President Oops!

The number of missteps by the Obama administration has created a minor cottage industry of statistician-bloggers keeping track. It's nearing comedy. Every administration utterance seems swimmingly prepared to be footnoted with exceptions, excuses and apologies. There's no need to chronicle the mistakes here since they are front page news daily.

However, I thought this was cute.

On Monday President Barack Obama signed his executive order reversing the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. He stood proudly with Americans from all over the country who have lobbied for this reversal.

As he invoked the memory of Christopher Reeve who suffered from a tragic spinal cord injury, he proclaimed that this was the change “so many scientists and researchers and doctors and innovators, patients and loved ones have hoped for and fought for these past eight years.”

Well, not so fast.

Two days later, the omnibus spending bill that Obama signed reversed his reversal. There was a provision in the omnibus spending bill called Dickey-Wicker that made it illegal to use federal funds in the creation and destruction of human embryos for research.

It seems that "measure twice and cut once" is an operational philosophy that President Obama has yet to learn. (more)