Dafydd ab Hugh has yet another interesting post about what he believes should be the Republican reaction to the elections.

Dafydd asserts (and I see no reason to disbelieve him) that there are only three grand, unifying items that most of the Democrats who won this week campaigned on. Here’s something that may shock some of you: Iraq is not one of them.

So what did they campaign on? I don’t mean each individual representative and senator; I mean, what grand themes did all Democrats invoke to nationally brand their campaign? So far as I can recall, there were only three things they all publicly agreed on:

• Raising the minimum wage;
• Increasing funding for stem-cell research;
• Implementing the few remaining pieces of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations that Bush hadn’t already implemented.

They could not come together on tax policy; they could not come together on immigration; heck, they couldn’t even come together on Iraq: many new Democrats elected Tuesday complained that we hadn’t “listened to the generals” (meaning generals like Eric Shinseki and Anthony Zinni) — and hadn’t sent enough troops to Iraq!

The entire post is absolutely worth a read, and possibly even worth mentioning in an e-mail to any Republican Senators/Representatives you might have.

I’m not going to comment on the bulk of the post, though, because Dafydd does a great job of making his point. Instead, I found a bit of information in this post that I didn’t know, and I can’t figure out why I didn’t know it:

But since that time, something remarkable has happened: medical researchers, denied the easy path of extracting stem cells by killing a human embryo, have responded with typical American ingenuity. They have brilliantly solved the problem: we now know how to extract embryonic stem cells without killing the embryo. This is a remarkable breakthrough… and it changes everything.

(Bold emphasis mine, italics belong to Dafydd)

I’ve been involved in a couple of debates recently about the ethics of using embryonic stem cells for research purposes. I’ve had people come back at me with the argument that embryos aren’t humans and therefore it’s okay to kill them to save actual “human lives“. I’ve heard the counter-argument that embryonic stem cell research is done on embryos that would be destroyed otherwise. I’ve heard the argument that it’s the mother’s decision.

None of those convinced me, for various reasons, and I’m shocked that not one of the people I’ve been arguing against, who in general struck me as well informed about the science involved, brought up the simple fact that it’s now possible to harvest stem cells from an embryo without killing the embryo. That seems very important to me, and I’m shocked that I’m only just hearing it.