TUESDAY POLITICS



Harvard Funds Human Stem Cell Research

Douglas Melton is Co-Director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. 
He also has a very personal reason for wanting to experiment with
high quality stem cells. His two children, Emma, 16, and Sam, 12, have
juvenile diabetes. They frequently inject
themselves with the insulin they need to stay alive, but that doesn’t
stop the gradual organ degeneration that can lead to kidney
failure, blindness, and malfunctioning limbs. Melton and his team would
like to be able to use stem cells to make working insulin-secreting
cells that prevent this long-term suffering for them and a million
others in the United States.  And today Harvard (richest
university in America) put its money where its mouth is and awarded
ethical approval and private funds to get the work started.  They
will concentrate first on diabetes, motor neuron disease (that brought
down Christopher Reeves), and blood disorders.  They plan to clone
embryos using cells from patients with these disorders and then
create “disease-specific” colonies of embryonic stem cells that can be
used to develop new treatments.  And Bush can’t just up and veto
it because it’s not federal funding.  Larry
Summers, the president of Harvard, said: “While we respect the beliefs
of those who oppose this research, we are equally sincere in our belief
that the life-and-death medical needs of suffering children and adults
justify moving forward with this research.”  In my own personal
family, right now my grandchildren’s other grandmother has been
diagnosed with ovarian cancer, has already been gutted by major
surgery, and is awaiting extremely aggressive chemo that may or may not
save her life, while one of their grandfathers (my son’s dad) has been
diagnosed a few months ago with multiple myeloma, a deadly blood cancer and is
already into aggressive chemo as well.  
Kind of puts it in perspective for me, but watch the sparks fly over
this one in the next weeks and months.  It’s about damn time.

Deep Thought: 
“One of the worst things you can do as an actor, I think, is to forget
your lines, and then get so flustered you start stabbing the other
actors.”
Today I am grateful for:  Common denominators.
Guess the Movie:  “You
know, we are sitting here, you and I, like a couple of regular fellas.
You do what you do, and I do what I gotta do. And now that we’ve been
face to face, if I’m there and I gotta put you away, I won’t like it.
But I tell you, if it’s between you and some poor bastard whose wife
you’re gonna turn into a widow, brother, you are going down. “  Answer:   Heat, 1995.  Winner:  suniagibbs
Gay marriage amendment likely to fail, but debate still rages

BY CRAIG GILBERT

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
WASHINGTON – With a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage
expected to fail Wednesday, an impassioned debate here Tuesday centered
on whether the Senate should be spending its time on the matter. 
(Rest of article here.)

MONDAY READING



if the Buddha got stuck

by Charlotte Kasl


I’m a self-confessed, self-help book finder and keeper, my current read
being this book, which appealed to me because:  (1) I feel stuck
myself spiritually at the moment, (2) I lean towards Buddhism as a
source for balanced precepts, and (3) I liked the catchy title. 
Charlotte Kasl is prolific, and I’ve read some of her other books in the
past.  As this bio
says, she  “has been a practicing psychotherapist, workshop
leader, Quaker, and Reiki healer for twenty years.”  I’ve read
about two-thirds of the
way through the book now, and I did find a very valuable little piece
of focus that I’ve been using daily since I read it.  Being the
kind of person who tends to label myself and others (often in negative
ways) to try to make sense of what the hell is going on, I often find
myself “stuck” there, unable to move on.  Kasl says:

You are
born.  You are a Zen baby because you live totally in the
present–the world of “I Am”…The “I Am” is that place of simply
being.  It is spontaneous, creative, receptive, and open,
unhindered by rigid shoulds, rules, concepts, and fixed
beliefs…  It is the place where most people long to return when
they embark on a spiritual journey… Throughout the day,…if thoughts
of I Am…clumsy, stupid, smart, or talented arise in your mind, gently
disconnect them, take a breath, and say to yourself “I Am.”  

This doesn’t mean to me that I have to regress to literally being a
child who doesn’t get up and go to work or clean the house or keep
commitments.  It just means when I start down that trail of
negative labeling (or even arrogant labeling, like “I’m smarter than
you are”), I can stop, take a deep breath, and snap myself back into
being fully in the appreciative present by saying, “I AM.” 
Period.  Neat trick.  I think it’s a keeper for me.

Deep Thought:  “In
all the time I was growing up, I only saw Dad cry two times. After the
first time, I didn’t say anything. But after the second time I left a
note on his dresser that said “See a psychiatrist.” I don’t know if he
ever did, but at least I didn’t see him cry again.”
Today I am grateful for:  Leaning and learning.
Guess the Movie:  “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.”  Answer:   Being There, 1979.
Preserving the Sanctity of Marriage

by Missy Comley Beattie
Pandering to his faithful, core, conservative base, George Bush is
again talking sanctity of marriage. Sanctity, of course, means holy.
Thus, sanctity of marriage translates to holiness of matrimony. It
sounds perfectly wonderful—as perfectly wonderful as sanctity of life.
And we all remember Bush’s rush from Crawford to DC in an attempt to
save Terri Schiavo because he values all life—believes in its holiness.
Except, of course, when that ethic involves the lives of Iraqi men,
women, and children. Better add Iranian and Afghan to the column of
expendables.  (Rest of article here.)

SUNDAY GOOD NEWS

I’m not a huge country music fan, though a lot of what I listen to is
what I guess you’d call “alternative” country or pop music.  So
the Dixie Chicks weren’t really high on my radar until the big hoopla
back in 2003 when lead singer, Natalie Maines, dared to criticize Herr
Bush.  That was when the tide had not yet really turned in public
approval of the war in Iraq, so the reaction to her comment about being
ashamed the Pres was from her home state of Texas brought the rightwing
conservative country crowd out of the woodwork with death threats and
CD burnings et al.  That was then. This is now.  Their new
album, “Taking the Long Way” sold close to 526,000 copies its first
week of release and debuted at Number One on both the Billboard 200 and
Top Country Albums charts, making the Dixie Chicks the first female
group in chart history to have three Number One entries.  Take
that Heartland.  And here are the lyrics to “I’m Not Ready to Make
Nice” from the new record minus a couple of repeat choruses:

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I’m not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I’m still waiting

I made by bed, and I sleep like a baby,
With no regrets and I don’t mind saying,
It’s a sad sad story
That a mother will teach her daughter
that she ought to hate a perfect stranger.
And how in the world
Can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Saying that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I’m not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I’m still waiting

---

Deep Thought:  “One way I
think you can tell if you have a curse on you is if you open a box of
toothpicks and they all fly up and stick in your face.”
Today I am grateful for:  The law of gravity.
Guess the Movie:  “The 600
series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They
look human – sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to
wait till he moved on you before I could zero him.”  Answer:  The Terminator, 1984.  Winner:  RnBoW_SPOT.
New pill seen as breakthrough in fighting breast cancer
Doctors believe that Tykerb, a new drug made by the UK firm
GlaxoSmithKline, could be even more effective than the older drug
Herceptin in extending the lives of thousands of women with advanced
breast cancer.
The new drug not only targets a protein that stimulates the growth of breast cancers, it also stalls the spread of the disease.
The American Society of Clinical Oncology congress in Atlanta heard
yesterday how Tykerb had prolonged the lives of women with advanced
breast cancer from four to eight months. Delegates were told that women
taking Tykerb were twice as likely to survive as those receiving
chemotherapy.
Leading cancer specialists described the drug as a breakthrough in fighting breast cancer.