Rufus, all that is meant by this is that Some Damn Thing Has To Give.

What that may be we shall see, but this is bloody ridiculous. This is not the site we had in mind.

Ah, the reckoning. That may be at hand.

Congratulations, Ryan! Hope you make it to Vegas. Bonneville was a pretty cool name, though. For my wife and I we both opted to just keep our own names since neither of us particularly cared to give them up.

The problem with the quiz is that it still requires you to answer each question with a binary. I want an option "C" on almost every question. Do I want the government to be bigger or smaller *how* - in what way? What does "bigger" actually mean? I can't even take the quiz properly.

Oh there are certainly differences. But why is Mormonism off the table and Scientology is not? There are also similarities.

I'm pretty sure you don't have to be a 'dishonest, robotic panderer' to have your religion affect your politics. And yes, we all had polygamist ancestors, though fewer of us have the same religion as those ancestors.

You're suggesting that faith matters not one tiny bit in terms of how political decisions are determined?

When the Mormon church split between the mainstream LDS non-polygamists and the FLDS polygamists, the FLDS folk moved out of Utah into Mexico and Canada (though some stayed, and remain today.) There are still large colonies of FLDS in both Canada and Mexico. That Romney's family were A) in Mexico and B) polygamists pretty strongly supports the FLDS connection. Though Romney is not FLDS by any measure.

Yeah, I honestly knew nothing of the Pratt name being an important Mormon name until now.

It's a fantastic book.

What an incoherent comment. Talking about religion is offensive and someone's religion is irrelevant but Scientology is a cult (so that doesn't count) and atheism is "pretty scary" so that doesn't count.

Give me a break, dude. Don't you even see how little this makes sense? What if people consider Mormonism to be a cult? Why are they any less entitled to that belief than you are to your belief that Scientology is a cult? Is your baseline here the objective standard by which to judge all candidates?

Besides, discussing religion is in no way like discussing penis size. The former is something you choose and actively maintain; the latter is something you're born with. There is a very big difference. But it's more than that. Penis size probably won't affect your decisions in office (though that may be debatable.) Your religious convictions have a huge impact on your politics.

Now I'm confused. No way in hell *who* is going to let him be President?

Why does this matter, though?

Because of the polygamist/FLDS past you mean?

So, I don't think anything has really changed. We have a great deal more analysis and op/ed type work out there largely thanks to blogs and cable TV. Lots more talk shows, lots more pundits. But the actual news is still in decent shape. You can read very fine reporting not just from the good traditional outlets like the NYTs or Reuters but from outfits like ProPublica.

But when we look at this and see all this opinion, and see how much of this opinion people consume, we think there must be a problem. When in reality, I think people are just consuming a great deal more media now than before. Back in the good ol' days there weren't so many choices, so people weren't reading blogs, listening to This American Life, or watching Sean Hannity on Fox. Now there's all this stuff available on top of the more straightforward actual news.

And lots of people manage to be dumb about it, of course, and Fox in particular has used a bit of sleight of hand to make their opinion journalism come across as actual reporting (and other networks have followed Fox's lead in the quest for ratings.) So there's plenty to scorn out there. I just think we need to be smart consumers. Contra Murali, no new law is needed. Contra gloom and doom, I think we'll be just fine as we adapt.

I think it will be very hard for several reasons for Romney to compete with Obama, and this won't help. He can't really rally the base - he can bring many of them to the polls, but he can't rally them. And he will have enemies among so-cons.

Great post, Jaybird. NOT a mini-post though. Fixed that for ya.

I widened it. Working on making it fluid still.

BlaiseP - your problem is that you're inserting the image (and I'm only referring to the first image here) rather than taking the link and putting it in the Post Image box. Don't insert, just place the link there.

I disagree. This comment is obviously the work of a fascist dictator!

Lovely. Thanks.

Sounds like my town.

Lots of it.

Local governments are usually more tyrannical. They're best used as efficient vessels of day-to-day governance. Very little power beyond the bureaucratic should be vested in local government. I say this as a big fan of Leslie Knope.

P.S. Card didn't write "The Giver."