(The stem cell initiative has its flaws, but the far Right is holding this research hostage to its own moral agenda. – promoted by SFBrianCL)

**UTBriancl asked me to post this here as well.  Thanks Brian!**

The day after President Bush vetoed the federal stem cell bill, Governor Schwarzenegger authorized a loan of $150 million to California’s stem cell research funding agency, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine.

You might wonder why an agency that was authorized in 2004 via Proposition 71 to sell $3 billion worth of bonds (up to $350 million a year) is in need of a $150 million loan.

Unfortunately, CIRM hasn’t been able to sell any bonds, because their legality has been held up in court for a year and a half by lawsuits filed by a taxpayer’s group, People’s Advocate, and an anti-abortion group, the California Family Bioethics Council.  A new lawsuit filed in Sacramento a few weeks ago is attempting to thwart the agency’s grant funding to the University of California on the grounds that some of the CIRM grantees had ties to UC. 

However, even if those lawsuits are rejected, the money raised by CIRM will likely not be able to be as fruitful as it could have been.  Because of the federal bans, researchers will not be able to conduct stem cell research using equipment that was purchased with federal grants.  Existing laboratory space that is supported with federal dollars also can’t be used for stem cell research.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, “Robert Klein, chairman of the committee that is overseeing spending of the state funding, describes Bush’s decision as ‘tragic.’

“‘We could get greater leverage out of our $3 billion if we were able to use federally funded facilities currently in place,’ said Klein, who led the effort to pass a stem-cell funding initiative in 2004. “

Meanwhile, research with embryonic stem cells continues on various fronts.  An article that appeared in the June 29 issue of Nature identifies the potential promise of stem cell therapy for heart disease.  Researchers at the University of Washington are making progress in repairing damaged liver tissues using stem cells.  At Johns Hopkins, researchers have used stem cells to allow paralyzed mice to walk again.  Stem cell research at Stanford has identified the relationship of immune response to Alzheimer’s disease.  Nevertheless, Karl Rove told the Denver Post last week that researchers have found “far more promise from adult stem cells than from embryonic stem cells.” 

Progress will continue despite the veto, but it will make funding and conducting the research, even in California, significantly more difficult.

Today’s California Blog Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: Arnold Schwarzenegger, CA-04, CA-11, CA-41, Jerry Lewis, John Doolittle, Republican corruption, clean money, voting, lots of other stuff.

Governor’s Race

• Look, Schwarzenegger’s occasional mild, inconsequential letters of mild protest are hardly “distancing himself” from George Bush. Maybe Schwarzenegger could put his money where his pen is.
• Schwarzenegger: Minutemen are terrific. So is George Bush.
• If Schwarzenegger really wanted to distance himself from George Bush, maybe he shouldn’t rely on the Bush family connections to fill the Schwarzenegger campaign coffers.
• Will some enterprising soul ask Schwarzenegger if he still thinks the Minutemen are doing a “terrific” job?
• Schwarzenegger is opposed to universal healthcare, might be OK with half of the current uninsured population getting some kind of insurance, but has opposed efforts consistent with even the anemic goal he’ll cop to. Schwarzenegger is a “compassionate conservative” in the George Bush model.
• You judge a man by his actions, not by his words. Schwarzenegger has consistently refused to support the moderates in his party, letting the Republican extremists dominate. Draw your own conclusions.
• BTW, here’s Frank Russo’s take on Schwarzenegger’s running mate, Tom McClintock. There could have been a moderate in that slot, but Schwarzenegger didn’t really have any interest in helping out with that.
• Once more, you judge a man by his actions, not his words. Schwarzenegger talks a good “moderate” game, but either does nothing or plays extremist hardball, depending on whether it’s an election year or not.
• We need clean campaigns. You know it, I know it, and the American people know it. Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t know it, though.

Jerry McNerney / Paid-For Pombo / CA-11

SNTP has a rumination on the McNerney / Filson fundraising dead heat. Filson was the Democratic institutional “moderate” candidate who was supposed to be able to really get funded, but McNerney picked up the grassroots support and ran even with Filson. Now if only McNerney could get a little institutional help, maybe we could narrow the gap with Paid-For Pombo. You’d think there’d be a lesson here for the institutional committees.

15% Doolittle / CA-04

• 15% Doolittle cuts through red tape for folks, if (purely by coincidence) they’re paying his wife a lot of money for services she didn’t actually provide.
• California is a community property state. That means that half of every dollar that someone pays 15% Doolittle’s wife actually belongs to 15% Doolittle. So in Q2 2006, 15% Doolittle personally took in more than $17,500 from campaign contributors.
• One MIL-yon Dollars! That’s what 15% Doolittle spent on his primary bid alone. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance… Seriously, think about this. There are fewer than 650,000 people in CA-04, and the most expensive media market is Sacramento. And 15% Doolittle spent a cool million to defend himself against a Republican challenger.

Other Republican Paragons

Jerry “Loot” Lewis: earmarks for political supporters seem to turn into business opportunities…

The Rest

• Dear Republicans, we really like the immigrant-bashing. Please continue.
• Paper ballots. It’s just that simple, and it works.
• Oy. Every time you look at the Department of Corrections, it just gets worse.
• I wonder if the anti-tax crowd will rally round to protest spending money on a new arena for the Sacramento Kings. I have never seen a cost-benefit analysis of goverment sponsorship of professional sports that showed the investment was anything but a money pit for the government.
• Good for the California Young Dems — voters are where you find them.
• Sheila Kuehl on social services in the most recent budget.
• Let’s be perfectly clear. The insurance industry is behind the push to demonize plaintiff’s lawyers (folks who represent individuals). And yet, they’re perfectly happy to use their own lawyers to sue to block the will of the people from regulating them. What’s the word for that again? Greed? Politics? Hypocrisy? Yes.
• Poor Abel Maldonado — caught between his leader and his constituency. Leader wins, Abel loses!
• Housing bubble updates from Calculated Risk: Inland Empire, Los Angeles, SF Bay Area.
• No, there’s no bias on Fox.
• Cab Drollery points us to “Cows With Guns“.

In a response to my post about the DWR’s Hetch Hetchy  report, sasha from Left in S.F. challenged the power replacement aspects of the restoration.

That’s all true as far as it goes, but as I’ve written before, the price tag of restoring Hetch Hetchy is better calculated in new asthma and lung cancer cases. Hetch Hetchy provides something like 20% of San Francisco’s electricity. If the dam were torn down, that power capacity would have to be replaced.

That power will almost certainly end up being replaced by gas-fired power plants, and those plants will be located in poor communities of color, because that’s where they put power plants. As long as advocates ignore the direct effect of the Hetch hetchy teardown, which will be more children tied to their asthma inhaler, more seniors unable to breathe, and more people in neighborhood clinics with shortness of breath, they are only confirming the worst stereotypes of the environmental movement, where environmentalists care more about trees than about people. 

Yes, the power would need to be replaced, but we need more power generation regardless of whether HH is dammed up or not. 

The E.D. report, however, has provided an analysis of where our power comes from and how Hetch Hetchy affects our power generation.  To be precise, the HH system provides only “0.6 percent of California’s electricity supply and represented 5.5 percent of statewide hydropower production. Also, only the Moccasin and Kirkwood plants actually generate power using water stored behind O’Shaughnessy Dam.”

Follow me to the flip…

And we must consider also where the bulk of HH power really goes: into pumping water.  Pumping water is the state’s single largest use of power.  If the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation District’s begin to make more substantive efforts toward conservation, much of the power loss can be made up throug small holding dams to increase hydropower generation along the Tuolomne.

The E.D. report also suggests other conservation measures including dynamic pricing for large energy consumers (ie industrial users) and local micro-conservation efforts. 

But more directly to your charge that we will have to build more gas-fired plants, well, that’s not necessarily true.  First of all, there were some members of the Assembly (Tim Leslie, a right-winger Rep, amongst others) who suggested trading off new dams for the restoration of the HH Valley.  While I’m not convinced this is the greatest idea, it is a reasonable consideration.  If we so desired, there are places on the rivers from the Sierra that we could build new dams.  Of course, there is plenty of environmental damage from dams as well.  Fish are unable to spawn properly and we could end up severely damaging our salmon population.  I think we’ve seen how perilous the salmon situation is already with the tight restrictions this season, building more dams would only accentuate that.

But as I said a few days ago on Calitics when we set a record for power consumption (which has likely been broken or will be broken today), we need more power generation facilities, specifically more alternative power generation facilities, with or without Hetch Hetchy.  I suggested requiring solar panels on all new construction, but I don’t think that’s the only option.  California has at least two resources in abundance, wind and sun, both of which are largely untapped.  And news that Vermont is now looking to produce energy from methane from cow manure offers another promise of new energy sources.  And of course, we could consider nuclear power productionm but the question of where we dump our spent fuel might hold that one back a while.

So, I think the accusation of environmentalists caring more about trees than people rings pretty hollow.  It’s not environmentalists that are pushing gas-fired plants on the world.  Environmentalists are working to decrease emissions and decrease the effects of global warming.  Heck, E.D. has other campaigns, Fight Global Warming and Clean Air for Life, running concurrently with their Restore Hetch Hetchy campaign. I think pointing fingers at E.D. and its partners is the wrong place to start.  If LA can save Mono Lake, why is it now so absurd to start talking about restoring Hetch Hetchy.  Look, I agree with the fact that we need to ensure secure water and power replacements, but that is not sufficient to kill the debate.

E.D. is working harder than anybody out there to clean up the air.  It’s a little disconcerting to see people on the left attacking them when it’s inconvienent for us.  I love the fact that we have HH and its resources, but if LA can save Mono Lake, why can’t we work to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley?