Edward's despicable lies yesterday...
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| Wed, 10-13-2004 - 1:00pm |
Frist knocks Edwards over stem cell comment
Edwards invokes legacy of Christopher Reeve
Tuesday, October 12, 2004 Posted: 8:47 PM EDT (0047 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist attacked Sen. John Edwards on Tuesday over a comment the Democratic vice presidential candidate made regarding actor Christopher Reeve.
Edwards said Reeve, who died Sunday, "was a powerful voice for the need to do stem cell research and change the lives of people like him.
"If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again," Edwards said.
Frist, a Republican from Tennessee, called Edwards' remark "crass" and "shameful," and said it gave false hope that new treatments were imminent.
Edwards campaign spokesman Mark Kornblau hit back, "Yes, breakthrough research often takes time, but that's never been a reason to not even try -- until George Bush."
Edwards made the comment Monday while he was stumping in Newton, Iowa.
Frist, who was a heart surgeon before coming to the Senate, responded Tuesday in a conference call with reporters arranged by the Bush-Cheney campaign.
"I find it opportunistic to use the death of someone like Christopher Reeve -- I think it is shameful -- in order to mislead the American people," Frist said. "We should be offering people hope, but neither physicians, scientists, public servants or trial lawyers like John Edwards should be offering hype.
"It is cruel to people who have disabilities and chronic diseases, and, on top of that, it's dishonest. It's giving false hope to people, and I can tell you as a physician who's treated scores of thousands of patients that you don't give them false hope."
Kornblau, Edwards' spokesman, said, "What's crass is George Bush standing in the way of promising stem cell research."
Edwards and Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry have been critical of President Bush's decision to limit federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
The candidates charge the federal limitation is hindering scientific progress on therapies that could offer hope to people suffering from maladies such as Parkinson's disease, juvenile diabetes and Alzheimer's disease.
Reeve, who was left paralyzed after a horseback-riding accident nine years ago, was an advocate for increased funding for new treatments for spinal cord injuries and stem cell research.
Kerry mentioned Reeve by name in Friday's presidential debate while criticizing Bush's stem cell policy.
Three years ago, citing moral and ethical considerations in destroying human embryos to extract stem cells, Bush limited federal research funding to embryonic stem cell lines already in existence.
Research using stem cells extracted from adult cells was not affected by the policy, nor was privately funded research using new embryonic stem cell lines.
The president and his supporters note that his administration is the first to offer any federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, accusing Democrats of trying to create the impression that Bush has banned the practice.
Criticizing Edwards' comment linking the lifting of Bush's policy to medical breakthroughs, Frist said research related to spinal cord injuries does not involve embryonic stem cells but rather adult stem cells, "where the president has absolutely no restrictions, no limitations and there are about 140 treatments."
Embryonic stem cells are believed to be able to develop into more kinds of cells than adult stem cells, and thus more useful in potentially treating diseases. Yet some research indicates that might not be the case, and the National Institutes of Health has called for further study of both adult and embryonic stem cells.
"Stem cell research is promising," Frist said. "The president vigorously promotes adult and embryonic stem cell research, but he does it with an ethical and moral framework."

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I've heard just yesterday on a new show that Embryonic cell research IS EXPECTED to help with lots of diseases AND to help with spinal cord injuries. There were medical experts interviewed. Unfortunately, I was making dinner and distracted, so I didn't catch all the details. But again on morning TV, I heard it again with respect to Christopher Reeves. Are all these people wrong?
I guess I'll have to do my own research when I have the time...
<<Lots of people don't support abortions, yet their taxes pay for some abortions. >>
Are you talking about in Canada?
Renee ~~~
Renee ~~~
I really don't think we can expect that our governments can do what each and every one of us believes is morally right, in all aspects, because we all have different definitions of what is morally right. But of course, given the fact that we live in democracies, those basic things that the MAJORITY agree are morally right end up being made into laws.
<<In both Canada and the US, taxes pay for healthcare (in the US, a certain percentage of the population is covered by Medicaid/Medicare, right?), and so abortions are sometimes covered. I saw it mentioned on an american show. Not sure what the criteria is for these procedures to be covered, but I understand that some are indeed covered. >>
"Congress has barred the use of federal Medicaid funds to pay for abortions, except when the woman's life would be endangered by a full-term pregnancy, or in cases of rape or incest. "
http://www.guttmacher.org/in-the-know/cost.html
Renee ~~~
Renee ~~~
Pulitzer prize winner Charles Krauthhammer, who is himself confined to a wheelchair, exposes Edwards for the opportunitst he is:
An Edwards Outrage
After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word "plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one of the great mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around the corner. It could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards did, that it is imminent if only you elect the right politicians is scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea where it will come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell research is just one of many possibilities, and a very speculative one at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle cures for paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student). The last fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure thing. Nothing came of it.
As a doctor by training, I've known better than to believe the hype -- and have tried in my own counseling of people with new spinal cord injuries to place the possibility of cure in abeyance. I advise instead to concentrate on making a life (and a very good life it can be) with the hand one is dealt. The greatest enemies of this advice have been the snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around the corner. I never expected a candidate for vice president to be one of them.
Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented from getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a travesty.
George Bush is the first president to approve federal funding for stem cell research. There are 22 lines of stem cells now available, up from one just two years ago. As Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics, has written, there are 3,500 shipments of stem cells waiting for anybody who wants them.
Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on stem cell research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem cells? You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply to the National Institutes of Health for the federal funding.
In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, Kerry referred not once but four times to the "ban" on stem cell research instituted by Bush. At the time, Reeve was alive, so not available for posthumous exploitation. But Ronald Reagan was available, having recently died of Alzheimer's.
So what does Kerry do? He begins his radio address with the disgraceful claim that the stem cell "ban" is standing in the way of an Alzheimer's cure.
This is an outright lie. The President's Council on Bioethics, on which I sit, had one of the world's foremost experts on Alzheimer's, Dennis Selkoe from Harvard, give us a lecture on the newest and most promising approaches to solving the Alzheimer's mystery. Selkoe reported remarkable progress in using biochemicals to clear the "plaque" deposits in the brain that lead to Alzheimer's. He ended his presentation without the phrase "stem cells" having passed his lips.
So much for the miracle cure. Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at NIH, has admitted publicly that stem cells as an Alzheimer's cure are a fiction, but that "people need a fairy tale." Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are shamelessly exploiting this fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their pollsters that stem cells play well politically for them.
Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of the game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy price controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate people with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the pale.
There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected.
Renee ~~~
Renee ~~~
Edited 10/15/2004 12:46 pm ET ET by nicecanadianlady
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That is not really
Miffy - Co-CL For The Politics Today Board
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