Among the many folks weblogging New Hampshire yesterday was Pandagon who did a terrific job.

How many of you are actually paying attention to this year’s race? Isn’t that great? And who thought that was possible just three or four weeks ago when so many thought it was a slam dunk for Bush?

Lots has happened in the news and on the web this week. Here goes my weekly update of items I find post-worthy:

Iowa has set the Democratic party straight. My friends now believe there is a fighting chance to take back the White House. Monday was a bad day for the Bush Administration. Kerry’s comeback (CNN) is very impressive. The press had all but killed his candidacy by panning him as “boring” and “aloof” (ya know.. like that other “loser” Al Gore), but Kerry and the grounded folks in Iowa have set the party straight. I can’t be happier seeing him and Edwards rise against the predictions of the pundits – who I believe are manipulated like little marionettes by the Bush campaign and the Right – however unwittingly.

I think it’s important that “in opting for John Kerry and John Edwards over Howard Dean, (Iowans) signaled (among other things) that they want a presidential candidate who is serious about fighting the war against the Islamist totalitarianism threatening open societies.” (NYTimes) It used to be the Democrats who were the party of defense and belief that American ideals are universal ideals (think Kennedy and Roosevelt). Somewhere along the way, the Republicans, traditionally a party of isolationism, has appropriated the theme and made it their own. Fighting for freedom is what liberals should do. Freedom doesn’t come cheap or easy. People have died to give us these freedoms and they are not to be taken lightly. Get it back in your head.

Kerry is a threat. And the Bush campaign will put out bad vibes to shake confidence in him yet again. You can bet on it… oh – they already have (Philadelphia Inquirer via Scripting News)!

Thank you Iowa.

So… how many of you watched the State of the Union? Like Bill Maher I gotta wonder – where was the state of the union mentioned in the speech? I tell ya – Bush is a master politician. He triangulates better then Clinton and has set up his re-election bid in a big way. But whenever he claims the center… it’s all talk and little real action. For example, last year he pledged to fight AIDS in Africa. This year there was no mention at all. Why would that be I wonder?

What if Watergate happened all over again and nobody cared? Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media (Boston Globe)! Watch this news story go nowhere fast. Too many people on both sides look bad.

Another news story I expect to get little play in the mainstream: David Kay, who led the search for Iraqi weapons (for the Bush Administration), said he now believes there were no stockpiles (Philadelphia Inquirer). He resigned.

Bob Keeshan, better known as Captain Kangaroo has passed away. (Patriot Ledger). God bless him and his family.

Hey, have you seen furl? A great concept, well executed, and a new way of using the web. (via Scripting News).

Another site to check out is musicplasma. Type in a band and it attempts (very well I might add) to guess other bands you might be interested in. A little slow, but the pretty neat.

Have you seen the Mazda RX-8 Transformer transformation? At Mazda’s own site!

Star Wars video games are hit and miss. Battle of Endor, freeware from Bruno R. Marcos, is a hit. Lots of fun.

And Bill, I gotta second your feelings about mr. dangerousmeta. Garret has moved his site to WordPress from MoveableType and it is a beaut.

Shelley has thankfully overcome a directed comment spammer attack.

Lots of people are doing Dean re-mixes, but I really like Al Hawkins’s Garageband composed tune. Put a smile on my face 🙂

And as for Philly Blogs the name change is on! I have a new name… or rather an old name that got stolen by porn spammers two years ago. Nice to have it back. Thanks to those who made suggestions 🙂

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values.

Words spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr. one year before his death (pdf). People have a one dimensional, simplisitic view of him. Dig deeper folks. Dig deeper (CSMonitor).

More at Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project.

Related reading for today is slactivist’s post Lifeboats for first class passengers, Garret’s sending along A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class (NYTimes), Do citizens really want these jobs? (CSMonitor) and The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know (Fastcompany).