out, using the W3Schools example, that embedded HTML works on Firefox but not on our friends at Internet Explorer: IE6 and IE7.  The IE boys take one look at the embedded HTML and decide that it’s not a job for innerHTML.  They return an "unknown runtime error".

Here’s how you update your page with AJAX when the responseText is complex and includes embedded HTML as it is here at Road to the Middle Class.  I call it the Double Span Solution.

First of all, you surround your text with two <span> elements, like this:

<p><span id=blog101><span id=blog101s>
<p>Text including a <a href="">link</a> and stuff.</p>
</span></span>
</p>

The idea is that when you want to replace the text in the middle of the two <span> elements you replace the entire inner <span> element.  You delete the old <span> and add a new <span> with the responseText and all of its HTML markup.

First of all you set up the new <span> element, preserving the element id from the old <span> element and adding in the responseText from the server.

var elem = document.getElementById("blog101s")
var newSpan = document.createElement(’span’)
newSpan.id = elem.id
newSpan.innerHTML = xmlHttp.responseText


Now remove the "blog101s" element and anything else floating around.

for (var i = 0; i < document.getElementById("blog101").childNodes.length; i++) {
   var n = document.getElementById("blog101").childNodes[i]
   n.parentNode.removeChild(n)
}

OK.  Now append the new <span> element right under "blog101".

document.getElementById(gBlogid).appendChild(newSpan)

And that should do it.