Via Ann Althouse, I happened on a New York Times story by Jim Rutenberg that begins:

With his decisive re-election victory behind him, Michael R. Bloomberg has been acting more like the man he once was before he entered politics: namely, like a Democrat.Freed from the political considerations of a campaign and with no aspirations for higher office, Mr. Bloomberg seems to be shedding his already thin Republican skin, and has taken a number of positions that are fully, even aggressively, at odds with the party he joined months before his 2001 mayoral run.

Witness:

*Last week, Mr. Bloomberg donated $100 million to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, “anonymously,” and stipulated that part of the money be used for stem cell research, which is anathema to the Republicans’ core base of anti-abortion voters because human embryos are often destroyed in the process of gathering stem cells…

How can the new York Times not know by now that not all stem cell research involves embryonic stem cells?This FAQs page from the website of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering — which will benefit from Bloomberg’s largesse — explains some of the differences between various stem cells and notes genuine ethical issues surrounding their use. The FAQ is quite sanitized, in my view, but at least it does not cast all the stem cell ethical issues as being solely in the minds of “the Republicans’ core base of anti-abortion voters.”