MORE STEM CELL GOOD NEWS:

State lawmakers yesterday rebuffed Governor Mitt Romney’s latest bid to bar scientists from cloning human cells and once again approved a measure that broadly endorses embryonic stem cell research.

The Legislature also rejected three other changes the Republican governor proposed. By large margins, lawmakers refused to take out wording defining when life begins, rejected his call to further limit what women can be paid for donating their eggs, and turned down his proposal to strengthen a ban on fertilizing eggs for research. Both the House and Senate reaffirmed the bill they approved last March and sent it back to Romney’s desk.

As I noted earlier, there’s a lot at stake here. I think that this opposition will backfire on Republicans.

UPDATE: Daniel Moore emails:

I’m not usually one to give politicians passes on what they try to do for political reasons, but Romney had to know that he had no chance of winning this. I suspect it was more of an attempt to show some conservative credentials as he moves towards a 2008 Presidential run. It’s hard to call Romney an ultra-right wing conservative in the vein of Pres. Bush, so he really doesn’t have to worry too much about that from the left. What he will have to worry about is making it through the primaries and having enough conservative credentials for it.

I agree that it’s mostly posturing.

The bind for the Republicans is that if stem cell research creates promising treatments or cures, they’ll look like they held them back. And if it doesn’t do so, they’ll be blamed for preventing it.