Join Dennis' Resolution

Now is the time for all of us who care about this country to make the same resolution as Dennis has made. We, too, will fight to restore the integrity of the Constitution. We will work to impeach the vice president and then president for the numerous crimes they have both committed. We will work to ensure greater peace among all nations by refusing to aid in the funding of the current wars. We will repeal the massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. We will guarantee civil rights for all segments of the population--gay and straight, citizens and those who want to be, workers and the unemployed, those in need of help of any kind and those able to provide it.

It is only by doing as Dennis has already resolved that we will be able to do two important things in 2008:
1. Elect Dennis Kucinich president of this country
2. Make sure that we immediately begin to improve the health and well being of not just this nation but the planet's as well.
Strength through Peace.

Assassinations, Terrorism and the lack of diplomacy

Another sad day today. Former Prime Minister, Benazhir Bhutto was assassinated today by persons thus far unknown. And for all the time and effort many of the candidates will put into saber rattling (e.,g., Rudy G. who was out with his statement first today about the terrors we face) and the kinds of pandering to the better way of life we have here (e.g., Mike H., who had not many words to say about the woman who had just died by putting her life on the line for her country) and what others will put their lips around in order to make their "feelings" known, I can say that what I would expect Dennis Kucinich to say would contain more of the context in which this killing happened and less about how great a country we have and how we are so much more expert at thwarting the killers among us.
I think it is time to think and to really consider what this woman has done by putting herself out there for her own country. It is a sad day, yes, and she was, as we all now realize, a woman who was after power in a country where Muslims were the majority. However, that doesn't mean that all Muslims were opposed to her and to her more liberal ideas. Surely her appeal to the poor and the women of Pakistan will mean that her death will be a bitter pill for the constituency of hers. She is also a strong model for the women around the world who would like to see a better world for themselves and to be able to live even in the face of fear with the hope of making things better for themselves and their country.
I just finished reading Dennis' autobiography and in some ways there is something to take from that book in the wake of the assassination. We are all given an opportunity to wake up to our connectedness. We are all given an opportunity to see that when we reach out to each other to work for our common good that we have the opportunity to instill hope in everyone around us.
We can bemoan the horrors of the violence of someone shooting that brave woman and then blowing themselves up or we can look to her life for the lessons of strength and commitment to make things better that she so believed in that she put her life on the line to try and make that happen.
Sadly, Pakistan is descending into further chaos because of the mistrust and the anger and the frustration the people there feel with their lives and the lack of choice to make things better. Here, too, we can all complain and feel frustrated that the message of courage and the will to make a better life for all is within our grasp if we are allowed to truly speak out and be heard.
Dennis Kucinich tries to do that every day and he does it without the press that doesn't want to hear what he has to say because his ideas run counter to their corporate concerns.
In his book, he describes how his life took these disastrous turns at the most inopportune times. For example, while his family sat in the church waiting for him to graduate from high school, the pastor tried to prevent him from receiving his diploma. He owed the school money and the pastor told him that if he didn't pay then and there, no diploma. Dennis figured out that if he didn't let him graduate then he wouldn't feel the need to repay the debt. So, he signed a note and received his diploma and paid his debt on time. He knew what he wanted and how to find the means to get it.
Prime Minister Bhutto wanted to help her country and to free it from the tyranny it has lived with under a military dictatorship. She has seen her father hanged and her husband tortured. She has seen other members of her family assassinated. She was a strong figure and we owe her the respect and the dignity of mourning her loss.
Yet, I feel that it is important to us to remember the context in which she lived and died and for us too to pay attention to the strong men and women among us who are there ready to lead and who deserve not just our support but our trust.
We mourn the loss of a great leader for Pakistan. We mourn the loss of a human being to death and to violence no matter who or where. We need to find the leaders here who will help us to deal with this troubled planet and heal it and which is why I keep harping on the comparisons of strengths and ideallism we have here in Congressman Kucinich.
Sometimes it takes a shocking loss to remind us what we have in abundance.

On a Sad Note

No matter how you feel today, your thoughts and prayers should go out to the Kucinich family for their loss of their brother, Perry. It is a difficult thing to lose a sibling especially when he is younger and I do hope that Dennis is finding consolation in knowing that we cannot control what happens to people even when they reside so deeply in our hearts.
With this sadness in mind, I have been thinking about all the good that the Kuciniches do as a couple and how they have affected people and their attitudes towards politics and towards the needs of the people politicians are elected to represent.
There was an excellent article in Huffington Post by Matt Simon about a visit that Elizabeth Kucinich made in lieu of Dennis' ability to be there. He had returned to DC to vote on the war funding issue and she had gone in his place to see a young man who many in the campaign have visited. He is a very young man living in a nursing home with MD and working diligently for the legalization of marijuana. Eleziabeth spent a good deal of time with this young man, Clayton Holton, and listened to what his needs are and what his story is all about.
Compassion is a word that gets thrown about as if it were just a commodity. Or maybe something you can order up on command, when it is needed. But compassion is a way of life and it extends to everyone no matter who or what they are or what they may be suffering with or from. We had to swallow every time someone referred to GWB as a compassionate conservative as if someone hadn't just made that up in order to give him a tag line that might mean something to someone who doesn't think being compassionate is something you work at.
Looking through the resume of GWB it is hard to come up with an instance of true compassion in his past. I can't help but think of one of the things that galvanized Cindy Sheehan against this president was the way he talked to the families of service men and women who had died. It was as if she could sense in his lack of presence any of the qualities one associates with someone capable of experiencing someone else's loss.
Elizabeth Kucinich seems quite qualified to be labelled as compassionate. It is in her resume and it is in her ability to sit and listen to someone who wants to tell her about him or herself and describe the kind of pain they are in whether physical or mental or spiritual.
With all of that wordiness, I guess I am saying, thank God that Elizabeth is with Dennis now while he mourns the loss of his brother and carries on his way to the presidency.
With all the labeling of who is and who is not compassionate based on their own personal history, it is easy to forget what the word really means and where it comes from.
I wish the whole Kucinich family a recovery from the pain they are in.

When Governments Lie too much

It is now only too obvious that this current administration is addicted to lying and almost about every word that comes out of their mouths is a lie. No longer should we waste our energy worrying about whether they are telling the truth. Our default position should be that they are guilty as charged and we can stop wasting time debating whether or not to impeach or whether they will change. The answers are yes and never. They will need to be impeached so that there will never be another power grab as the one going on now.
If you aren't frightened by it then you are not paying attention. There are good people, like Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst and John Kaminski from Maine who have had really good insights into the trouble we are in and have come away with hope in their hearts. They are far better people than I am. I am frightened by what I see.
One part of me says, get rid of everyone of them. No one who has served in government and taken money from any corporation should ever be allowed to serve the public. You cannot have two masters.
If money is one of your masters, then you cannot serve the people. The people must come first and with that as their oath along with their oath to defend and protect the constitution, public officials whether a dog catcher or a postal employee or a congress person or the president, needs to take such an oath and to be held to it.
I don't care if there are complementary foundations that would like to offer help to the candidate. We should all pay for the campaigns and maybe then they will not be as long and as exhausting. Maybe they just don't serve our national good at all.
Conversely, we could decide to put all public servants on a service contract. In other words, you apply for the job, you have other candidates for the job and we all interview you and get to make a selection based on a popular vote, e.g., as in a democracy.
But the point is, could we have elected in a fair election, a president such as George W. Bush? Most likely mistakes are made but then others elections would not be tied to his and we could have impeached him 4 years ago and not let this madness continue unabated this long.
I know it is easy to place blame on all of us for not stopping them. We have been watching a very long train having a very big collision. We do not know if we are going to get hit by it so we are scared to move or to change anything. No matter what rock you look under there is damage to this country from this administration and it is just time to look and pray for those who will truly represent us and not the people looking to get even richer than they are now.
If a woman who worked in Iraq and was gang raped there by her fellow employees, i.e., Halliburton employees, and cannot be properly defended and protected, then we none of us has the luxury of going out on the streets to protest alone. We need a critical mass. The best protected still of that political mass is to vote. To vote for Dennis Kucinich in the primaries because you know he is right and no matter how little time he has had to speak out nationally, you know he is right.
He is right to urge you to vote your heart and give to the country the gift of a real change for the better. Not just change for change's sake but change that means the course of this country will be re-routed to conform to the rules and laws set down in our constitution.
When our government has used the obvious course of all dictators, to lie to the public, we know we are going in the wrong direction but we also need to not just be promised a change in direction but a way to get to the new goals.
I can think of no more reliable way to make sure we are heard than at this point to vote. Not just to vote but to work as poll watchers and other election day officials so we can also be assured that all the votes are counted fairly.
As a way of changing what they used to say in Chicago on election day: Get the vote out and count it fairly.

Water Cooler Talk, 12/17/07

Here is my fantasy: This Monday morning, workers in an office building in Manhattan are not working. They are standing in front of the water cooler discussing what they saw on kucinichtv.com last night. They and their colleagues are all fired up thinking about what is going on in this country and particularly in regards to what has been done to the constitution that is supposed to be the legal means by which this country is governed.

Last night, they heard the congressman as well as John Kaminski and Ray McGovern discuss what has been going on in terms of the shredding of that document. They heard these three men speak in level tones about a topic most of them probably would not have spent two hours on a Sunday night thinking about had these not been the times we are actually living in rather than the times we wish we lived in.

I mean it is just before Christmas. It is a time of parties and anticipating the break from the normal schedule. Yet, these are also the times when it is necessary to stop and talk and think about the ways in which the constitution of the United States has been perverted and shredded by an administration and followed along by a Congress only too willing to throw it out in order to gain for themselves whatever personal advancement they are interested in.

However, my fantasy cohort of office workers is really angry and unnerved by what has been happening. They listened to Gore Vidal introduce the discussion with such sadness and contempt in his voice that they were primed to really think about what they could do.

The one thing that struck all of them was how no other candidate is taking the time to educate us on what the constitution says and what the framers of it meant when they wrote it. Rather than it just being a document that sits somewhere lifeless and unread, the document is quoted, the document even sits inside the jacket of the congressman and he is able at a moment’s notice to bring it out and show you just where the constitution describes, for example, what rights we have as citizens when it comes to our privacy. He can show you the 6 instances where impeachment is mentioned and how nowhere within the document is there any mention of God granting us these rights. This was human work for humans living in the early years of this country’s beginnings. The promise of this series of discussions is that at the end of it all, there will be a white paper giving the country the results of these discussions as well as suggestions for amendments.

For many of the office workers, they are playing a new game called, “Did you know”? For example, they ask each other a question about the constitution’s description of the separation of powers and the checks and balances that is supposed to ensure. When they think about it, they are amazed to think now about what happens in their daily reading of the papers. What is in fact a signing statement? Where is that allowed in the constitution? What is the FISA act and where is the warrant authorizing the government to eavesdrop on a citizen? What is the law about torture? What is an international treaty and when we sign it, what are our legal obligations? The questions begin to outnumber the players of this game and yet, they keep spilling out of their mouths because they are just beginning to understand the serious discrediting of the laws the current administration is guilty of. Thoughts turn to impeachment and why this valid process for removing from office of persons who are lying to their country in order to start a war and to continue it is not being applied as the constitution warrants it should be.

This is the beginning of my fantasy of what could happen if more and more people would take the time to listen to the Constitutional Initiative that Congressman Kucinich has begun and will continue. Since it is free and available to anyone with an internet connection, it is a serious concern of mine that so few people tune in to listen to the discussions of these topics and how they are affecting the government that runs this country.

We need more than 500 people to tune in and to stay tuned in and to participate. We need everyone to care about and defend the constitution because if we don’t, who will and if we don’t, what will happen to it?

Do you feel the anger yet?

I am trying to stay relatively cool in my response to the Des Moines Register's stupid decision not to allow Dennis to debate. We know the reasons for it and yet, we can all be as mad as hell and wondering what to do to change the circumstances of how we receive our election coverage in order to make an informed choice when voting.
For many the chance to vote is slim to nonexistent due to the feeling of total disenfranchisement by a system that seems so geared towards the ones that the corporations and the media jointly agree will serve their own interests best. We see it all the time and it continues despite what we know to be the truth of that statement. Hardly a fact about itself that a democracy should be proud of nor that these candidates who have been annointed by the media/corporate interests should feel proud of.
I have often asked myself a question: What would I do if I were Hillary, Barack, or any of them and saw the way that Kucinich is treated during a debate and/or not let into a debate?
What would you do?
Would I sit there like a lump on the log and not even pay attention to the way he is not given equal time? Would I be thinking well that is just more time for me to say what I want to say? Would I identify with his struggle at all and decide to offer a hand and a voice so that he received an equal share? Would I stop to think, even in some kind of self-serving way that perhaps people are making judgements about me based on how I let this happen and did nothing?
I don't know but I can guess that if the tables were turned and no one was letting Hillary talk or Barack talk, that Dennis would not stand there and act as if someone were not getting a fair shake. I can feel that about him and his sense of how the world should be when I watch him talk to people.
Did you see the video clip where he asked himself a question at the Black and Brown Debate last week? Did you see how he both asked the question of himself with such politeness and then thanked himself for asking the question? Did you see Hillary laughing at it all as if the pet had just stood up and done the most fantastic trick. Well, he is not the pet, but he is the only one who knew how to ask a good question and to answer it fully.
Start getting a bit angry now because we are truly running out of time and we need everyone to get involved and do something to make sure Dennis is our next president. Start with that premise and work backwards as to how you will make that happen.
thanks.

When Enough is truly Enough

My good friend Kevin wrote to me last night because he was so angry that Dennis had been blocked from participating in the last Democratic Debate in Iowa today. Do you know why the valid presidential candidate was disqualified? The purported reason had to do with where the campaign's headquarters were located.
Perhaps another reason is at the heart of the matter. And it so happens that Kevin's anger and the reason that Dennis was denied the opportunity to speak about his ideas specfically related to health care has to do with who was one of the sponsors of this "debate."
Kevin is a good friend and his health concerns are large because not only is he on disability but his wife has MS. Her illness is a huge drain on their finances. He wrote to me earlier this month about Dennis and what he had to say about health care, that he was in favor of a single-payer, unviversal health care system that was and will never be a for profit delivery system. This bill hich he co-sponsored with John Conyers of Detroit is a vast overhauling of how we would receive our medical benefits. Kevin was quite sceptical as to whether or not this could even be passed in the congress with the kinds of money the insurance industry has and the way they would fight this.
Others too have written about this. You see, they don't ask how Dennis would fund this because that is really a no brainer, they ask how will he get the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry with their enormous lobbies to not butcher his ideas and keep them from becoming a reality?
I understand only too well too what it is like to spend and spend on insurance and to never really get what it is you need. The insurers fight you every step of the way. It is a frightening system that causes such awful problems for so many people that it could fill long ledgers of names of people who would benefit if only we could get this type of universal coverage administered the way Medicare is administered now.
But, then there is the huge stumbling block--the insurance industry. Who is one of the largest backers of the organization sponsoring the debate today? The insurance companies, in fact all of them. If you live long enough to join this organization, from the moment you give them the check, your mailbox is flooded with all kinds of insurance forms to sell you anything that can be insured. This organization's whole purpose in life is to be a shill for the insurance companies. In fact, if we all stretch our minds back a year or so ago, it was AARP that had a membership revolt when they found out how that organization that purported to represent their interests was really representing the interests of the pharmaceutical companies when the whole argument about Medicare drug coverage was proposed by the Bush administration.
So, the fact that Dennis Kucinich is in favor of and proposed, in essence, to end our servitude to the insurance companies, is it any wonder that they are in favor of thwarting his efforts to get his message out?
I watch with interest who the companies are that sponsor these debates and for the most part, not one of the companies spending their money to host these events are representative of the interests of the majority of us who work hard, try to save a little bit and are stretched financially in more ways than we care to report to anyone.
I have listened to Dennis answer questions about this plan while following him around in New Hampshire. I can tell you one important lesson I learned from his description of his health care reform ideas is that we don't sit in judgement of what people need. When a person is in need we help because that is what we are here for.
It can be applied to every social service we need to extend to the citizenry of this country and only one person is talking that way and making it clear where he stands and who he represents. That is why Dennis Kucinich is not allowed to speak--because he really does represent us and what we need.
A more humane way of dealing with all of our ills could be possible if we all get out there and elect Dennis Kucinich for president whether his name is on the ballot or not. It is like making a real investment in all our futures.

An Official Announcement

I am not a celebrity but I sure can spot some of them when I am in a restaurant in New York waiting for someone to join me. I cannot name the man I spotted the other day and asked to write for the Kucinich campaign. I have no idea why he refused to help us. Therefore I will not share his name. It would only embarrass him come election night when Dennis takes the presidency and he had not signed on to help. I cannot inflict that kind of pain on someone whose work I admire but who has not yet stepped up to the plate to work for a candidate.
Perhaps, and this is just a wishful thought, he will do so soon and just needs to think a bit more.
Sean Penn certainly stepped up to the plate in a big way last week. I first read the whole speech in its entirety on Commondreams.org and I can tell you, it was a big and happy surprise. The Huffington Post picked it up over the weekend. It gained a lot of peoples' attention who are hungry to hear more about Dennis and to be shown that he is on the minds of lots of people. The complaint level is rising, I think about what is not being reported and what is.
I had a nice little op-ed piece published by opednews.com over the weekend about how Dennis' backers will sink the good ship MSM. I hope that people begin to realize as the MSM does already and as the other corporate interests that back the so-called front runners that their do too that a Kucinich presidency means that business will not be as usual. It means that there will be an actual fair wage for workers and good benefits for all and that this screwy economy that rewards only the rich right now will come to a halt.
Did you ever wonder what it would mean to take on the corporate interests? Did you ever see the parallels between the lack of interest by the MSM in Dennis and the fact that he wants them to be governed the same as you and I are governed? Then, perhaps, it is not such a big mystery why they ignore him. In fact it becomes increasingly clear that his way of seeing how fairness actually does matter will wipe out the kinds of unearned but more truthfully robbed wages the corporate bullies receive while denying to the workers the same kind of largesse.
There is a corporate underbelly to this whole world's economy that no one really wants to expose. Oh, yes, Naomi Klein has been and continues to expose it. Take a good look at her new book, The Shock Doctrine and you will begin to understand why Dennis' ideas are more than an inconvenience to the powers that be. Were this new way of looking at the ultra-rich and their priorities to be revealed and what's more, ended, then there would be a real revolution again here on these shores but not against some foreign or faraway power but against the men and women who are enslaving most of us and have no scruples about it whatsoever.
It is a shame tha this does not get reported in our supposedly free press. But it doesn't and it won't. That same press is owned by these same slave owners. Yes, there are sights and sounds that many people are waking up. That is why, for example, we can read about the real reasons for the stage hands strike on Broadway that you won't read about in the New York Times but can read on alternet.org
So, it is time for us to officially announce our freedom from this tyranny and let our voices get out there and say what is needed and how to go about getting it.
We need to see more leaders like Dennis Kucinich step forward too and say the same things. More voices would be a very positive sign.

Interview with Dennis Kucinich

Are You Keeping Up with the Congressman?

I swear every day it gets harder and harder to keep up with all that there is to report on and to think through when it comes to a Kucinich campaign. I try to keep up and that is what I am supposed to be doing and I am having trouble doing that.
My recent post on the Huffington Post got a number of people excited that Dennis' campaign is both not getting the coverage it should while at the same time we are all so greedy that whenever something does appear, there is a cry for more and a cry to each other that finally someone is talking about him. I feel honored, honestly, to be in the position of being one of those with the ability to write about him.
The writing itself is difficult at times. Waking up each day to write about the campaign or where he has been or what he has said about something is not that easy. There is a certain lag time that may creep in to having to digest what has been said.
Take the Iran issue. There he was first thing the other morning, as soon as the report was made public, he had a response. His response, like most of his responses, had a lot of clarity to it. But if you go back a few days before that NIE came out, what was he saying? That there was no reason to go to war with Iran because there were no nuclear missiles coming at us. We are not a nation that should be engaged in pre-emptive war. That is not allowed. That is why he is trying to impeach the vice-president and then the president.
Let's all think this through. Whether that NIE had come out or not, Kucinich would have been saying exactly what he has been saying and saying it to the students in New Hampshire and saying it on national television, saying it on Kucinichtv.com and elsewhere. In fact, wherever they do allow him to speak.
And speaking of allowing him to speak. Did you see the clip from the Brown and Black Debate for the Iowa caucus where he asked himself a question? If that was not the purest form of Kucinich humor. Straight from the midwest with lots of dignity but a good laugh too because he did actually get to be asked a question he thought was important and to answer it as well and then, being polite, he thanked himself. Even Hillary found the formatting of it funny. Though did she find it funny that the audience went nuts over what he had to say?
That is the thing about listening to him speak. The audience loves him. Give him five minutes or five seconds and he is going to get everyone's attention and they love him.
That also says a lot about someone getting no attention and yet being the darling of so many progressives who know just what Dennis Kucinich stands for and if they are hearing him for the first time, then they are aware of hearing someone speak to them about the issues they care about too, that are about who they are and what their needs are.
More catching up to do.

Health Care Report from New Hampshire, Part 2

I am sure that most of you saw the hostage situation unfold in New Hampshire on Friday. I did a bit of reading around of the papers and the blogs to see how people responded to the situation. It is unfortunate that the sympathy by and large all goes to the people who were taken hostage and none of it goes out to this poor guy who had no other way to bring attention to the fact that he was in desperate need of real mental health workers who could work with him to end whatever was obviously disturbing him to such a severe degree.

This man, Leeland Eisenberg, didn't take a gun into the Clinton campaign headquarters and he didn't fire at anyone nor did he hurt someone. What he did was make a really bad call for help. What he got was a lot of attention for a problem that is truly huge in these states where the funding has been severely cut or is nonexistent for good mental health services as well as substance abuse programs. I don't have the figures right here but will find them as to what New Hampshire spends on such cases, but it was known to people in Rochester, NH that this man needed help. Why he didn't receive it is a mystery.

The kind of Sherlock Holmes we need right now is the one who actually sees there is no mystery involve. We all need to be covered for our mental health problems just as we need to be covered for our problems with drug abuse and anger management and our depression and our more severe forms of mental illness. Without this type of coverage in place along with the facilities and professionals who are trained to work with this part of the population, we won't have a decent and democratic form of health care. We will continue to maintain a very discriminatory form that is based solely on your ability to pay.

We cannot send our mentally ill to Bangkok for weekly therapy sessions. While many travel there for surgery, the kind of intense and personally involving care a person with a mental illness deserves and requires is quite different. It also means that we as a society must learn to value all humans no matter their ability to perform as we do.

Dennis' comments to the man in New Hampshire about there being those who do not truly deserve health insurance and the benefits in his plan were fair and would have helped Leeland Eisenberg. He would not have had to take a political ad by Clinton and turn it into a personal message to him that he could get her help if he could get her attention.

Health Care Report from New Hampshire

It has become clear to many in this country how poorly our current health care truly cares for us. While I was in New Hampshire last week, I heard Dennis speak about his plan for a single-payer, not for profit system and how it would work. But first a little scene setting.

We were at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. The school hosted a Town Hall meeting where a few students had been chosen to ask Dennis questions, which he answered and then he answered questions from the audience. (A report on the following exchange I am about to mention is at the Exeter Times website.) An older gentleman stood up and asked about what Dennis could do for him. It turns out he was a prostate cancer survivor but now his wife was stricken with some form of lymphoma and required an injection every two weeks that cost $10,000 a shot. That is an incredible sum of money and he wanted Dennis to look into this fro him and to see just how the company making this drug could get away with these kinds of charges.

After Dennis promised he would investigate this, another gentleman spoke about what Dennis would do to make sure in his proposed system of health care that there would not be abuses by those who were either malingerers or those who just never took care of themselves.

Dennis, in his own fashion, answered the question. One of the things I came to see was how he would place in context his own reasoning. Answers to questions are not just straightforward rote recitations of facts and figures. There was this constant use of both his own personal experience and how that influenced his ideas. In this case, he spoke of watching his mother die from emphysema. He then moved on to say that of course we would always encourage people to live healthy lives but we would never penalize someone who didn't. According to the world as Dennis sees it, we all could be this woman who ended up with a disease out of the blue that requires this kind of extraordinary treatment. Plus, we are all here for each other. There are those who take excellent care of themselves and something horrible happens. There are those who don't take care of themselves. But the system is there for all of us. This is what a democracy is to Dennis and it made a lot of sense to a lot of people in the room that night.

Then today in the Boston Globe I read the op-ed piece by this doctor who had been assured that his daughter would receive two years of post graduate health insurance on her parents' policy and things didn't work out that way. He said in his piece:
Two important lessons can be learned. First, we need to sever the connection between healthcare and employment. People need continuous, portable coverage that is affordable, comprehensive, and equitable. Second, we cannot depend on the private insurance industry to provide this for us.
Piece-meal reform such as the new law will not work. Both employers and the public support the concept of single-payer healthcare. Big business is starting to realize that a single payer system will be the only affordable way to cover everyone. When will our politicians understand that their political futures will depend on supporting this kind of comprehensive reform?
Michael Kaplan is a family physician and a member of Physicians for a National Health Plan and the board of directors of the Universal Health Care Education Fund.

What happened in the granite state

There is nothing granite-like in Dennis but I can tell you now from having spent a few days with him that there is something very different about him. No, he is not an alien and would not be confused with one. His though is a towering intellect that will not stop. Determination pours from him as if he were a battery driven speaker that has an endless supply of ideas, words to express them and an unapologetic way of talking.
I have never seen a campaign in my life. I never was interested enough to find one of interest to watch close up. It seemed like it would just be the most tedious way to spend one's time. You would be chasing from place to place in order to meet people and talk to them and listen to them and find out what their concerns were and then you would be exhausted and wonder just why you were doing this every single day for over a year.
But watching Kucinich over the past 3 days was a wonderful lesson in campaigning for anything one believes in and wants to do no matter what. Something incredibly spiritual and dependable seeps from his eyes as he speaks. He can look straight at you in the eyes and say what you have heard him now say over and over again for three days and it feels fresh and heartfelt.
I spoke at length with one of his interns in New Hampshire, Sanjay Seth. What a huge amount of enthusiasm he displayed for the congressman and his efforts to become our next president. He reported on listening to him every day and while he heard the same speeches on the same topics over and over too, he reported that it always felt like Kucinich was saying what was in his heart. Sanjay smiled, he always smiled while I was watching him work, he loves doing what he is doing, advance work on the campaign.
I intend to return to New Hampshire at least for a day or two during the primary voting on January 8th. It would be great to see how the people there have taken in Kucinich's message of hopeful hard work (my words).
Tomorrow I will write here at length about the impeachment teach-in because to me that was one of the best events that I could have had the pleasure to attend. But what better way to introduce the events from the past few days than to introduce the people I met who work there on the campaign.
Starting in no particular order, there is Sanjay Seth who comes from North Dakota and seems to thrive on hard work. At 19, he is in charge of the advance detail work for when the congressman appears say at a bookstore or at a convention or in a school. He gets the podium ready, makes sure all the material needed to spread the word is available and that most important of all, that those who want to join the campaign have the material they need to make the choice to sign up.
Sanjay tells with glee the story of his father, a doctor in Bismark, North Dakota who helped him to see what Kucinich is all about by having walked up and down with Kucinich signs pasted all over him on one of the coldest days in Bismark and how people stopped and spoke to him about Dennis' run for the presidency during the previous election.
Here we are in 2007 and Sanjay is making his way throughout the state of New Hampshire trying to make things as nice as possible for Dennis and so that he can make a mark on what is becoming one of the most ad hoc organized campaigns a valid and potentially successful candidate has probably ever assembled.
Sanjay is not interested in politics as a career, he is a poet and we look forward to seeing some of his work.
Hal, excuse me Hal, I didn't stop to get your last name but Hal is another wunderkind working with the campaign who put together Kucinich tv. If you have ever watched it, you know what a great thing it is to have an internet tv connection to the campaign and it was all started by, set up and thought up by our pal Hal.
That is the start of my report. It could go on forever, but my eyesight has walked out the door. By the way I am listening to one of Dennis' favorite singers, Michael Franti. Check him out too and you will not be disappointed just as Dennis is no disappointment.

Off to see Dennis

It is now time to go off on the road again to visit with the folks who are listening to Dennis Kucinich in person. I am following this obsession to make known who he is and what he is talking about to as many people as possible. I don't care to be a part of the world that just repeats what they are told but rather to be one of those who listens and questions and then takes it upon herself to try and relay the answers to the questions we may have about where he stands on issues and why he came to those conclusions, etc.
For this trip what interests me is very minute. I hope to take other trips and to follow him into other communities to see what happens when he speaks to other citizens. But on this trip, what I am most concerned about is the way in which the mainstream media is talking or rather not talking about him. I want to know what he sees as his part in making that happen, what he feels about it in general and what he thinks he can do to change that.
Most of my feelings on this topic are evolving as I am beginning to pursue the answers to these questions and what it could mean for our democracy that certain candidates are listened to and other candidates are ignored, if not forcibly shut up in front of a huge audience as Dennis was at the CNN debate in Las Vegas.
When we begin to understand the answers to the questions of what makes a candidate interesting to the media and what it is that keeps voters from being able to hear what a variety of candidates have to say, then we can have a better vantage point from which to evaluate how well or not our system of government works. If there is going to be true voter equality then there has to be also the complementary attention to making sure we hear what all the candidates have to say about the issues that affect us all.
That is what this road trip is about. How well does he really communicate to an audience when he is allowed to speak and not with a thirty-second clock and not with a moderator who is noticably disinterested in hearing his comments. And then, what do his listeners like about what he hears and what don't they like?
These questions just don't get asked and need to be. I hope to then find a forum where we can all not just read my report but discuss it.
Stay tuned for further developments as they occur.

Who Knew?

Who knew that Dennis and Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, were friends? Did you know that? Iread today on alternet that they were friends for 40 years. That seems a little odd since Dennis would have been close to being a child when he met Larry Flynt but with Dennis, all things are possible.
What I do know is that if Dennis is now getting endorsements from Larry Flynt, he must be hitting some lucky number. Remember that Mr. Flynt is the one who is holding a number of very salacious cards about the Republicans. Personally, all the slime that has been coming out about the far right and their fellow travelers, the Christian fundamentalists, has made me wonder just what is going on in this world of money and greed? I think perhaps I just answered my own question. If you are that covered in one vice, greed, why would you foresake other vices? I mean who in their right mind really can trust a party that has fostered this type of behavior? This is why I think it is time to flush, literally, all this influence peddling that goes on in the name of greed from politics. It opens up such a vast world of vice and sleaze and who knows this better than both the left and right wings of the greed machine that runs this country.
I don't know about you but I find it more reprehensible that people have these lavish homes with more square footage than any normal family ever needs and that they have had to cut down forests and pave over pastures and destroy natural habitats in order to create for themselves this perfect home. In the meantime, people are starving and the food banks are empty but the haves, those with way more than anyone could ever need, cannot be responsible caretakers of the planet. That to me should be the moral issue we all get our underpants in a tizzy about. Why is gay marriage such an evil thing when people are stripping the planet of its resources for one little group of people to enjoy while keeping out everyone else?
So, I come back to the constant question, the one that names this blog and that makes me want to know just why not Dennis? What would happen if we all were having the time of our lives here living within the bounds of what the earth has to offer us all and keeping our lives safe by following a program of peace rather than seeing the world as a violent place which every right wing nut case says it is?
Let's stop the fear mongering and end the greed and the way it has destroyed our planet and get back to what matters: that we live in peace and harmony with one another, that we all have a living wage and good health care and safe water and food and air to breathe and that we help all who need it no matter who they are.
That is what Dennis Kucinich advocates for as well and why it is time to have a Kucinich presidency.
Think about that as they ratchet up the claims that we need to go to war again against another unenemy.
There really is strength through peace as Dennis has been saying.

Why Conservatism Fails Now

I don't know why we listen to the conservatives who seem to want to find any way to defend their policies and to attack the Democrats. There is never a sense of seeing that they have made a very huge mistake in the ways in which the country and the world have been altered according to their own false perceptions. Michael J. Gerson has been on the airwaves too much lately talking up his new book with its "brave" title. I have a feeling this man would like to run for office himself. Unfortunately, he is as incapable of reversing the image of the conservative movement as anyone else who takes on that task and the reason is simple--they have completely failed to both move this country forward in any kind of meaningful way and when it comes to trying to discuss the problems they have created, they refuse to see why their ideas didn't work and just want more chances to fail more.
I realize that there are times when healing is an important issue in any time of great upheavel. However, the upheavels have not ended. We are not finished with the kinds of empty rhetoric accompanied by the narrowly defined reasons for hopeful assessments of the what the Bush administration has bequeathed us all. There is nothing but disaster after disaster to look at no matter which way you turn and that is not some partisan jab at the conservatives in this country but an honest assessment of what conservatives have failed to do and have failed to correct for. By asking us to also place blame on the Democrats when they had a majority in the House and Senate while this train wreck was occurring and then to say there was inaction in the Congress is like asking us to look in the mirror and not see ourselves. They continue to posit these Alice in Wonderland statements and to lie as if there were no reason to tell the truth and then expect us all to fall in line and continue these policies that are pointing to nothing but their own shame and failure.
It really doesn't matter that the "surge" is working in Iraq because the numbers of people who have been destroyed, the amount of property destroyed, the infrastructure destroyed, the faith in their own futures destroyed and you really think we can sit down and talk rationally about the effectiveness of the "surge."
What we can talk about is how every one of their policies was wrong to begin with, that they lied and falsified everything in order to go to a war that never should have been fought. I don't care how they justify it now and tell us what a great job they are doing now. They never should have been there to begin with and had they told us from the start why, the real reasons we had to go to war and let us honestly vote on it, then we could all say, yes, it was a failure that we all participated in. But no! Their idea of democracy is to get their way anyway they can and never mind what others with opposing views feel or think.
So, yes, conservatism is dead, thank God for that. It has died and those trying to resurrect it like Michael going on the radio and television to plug his awful book with its "daring" title, ought to be glad that it has failed and find something more suitable to the real world in which we all live that meets the needs of everyone not just themselves and their friends.
After all, had they really cared about any kind of fiscal or governmental responsibility we most likely would be sitting here talking about things with our budgets at surplus levels and our world not quite so fractioous a place.

They Know He Could Win

Yes, they do and they are terrified of a Kucinich presidency. That is why they do not let him speak and do not let him participate. They know that every single one of us who knows what the truth is, meaning, we know that war is not the answer, that the rights of workers trumps the rights of the rich and that the health and well being of every single person on the face of the earth is more important than corporate profits will vote for Dennis in a heartbeat. Having him shut out of the debate even while he sits and bides his time on the platform is a travesty.
David Swanson wrote an excellent piece today on the Downing Street blog and I agree with him and in fact had written something similar last night before I got so tired from being so frustrated that I gave up and just let my eyes close as I watched the non-debate unfold. It was like watching someone who smiled for no reason at jokes he must have had running around in his head, in other words, the definition of a crazy person.
Blitzer behaved as disorganized and ignorant as any of the media people I have seen thus far. I don't, as a rule, watch television due to the total dumb illness that seems to attract advertisers to the tube in order to shout at me to buy things I never would ever in my life need. Not only would I never buy fast food in order to bribe someone to do my work, I would never want to delude myself into wanting to be some unfortunately ultra-rich woman who can just lounge around and enjoy my own self-image. The long list of symptoms that pharmaceutical companies have dregged up and that numbers of doctors of all kinds have agreed to push as real diseases makes me ill. I have a difficult time sleeping at night worrying about all those people who are so afraid of their bodies that they actually believe that every one of the problems the doctors and drug companies have found to sell to us can be cured by taking a pill. Were it ever so simple and so easy.
Life is so much more complicated and what is annoying is even people like the current crop of candidates is beginning to wake up to the fact that the media is not serving even them well. I just cannot imagine how any of them walked away from last night's event and felt that they looked good--not even poor Dennis who became and looked very angry (not that he didn't have reason to be angry) and my final question to all the candidates is: Why do you put up with this?
I would not. Maybe that is why I am not running for president. I cannot take the sheer stupidity and insanity that is allowed to run rampant across these screens and that people pay good money to support and that the world is in essence dependent upon to get accurate and trustworthy information from. At the end of it all, the only thing I want to know is why if you are such a good person, any of you, you let yourselves be treated that way and why are you so afraid to hear what Dennis Kucinich has to say? Could it be that all you really care about is your own campaign numbers and your own little slice of the pie, even you, the moral pygmy of the group, John Edwards?
I agree that most people who watched last night will never watch again. They have been shown all the reasons why not to watch and all of the reasons why not to care. I wish I could not care any longer either. It would make my life a whole lot simpler on the day to day front. Obviously not in the long term. But remember this: They are only trying to shut up Dennis Kucinich because they know we all want him so let's make sure he wins. We must shut these people up and make them pay attention to the truth. War is not the answer, we all need to help one another get what we need to have a good life which includes a decent wage, fair and equitable laws that respect human rights and a healthy and clean medical and food chain that is there for us all.
Pray that this happens and then get out there and work for Dennis in as many ways as you can.

Why We Don't Get a Debate

Why are we subjected to this idiocy that is not perpetuated by the candidates but by the idiot media folk who cannot listen nor respond to what the candidates or the people want which is to really debate the topics and to talk.
I am embarrassed to say, I cannot stand to listen to the likes of Wolf Blitzer and the other people asking questions tonight. It is as if they are more interested in their own reputations and standing tall against the candidates and pushing their own ideas around than in any kind of real debate between the people who are actually going to try and run this country.
It is frightening to listen to this kind of idiotic grandstanding. I cannot bear it and would love to see the debates taken over by the candidates themselves and have them pick the topics, end this one-word answer without the proper context to tell the people listening why you are saying what you are saying along with the real disorganization of the questioning.
This is not a reasonable way to choose or to learn, it is like scrambling every idea and having it chopped and diced by the media and then asking the candidates to make sense of the insanity and not just talk in the abstract but in terms of the substance.

So You Say You Want a Revolution

Did you receive the email today from the Kucinich campaign? Have you heard about the campaign's plans to hold webcast town hall meetings on the constitution? It made me think of what would have happened had the Framers been able to do all of this with technology. What would the Constitutional Convention have looked like?
As Gore Vidal noted in The Nation recently, Dennis Kucinich is about the same height as James Madison was. Not a bad comparison to make, I thought, and then the email arrived announcing the newer Constitutional Convention and I am thinking what if we could have been at the first one with our video cameras and been able to post it on YouTube so the whole world could have seen and heard what the original Framers had in mind and what they debated and watch the unfolding of the document that has shaped so much of our lives?
Over the next 10 weeks, there is something similar about to happen for us presented by the campaign and I intend to watch it and critique it as I think anyone in their right mind should be doing. Having had to watch in this kind of helpless, dreamlike state as the Bush administration trampled and tore at the Constitution, remaking it in the image they wanted it to be in, now is the time to once again learn what it really says and how the checks and balances of a truly democratic country is supposed to work.
As with all such ideas/concepts/documents there is much that is said that is worthless and was not meant to be but was put in because it is a document debated by humans not some extraterrestrials who know better than we do how to run a country. It contains the kinds of flaws that any human made article is going to contain. However, what Bush and his allies objected to is the constraints it put on their power and that is something we all now need to watch as we move forward in our time here. How has the lesson of the executive seen in the terms of the Bush Framers been or will be passed down to the next president?
I daresay that if it is a Republican presidency we will see much more of the same with even more vigor and if it is a number of the current candidates from the Democratic side it will also be much more of the same.
I think I can safely guarantee that if it is a Kucinich presidency it will not be more of the same but a radical retaking of the very real document that formed this country's government and how it is to govern and relate to its citizens. Let's all watch and see what the talk will be about and let's also talk about it with some concern for what has happened to the Constitution by those who have been sworn to uphold it.

Can we be critical?

I was asked this question at the Presidential Debate in Philadelphia and have had that question bumping around inside my head ever since. I didn't quite know how to answer it because this is a time of outright political partisanship which cannot be betrayed, I thought, by thoughts of why Dennis should not be always listened to. I mean the forces are arrayed so strongly against him and the media cannot help but repeat endlessly that he is unelectable and thus everyone feels compelled to parrot those thoughts so . . . how can I be so full-throated in my acceptance of whatever Dennis says?

It was definitely a good question and one that stuck me in the throat and made me uncomfortable. I returned home after the debate all fired up with having met Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich and having found them to be the kind of people one would like to believe belong headquartered in the White House not because they will return it to some mythic past but will alter it forever. It is possible to stand near them and think that they can be elected because so much of what they stand for is about what all of us who are progressives believe this country and all countries should be about. Not because we want to impose these ideas on others but because underneath it all, we feel they speak to a humanity in us that transcends all kinds of divides. That they are the true uniters when it comes to speaking the truth and saying what matters and genuinely wanting to end the brutality of our lives and replace it with what it is we all want. Whether we look at this with some kind of scorecard of progressive demands, e.g., a not-for-profit health care system, an end of wars of all kinds, a world in which workers' rights, the environment and the need for goods are all considered important and based on fairness.

Yet the question remained, can I be critical of Dennis or of the platforms or of anything in the position I have taken as a blogger asking why not Dennis? Then I read an article, the cover article, of the most recent issue of The Progressive which is about Dennis by John Nichols. It asked in another context a similar question: Can Dennis give up his dream of becoming the next president and challenge the Democrats solidly enough to pay attention to the needs of the rank and file Democratic voter who has wanted and voted for an end to this war and so many other issues that have not been honored by the Democrats sent to Congress with this mandate.

If Bush thought in 2004 that he had political capitol to burn, the Democrats were handed a check that could have been cashed and paid them the presidency in 2008 as well as a cooperative Congress had they listened to who elected them to do their jobs. Instead they took the check and tore it up. It was not what they wanted. They wanted real money and real cash and they wanted to let the world know that politics was going to stay the same no matter who had voted or said what.

If Schumer has his reasons for voting for the torture of "enemy combatants" and I am not sure just what those reasons are, we can surmise the reason for Diane Feinstein's capitualtion having a lot to do with her husband's money coming from being a military contractor. Constant war is good business, I fear. But we know that there has been no cry for their recall from their constituents, of which I am one.

So, we have sent Democrats off to war, as it were, and they ended up fighting for the other side just as we have seen them do for so long that it should have come as no surprise. Just as the protests against the war have seen none of our elected officials make an appearance (except for Dennis on occasion) it is often a fact of life these days that it makes no difference how much most of us want a change that change seems to be that annoying amount of coins in our pockets that we never know what to do with. It is not the abstract noun of meaningful movement from where we have been to some place new and different and difficult because of how it stirs up the cobwebs and makes everyone rethink the way they do things.

That takes me in a circuitous route back to the original question I asked myself at the start of this entry: Can I be critical of Dennis? The answer then becomes no. The no means, I cannot be critical of Dennis and his reasons for running for office because he is the only one who stands between me and utter and complete despair. Were there no Dennis Kucinich in this race, who would be saying any of the things that need to be said, that we need to have said for us by someone who has been elected and who risks all in the saying of them.

I often wonder from a writer's point of view what it is that can keep someone moving forward as Dennis does. He goes to a rally and he shouts out what is the best anyone can say about workers' rights and about health care reform and the crowd cheers, go crazy with him and then the unions and the progressives desert him when it comes time to give support. Why? Now that is the real question. Not can we be critical of Dennis but why isn't Dennis critical of us?

Why doesn't he come back at us and ask us to do what we are shouting at him in approval of? Why doesn't he bow to our rejection of him and go home? Why does he persevere in the face of the media's diminishment of his run for office as if it were a foregone conclusion that he would never be president? Why does he go forward as if he has not been slammed so many times that were it someone like me, I would be a mess of jelly sitting in the corner asking what had I ever said that causes such hostility?

Perhaps he understands something that none of us does, not me, not John Nichols, not the people in all those newspapers who belittle him and that is that this is a fight, a real fight that needs to go forward against all odds. Not because it is comfortable or safe and certainly not because he has any assurances of success but because he believes in us and in our needs which are no different from his or the women in Iraq or the men in Sudan or the children in India. We are all of a fabric that depends on each other. I know he knows that and that I do believe is what keeps him moving forward for us, for him and for those to come.

That is the answer to my questions, at least for now. I hope we can all hang onto that thought and not become the parrots of the media but remind them that they too are a part of this fabric and have some responsibility to more than themselves and the advertisers.

Here's one for the books--What if

Dennis Kucinich becomes the next president of the United States because the dummies in the House of Representatives continue to act as they did today while Dennis pushed through his resolution to impeach Dick Cheney? Did you ever read a more convoluted and assinine story of sheer stupidity and moral turpitude than that displayed on both sides of the aisle today? It reads like a piece out of Alice in Wonderland. What is is not and what should be cannot be and on and on while Dennis Kucinich walks across the room and gets what he needs and the job is done.

What world do these jokers live in and what makes them think that by shooting themselves in the foot and looking like the assinine idiots they have proven themselves to be all along that they have in any way changed the debate?

Okay, now I have calmed down a bit and can replay for those who have not yet seen this drama unfold what I have read about what happened today when Dennis Kucinich, lone man with the mission of protecting all of us, came forward and after 6 months of work has finally gotten through another loophole the articles of impeachment brought to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote. The democratic leadership wanted it tabled because this was not "a priority." Then, in order to get at Nancy Pelosi, the GOP decided in their infinite wisdom not to vote to table the resolution. So they ended up voting, after about an hour on whether to vote and then due to the craziness of this mirrored world in which those in politics choose to live, the resolution ended up passing and will go on the House Judiciary Committee.

Rep. Kucinich has now accomplished the impossible and made the Republicans vote to bring the articles of impeachment against Cheney forward in order to embarrass Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. I think I could not have dreamed up this plot had I been looking for the most fantastic way to tell the story of this entire period in which we live. In the time it takes to tell this odd story, I am still sitting here thinking, but how could they have been so stupid? Don't they realize that what they have done is just handed Cheney's head on a platter to be convicted of the crimes of which he has been accused?

On top of that, don't they see that because the numbers are really on Dennis' side that this could be the very thing that pushes voters now to see who is on their side, listens to them and does the work they have been voted into office to do? I don't know about anyone else, but there is something so satisfying in the ways in which their awful tactics have finally helped to shoot the man who shot the man in the face that I am happy for the moment and feel that at least for now there is a chance of justice being served and in such an amazing way and with Dennis at her side.

Countering the Negative

Too often lately I have had to listen to someone say, I agree with Dennis but I cannot vote for him because he is unelectable. Oh really?
What makes people say that? I had begun to think it was about the difficulty Kucinich has getting his ideas out to the public, how often the media trashes him and makes fun of him and his ideas. Then I realized that was not the case, and I didn't realize this because I had some golden and grand insight into the problem, but because Suzanne came up with it this morning and it was sheer genius.
I had be expounding on the clash between the gatekeepers and the people who just think in negative terms. Then she rightly, I do think, saw that it had more, much more to do with the ways in which we have all been infantilized by our government. We never have to see or hear an awful thing, for example, about this war and when we are exposed to it, it is cropped and abridged so the full horrors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are kept from us. In fact, it is even worse than that, we let those who show us that horror be attacked for being unAmerican and traitors for daring to suggest anything our soldiers do can be anything but the most noble and honest and exceptional only because they are Amerians.
Returning to Suzanne's perception though, it is clear that if we are told that someone is unelectable we believe it. We don't ask why or how that idea came into being. We let them say because they can say it and are in need of keeping someone like Kucinich from being in the White House that he is unelectable and then we all fall into line and say the same thought without ever asking ourselves is that true?
Not unlike what we were fed about the need for war with Afghanistan and Iraq, we tend to parrot what we are told and rarely question whether there is any truth to it. Even now when we have been told so many lies, we tend to continue to believe what the authorities say, because we have been educated that way. Authority figures are the supreme commanders of our thoughts and deeds. In school, we cannot challenge it and as we continue in life, there is no way we can alter that early imprinting unless we are aware that it has happened to us.
Think back as to why you believe that Dennis is unelectable. Just come up with the reasons for them saying this. What are those reasons? Isn't it funny, but there aren't any that come to mind because we have only been sold a bill of goods that are not really there. It is like three-card monty on the streets. You think you see the card that you should bet on but you are just being fooled while your pocket is being picked.
The next time someone says to you that Dennis Kucinich is unelectable, ask that person why. Let him or her try and formulate the reasons and see if they have any more meaning than that they have just been told that so often they believe it.
My response is we should all grow up and learn to make these decisions for ourselves. Vote for the man who does care about you and your needs and then tell the authorities that you are an adult too and can make up your own mind, take responsibility for how this country is governed and in the end of it all behave like the ones who need to make the difference because that is the job of all adults.

Vote for Dennis, vote early and often

I mean why not vote as often as you can for Dennis? People do not take him as seriously as he should be taken and yet, he is the only one running for president who has a long list of ideas and proposals that match exactly what most people say they want in a democratic candidate.
My biggest fear is that we will all say this mantra over and over and we are even now beginning to see it in the media too (e.g., Rebecca Traister's piece in Salon.com) but to be honest there is something that Dennis offers that this mantra does not express: Dennis is truly one of us. He is all those weird and yet acceptable guys who have made it and been able to do things for people and put his life on the line to do it.
Beyond that kind of sustained presence in the world of politics, a world none of us would want to be in, Dennis is the kind of person who is not swayed by the passing fads of what is right now but may be of only transient interest and truly only of interest to win elections.
I have been receiving reams of emails (I know that is not literally true) from the Clinton Senate office informing me of how much she has been doing for the state of New York and the country in this past legislative session. Mrs. Clinton would be a much better long-term Senator from my state than she will ever be a president. Not only because she loves, truly loves to put together these tedious but necessary positions of the most mundane aspects of life but because what she could teach the younger senators coming up about it they will not learn anywhere else.
Unfortunately, she is not aware of her own strengths and must pursue the presidency with a kind of obsessive need that matches the kind of power grabbing this country needs to rid itself of.
The reason I am in favor of seeing a Kucinich presidency has more to do with who he does not represent, who he does not favor and who he cannot be rather than who he knows and who is giving him the kind of coverage he rightly deserves.
For now, that is something all of us need to begin to think about. Dennis Kucinich represents a counter-narrative to the stories the media present as to who is the lead and why. Kucinich is not about pretending to be a Robin Hood manque, he is in fact a man of strong principles who looks at the world as it is and says that it cannot stay this way.
That is why he is a threat to the people who support the Clintons and the Obamas and the Edwards, etc. It is because he does not take that kind of money and he is not in any way thinking in the same ways that they are. That is what I mean by the fact that he offers a counter-narrative. Think about that. Think about what it feels like not to think about who has the best chance of winning but who should win because of what he will do to change the ways in which the world is run.
That is the ticket as far as I am concerned. The ticket is we need someone to run this country and turn it radically around from the ways in which Bush and company have been involved in directing it.
Spend some time reading lots of political theory now and you will begin to see that there is another way of life that is more gratifying than what every other one of the democratic candidates offer. Everyone of them but Kucinich see the world as it is right now and just want to tinker with it, Dennis wants to radically alter it and that is why they won't talk to him. He sees what is and knows it is wrong. But he says it in the best ways possible.
Vote for Dennis and vote often and vote early and tell all your friends to do the same. He is after all, our last best chance at changing the world.

The time has come to stand up for Dennis

As he now will be using an arcane legislative move in order to bring to the House floor next week, on election day no doubt, the articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney. There is no doubt in my mind that on this Dennis is corrent in what he is doing and he must be supported. We must all take a stand behind him and with him and urge everyone we know to get that vote moving forward and to have it known in this case who sees the wrongs committed against the constitution and the American people by a mad man who believes wrongly in his own rightness.

I have written about the two of them, Bush and Cheney, at length and there is a new article on my website to look at about them. But Dennis is taking action and it is the most important event of this month and we must do all we can to stand with him on this.

Let's get the word out as best we can that the articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney will be put on the House floor next week and make sure everyone we know knows about it and helps by calling all those wimpy Congress people who do not sign onto this due to their own fears of retribution.

Please help Dennis and stand with him on this extraordinarily brave move.
Peace must be with us too.

Lots of talk about Dennis and UFOs

Lots of people are discussing with some kinds of enjoyment what Tim Russert tried to do to Dennis the other day by asking him about the UFOs he reportedly said he saw and felt a connection to. I personally have no idea what to make of the comments as they are all out of context and I have not read the book from which the comments are being extracted. I find it is always dangerous to have one's words taken out of context but what it points to is this:

Those who are favorably inclined towards Dennis already and from the amount of material I see on the web, that number is huge, there seems to be a lot of understanding and reverence for the predicament the man is in. So in the interests of reporting on something I do know more about, let me say this and move onto the sense of this growing swell of understanding of what Dennis stands for.

But first let me say, it is fine that they pick things apart badly and it is also fine that in the midst of this two things may be going on. One is the feeling I have about who Dennis is that he may just not want to get into a brawl over something that was written by a friend and second that the media loves to take apart people who are after them and see through them.

Therefore enough has been said by me about this whole issue.

What interests me is just how the media continues to trivialize and debase a candidate who has done so much for those of us who are walking around feeling like we are the lepers in this very rich and materialistic society. Dennis' example is a lot more reassuring than what the others have to offer and for my money and the time I am spending thinking about what he has to offer, I am willing to go for broke, as it were, in terms of thinking out loud about a) how hard it is to feel like such an outsider all the time and then you find a candidate who is not truly an outsider but knows what one feels like and b) that he has the intellectual and spiritual stamina to keep at this no matter what is thrown his way is quite remarkable.

onto some facts:
1. Dennis' poll numbers are rising
2. Dennis doesn't take money from corporate interests
3. Dennis is fighting to impeach the vice president and the president
4. Dennis is in favor of a not-for-profit health care system
5. Dennis is opposed to all war
6. Dennis' idea about a department of peace means so much in terms of how he sees the conjunction of domestic policy with foreign policy
7. Dennis knows that all this chest thumping about China is a lot of grandstanding by his colleagues who for the most part have voted for every measure to give China favored nation status

Finally, if you have the time and the inclination, go to my website and read the article about Bush and Cheney's militarization being like the students from Columbine www.deborahemin.com
We have lots of wake up calls being given to us these days. We need to wake up to them and sound the alarms to all our friends and family. We may no longer have the kind of choices a true democracy needs if we don't act soon.
Thanks for checking in here today.

In Honor of Having Met Dennis

It was not a dark and stormy night but a wonderfully beautiful night in Philadelphia where I met Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich for the first time. I was so impressed with the two of them and the people who work with him that it kept me awake a good part of the night afterwards. I should not say this I think but I don't know how people can campaign. It is like being in an opening night every night of the week and there is no let up in sight. Of course there are the primaries to look to but they loom so far away in some cases and this constant being on and available to people must continue as does the work you have to do for the people who elected you to represent them in Congress.

There, now I feel better, admitting that I could never do what he does and does so well. Nor could I work as tirelessly as the people in the campaign with him. That had to be said.

But then I have to also say that all Americans should be allowed to do what we did and go to a debate or some other major campaign stop and see the whole process in action. It is the kind of education that we all need. Civics classes will change radically were all Americans allowed into the world of the campaigns. You see what no reporter can bring to light for you.

For example, and this is a very petty example of what you can observe: We were watching the debate down in the bowels of this building at Drexel University where all the campaign people who were not in the auditorium with the candidates were hanging out and watching the debate on numerous television screens. Each candidate was assigned a room. Hillary's campaign had blacked out the windows of her room. Obama's staff had taken posters with his name on it to block out the view of his room. The rest of the campaigners were open and you could walk by and watch them watching the debate and talking to each other and making phone calls and munching on their pizzas.

Then while watching the debate on the television in this larger room, we Kucinich people were not as focused on each other and what we each thought but more on just watching the debate as it unfolded. Of course it unfolded over a long period of time and we had to wait 25 minutes into it before anyone asked Kucinich a single question. The disappointment in the room was quite extraordinary. We didn't like our man, as it were, being ignored so obviously.

I intend to write at much greater length and will let you know where that article is when it shows up but the thing to remember is the kind of metaphor the blacked out room of Hillary's staff and the room equally obliterated with Obama's picture and the rest of the candidates being more open and visible in their staffrooms. It conjured for me an image of someone who values secrecy more than anything and is just too reminiscent of the current occupant of the White House and the Obama move to be as secretive in his way made me realize even without watching him in the debate that he is not just inconsequential but a redundancy.

Where is the real candidate these days to be found? We found him after the debate willing and eager to stay and talk to everyone who wanted to tell him something or to ask him questions. His name is Dennis Kucinich.

Dennis on my mind

Today I watched Dennis' video on his signing up to run in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire and was swayed once again. It is an odd experience for me to feel swayed by a politician. I like writing about politics and their intersection with culture and the arts but to be involved in this more direct way is new to me. It also makes me wonder why am I feeling so tied up in this campaign.
As I look at the times in which we live, I see how extraordinary they are. While the Chinese may say that it is a curse to live in interesting times, and in some ways they are correct, on the other side of that curse is the blessing that when it is necessary, all of us can rise to the occasion and contribute. Many years of thinking about the ways in which the culture and arts intersect with politics have gone into getting me to this point of wondering just who represents my needs and goals the best. I don't think I have ever asked the question before. I never asked either who did I think could get the country and by extension the world out of the mess that is sitting here in our laps.
So, I watched the video and listened to him and asked myself if there were things I disagreed with. Of course there was one tiny point that slipped into my thinking that made me a little uncomfortable and that was I have a difficult time with the state motto of New Hampshire--Live free or die. It has been a rallying cry of the libertarian wing of the Republican party and it seems like an awful expression. However, Kucinich did say some things I thought I would never hear a person running for office of any kind in this country say and that was that we are not here to be the best or on top of everyone else. First principles according to the ways in which this country was first conceived live within Dennis' thinking. Not the most practical thing to say and while it annoys me that most candidates say the most bland and all things to all people stump speeches day in and day out, Dennis is much more of the moment. Things are happening at the moment he is speaking and he is not unaware of them.
In this way, reveries of other stump speeches of other candidates began to rumble through my mind and I know that there is a certain boredom that has to set in when this is what you are saying day in and day out to mostly press people who will then go out and say what you said with some kindness towards it or with some animus towards it.
All in all, life is hard when you have to be on in that way every day.
Blogging is like that too. Every day there has to be a topic of concern to say something about. I have been talking about Dennis for the Huffington Post as well as on myspace and now here. It feels like a new kind of obsession that should lead to either some new insights into what makes politics interesting in and of itself or will grow tiresome and tedious.
But since I do know we live in much too interesting times, I think there will be a very large percentage of the time when there will be more than a human can say in one day.
Today I am preparing to go to Philadelphia for the debate on MSNBC. I hope to be able to blog from there and tell what I have seen and what I hope to see down the road from there. What I do know is this, in my catalogue of skills for anyone I want to have to listen to at all, there has to be some real intelligence as well as a commitment to things of an abstract nature that are not about making us all wealthy and powerful but that speak to the more realistic aspects of life.
We all need good health care and we all need to be able to work and to retire. We all need to eat and if you are watching the papers these days you know that there is a severe food shortage at your local soup kitchens so if you think of it, take in some food now. No one in this or any country should be going to sleep hungry. We also know we all need to be educated and to receive an education that is not just affordable but free.
Start listening to Dennis for the next couple of months and ask yourself, why not Dennis? He is saying everything you want to hear and most likely is going to deliver what he says.

John Nichols got it right

Hello again on a finally fall day in New York City. I was so pleased last night to read on Common Dreams that John Nichols has understood what Dennis has been saying for a long time about the run-up to war and about war in general. There were many comments about his article, none of them about anything other than what Dennis has been saying about the war.
Many complained about how Dennis is still a member of the Democratic party. Others complained about how ran for president in 2004 and then supported Kerry when he won the nomination. Many complained that he will show up in the convention center and not be out on the picket lines during the Democratic convention this summer. I cannot speak to any of that. To me this is about as relevant an issue as what someone saw in their tea leaves this morning when they got out of bed.
What matters most is that someone in the media is beginning to see why Dennis matters and what this country needs as an antidote to the years of Republican mis-rule. It is going to take someone as iconoclastic as Dennis but who is a part of the Democratic party to fix what has been disastrously broken while at the same time lead us in a way towards healing. He is no messiah come to claim us but a perfectly human being who has loads of incredibly good ideas and wants to be of service to this country.
I urge us all to read more and look for more of the media beginning to listen to what Dennis has to say. There was a great interview with him posted up on his website the other day from a paper in Monterey. I think it is also important to urge your local papers to begin to acknowledge his presence and to write about him. You, too, can write about him and get his name out there for people to start talking about.
Life is too short for us to be worrying about the popularity of someone judged by the amount of money they have been able to raise. Ask yourself just whose money are they all playing with? What kind of a person do you want up there leading the agenda for the next 4-8 years? What will help us to regain some stability and feeling of confidence about ourselves and our own abilities to make the world a better place in which to live?
For these very abstract and not all that specific reasons, there is someone I think can do the job. For the ways in which he articulates his reasons for wanting to lead the country, go to his website.
At tne end of this long election cycle, I do hope we come out with a clearer purpose that serves more of the people who are in need of help rather than just the wealthy who seem to have found a wonderful set of accomplices for stealing the government coffers.

If the Question is about Hillary

Then we need to ask a number of piercing questions about her and the way her campaign is being reported about. There is a big difference between the way the media portray a candidate and the way a candidate most likely feels about the way she is presenting her ideas.
At this moment, let's just focus on the whole notion of polling. I find it quite objectionable to turn the campaign process into a long and tedious horse race. Americans have a fascination with numbers and believe in numbers they can find surety. I don't think though most of them when asked can tell the difference between a factor and a percentage. So, if numbers are so great, what can we say about them other than that? If Hillary is ahead by 30 percentage points then what does that mean? It then becomes someone else commenting on the differences between numbers and the history of these differences and what they might predict.
The other way to report this campaign process though is much more interesting and has to do with what a candidate actually stands for and what he or she is promising to whom he or she will do when elected. Then a look at numbers can be interesting. But it is who gave how much money to whom and why. Looking at those numbers seems to provide more insight into what interests the candidate represents because no one gives money to someone they hope loses.
Then there is the more time consuming and less quantitatively reported coverage of the campaigns. In this type of coverage, it matters who said what, in what context and what it means. Then we can all sit down and discuss, for example, what is the vote for the Kyl-Lieberman bill all about? Why did Hillary for that and what was she looking to do?
How do you interpret her stance on war and on threatening war in instances that seem particularly Bush-like in their manner? I see it as a way of saying, vote for me because not much will change if you do. To me, that is the kind of impact a war mongerer has.
On the other side of the coin, there is Dennis who is not voting for war measures and is not equivocating about where he stands about this war, the coming war with Iran or any other war.
What press person has been willing to talk to him about these positions? Who has been industrious enough to get in there and talk to him about what a war economy does to us all? Who has talked to Dennis about how equal rights for every citizen translates into a call for war no more?
I could go on and on in this way, but go to his website and read each and every one of this positions on the issues you care about. Rather than re-iterate his comments, I am more inclined to put into perspective what the others are saying as opposed to what we can see documented of what Dennis has to say and beyond that, why, in all good conscience, it makes sense to vote for him.
Peace is a wonderful blessing and his message of strength through peace is the subversion of what the war mongers all believe. To them, peace only comes from the show of the military muscles. It is a sad statement about how we have been trained to think in this country that too many people agree with that idea without really examining it.
Ask yourself, are you interested in just being a number in this election or do you want to really have a voice and elect someone who will be able to articulate your concerns?
Then ask yourself, why not Dennis?

They call it diplomacy but sure sounds like threats to me

I have never really thought the word diplomacy was intended to be read as a wink-wink word that really meant a threatening statement used to intimidate someone to do what we want them to do. Today's attempts by the Bush administration via the harsh words and wording of the statements made by Secretary Rice made me wonder just how they define "diplomacy."
Perhaps to the current administration, the word just means do it my way or else. To others, such as myself, it means having a discussion where there is room and time to listen to each side without making any threats whatsoever. I don't know how you go to a bargaining table when you have already stated that every option, including dropping bombs on them, are still in play. Who would talk to people who have no interest in really listening except for exactly what they want to hear?
In the convoluted logic of the Bush/Cheney world it is hard sometimes to ever know why they even bother going through the hoops they set out. They are not truly kidding anyone about their intentions. I mean you don't get yourself set up for this kind of war for almost 2 years now and then just walk away, wash your hands of all the planning and movement of people and then say, oh well, I have changed my mind.
There are too many warships in the Persian Gulf right now and there are too many covert operations going on within Iran right now for this to be just a tease or a way to intimidate. This is a slow but gradual way to sidle into war without the need for any kind of declaration of war by the congress. Yet again, through sleight of hand which many, too many, of the people running for president endorse, this duo has gotten its way, circumvented that constitution and its rules for the ways in which war can be declared and they are now let loose to do as they please.
With cohorts in the press, such as the Washington Post, giving them all the propaganda they need and the senators running around acting as if this were just any other day at work, I am amazed at how simple it all turned out to be.
Those of you with sons of draftable age, I suggest you begin finding a way out of the country in order to protect your son from service to this miserable new war. There is no way any of this can happen without some form of the draft being re-instituted and they, Bush/Cheney don't care any more for the political fall out, they won't be in office.
Think about it, we are off to the races again and before most of us wake up to what they have done, there will be another long list of horrendous consequences to their misguided and ill-prepared war in Iran.
Don't say I didn't tell you so.