State of the Union Follow Up

President Bush received much attention for statements during the state of the union.

1. Breaking our addiction to foreign oil

Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports
By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.

The president's State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that "America is addicted to oil" and his call to "break this addiction."

Other articles explore how feasible a goal is:
The February 3, 2006 Australian runs an article with the following analysis:

As a simple comparison of prices at the pump will reveal, by far the most effective way to begin the weaning would be for the US to tax oil more heavily. Last weekend, according to official figures, the average price of petrol across the US was $US2.34 per gallon - about 82 Australian cents per litre.

But this is an administration that has not so far seen a problem that it couldn't cure with a tax cut, and so taxing oil more heavily is out of the question.

Instead, Bush is advocating additional funding for development and commercialisation of alternative fuels such as ethanol produced from plant waste, and alternative types of engine, such as hybrids.

The additional funding of $US300 million is relatively modest compared to the substantial sums the administration has already carved out for energy research (much of which is channelled towards the oil firms).
...
The sort of approach discussed by the President sounds like it will rapidly turn into the usual round of large handouts for large companies seen on numerous occasions over the past five years, ...

And a Third, from the New York Times: Bush's Goals on Energy Quickly Find Obstacles

Diplomatically, Mr. Bush's ambitious call for the replacement of 75 percent of the United States' Mideast oil imports with ethanol and other energy sources by 2025 upset Saudi Arabia, the main American oil supplier in the Persian Gulf. In an interview on Wednesday, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Turki al-Faisal, said he would have to ask Mr. Bush's office "what he exactly meant by that."

Politically, both parties on Capitol Hill displayed a lack of enthusiasm. Democrats said Mr. Bush had opposed foreign oil reduction targets in last year's energy bill, and Republicans questioned the practicality of relying on ethanol and other alternatives.

Scientifically, researchers said ethanol and other alternative fuels were still years away from widespread commercial use.

Economically, energy analysts said Mr. Bush's goal of reducing Mideast oil imports would have little practical benefit because oil was traded in world markets and its price was determined by global supply and demand, rather than bought from one country by another.

2. Health Care: The President offered several ideas regarding health care.

According to The Chicago Tribune A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 76 percent of Americans call health-care reforms "an absolute priority."

Naturally, then, people were happy to hear Mr. Bush speak to health care. Of course to fix a problem, we have to figure out what the problem is. Here, the Tribune's article suggests two very different views:

Conservatives argue that consumers will become more cost-conscious about medical care when they spend their own money, and they say health savings accounts are a way to make that happen.

So for Conservatives, we are not responsible enough: we need to be made to carry more of the burden. That should not surprise people who have many (GM) many (Ford) business section articles discussing the burden of healthcare on profitability.

But Democrats charged the president's proposed policies would do little, if anything, to reduce families' medical expenses or expand access to care.

Companies want to cut back their coverage, and Conservatives want people to pay more in order to be responsible. Is that "Health care reform" that the people will welcome?

3. Human Cloning: President Bush said,

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

I was a bit confused on what this meant, but I was directed to Pharyngula, the blog of a "god-less liberal" who says,

Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It's also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

So a statement that is lost on most of us is important both to the scientists that are engaged in the research, and the religious conservatives who desire the science not continue.

this is remniscent of President Bush's identification of the Dred Scott case as a poorly decided case in the 2004 debates. While most audience members were puzzled, President Bush was speaking to a narrower group who associate Dred Scott with Roe v. Wade. He did not want to say Roe and alienate some potential voters, so in sayin g Dred Scott, he hit the target audience. Google Dred Scot and Abortion