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The Flat Earth Society is at it again! 3/17/2011 10:48:26 AM
Conservative politicians out to derail therapeutic cloning.
Senator Michelle Fishbach and other conservative Minnesota legislators have teamed to try to make therapeutic cloning a felony. Therapeutic cloning is an attempt by scientists to create organs using the patient’s own DNA. The nucleus of an egg is withdrawn and replaced with the nucleus from, say, a liver cell. The egg is never fertilized. The resulting blastocyst forms inner cells from which stem cells can be retrieved and later injected into the problematic area. One of the benefits is that the body recognizes its own DNA and does not reject the infusion. It’s unfortunate the scientists who created this process didn’t give it a different name. Conservatives have a hard time discriminating between this process and Dolly the sheep. These are the same people who confined Galileo to house arrest for claiming that the earth revolves around the Sun. Repeat, the egg is not fertilized. Sure it’s a potential human being, but a block of granite is also a potential statue.
This procedure can save millions of lives and make the waiting line for transplants much shorter. Note: until recently the Pope opposed the use of condoms in A.I.D.S.-ravaged Africa.
Yet, these people claim to be pro-lifers. Right-wing conservatives like Fishbach care more about the unborn and the living dead than they do about babies who don‘t have health insurance, school-aged children whose teachers are under attack in Wisconsin, young married couples who need a housing loan, workers who want a living wage, and senior citizens whose pensions, social security, and Medicare benefits are being attacked. Conservatives really ought to come up with a more appropriate name than “pro-life” since some of them tried to rationalize the murder of an abortion doctor, in a church of all places. They also don’t have a problem with capital punishment, Bush’s illegal war in Iraq that cost over four thousand young American lives and resulted in countless wounded men and women whose lives were ruined. Do I need to mention the conservative lobbyists who oppose any kind of gun regulation despite the 270,000 gun deaths in the last nine years? Right-wing politicians view these deaths as mere collateral damage; it’s their beloved and ambiguous Second Amendment that’s most important.
And how about those global warming deniers? We know carbon-based fuels create smog and smog causes respiratory problems. Without progressive legislation there would be no scrubbers on smog stacks, there would be no catalectic converters on cars. Acid rain would still be destroying crops. Yet, conservative politicians deny the possibility (despite 97% of all climate scientists agreeing) that carbon-based fuels cause global warming. What about what’s happening in Libya and the Middle East and the resulting crazy gas prices? Don’t you think it might be a good idea to do everything in our power to create renewable energy? Yet conservatives scoff at switch grass, electric cars, cap and trade legislation, anything that might put a damper on the greedy oil conglomerates. Even compact bulbs are a target because you can use them for several years without replacing them. Conservatives argue that they don’t want to be told they have to buy a certain product. They don’t want to be told they can’t smoke in a restaurant either or that a restaurant can deny service to blacks (See the Cato Institute and Rand Paul).
Have you been paying attention to what’s happening in Wisconsin? Is it any coincidence that Scott Walker is an evangelical Christian? They’re theocrats who believe America was founded as a Christian nation, despite the First Amendment. Evangelicals also pushed for home schooling and created a school in Virginia, Patrick Henry College, that teaches intelligent design and grooms students to run for congress. No Child Left Behind was a scam that relies on state testing, something teachers especially despise (you tend to teach toward the test). Efforts to kill public employees unions can’t attract quality teachers. Home schooling, a form of brainwashing, isolates children, stunts their social growth, and ill-prepares them to live in a modern society.
Did you know that Texas is 19 billion dollars in the hole despite the fact that they’ve managed to dodge the recession? Well, Texas doesn’t have any state income tax for one thing, and they’ve passed “Right to Work” legislation which means fewer unions, but they’re still almost as far in the hole as California, a supposedly liberal state. Could it be that their “no new taxes” pledge just doesn’t work? According to the 2010 census, the top 20% of Americans control fifty-four percent of our nation’s wealth and with Republican legislators controlling most of the state governments since 2010 that number will only get higher. Attacking a middle class stalwart such as public employees unions isn’t going to help either. They spend their money; they don’t hide it in off shore accounts. Corporations now claim that those laid off during the recession are now obsolete; remaining employees do their jobs. Can you say “sweat shops”? They’re also hiring more part-time workers to avoid paying pensions and health care. How is this not unpatriotic? How do you justify giving these people tax cuts when they downsize and outsource at the first sign of a recession? The 3M chairman (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) accuses Obama of not being very friendly to business interests. He didn’t mention that 3M does three-quarters of their business in foreign countries. Corporations will also create more than a million jobs in Southeast Asia in the coming year while our unemployment rate hovers round nine percent.
How about those freedom fighters, the Tea Partiers? Freedom for fat cat whites, no freedom for gays, the poor, Islamic Americans, illegal aliens who’ve been in America for years, atheists and agnostics, or women.
A National Public Radio fund raiser was recently fired for calling these people racists. According to a NAACP investigation, the leaders of five out of six of the largest tea party organizations had ties to white supremacists. Funny, when Rush Limbaugh does an impression of the Chinese premier insulting Chinese-Americans all over the country, he keeps his job. His excuse, Sid Caesar used to imitate Chinese in his act. I doubt Sid Caesar would want his name mentioned in the same sentence as Rush Limbaugh. Nobody in the press bothered to ask him; he’s still alive.
Meanwhile, Rick “Two Gun” Perry goes on the Daily Show, decrying the 16th Amendment and trying to blame the Depression on FDR, missing the similarities between what happened in 1929 and the recession of 2008.
Did I tell you that Texas is 18 billion in the hole? Did I tell you that when Reagan took office the deficit was under a trillion dollars? When he left it was over four trillion.
No, the only kind of morals neo-conservatives have are the kind that get them elected, catering to the Flat Earth Society, kowtowing to Southern segregationists, Western gun nuts and taking money from crazies like Lyndon LaRouche and “Scary Gary” North.
