Steorts provides us with his thought experiment as a kind of “so there” to Christians who find Mormonism unbelievable. I would suggest that Mr. Steorts has put his question forward in a way that misses the most important parts of why Christians believe what they do.

First off, don’t be offended, Christians think that every religion other than Judaism is completely unfounded. The Christian faith makes exclusive claims. Let’s avoid the side issues and go to the central feature. Christians believe their faith for one simple, at least somewhat rationalistic reason. They think that Jesus REALLY did rise from the dead. There are evidences that explain why Christians think it happened.

1. The historical existence of Jesus and his crucifixion by the Roman Empire are not seriously disputed.

2. Something significant happened to alter the behavior of his disciples after his death. They were quivering jello before he died. Afterward, they went out and established the Christian church at the price of persecution and death. How to account for this transformation if he was just rotting in the ground and that was it?

3. Contemporaneously to the period when Jesus was killed, Paul boldly claimed that the resurrected Christ had been seen by many witnesses (1 Corinthians 3-6 referencing some 500 witnesses). Why put that out there if easily disproven?

4. If Paul were lying about the witnesses, then no one would pay any attention to him and the cult would fail as did virtually all others. Instead, the church grew at a startling rate, despite the fact of intense persecution that grew with time.

We could go on in this fashion. I don’t claim that this constitutes a bullet-proof case for the resurrection of Christ and the truth of the Christian religion, but I do claim that it provides some basis for a rational belief. At the same time, I claim that Mormonism, Islam, and a number of other faiths cannot hope to rise to anything like this level of evidence. In short, the Christian faith was based on a claimed fact that could theoretically be proven false. That is not the case with Mormonism. Steorts makes a mistake in conflating the two as though they occupy similar ground with respect to reason.

MIKE HUCKABEE ON FNS. Host Chris Wallace opened this morning’s edition of FOX News Sunday by talking to 2008 GOP Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. He asked him about that 1992 survey publicized by an opposing candidate in which Huckabee talks about quarantining patients with AIDS. Huckabee denied calling for such a quarantine; rather, he said they should look at established medical protocol rather than “political correctness.” He said that his answer was based on our limited knowledge of AIDS in 1992, and Wallace countered that the CDC had published in 1985 that AIDS could not be transmitted by casual contact. Huckabee noted that there was the case of the girl who was infected by her dentists, so we weren’t sure. Huckabee pointed out that he had two friends die of AIDS, including one who might have been a homosexual.

Wallace asked Huckabee about religion and public office. Huckabee said that the question should be: does he say and believe what he’s always said and believed? Mormonism, Huckabee argued, should not be an issue.

JOHN MCCAIN ON FNS. Next up for Wallace was John McCain, who argued against torture.

Wallace brought up that “neocon” Bob Kagan had averred that this latest NIE had destroyed U.S. credibility abroad. McCain argued that it was the Europeans who were skeptical of the latest NIE, as they’ve seen for themselves what Iran is doing.

Wallace brought up a spurious attack on McCain by Mitt Romney. Evidently, Romney is mailing fliers which claim that McCain wants to give Social Security to illegal immigrants, which Wallace pointed out was not true. McCain pointed out that Romney has been all over the map with his stated policy positions, and he’ll have to explain that to voters. McCain suggested that Romney was concerned about the polls in New Hampshire, and he reaverred that he would win New Hampshire.

Wallace asked McCain why none of the “big five” Republican candidates seemed to be catching fire in the imaginations of the voters, and McCain suggested that this was because there was “no establishment candidate.”

JOE BIDEN ON TW. To host George Stephanopoulos, Joe Biden declared that Iran is a “problem,” not something which requires the use of military force. He said that the Europeans were “embarrassed” by the United States. He said that there was “no such thing as a surgical strike” against Iran’s nuclear program, but the real problem is not Iran. The real problem, Joe Biden said, is Pakistan.

Joe Biden called for a special council to investigate the destruction of the interrogation tapes.

Joe Biden told Steph with a straight face that 20% - 30% of what we pay for a barrel of oil is because of President Bush’s rhetoric. Steph challenged this slightly, but he let Biden sputter and his claim remain.

Asserted Joe Biden: “Our credibility internationally has been absolutely devastated, absolutely devastated.” For the duration of the ABC interview, Biden moved back and forth between this theme and another that we still had credibility which President Bush would absolutely devastate if he did this or that of which Joe Biden did not approve.

“This Administration is out of control,” Joe Biden observed in an act of projection.

Host George Stephanopoulos brought up that Newt Gingrich thinks that the latest NIE is an act of sabotage by disgruntled former State Department employees. Joe Biden quipped: “I like Newt Gingrich I really do but who are you gonna believe?”

Steph showed a poll showing Biden in the law single digits in Iowa. Joe Biden smiled, cocksure: “I’m everybody’s second choice.” With a broad smile on his face, he promised Steph that he would drop out of the race if he did as badly as the polls indicate.

JOE BIDEN: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S SECOND CHOICE.

NEWT ON TW. Host George Stephanopoulos next spoke to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Newt said that the NIE was the product of three former State Department employees who do not like the Bush Administration. He said that the entire report was “mushed together” and didn’t say what our headlines assert. He said that the information came from a defector who could be a plant.

Newt said that we did not need a special counsel to investigate the destruction of the interrogation tapes, as the FBI could do a fine job.

Advice for Hillary? Newt said that Hillary should recruit women, telling them that she was their best hope for a female President and that such a President (Hillary, woman) would be the historic “change.” Hillary herself must become the answer to Obama’s Oprah.

RUDY GIULIANI ON MTP. Tim Russert’s guest on Meet the Press was 2008 GOP hopeful Rudy Giuliani part of his “meet the candidates” shtick. Russert opened by showing him the NBC/Mason-Dixon polls which shows Mike Huckabee crushing the nearest opposition, 32% to 20%, with Rudy a distant fifth place with 5-perecent. Russert asked, “Is that a problem?” Rudy chuckled tightly and said that he wished Russert had shown Florida, where he has an 18-point lead. He pointed out that some polls show him ahead and that polls show that he’s leading in most States. He promised to “work hard, maybe surprise a few people in Iowa, in New Hampshire.” He’s basing his campaign on doing well in Florida.

He said that if he wins “a couple” early “Florida for sure” then he goes into February 5th with leads in New York, Illinois, California, New Jersey, Connecticut “YEAAARRRRGH!” (Blue States, the lot of them.)

Rudy says he’s “in,” even if he loses Iowa and New Hampshire.

Russert asked Rudy about the latest NIE. He asked if it removed the option of a pre-emptive military strike against Iran. Rudy said that it did not, as everything must remain on the table. The NIE admits that it might not be correct. He pointed out that Iran has shown that it is susceptible to the pressure of the threat of the use of military force, as the NIE said that it backed off its nuclear program in 2003, the year the United States militarily deposed Saddam Hussein. They realized that they could be susceptible to the same thing.

Russert asked skeptically if Rudy were trying to claim that Iran stopped its nuclear program because we deposed Saddam Hussein. Rudy answered no, but we have to look at what was going on in 2003. If the report is correct, and he reminded Russert of the NIE’s own caveats, Iran stopped its program at the same time as we deposed Saddam, acted in Afghanistan, and Libya’s Qadaffi at long last gave up. The pressure was on. He suggested using the NIE with our allies, showing them that the pressure worked.

Russert quoted Giuliani advisor Norm Podhoretz as arguing that we should bomb Iran ASAP and that he was pretty sure Rudy agreed with him. Rudy said that his opinion was what he had just said to Russert, that the use of force was a last resort but should not be taken off the table.

Russert’s questions often bordered on childish, such as the one about cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar, but Giuliani was an adult. I’m not a Giuliani supporter, per se, but he came across as prepared to be President. (Rudy was splendiferous, and anyone who disagrees is not to be trusted as a human being whose soul is not a clod. Scratch that. I’m teasing.)

ROCKEFELLER AND HAGEL ON FTN. Host Bob Schieffer, for this week’s Face the Nation on CBS, offered us two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee: Democrat Jay Rockefeller and Republican Chuck Hagel.

Rockefeller said that it was a very good question: Why were the interrogation tapes destroyed? He speculated that there might have been things on the tapes which they didn’t want anyone to see or that they might have wanted the discussion to be dropped. Rockefeller said that he found out in 2006 that the interrogation vid had been destroyed.

Rockefeller said that he cannot say anything about what he’s learned about torture on the Intelligence Committee not even with “Chuck” though he did say that he was disturbed by it. The committee is going to call FBI Director Michael Hayden.

Hagel said that there was no justification for destroying the tapes. He said that everyone has confirmed to him including a Washington Post story that torture “doesnt work” in interrogation. If it doesn’t work, he asked aloud, why are we doing it? We are saying what to the world? That the Army field manual applies only to the Army, not to the CIA and those in the field? Hagel wants to know “how far this goes up in the White House.”

Schieffer asserted that Harriet Miers was told about it and simply asked them to stop it but didn’t tell the President. Hagel is convinced that “senior members of the White House” had to have been told, what with it “rattling around” for years.

Schieffer wondered it there were other tapes, and Rocky didn’t know. He finds it curious that they started taping in 2002 and stopped it in 2002.

Rocky and Chuck want Congress to investigate the tapes, not a special council.

On Iran, Hagel explained that intelligence is not a tidy, little box; rather, it is a mosaic. The latest NIE is the product of 16 agencies coming to a conclusion. He argued that Iran was still dangerous.

Schieffer said that this was the opposite of what the Administration has been telling us for three years.

Rocky said that “diplomacy can work,” citing North Korea as his example.

PERVEZ ON LE. Wolf Blitzer’s first guest on CNN’s Late Edition was Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, an interview taped “this weekend.” He was wearing a three-piece suit, tan with a green-ish tie, but am I color blind?

No medals.

Blitzer asked him if it would be okay if the U.S. acted on “actionable intelligence” and authorized US forces to march into Pak to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Pervez did not agree, saying that we share intelligence and “within Pakistan, the Pakistani forces will act.”

Blitzer suggested that various people in Pakistan’s military and intelligence are sympathetic to al Qaeda, and Pervez took very strong exception. “We are suffering, here,” and he cannot imagine anyone sympathizing with those who are killing their brothers.

Pervez said that there has not been a failure of Pakistani intelligence; rather, it is a failure of combined U.S. and Pakistani intelligence.

Those who criticize, he said, do not understand the situation on the ground.

Well, Musharraf was defensive.

Wolf quoted Afghan President Hamid Karzai talking about terrorists crossing from Pakistan into Afghanistan and he tried to goad Musharraf into attacking Karzai. Pervez explicitly refused the bait and speculated that the terrorists were crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan. “The real backbone of everything that’s happening here is in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan.”

After a commercial break, Musharraf pledged that the Pakistani elections in January will be “free and fair.” Blitzer quoted Benazir Bhutto and Nawar Sharif, the two ex-prime ministers, as having declared that the elections will be “rigged: (Sharif’s word). Musharraf talked about how he’s changed the law to make the elections more fair, which things we not done during the tenure of the former prime ministers. Musharraf said that they were “preparing for defeat.” He suggested that they should “accept defeat.”

Wolf kept asking him if Bhutto and Sharif would be allowed to run. Musharraf pointed out that the media in the West treats every country like a dictatorship. He argued that there is a system in Pakistan, basically a rule of laws and not men. It is not his place to allow or to disallow anyone from running for anything.

There was an old photograph behind Musharraf’s right shoulder, under a lamp.

Musharraf said that he had to remove the former chief justice of the Pakistani high court, “and he’s not coming back.” He asked us to “please understand us.” He would like to be interviewed by all media organizations, see the environment on the ground in Pak and don’t judge him by the situation on the ground in the United States.

JOHN BOEHNER ON LE. Wolf’s next guest on LE was House GOP leader John Boehner. This one was live.

Wolf wondered if our aid to Pak were well spent, and Boehner suggested that it was, although what has been happening in the past few months has been “troubling.” He expects the State of Emergency to “go away” soon.

Blitzer asked him about the NIE on Iran. Boehner wondered how we went from a dangerous, nearly nuclear armed Iran one moment to one without nukes now. Either he doesn’t have confidence in what the NIE told him a few months ago, he said, or he doesn’t have confidence in what they’re saying now. He doesn’t understand why it has changed so dramatically.

Boehner suggested that Iran was still dangerous, “its leadership on the border of being crazy.”

Blitzer asked him about the CIA destroying the vid in 2005. Boehner said that the-then CIA chief, the President, and Congress were not aware that this happened. He wants to get to the bottom of it. Wolf said that Biden had called for a special council, and Boehner thought there was no need for that.

Boehner accused Congressional Democrats of “blackmailing the President” for domestic spending when we need money to support our troops in Iraq. (It’s the latest Dem bill.) Blitzer played a clip of Steny Hoyer asserting that Bush has borrowed more money from foreign governments than anyone else combined. Blitzer argued that the Dems want only $11-billion. Boehner said that $11-billion was a lot of money. Blitzer argued that the Republicans had increased the national debt. He accused the Republicans of seeking to shut down the government and defunding the war simply because they refuse to give the Democrats a measly $11-billion. Boehner said that the money was a waste and they have to reduce spending, streamline the government.
=====

Now have it.

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.

Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

So this is all very interesting indeed. And it now begs the question: Who amongst those now denouncing the Administration for allegedly using waterboarding as an interrogation technique was demonstrating “outright support” for the technique back when they were first briefed about the issue? Oh, the story says that at the time of the briefing, there was deep concern about another imminent terrorist attack, but the Bush Administration was at least equally concerned and no one has given them a free pass on the issue of torture despite the existence of that concern. And while notes may not have been taken, the briefings were described as “detailed and graphic,” so one pretty much had to be a vegetable not to understand what was going on. Even if the briefings were vague on the specifics of waterboarding, all of the reporting on the issue after the fact should have prompted at least a few of these latter-day critics of the practice to come out, admit that they were briefed on the issue back in 2002 and say something along the lines of “at the time, I didn’t have a full awareness of what waterboarding was, now I do, I’m appalled, blah blah blah.” Thus far, we haven’t even gotten that and if we do, it will only be because this story has now come out.

And of course, many of the Democrats who had been briefed on the issue of waterboarding–and who showed “outright support” for the practice–were the same ones who not only castigated the Administration for its alleged use of the practice and who demanded that Michael Mukasey render a quasi-legal decision during his confirmation hearings on the acceptability of waterboarding. The mind reels. We have the following weak tea from the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

Pelosi declined to comment directly on her reaction to the classified briefings. But a congressional source familiar with Pelosi’s position on the matter said the California lawmaker did recall discussions about enhanced interrogation. The source said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage — they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice — and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. This is one of the lamest attempts to deny knowledge of any controversial policy I have come across in a long time. Just what was Pelosi thinking? Did she believe that it was okay to remain silent simply because waterboarding allegedly had not been practiced at the time? And again, now that waterboarding has allegedly been practiced, why hasn’t Pelosi come out with an admission that she was briefed on the issue and a mea culpa stating that she should have objected to the practice at the time? Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that consistency is never a virtue.

And then we have this, from the former ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman:

Harman, who replaced Pelosi as the committee’s top Democrat in January 2003, disclosed Friday that she filed a classified letter to the CIA in February of that year as an official protest about the interrogation program. Harman said she had been prevented from publicly discussing the letter or the CIA’s program because of strict rules of secrecy.

“When you serve on intelligence committee you sign a second oath — one of secrecy,” she said. “I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything.”

You know something? I am somewhat sympathetic to this. But the oath of secrecy does not entail an oath to not work against the implementation of a policy one finds offensive. Other than filing an official protest, what did Harman do to scuttle the practice of waterboarding behind the scenes? What did Pelosi do?

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Say this for John McCain. At least he understands when consistency might be a virtue:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former Vietnam War prisoner who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination, took an early interest in the program even though he was not a member of the intelligence committee, and spoke out against waterboarding in private conversations with White House officials in late 2005 before denouncing it publicly.

I have a lot of problems with McCain’s policy platform on various issues, but when it comes to national security matters, he has been utterly principled and honorable. The passage above speaks very well of his sense of intellectual curiosity and his sense of virtue.

As for the rest of the people discussed in the story: Meh. The next time they say anything about the issue of waterboarding, this story should come up and they should be made to answer certain questions. They got some ’splainin’ to do.

Looking for a bottom line, here’s as good as I can give you.

The data covers the following swing states, OH, MO, WI, MN, IA, NM, OR, and VA. The non-swing states covered are CA, NY, KY, AL, KS, MA and WA. There is some FL data but not for all candidates so it is not included here.

The swing states have 91 total electoral votes. Here is the head-to-head results of those 91 EVs:*

McCain 52
Clinton 39

McCain 66
Obama 18

Giuliani 11
Clinton 67

Giuliani 46
Obama 4

Romney 0
Clinton 91

Romney 8
Obama 83

Huck 11
Clinton 80

Huck 0
Obama 91

*Note 4 ties make some numbers add up to less than 91. Specifically, Obama-McCain in OR, Obama-Rudy in NY, Obama-Rudy in MN, and Clinton-Rudy in VA.