President Obama's decision to reverse the Bush policy on stem cell research is not surprising, given the fact that he made the policy a campaign issue, and his left-wing inclinations certainly pointed in that direction. Still, his decision has at least one person who supported lifting the ban, Charles Krauthammer, angry. Krauthammer was even invited to the bill signing ceremony, but declined. Why was Krauthammer so ticked off by the change?

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research -- a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

Read the whole thing. Like Krauthammer, I am not religious, but I also believe that we cannot simply allow scientists to do their thing without any kind of lines drawn, except the one's they draw themselves. The World War I French Premier Clemenceau once said that "war is too important to be left to the generals". Well, science is too important to be left solely to the scientists.

Ellen Goodman points out that there are over a half-million "leftover" embryos sitting in freezers in fertility clinics. I agree with Krauthammer that these embryos, created for the purpose of allowing women who cannot conceive naturally to get a shot at motherhood, are the only ones that should be used for research, with the permission of the couple who created them.

A libel ruling against Staples has some in the media concerned about their own First Amendment rights.

John Bolton believes the Obama foreign policy team is taking an anti-Israel tack.

In today's New York Times, two pieces with very different takes on what to do next in Afghanistan. Leslie Gelb says we need to withdraw our troops, since defeating the Taliban is impossible. Max Boot, Frederick Kagan and Kimberly Kagan believe that the war can and will be won, and that a well though out and directed surge will do the trick.

Another conservative columnist discovers that Obama really is a partisan liberal.

Jew hatred is on the march again all over Europe, even in places that seem so bucolic in our imaginations, places like Sweden.