GRETA AND THE RUGHEADS...

...make delightful fodder for the screamingly funny Larry Miller, but he misses a small point, as I lay out in this letter to him:

I wish I could write that well, hammered. I would have never left the frat house.


Greta, of course, is proof that the shiboleth about only good looking folks getting on TV is false. Wait, so are you, Larry. At least you don't have a laydown malpractice suit against your plastic surgeon. Wait, do you? Perhaps I can get on TV!


As a trial lawyer -- could you guess? -- I have to take issue with your condemning Cohen for representing these vermin (although I sure as hell wouldn't). Say it with me one more time: everyone, no matter how vile, has the right to counsel; that's what makes it America. And Jewish lawyers, you know, have a tradition of representing the grossly unpopular ( I cannot bring myself to apply the term "underdog" here; how about just "dog"?). If the principles we live by have meaning, then they apply to the most heinous.


Your remarks about drinking remind me of the bit you used to do (maybe still, but I didn't have a coupon for the last time you did stand-up in Houston) about being out on a school night and, as the clock spins, telling yourself repeatedly that as long as you get ___ hours of sleep, you'd be cool. A classic! I howl everytime I watch my Napster-supplied illicit download of it.


Give Greta a break and remember she's a short-term phenomenon. Absent some blind guy's friends playing a cruel joke on him, she's unlikely to reproduce

CLONING, AGAIN

Wesley Smith weighs in on the side of adult stem cell research. Facts are always welcome, but what does it prove? Here's what I wrote him:

Mr. Smith once again catalogues adult stem cell successes and thus adds much to the debate, although his implicit thesis: that the media pushes embryonic stem cell research because it wants to promote the destruction of embryos as part of some sort of institutional agenda to denigrate the view that such are human life with moral standing, strikes me as insuppportable.


As a lawyer -- and Mr. Smith was a successful one before he became a pundit -- one learns to cast the debate in terms that favor ones client's side, and Mr. Smith, it seems, is indulging in just that when he discusses stem cells and their promise only in terms of regenerative medicine, i.e., cures for existing conditions. He ignores the larger issue of genetic medicine applied at or before the point of conception to remove/deactivate genes causing birth defects, congenital illnesses, etc., or add/activate genes promoting desirable characteristics (general robustness, intelligence, etc.), and whether promise in that area is linked to embryonic or adult stem cells.


In so doing, he joins President Bush and other opponents of pre-birth genetic medicine in defining what are acceptable goals for genetic science in advance of the development of the science. The end result these opponents frankly seek is to foreclose individuals' choosing to utilize such science for their children-to-be. This is being accomplished. not by seeing what is and is not possible first, then making appropriate judgments, but, through enforced ignorance, delaying at all costs the development of the science so no one can have its (arguable) benefits.


That is simply barbaric.