good news for Lolo...
Now all we have to figure out is why it's in the stimulus package.

CBS NEWS: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/10/earlyshow/main4789551.shtml

MS is an "auto immune" disease, where your own body's immune system attacks the insulation cells of the nervous system.

MRI's show a lot of this type of damage, called "bright areas" but only half of people with this finding on MRI's have problems with their nerves/brain/function

So in this case, the doctors reset the immune system with stem cells:

Burt led a study that looked at a completely new way to treat MS -- stem cell transplant. The patient's own stem cells are stimulated to grow more cells, then harvested. Next, chemotherapy is used to wipe out the immune system.

"It was rough," McClure said.

The treatment lasted nearly a month. Then Edwin's previously harvested stem cells were transplanted back.

"They call it your birthday when you get re-infused," McClure said. "So that birthday was January 21, 2006."

"When did you start thinking, 'This might have worked,'" asked Turner Bell.

"When my hair started growing back," McClure said.

"Well now for the first time in battling MS, I think you can say there's a study that's shown we've turned the tide against the disease," Burt said.

And today, Edwin's symptoms of MS have completely disappeared.

What's wrong with this article: LINK

there is a 'need" for late term abortions?

Why? Lots are in teenagers who ignored the pregnancy...of course, they could easily have the kid and give it up for adoption...but often it would embarass their parents.

Some are for "health" reasons: Rare, for cancer or severe heart disease where carrying the child to term would be lethal to mom.

A lot of these women would be willing to wait until the child was viable and give the kid a chance...but if not, most docs would abort the kid/deliver the kid prematurely.

and if the woman's health was this bad, most OB would deliver the kid carefully in the hospital, not in an outpatient clinic which can't care for emergencies.

But the dirty little secret is most of these abortions are for malformed children, or retarded kids.

When you only have one or two kids, they have to be perfect.

The decision to do this terribly hurts the family, who often are in despair and have no choice, because no one has come to them and said "I've had the same problem, but this is what you face".

Why do you think Sarah Palin has faced such venom? It's because she didn't abort her Down's syndrome child...this is often displaced hatred because the women hate themselves for aborting their own kid.

That is why only prayer to heal the hearts harmed from abortion will stop the massacre of the innocents...

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/02/fight_global_warming_get_an_ab.html

American Thinker blog quotes a British bureaucrat admitting what a lot of the PC think:

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.

“I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said.

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word.”

Using abortion for population control is inhuman. But the bottom line is that Great Britain is moving toward a China-type policy where the government intrudes into the most personal decisions made by families; how many children is right for them.

--------------

yes, and similar sentiments are found in the elites of Manila...although few are bold enough to say so: they only insist we need population control, meaning for poor people, not mentioning, of course, if the elites didn't steal so much and insist on huge bribes that industry would invest here, instead of Pinoys having to do the same type of job overseas.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/world/6241151.html

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that euthanasia is a “false solution” to suffering, adding his voice to a bitter debate in Italy over the fate of a comatose woman whose father wants to remove her feeding tube.

During his Sunday blessing, Benedict said that love can help confront pain and that “no tear, from those who suffer and those who are with them, is lost before God.”

Benedict didn’t mention Eluana Englaro by name, but it was clear he was referring to her case, which has made headlines in Italy for months.

Englaro has been in a vegetative state since 1992 after a car accident. She was 20 at the time.

Her father has fought a decade-long court battle to disconnect her feeding tube; he says his daughter visited a friend in a coma shortly before her accident and expressed the will to refuse treatment in the same situation.

In July, Italy’s highest court ruled that Englaro’s feeding tube could be removed, upholding a lower court ruling. But Italy’s health minister, Maurizio Sacconi, issued a decree in December telling hospitals across the country that they must guarantee care for people in vegetative states.

Italy does not allow euthanasia using methods such as fatal doses of drugs. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but no law allows them to have a living will in case they become unconscious....

this is essentially the same as Terri Schiavo...

The problem is that the patients are usually described as "comatose" when they are actually severely brain damaged...if they are "vegetative" they can't swallow, and die of aspiration pneumonia (Average life span six months) which is why the church didn't object to not placing tube or removing them in the past...

what has changed is that the pro death people are removing tubes as a form of euthanasia, even though, like Schiavo, they are responsive (Schiavo was responsive on and off...her "vegetative" diagnosis was made by a doc who visited for one hour)...

an older British medical journal study showed that 45% of those diagnosed as 'PVS" were actually responsive to the environment...and more recent studies bear that out..

Ironically PET scans and MRI's are now finding many of these people do respond to the environment, and often their seizure or pain medicines make them only appear "Vegetative"...

from the NYTimes:

Jodi Jacobson, a former head of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, which wants financing for all aspects of women’s reproductive health, including abortion, wrote a blog post titled “Dybul Out: Thank You Hillary!!!” It argued that he had worked too closely with the far right, and she accused him of lobbying to please the Roman Catholic Church by letting its relief groups refrain from distributing condoms....

this is of course nonsense, because Catholic institutions are never going to give out condoms.

but it gets worse;

At the heart of the debate was the difficult bipartisan compromise behind Mr. Bush’s AIDS plan. It is the darling of two groups that normally oppose each other: foreign policy liberals who want to help Africa and evangelical Christians who support mission hospitals there.

This ignores that mission hospitals and church clinics supply most of the rural health care in Africa..

Notice the NYTimes says one or the other?

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.e67f6ceac8d2d7ee544d913d28fedcc9.1231&show_article=1

"In clinical trials, a team of scientists led by Richard Burt of Northwestern University in Chicago essentially rebuilt the immune system of 21 adults -- 11 women and 10 men -- who had failed to respond to standard drug treatments.

First they removed defective white blood cells that, rather than protecting the body, attacks the fatty sheath, called myelin, that protects the nervous system.

The immune systems were then replenished with so-called haemopoeitic stem cells -- extracted from the patient's bone marrow -- capable of giving rise to any form of mature blood cell.

The technique is not new. But this was the first time it had been applied to young and relatively health individuals in the early, so-called "relapsing-remitting" phase of the disease. Participants had had MS for roughly five years."

The head of the Bush initiative on HIV/AIDS to Africa has been removed.

Apparently he wasn't pushing the agenda of some very left wing groups, who want condoms in schools, no funding to church groups pushing abstinence,  etc.

He might be a gay doc whose work saved 2.2 million people, but he is not PC enough.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24961574-26040,00.html

unfaithful wive opt for prenatal testing...

the risky chorionic villa testing that has a high abortion/malformation rate and is rarely done except for severe malformation risks.

They presumably will abort the kid if the "wrong" man is the father.

what's wrong with this picture?

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/01/despite-bombing-ally-closing-gitmo.html

from gateway pundit:


In his first week as president Barack Obama already banned harsh interrogations, closed Gitmo, passed legislation to fund foreign abortions, pi$$ed off the Vatican, stared down a reporter, pi$$ed off Pakistan, bombed an ally, killed civilians, snarked at GOP leaders and bashed Bush and the AP claims he mostly avoided divisive partisan and ideological stands.
Yeah, right..


I couldn't say it better myself.

sorry I have not been blogging....most of my essays are published elsewhere, and then I crosspost/rewrite for here.

But for two months I have been busy, and when I try to log on here (or even read Hewitt's blog) I couldn't get on.

Too many conservative blogs are ignoring the real issues.

I am reading nonsense about Obama's birth certificate, as if at this late date any judge would overturn an election on a technicality.

There are a lot more worrisome issues.

Problem one: Lying about being prolife.
This has hit the point to where 50 catholic bishops have had to open their mouths and correct Obama's propagandists.

This has implications in the future: we essentially have one political party who is interfering with a church's dogma.

Changing prolife laws will drastically affect Catholic hospitals and health care workers. If medical care is taken over by the government, this will especially become acute. Years ago, when Clinton "ordered" military docs to do abortion, they refused and he couldn't force them. What will happen now?

Ditto for IHS and other federal doctors.

But if there is a health care takeover, a Catholic doc will again be "reeducated" as some of us were in medical school

And if you think that is bad, wait until euthanasia starts getting promoted as a right.

The "gay marriage" part has little to do with "equal rights": No one is stopping gay couples from living together and being faithful with one another. Many lesbians already do.

The legal fight however will destroy churches that oppose such unions. Look at the fights by the boyscouts, and multiply by 100...and expect these churches to be taxed in the near future.

Finally, the public schools already are full of a wishy washy agenda, where traditional morality is ignored but the religion of green and tolorance is stressed.

With the federal takeover of schools, expect more so.

Home schoolers are safe for now, but watch for many such partents being harassed for child abuse.

Finally, we saw how within 24 hours of Joe the Plumber asking an awkward question of Obama, that government offices went into his files. Expect government offices to do the same for other opponents.

So far, no internet censorship, but just wait...hate speech is a broad brush that can shut down a lot of nasty people.

The Freepers already had suits against them by Clinton...expect similar in the future.

heh.
On Friday night, the Catholic Bishop's conference spokesman announced that they were stopping all donations to ACORN.

Did they do so because ACORN is supporting Obama?

Nah. They used the excuse a fourmonth old report that the head of ACORN had covered up a million dollars stolen by his brother from the organization in 2000.

Not only did he steal the money, but a few members of the board got together and decided not to prosecute the thief, in exchange for his family repaying the money. So far, one fifth of the amount has indeed been repaid.

But two board members found out and sued to open the books, and so the story did get publicity, in June, 2008. As a result, the head and the brother left ACORN and...nothing else until this week, when the entire board met, said the two board members didn't have the "right" to start a suit to open the books, and so the suit was withdrawn.

The excuse for the coverup: The good of the organization: they are deep in doodoo about other reasons, so don't want more criticism.

Hoo hum..nope, no news here, folks, just move along.

full rant at:

http://www.bloggernews.net/118116
and cross posted political part below:

But what if the abuser has status in the community, e.g. a well known lawyer, cop or businessman who will have no problem walking in court and denying the abuse? Often if the abused partner has hid the abuse out of shame, or she has withdrawn the accusations or the restraining order out of pity (so he won’t lose his job), she can’t prove her case. The result is that he essentially goes free to abuse again, and she ends up unable to prove the pattern of repeated abuse, and even complaints by family and friends that confirm the abuse might be dismissed as biased.

The helplessness of those suffering from domestic abuse against a criminal justice system that dismisses the seriousness of this crime can be seen in the Palin case:

If even a governor and her family after repeated complaints of domestic abuse and threats to a woman and her family can’t get a cop fired (and his right to carry a deadly weapon revoked), what does that mean for the average minority woman in Alaska who complains of domestic abuse by a policeman?  Presumably, after the politics calms down, someone with a background in human rights and domestic abuse will do an expose on the problem, but don’t hold your breath in the meanwhile.

But a lot of abused spouses will recognize the pattern: He has power, I do not. So he will keep getting off until he kills me, or his next girlfriend.

(FYI: the International Association of Chiefs of Police suggest guidelines for such cases. But I’ll give you a hint: The answer is not to censor the complaining family members for abuse of power).

Sigh.

Obama's numbers must be slipping  because our Filipino paper has an article telling us about all those terrible American racists who won't vote for him.

Actually, there are racists, at many levels. Myself, having lost a scholarship when the school decided I wasn't a minority, I am racist. My son, who in the Job Corps noticed all the kids in one dorm smoked Marijuana and no one said a thing, but that if the Hispanic kids (like him) tried anything, they were disciplined, is racist too.

All those "polls" who tell America that the world wants Obama as the next president ignores the one sided media coverage by anti American (leftist/progressive) newspapers not to mention the openly anti American CNNInternational.

One of our ABSCBN reporters was at the Democratic convention, and interviewed some local Pinoys in Denver, and was astonished to find many of them were anti Obama: Because  they had relatives in the Military, and Obama was anti Military.

Obama's problem is not racism, but that he is painted as the great hope for mankind, and was placed in running by his radical followers hijacking the primaries.

I'm a Hillary backer, and just go to Real Politics: numbers don't lie. The caucuses went big for Obama, but the actual numbers were even.

The problem, of course, is if McCain wins, I agree with James Carville that there will be riots.

If it is close, expect 2000's troubles squared.
Someday, AlGore will be noted in history books like the Gracchi brothers: Not for what he did in office, but because he broke the system and the unwritten rules to try to get elected.

And if Obama wins, with all those illegal votes, McCain, like Nixon, won't make a fuss.

He will put the good of the country before his personal ambition.