Since I've been busy with Dean Esmay, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, I tagged in my partner Jon Rowe to put the Worldnutdaily's usual nonsense about church and state into a figure four logic lock. Count the pin, 1 2 3. He also hits one of my major pet peeves in this post about the tired cliche "we're not a democracy, we're a republic." Whenever I hear it, I assume that the person speaking is just repeating a phrase without any understanding of what it actually means. As Rowe points out, it isn't an either/or situation. A nation can be both a democracy and a republic because a republic is a specific form of democracy.