You gotta have faith

FEMA keeps and promulgates a list of groups that qualify for tax-deductible charitable contributions, to help people who want to donate, but don't know where, to help with things like the Katrina/Rita efforts. One of the organisations is the American Red Cross. (Must be my day for them: http://guambatstew.blogspot.com/2005/09/gloat.html ) The American Red Cross is not a "faith-based" organisation. There is one other group on the list which also is not a faith-based group. Now, FEMA is a government department, but all the rest on that list of helping groups are faith-based.

And, as you would know, Pat Robertson has a great deal of faith, of a particularly strident evangelical Christian brand. (You can get a free history lesson coupled with one of his recent visions here: http://guambatstew.blogspot.com/2005/08/monroe-doctrine.html) It appears one of his organisations is on that FEMA list, and his group has also been the beneficiary of other arrangements and connections, perhaps not all one-way, with various sympatico political bodies. I'm not one to judge the veracity of this, and this may be libelous material, and if so I certainly do here and now renounce it, but there is a story about all of this at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/blumenthal