What happened to Michael J. Fox is a tragedy — but tragedy is not a good basis for deciding broad-reaching moral issues, such as stem cell research. Much more useful is actual information, such as Mary Davenport’s accessible science writing explaining why stem cell research has so far failed completely to fulfill its promise, and why it’s unlikely that it will ever fulfill its promise.
Still, if the personal approach appeals to you, be sure to watch this:
Hat tip: Michelle Malkin
UPDATE: Here’s a little more help from Ryan T. Anderson to explain just how dishonest those ads are, and why they’re nothing more than demagoguery and pandering. The fact that the electorate seems to be responding to them should reflect disgracefully on a dishonest party, and should not be seen as a cause for celebrating a scientifically bankrupt idea. (By the way, the title of Anderson’s article “Spin City,” reminds us that Fox’s last role was a comedy that did manage tentative jokes at the expense of this type of spin — but that forgive it as long as the spin was for a politically correct cause.)
MICHAEL J. FOX is making a splash on television sets across Missouri, appearing in a stem cell commercial attacking Senator Jim Talent during Game 1 of the World Series. According to Fox, “Senator Jim Talent opposes expanding stem cell research. Senator Talent even wanted to criminalize the science that gives us a chance for hope.” Of course Senator Talent has been a consistent supporter of increased funding for stem cell research that doesn’t involve the destruction of human embryos and has only sought to criminalize human cloning, but one needn’t let the facts get in the way. (And it is worth mention that Missouri has a bill on the State ballot that would allow the cloning of human beings and then require their destruction prior to gestation.)
Fox has also just released a similar ad attacking Michael Steele in his race for the vacant Senate seat in Maryland. The reality, however, is that the only person in that race to have voted against stem cell research is Steele’s opponent, Ben Cardin.
In four other states, ads are attacking congressional Republicans who voted against federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The ads, paid for by the Democratic group Majority Action, attack Representatives Chris Chocola, Thelma Drake, Don Sherwood, and James Walsh. They all follow the same format: three healthy citizens tell of impending medical doom and how only embryonic stem cell research will save them. They conclude with these startling words: “Stem cell
research could save lives, maybe yours or your family’s, someone you love. Only Congressman Walsh said no. How come he thinks he gets to decide who lives and who dies; who’s he?” (Apparently the irony of those who favor embryo-destruction accusing others of deciding “who lives and who dies” was lost on the ad’s producers.)These ads are repulsive. They play on the hopes and fears of million of Americans who are suffering from debilitating diseases, are caring for loved ones, and yearn for something, anything, to hold onto. They manipulate the public’s emotions in the worst imaginable ways, promising them cures that are, in fact, quite uncertain, and pressuring them to forgo their own ethical convictions.
When emotions have subsided and right reasoning returns, one readily grasps three solid reasons to reject appeals for governmental funding of current methods of embryonic stem cell research: First, current methods are unethical as they destroy human beings in the embryonic stage of development. Second, embryonic stem cell research–contrary to all the hype claiming otherwise–doesn’t show any signs of success in the near term, while adult stem cell research is curing diseases now. And third, methods of embryonic stem cell research may soon be available that will not require any human embryo destruction. That is, embryo destruction isn’t only unethical: it’s likely unnecessary.
You can read the rest of Anderson’s article here.
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Well, it looks like the wires of the conservative blowhorn were busy last night, demanding of the Faithful-30 that they MUST blog on this issue today … And so it came to pass that throughout the foetid swamps of the über-right, conservative bloggers big and small just decided to all set Mr. Fox straight … And with good reason. Check out this report from Kos:
“Republicans who indicated that they were voting for a Republican candidate decreased by 10% after viewing the ad (77% to 67%). Independents planning to vote for Democrats increased by 10%, from 39% to 49%.”
Greg, that just goes to sure that base demagoguery and pandering works. That’s why the Dems launched those deceitful ads. I wouldn’t boast about it. It’s an embarrassment to the electorate.
Book, I was informing, not boasting; an attorney should know the difference. Regardless, the ad’s effectiveness says more about the medium (televised ad) than the message, although most Americans do have more sympathy for the research than for the rhetoric against it.
One is not “sympathetic” to research, Greg. Research is either useful or not. If research is both useless and destructive, it is to say the least disturbing when people are willing to embrace it merely because an ex-actor shows up shaking on the screen.
“nothing more than demagoguery and pandering” fit the style of today’s Democrats. Not THE Democrats we all remember: just the totalitarian, terrorist version America hosts today.
Paul Greenberg notes their monstrosity of their current pitch against humanity (while attacking A. Specter, R, Penn. for the same inhuman idea):
“..(It is) the reasoning that German doctors once used to justify their experiments on concentration camp inmates. They were going to die anyway; why just throw them away?
–(skip)–
The trick is not to think of the subjects of these experiments as human, but as Jews, Slavs, Gypsies . . . the eugenically undesirable. And remember that they were doomed anyway, and you can see the (brutal) logic of it.
That’s the trick in this case, too: Think of these embryos as something other than human..
–(skip)–
Call the subjects of these experiments blastocysts, surplus embryos, pre-embryos, whatever, but don’t let on that they’re what all humans are at that stage of our development.
–(skip)–
For the senator’s logic has all kinds of possibilities. Think of the prisoners on Death Row. Or comatose patients in nursing homes who are not living so much as waiting to die. And what good are the Terri Schiavos doing anybody? Why not experiment on them, too? Or just use them for parts? They’re just hanging around. Like those tiny embryos.”
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/greenberg062305.asp
Greg, that just goes to sure that base demagoguery and pandering works. That’s why the Dems launched those deceitful ads. I wouldn’t boast about it. It’s an embarrassment to the electorate.
Comment by Bookworm | October 26, 2006
It used to be that cloak and dagger operations were in the shadows, but with the new advent of the dawn of the 21st century, everything seems to be out in the open, all hanging out. It doesn’t even take a lot of power to pierce the veil now a days. Just look at North Korea and Iran. What used to be higher government level analysis, can now be done by amateurs on the internet. Not only because of the power of parallel data processing, but also because the Iranians don’t really care to cover up their deception campaigns. It is all out in the open, as with Pallywood, for anyone to see.
Back in the old days, nobody knew what the heck anyone else was doing. Everybody was in the dark, one of the reasons why they called it the Dark Ages, after the Byzantines set up the standard model for spycraft and intrigue.
Now they are proud, now they are broadcasting it to the world. And it seems to actually work better now that it is in the light, for some weird, weird, reason. It is as if with the Big Lie technique. Make your deceit so big, so abrasive and obvious, that nobody would believe that someone could be stupid enough to come up with a lie like that. It seems counter-intuitive that Iran and North Korea, by broadcasting their intentions, actually acrue the benefits of when as if their intentions were masked and obscured by cloaking techniques of the highest order and quality.
Hey Book, your highly rarified reverence for human life sure don’t extend to Iraqi citizens, at least not to the hundreds of thousands who have died in the Bushie war of aggression and who you’ve worked tirelessly to DENY their being dead. Your motivations, there, are of a kind with those of other deniers, for example of AIDS deniers and Holocaust deniers. The shoe fits, Book, and you’re wearing it.
How many fake liberals are going to be on the Left’s team anyways? The legions seem endless to me. The Left is unhinged for a reason.
And which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would those be Greg? And don’t give me the Lancet article, which has been debunked from the Left, Right and center. If you have nothing of value to say, please leave your insults at some other blog.
In military expedience terms, unnecessary is unethical.
Greg, there is no ban on embryonic stem cell research, only on federal funding of it. It’s obviously not a good a bet or the private foundations which are all leftwing, i.e., Soros, Heinz, Ford … would be funding it.
Erp, you are dealing with a person for whom questioning the Lancet study = indifference to AIDs sufferers = Holocaust denial. That is not rational thinking. That is not honest disagreement. That is one of The Annointed dropping down from on high to chide us foolish mortals. Some folks seem to think a halo shines above their demitasse-sized heads, but they are welcome to their delusions.
The only thing funnier than a fake liberal calling Bookworm, a fake liberal, is a Lefty calling Neo-Neocon a supporter of war mongers like me.
The public’s attention to stem cell research has increased substantially since 2001, when the debated first broke into the news. While majorities say they support stem cell research, question wording can influence results, which suggests there is still some uncertainty on this question. For more public opinion on stem cell research, visit Public Agenda’s Issue Guide on Medical Research (see http://publicagenda.org/issues/frontdoor.cfm?issue_type=medical_research).
Public Agenda (http://publicagenda.org/index.cfm) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group devoted to public opinion and public policy.
All critiques of the Lancet study have been addressed, and the study’s merits remain. The MO of a denier is to persist in obfuscating facts and the expansion of knowledge. How do deniers do that? Well, as Book herself points out in a blog-entry today, they conflate information with opinion. She’s quite right. At this junction, the issue is not whether the Lancet study is defensible, only whether or not an interested reader is knowledgeable of how the study withstands critique – A line of reasoning that our deniers, such as Book, ignore.
All critiques of the Lancet study have been addressed, and the study’s merits remain. The MO of a denier is to persist in obfuscating facts and the expansion of knowledge. How do deniers do that? Well, as Book herself points out in a blog-entry today, they conflate information with opinion. She’s quite right. And at this junction, the issue is not whether the Lancet study is defensible, only whether or not an interested reader is knowledgeable of how the study withstands critique – A line of reasoning that deniers, such as Book, ignore for their own partisan purposes.
Greg, I learned to read about 65 years ago and generally have no trouble deciphering the meaning of a paragraph written in standard English. However, your comment above stumped me.
Please anyone, jump in and help me here.
He means,
At this junction, the issue is not whether the Lancet study is defensible, only whether or not an interested reader is knowledgeable of how the study withstands critique
That it doesn’t depend upon the objective criteria of whether Lancet is guilty or innocent of the crime of being manufactured. It depends on how much you, the reader, personally know. And since Greg believes he knows more than the rest of us, this puts him defacto in a superior position. Which he prefers to have.
It makes more sense if you ignore the first 3 sentences, and focus on his conclusions.
Public Agenda writes:
” While majorities say they support stem cell research, question wording can influence results, which suggests there is still some uncertainty on this question.”
I’m not sure what THE QUESTION IS, Public Agenda.
Certainly all Americans oppose using human beings for experimental purposes, no matter how fantastic the promised results. (See Nazism, Imperial Japan for more on such testing.) It is wrong.
Wrong. It can’t be justified by Michael J. Fox, polls, propositions, or opinion polls. Wrong in America; ok in totalitarian states.
Or, let’s put it this way: put YOUR child up for experiment. That’s right, YOUR child.
Go ahead. Then tell me how it’s necessary to save lives.
But they don’t believe an embryo is a child, so…
Y.: I don’t accept their ‘non-belief.’ We in America have always supported the most basic of human rights. It’s what makes us Americans, and sets us apart from the rest of the world, where human rights is a debatable subject. A political subject, as below.
200 years ago our ‘friends,’ the French, were celebrating the universal rights of man at one moment, and executing everyone they could find the next.
(By employing the newest of scientific advances, of course.)
I think, therefore I am. If I cannot think because my head is detached from my body, then I am not a man, and therefore not entitled to the universal rights of man. Ex post facto, I never was because I am now unable to think.
I still find it really funny that while Greg speaks often times of the Reichwing, he is the only guy who has European characters on his keyboard or simply a program that inputs them. Because normally American keyboards do not have umlouts (the two dots over the u he used), and it also lacks the french accents.
Is he not too close to the German experience himself, to be flinging stuff around about the Germans?
Y- it’s not that tricky to get diacritical marks in your text. You don’t need a “European” keyboard. I often use them myself when communicating with a particularly pretentious correspondent. Perhaps Greg has brushed up against academe. That’ll explain his obtuse prose as well as the umlauts.
o/t Umlaut was the name of our beloved cat (now unfortunately in cat heaven). He was so named because his eyes were such intense black dots in an otherwise light grey coat. Notwithstanding his German name, he was a real pussy cat of a cat as was his sister, Tilde (a Spanish diacritical mark) who was so named for the graceful swirl of grey in her otherwise spotless white coat. We miss them both very much.
I suspect Greg is actually not a person but a rogue computer program, like the Agents in the Matrix movies, that randomly invades blogsites with a narrow point of view and impenetrable prose. That explains the lack of affect in his writing style and inability to answer a direct question. He’s robotic. I regret getting testy with him previously because ethically that is equivalent to shaking the vending machine that won’t give you change back.
Y., you do fare well at 18c wit, certainly better than I.