There's no political advantage to getting any more liberal than "it's OK until they find a way to do it without destroying embryos". Already at that state, you've won the vote of everyone more liberal than you on the issue, and you minimize alienating some fence-sitters with more divisive language. Deep down, I bet a lot more of them agree with you than not.

The problem with that stratagem is that it misleads the public in the long run -- builds consensus upon the illusory downside because not even the more liberal candidate is willing to deny it.

Politics can be a race to the center. But like sumo wrestling, you can use your opponent's strength against him as he charges towards you dodge out of the way.

How many more people are going to be against emergency contraception as a consequence of both parties' feigning belief in the sanctity of 3 day old microscopic embryos in their respective propaganda campaigns?

All it takes is a few rich and influential people (or a majority of the population) to get diseases that could be cured through stem cell research for all opposition for it to collapse.

Politicians make that most grievous of fallacies and do politics. Pandering to more voters is sadly what politics is nowadays. If only people stuck to their guns and didn't care about pandering, then there'd be many more parties and much broader views to choose from, and in the end more freedom.

^The US is the product of the SMD system. Our PACs and IGs kind of act like the third parties in PR systems.

What do IG and SMD stand for there? The political meanings of those acronyms aren't even listed on wikipedia (among their over 9000 other meanings)

It's just really counter-productive for the pro-stem-cell advocates to take for granted (or refrain from disputing) the false premises upon which anti-stem-cell beliefs are based.

Politics has become the art of misdirection in which concerns are sidestepped by appeals to only the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis.

my understanding, limited as it is, is that not a single medical treatment has been developed from embryonic stem cells, and that the most promising techniques have been and are using adult stem cells

another point is that even the 'bush ban' only stopped *federal* funding, while still allowing full embryonic stem cell research to be funded privately - it follows that a free market looking at 'extremely promising' medical techniques springing from the embryonic cells would find its funding adequate vis a vis its *promise* - and the bush restriction was only on *new* embryonic lines, not those already researched (and found unproductive)

furthermore, those that claim that private research was running into a lack of viable embryonic stem cells harvested for research... well, evidently they are leaving out the fact that undifferentiated stem cells do not face the 'hayflick limit' - meaning that the cell lines can be divided indefinitely (immortal cells) because of no shortening of their telomeres during cell replication

i may be misunderstanding some part of the science, but in this day of polemics and political rhetoric... i suspect that those against the bush (and clinton, iirc) decision weren't showing all their cards

imho, overstated arguments = lost credibility