George Bush has brandished his veto pen. He will likely mark his name on the offending piece of legislation today. George, what took you so long?

There hasn't been a presidential veto since 2000. One has to go back to the 1820s--starting during the presidency of James Monroe, continuing throughout the administration of John Quincy Adams, and finally ending with Andrew Jackson--to find a longer period without a president vetoing a bill. Given that the likes of the No Child Left Behind Act, McCain-Feingold, and the Prescription Drug Bill never passed the desk of John Quincy Adams, we can forgive him for keeping his veto pen in his sock. What's George W. Bush's excuse?

The bill Bush will block seeks to expand federal funds for embryonic stem-cell research. As the White House puts it, the bill "uses taxpayers' money to pay for research that relies on the intentional destruction of human embryos," and "overturns the President's policy that funds research without promoting such ongoing destruction." On moral, budgetary, and Constitutional grounds, the veto is justified. The president is not banning stem-cell research. He's just saying no to stem-cell research on the taxpayers' dime when it's done on aborted life.

All of this comes after George W. Bush became the first president to approve the funding of such research through the federal government. Perhaps the president thought this would win over liberal critics. It didn't. Liberals still regard him as an anti-science troglodyte and dismiss any compromises he's made to satiate them as not going far enough. It's all the way or nothing with them.

With attacks coming instead of gratitude, the president perhaps is wondering why he didn't use his veto pen when this issue first came up in 2001. Oh, well. It's better late than never.

I'm glad to see him do it. The argument that the embryos in question will be destroyed anyway is idiotic. It's like grabbing Jews out of the gas-chamber line to perform experiments on them and saying "It's o.k., they were going to be destroyed anyway."

Shouldn't the same line of thinking apply to federally funded abortions?

I'm not quite sure where to stand on this issue. Exactly what is so bad about stem cell research? Are we operating on the assumption that life begins at conception? What would you say to the liberal critics who charge that you assign more value to a petri dish than to the people who are alive now suffering from Parkinson's?