Hillary's Five Million and Romney's 35 Million

Should Hillary and Mitt take up stamp collecting?




Hillary Clinton today said that she dipped into her personal fortune to lend the campaign $5 million of her money. Since runs for political office don't involve the retailing of widgets, the only way she will recover her money is if people in the future pays her off. As to what exactly those services will be remains for yet another scandal to unfold. But as a self-professed public servant for the last 35 years, what is the source of her millions? Simon & Shuster gifted her with $8 million for her tome Living History and Bill Clinton got another $10 million for his autobiography My Life. The horse trading, back room deals, and Whitewater and commodity bonanzas are sources of subterranean streams of lucre that is so much a part of the swampland politics of Arkansas and the White House. Money, of course, is the mother's milk of politics, and that the Clinton campaign is scrambling for dollars cannot be a good sign. This is especially true as Obama is outraising the Clinton campaign by a factor of three to one.

Of course, she is following in the footsteps of Romney, who loaned his campaign $35 million dollars from his quarter billion dollar family fortune. Perhaps Mitt can look back on his 1975 classnotes from Harvard Business School to consider his return on investment-- about $1.1 million dollars per delegate.

Could it be that there are cheaper hobbies out there for bored litigators and tycoons?

Mitt Romney for Secretary of Transportation

Shame on all those bleeding-heart neighsayers and nattering nabobs who criticized Mitt Romney for lashing his dog to the top of his station wagon for a 12 hour family trip and then hosing down the beast when through its howls it expressed his displeasure by unleashing a waterfall of diarrhea over the car's windshield.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2007/06/romneys-dog-sto.html

This is a great example of out-of-the-box presidential thinking, just the kind of thinking we need to address the problems of transportation in our country. Instead of raising taxes to build new expressways, we just need to cable our seniors or youngsters to the roof or hood. Perhaps a bit of velcro on our Airbusses and Amtracks is all that we need to alieviate trafiic congestion. And who would not appreciate a good hosing after a long, dusty trip, especially when one's bodily fluids are awry.

For Secretary of Transportation in the next administration, Mr. Romney gets my vote.

Mitt Romney's Atheism

Of all the Republicans now running for the presidency, the one whose character impresses me the most is Mitt Romney, the former Governer of Massachusetts. McCain is a tragic figure, slouching his way to Gomorrah, forever a skeletal bridesmaid in the grim Bush-Iraq nuptials. Gulliani has no demonstrable understanding of world affairs other than to promise that his plan will be the Bush plan on steroids. On Fox, he promised to do to Pakistan what we have done to Iraq and Afghanistan. By contrast, Romney's political and business skills give him the star quality that could take him to the convention. His personal life is beyond reproach, the only leading Republican candidate to have married once. In an interview on CNN yesterday, I thought he was skilled in framing his religious background in more palatable terms for Catholic and Protestant watchers. Romney spoke of "spirituality" and "shared American values" rather than the religion of his great great grandfather Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt.

Time will tell whether or not this will work. A residual bigotry still lingers for those outside of the religious American mainstream. However, I'm not sure if claims to "spirituality"or "values" differs from that to which an atheist would profess. And perhaps that's a good thing.

Rabbi Marc Gellman, in Newsweek, discusses the question of whether God is real, and defines this question as a mystery in distinction to a problem. "Mysteries are not problems that have not yet been answered. "What is the cure for cancer?" is an unanswered problem,not a mystery, but the question of whether God is real or whethergoodness is rewarded or whether there is a purpose to human existence orwhy do fools fall in love or who put the bop in the bop sh-bopsh-bop-these are all mysteries and they will not go away and they will always be important and they will always define us by the way we answerthem with our lives and our hopes." The question of God's existence is at the bottom a mystery that cannot be proved with evidence that is outside of us. Rather, it "is resolved by the answer we give to it withour life. If a person believes that all human beings are made in theimage of God and thus deserve respect, then God is real for that personas the source of his or her transcendent duty to treat all people with love and respect. If, on the other atheist hand, people are just one of many species ruled by the survival of the fittest, then God does not exist for that person and neither does any transcendent duty to treat others with dignity."

Of course, Gellman's conclusions are nonsense. There are people who believe that God is real and that we are made in the image of God while cheerfully treating humans as the most expendable of objects. And, on the other hand, there are those who reject any belief in God while their values compel them to treat others with transcendent dignity. It is for this reason, speaking for myself, religious or non-religious self-definitions and creedal affirmations are not nearly as important as how people live their lives and the everyday ethical choices that they make.