Romney is a phony, but at least not a lunatic. sm

• Anyone interested in the candidates houses? SM - fallow sallow
  • That is his vacation home - mamt
    • Romney is a phony, but at least not a lunatic. sm - LVMT
      • Romney is a joke, he tried meeting w/black folks - sang *who let the dogs out* - which was....sm
      • I agree - scmt
        • I know it, if it comes up between clinton and McCain I just - may not vote at all

The messages you are viewing are archived/old.
To view latest messages and participate in discussions, select the boards given in left menu

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 was disrupted by Democrats. So what?  Events of newsworthy importance have always drawn the lunatic fringe. How do you know the people chanting were Republicans?  Did they wear a sign?  Did they say they were Republicans?  Did they not pass the sniff test to prove they were leftists?  What?  Do you NOT THINK there are Democrats who don't approve of Cindy Sheehan?  My, what a narrow world you live in.

Eric Rudolph to clinic workers.

THAT'S a total lunatic.

Your problem with gt is that she's decided to communicate in true conservative style that she must have learned on the other board.  She's trying to point out to them how they come across, which they routinely deny doing.

Not very pleasant, is it?

Does Romney’s America Include Non-Believers?

James Joyner | Friday, December 7, 2007

New York Times" href=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/opinion/07brooks.html?ex=1354683600&en=8a31b02ef8ccfd20&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss>David Brooks has a sober and thought-provoking take on Mitt Romney’s “Mormon speech,” simultaneously praising its intricate weaving of philosophy and worrying that his method of arguing for inclusion of Mormons in the political sphere was at the cost of excluding non-believers.

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.

The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

In Romney’s account, faith ends up as wishy-washy as the most New Age-y secularism. In arguing that the faithful are brothers in a common struggle, Romney insisted that all religions share an equal devotion to all good things. Really? Then why not choose the one with the prettiest buildings?

Indeed. The problem with the secularization of religion is that it winds up being insufficiently secular and insufficiently religious.

Brooks is also right that non-believers are more excluded from our process than even aggrieved religious groups like Mormons and Muslims. As noted here months ago, an atheist would have a much harder time getting elected president than a homosexual, black, or Hispanic — let alone a Mormon.

Memeorandum rounds up the blogger reactions to Brooks’ column. Most, like Ron Beasley, seem to agree with Brooks.

An exception is Red Stater Hunter Baker (who doesn’t appear to have read Brooks’ column) takes the opposite view, though: “The United States has traditionally been a nation that recognizes freedom must be paired with religion and morality if it is to persevere in political society. Mitt said it. Libertarians need to hear it. So do secularists.”

While there’s not much question that the Protestant Reformation played a role in the rise of democratic governance in the West, it’s far from clear that religion is necessary for freedom. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of a free theocracy.

The Washington Post weighing in on the question this morning with an editorial entitled, “No Freedom Without Religion? There’s a gap in Mitt Romney’s admirable call for tolerance.”

Where Mr. Romney most fell short, though, was in his failure to recognize that America is composed of citizens not only of different faiths but of no faith at all and that the genius of America is to treat them all with equal dignity. “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom,” Mr. Romney said. But societies can be both secular and free. The magnificent cathedrals of Europe may be empty, as Mr. Romney said, but the democracies of Europe are thriving.

“Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government,” Mr. Romney said. But not all Americans acknowledge that, and those who do not may be no less committed to the liberty that is the American ideal.

The estimable John O’Sullivan, though, thinks Brooks and others are reading something into Romney’s message that was not there.

The religious liberty celebrated by Romney plainly entails the liberty to be non-religious. What Romney is opposing in those sections of the speech that seem to concern the culture wars is an obligation to be non-religious in the public square.

David’s arguments seems to be that if religious people were to unite against secularists to fight the their joint battles more effectively in the culture war, that would be an aggressive, divisive, and regrettable act. But that argument itself rests on the unstated assumption that the culture wars would stop if religious people stopped fighting them. In fact the culture wars began because the Left employed the courts to change America on everything from abortion to school prayer to gay marriage. This has not stopped. The obligation to be non-religious in the public square, though a very recent invention of liberal philosophers, is treated seriously in legal arguments and court decisions today.

So why shouldn’t religious people, while affirming the right to be non-religious, organize to defend their joint beliefs and interests in the way deplored by David?

No reason at all, of course. Indeed, while I would prefer that public policy decisions be decided on purely secular grounds, religious convictions are ultimately no less legitimate motivation for policy preferences that economic interest, party loyalty, or “we’ve always done it this way.”

It seems inevitable, though, that the overwhelming majority who are religious will mount their fight to protect their cultural values (even those shared by many secularists) on Us vs. Them grounds.

Further, as Eric Klee reports, Romney is thus far refusing to distance himself from the Brooksean interpretation.

A spokesman for the Mitt Romney campaign is thus far refusing to say whether Romney sees any positive role in America for atheists and other non-believers, after Election Central inquired about the topic yesterday.

It’s a sign that Romney may be seeking to submerge evangelical distaste for Mormonism by uniting the two groups together in a wider culture war. Romney’s speech has come under some criticism, even from conservatives like David Brooks and Ramesh Ponnuru, for positively mentioning many prominent religions but failing to include anything positive about atheists and agnostics.

Indeed, the only mentions of non-believers were very much negative. “It is as if they’re intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They’re wrong,” Romney said, being met by applause from the audience.

Romney’s strategy, if indeed it was intentional, is a politically sound one. The numbers favor pandering to the religious to the exclusion of non-believers; that’s especially so in the Republican primaries. It’s not the way to national unity but that’s generally well behind winning votes in a politician’s calculus.

And you're the one who has issues..severe anger management issues.  You've been up and down this board throwing hissy fits, one right after another, being rude, crude, angry and obnoxious to anyone who dares to disagree with you, and you even had the audacity to suggest to someone (who has put up with your crap and tried to discuss issues with you) that they have anger issues.  YOU are the one with an obvious anger problem.  You act like a 3-year-old who is throwing a tantrum because she can't get her way.  You're the one who is phony.  You must have a pitiful personal life, and it must really suck to be YOU because you are obviously miserable.

Nevada tanning salon gets 9/11 loan: audit

By Jim WolfThu Dec 29, 3:10 PM ET

A Texas golf course, a Nevada tanning salon and an Illinois candy shop were among small businesses that may have improperly received U.S. subsidized loans intended for firms hurt by the September 11 attacks, an internal government watchdog has found.

The Small Business Administration's inspector general said in a report made public on Wednesday that in 85 percent of the sample of loans it reviewed, a company's eligibility to receive the money through the program could not be verified.

A leading Senate Republican called for further investigation, but the Small Business Administration said the program was properly implemented.

The one-year, $4.5 billion Supplemental Terrorist Activity Relief, or STAR, program offered loan guarantees to small businesses adversely affected by the September 11 attacks.

However, the Small Business Administration had failed to properly oversee lenders to make sure that only eligible borrowers obtained STAR loans, the watchdog's report found.

Money may have gone to businesses that were not adversely impacted by the terrorist attacks of September 11th or their aftermath, wrote Robert Seabrooks, assistant inspector general for auditing.

Congress authorized the program in January 2002, and set aside $75 million to cover potential defaults. The program was operated through the Small Business Administration's main loan-guarantee program and the loans were made by participating banks. In all, 8,201 loans were approved totaling $3.7 billion, but only 7,058 were actually paid out.

Of 42 STAR-loan recipients interviewed by the inspector general's office, just two said they were aware they had obtained a such a loan. In cases where eligibility could not be established, 25 of 34 borrowers interviewed stated they were not adversely affected by the attacks, the report said.

GOLF COURSE

The report's examples included the Texas golf course, whose owner was cited by a lender as saying people were more interested in staying home and watching the attack on television than playing golf. However, the course was owned by someone else when the attacks took place and the justification for the $480,000 in loan guarantees did not apply to the new owner, the report said.

The tanning salon's lender blamed the September 11 attacks for hurting the Las Vegas casino industry which employed many of the salon's customers.

However, the inspector general found the salon's business had grown by 52 percent in 2001 and 32 percent in 2002 and said there was no evidence the owner could not borrow outside of the program. The SBA guaranteed $437,000 in loans to the salon, which were used to expand.

The Illinois candy shop received $21,250 in guarantees but could not back up its claim that the attacks had delayed the shop's opening, the report said.

Senate Small Business Committee Chairwoman Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, said her panel would look into the program.

If abuses are discovered, many questions must be answered by the parties involved, beginning with how and why was this allowed to happen, she said in a statement.

SBA said it has told lenders it will not honor guarantees on defaulted loans that fail to document the September 11 link.

SBA implemented the STAR program as Congress intended, Administrator Hector Barreto said in a statement.

The inspector general said it appeared qualified borrowers were not shut out of STAR loans.

(Additional reporting by Diane Bartz)