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Monday, March 1, 2004 |
FEATURED ARTICLES
- ACT; Americans Coming Together - New PAC created by Emily's List Founder
- Odd Man In - Dennis Kucinich is Nobody's Fool, The New York Press
QUOTE OF THE DAY
This idea of having a press corps cover you relentlessly may be overrated. It's like being covered by corporate cops. I mean, they certainly didn't do Howard Dean any favors. The thing is, if you depend on the media for your life, for approval, then you end up being bound by its logic. I don't, so I'm not."
- - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (From today's Rhino's Bottom Line)
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - MARCH 1st
1790 -- US: First census count includes slaves & free Negroes. Indians are not included.
1847 -- US: Michigan becomes first state to abolish the death penalty.
1872 -- US: Yellowstone becomes world's first national park.
1967 -- US: Black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell is stripped of his House seat for "gross misconduct." Ralph Bunch later commented: "...if Adam Clayton Powell were white, he would have his seat today." Powell was later re-elected without campaigning.
1997 -- Germany: 15,000 demonstrate in Lunesburg against shipment of French nuclear waste to site in Gorleben. Over the next several days hundreds of thousands participate in demonstrations & direct actions along the shipping route.
RHINO HERE:
If you're in a Super Tuesday primary state, Rhino urges you to get out to vote, & to consider joining me in voting for Congressman Dennis Kucinich. If you saw either of the 2 debates this past weekend, I hope you agree with me that Dennis was insistently courteous & consistently on target. He answered many important questions directly, when the other candidates seemed to talk in circles. He comes into Super Tuesday having placed 2nd in last weeks Hawaii primary with 35% of the vote, receiving 50% on the Island of Maui.
I appreciate Dennis Kucinich's intelligence on so many of problems facing us, not to mention his courage & strength of character, being willing to go the distance all the way to the convention no matter what the pundits say. I want him to go into that convention & speak for me on the issues, hopefully influential in the building of the platform. The man is nobody's fool & that's the topic of today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE.
ACT; Americans Coming Together - New PAC created by Emily's List Founder
But 1st, Rhino directs your attention to a newly formed Political Action Group. Americans Coming Together (ACT) is an intelligently organized alliance of committed people, working to defeat Republican reactionaries in races up and down the ticket, especially shrub & his gang of neo robber barons. They seek to create the largest turnout of voters in history, voters who will go to the polls in November and elect progressive candidates from the school boards to the White House..
Among the founders is Ellen R. Malcolm, the founder & president of EMILY's List - a political action committee that supports pro-choice Democratic women candidates. Under her leadership, EMILY's List - an acronym for "Early Money is Like Yeast" because it "makes the dough rise" - has grown to be the largest political action committee in the country. Since its founding, EMILY's List has help send 11 pro-choice Democratic women to the U.S. Senate, 55 to the U.S. House of Representatives, and to elect seven governors. Malcolm will lead the effort to build ACT's membership and raise $95 million to support ACT's voter contact program.
FOR MORE INFO & TO JOIN ACT, GO TO: http://www.americacomingtogether.com/about/
8:11:54 AM 
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Odd Man In - Dennis Kucinich Is Nobody's Fool.
by Matt Taibbi, The New York Press, 2/23/04
(Excerpt of Interview with Congressman Kucinich)
Q: Leaving Al Sharpton aside for a moment, in what way can you say that you present a real alternative to George Bush in a way that John Kerry or John Edwards does not?
A: On the war. You know, both of them have the unfortunate occasion of having parroted the president's position on weapons of mass destruction. And not only parroted it, but in the case of Sen. Kerry, greatly embroidered and embellished it. Just look at his speech, I think it was October 9, 2002-he goes into tremendous detail about the weapons of mass destruction, he is tremendously detailed about the threat. And then for it to have turned out… What a great concession, to admit to having been fooled by George Bush, and then calling this a qualification for the presidency... I mean, perhaps it is a qualification for the presidency, and what does that say? I was never subject to the rarefied atmosphere of the Senate, but as the ranking Democrat on a congressional subcommittee devoted to national security, I never saw any proof that there were weapons of mass destruction.
Q: But a lot of us who were on the outside, who didn't even have the privilege of being in Congress, we supposed automatically that this whole weapons of mass destruction business was a pretext for an invasion that was planned all along for other reasons. Is that correct? Is the idea that they were fooled a little strange to begin with?
A: Of course it is. And of course that's what was going on. But there were a number of things that went into this, that played a part. One of those things was the whole dramaturgy of the constant threat, the lions and tigers and bears, oh my, and that was played up. And then there was the realpolitik search for hegemony in the region. And on top of that there was the posturing of various political leaders who were engaged in this ridiculous struggle to look tough. So this raises the question of what category of person you want your president to be in. That's not to say that the others aren't fine people in their own right. But it does say that when we entered a war that was totally unnecessary, that…I challenged the White House, I challenged the members of my own party, I challenged the media. And they did not [act] and so having given in to the administration on the war, it made it impossible for the party to challenge the White House on economic issues.
Q: Wasn't the vote that Kerry and Edwards made also just generally an endorsement of the whole idea of pre-emptive war?
A: Absolutely. It licensed pre-emptive attack.
Q: Because when the newspapers today talk about the vote that the two senators made, they generally discuss it only in the context of their having believed there were weapons of mass destruction. But wasn't there a larger issue, which involved lessening the standards for going to war?
A: Yes-but again, what are the implications of their having believed there were weapons of mass destruction? It's not just about a vote, the vote was what it was, but what information did they have? It just raises the question-what were they thinking? I mean, if they were fooled by George Bush-who else would they be fooled by? ...
IT'S All POSTED AT: http://www.nypress.com/17/8/news&;columns/cage.cfm
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7:31:05 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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