In 2003 congress appropriated close to 19 billion dollars for his AIDS plan. In 2004 Warren sent a letter to 150,000 pastors, in effect urging “those of us who accept the Bible as God’s word” to get out the vote for Bush (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/10/31/8359189/index.htm). I think it’s safe to say that he was a major factor in Bush’s re-election.

Now he is awarding this treasonous criminal a ‘peace’ award? This is nothing more than one back scratching the other, and an egomaniacal idiot who cannot admit the truth. Now that’s some real Christianity!

In my time at his cult..errr.. church, I witnessed horrifying things. And I received lthere was very much corroboration from many good people. I was very active in ministry, so kind of on the inside. I could write a book about what REALLY goes on behind the scenes. I would call it “The Purpose Driven Ego”.

Just in case I didn’t get this point across crystal clear: I find the Pastor to be a reprehensible and disgusting pig. If heaven is going to honor people like him and George Bush, then it cannot be anymore an honorable place than hell. Fortunately, God sees all and isn’t conned by these snake oil salesmen.

Can you say white sepulchre?

It’s to bad the Christians don’t believe their own masters words. What a joke!!!

Bush’s initiative, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has not found a way to prevent a significant number of the estimated 1.7 million new cases of HIV each year in Africa. Nearly half of today’s 15-year-olds in South Africa, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the program, will contract the virus in their lifetimes at current infection rates, estimates show.

( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/20/ST2008022000118.html )

Studies have shown that family planning could avert far more infections than antiretroviral drugs because many women, especially those with HIV, want fewer children.
The same money spent in more evidence-based ways would bring more health and happiness,” said Malcolm Potts, former head of Family Health International, a research group that receives significant PEPFAR funding.

In Rwanda, the 3 percent HIV rate is far lower than in [PEPFAR-targeted] southern African nations. PEPFAR money increasingly is used to improve basic medical services.

Reagan studiously ignored AIDS in the US whilst his GOP variously claimed the STD as an exclusively homosexual disease and/or a punishment from God for ‘liberalism’.
Many of Reagan’s GOP continued in office through the Clinton administration and into Bush’s administration. At the same time the religious Right’s influence on the GOP and thus national politics increased, whilst their oppositional attitudes to sexuality, sex education and liberalism became even more institutionalized.

Bush’s PEPFAR was not the apolitical strictly humanitarian effort it was and still is claimed to be. Unlike the reh eventual response to AIDS in the US, PEPFAR funding for Africa was contingent on the specific exclusion of contraception and practical sex education and an emphasis on the religious tenet of abstinence.

The disease, its method of transmission and its consequences were ( and are) exactly the same regardless of the continent in which AIDS occurs but the US funded ’solution’ was distinctly different for Africa , precisely to serve an American political/religious dogma and NOT to properly serve an indiscriminate pandemic, because of the political and legal oversight and controls that the US possesses that PEPFAR’s African beneficiaries DO NOT have in place.

(Just compare PEPFAR to the approach to Malaria, which kills many more people but which doesn’t involve sex and thus ‘morality’).

PEPFAR actually has nothing relevant to show for it’s sponsorship by Republicans and it’s concentrated $15 billion funding, except for maintaining the cash flow of the international divisions of US ‘Faith-Based Intiative’ benefactors which also happen to have nothing to show for their domestic programs either.

I see Bush as significantly culpable rather directly responsible for this policy. Such benefits has have been realized form PEPFAR ( as noted in the WashPo article) appear to be a result of local initiatives in circumventing the strictures of the policy and not adhering to it, therefore Bush deserves at the very least NO CREDIT at all.

Meanwhile the real authors and strict practitioners of this policy do indeed deserve all the credit for the ineffectiveness of PEPFAR and consequently a good deal of the otherwise preventable suffering and death that has resulted from ensuring their dogmatic political concerns were served under the public pretense of purely humanitarian concern.

1) P=Pandemic diseases,
2) I=Illiteracy,
3) E=Extreme poverty,
4) C=self-Centered leadership and
5) E=spiritual Emptiness

pIece, not PEACE. Illiteracy, huh? The irony is palpable. The stoopid? Well, apparently it only hurts a little when you don’t know any better.

I’ve got your reconciliation Rev, hanging.

Rick Warren is a self-absorbed and self-promoting moron!!!

Oh, you knew that already? Well, it still bears repeating…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPFAR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constant_Gardener

like i said, this whole “Aids initivative” thing sounds like a boon to big pharma Much much more than it is a charity..

“The flawed dataset shows PEPFAR money flowing from U.S. government primary contractors (prime partners) to their indigenous sub-partners in the field. The Center found more than 100 instances in which the total amount awarded to sub-partners was listed as being greater than the total amount received by their prime partners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President’s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief

“Critics of PEPFAR found fault with President George W. Bush’s selection of former Eli Lilly and Company chief executive Randall L. Tobias as the first Global AIDS Coordinator in charge of PEPFAR, a position in which Tobias served from 2003 until 2006.

Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, stated that the naming of Tobias raised “serious questions of conflict of interest and the priorities of the White House”,[5] while Kate Krauss of the AIDS Policy Project called Tobias “the fox in charge of the henhouse”. Ambassador Mark Dybul replaced Tobias as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator on August 11, 2006.”

Among other things, looks like they were VERY secretive about thier finances, to the point where a public interest org sued them for the info, and looks like they eliminated thier entire PREVENTION budget and switched 100 percent to “treatment and research” (i.e. money going into someone pocket for drugs and research..)

WTF was a church ever doing hosting a political debate?

And why would the Pastor be the ‘moderator’?

Separation of Church & State should have prohibited this in the first place.

Al Gore: Nobel Peace Prize Award Winner

George Bush: Fake Peace Award from Fake Pastor from Fake Church

Right, these guys care nothing about life, improving life, or the alleviation of suffering. I personally beleive that male run societies (pretty much all of them these days) have an inherent desire to control womens sexuality/reproduction…basically, to make a long story short, if you keep the women chained down as “baby factories” then they wont have time to advance themselves or thier ideas in the world. I think you will see in socieities a correlation between the degree of power women have over thier own bodies and the degree of power they have in that soceity as a whole..