Now, it is true you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time… But I have faith in humanity. If you put people on equal playing field with GOOD information, they make the right decision most of the time. The problem is that our media is more obsessed with Britney Spears and how politicians pray than with real substantive issues. This is not the fault of the electorate, but the fault of just a few major corporations steering the debate.

When you are, like me, earning a great wage, but STILL just scraping by, it is VERY hard to keep up on the issues. Luckily a few years back I decided to spend more time reading and I discovered political blogs to augment my daily dose of cnn.com and I learned I was missing out on a LOT of information.

I think this will happen again in the future.

Try as the beltwayers might, you can’t stop the blogs. The blogs are the modern day revoluationary pamphlets usurping the disinformation from the state-sponsored newspaper. When people have the information, they make the right decision! The trick is getting them the information.

I disagree with Brian about McCain. McCain is 8 years from his “straight talk express” days (which I didn’t even buy back then). He may not be as fundie as Bush, but I highly doubt we’ll get non-fundie supreme court nominees from that joker. At least Hillary would appoint a moderate to moderate-liberal on the courts. Not to mention his stance on pre-emptive military strikes! He may not come off as much fundie, but all he wants to do is bomb the opposing equally crazy religions in the world. That brings us closer to a mad max apocolypse than the Cuban Missle Crisis. The “Christians vs Muslims” wars are going to destroy the world. It’s worse than Democracy vs Totalitarian Communism because neither side seems to be afraid to engage in “hot” wars or attacks!

Obama claims to be a Christian, but has thus far made hardly any mention of it that I have heard of. The same could also be said of John Edwards. Both candidates deserve a lot of credit for that, in my estimation. Interestingly, as an apparant sign of just how frightened someone is of Obama, I keep receiving an e-mail of dubious factual accuracy which raises the alarm that Obama is a Muslim (he’s not) and that he chose to be sworn into Congress on the Koran (no, that was House Representative Keith Ellison). Most of the people forwarding this thing on to me are Republicans, which is very telling.

Speaking of the Republicans, we’ve already dissected Huckabee here. Giuliani is someone I ought to be willing to support because of his rational stances on social issues, but I think the guy is nothing more than a thug. While we’d be safe from a theocracy under a President Giuliani, I have a feeling we’d be too distracted by our new wars to be appreciative of that fact.

Romney has the wackiest beliefs of all, but for as much attention as his speech on religion garned a few weeks ago (when he said only people of faith ought to have greater rights than those of us without any faith), it had the feel of a political tactic, not a core conviction, and frankly he doesn’t scare me too much, apart from the fact that he’s a complete moron, much like the president he’s trying to succeed.

McCain is pretty theocracy-proof, and any mention he makes of religion is almost certainly tailored for his audience at the moment. He now claims to be a Southern Baptist, but for all of his life he was (if I remember correctly) a presbyterian. He does have the laudable history of calling Jerry Falwell an agent of intolerance, but that is unfortunately countered by his commencement speech given at Falwell’s “university” a few years later. I suppose if I had to pick one Republican to hold my nose for, it would be McCain.

If polls are correct, there ought to be something like 30 million voters who reject religion. I find it hard to believe that if all of us could be motivated to vote it wouldn’t make a difference in the election. Huckabee is just the sort of candidate that might just make that happen, if the stupid people decide to wield their power.

Well said, I’ve been trying to say that for days, but you put it much better.

Quite frankly, I don’t hold out any hopes about the lessening of people’s stupidity. The ONLY support I’ve really heard in favor of Hilary Clinton has been “Well she’s a woman and we have to stand up for our gender”. Unfortunately, it’s also the only GOOD thing I’ve found about her in my investigations. The democrats seem uniformly for national healthcare, but apparently no one is watching the recent behavior in England with the NHS. Do we really think our current and possible future politicians are any less sleazy than England’s? I really think our least dangerous candidates are Ron Paul and John McCain…and I really just feel McCAin is the best of a bad lot, not really any better than the rest, just less likely to acclomplish anything, good or bad. I like ontheissues.org….a voting record is very informative.

Huckabee. Sigh. Yeah, he’s a scary bastard, despite his aw-shucks nice guy demeanor. It shows how far from the ideals of the framers we have drifted when a presidential candidate can give such an undemocratic speech and still be a viable contender. On the one hand, as stupid and as politically powerful as the Christian right has been, I still don’t see him getting the nomination. Yes, he could win, but I don’t think he will. The Republican party is now paying the price for sucking up to these people for the last few decades, and watching it tear itself apart is at least entertaining.

On the other hand, if he did win, and was somehow able to enact even some of his bigoted, hateful, bronze-age ideas, things would undoubtedly get very bad in America, but only for a while. OK, maybe not in any of our lifetimes, but one day the fire of religious zeal must burn itself out, and when it does, the survivors will wonder what kind of fucking morons we had to be to let it happen at all. Europe is the most secular place on earth, but it was forged in the fires of religious totalitarianism. They aren’t eager to go back to the dark ages, but we, or at least some of us, apparantly are.