While I'm ranting...
 

Actually, he hasn't been heard from - either TV or radio - in close to a year.

We may not have found his body yet, but it appears we've taken out his booking agent.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

Presumably by interpreting the Koran differently than the Ayatollah or Ca would.

Yeah, there was no christian violence after the new testament was written. That whole Crusades thing aside. And the Thirty Years War. And the Spanish Inquisition (I bet no one was expecting that).

How many practicing muslims have you known? Seriously. I've known plenty, and even named my son after one. Those I've befriended had a much better perspective on the world than, say, Jerry Falwell.

Dunno if anyone's interested
 

The People For the American Way Foundation has put together a coalition for monitoring polling places in several states, and they're specifically looking for lawyers and law students and people who speak Spanish. If you're interested in volunteering, check out http://www.electionprotectionvolunte...ion/index.cfm. They will be having conference call training for lawyers on October 2 and October 6.

ET link to FAQ question about what they're looking for lawyers to do.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Ty, if you are going to lecture me then you ought to at least firm up the point that you made, and on which we disagreed. I didn't say the FBI had finally established some brilliant method of determining who was funding terrorists. I said that Cat was deported, I believed, because of his donations to charities that support (yes, I should have said "are believed to support") terrorists, and not because of his position on Rushdie, as you suggested.

Nothing you say suggests that he was barred because of what he said about the fatwa against Rushdie. You agree that it was because of donations. You (appropriately) question whether that is too broad a net, but that's different than saying it was because of what he said about Rushdie.

Plus, he did bring it on himself. Anyone who could walk away from that kind of talent should be beaten with sticks. I bet he's not even allowed to watch Harold & Maude, for god's sake.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

Mohammed Finch?

Shit, Sidd. I've told you to get off of this hippy-dippy crap, and into more traditional names. Couldn't you have named the kid Fred, or John, or something?

While I'm ranting...
 

I guess criticism of the Saudi royal family is out of bounds too, then.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

When was he ever? He was born and raised in London by Cypriot and Swedish parents.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

"Cats in the Cradle"??? Damn you, damn you Bob, you vengeful bastard. Now its stuck in my fiucking head. I. Will. Kill. You.

"M'boy, wuz jus like me..." Ah, Dylan Thomas couldn'tve captured the feeling of crusing down the road in your Grand Tourino any better. "Taxi" is the 70s radio equivalent of Don McLean's mean spirited 10 minute assualt on American listeners, "American Pie." Disregarding the fact that Buddy Holly is perhaps one of the most overrated artists of all time, McLean decided to explain to us to for an excruciating ten minutes why Holly's passing was so important. Obviously, it really affected Don. Too bad the rest of humanity didn't give a shit. No, the music didn't die. At least in Taxi's cycle (which might as well be as long as Wagner's the Ring cycle after minute 6), somebody gets stoned and runs into a hottie he used to nail.

I'll give you Father and Son. Its actually a very poignnat song. In fairness to Yusuf, he did have the gift of brevity and imagery in his songs, unlike Chapin, who explained - thus robbing all the soul he could ever hope to infuse in his music - every stitch of every interaction between his characters like faulkner writing an appellate brief to music. But I'll give him 30,000 Lbs of Bananas - I think its amusing. Even if it cruelly trivializes the death of a hapless migrant truck driver. But that was Harry. Spontaneous son of bitch that he was...

When i have a son, I plan to listen to Cats in the Cradle while I rock him to bed. Then I'll coolly step out onto the patio and shoot myself for the betterment of humanity.

Dunno if anyone's interested
 

That's nice and all as far as I'm concerned, but one of the cities this well-known ultra-liberal group "targets" as a site for monitoring due to disproportionate "disenfranchising" is Chicago? Puh-lease.

Who's going to "disenfranchise" them here? The voters are mostly Democrats, the election officials (local, county and state) and judges are almost all Democrats (many polling places have no GOP judges), the cops are mostly Democrats and the court system is almost all Democrats...

For fuck's sake, we don't even disenfranchise the Dead here, why would we do it to the Living?

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

The Cobourn (sp?) point wasn't directed at you, FWIW. Nor did I think you necessarily disagreed with me re donations, but your post was the springboard for mine. Maybe he gave money to bad people in order to fund them to do bad things, but maybe he gave money with the best of intentions to an apparently legitimate charity, without any knowledge of what they later did with it.

Was he really talented, or just a one-hit wonder? I won't pretend to know.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Oops. Nailed for my ignorance about Cat Stevens. I thought he had U.S. citizenship and relinquished it, but maybe I'm thinking of someone else.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

Hamas.

Ty, you would want the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was a threat before they could keep him out. While that may be the standard for convicting someone of a crime and taking away their liberty, that is not the standard to be applied to keep suspect foreigners out of our country. A foreigner has no right to enter our country. It is a privilege we extend to them. We can stop extending it at any time and for any reason we wish. A foreigner doesn't have a constitutional right to enter this country and doesn't have a constitutional right to due process on that decision.

Now once they are already in this country, I agree, the situation is different. They do have some rights. But not before they enter.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

I take back whatever good things I have said in the past about the Swedes.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

Cite, please, you shit-making-up troll.

I certainly didn't say that the government should meet the same evidentiary burden to exclude an foreigner as a jury would require to convict -- I just pointed out that the standard that the government is applying in these means that they may not even know or think that Stevens intended to give money for the wrong reasons. Whatever the foreigners' rights or lack thereof, it's a drag for us citizens who can't be visited by foreigners. For example, I got to send back my tickets to see Cubanismo at Zellerbach Hall this year after they had trouble getting into the country. Maybe some people like Cat Stevens' music as much as I like Cubanism. This is your cue to go off again about how Muslims are the problem, not Cubans.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

And the Norwegians probably aren't on your Ramadan card list ever since the bastards gave Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize, right?

After the liberals ban your Bible, Wal-Mart wants to ban your hate speech
 

Bowing to a barrage of complaints from Jewish groups, retail leader Wal-Mart Inc. has stopped selling "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," an infamous anti-Semitic tract long exposed as fake.

I'm too lazy to google if Mein Kampf is still available.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

Actually Ty, check any story on Yahoo! news on this and they cite "suspicions" of funding Hamas and Sheik Rahman's organization (whatever it's called) as the reason he was on the watch list and was denied entry to Israel in 2000. I can't say that he did this or not, or whether the alleged funding was direct or indirect, but that is the cited reason for whatever its worth.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

The significance of the distinction between whether his money went to the directly or indirectly, and with or without his knowledge, was the whole point of my prior posts. I'll wager that he didn't send money directly to Hamas, but I've already demonstrated how little I know about Cat Stevens.

RNC: Yup, they're coming to get your Bible.
 

Today the RNC acknowledged that they did run the "Liberals will ban your Bible" mailer in Arkansas and W. Va.

Despite its idiocy, GOPers hoped to mobilize the Christian Soldiers to go to the polls to keep gays from burning their Revised King Jameses.

Unfortunately for Bush, it may not be having the effect that it wanted in flyover country.

• But as the appeals become public, they also risk alienating moderate and swing voters.
  
  An editorial on Sept. 22 in The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, for example, asked, "Holy Moley! Who concocts this gibberish?"
  
  "Most Americans see morality more complexly," the editorial said. "Many think a higher morality is found in Christ's command to help the needy, prevent war and pursue other humanitarian goals. Churchgoers of this sort aren't likely to believe childish allegations that Democrats want to ban the Bible."

Even its defenders had a hard time with this one.

• Mr. Parker, of the Interfaith Alliance, said, "I think it is laughable to think that someone could be arrested for reading out loud from the Bible.''
  
  But Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, argued, "We have the First Amendment in this country which should protect churches, but there is no question that this is where some people want to go, that reading from the Bible could be hate speech."
  
  Still, Mr. Land questioned the assertion that Democrats might ban the whole Bible. "I wouldn't say it," he said. "I would think that is probably stretching it a bit far."

"Maybe not the Golden Oldies like Genesis," he added, "but certainly the Liberals are out to get my New Testament and cover them with gay cooties, so we must remain vigilant."

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Hey, I guess if we can forbid Cat Islam from entering the US, then Egypt can keep out Madonna for becoming a Jew *

* Next week, China bans her for Shanghai Surprise

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

I hardly see how a statue in Lubbock qualifies him as overrated.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Can they throw her in jail next time she visits for human rights violations? That thing was a crime against humanity.

On the whole ban-the-bible thing, I've always wanted to vacation somewhere in the rural south, get good and liquored up and pick a fight with some fat hillbilly, just so I could tell him "I'm about to get all Old Testament on your ass".

This has nothing to do with anything, and I return you to your regularly schedule Cat Stevens is/isn't a terrorist sympathizer argument. Happy Friday, all.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

Hey! I know! Let's raise up a crusade and take back the Holy Land (and everything else within 1000 miles of it)!

RNC: Yup, they're coming to get your Bible.
 

Speaking of gibberish

Anyone from the DNC going to step forward and accept responsibility for the mass e-mail to college students with the "George Bush will reinstate the draft and get you!!!!" message?

Or the one from Kerry about "over a million blacks being disenfranchised" in Florida alone.

RNC: Yup, they're coming to get your Bible.
 

I didn't hear about this email. Did you get one?

Did Coltrane forward you his?

RNC: Yup, they're coming to get your Bible.
 

You're going to have to provide a little more detail if you want us to respond, since there aren't enough tinfoil hats to go around.

Why I love Jon Stewart*
 

From Time:

• SOMETIMES IT FEELS AS IF WHEN THE STAKES GET HIGHER, THE QUALITY OF DEBATE GETS LOWER. Oh, I don't think there's any question about that. Now it's gone Malcolm X. It's gone "by any means necessary." I mean, how many campaigns do you remember where Hitler has come up a lot? If I were the Hitler people, I'd be raising a stink. I think he's gotta protect his legacy. He's gotta come out and go, Look, all right, you guys have your flaws but, hey, I was evil, baby!
  
  ****
  
  DOES IT WEIRD YOU OUT THAT PEOPLE TAKE YOU SERIOUSLY AS A POLITICAL PUNDIT? Well, I don't know that that's the case. But I will tell you this: I don't put any stock in political commentating. Political commentators at this point are mostly rewarded by the extremity of their viewpoint. Most of the analysis you see on television doesn't reflect the general sense that the public feels about a situation. It's two sides advocating, with no arbitration.
  
  SO YOU'D LIKE TO SEE MORE ARBITRATION? That's the change I would like to see — that the news media take a more active role in arbitrating, in mediating, in credibility. The way I've always looked at it is, politicians are — When you go to a zoo and you see a monkey throwing its s___, you can't get mad. That's what monkeys do. But you want the media at some point to go, "No! Bad monkey!" And that's really the direction that it should be going in. Not for Republican desires or Democrat desires but for truth.

*Platonically, of course. NTAWWT. Gosh, that makes me miss Penske. [sniff]

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

I will never vote for DiFi because she single handedly killed term limits.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Then your secret love is for Boxer?

[Crush] Whoa. You've got serious voting issues, dude. [/Crush]

http://movies.israel.net/nemo/10.jpg

My sentiments exactly
 

Rich, very rich

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

No, but Polosi is kind of hot for an older broad.

My sentiments exactly
 

I think that belonged in the DiFi thread.

RNC: Yup, they're coming to get your Bible.
 

On which one?

I know Matt, Kevin and Josh like to ignore these Dem gaffes, so someone needs to point them out to you.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

Turns out that if you listen to Tea for the Tillerman backwards, it says "Kill the Infidel."

I read it in a blog, so it must be true.

Moderate Muslim is an Oxymoron
 

You silly ass. Didn't you hear Rummy slip up in front of the Press Club and keep referring to Iraq and Afghanistan as "Phase One?"

RNC: Yup, they're coming to get your Bible.
 

Like you, when you can be bothered to explain what the hell you're talking about.

But he's a strong leader who doesn't pay attention to polls.
 

"I saw a poll that said the right track/wrong track in Iraq was better than here in America."

--President Bush yesterday at his Rose Garden press conference with Prime Minister Allawi

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Why not go all the way to the top? I bet Hillary's not getting much since Bill's heart almost exploded.:D

S_A_M

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

I thought club was male.

Liberals want to ban your Bible.
 

Like she was getting any from Bill before...