Saturday, February 07, 2004

Would John Kerry tap Howard Dean as VP?
From the article:
In remarks that would have seemed almost incredible a month ago, the former front-runner indicated in Milwaukee that he would be willing to accept the vice presidential slot on the fall ticket if he did not win his bid to lead it.
"I would . . . do anything I could to get rid of President Bush," Dean told a Milwaukee radio station when asked if he would be interested in the No. 2 spot on the ticket. "I'll do whatever is best for the party," he said on "Morning Magazine" on WMCS-AM, a station with a predominately African-American audience.
I think John Kerry owes Howard Dean a lot. After all, Kerry had worked in quite a negative fashion to destroy Dean's lead in Iowa while, at the same time, co-opting Dean's campaign message and attitude.. trying to claim it as his own. If Dean fails in Wisconsin, and if this VP offer was to happen...and Howard Dean should indeed be gifted with the thanks for all he's done for this party in the 2004 campaign.. if this was to happen, I wouldn't feel so creepy about how the "new, improved, changed" John Kerry got to this point.



Dr. Gerry Lower/Keystone, South Dakota
Jesus, Jefferson, and Bush
Jesus, like Hippocrates before Him and Jefferson after Him, was a dialectition who based His further thought and action on the dialectic human values residing at the core of science, democracy and nascent Christianity. All three men saw the causes of human problems to be entirely earthbound. For Jesus, the causes of political violence and human misery were not supernatural in origin but the result of competing despotic political philosophies with God-awful values and priorities.
Accordingly, Jesus confronted both Judaism and Romanism, out loud and in public, pointing out the despotic nature of absolutism, the unjust nature of legalism and harsh penalism, the counter-productive nature of vengeance-based moralities, and the greed-driven, life-cheapening nature of marketplace values. These diagnostic efforts were entirely empirical and in full recognition of the spiraling nature of vengeance-based "moralities." Jesus offered instead a political philosophy born of human knowledge, honesty and compassion. For that contribution to a saneand honest political philosophy, He was silenced by those prefering to honor religious despotism and rule by the rich and powerful.
...Jesus lived in a world having no relationship whatsoever to the supernatural constructs which the JudeoRoman church employed to justify empire in His name. Implicit in that Romanized view, Jesus was second to god's law, the implication being that Jesus was a devout legalist/penalist who would never break God's laws and who enjoyed a good execution or a good war to spread the word. In other words, Jesus was characterized most of all by blind obedience to the Pope. In Roman eyes, Jesus was unattainable. Christian values were not to live by, they were to justify self-righteous conquest and control, in the name of Jesus, but in the interest of the rich and powerful. Is this not the same approach used by the Bush administration in promoting capitalistic right wing dominion on a global basis?
-Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and their enlightened Christian friends brought Jesus down to earth two centuries ago. In order to make Jesus real on earth, we must do likewise. We must accept the humanness of Jesus and the fact of His death. We must accept that He can only live now through the people, and know that He is uniformly attainable because of His humanness.
... We must abandon supernaturalism, vengeance, self-righteousness and choseness and we must become citizens of Jefferson's Democracy, steeped in the values of Science and nascent Christianity, steeped in human knowledge. We must take our place, for the first time, as a Democracy among Democracies, in the interest of human maturation and world peace.

Yahoo News: Girl Dies After Second Head Is Removed
I'm very sorry when noble and loving attempts fail

I wish they could have saved Rebeca Martinez.
What country did you say we're living in?
American peace acitivists are terrorists now??!??
Des Moines peace activists ordered to testify in U.S. court-
Possibly part of an investigation conducted by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force

Dissent now equates to terrorism??
Give us a break, already!!
Colin Powell disagrees questions about U.S. intelligence on Iraq will make people "very suspicious" about future claims

In my opinion, Colin Powell's decision on February 5th, 2003 to choose loyalty to a politics-first administration with highly questionable ethical integrity while selling his WMD spiel (and his political soul) was the day he lost the U.N.'s trust in him. Because of his loyalty (at any cost), General Powell looks very foolish in this article when you compare what he says now to what he warned us all about on February 5, 2003.

Here is the main point.. the point that will NOT apparently even be addressed by this "independent" (not) commission:
Annan cautioned, nonetheless, that people who use intelligence must be "very, very careful as to the quality of the intelligence and perhaps be extra careful to check with other sources to make sure that it is solid."
That would be people who USE it...not people who produce it.