Reverend Terry Jones has blood on his hands…

Reverend Terry Jones and 30 constituents of the Dove World Outreach Center Church in Gainesville, Florida held a “trial” on March 20th as part of their “International Judge the Quran Day.” After a five-hour process, the Quran was found guilty and sentenced to be burned. The church confirmed that a picture on their website of a book in flames in a small portable pit was the Quran.

Last year when Rev. Jones first announced his plans to burn the holy book to “stop Islam” many U.S. leaders spoke out against the act. General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said that Jones’s plan“could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort”. Defense Secretary Robert Gates personally called the Reverend to ask him not to do it. Obviously Jones ignored the pleas to demonstrate tolerance and the warnings of increased violence and went through with his hateful plan anyway.

Three mullahs seeking revenge for the burning at the church, urged thousands of protesters to take their frustration to the streets which eventually led them to taking out that frustration on a U.N. compound in North Afghanistan today, resulting in the deaths of at least 12 people. 7 of the dead were U.N. workers from Nepal, Romania, Sweden and Norway according to United Nations officials in New York, while 5 were Afghans. There were early reports, later denied by Afghan officials, that at least two of the dead had been beheaded. 27 people were arrested on charges of inciting violence and are suspected of possibly being a part of the Taliban.

The Reverend doesn’t believe he bares any responsibility for the violence saying “We must hold these countries and people accountable for what they have done as well as for any excuses they may use to promote their terrorist activities”. Even after being warned what his burning of the Quran could lead to in the Muslim world, the Reverend went ahead and carried his plan out anyway. Knowing that those who use Islam for their own means would use something like this to prop up the hatred they promote, the Reverend did it anyway. Knowing that his savior Jesus Christ would never endorse such a hateful act, the Reverend did it anyway. The Afghans who took innocent peoples lives today will hopefully pay for their horrendous actions. Burning someone’s holy book is asinine but killing someone else over it is obviously stupid beyond definition.

Let’s all just hope that the next time the Rev. decides to poke the hornet’s nest it’s not from 1,000s of miles away across an ocean from the safety of his little bubble in Gainesville Florida, but up close and personal. What do you say Reverend? Want to hold Islam responsible for it’s actions? How about a trip over to the Middle East? I’m sure there’s a ton of Qurans over there you could burn. I’ll even pay for your ticket, one way of course.

GOP looks to add environment to list of casualties in budget battle

The battle of what to cut and what not to cut continues to rage between Democrats and Republicans over our governments budget. It appears though that both parties are tentatively working on a deal that would see cuts coming in the amount of 33 billion over the next 6 months, a little more than half of what the Republican controlled House recently passed.

According to some anonymous Democratic lawmakers, part of that deal would see President Obama going along with some GOP proposals that will roll back key environmental protections. Some of the proposed cuts would stop the government from being able to regulate greenhouse gases, cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay and shutting down mountaintop mines. What’s worse is the President’s round about way of agreeing to a bill that he knows will anger a large portion of his liberal base. According to members of the Congressional Black Caucus the administration stated that House GOP proposals restricting the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate would have to make it into the final bill, so as to control how the White House’s position will appear. If all this is true it looks like Obama is ready, willing and able to once again give his base another reason to be disappointed in him, but then again in his desperate bid to appear centrist for the next election what’s one more disappoint for those who worked so tirelessly to get him in office in the first place?