Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Liberal distortion of stem cell issues

Opinion Journal:

The debate over stem-cell research is once again being portrayed as a kind of moral Armageddon: a choice between federal funding and none, between scientific progress and religious zealotry. We hate to spoil the political drama, but maybe the system has stumbled toward a compromise that is more sensible than the debate makes it appear.

A bipartisan bill that passed the House on Tuesday would lift restrictions imposed by President Bush in 2001 on federal financing for stem-cell research. Mr. Bush threatens to veto the bill--a first for his Presidency--saying it "would take us across a critical ethical line." But despite GOP defections and likely passage in the Senate, no one doubts that Mr. Bush has the votes to sustain a veto.

Recall what the President's August 2001 decision actually did. It allowed federal funding for research on existing stem-cell lines where, he said, "the life and death decision has already been made." But it forbade funding for research into new lines, which entailed both the creation and destruction of human embryos.

Critically, Mr. Bush's decision applied only to federal funding; it did not impinge on the rights of individual researchers, universities, hospitals, private labs, public corporations or states to conduct embryonic research. In other words, the President did not "ban" anything. He simply refused to allow taxpayer money to be spent on a practice millions of Americans consider morally offensive.

One of CNN's newsreaders, in discussing the South Korean development in stem cell research said that that type of research is illegal in the US. It is clearly not. Ignorance or bias, the results are the same, the public is mislead in a way that helps liberals point of view. When is the last time they made an error that helped conservatives?