Are There Heroes in Washington? Remember when you were a kid in grade school and you learned about George Washington refusing to tell a lie? And Honest Abe Lincoln? Then there was Roosevelt assuring the country that we had nothing to fear in the face of the worst depression in our history and World War II, and Truman insisting that the buck would stop with him.

Sometimes it seems as though political heroics are a thing of the past or simply legend, but Senator Arlen Specter, the senior senator and a Republican from Pennsylvania, is showing his party and the country that backbone still exists in the nation's capitol. God bless the man, I don't always agree with him, but here is a man battling cancer, and he is standing up to the president of the United States and the fanatics who seem to control the direction of the ship of state. He fought his own party to hold the chair of the judicial committee, and now he is mustering enough votes to override a presidential veto on stem cell research.

Of course it is quite possible that Senator Specter is working in conjunction with the White House. It is difficult to believe that the administration is truly opposed to human embryonic stem cell research, but they do have to appease their base constituency. Perhaps the administration quietly requested Senator Specter, a known maveric, to spearhead the movement, thus saving the administration's face? Regardless, I still pick the good senator as a true political hero, someone I can ask my children to look up to.