Back in Early August, I reported on the confluence of the Dennis Kucinich for President campaign and two well-known New Age hucksters, Jasmuheen and Hira Ratan Manek. These two, along with other gurus and advocates of questionable health practices, are appearing this weekend in Sedona, Arizona at a gathering called the Raw Spirit Festival.

Jasmuheen (whose real name is Ellen Greve) and Hira Ratan Manek are Breatharians, people who claim to be able to live and remain healthy without eating or drinking. Jasmuheen also claims magic telepathic powers and the ability to communicate with dead people. Both Hira Ratan Manek and Jasmuheen have been exposed as frauds, but both continue to make money off of their extravagant claims.

The Kucinich for President campaign joins them this weekend. Elizabeth Kucinich, the wife of Dennis Kucinich, is giving a keynote speech on the same stage upon which Hira Ratan Manek and Jasmuheen are giving their own keynote speeches. Back in July, the Kucinich for President campaign listed Elizabeth Kucinich’s speech as an official campaign event. After I reported on the participation of Jasmuheen at the Raw Spirit Festival alongside Elizabeth Kucinich, the Kucinich for President campaign deleted the event from their calendar. However, the Raw Spirit web site continued to show Elizabeth Kucinich, along with Dennis Kucinich, as a keynote speaker, close to Jasmuheen, who appeared in a heavily Photoshopped picture designed to give her the appearance of having a divine aura.

Happy Oasis, as the founder of the Raw Spirit Festival calls herself, came to Irregular Times to complain about what she called our unfair treatment of Jasmuheen and Hira Ratan Manek. Subsequently, Elizabeth Kucinich’s name and picture disappeared from the front page of the Raw Spirit Festival site. It seems that someone did not want the Kuciniches to be closely linked to the likes of Hira Ratan Manek and Jasmuheen. Jasmuheen’s Photoshopped picture was replaced by an ordinary photograph. The photograph of Elizabeth and Dennis Kucinich was replaced by the photograph of a man who calls himself High Priest Kwatamani, author of the book Exposing the Ice-Cold, Deep-Freeze Mentality and Whole Life Healing of Sexual Energy within the Divine Parallel, sitting on his wicker throne.

At about the same time, however, the Dennis Kucinich for President web site put the Elizabeth Kucinich keynote speech at Raw Spirit back on the official campaign schedule. Messages also started to appear elsewhere on the web, at places like rawveganradio.com, suggesting that Dennis Kucinich might appear and give a speech at the Raw Spirit Festival along with his wife.

Although her picture has been taken off the front page, Elizabeth Kucinich is still listed as a vendor at the Raw Spirit Festival, and is still shown on the Raw Spirit Festival web site as giving a speech tomorrow night at 7:00. Dennis Kucinich is scheduled to make an appearance before the New Hampshire Committee for an Independent Voice in Hollis, New Hampshire from 1:30 to 2:30 that same afternoon. It is possible that Dennis Kucinich could take an airplane and make it to Raw Spirit in time to give a speech that evening.

I called the scheduler for the Kucinich for President campaign to clear up the discrepancies, but she didn’t return my telephone call.

Whatever is happening with Dennis Kucinich, Elizabeth Kucinich is clearly going to be right at the center of the Breatharian supernatural New Age nonsense. Elizabeth Kucinich will be giving her speech shortly after a Breatharian sun gazing exercise led by Wayne Purdin, who claims that “Science has proven that some Sun Yoga practitioners can live for months or even years without eating food, and that tremendous healing light is given by our physical sun and the cosmic light rays it emits.”

Of course, science has proven no such thing. That’s not stopping people at the Raw Spirit Festival from making such extravagant claims, of course. They’re relying on the people attending Raw Spirit to suspend their ordinary abilities of critical thinking.

The Kucinich for President campaign ought to be ashamed to be associated with this kind of fraudulent absurdity. That Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich continue to associate the Kucinich 2008 campaign with the Raw Spirit Festival, and its many frauds, is an indication in itself that Dennis Kucinich is not fit to hold the power of the Presidency.

I’m sorry to say that, because Dennis Kucinich advocates many sound policies that other Democratic candidates for President don’t have the courage to embrace. However, in evaluating the presidential candidates of 2008, we must not be like the people attending the Raw Spirit Festival, overeager to suspend sound judgment because of what we want to believe.