Spitting into your Mitt

I wasn't fast to sour on Mitt Romney. Not that I'd vote for him, of course, but he didn't seem as awful as the typical Republican. Many of my friends were more perceptive.

When he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, I could tell he was lying about his views of abortion. But it didn't seem so terrible when he won narrowly, in part by making an issue of Shannon O'Brien's proposal to align the age of consent to sex with the age of consent to abortion. The 2008 Presidential campaign came, and Romney made his infamously expedient conversion to hard right views in ardent favor of a blastocyst-to-birth welfare state (and police state, too). That proved my 2002 belief correct.

This is a man who will say anything to win an election. He's running on a marketing plan, not on his own convictions. (It's not that I believe he lacks convictions; I think he does have true convictions of his own, but I suspect that they're too wingnutty and extreme and downright weird to ever win.)

The problem for Romney is that even Republicans, who desperately wanted to believe him, could tell that he's as smarmily insincere as politicians come. And, man, that's saying a lot. Sarah Palin, for instance, is about as self-promoting as they come, but she still from time to time lets slip some really outlandish bullshit out of her core convictions, however inchoate they are.

So, when Mitt offers up his ass to be kissed by the habitual ass-kisser Larry King, he of course says that Obama is "learning on the fly." Yep, Romney pretends that he would of course know exactly what to do about an episode in the economy that has no analogy dating back seventy years to a time when the organization of the economy was much different, much more local, and moved much more slowly. Romney says this with the same smug arrogance of the "masters of the universe" on Wall Street for the simple reason that he's one of them. His recipe for fixing this would not be so different from Tim Geithner (minus points for Obama), although it would be much more pitched to allowing disastrous failures. Romney would wind us all up in penury.

In sum, Mitt Romney is:

• smarmy
• insincere
• smug
• arrogant
• the exact wrong doctor for the economy
• and won't countenance the destruction of blastocysts in research that might help his wife Ann, who suffers from multiple schlerosis - and he reached this epiphany for craven political reasons

The ipecac candidate! But of course - of course - he's running in 2012, his non-denial denial notwithstanding. Otherwise, he'd have better things to do than show up on CNN.

Pilonidal cyst chasing

The blastocyst caucus was out in force today.

“I believe Barack Obama is turning the clock back and ten years ago, it sounded like embryonic stem cells were the future,” Republican New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith said on CNN. “They're not.”

Yah, turning the clock back to the age of reason, to a time when even conservatives were embarrassed to admit that they had scotched the future and because they did, we should keep giving the future a shiv between the ribs whenever it peeps, "I'm not dead yet."

All this stupidity relies on the absolute belief that ensoulment happens at conception, and after that the 32 or 64 or 96 cells of the barely differentiated blastocyst are a human being. Not only is this a non-empirical religious doctrine, it's recently made up. Or, I should say, made up again after many different and contradictory incarnations (heh) over the millennia.

Never mind that conception itself has no obvious biological definition. Does it happen when the sperm penetrates the ovum? When meiosis starts? Or in a later phase? Does that mean identical twins share a soul? (And what if only one of them commits a mortal sin! Heaven or hell?)

Even more, these cell masses are flushed by the hundreds of thousands every year after infertility treatments. How is it better to throw them away?

The blasto caucus would have consigned us to the Dark Ages had they been around then.

Click image for Wikimedia Commons public domain statement.

When do I get my ticker item?

If six Republicans writing a letter that nags Barack Obama to hurry up already to reverse Bushist Republican policy is news, hey, I shaved and showered today!

On the upside, finally some bipartisanship that promises change I can believe in, instead of more right-wing obstruction...

Family jewels

Looks as though wearing a cup all those years while playing baseball and fast-pitch softball was a good hedge against the day when I come down with senile dementia or cancer or type I diabetes (unlikely at this point, but I did wait till almost 50 to part with my appendix). Heck, I could already use some shiny new cartilage in my knees.

Still, this new knowledge does complicate playing serve and volley. If a hot shot comes back, which area gets the better protection of my racket - my head or my family jewels?

Not indistinguishable

Of course, the hot skin cells reprogrammed as stem cells are different from fetal stem cells. How will that affect research results? We can't tell yet.

Even scarier

The plasticity of DNA will continue to be a source of fear for the people who oppose stem cell research. This breakthrough, if it actually helps allay fears over research, will only help temporarily.

If a scientist can turn a skin cell into something indistinguishable from a fetal stem cell, can she turn skin into a fetus next? When those who resist biological research cotton onto this - and they will, they'll be moving toward a complete ban on manipulation of human DNA by any means. No delivery of gene therapy by infection, ah, inoculation with a virus to deliver the repaired gene. No cancer treatments that change the operation of somatic cells, turning up genetic repair mechanisms or turning them off, as required. No gene therapy at all. If God made your genes fail, that's your fate.

It is a scary world, no doubting that. If the past is any guide, our children will see things that would give even me the willies. But, otherwise, we stop and accept the things that kill us simply because they are already familiar.