Amarillo, Texas is as Normal as Ever

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Faulkner once explained that he set most of his stories in Yoknapatawpha County because there was such an inexhaustible wealth of material contained within that one slice of Mississippi there was simply no reason to branch out. That’s kind of the same way I feel about this 128-word AP news item:

A man who last year swiped a Quran from an Amarillo preacher planning to burn the scripture at a park was arrested at another event featuring the evangelist.

Police say 24-year-old Jacob Isom of Amarillo was planning to disrupt a David Grisham event Sunday that also featured the Rev. Terry Jones, a Florida preacher who gained notoriety last year for threatening to burn a Quran. Grisham, who is running for mayor, was holding a campaign rally.

You probably know Jones as the Quran-burning preacher from Gainesville. You may know Isom as the shirtless skateboarder-turned-Internet-meme who, while shirtless, broke up a planned Quran-burning in Amarillo by filching the Quran. You probably don’t know David Grisham, but he was the preacher whose attempted Quran-burning was broken up by the shirtless Isom at a rally last August. Grisham is also the founder of Repent Amarillo, an organization devoted to waging spiritual warfare against strip clubs, gay bars, and the city of Houston. He also shot Santa Claus.

As you were.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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