was that a non-denial denial or a non-answer answer or a shut up and leave me alone!

The email I sent him simply asked his opinion on Goode's comments.  It did not express my opinion.  The letterhead still shows him as the Chief Deputy Majority Whip too.  The letter reads:

January 17, 2007 (although I didn't receive it 'til 1/31)

Thank you for contacting me to express your support for allowing elected officials to have their choice of how to take the oath of office.  I appreciate hearing from you and having the benefit of your views.

You may be assured that I will keep your support in mind should legislation pertaining to this issue come before me in the House of Representatives.

Again, thank you for contacting me.  For your convenience, you may receive further information from me on issues important to the 7th District at http://cantor.house.....  Your thought and comments are always welcome.

With kind regards, I am

Sincerely,
Eric Cantor
Member of Congress

Jefferson created his own version of the New Testament by cutting and pasting:http://en.wikipedia....  Apparently it once was routinely given to new members of Congress.  In sum:

Miracles, references to the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and Jesus' resurrection are notably absent from the Jefferson Bible. The Bible begins with an account of Jesus's birth without references to angels, genealogy, or prophecy. The work ends with the words: "Now, in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed." There is no mention of the resurrection.

Here are Jefferson's reasons for doing so:

In extracting the pure principles which he [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurgos, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of ? or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.

One Harper's writer said: Jefferson believed that an authentic Christianity had long ago been hijacked by the Christian Church. The teachings of its founder had become so distorted as to make "one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites."

But then I don't expect any member of Congress (now that John Danforth is gone) to know anything about Biblical history.

When he took the oath of office, he didn't place his hand on anything. All it got him was a spot on Mt. Rushmore next to.......wait for it.......Thomas Jefferson.

Virgil is sticking Martinsville for around $145,000.

Article is in the Roanoke Times.

Excellent diary.

for that clever pun :)

The real issue is what Virgil said about Muslims.  Do they agree with his points that Muslims are going to swamp the country and his repeated insistence that a Muslim immigrant is akin to a terrorist immigrant? 

Anyway, thanks for these important updates to the Virgil Vigil - I'll update that later with these continuing "no comment" statements.

Thanks for the post!  It's great to get her (and every elected official) on the record ... like her vote against stem cell research ... and voting against the minimum wage before she flip-flopped and voted for it ... 

I really can't say if I will or won't ... we've done a lot of analysis of the prior race ... keeping options open ... additional input, thoughts, and analysis are always welcome

I guess it really wasn't.  That was just a way of saying: screw Muslims, the Koran, and religious freedoms as understood by the Founding Fathers.

If I'm reading between the lines correctly Jo Ann is saying that she wants to have a religious leader head the government and for the Constitution to be revised with an eye towards the mores of the 1st century B.C.