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When Big Brother Becomes the Nanny
November 30, 2007

In an effort to save ourselves from ourselves, Ohio joins Maryland, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont and Hawaii in proposing this month a ban on artery-clogging trans fats from restaurants. So far none of the bills have passed at the state level, although New York City's first phase of a ban (which applies to oils, shortening and margarine used for frying and spreading) has been in effect since this summer. These "for your own good" initiatives are misguided, largely because they have been forced down the throats of businesses and consumers.

Government attempts to tackle obesity problems and micromanage our daily lives are not new, but have become more aggressive and intrusive. How far can the government intervene in our lives? At what point should individual responsibility kick in?

David Harsanyi, award-winning columnist at The Denver Post, attempts to answer these questions and more in his latest book, Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children. In the book, Harsanyi takes "nannies" to task from every level of government and argues that individual freedom should trump paternalistic policies, every time.

Recently, Mr. Harsanyi joined CFIF's Renee Giachino to discuss Nanny State and how and when we lost our right to be lazy, unhealthy and politically incorrect.

What follows is the interview originally heard on "Your Turn - Meeting Nonsense With Commonsense" on WEBY 1330 AM, Northwest Florida's talk radio.
Listen to the interview here: http://tinyurl.com/ys8p3k
http://tinyurl.com/yovba8

Stem Cell Vindication
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 30, 2007; A23

"If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough."

-- James A. Thomson

A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.

Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush's stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president -- so vilified for a moral stance -- been so thoroughly vindicated.

Why? Precisely because he took a moral stance. Precisely because, to borrow Thomson's phrase, Bush was made "a little bit uncomfortable" by the implications of embryonic experimentation. Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be drawn.

In doing so, he invited unrelenting demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity -- a "moral ayatollah," as Sen. Tom Harkin so scornfully put it.

Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn -- between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.

History will look at Bush's 2001 speech and be surprised how balanced and measured it was, how much respect it gave to the other side. Read it. Here was a presidential policy pronouncement that so finely and fairly drew out the case for both sides that until the final few minutes of his speech, you had no idea where the policy would end up.

Bush finally ended up doing nothing to hamper private research into embryonic stem cells and pledging federal monies to support the study of existing stem cell lines -- but refusing federal monies for research on stem cell lines produced by newly destroyed embryos.

The president's policy recognized that this might cause problems. The existing lines might dry up, prove inadequate or become corrupted. Bush therefore appointed a President's Council on Bioethics to oversee ongoing stem cell research and evaluate how his restrictions were affecting research and what means might be found to circumvent ethical obstacles.

More vilification. The mainstream media and the scientific establishment saw this as a smoke screen to cover his fundamentalist, obscurantist, anti-scientific -- the list of adjectives was endless -- tracks. "Some observers," wrote The Post's Rick Weiss, "say the president's council is politically stacked."

I sat on the council for five years. It was one of the most ideologically balanced bioethics commissions in the history of this country. It consisted of scientists, ethicists, theologians, philosophers, physicians -- and others (James Q. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and me among them) of a secular bent not committed to one school or the other.

That balance of composition was reflected in the balance in the reports issued by the council -- documents of sophistication and nuance that reflected the divisions both within the council and within the nation in a way that respectfully presented the views of all sides. One recommendation was to support research that might produce stem cells through "de-differentiation" of adult cells, thus bypassing the creation of human embryos.

That Holy Grail has now been achieved. Largely because of the genius of Thomson and Yamanaka. And also because of the astonishing good fortune that nature requires only four injected genes to turn an ordinary adult skin cell into a magical stem cell that can become bone or brain or heart or liver.

But for one more reason as well. Because the moral disquiet that James Thomson always felt -- and that George Bush forced the country to confront -- helped lead him and others to find some ethically neutral way to produce stem cells. Providence then saw to it that the technique be so elegant and beautiful that scientific reasons alone will now incline even the most willful researchers to leave the human embryo alone.
http://tinyurl.com/24pe26

JFK Medical Records Were Manipulated

PLAYBOY.COM article reveals new evidence about JFK’S ASSASSINATION
WEBWIRE – Monday, November 26, 2007

Jefferson Morley’s "The Man Who Didn’t Talk...and other tales from the new Kennedy assassination files" offers an update on new findings related to the most shocking political murder in American history

In Playboy.com’s exclusive report "The Man Who Didn’t Talk...and other tales from the new Kennedy assassination files" Jefferson Morley discusses new findings about JFK’s assassination including doubts over medical evidence from the late president’s autopsy, and whether or not the CIA ignored a potentially life-saving call to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy’s death.

Morley, a former editor and staff writer for washingtonpost.com, has written about the Kennedy assassination for York Review of Books, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Washington Monthly, and the Miami New Times. He is now national editorial director for the Center for Independent Media in Washington D.C. which sponsors a network of online news sites in four states, and is the author of the forthcoming book, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA.

Morley’s article, which can be read in its entirety at www.playboy.com/jfk, discusses the following uncomfortable new facts:

George Joannides, as chief of CIA psychological warfare operations in Miami in 1963, ran an anti-Castro student group that had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination.

This group helped depict Oswald as a pro-Castro supporter immediately after the assassination. In 1978, Joannides was named CIA liaison to the Congressional Committee investigating the assassination, but he never told them about the connection, and in fact, withheld documents that showed the connection.

Joannides’ operation was one of four CIA operations that had taken note of Oswald before Kennedy was killed. The CIA’s failure to warn the Secret Service and Dallas police about this suspicious figure constitutes "an intelligence failure" of immense proportions.

The latest scientific analysis of JFK forensic evidence undermines the official story that Oswald acted alone.

The JFK medical evidence is worse than a mess--it is a documented national scandal that awaits decent news coverage. The new evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt that the photographic record of Kennedy’s autopsy has been tampered with by persons unknown.
http://tinyurl.com/29pfbn