Breaking News: a U.S. Court has struck down the Obama stem cell policy, which so many of us advocated for and waited for -- and in which so many people put their hope and faith. From the New York Times article:
A U.S. district judge struck down President Obama’s 2009 executive order expanding embryonic stem cell research, saying the order violates a ban on federal funds being used to destroy embryos.
The ruling came as a shock to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and at universities across the country, which had viewed the Obama Administration’s new policy and the grants provided under it as settled law. Scientists scrambled Monday evening to assess the ruling’s immediate impact on their work.
This is nonsense, of course. The embryos are already destroyed.
With the case back in his court, Judge Lamberth ruled that the Obama Administration’s new policy violated the clear language of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, a law passed annually by Congress that bans federal funding for any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.”In rules announced last year, the Obama Administration allowed funding of research into any embryonic stem cell lines that either were allowed by the Bush Administration or had been created using embryos discarded following fertilization procedures and in which unpaid donors had given clear consent for the embryos to be used for research purposes.
So that bullshit reasoning is right out the door.
Hm, you know what I think smells funny here? The timing. Say, who's the judge that ruled on this?
Why, it's non other than professional Clinton basher and conservative darling, Reagan-appointee Royce Lamberth!
From a Washington Monthly piece:
Lamberth allowed Judicial Watch bulldog Larry Klayman to depose everyone from George Stephanopoulos to famous fundraiser John Huang in suits against the administration that most judges would probably have thrown out as frivolous.
More:
Still, Lamberth is a conservative. He attends functions of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society, as well as the libertarian Cato Institute, and he serves on the advisory board of the University of Texas' Texas Review of Law and Politics with some serious wing-nuts, including Clint Bolick, Edwin Meese, Robert Bork, Phyllis Schlafly, Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, and University of Texas professor Lino Graglia. Lamberth is also a friend of David Sentelle, the now-famous U.S. Court of Appeals judge who replaced Robert Fiske with Ken Starr as the independent counsel investigating Whitewater, setting the stage for Clinton's impeachment.
Phyllis Schlafly, Ed Meese.
Fantastic, really.
Well, I would say the timing here is just impeccable. Perhaps the conservative godfathers -- they're practically all listed above -- felt the "Ground Zero Mosque" deal was falling apart, slipping away, peaking too early. It's not even September yet, after all.
No, no, boys -- we'll need some more red meat before November. What else we got? Hey, how 'bout that stem cell deal. Sounds like abortion to me! Abortion always gets the little people to the polls. Someone wake up Royce...
A stretch? Maybe. Then again, this is the guy who gave us Ken Starr and thus Whitewater.
And you thought that whole mosque thing was crazy...
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