Romney is not running, Biden is...

• Jet not sold on ebay, sold at a loss privately. nm - one more lie
  • Get your facts straight, please....there was no lie....sm - ms
    • Typical - Babs
      • Again with the lies.... - sam
        • Wanna revist the Romney/McCain primary wars? - MR: JM loose cannon top-10 list. sm
          • Romney is not running, Biden is... - sam
            • No difference. Fact is that primary rhetoric - is what it is, and sm
              • What verifiable facts? Has anyone verified them? - sam
  • Once Again - CleanUpHitter
    • John McCain said she sold it at a profit on ebay. nm - one more lie
      • yes, he changed the story - Roque

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I am totally relieved to know he finally announced his VP choice.  Just got sick of the Hillary-lovers pushing for her.  So am relieved she's out of the picture.  Also relieved it's Biden.  I actually wanted Biden to win the presidential nomination when he was running.

I am very relieved mostly because Biden will bring the experience and knowlege that Barack needs.  Barack looks up to him and will definitely listen to him and follow is guidance.  I think it's an excellent choice and believe the democrats have a better than average chance to win.

As for the McCain camp - understand they are pretty upset about the choice.  I knew they were pushing for Barack to choose Hillary.  Has to make you wonder, why would the republicans be so rigid in their constantly pushing to have Barack choose Hillary - I can tell you why and its so obvious...they want to win.  Plain and simple.  If Barack chose Hillary it would be a definite 100% chance of loss (okay maybe 95% chance).  Also, do you really think the republicans are going to try to push for Barack to choose someone who is a good candidate?  So now will be interesting to see who the republicans choose for their VP.

for the following reasons:

A.  He's had his face in the public trough for half a century and so has lots of connections and many favors he can call in for his boss.

B.  He has zero charisma and so cannot challenge Obama for the worship of the masses.

C.  He is a complete dips**t, and so poses no intellectual threat to his boss either. 

The guy is the perfect ''second banana''.  And I love that during the primary campaign Biden kept insisting that Obama had insufficient experience to be president.  Now Biden, with a straight face, has to work for the man.  That must really chafe, but at least he caught the bouquet!

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.

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/08/hunter-biden-joe-biden-anthony-lotito.php

Obama has shown great judgment in the people who surround him.  He picked a great VP choice, and his wife is impeccable as a helpmate and is a fantastic role model for the American children.   

Whatever we hear, read or see on TV MUST be fact. 

VOTING A WRITE-IN VOTE FOR LOU DOBBS!!!

Downhill................

    From the faux populist gibberish mouthed by speaker after speaker, you would never have known that the Republicans have been in power over the past several years and used that titanic power to lead the country to its present sorry state.

http://www.truthout.org/article/running-from-reality

quit trying to deflect the issue.  McCain a poon dog.

Okay, I have an idea.  If you were able to run for President or even be the top adviser for the next President, what would your plans be for getting us out of this economic crisis?  Everyone seems to hate Obama's plans, and nobody really knows McCain's plans, so help us out here - what would you do?

nm