3reddogs wrote: "In the meantime, Big Pharma CONTINUES to make billions selling treatments for diseases. It seems to me it's in their best (LONG-TERM) financial interest that we continue to treat diseases instead of cure them. Maybe that's why so many politicians who accept big bucks from pharmaceutical companies have to keep coming up with increasingly lame reasons why they can't support embryonic stem cell research even when these embryos would be limited to those that are going to be discarded by fertility clinics."

That's a good point, and it could certainly explain the otherwise inexplicable opposition of the goopers, and many demos, to stem cell research.

But might it also explain why the leaders of the Unchristian wrong, the likes of Falwell, Dobson, Robertson, etc. are inflaming their flocks so rabidly against it? Are the pharmas making undisclosed contributions to those organizations? Or secret direct payments to the leaders?

I can understand someone's moral objection to stem cell research. What I cannot understand is objecting to it without also objecting to those fertility clinics that produce all those excess embryos, the vast majority of which must be discarded. Do the hundreds of thousands of embryos that are discarded as medical waste have less of a human life than those used in experiments that may just benefit human beings?

The Catholic Churh is at least consistent on this issue, and opposes the fertility clinics also because they produce the excess embryos. Those who oppose one and not the other are plain hypocrites.

In an otherwise good article, Joan Walsh takes the opportunity to once again castigate Sen. Kerry for his botched joke. Is she the only one who appears regularly in public that has never botched a line or two?

Ms. Walsh, and too many other Democrats, are missing a golden opportunity to make lemonade out of that lemon. They should say something like: Kerry botched a joke, one that would have been inappropriate even if it had come across as intended, and deserves criticism for it. But Kerry's apologized for his mistake. When will President Bush apologize not only botching a war but an entire presidency?

According to Tim Russert, the Republicans were afraid of just such a response. So far I am aware of Keith Olbermann and Harold Ford making it.

If they can't say something like that, Ms. Walsh and other Democrats should, like Kerry, just shut up about it. Their complaints about it hurting the Democratic campaign are setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy, by keeping that tempest in a teapot brewing in the public eye a little longer.

If the shoe were on the other foot, if Kerry had won in 2004 and Bush said something similarly stupid, you can bet that Rover Boy would have have had Bush apologize, after setting the Republican Talking Points Machine in motion and bringing the subject back to the many real mistakes would have made as president by now.

In fact he would probably have arranged for Bush to make such a "mistake." Like that other public word mangler Kerry, it would have seemed a perfectly nutural thing for him.

I've suspected from the beginning that the agenda of Cheney (the real president) is to achieve total control of the country. Everything that has happened since has only strengthened that suspicion, especially his obsessive quest (he's the real president) for "unitary" presidential power, aka dictarorship. Why go to all that trouble to achieve unprecented dictatorial power if you have to turn it over to a successor administration, perhaps even a Democrat?

Reading between the lines of Cheney's latest pronouncement pretty well confirms my suspicions: "It may not be popular with the public — it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing... We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is 'right'... The fact of the matter is this is the 'right' thing for us to be doing. We need to succeed here, it has a direct bearing on how we do around the world on the global war on terror."

And if the "right" things they are doing are not succesfully completed by the time they are supposed to leave office? Will they trust a successor administration to continue doing the "right" things as they see it? Or do they have plans not to allow a successor?

And if that is not enough, consider his puppet president's recent statement that he will keep both Cheney and Dumbsfeld on for the rest of his term. Cheney had to know will cost the Republicans many votes on Tuesday.

Read between the lines: Cheney, the real power, doesn't give a damn about this election; he'll pursue his agenda regardless of the outcome.

No matter the results of Tuesday's election, the Republicans will be in power until January 1. And they now have the Military Commissions Act, the ability to suspend habeas corpus and four very dependable Supreme Court Justices on their side. Look what they achieved in 2000 with only three justices.

And if one of the remaining five judges is not able to vote for any reason, a tie vote would ratify anything the Republicans do.

The Bushies argue that we should be afraid, very afraid. And on that point they are absolutely right.

George W. Bush really is a bold, decisive leader. So is the first lemming over the cliff.