Abby Normal Brains

[elfs]

The 2008 Republican Platform calls for a nationwide ban on embryonic stem cell research, public or private

The language of the 2008 Republican Platform has been changed this time around to call for the ban on the creation of embryos for any purpose other than implantation. It begs the question: if they get their way, would the discard of unused embryos created for implanation be prosecutable?

Court rules that testing dead animals for disease constitutes "treatment," bans universal testing for Mad Cow.

Creekstone Farms wanted to test 100% of the animals it sent to the slaughterhouse for CJD. The USDA sued Creekstone, claiming that their over-use of the test violated the USDA's authority to regulate the "diagnosis and treatment" of veterinary concerns. The USDA's concern is that if Creekstone were allowed to test, then other slaughterhouses would be forced to raise their testing from it's current 1%, raising the price of beef nationwide, and was therefore "anticompetitive."

Your Republican Administration at work, folks. The market works, except when they don't want it to.

George Stephanopolous: The team to vet Sarah Palin left for Alaska the day after McCain's announcement.

I mean, really, the whole point of this conversation is to show how poor McCain's judgement really is. We expect our presidents to nominate people to various positions, and sometimes those nominations get rejected. But we expect our presidents to at least do some due dilligence before the nomination!

You have to love that "Democrats Say" bit at the end. Democrats aren't saying that. It's a fact. The editor of Palin's hometown newspaper, the town where she was mayor, has said that his archives are not on-line and nobody has asked to see them for months. Adding "Democrats say" is a way of deflecting the authority of reality itself and merely attributing what is real to the opinion of the opposition.

Brutal: The Digest digests Dick Francis' Silks

Man, I love the Digest. Dick Francis is famous for mysterious, romantic books about horse racing. He's farming out his stable of characters to his son, Felix, and the Guardian brutalizes him:

My father had wanted me to follow him into the family law firm as a country solicitor, but I had always resisted. "What schmuck wants to take on his dad's franchise?" I had told him. "Next you'll be suggesting I write thrillers."

I had fallen in love with steeplechasing as a teenager (cut and paste in "the thrill of half a tonne of animal thundering along at 30mph" from dad's 43 other books) and I had tried to make a career as a jockey. But I was too clever for that, so I decided to become a barrister after someone pointed out that jockeys wore silk and barristers took silk so they were quite similar really.

Maybe someday, I'll get digested too.