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Katherine Harris became famous in 2000, when, as Florida’s top election official, she did everything in her power to throw the presidential election to George W. Bush. (Her best efforts weren’t enough, and the Supreme Court had to step in to stop the counting of actual votes cast by actual voters lest Bush fall behind.)

Now she is a member of Congress and a candidate for U.S. Senate. From the Orlando Sentinal:

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said this week that the separation of church and state is “a lie,” that God did not intend for the United States to be a “nation of secular laws” and that a failure to elect Christians to political office will allow lawmaking bodies to “legislate sin.”

…

Separating religion and politics is “so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers,” Harris said.

We know it’s not the voters who choose them in Katherine Harris’ world.

“Our rulers” may seem like strange terminology in a democracy, but it just flows off the tongue if you don’t believe in democracy.

Harris isn’t the only right-winger to believe there’s no separation of church and state. Here’s Jan LaRue, Chief Counsel of Concerned Women for America:

Well, you know, the interesting thing is, at the founding of our country, there were state churches. That’s what it’s all about in a country where the people get to rule, and if you’re in a state you don’t like, you get to move to another state.

And Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

government — however you want to limit that concept — derives its moral authority from God. It is the “minister of God” with powers to “revenge,” to “execute wrath,” including even wrath by the sword

And Thomas Jefferson:

governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

Wait a second! How’d he get in here?

Via Crooks and Liars: Bruce Schneier on what the terrorists want:

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

…

[O]ur job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

George W. Bush said this week that we’re not leaving Iraq, “so long as I’m the President”. Could this old cartoon (the top one) hold the explanation? Is Iraq payback for something that never happened?