In a sweeping victory for common sense and Religious Freedom, the Supreme Court Wednesday affirmed the totally uncontroversial and obvious principle that religious organizations are pretty much above the law, the end, you can all go home now. In its ruling, the Roberts Court invalidated a lawsuit by a former church employee who maintained that she was discriminated against when she was fired by a Lutheran school for violating the strictures of the faith. Justice John Roberts echoed the voice of the majority when he noted:

“The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important, but so, too, is the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith and carry out their mission.” Read more »

This morning, NOJO, our resident blogaholic (the glue who holds Stinque together, in much the same way Santorum binds the evangelical community) took a look at Mitt Romney’s claim to have created 100,000 jobs and concluded that he was a vulture who fired people with good, well paying jobs, replaced those jobs with thankless, low paid retail positions and in the process enriched himself beyond the dreams of avarice.

NOJO was being far too kind.
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“Coming out of Iowa, Santorum lost a little juice.”

-Former GOP chairman, Michael Steele, as heard on Morning Joe today around 7:00

Let’s face it: Michael Steele + Rick Santorum = Formula for Awesome.

In ordinary times, it would strike us as the one of most absurd thing we’ve ever read. But these are not ordinary times, what with a one time GOP Frontrunner asserting that the HPV vaccine casues mental retardation, based solely on the testioney of some random woman she met on the campaign trail, what with a different onetime frontrunner summing up the reasons for his departure from the field by quoting from the Pokemon movie, what with a third onetime GOP frontrunner forgetting, on stage, in the middle of a debate, the name of one of the three Federal agancies he wants to dismantle. Stil, even by these lofty standards, New Ginrich’s latest salvo in the war for the GOP Presidential nomination is laughable in its chutzpah. The New York Times Reports:

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Thanks to a $5 million donation from a wealthy casino owner, a group supporting Newt Gingrich plans to place advertisements in South Carolina this week attacking Mitt Romney as a predatory capitalist who destroyed jobs and communities

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Yeah, I know all of us here are about freedom of conscience, religious tolerance, separation of church and state and a firm belief in the Constitution’s insistence that public office in the United States of America can never be contingent upon the adoption of a religious oath.

But can we at least agree, just this once, that when Mitt Romney makes statements such as:

“[Barack Obama’s policies would] poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God.”

that we are allowed to point out that Romney belongs to a church that demands its adherents wear special magical underwear, that until recently denied African Americans the right to serve as pastors, that believes that the Native Americans peoples are descendants of a lost tribe of Israel, and that holds the doctrine that when he dies, a follower in good standing is made God of his own planet?

Because if Mitt Romney can accuse Barack Obama of wanting to drive God out of America, surely it’s fair to remind voters just what Romney mans by “God.”

Because two can play that game…

Today we shall examine two quotes, side by side. The first, from our esteemed former Speaker of the House of Representatives, and current GOP frontrunner.

Like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR, I would be prepared to take on the judiciary if, in fact, it did not restrict what it was doing.

-Newt Gingrich, announcing his intention to abolish the 9th Federal Circuit court for issuing decisions with which social conservatives (such as himself, presumably.. don’t laugh) disagree.

The second quote is a little less recent:

John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can.

–President Andrew Jackson –whose disdain for Federal Courts Gingrich admires– reacting the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), that denied the Federal Government the right to evict the Cherokee people from their lands. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act after gold deposits were discovered on the Cherokee peoples tribal lands. Though the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional, Jackson ignored the ruling and the eviction proceeded apace. The removal, which ocurred at the height of winter, led to the deaths of well over 4000 Cherokee men, women and children, who were forced to undertake a death march of over 1000 miles to their new reservations in Oklahoma. The march has since come to be known as the Trail of Tears.