Artificial Life, Huck's Abroad, And Taxing Deliberations

A couple of more controversial topics:

Artificial DNA, artificial life?
Researchers in Maryland have finished creating the world's first chromosome built completely from scratch by hand. They anticipate implanting the microbe chromosome into a cell to try to make it work in a real environment. The article goes on to talk about various uses of such creations for business, medicine, or other applications. While I think these developments could hold tremendous potential for helping humanity, I have big concerns about the lack of ethical boundaries shown by researchers in recent years. This stuff is fascinating, but very dicey.

Pastor Mike's foreign policy could be disastrous
Peter Wehner comments on a recent article about Mike Huckabee's foreign policy suggestions. The short version is that he thinks Huckabee is naive and lacks true understanding about how foreign policy works. Food for thought before you vote for him.

Taxes are catch-22 for Democrats
Michael Barone writes about the big problem that taxation has become for Democrats in Congress. They always look for ways to tax 'the rich', but 'the rich' are generally their biggest supporters. The Democrats have to walk a line between fleecing their biggest supporters or fleecing the huge middle class, and the recent AMT debacle is a perfect illustration of their quandary (or should we say quagmire?). It doesn't take much to understand that the very rules Democrats said they would follow to guarantee fiscal responsibility ('pay-go') got tossed out the window at the first sign of conflict. It's fun to watch them squirm, but ultimately higher taxes always hurt everyone (except those in power).

There's my two cents.