California is dead last in respect for life

At least according to "Americans United For Life".

Their criteria is not just based upon abortion, but also upon other factors, like the stem cell hulabaloo.

But what about those of us who just oppose state funding of foetal stem cell research because 5 years later it has proven to be nothing but a corporate welfare pipe dream?

Stem Cell Boondoggle gets better and better

We told you so, but you liberal dupes just thought we were just "bigoted religious extremists".

Gee, I didn't know opposition to dubious corporate welfare was religious. But leftist dupes will be leftist dupes...some excerpts:

A performance review of California’s stem cell institute says the fledgling agency needs to improve several policies, better document how it reaches its policy decisions and further justify some salaries.

...yesterday, the agency said it would follow all of the bureau’s recommendations except one: the suggestion that it require public conflict of interest disclosures by a committee of scientists that recommends which research grants should be funded.

“It’s hard for me to determine whether this is the auditors being overly demanding or the institute continuing to do what it has done in the past – oppose all attempts to make it conduct its business in the open sunshine of the public,” said Jerry Flanagan, of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which has been keeping tabs on the institute.

The audit also revealed that the state’s Fair Political Practices Committee has concerns with the institute’s conflict of interest policy for out-of-state scientists who are members of a working group that reviews grant applications and makes recommendations on which should get funding.

The institute’s board reviews this groups’ recommendations, then votes on who should receive funding.

The board contends that the working group members serve only in an advisory capacity and are therefore not required to publicly disclose their potential conflicts of interest, as required of the institute’s staff and governing body.

Instead, the working group members file disclosures to the institute, which keeps them under wraps and available for private review by state auditors.

The Fair Political Practices Committee believes that the working group members are decision makers and therefore should be required to publicly file financial disclosure statements.

The legal stance is a threatening one for the institute.

Groups challenging the institute’s legality have also said this working group is a decision-making body, and therefore, the challengers argued, the institute is unconstitutional because the people deciding how to spend the state’s money are not accountable to the taxpayers.

Democrat Wants State To Own Part Of Stem Cell Research Firms

Dance with the devil and you get what you deserve:

A bill expected to be introduced as early as today would require companies doing business with California’s $3 billion stem-cell institute to give the state a larger portion of their revenues than the institute has proposed.
(...)
Some members of the institute previously have resisted forcing businesses to pay the state significant amounts, arguing that such a requirement could deter companies from having anything to do with the research effort. That’s a worry shared by Ken Taymor, a lawyer and researcher with Stanford University’s Program on Stem Cells and Society.

"I’m concerned that it would discourage the most promising businesses from participating," he said. Taymor added that the bill seems premature, since it is unlikely any products will be developed from the institute’s grants for at least a decade.

Private firms were drooling at the prospect of using our tax dollars to do their research. No need to go to venture capitalists or the private equity markets and take a risk. Instead they donated large sums of money (actually a meager amount compared to the contracts they are now getting) to a cynical ballot measure that played on false hype to justify corporate welfare. Of course they failed to mention 25 years of failures in promoting the $3 billion bond measure.

Now a radical Commiecrat, Senator Sheila Kuehl, wants a larger share of the revenues of these companies. In the real language that is called a tax, not revenue sharing. Kuehl is just like any other Demunist, she does not like private business; she just tolerates it.

Bolshevik bulldyke and Soviet sapphic Sheila Kuehl’s move is predictable, but that’s the price of corporate welfare. All the pro-business biotechies who signed onto what they thought was a free giveaway should have known better than to deal with the Quisling Quimlicker and her Commiecrat Cabal.

But the story gets better. "We were tricked", says the Bolshie bulldyke:

Under Proposition 71, bills affecting the institute’s operations can only be passed with a 70 percent majority, which could make it tough to get the measure enacted. Nonetheless, Kuehl said voters were promised the program would generate significant financial returns to the state when they passed Proposition 71 in 2004. The measure authorizes the institute to spend about $300 million a year for 10 years on stem-cell studies. Moreover, she noted that the institute last week awarded its first stem-cell research grants.

I am saddened that so many people bought into the stem-cell sob story snake oil, given that there has never been any actual breakthrough using aborted embryonic or fetal material. Never mind moral objections to abortion; this was such blatant corporate welfare for something with dubious returns.

There was no justification for this boondoggle. There was no demonstrable health benefit, as there was with the polio vaccine. There was no race with Nazi scientists, as there was for the atomic bomb. This was not a "space race" with the Soviets so we wouldn’t go to bed by the light of a Soviet occupied moon.

There was only (1) a cynical play on the hopes and dreams of crippled people without any demonstrable proof of progress, and (2) a spiteful move by the Left against moral and religious objections of any sort, to subsidize killing fetuses in any way possible.