At today’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s statement today on stem cell research. McClellan took issue with a reporter’s characterization of Frist’s release: “the president is stuck in a 2001 decision when the science is passing him by.” It makes sense that McClellan doesn’t want to admit that even Frist, who is usually a loyal ally of the President, is starting to waver. But, in the statement, it’s clear that Frist has finally accepted the fact that the President’s stem cell research policy is failing:

On August 9, 2001, shortly after I outlined my principles (Cong. Rec. 18 July 2001: S7846-S7851), President Bush announced his policy on embryonic stem cell research. His policy was fully consistent with my ten principles, so I strongly supported it. It federally funded embryonic stem cell research for the first time. It did so within an ethical framework. And it showed respect for human life.

[snip]

While human embryonic stem cell research is still at a very early stage, the limitations put in place in 2001 will, over time, slow our ability to bring potential new treatments for certain diseases. Therefore, I believe the President’s policy should be modified. We should expand federal funding (and thus NIH oversight) and current guidelines governing stem cell research, carefully and thoughtfully staying within ethical bounds.

Then again, maybe Frist is just trying to prove he still deserves that MD degree.

Another bold prediction from ThinkProgress:

In the weeks to come, we’ll hear plenty more about this…

Three weeks after rejecting the pollution-cutting ideas the PM put forward at the G8 summit, [President Bush] signed up to a rival treaty with Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea.

But the new plan has none of the tough targets to reduce emissions which Mr Blair wanted – and which were first put forward in the Kyoto treaty on climate change.

…and see several more stories like this one…

At least 37 people have died in a severe heat wave that has been spreading eastwards across the US.

Heat warnings were issued in nine eastern states and in the cities of Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore.

and yet you’ll probably never see anyone draw the connection between the two, which is this: a recent study in the journal Nature showing “that severe heat waves are now four times as likely to occur because of increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.”

When we think about addictions that plague college students, we generally think about crystal meth, alcohol, and sex, but Lauren Patrizi has shed light on a new college addiction: online gambling. As an online gambling addict herself at 19 (because these online gambling firms are registered off-shore, where the 21 year age limit doesn’t apply), Patrizi wasn’t at all surprised to learn that college students are three times as likely as rest of the population to experience pathological gambling problems and twice as likely to experience sub-clinical gambling problems.

But students aren’t just finding internet gambling — internet gambling companies go out of their way to find them. Party Poker, one of the largest and best known online gambling firms, has begun advertising on TheFaceBook.com, the internet hub for college students (800+ colleges are registered, about 2.7 million users). In the ad, college students are hugging each other with the tagline, “Just wanna have fun?” Another site, Absolute Poker, has ads proclaiming, “College Students: Win Your Tuition.”

Ed Looney, the director of the New Jersey Council on Compulsive Gambling, explains, “I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this Texas Hold ‘Em rage. When crack cocaine came out, the phenomenon was similar.” Read more

At today’s White House press briefing, Scott McClellan was asked about the inaccurate information Bolton provided to the Senate:

QUESTION:…Is the president concerned about the apparent error on Mr. Bolton’s questionnaire to the Senate in which he said that he had not been questioned in a federal investigation in the preceding five years when now it has been revealed that, in fact, he was at least interviewed in the context of the inspector general’s CIA investigation of the uranium potential sale from Niger to Iraq?

MCCLELLAN: I think the State Department addressed that last night, and it was John Bolton who pointed that out.

Actually, that’s completely wrong. It was Sen. Joe Biden who pointed out that Bolton provided inaccurate information to the Senate in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t until several hours later that John Bolton fessed up through a State Department spokesperson.

Because it has been more than two years since the original invasion of Iraq, much of the American public has forgotten how easy Bush administration officials predicted the occupation of Iraq would be. The Washington Post reports the hard truth:

Efforts to rebuild water, electricity and health networks in Iraq are being shortchanged by higher-than-expected costs to provide security and by generous financial awards to contractors, according to a series of reports by government investigators released yesterday.

Taken together, the reports seem to run contrary to the Bush administration’s upbeat assessment that reconstruction efforts are moving vigorously ahead and that the insurgency is dying down.

Here are just a couple of instances of the Bush administration’s rosy rhetoric failing to meet the current harsh reality in Iraq:

CLAIM: Iraq Reconstruction Would Cost Only $1.7 Billion

TED KOPPEL: You’re saying the, the top cost for the US taxpayer will be $1.7 billion. No more than that?

ANDREW NATSIOS, director of U.S. Agency for International Development: For the reconstruction. And then there’s 700 million in the supplemental budget for humanitarian relief, which we don’t competitively bid ’cause it’s charities that get that money.

TED KOPPEL: I understand. But as far as reconstruction goes, the American taxpayer will not be hit for more than $1.7 billion no matter how long the process takes?

ANDREW NATSIOS: That is our plan and that is our intention. And these figures, outlandish figures I’ve seen, I have to say, there’s a little bit of hoopla involved in this. [ABC, Nightline, 4/23/03]

Read more

Strange things happened two nights ago before the House passed the CAFTA trade agreement. And even if one ignores the coercive way in which Republicans kept the vote open more than an hour, or the backroom bargains the administration made to get wavering representative on board, there is still something bizarre about the way President Bush himself promoted the bill. In a personal appearance before the vote began, the president stressed a novel point: CAFTA is a front in the war on terror. As the Washington Post put it:

Underscoring the importance that Bush attaches to the pact, he put his prestige on the line by making a rare appearance with Vice President Cheney at the weekly closed-door meeting of the House Republican Conference. Bush spoke for an hour, lawmakers said, stressing the national security implications of CAFTA, which are rooted in the concern that growing anti-American sentiment in Latin America would flourish if the United States refused to open its markets wider to the nations that negotiated the pact.

“Mothers and fathers in El Salvador love their children as much as we love our children here,” Bush said, stressing the need to look out for the young democracies in “our neighborhood,” according to lawmakers. He also noted that four of the six countries — the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua — have assisted the U.S. military effort in Iraq.

Setting aside the dubious claim that open markets lead to better relations (after all, isn’t the highly visible presence of US economic interests in the Middle East one of the things that Islamic fundamentalists have a problem with?), there is something very troubling about the last line in the above quote. Is the moral of the story, “put your lives on the line, and then reap the economic benefits”? Do we trade only with the nations that fall in line with our military interests?

– Conor Clarke