First 100 days: Blinded me with science
“President Barack Obama's announcement Monday that he is overturning his predecessor's policies toward embryonic stem cells also will include a broad declaration that science — not political ideology — would guide his administration,” the AP reports.
Still, the New York Times says Obama “intends to avoid the thorniest question in the debate: whether taxpayer dollars should be used to experiment on embryos themselves.” White House officials said “the president would leave it to Congress to determine whether the long-standing legislative ban on federal financing for human embryo experiments should also be overturned.”
More: “The ban, known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, first became law in 1996, and has been renewed by Congress every year since. It specifically bans the use of tax dollars to create human embryos — a practice that is routine in private fertility clinics — or for research in which embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury.”
The Washington Post adds, “When President Obama lifts restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research today, he will also issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence, officials said yesterday… Although officials would not go into details, the memorandum will order the Office of Science and Technology Policy to ‘assure a number of effective standards and practices that will help our society feel that we have the highest-quality individuals carrying out scientific jobs and that information is shared with the public,’ said Harold Varmus, who co-chairs Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.”
USA Today: “The executive order will reverse President George W. Bush's 2001 decision to withhold federal support of research on newly collected colonies of embryonic stem cells, the master cells from which all tissues are formed. Bush, who opposed the destruction of embryos necessary to harvest the cells, limited research funding to 21 stem cell colonies, or lines, already in existence. That number will jump to hundreds of lines, many specifically created for research into diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's. The National Institutes of Health will have 120 days to set new research guidelines.”
“The U.S. military announced Sunday that 12,000 American soldiers would withdraw from Iraq by September, marking the first step in the Obama administration's plan to pull U.S. combat forces out of the country by August 2010,” the Washington Post reports. But: “Only hours before the announcement, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle plowed into a crowd gathered at the entrance to the police academy in Baghdad, killing 28 people and wounding dozens more.”
In an interview with the New York Times that the paper published on Sunday, Obama said that the U.S. is not winning in Afghanistan, and he “opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.”
"Iran has test-fired a new air-to-surface missile, Iranian media reported yesterday, in the Islamic Republic's latest display of its military capability," the New York Post writes. "The test was carried out despite the offer by President Obama to engage Iran in direct talks if it 'unclenches its fist.'"
"In advance of next month's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, the White House is moving to ease some travel and trade restrictions as a first step toward better ties with Cuba, the London Observer reports."
The New York Times profiles David Axelrod on its front page. “The circle around Mr. Obama has grown exponentially since he arrived in the White House. An army of new assistants, deputies and advisers surrounds him, but it is Mr. Axelrod who sits the closest to the Oval Office. His proximity is a symbol, in a unique West Wing kind of way, of how close he remains to Mr. Obama.”
The article also teaches the Beltway about a meeting many an insider would love to be invited to: Axelrod's Wednesday night meeting at his downtown DC apartment. "The two-hour sessions are just one way in which Mr. Axelrod is making the transition from Chicago political consultant to the White House. His title does little to capture his full importance to Mr. Obama. His voice, and political advice, carry more weight than most anyone else’s on the president’s payroll.
Bloomberg News has the story about how AIG convinced the government that it’s too big to fail. AIG "appealed for its fourth U.S. rescue by telling regulators the company’s collapse could cripple money-market funds, force European banks to raise capital, cause competing life insurers to fail and wipe out the taxpayers’ stake in the firm. AIG needed immediate help from the Federal Reserve and Treasury to prevent a ‘catastrophic’ collapse that would be worse for markets than the demise last year of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., according to a 21-page draft AIG presentation dated Feb. 26, labeled as ‘strictly confidential’ and circulated among federal and state regulators."
