Bush prepares for covert veto of stem cell research

You'd think the stem cell bill would've sailed through Congress. Technically, it did, but just shy of enough Senate votes to override a veto. I haven't written too much about it because there's just been so much madness surrounding the bill's passage that it would take too much time to catalogue them, much less address the sheer inanity of the arguments from the right. Actually, it's just one argument: a clump of 100 cells is a human being.

There isn't another viable argument for Republicans who've staked their careers on wooing fundamentalists. But there are all kinds of problems with the argument-- embryos are lost and destroyed constantly, and in the womb, not just the labs of evil scientists. Embryos covered by this bill would otherwise be destroyed, which sort of means that the thirty-odd GOP senators and the White House are mandating the continuation of what they call murder. And we certainly aren't going to see any laws that demand female 'carriers' be found to bring these 'humans' to term.

So instead of debate, we had people like Kansas Senator Sam Brownback showing a blown-up child's artistic rendering of an embryo, which he said was asking the senators "Are you going to kill me?" That's about as inane as it gets, and it typifies the embarrassing stupidity of the debate.

Bush has now said that he'll veto the bill as soon as it lands on his desk-- but he's refusing to let the media in the room while he loses his veto virginity.

SNOW: The president will, however, before he delivers remarks this afternoon, veto the Castle bill.

Here’s how it works, because I know a lot of you have had questions. There will be no photographers, no ceremony. What the president will do is, in his office, he will sign a veto message, he will hand it to a clerk, who will convey it to a clerk of the House, and then you go through the formalities of announcing a message from the president, and at some point the House will vote on the veto.

As Think Progress notes, the likely reason is that almost 70% of Americans favor the bill. Not the sort of thing you want on the nightly news.