Month: August 2006

In response to a recent incident in which blogger Raed Jarrar was forced to take off a shirt with Arabic writing on it or miss his flight at JFK, a T-shirt has been released:

It says “I AM NOT A TERRORIST.”

They can be ordered here, with all profits going to the ACLU.

Katherine Harris, the woman who handed the election to George Bush in 2000 (as Florida’s Secretary of State….despite the fact that she campaigned actively for Bush), received her Republican party loyalty payback, and was elected to Congress.

Now, she’s running for Senate.

In an interview published Thursday with the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention, she said, among other things:

“we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.”

“And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s certainly isn’t what God intended.”

” If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin. They can say that abortion is alright. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong. …”

If you want to read the whole disgusting thing, click here.

Luckily, even her fellow Republicans don’t think she can win against Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in November. Her fundraising has lagged, her campaign workers have been quitting by the truckload, and she received $32,000 in illegal campaign contributions, which has been all over the news. So, naturally, she’s appealing directly to the American Taliban for a last-ditch effort.

I wish I could be confident that it won’t work.

Bush, away on yet another vacation (this time to the “Shh-I’m-Really-Not-A-Texan-But-A-Scion-Of-The-Old-East-Coast-Establishment” family homestead in Maine), tried to head off the inevitable “Fiddling while Rome burns” criticism by meeting with the families of five Maine soldiers who died in Iraq. Here’s the report from the Kennebec Journal, a local paper.

From the paper:

One anti-war widow said she used the opportunity to voice her objections to Bush’s policies. “I said it’s time to stop the bleeding,” said Hildi Halley, whose husband, Army National Guard Capt. Patrick Damon, died June 15 in Afghanistan. “It’s time to swallow our pride and find a solution.”

She said Bush responded by saying “there was no point in us having a philosophical discussion about the pros and cons of the war.”

Nice, eh?

Greg Sargent, a blogger, interviewed Mrs. Halley, who went into much more detail regarding what she said to Bush, and his response.

“…as President, you’re here to serve the people. And the people are not being served with this war.'”

She added: “I told him, `It’s time as a Christian to put our pride behind us.”

Thank you, Mrs. Halley.