Do you agree? Then you should sign this petition. Therapeutic cloning has thremendous potential to help cure disease and extend life. The petition reads:

We the undersigned recognize that the cloning of cells offers scientists the chance to advance medical research and perhaps one day treat devastating illnesses such as juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s by replacing lost or debilitated cells.

Congress should not outlaw this research despite recent pressure from various political factions. Nor should Congress impose a moratorium on this research, which would have the effect of halting the advances that are currently being made.

We the undersigned — many of us conservatives, some of us scientists, all of us concerned for the future — want it known that therapeutic cloning has supporters from across the political spectrum. To halt this research would be a terrible blow to science and public health.

See what some leading thinkers have written about the left-right allied attempt to outlaw life-saving scientific research.

That’s the logic of those who look at a case like Andrea Yates‘ and conclude that no sane person would kill her own five children. But the sad fact is that people do evil things all the time, and it doesn’t necessarily make them incapable of appreciating the consequences of their actions.

While Yates’ case got much more publicity, a local case here in suburban Chicago featured frighteningly similar circumstances. On March 4, 1999, Marilyn Lemak laced her three children’s peanut butter with drugs and then smothered them to death. They were 7, 6 and 3 years old. She was found guilty last December and now a judge has sentenced Lemak to life in prison, lecturing her in court thusly:

“It is appropriate that you spend the rest of your life thinking about these children,” Circuit Judge George Bakalis told Lemak in a blistering and rare display of outrage before a hushed courtroom full of spectators in Wheaton.

“It is appropriate that, every day, as you look at the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the bars, you will see the faces of these young children and hear these young voices asking you: ‘Why, Mom? We loved you, Mom. Why did you do this to us?'”

What a brave display. Indeed, holding people responsible for their crimes is not cruel, but rather gives people the dignity of shame. When we harm others, we should feel guilty and we should pay for our crimes. If nothing else, we need to make sure that violent people aren’t allowed another opportunity to kill again. Conversely, we owe nonviolent people the dignity of freedom. Instead, what we do, as psychiatry critic Thomas Szasz has noted throughout his career, is lock up innocent people we believe are crazy and set free guilty people we believe are crazy.

There may be some cases where a person is truly incapable of appreciating the consequences of his
actions. But why set them free, if a person who has demonstrated violent tendencies and cannot tell right from wrong is clearly a danger to society? “Guilty but insane” sounds good to me. Lock them up in a special psychiatric facility for the remainder of their lives. The important thing is to appreciate who really is dangerous to society and who is just someone who makes life hard for his family or the psychiatrist assigned to care for him.

Michael Sneed reported last week that the White House is trying to get Gov. George Ryan to resign, fearing that the stink from the license-for-bribes scandal will drag down Attorney General Jim Ryan’s gubernatorial chances against Rod Blagojevich.

“Gov. Ryan is a party guy and may see the need to step aside in an effort to help Jim Ryan win the race,” a top GOP source told Sneed.

First, I don’t see any evidence that Ryan is a party guy. He has consistently double-crossed his party to make deals with both Madigan and Daley. For goodness’ sake, he ran in ’98 on a pork-barrel spending platform. Second, if Ryan were to resign, wouldn’t that make things tougher and not easier on the attorney general? It would be an admission of guilt on the guv’s part which would only reflect badly on Jim Ryan. It’s clear that Rod plans to make Ryan’s lack of initiative in investigating the licenses-for-bribes scandal a major part of his attack strategy.

To have the guv resign, especially so close to the election, would only help the Democrats. Now the attack becomes, “Why didn’t you do anything to investigate the governor who would be forced by the pressures surrounding the scandal to resign?”

But there’s a larger point of silliness here, which is the apparent belief on the part of Dubya and others at the White House that who’s in the governor’s office will make a difference in ’04. Illinois has gone big for Democrats three elections in a row. Certainly, a liberal Republican like Ryan didn’t make a difference in 2000, and I don’t see any reason to think that Jim Ryan would do much better. And, gee, didn’t Dubya also lose Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where his gubernatorial pals John Engler, Tommy Thompson and Tom Ridge were supposed to help him out?

And his own brother left Dubya’s chad hanging for more than a month before the Supreme Court stepped in and settled things. In other words, Dubya needs to focus on winning over the voters in the suburban areas of these states if he wants to win. Republican governors won’t do it. Voters are very well able to distinguish between Republicans and Democrats at the state and national levels.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) says the U.S. government should "do what’s right" and compensate Afghans who lost innocent family members to American bombs.

This strikes me, at first blush, as an excellent idea. While I think there is a distinction between U.S. bombs which accidentally killed innocents and Al Qaeda terrorists who intentionally murdered innocents, to the extent that the U.S. government knew in advance that there would so-called "collateral damage," it has a moral responsibility to try and make restitution.

The certainty of Aghan civilian casualties was one factor that initially made me uneasy about the war in Afghanistan, the other being my fear that the war would only create more terrorists in the end. But it’s clear that the war has been successful in disabling or at least significantly hampering Al Qaeda’s efforts, and taking the Taliban out of power was a nice side benefit.

But that still does not erase the U.S. government’s moral responsibility to make restitution to those Afghan families that were unjustly torn apart by the bombings.

Rohrabacher, head of a nine-member congressional delegation that visited Afghanistan, called the compensation a "legitimate cost of doing business." That seems a little bean-counterish, but it’s right. The government is supposed to protect our lives, and part of doing that job in Afghanistan involved the foreseeable, but ultimately unavoidable, loss of innocent Afghan life.

Compensation won’t make the victims’ families whole again, but it is the right thing to do. In addition, it won’t hurt American PR efforts in the region, though I suspect nothing would help so much as immediate American withdrawal from all areas not directly related to the war on anti-U.S. terrorist groups.

The only thing about this proposal that concerns me is preventing fraud. How do you prove that a family member was killed by by an American bomb and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban? And how do you check those facts before doling out the cash? It would be a shame to see such a well-intentioned program be badly administered, as so many are.