Why do religious groups need to have their theology stated on state property?  Do they need government approval to sanctify their faith?  Does it make them feel better that Big Brother gives his blessing?

In Olympia Washington, an atheist group placed its message next to a Christian Nativity scene and a “holiday tree”.  It reads:

“At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

The sign is a placeholder until the message the group truly wants to display arrives, which is to keep church and state separate.

In 2006, when a menorah was displayed, a Christian group asked the state to sponsor a nativity scene.  State lawmakers denied the request, saying they didn’t have time to wade through requests from religious groups to offer government endorsement.  Then why did they allow the menorah? 

This year there is a Nativity Scene and the atheist message, but no menorah was requested.  Either every religion should have placement, or none.  And if you truly have faith, you don’t need government imprimatur.

That would entail President Clinton becomming Senator Clinton.  The choice is New York Governor David Paterson’s to make.  Whoever gets the nod would round out the last two years of Hillary Clinton’s term before a new election in 2010.

Paterson has a strong bench to choose from. There are a number of contenders, including at least eight members of New York’s delegation in the House of Representatives, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, Caroline Kennedy, and her cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr.

If this were to be so, it wouldn’t be unprecedented.

President John Quincy Adams lost his re-election bid in 1828. Two years later he returned to Washington after winning election as a congressman from his home state of Massachusetts. He served in the House of Representatives until his death in 1848.

President Andrew Johnson also served as a Senator from Tennessee in 1875, 7 years after the Senate acquitted him of impeachment charges. He died a few months after taking office.

• Amb. Marc Ginsberg shares his thoughts on President-elect Obama’s national security team, including the selection of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

• Spiritual Guru Deepak Chopra is under fire for suggesting that American foreign policy played a factor in the Mumbai attacks. His son, Gotham Chopra, joins Alan to defend his father.

• “Mr. Warmth” himself, Don Rickles, discusses his legendary career and his hilarious new book, Rickles’ Letters.

President Bush admits to Charlie Gibson in an interview to air Monday night on ABC, that he was unprepared to lead a nation that could possibly be at war.

GIBSON: What were you most unprepared for?

BUSH: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, “Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack.” In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.

This is reminiscent of “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” during the Katrina tragedy, in spite of a 41-page report by the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), predicting just that.  It is also consistant with the administration’s admission that it didn’t anticipate the Iraq insurgency.

Unprepared for war; unprepared for a national emergency; unprepared for the contingencies of a war BushCo started.  What a legacy!

And only NOW they tell us.  According to the National Bureau of Economic Research is he body that determines these things.

By one benchmark, a recession occurs whenever the gross domestic product, the total output of goods and services, declines for two consecutive quarters. However, the NBER’s dating committee uses broader and more precise measures.

The GDP did contract by 0.2 percent at an annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2007. However, that drop was followed by a 0.9 percent rate of increase in the first quarter and a 2.8 percent spurt in the second quarter, when the economy was boosted by the distribution of millions of economic stimulus payments.

However, employment, one of the measurements tracked by the NBER, has been falling since January.

The GDP turned negative again in the July-September quarter of this year, falling at an annual rate of 0.5 percent. Many economists believe the GDP is falling in the current quarter at an even sharper rate of 4 percent.

They can’t blame President-elect Obama for this one, as conservatives claimed fear of his presidency was driving us into a recession once he got elected.  Maybe they can blame Hillary Clinton, as she was going to be the likely next president at the time the recession actually began.

Current and future Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, and National Security Advisor-designate Jim Jones (l-r) round out President-elect Barack Obama’s national security team.  Described as two cold war warriors and one political rival, these choices, nevertheless, signal a shift in how foreign poicy and national security will work.

Susan Rice is in line to be UN ambassador and Eric Holder will be nominated as attorney general.  Expect Holder to be the most controversial of the choices, as conservatives go after him for Elian Gonzales and Marc Rich.

With mobs burning homes, churches and mosques, and a death toll in the hundreds, Nigeria is experiencing the worst violence since 1994.

The fighting began as clashes between supporters of the region’s two main political parties following the first local election in the town of Jos in more than a decade. But the violence expanded along ethnic and religious fault lines, with Hausas and members of Christian ethnic groups doing battle.

Because it’s not labeled “terror” it doesn’t get the attention of Mumbai, but it is ongoing religious tensions between Chritians and Muslims responsible for the latest flare-up.

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The Red Cross said around 7,000 people had fled their homes and were sheltering in government buildings, an army barracks and religious centres.

UFO enthusiasts want Obama to release the contents of America’s “X-Files” to have the government come clean about what it knows about extraterrestrial phenomenon.   With John Podesta on the transition team and Bill Richardson a likely cabinet member, they think they have a shot.  Podesta led an effort to declassify 800 million pages of documents when he was in the Clinton White House, and Bill Richardson has called for full disclosure by the Pentagon of what really happened in Roswell in 1947 in his home state of New Mexico.

The group wants the incoming president to insist on a “full briefing from your military services and intelligence agencies regarding what they know” and to open congressional hearings “to take testimony from scores of government witnesses who have already come forward with extraordinary evidence and are prepared to testify under oath.”

Stephen Bassett, Executive Director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee, hopes to have 40,000 signatures to Obama by inauguration day.  Britain and France have been more open about this with their citizens than have our government officials.  

Mr Bassett also believes that military and intelligence officials have studied the technology of alien spacecraft, material that would help the US develop new energy resources, as Mr Obama wishes, that will lessen US dependency on Middle Eastern oil.

Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” played an ad by Chambliss’ opponent, Jim Martin, where Chambliss, fighting to retain his Georgia senate seat, says, “We may not be in a recession.  I don’t know what that term means.”  Chambliss says he was quoting Alan Greenspan, even though Greenspan said last April that we’re headed into a recession.  Chambliss then went on to misstate what the technical definition of a recession is.  It is actually two consecutive quarters of negative GDB growth, not two consecutive months as Chambliss states.

h/t Think Progress.