This is what happens when a political apparatchik forgets her cover story and speaks her mind:

(Via TPM.)

Peter Watson’s piece in today’s Times – Here’s an improvement on democracy – has a lousy title but is spot-on otherwise:

The inconvenient truth is that the West should be exporting secularism around the world before it exports democracy. Democracy implies not just one person one vote but – no less important – that the political process proceeds by rational means, by argument, by persuasion, and is based on knowledge that is as objective, as scientific, as one can make it. The objective knowledge has to come first.

In other words, secularism is a necessary precondition for effective democracy. Without it, nascent democracies rarely survive.

Here’s Hitch, in characteristically forthright style, shredding “Mitt Romney’s windy, worthless speech”. Money quote:

A long time ago, Romney took the decision to be a fool for Joseph Smith, a convicted fraud and serial practitioner of statutory rape who at times made war on the United States and whose cult has been made to amend itself several times in order to be considered American at all. We do not require pious lectures on the American founding from such a man…