Tag: Health

From Stem to Stern.

On the Sunday shows, Republican Senators Arlen Specter and Sam Brownback go toe-to-toe on stem cells. “Brownback questioned ‘what it does to the culture of life’ when government approves performing research on the embryos, which he considers ‘young human life.’ Specter shot back, asking what it does ‘to the culture of life when you let people die because there are medical research tools which could keep them alive?’” For what it’s worth, Specter believes the Senate has the votes to override a Bush veto, even as Boss DeLay erroneously invokes various world religions to keep the House in line.

Stems and Thorns.

With the nuclear detente and Priscilla Owen now on her way to a judgeship, congressional attention turns to stem cell research. With the right-wing fundies already on the warpath over the loss of GOP nukes, how will they respond in the unlikely event of Dubya’s threatened veto getting overridden?

Dubya Stems the Tide.

In the face of growing bipartisan support (and withering hopes for Social Security privatization) in Congress, Dubya declares he will veto a bill easing stem cell restrictions. In five years, Dubya has never used the veto before…but of course he’s always ready to answer the bell when the right-wing fundies come-a-knockin’.

Raking over the Muckrakers.

“The reasons for the companies’ actions are not hard to find: They face potentially massive liability claims on the order of the tobacco litigation if cancer is linked to vinyl chloride-based consumer products such as hairspray. The stakes are high also for publishers of controversial books, and for historians who write them, because when authors are charged with ethical violations and manuscript readers are subpoenaed, that has a chilling effect. The stakes are highest for the public, because this dispute centers on access to information about cancer-causing chemicals in consumer products.” Twenty chemical companies, including Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich, Goodyear, and Union Carbide, attempt to deflect a lawsuit landslide by subpoenaing peer reviewers of the recent book Deceit & Denial and by hiring a gunner — Phillip Scranton of Rutgers University — to defame the scholarship of its authors, historians David Rosner and Gerry Markowitz (the former of whom I took a class with several years ago.) The official Markowitz-Rosner response is here.

Scranton’s major allegation? Like every other historian and/or author in the business, Rosner and Markowitz suggested some possible reviewers to their publisher. (It seems they figured it might help to know something about carcinogens.) Otherwise, the pair appear to be guilty of making an argument that flies in the face of corporate profits and of letting their sources speak for themselves — Says AHA Vice-President Roy Rosenzweig of Deceit & Denial: “In my opinion, the book represents the highest standards of the history profession.” For his part, Scranton refused to comment for Jon Wiener‘s article for The Nation above, but if I were him, I’d start talking…because right now he comes off as the lowest of corporate stooges.

Lacuna, Inc?

“Sun is shinin’ in the sky, there ain’t a cloud in sight…” Life imitates art as scientists attempt to achieve “therapeutic forgetting”, a.k.a. the focused erasure of memories. Right now, though, they haven’t got much past dulling the edge off old remembrances. “Our experiences and our memories in a lot of ways define us and define who we are,” notes Stanford ethicist David Magnus about the field, “[a]nd so that’s a scary step to go down. We should be very careful about going down a path that could lead to a serious alteration of the core essence of our identities.” Can you hear me? I don’t want this anymore, I want to call it off!

Isengard Unleashed.

“I expect the Bush administration will go down in history as the greatest disaster for public health and the environment in the history of the United States.” Senator James Jeffords (I-VT) — and the NY Times — review Dubya’s dismal environmental record. This piece bends over backwards to be charitable to the Dubya EPA, yet even here it’s hard not to notice that George W. Bush’s America increasingly has a sickly, charred smell to it.