Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack apparently has a problem: He is a Democrat who wants to run for president. But, he signed a bill banning all human cloning in Iowa three years ago. Vilsack apparently thinks that supporting a cloning ban would, shall we say, hinder his chances of gaining the nomination. So now, he has reversed course and promises to sign a bill reversing the cloning ban if it reaches his desk.
But don’t think it is politics that has caused his change of heart: Oh no! He says it was all of the advances in human therapeutic cloning over the last three years that caused him to rethink his position.
Come again? Apparently Vilsack hasn’t been keeping up with the news over the holidays. If he had, he would know that the human cloning project has utterly imploded; the “advances” by South Korean researcher “Woo-Suk Hwang having been proved to be a total fraud. Since Hwang was the only researcher in the world claiming to have successfully cloned human embryos and derived embryonic stem cells from them—and since he lied about doing it—there would seem to be no cloning advances upon which Vilsack could base his claim that the Iowa law needs to change.
Timing is everything in politics, Governor. Your announcement is about a month too late to be seen as anything but craven politics.
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