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?

In order to build a voting majority of the faithful, Romney covered over different and difficult conceptions of the Almighty. When he spoke of God yesterday, he spoke of a bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom. There was no hint of Lincoln’s God or Reinhold Niebuhr’s God or the religion most people know — the religion that imposes restraints upon on the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings. He wants God in the public square, but then insists that theological differences are anodyne and politically irrelevant.

Romney’s job yesterday was to unite social conservatives behind him. If he succeeded, he did it in two ways. He asked people to rally around the best traditions of America’s civic religion. He also asked people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end.

"It's just outrageous that under President Bush, the National Institutes of Health have been basically decreased in funding."
Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 in Philadelphia, Pa.



NIH funding is up under Bush

At a Democratic debate in Philadelphia, Sen. Hillary Clinton was asked what she would do as president to fight cancer. As part of her answer, she said, "It's just outrageous that under President Bush, the National Institutes of Health have been basically decreased in funding. We are on the brink of so many medical breakthroughs, and I will once again fund that research."

Her claim about the funding of NIH is not accurate, no matter how you slice the numbers.

Regardless of which years you choose to compare, or whether the numbers are adjusted for inflation, funding went up.

In non-inflation-adjusted dollars, funding increased. Bush requested $28.9 billion dollars in net budget authority for fiscal 2008 (the year that began Oct. 1, 2007), and the agency received an estimated $28.6 billion in fiscal 2007. Either of these numbers is greater than when Bush came into office -- $20.6 billion in fiscal 2001, the last year for which Clinton presided over the congressional budgeting process, or $17.8 billion in fiscal 2000, the last full fiscal year Clinton was in office.

The numbers tell the same tale for net outlays, with an estimated $28.1 billion in fiscal 2007 compared with $17.3 billion and $15.4 billion for fiscal 2001 and 2000, respectively.

The increases aren't as large when the numbers are adjusted for inflation. But they still went up.

In response to an inquiry from PolitiFact, the Clinton campaign provided two newspaper stories that said the NIH budget had been flat since 2003. We acknowledge that is accurate, but we still find funding has gone up during Bush's presidency. We find her statement to be False.

An Inconvenient Truth
Lawrence Bender/Laurie David Production; Paramount Classics and Participant Productions.
2006 (79th)
* DOCUMENTARY (Feature) -- Davis Guggenheim
* MUSIC (Original Song) -- "I Need to Wake Up," Music and Lyric by Melissa Etheridge

Christopher Gore {d. May 18, 1988}
1980 (53rd)
WRITING (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) -- Fame

Lesley Gore
1980 (53rd)
MUSIC (Original Song) -- "Out Here On My Own" from Fame [Music by Michael Gore; Lyric by Lesley Gore]

Michael Gore
1980 (53rd)
* MUSIC (Original Score) -- Fame [statuette]
* MUSIC (Original Song) -- "Fame" from Fame [Music by Michael Gore; Lyric by Dean Pitchford] [statuette]
MUSIC (Original Song) -- "Out Here On My Own" from Fame [Music by Michael Gore; Lyric by Lesley Gore]
1983 (56th)
MUSIC (Original Score) -- Terms of Endearment

So he wasn't elected president. Big deal. How many other presidential candidates have an Emmy and an Oscar to brag about? -- Associated Press

Six months after grabbing Oscar glory for his eco-documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," former Vice President Al Gore collected an Emmy Award on Sunday for his fledgling youth-oriented cable network, Current TV. -- Reuters

Former vice-president Al Gore can add Emmy- award winner to his already very diverse resume. He has already won an Oscar, been the Grammy's and as of last week Spain gave him the country's equivalent of the Nobel Prize for his efforts to build environmental awareness around the world. No other major politician has two Hollywood awards like this - Reagan and Schwarzenegger only ever received Golden Globes. -- Hollywood Today

And former Vice President Al Gore now has an Oscar. Does that give him fresh clout?

Just after Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth - in which he asked American households to cut their use of electricity - the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research took a look at Al's energy bills.

Mr Gore, President Bill Clinton's deputy, has said he wants to concentrate on publicising the need to combat climate change, a case made in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, which won him an Oscar this year.

Preamble
Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society's principles and standards of practice.



Seek Truth and Report It
Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

Journalists should:


— Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.

...

Nuremberg, August 3, 2007 – In Europe and the USA, doctors and teachers are regarded as the most trustworthy professionals. The public are generally least likely to trust politicians and top managers, which applies also in Germany. These are the findings of the GfK Trust Index 2007 survey of 18 countries carried out by GfK Custom Research.

With average figures of 3.2 and 3.1, doctors and teachers scored highest in all countries on the Trust Index scale of 1 “very untrustworthy” to 4 “very trustworthy”. Next are the police and army, each with a score of 2.9, followed by the clergy with 2.7, lawyers with 2.4 and journalists with an index value of 2.2. Respondents found politicians to be the least trustworthy group, giving them a trust index of only 1.7. With an index value of only 2.1, top managers of major companies did not score much higher.

...

Some of Mr. Giuliani’s advisers are frustrated at the extent to which his decision not to compete aggressively in Iowa has pushed him to the side of the stage at a moment when the political world’s attention is focused on the caucuses there that will kick off the election season in less than two weeks.

Mr. Giuliani’s initial campaign theme, built around his record as mayor of New York, has given way to a new one: “Tested. Ready. Now.” But its introduction, in a speech last Saturday in Tampa, drew little attention on a day when most of the other Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were grabbing the spotlight in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Compounding his problems, Mr. Giuliani drew the kind of attention last week that a candidate with declining national poll numbers and a history of treatment for prostate cancer would just as soon avoid after he abruptly entered the hospital in St. Louis and stayed there overnight.