Mitt

Mitt Romney is the first major-party nominee for president who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - the Mormons. Here is a brief primer about Mormon history and beliefs: Who are the Mormons? The LDS Church claims some 14 million members, more than half outside the United States. Most American Mormons live in the West, with more than a third concentrated in Utah. American Mormons are overwhelmingly white (88%) and Republican-leaning (74%), according to the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The presidential campaign has placed a spotlight on the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “The Book of Mormon” musical is pushing the religion to the forefront of pop culture. And with Ann Romney's recent appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” semi-secret Mormon undergarments are no longer so secret. Not that Mrs. Romney's underwear was showing. But the fact that it didn't show under her sleek, knee-grazing skirt stirred up debate among some members of the faithful about whether she was or wasn't wearing the “temple garments” required for most adult Mormons.

Cleanup and confession were the dominant Olympic themes emanating from here Thursday as the Salt Lake Organizing Committee named a new president and an American member of the International Olympic Committee admitted giving a job to the son of an IOC member who resigned last month because of the bribery scandal.

A political system in gridlock, conservatives and progressives at each others' throats, military threats looming in the Middle East: Welcome to the last days of the Roman Republic. In 64 BC, Marcus Cicero, an idealistic outsider and the greatest orator ancient Rome produced, was running for consul - the highest office in the land - in a desperate bid to restore sanity to a corrupt and broken political system. It was a bitter contest to lead the most powerful government on earth, with accusations of incompetence, inconsistency and sexual misdeeds filling the air. Marcus wanted more than anything to save the republic from ruin, but he was hampered by his lowly birth and political naivete.

WASHINGTON -- In an answer to a question during Tuesday night's presidential debate about assault weapons, Mitt Romney said, “we of course don't want to have automatic weapons, and that's already illegal in this country to have automatic weapons.” Fully automatic weapons -- guns that fire continuously when the trigger is held down -- are legal to possess in the United States but are tightly regulated. The National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the Hughes Amendment in 1986 have all placed limits on how automatic guns can be bought and sold, but did not make it illegal to possess them entirely.

President Obama officially launched his re-election campaign with public rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday.With that launch came a re-tooled stump speech which both defended his record in office and laid out the contrast with Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The speeches in both cities were largely the same. Here's a full transcript of his remarks in Columbus, following the acknowledgement of local leaders. OBAMA: "I want to thank so many of our Neighborhood Team Leaders for being here today.  You guys will be the backbone of this campaign.  And I want the rest of you to join a team or become a leader yourself, because we are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way -- door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

This talk of whether the Lakers should re-sign Dwight Howard is a no-brainer. D12 is the superstar the Lakers need to build their future on. Fans and the media have been too hard on a guy recovering from serious back surgery, forced to take a back seat to Kobe, trying to perform in the wrong system while being coached by the wrong coach and all the while trying to live up to Shaq-sized expectations. We all better give him a break or he will take the first offer out of town and leave the Lakers and us fans holding the bag. Gino Cirignano Playa del Rey :: Advice to Dwight Howard: Move on. The Lakers are not the team for you, at least not now. You are a very good player but not a leader like Chris Paul to the Clippers.

For environmentalists, population has long been a problem. Many of the things we do wouldn't cause so much trouble if there weren't so many of us. It's why I wrote a book some years ago called "Maybe One: An Argument for Smaller Families. " Heck, it's why I had only one child. And many of us, I think, long viewed immigration through the lens of population; it was another part of the math problem. I've always thought we could afford historical levels of immigration, but I understood why some other environmentalists wanted tougher restrictions.

In today's world of 24-hour news and 15-second sound bites, every policymaker knows that managing the message is the key to winning over the public. So why has the messaging on behalf of one of the most dramatic public reforms of our lifetimes, the federal Affordable Care Act, been so incompetent? Provisions of the 2010 healthcare reform have already changed the lives of millions of Americans for the better. It has brought insurance coverage to more than 2.6 million previously uninsured young adults, cut prescription costs by a total of $3 billion for millions of seniors, eliminated co-pays on preventive services such as child immunizations and cancer screenings and eliminated annual and lifetime claims caps for more than 80 million policyholders.

It has become fashionable of late to denigrate the importance of Iowa's caucuses, and even New Hampshire's primary, by suggesting neither has been very successful at picking party nominees. Naysayers note that only two of the last five Republican winners in Iowa garnered the party's nomination, while only three in five New Hampshire victors became the party's general-election standard-bearer. However, such analyses err by missing the dramatic joint impact of these two contests. Since 1976, when proliferating primaries and caucuses became the basis for selecting convention delegates, every single nominee but one, in both parties, won either Iowa or New Hampshire.