We’ve sat down and inked-out a win-win agreement with the U.S. Marine Corps and can now host officially licensed USMC merchandise (be sure to tag your designs with USMCFP). Also, please be sure to follow the new Marine Corps design guidelines – violating products will be shot down – Ooh-Rah!

Those guidelines read as follows:

• No use of an artist's signature or URL (i.e., website address)
• No advertising of any businesses, products, or services of a third party
• No profanity, vulgar language, graphically violent images, or hate language
• No skull imagery
• No blood imagery
• No sexual innuendo, explicit sexual language, images, or graphics
• No reference to drugs, medication, or alcohol
• No derogatory reference to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, mental handicap, obesity or physical impairment
• No political party associations (e.g. Republican, Democratic)
• No Undergarments (you cannot create Marine Corps thongs, boxer shorts, boxer briefs, etc)

It is interesting to note the trademarking of a logo of a branch of the United States government. As a test of political speech (where “political” refers to issues of policy and not partisan electioneering), we’ve designed the following bumper sticker that meets all the above conditions:

If you click on the bumper sticker’s image here and find that the sticker is available for sale, you’ll know that the Marine Corps can handle a little critique. But if the sticker is no longer for sale, you’ll know that there’s an additional rule in play: no bumper stickers that air criticism of the Marine Corps. That would be government suppression of political speech.

Stay tuned to see what happens.

Update: As of July 17, the bumper sticker has not been removed from the Cafepress marketplace. Meanwhile, shirts like the one below that violate the design guidelines in multiple ways are also being allowed:

It will be interesting to see how winnowing proceeds.

But peace? Do horses stand for peace?

Horses have often been used as tools of war. The cavalry would ride their horses to hunt down other human beings. Knights covered their horses in armor as thick as their own.

Today, riding a horse is something different for most people. To ride a horse is to know tranquility, and to build a close, respectful relationship with another being, in spite of its difference. Isn’t that at heart what peace is all about?

It’s this idea that’s captured in the Equestrians for Peace bumper sticker – and in the Peace Horse tshirt as well. In both, the design shows a horse leaving behind a small cloud of peace symbols with every step.

It almost sounds funny, doesn’t it? I mean, come on, the group names itself Hutaree, and is led by people named “Captain Hutaree” and “Guhighllo?” What a laugh, huh?

And then we remember that these reconstructionists, eager to create a kingdom with their understanding of God’s Law, decided that it would be a good idea to kill cops for Christ. Call it like you see it with this bumper sticker against the Hutaree: it adopts the Hutaree badge, right down to the CCR acronym at the bottom. But in this sticker, CCR stands for Crazed Christian Reconstructionism.

Question authority. Question religious violence. Confront the Hutaree and their fellow travelers with this anti-Hutaree sticker.

The shirt features a unique design: The peace sign, not as a solid graphic but as a symbol made up of dolphins swimming free.

The shirt manages to appeal to another progressive value as well: It’s made in the USA in order to avoid association with sweatshops that pollute the environment and abuse workers.

What’s more, every sale of the shirt will benefit both progressive organizations and people working in what some people refer to as “developing countries”. One dollar from every sale is donated to a progressive organization, and another dollar is added to a Kiva fund to provide microloans to people in impoverished communities seeking to establish small enterprises to improve their lives.

This microloan program proves that Americans don’t need to choose between buying goods made in the USA and supporting economic development in less wealthy nations. Sweatshops just don’t provide economic advancement of the quality that microloan investment does.

What these Republicans forget is that anybody can wave the flag. It’s really not a big deal. Anyone can buy a flag lapel pin. Anyone can stick a big American flag outside their homes. It doesn’t mean anything.

Real patriotism is harder than just displaying a flag. Real patriotism means knowing who your representatives in Congress are, and how they’ve voted on issues that matter to you. Real patriotism means calling up elected officials and telling them what you think about what’s they’re doing in your name. Real patriotism means talking back to power, instead of just worshipping it.

But, Republicans understand patriotism on the level of the symbol, and not the meaning that lies beneath the symbol. Fine. If what it’s going to take for us liberals to get Republicans to pay attention to something more than glitzy superficial patriotism is to wave the flag, then we can wave the flag. That’s easy…

…and that’s the point of this bumper sticker. Republicans can wave the flag, but liberals can wave the flag too.