Dennis Trainor Jr on The Real News talking about American Autumn: An Occudoc

American Autumn: an Occudoc, is a film that I had the privilege of working on with Dennis Trainor Jr as a camera operator. He and I worked together on Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign in 2007, which is how I first met him. Then Dennis Kucinich was my boss. Later Dennis Trainor Jr would be my boss as producer of this documentary.

All my Favourite employers have been named Dennis.

The Film is available for streaming FREE online at Occudoc.org

I disagree with 50% of what Ron Paul stands for

But the half I agree with, I agree with 100%.

[MUSIC] - WAR CRY

Lyrics: 

I don’t know what I’ve been told

you can win the war but you’ll lose your soul

you can drop a bomb that will burn a hole

through everything you love and know

Brothers face down in the soil

your machine it runs on oil

brothers face down in the mud

your machine it runs on blood

you pretend that it’s anything but wrong

(war cry)

All this death and all this strife

so you can life your American life

we cannot quench our lust for more

we lost our soul but we won the war

Uncle sam can lend a hand

brothers face down in the sand

I don’t know what I’ve been told

you can win the war, but you lose your soul

you pretend that it’s anything but wrong  

(war cry)

OTHER STUFF:

* I'm headed back down to #OWS tonight, and I'll be there till very late Sunday night (actually 1:30am Sunday morning).  I'm doing some volunteer work for the documentary I worked on previously.  I really want to see the project through now that I've been working on it for so long.  If you're at OWS at anytime during that period, say hello!



* Yet another big thank you to PE Nolan for letting me crash on her couch.



* THIS is extremely exciting:  A contingent from #OWS is marching from NYC all the way to Washington DC, covering 20 miles a day for two weeks straight.  Holy smokes this is awesome.



* The next 16 people to order t-shirts from my Etsy store will get a copy of my band's cd FOR FREE!



* My band, Theodore Treehouse, just launched a kickstarter project for our second album.  We're trying to raise $8,000 to a) pay for recording b) pay for mastering c) pay for publishing and d) repair our van so we can e) go on a tour of all the Occupied cities in the USA.  Which is getting to be a larger number every day.  We're raising the money in $10 and $20 increments.  So that's a lot of people.

Dennis Kucinich on Countdown w Keith Olbermann

"Our whole economy has been protecting an investor class at the expense of everybody else."

Dennis Kucinich running for President in 2007

So Google Video is shutting down, and I've moved the videos over from my Google Video account to my YouTube account. I had the opportunity to re-watch them, and one that stood out was this video that I uploaded (but did not shoot) while I was working for Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign back in 2007.

Listening to this speech, and seeing how Obama has courted Wall Street at the expense of working people, courted big energy companies at the expense of working people, and continued with the policies of spying on the American Public, and created a new policy of claiming the extra-judicial right to assassinate US citizens deemed to be terrorists, I just have to ask-- WHAT THE FUCK?

Daily Show gives Dennis Kucinich a great interview

The Daily Show - Dennis Kucinich's Improbable Success
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

As a fan and former employee of Dennis Kucinich, I'm used to him being the butt of every joke.

But, now that the the entire world is in the shitter because of very policies that Dennis Kucinch has been opposing for decades, (for which people said he was crazy) it's harder to emasculate and deride him and his policies without just looking like a totally ignorant douchebag.

Dennis Kucinich gets Gov Scott Walker to Admit It

via NoCureForThat

Washington D.C. (April 14, 2011) — Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today scored an admission from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker that his decision to strip the rights of public workers to bargain collectively “doesn’t save any” money for the Wisconsin taxpayers.

Dennis Kucinich speaks in Wisconsin

I'm proud to say that I worked as a volunteer and delegate 2004, and as an intern in 2008, to elect Dennis Kucinich president of the USA.

The Punk Patriot's Rap-A-Long Vlog

Why Dennis Kucinich Flipped His Vote

---

Blog Bonus:

What Happened to Cynthia McKinney?

THANK YOU DENNIS KUCINICH!

Why we should all be thankful to Dennis Kucinich about his taking a stand on this terrible healthcare bill:

An Article from HuffPo's Ellen R Shaffer: Thank You, Dennis Kucinich!


Videos:






Now Dennis Kucinich is facing attacks from Markos of Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, and now President Obama's White House-- not for being a conservative, corporate blowhard like Sen Max Baucus (D-MT), but for being a progressive!

Help Kucinich fight back against attacks from the faux-left by Donating to put this radio spot on air.

KEEP UP THE GOOD FIGHT!

FireDogLake is being AWESOME

I was really happy to see this in my inbox today:

Last September, progressive groups including MoveOn, DFA and blogs across the country came together to raise over $430,000 for 65 members of Congress who pledged to vote against any health care bill that doesn't have a public option.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich is one of those members who took the pledge and intends to honor it.

And now MoveOn is demonstrating against him because of it. He's being threatened with primary challenges, and President Obama is going to his district today to campaign for the health care bill.

Donate $5 to Rep. Kucinich and let him know that we've got his back for opposing any bill without a public option.

The health care bill that Congress now wants to pass doesn't contain a public option, which would have served as a check on private insurance. Instead, the bill is written as a giant giveaway to big business--it doesn't make health care affordable, it just forces people to buy insurance from unregulated monopolies.

Dennis Kucinich is doing what a member of Congress should do: holding out his vote for something that 80% of the American people want. Now that only 50 votes are needed in the Senate, and 51 Senators have said they'd vote for a bill with a public option, even that last threadbare excuse is gone.

Dennis is asking the question everyone should be asking: why?

If we allow Dennis to be targeted for his principles and have his political career destroyed for simply doing what progressives should be doing, no member of Congress will ever have the political courage to stand up against corporate power again.


Donate $5 to Rep. Kucinich and let him know that we've got his back for opposing any bill without a public option.

Please repost this everywhere progressives go on the internet.

Kucinich Responds to Markos

Real quick: Watch this video

Thanks again to Single Payer Action.org

Markos of Daily Kos is a spineless weasel

Thanks to Single Payer Action I found out that Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, has sided with corporate assholes like Max "we need more police" Baucus (D-MT), and aligned himself with the insurance companies against people like Dennis Kucinich (D-OH).

From Single Payer Action:

He fell into line with the corporate Democrats, arguing that it was Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) who is to blame.

That would be Dennis Kucinich – the only member of Congress who supports single payer and is willing to stand up to his party and say no to the insurance industry bailout that is Obamacare.

“And I'm going to hold people, like Dennis Kucinich, responsible for the 40,000 Americans that die each year from a lack of health care,” Markos said on MSNBC last night. “And I don`t care if you`re a Republican or you`re a conservative Democrat or you`re somebody like Dennis Kucinich. The fact is, this does a heck of a lot for a lot of people.”

Yeah, that makes sense Markos... it's Dennis Kucinich's fault for wanting Medicare For All, not the obstructionist Democrats like Max Baucus who don't even want this bill to pass unless it totally ass-rapes the pocketbooks of every American for the increased profits of Health Insurance companies. It's all the fault of the guy who thinks we can do better, and not the fault of the assholes who made the bill suck so much.

This whole thing is amusing only because back in September, Dennis Kucinich was Markos's best buddy, with Markos saying,

“We’re not talking what we really wanted – we really wanted single payer – so we already compromised from our position,” Markos said at the time. “I think the public option at this point is sort of our Waterloo. This is where we stand and fight.”

To continue with Markos's 'Waterloo' analogy, he's given up on fighting for the French, defected to the Prussians after seeing that they were winning.

And for that, Markos is a spineless weasel.

BONUS: In case you missed it, here's the "We need More Police" comment from Max Baucus.

WHY PROTESTS TODAY SUCK

Protests today are totally impotent...

Except there's an unpermitted protest coming up in March, that I didn't know about at the time of filming, which I hope proves me wrong:
http://www.thepeaceoftheaction.org
The usual stuff:
BLOG: http://punkpatriot.blogspot.com
FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/1OtiqI
TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/punkpatriot
STORE: http://punkpatriot.etsy.com
DONATE? http://bit.ly/7OwKc2

VIDEO: Insurance Companies Pass Landmark Bill

Come back tomorrow for Part Two!

Sen. Al Franken Lays the Smackdown on Health Insurance Lobbyist LIES

In a repeat performance of Dennis Kucinich's smackdown in the house, Sen Al Franken lay the smackdown on the bullshit of the private health insurance industry lobbyists. Watch the video here.

NEW T-SHIRT ON ETSY

Visit the PunkPatriot.Etsy.com Store RIGHT NOW!


Light green text on dark green shirt, one of the many varieties available. You pick and choose your colors.

It's an HTML joke! In Helvetica! (for those who follow those things.)

Also, seriously, end war. Not just the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the idea that forcing people in one country to kill people in another country proves something.

Since these are handmade, they are available in a near infinite number of color combinations.

Many other color combos are available. Just ask. Also, be sure to include what SIZE you want in your order.


Light green text on dark green shirt again, but in poorer lighting.
T-Shirts, as always, are $10 per each, $5 shipping and handling.

Where were you on 9-11-01?

I remember waking up, getting ready for English class. It was my second week of my freshman year of college. Before leaving to catch the bus to the other campus, I was checking the primussucks.com bullitan board, as was my habit at the time. There were several posts about the "airline accident" in NYC, and then suddenly, there were posts of a second plane hitting. It was probably a few minutes after 9am. My class didn't start until 10:30am.

I ran downstairs to see what was going on on the news. I sat there watching in disbeleif. I had become friends with the RD of the dorm, and I ran and got her, because I figured she ought to know.

She and I sat there watching transfixed as the towers burned. As the first tower fell, I was in total disbelief. I knew at that time that a steel structure building had never collapsed due to fire. Cookie was concerned that the buildings might burn down, and I mentioned that to her. Time was static, so I don't know how many minutes after that I was proven wrong. I imagined all the people's lives inside being extinguished in a horrible instant, and my could feel my heart, and my soul, fall to the floor with the tower. Felt completely empty.

Cookie, the RD turned to me and said, "I would hate to be president right now." I looked at her, and asked if she was kidding. I looked back at the television and said, looking into the smoke, "for at least a year after something like this, you could pass whatever laws you wanted to. If he wants to the Senate to declare war, he can declare war on whomever he wants. Nobody will question the President during a crisis like this."

Looking back, I don't know why I said that, or how I knew that's what would happen. I'm not a Machiavellian person. It was what little American history I'd studied, probably; knowing how we interned the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Knowing how we had the Red Scare during the 1950s. During the Gulf War I was too young to understand what was going on, but I knew enough by the time Clinton was in office that I was against Clinton bombing Iraqi aspirin factories during the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a distraction. I had followed the 2000 election quite closely as a Senior in high school, watched as it was stolen, and was convinced that G.W. Bush would, like his father before him, declare war on somebody. I even have a letter I was assigned to write myself in High School by myself as a College Sophomore writing to my self as a High School Senior about what the future holds for me. It scares me a little now, but I said in that letter, half joking, "with George W Bush in office, we're sure to be at war with somebody by now, for no good reason." There was an inevitability I felt about it. Perhaps I was just jaded.

Sitting there watching as the remaining tower burned, Cookie looked back at me after my comment with tears and bit of anger in her eyes, visibly upset by what I'd said, and understandably. She said then, what I would come to agree with in the following October, when the congress passed the USAPATRIOT act. She said then, sitting next to me, "I hope you're wrong."

I wish I had been too.

***

Back on the couch, watching the images of the one tower smolder, still feeling raw as I felt the souls of every person in tower two extinguished in an instant, I didn't know what the appropriate thing to do was. Everything felt out of place and inappropriate in light of recent events. At 10:00 or so, I went and got on the bus to go to the Portland campus.

English class was still held, and I thank my professor to this day for not canceling class. His example is exactly what was actually meant when they said, "If we change our ways, the terrorists have won." For an hour and a half, we did grammar and writing style, as if nothing had happened.

I don't think Mr Phillipson realized at the time exactly what was happening or how serious it was, and he apologized the following class period for not having canceled class, but several of us thanked him.

Those of us who came into class, looked around confused about what to do or feel. Then our professor came in, threw his books down on the table, and said, "so, crazy stuff going on huh? Okay, let's do grammar."

At the time it struck me as being cold and detached, but looking back, it was exactly what we needed. It was nice to leave the insanity that was going on outside and focus on "Strunk and White." That class that day was a sort of psychic haven, while people standing outside the classroom door watching the screens, talking to one another about the end of the world.

***

That night, there was a girl in my dorm whom like most kids in my building in the 2nd week of classes, I didn't know, she was on the phone that night in the hallway, calling over and over again, crying, trying to find out if a friend of hers was on one of those four flights.

The phone lines were still all completely jammed as everybody in the USA was calling their loved ones to find out if they were okay. I really wanted for her friend or relative not to have been on one of those planes. It turned out that her friend was indeed on one of those planes. She dropped out of school. I did not see her again after that.

Over the next couple days, as the list of names of those who were in the towers came in, I made a list, and printed it off, and hung it up in the hallway of my dorm outside my room. I made it a point to read every single one and imagine who they were, see in my minds eye the person attached to that name. Something inside of me broke, but for the better. The bubble of security that had come with being an American born in the 1980s, the end of the Cold War nothing but a fuzzy childhood memory, had been not popped but shattered. There was an entire world of people out there, and it mattered what our government did. We could die because people in our government were killing people somewhere else in the world. I hadn't been paying attention in much detail to what my government had been doing. It was time for me to start.

I remember watching over the next few days, as no clear case was built for Osama Bin Laden. They just started repeating that it was suspected to be him, and at some point, it shifted from being suspected to be him, to be unquestionably by him, without any supporting evidence to report confirming this. It was because of this that I became skeptical of the official storyline very early on. There just wasn't any evidence to support what they were saying, or if there was, they certainly weren't presenting it. They were just stating things as fact with no evidence. The Bush administration refused to investigate for nearly two years, despite the pleas of family members who had lost their loved ones. Documents released on the matter were few, and those that were were almost entirely redacted.

It seemed like the talking heads were just making it all up, and just expecting us to believe whatever they said because we were in a state of shock, and they were the NEWS.
I had become too cynical and skeptical to just believe whatever I was told. All I wanted was evidence. Apparently four women who had lost their husbands in the attacks felt the same way. The whole thing reminded me too much of George Orwell's "1984."



Later, on October 26th, 2001, I saw on the crawl at the bottom of the screen that the congress had passed a new "anti-terrorism" bill. I didn't understand the need. Terrorism was illegal already. They didn't need to pass a law against it. I wondered what it could possibly be about. With the help of Jefferson.gov and the New York Center for Constitutional Rights, I started reading through the USAPATRIOT act. Turns out it was something straight out of 1984. At that point, I became more skeptical of the official story. Especially as I then learned from the New York Center for Constitutional Rights that this bill had been prepared and drafted a year prior, but was introduced at the last minute, giving nobody a chance to read it.

And that's really when everything began to change. Our libraries were (and still are) subject to search at any time by federal agents, and librarians who spoke out were slapped with law suits and detaining orders, telling them that they could not speak to anybody not even a lawyer. The librarians started putting up signs saying that federal agents had NOT searched their records yet. Over time those signs disappeared, and the librarians couldn't talk about it, by law.

I checked Jefferson.gov to find out who'd voted against the USAPATRIOT act. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. They became my heroes, even though I didn't know who they were at the time.

I became urgently interested in foreign affairs, history, and policy. I asked the questions that everybody was discouraged from asking, like, "why do they hate us?" I didn't want to go to the mall or go shopping or go to Disneyland, like Bush advised. I didn't want to "soak up the sun, and tell everyone to lighten up" as Sherly Crow's song, released just barely a year after, suggested. This was serious, and the responsibility was personal.

I researched our CIA's and Military's history in the Middle East and all around the world. It became clear to me through study why the USA was hated. 9-11 was, as Ron Paul said, "blowback."



For me, 9-11 was a wake up call, an alarm going off, calling me to civic responsibility. To personal responsibility. It seemed to me that most of the country hit the snooze button.

Don't forget.

..||..

Citizens lobby for HR 676 in Washington DC

If you watch the mainstream press, you will hear that a single-payer health care plan will not be seriously considered by lawmakers crafting reform of the US health care system. Advocates of HR 676, the single-payer health care plan in the House of Representatives, beg to differ. This video follows their efforts at a rally in Upper Senate Park.