##############Workers WhiteHouse By, For and OF The People###############
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In a democracy, men do not seek authority so that they may impose a policy. They seek a policy so that they may achieve authority. --Gilbert Pinfold in "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold" by Evelyn Waugh.
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Issues aren't real. Issues are just masses of opposing scenarios vying to become perceptions. --Mark Alan Stamaty
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Agitation
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters." -- Frederick Douglass
Tell a man whose house is on fire to give moderate alarm; tel1 him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen. -- William Lloyd Garrison
My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast. - Miguel de Unamuno
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Aristocracy
The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar . . . I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies - Thomas Jefferson
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Belief
A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish - Chesterton
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A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation -- Howard Scott
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You don't need a totalitarian dictatorship like Hitler's to get by with murder . . . You can do it in a democracy as long as the Congress and the people Congress is supposed to represent don't give a damn - William Shirer
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Editors
A person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see to it that the chaff is printed -- Elbert Hubbard
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Effort
If we always do what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always got -- Toni Worst
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Exploration
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time. --TS Eliot, Four Quartets
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What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. ~ The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ~ To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.' ~ Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. ~ Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. -- German professor in They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer
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Fear
We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. - Edward R. Murrow, 1954
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Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear -- George Orwell
Every new generation must wage a new war for freedom against new forces which seek through new devices to enslave mankind -- Progressive Party platform, 1924
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations -- James Madison
It is my impression that the Capitol is now rather more like the Kremlin during Stalin's feisty reign than
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Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. - Theodore Roosevelt
Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen - Huey Long
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Heart
The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart - a revolution which has to start with each one of us. - Dorothy Day
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Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. - Albert Einstein
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Innocence
Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it - James Baldwin
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Justice
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties -- but right through every human heart -- and all human hearts." -- Alexander Sozhenitzyn
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Language
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to the long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemisms, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. -- George Orwell
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A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. -- GK Chesterton.
Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching. -- Satchel Paige
Sweetie, if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up space. - Progressive lawyer Flo Kennedy
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Mass movement
There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. - Eric Hoffer
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Memory
Our most ancient ones taught us that the celebration of memory is also a celebration of tomorrow. They told us that memory is not turning one's head and heart towards the past. It is not a sterile remembrance which speaks laughter or tears. Memory, they told us, is one of the seven guides which the human heart needs in order to make its journey. The other six are truth, pride, consistency, honesty, respect for oneself and for the other, and love. That is why, they say, memory always points towards tomorrow, and that paradox is what prevents nightmares from be repeated in that tomorrow, and so that the joys - which also exist in the inventory of the collective memory - will be new. Memory is, above all, say our most first ones, a powerful antidote for death, and an indispensable food for life. That is why the one who cares for and guards memory is caring for and guarding life. And the one who does not have memory is dead. - Subcommandante Marcos, May 5, 2001
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Our military establishment today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime ... We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions ... Three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all corporations. "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process. - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell speech, January 17, 1961
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It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. - Samuel Adams
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Poor
When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist." - Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist
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Post-modernism
Behold these idealists then, successful business men, professionals, property owners, money lenders, creeping into the social ranks they once despised, pitifully, contemptibly, at the skirts of some impecunious personage to whom they have lent money, or done some professional service gratis; behold them lying, cheating, tricking, flattering, buying and selling themselves for any frippery, any cheap little pretense. The dominant social idea has seized them, their lives are swallowed up in it; and when you ask the reason why, they tell you that circumstances compelled them so to do. If you quote their lies to them, they smile with calm complacency, assure you that when circumstances demand lies, lies are a great deal better than truth; that tricks are sometimes more effective than honest dealing; that flattering and duping do not matter, if the end to be obtained is so desirable; and that under existing "circumstances" life isn't possible without all this; that it is going to be possible whenever circumstances have made truth-telling easier than lying, but till then a man must look out for himself, by all means. And so the cancer goes on rotting away the moral fibre, and the man becomes a lump, a squash, a piece of slippery slime, taking all shapes and losing all shapes, according to what particular hole or corner he wishes to glide into, a disgusting embodiment of the moral bankruptcy begotten by thing-worship." -- Voltairine de Cleyre
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Propaganda
Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind." - Edward L. Bernays, the father of American propaganda
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses [constitutes] an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our government." -- Edward Bernays in 'Propaganda,' 1928
The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. - George Orwell, 1984
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Reasonableness
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man -- GB Shaw
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Rebellion
A determined population can not only force a domestic ruler to flee the country, but can make a would-be occupier retreat, by the use of a formidable arsenal of tactics: boycotts and demonstrations, occupations and sit-ins, sit-down strikes and general strikes, obstruction and sabotage, refusal to pay taxes, rent strikes, refusal to cooperate, refusal to obey curfew orders or gag orders, refusal to pay fines, fasts and pray-ins, draft resistance, and civil disobedience of various kinds. ~~~ Thousands of such instances have changed the world, but they are nearly absent from the history books. History texts featuring military heroes lead entire generations of the young to think that wars are the only way to solve problems of self-defense, justice, and freedom. They are kept uninformed about the world's long history of nonviolent struggle and resistance. -- Howard Zinn in "Declarations of Independence," 1990
"We did not rise up and become rebels because we believed ourselves stronger and more powerful. We rose up to demand democracy, freedom and justice because we have the reason and the dignity of history on our side" --Fifth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, Zapatista National Liberation Front
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Society
I think society is one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have. When I was young and needed help, society wouldn't give it, because it had no confidence in what I was doing. But when, through my perseverance, society took an interest, then it wanted me not to do the next thing, but to repeat what I had done before. At every point society acts to keep you from doing what you have to do. -- John Cage, 1973
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Supply and demand
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. - Wendell Berry
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Think tank
THINK TANK: An organization which invents disinterested intellectual justifications for the policies of the corporate groups that fund it. The result is an unfortunate confusing of knowledge and power - John Ralston Saul
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There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old . . . In an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude." -- Aldous Huxley
Totalitarianism demands the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact science, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian and the sociologist. -- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature."
"A society becomes totalitarian when it sstructure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when it ruling class has lost its functin but suceeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of fats, or the emotional sincerity, that literary creation demands. -- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature."
The highest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt social order, is to tell the plain truth-- Edward Abbey
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The limit of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress -- Frederick Douglass
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O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! . . . O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst. . . broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. - Mark Twain
The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times. - Joseph Goebbels, quoted in "The Goebbels Diaries 1942-43"
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. - Eugene Debs, Socialist candidate for president, June 16, 1918. The speech led to Debs's being stripped of his citizenship and sent to jail for 10 years
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WORDS: Conduits of spirit - RW Emerson
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SupPOrT the TroOPS? TrancePORT the TROOPS ! hoME ! Anti - War = Pro - Peace. Do You Promote Peace? ARE You 4 Peace? Did You Protest to Protect? You DO Know There is a PEACE CanDiDate. CAN You Support Peace by Supporting the Only Peace CanDiDate with a PEACE Plan? Respect the Troops Who Are Stuck There. HONOR Those Who Have Been Wounded and TRY to Heal the Families Grieving for their Loved, LOST by Demanding A Cease and Desist on the Archaic Ritual of KiLLing in THIS, the 21st Century!
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We tried to STOP the WAR, you All must have thought the efforts could possibly BE successful? We Must believe and understand one person can make a difference! AND that MANY could make a HUGE Difference! SO We, who have 2 hands to write/work with and 2 feet to Move Forward with, don't WE OWE at Least a TRY, to HELP Our Fellow Americans who are not that Lucky and IN dangerous, difficult situations beyond their individual control? With regards to the external environment they find themselves stuck in, in additional to the body,mind,spirit damage they are suffering through.
Can't We, in any Capacity TRy to aid and assist the burdgeoning, honorable, exciting and Historic Movement to PROpel the Compelling Programs and Just Policies of the Kucinich for President campaign, which advocates Healing the Pain!
We know the Media, by omission and manipulation helped Sell this War. WHY Do Many still Believe the Media's Monotonous, Repetitous Reinforcement of ANYthing they Try to credibly report ON? Do you REALly think they are giving you the scoop on who is a frontrunner? on WHO IS electable? IF one is going to let media gatekeepers or money-lovers decide who is electable, you either don't understand democracy or don't BElieve in it. DO YOU THINK INSIDE THE IDIOT BOX? ...OR are you going to catch the Train of Thought and JOIn those who are thinKinG OUTside the BOX, especiALLY of Fox!
"Don't believe that a small, but committed # of People can change things, inDEED it is the only thing that ever HAS!" ~~~Margaret Sanger
" A new, SpiRiTuaLly based social ACTivism is beginning to assert itself. It stems NOT from hating what is wrong and trYING to fight it, but from LovYANG what could Be and making the commitment to bring IT Forth."
~Marianne Williamson~~Taken from "Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual CitiZenS"
Those of Us who sense a New World attempting to come to Fruition have a responsibility to Help it Be So. As professor Richard Tarnas has written, "He also reflects on our curious postmodern predicament at the end of the millennium. Today, he says, we find ourselves wandering disconsolately between two worlds, one dying, the other struggling to be born. On the one hand, the spiritual and intellectual certainties of the past no longer command our allegiance. On the other, the promises of a more integral worldview, a cosmology of tomorrow -- one based on a deeper relationship with nature and with the larger cosmos -- require of us a leap of faith few are ready to take. With the future of the human spirit and the future of the planet hanging in the balance, we have no choice but to embrace courage, imagination, and our deepest inner resources."
I meditated on the strength, sincerity and courage of Kucinich's convictions and message to us, wondering from where in his background and stated principles, make real and authenticate his commitment. It is I believe from his holistic worldview of an interconnected, interdependent World, a vision of Unity and Oneness, At-One-Ment, withIN and WithOUT. Kucinich From Spirit and Stardust says, "WE RealEyEs that what affects anyone, anywhere affects everyone, everywhere. As we help others to heal, we heal ourselves. Our Vision of interconnectedness resonates with new networks of World CitiZenS in nongovernmental organizations linking from numberless centers of energy, expresSinG the emergence of a new organic WhoLe, seeking within and across national lines."
So I think his calling for cessation of hostilities, and facing up to the resulting death, damage and destruction is calling to be honest and real and get off make-believe Disneyland carousel, most of the world sees, but the insulated nature of our culture-sphere inhibits, stunting necessary change and growth.
These realizations are not something Kucinich and his constituency are "extremely" are trying to foist upon us, this is a personal challenge as well as a "macro" civilizational challenge. Richard Tarnas again~~~
"I think it affects everybody, but the more informed and thoughtful a person is, the more aware they are of the reality of the spiritual crisis. We live in a world in which mainstream, conventional modern science has essentially voided the cosmos of all intrinsic meaning and purpose. There is no spiritual dimension to it from its point of view. The intellectual power of mainstream modern science has effectively defined what kind of cosmos we live in. And yet human beings aspire for spiritual significance in the life that they lead and in the world that they live in. It is only, I think, though going through a profound inner transformation, and also an intellectual transformation, that one can see beyond that crisis and come into a world of a different kind."
He adds~~~
"I think Thomas Kuhn quoted Max Planck about the idea that a paradigm in science does not shift simply because the evidence in favor of the new one begins to outweigh the old paradigm. It's not a rational, empirical shift. That is because there is so much investment -- psychological, unconscious, as well as economic -- in the old paradigm by individuals who have lived their whole lives within it. They can't go through that kind of gestalt switch. As Kuhn says, two people who are working within different paradigms are almost, in a sense, in different universes. If you have lived within one long enough and you are not graced with a kind of illumination which helps you break out of the old worldview, it is very difficult to make your way into it."
We who do choose to Be are midwives, through writing, art, music, action, dancing, speaking, poetry, info-sharing and caring, midwives in the pollinating and birthing of the Happy New World. One more Meme from Professor Tarnas~~~
"What will happen will very much depend on the consciousness that human beings in our society -- and particularly a certain core of our society -- bring to this moment.
There is no question that if we look around at the world today, we cannot avoid the fact that something big is dying. We are watching it and we are experiencing it. But the great challenge that all of us face as individuals is also being faced by our civilization. That is, can we go through that death at an inner level? Can we recognize the great spiritual, archetypal dimension to that death and go through it at that level? Or, will we be unconscious, blind to that deeper reality and act out self-destructively by making our world ecologically unlivable or killing each other in nationalistic competition, or whatever? Those are the choices."
full story~~~http://www.scottlondon.com/insight/scripts
HERE IS MY PIE CHART, but This Is a LOGIC TREE
ANTI-WAR(-) = PRO-PEACE(+)
PROTESTORS(+) = PROTECTORS(+)
EXTENDED PROMISED = INVOLUNTARILY = CORPORATE PROFITEERING
TOURS OF DUTY(-) DRAFTED(-) HOSTAGES(-)
PEACE PLAN(+) = PROTECT(+) = SUPPORT PEACE(+)
PEACE CANDIDATE(+) = PROTESTOR(+) = PROTECTOR(+)
PROTESTORS(+) not= SUPPORT PEACE CANDIDATE(-) = XXDANGERXX
MEDIA = 0-CREDIBILITY(-) = TRYSTOPWAR = TRYHELP-KUCINICH.US!
thinkPEACE-speakPEACE-actPEACE
The Future, in Order to TransForM US, enters inTO US, Long Before it HIPpens! ~~~RanieR MaRia RiLke
think!, the troops can vote absentee, did you consider they probably vote, along with their stateside families for the Only candidacy that has a plan for amelioration, bringing UN PeaceKeepers In, and our Troops Home. Also former Veterans finally voting for the Peace they have all fought for, including recent returnees supporting an inSPIRITional MoveMent, to bring their buddies Home, Not in Our Name Will We Offer Support to candidates who will keep them there.
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* ThinkPeaceSpeakPeaceActPeace by VOlunTEer for KUCINICH
by CultureJamCleveland Friday January 30, 2004 at 03:53 PM
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/01/1674669.php
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Kucinich to reveal details of secret U.S. nuclear wars
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 14, 2004
WHAT: Press conference
WHO: Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich and Dr. Doug Rokke, PhD
WHERE: University of Illinois, Champaign Campus, Illini Student Unit, Pine Room
WHEN: Monday, March 15th, 7:00 PM
Champaign, Ill. Â Democratic Congressman
http://www.kucinich.us/pressreleases/pr_031404.php |
