I too, am extremely excited by the breakthrough reported in yesterday's post and wrote a diary at Kos on the subject.

I think it is important that liberals and Dems jump on this result before some right-winger like Santorum or Lieberman does. Not only because it has the potential to deflate ES cells as a wedge issue to get the right-wingers angry, but because if Santorum endorses the technology, the knee-jerk rejection of it by the entire left-wing is likely to set off an earthquake.

This is a chance to eliminate a stupid partisan fight that consistently brings those crazy blastocyst-loving right wingers to the election booths every couple of years to stick it to those baby-hating Democrats.

One could say that ES cell science is a winner for Democrats, but I don't think so. That would require one to believe that Americans know enough about science and medicine to overcome their emotional reactions to the poor little blastocysts being killed by those evil baby-eating scientists to actually realize that this is the future of biology. I think this new techology is a winner for whichever side picks it up first, hopefully it will be the Dems, and they can still be on the side of science. Now they can just say, hey, we found a compromise that's actually even better than the original. After all, these cells would genetically match their donors. This is great stuff, better than ES cells if they truly are as powerful as these researchers have shown.

Sticking to the, "I am a scientist feed me babies!" message is a mistake as long as a technology as promising as this is out there.

In other news, there can no longer be any doubt, Iraq is in a civil war especially considering a rising refugee problem. I think we've now checked off everything on the list. Death squads killing civilians, people shooting eachother over religion, destruction of holy sites, bombings in markets (not just the occupation is being targeted), open gunfights in the city streets, and now people dividing by religion and fleeing their homes.