Our Latest Stories:

Here’s how our Pumpkin for Obama T-Shirt for Kids appears in our Skreened shop:

And here’s how the kids’ shirt (made sweatshop-free in Los Angeles, California and printed sweatshop-free in Columbus, Ohio) looks in its natural habitat:

As people lined up for a Columbus, Ohio campaign rally featuring Barack Obama on October 10 2008, t-shirt hawkers lined up right next to them. Here’s what I saw:

Nice design! T-shirt made in sweatshop-notorious Haiti.

Hope that it’s made in sweatshop-free conditions. Believe what you want. Know that this one is made in Haiti, too, and sold on the cheap for a reason. Figure it out.

This t-shirt complete with flying birds and royal lions is made in sweatshop haven Nicaragua.

These aren’t necessarily official Obama campaign products, but they are piggybacking on his popularity, selling a message of progressivism on a decidedly unprogressive product. That’s not the change I believe in.

People in high offices on Wall Street, and financial elites in Washington D.C. like Ben Bernanke, have been talking about “grave threats to financial stability” for the last three weeks. Only people so removed from the everyday reality most Americans have to deal with could talk about “grave threats”. The threats are not grave. The economic reality is grave, and it’s been grave for a long while.

We’ve been dealing with the grave economic reality wrought by elites like Bernanke and Paulson for a long time, and we’re used to the challenges. To see these people freak out about their economic problems, while they’ve still got millions to spare even in the worst case scenario, is absurd, but it isn’t at all amusing.

Essentially, Wall Street’s economic crisis has been caused by fear: The fear of rich people that they might lose some of their riches to someone else. They’re seizing up. They’re refusing to lend a hand. They’re acting selfishly, and they’re depending upon us working Americans to bail them out.

The rest of us have been dealing with dwindling wealth for a long time, and there’s an old saying that keeps us going: I’ve been down so long that down don’t worry me. Here’s what it means, Wall Street: When times are bad, you don’t cower in a corner being afraid, because it’s not an option. You don’t pull the sheets up over your head and pretend that you’re still asleep. You don’t moan and cry about it like Paulson and Bernanke. You get up in the morning, and you keep on going, and you learn to live with it, because that’s the only thing that you can do, and you get over your worries, because worrying doesn’t make anything better.

Grow up and deal with the problems, Wall Street, and this financial mess will be over a lot sooner than if you keep on fussing about losing that little bit of your wealth that’s at risk. Put on your pinstripes and get to work.

An organizer with the Columbus, Ohio GOP just emerged from the Capital Center where John McCain and Sarah Palin will appear later today. She came bearing a plie of t-shirts for sale at $20 apiece and told the fifty or so of us in line (with less than an hour to go before doors open) that proceeds would go to “bringing young people to Ohio to canvass, because numbers in that are not great.”

The inspiration came, of course, from Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric in which Palin declared, “It’s very important, when, when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and, and, uh, comes into the airspace of the United States America, where, where do they go? It’s Alaska! It’s just right over the border.”

The minute the idea of Alaskan airspace entered my head, a certain unintended implication sprang to mind:

After the initial inspiration, the final design. It doesn’t take a super genius to figure out what it means, so be careful not to wear it around Sarah Palin, she just might get offended… after thinking about it for a while.

Alaskan airspace indeed.

Overheard in line for the McCain-Palin rally here in Columbus, Ohio (110 minutes until doors open and twelve people are in line… Quel enthusiasm):

“I don’t know who they have advising her, but whoever it is, they really need to give her some new advice. I’m sure if she becomes President she’ll be surrounded with some great aides.”

Postscript: The people staffing the merchandising booth I’m standing next to say they’re licensed with the McCain campaign. The shirts they’re selling are made by Gildan.

Sarah Palin says that she has special foreign policy expertise because she lives in Alaska, which is next to Russia, except for all that water between the two countries, what with that maritime thing and all.

Other people say that Sarah Palin isn’t ready to become President in the likely eventuality that John McCain dies in the next four years.

Help build common ground with this campaign tshirt, which suggests that Sarah Palin go back to doing what she does best - standing in Alaska, watching the skies just in case Putin rears his head into our airspace.

Help Sarah Palin see Russia again. Send her back to Alaska, where she can conduct her foreign policy studies without bothering the rest of us.

Also available as a bumper sticker and a political button.

For nearly two years now, we’ve been designing and selling sweatshop-free t-shirts through Skreened, a print-on-demand shop in Columbus, Ohio. All of the shirts come from American Apparel, which does vertically-integrated shirt production on the up-and-up in Los Angeles. That’s an ethical alternative to the t-shirts you see made in China or Indonesia, made using prison labor or child labor paying the dirt-poor wage that is necessary to make shipping a shirt across the vast Pacific Ocean economically rewarding.

Well, happy day, Skreened is taking another step forward. They’ve just opened their first brick-and-mortar store:

Situated at 3327 North High Street in Columbus, Ohio, the Skreened store features a full array of American Apparel shirts for men, women, boys, girls and even babies in a variety of colors and a surprising array of organic fibers. You can walk right in, browse the full catalog of thousands of shirt designs, pick out just the right color, size and style of t-shirt and have your shirt printed for you right there on the spot. You can even design your own shirt right there too. The approach is kind of like doing a paint-your-own-pottery, except on a t-shirt.

In beta development at the store is a multi-touch screen (or is that “skreen?”) installed in the storefront window to let you make a t-shirt order even when the Skreened shop is closed. Pretty spiffy stuff.

Sarah Palin slammed community organizers as a way to get to Barack Obama this week, saying, “I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities!”

Har, har, chortle chortle. That’s funny, until you realize what a mess Sarah Palin made out of her responsibilities as mayor. When she became mayor, Wasilla had a balanced budget. When Palin left the position of mayor, Wasilla was in deficit spending, and tens of millions of dollars in debt. This debt came in spite of the fact that Sarah Palin fired people and cut important municipal services left and right. Sarah Palin didn’t live up to her mayoral responsibilities.

As community organizer, Barack Obama had a lot of responsibilities, including the burden of being responsible for helping people find work and get back on their feet again in the face of abandonment by corrupt business interests. Barack Obama left his community better than he found it. Sarah Palin did not.

Oh, but all of this is just so much babble to right wing Sarah Palin supporters. They’re deaf to reason and blind to facts. They’re looking for some entertainment, and some zippy one-liners to help them decide who to vote for.

So, let’s give them a zippy one-liner. Jesus was a community organizer, and Pontius Pilate was a governor.

I guess that shows them!

Well, I know it’s not a logical argument. Unfortunately, right wing evangelicals don’t have much respect for logical arguments. They like quoting scripture - so, okay, let’s give ‘em scripture.

It dazzles them. It hypnotizes them. Say “Jesus” in combination with a political argument, and an evangelical Sarah Palin supporter is defenseless. You know it’s true, so use this Achilles heel to advantage, with the bumper sticker and t-shirt you see here.

Seriously, let’s have a little compassion for poor old Sarah Palin. She was just reading from a script. It’s not as if she thought up that insult to community organizers herself.

Vote for the McCain-Palin ticket, and you’ll be voting to continue the flood of manufacturing out of the United States. John McCain and Sarah Palin support special tax breaks for corporations that move their factories outside of the borders of the USA, an abandonment of American working families.

As mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin encouraged big box stores like Wal-Mart to come to the little village, ruining main street businesses, and selling stuff made in outsourced sweatshops in China. Palin would work with McCain to do to all America what was done to Wasilla.

We need to contain that damage, and put Sarah Palin back in the arena of small town politics, where she can’t do much harm. Wasilla needs its village idiot. In 2008, let’s send Sarah Palin home.

The tshirt you see here, by the way, is made in the United States of America by American Apparel and printed in the USA by Skreened. The people at Skreened and American Apparel aren’t just complaining about the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas. They’re doing something about it - they’re manufacturing!

Americans are losing jobs, losing homes, and losing hope. If we’re going to turn this around, we need to say no to the more-of-the-same campaign of McCain-Palin, but we also need to vote with our wallets, and support made-in-the-USA businesses like Skreened.

Republicans are all agog over Sarah Palin. They’re practically drooling. It isn’t for the policies of Palin, though, or the substance of Sarah, so much a it is for her image. It’s Republican identity politics at its worst. They say that Sarah Palin is the hottest VP from the coolest state. Really. That’s what the GOP is putting on buttons.

As for myself, I have a bit of trouble finding a woman who is as mentally unhinged as Sarah Palin is, to be hot. When you’re always wondering if a woman is going to stab you in the back, or put a rabbit in the crock pot, or leave a moose head in your bed, or try to take you to her weird Wasilla church of prophecy, it’s kind of hard for a man to feel any kind of real attraction.

That’s why I responded to the Republican political button with a design of my own: Sarah Palin, the craziest VP from the coolest state - she’s come undone. It’s on a shirt too… and another Sarah Palin video podcast.

In the last few years, the American public has come to recognize that global warming is a very serious problem, and that human disregard for the environment, through actions like cutting down forests and burning fossil fuels, is responsible for the growing climate crisis. Even most Republicans have given up their denial and now admit that we have to make serious changes to our environment and energy policy to reduce the impact of the effects of global warming that are now upon us.

Not Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin wants to drag the Republican Party back into the past, and she wants to keep America running on the same old dirty fossil fuel economy that was developed back in the last century.

Sarah Palin still doesn’t admit that human beings are responsible in any way for global warming. She thinks that burning fossil fuels is just fine for the climate.

What’s more, Sarah Palin doesn’t even admit what’s happening in her own back yard, in Alaska. For the second year in a row, ice in the Arctic Ocean is reaching record low levels - a melt off of tremendous proportions that even global warming experts didn’t think would occur until the end of this century. Glaciers are disintegrating, and ice floes are disappearing at an historically unprecedented rate, causing sea levels to rise, and threatening human coastal communities…

…and polar bears. Polar bears hunt on the ice, and if they don’t have ice to hunt on, they don’t get enough to eat. Their hunger makes it more difficult for them to breed, and for adults to survive. Loss of weight among polar bears has been documented, and other arctic marine mammals, such as walrus and ringed seals are in serious trouble as well.

That’s why, after years of illegal delay, the Bush Administration was finally forced to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act earlier this year. However, as Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has filed suit in order to force the polar bear back off the list of threatened animals protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Sarah Palin insists that there isn’t any problem. Science contradicts Palin, but she doesn’t seem interested in what scientific experts have to say on the matter. Sarah Palin thinks that she knows better. That’s the same arrogant attitude of George W. Bush that has led America into disaster.

Sarah Palin denies the climate crisis affecting polar bears for the same reason George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have: Sarah Palin is in the pocket of Big Oil.

Big oil companies want to go drilling for oil in polar bear habitat. That offshore oil drilling would not bring us any gasoline for years, and would only save Americans a few pennies at the pump, but the oil corporations would make huge profits from the additional drilling.

Sarah Palin thinks that what’s good for big oil is good for America. We have seen under George W. Bush that Palin’s idea of what’s good for America is just plain wrong.

The problems that are placing polar bears in danger are the same problems that place Americans, and people around the world in danger. Already, there are wars being fought, such as the conflict in Darfur, because of climate change. Already the American Southwest is dealing with droughts, the American West is facing wildfires on a scale that has never been seen before. Our fisheries are dwindling, our natural resources are endangered.

The climate crisis has begun, and Sarah Palin is not qualified to deal with it. Yet, as a Vice President under the most elderly President in American history, the chances are very good that Sarah Palin would become President herself.

She just isn’t up to the job. The problem with Palin isn’t just inexperience. Sarah Palin also has demonstrated that she is willing to put oil company profits above the good of the American people. Our nation has suffered eight years under that style of failed leadership. We cannot repeat that mistake. Sarah Palin must not become Vice President.

We’re in the same boat with the polar bears. We will suffer the same neglect under Sarah Palin that the polar bears will suffer. As animals, polar bears don’t have a political voice. So, it’s up to us for to speak for the polar bears. That’s why we’re created this t-shirt for the 2008 election: Polar bears against Palin. (Made in the USA, no sweatshop labor involved)

As the Democratic National Convention of 2008 begins with a faith-based panderfest, the crackdown is beginning outside, with law enforcement confronting the danger of… bicyclists. No kidding. The Associated Press reports that “Denver police also asked area law enforcement to be on the lookout for caches of supplies that could be used by violent demonstrators, such as helmets, nails, heavy protest sign handles and even bicycles.”

Bicycles? Bicycles are now signs of impending violence?!? I can see how the executives of big oil corporations might think so, but for the local police to regard a bicycle as a legitimate reason to suspect someone of conspiring to commit acts of violence is a sign of how far into paranoia Homeland Security has gone.

A bicycle is not a weapon. A bicycle is a peaceful tool that builds healthy bodies and preserves clean air and water. A bicycle is a quiet thing. It does not roar. It does not burn. It does not bash.

I think the Denver Police ought to take a look at Bikes Not Bombs to have an idea about the kind of people who may be riding a bicycle outside the Democratic National Convention this week. Bikes Not Bombs explains its mission by saying,

“Lasting peace and social justice require equitable and sustainable use of resources. BNB provides community-based education and assists development projects with recycled bicycles, related technologies and technical assistance, as concrete alternatives to the militarism, over-consumption & inequality that breed war and environmental destruction. Our organization is part of a worldwide movement for peace and responsible stewardship of the earth.”

I wish that the leaders of the Democratic Party would take a look too. It doesn’t send a positive message that Democratic Party officials are getting special police protection from bicycles. If I were head of the Democratic National Committee, I’d make sure to issue an official statement condemning the paranoid police pursuit of bicycles - and I’d tell the Denver Police to back off.

Of course, I’ll never lead the Democratic National Committee, but the point isn’t about me. It’s about the best direction for America. We need more bicycles on our streets - not fewer. If every household in America had and used a bicycle on a daily basis, we would be a more prosperous and peaceful nation.

(Bicyclists for Peace Tshirt)

Since the campaign of Barack Obama announced this morning that Joseph Biden would run as Obama’s running mate, our most popular-selling shirt is…

Yep. Look for other signs of discontent among people who are, to put it mildly, bummed that Hillary Clinton will not be on the top or the bottom of the presidential ticket in 2008.

8/24/08 Update: With a day and a half passed since the announcement, Hillary Clinton 2012 Shirt sales have tapered off, and Obama-Biden 2008 T-Shirt sales have rocketed up. Is the disgruntlement converting into gruntledom?