My Computer is DYING

So my computer has slowly been dying. Weird things have been happening. The screen is getting glitchy. And nowadays I can't edit a video without the harddrive seizing up and shutting off.

I am currently unemployed. No, wait. THIS IS my job. I make t-shirts, I make videos, I do interviews with interesting and intelligent people, and then make that content available to you.

I don't make any money via ad revenue. This is ad-free content.
I don't get paid by any corporation. I rely on the support of you, the audience (just like NPR does.)

While I am searching constantly for side-work to help pay the bills, the only callbacks I'm getting are for things like medical jobs I'm not qualified or suited for, and valet parking. I'm actually hoping to take a valet parking job, where I'll be making $5 an hour. That's where I'm at right now.

I'm not asking you to buy me a new computer. I'm asking for help with getting a computer so that I can continue to produce the content you apparently like (for some reason).

If everybody who "likes" the Punk Patriot's facebook page and reads this blog chipped in $0.50, It would be more than enough:
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[Music] A beautiful thing to wake up to

SQÜRL - 'Pink Dust'

Beat the Press

Why the A.P. Phone Records Seizure Should Frighten Us All.

Forget about Benghazi or the IRS’s alleged targeting of “nonprofit” Tea Party groups. There is a scandal brewing in the Obama White House—one that should outrage all Americans who care about civil liberties. But it is not either of these media obsessions. The real scandal is the Justice Department’s unprecedented seizure of the Associated Press’ phone records.

As the AP reported last week, the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months’ worth of its reporters’ and editors’phone records without a warrant or justifiable cause. The records cover over 20 AP reporters’ telephone lines, including their homes, offices and cell phones. AP President, Gary Pruitt denounced the move, and called on Attorney General Eric Holder to return the phone records and destroy all its copies.

In a letter to Holder, Pruitt wrote, “We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

The DOJ claims it needs the phone records to identify a source who allegedly leaked information to AP reporters regarding a foiled terrorist plot originating in Yemen. However, as former constitutional lawyer and Guardian blogger, Glenn Greenwald notes, “The legality of the DOJ’s actions is impossible to assess because it is not even known what legal authority it claims nor the legal process it invoked to obtain these records. Particularly in the post-9/11 era, the DOJ’s power to obtain phone records is… dangerously broad” (“Justice Department’s pursuit of AP phone records is both extreme and dangerous,”05/14/2013).

Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges agreed. Speaking on Democracy Now! last week (05/15/13), Hedges called the seizure “frightening.”

“[I]t is one more assault in a long series of assault against freedom of information and freedom of the press,” he said. “And I would also, of course, throw in the persecution of Julian Assange at WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning as part of that process.”

The Obama administration has overseen more prosecutions of government whistleblowers than any other administration in history. Barack Obama has invoked the 1917 Espionage Act twice as many times as all previous administrations combined. What is further infuriating is Obama—a former constitutional scholar—ran in 2008 on a platform of “restoring transparency” to government. Instead, he has done just the opposite. Perhaps that explains why the transparency theme was largely absent from his 2012 campaign.

Whistleblowers, government insiders and other often times “off the record” sources are crucial to investigative journalism. The classic example is “Deep Throat,” who helped Woodward and Bernstein break the Watergate break-in story during the Nixon years. Without Deep Throat (revealed in 2005 to be FBI Associate Director Mark Felt), The Washington Post reporters would never have been able to shed light on the Watergate scandal.

Both these intrepid whistleblowers and the reporters who bring their insider information to the public are an indispensable part of democracy. The very job of journalism is to serve as a watchdog of government and corporate entities. It is to bring citizens the truth—no matter how unpleasant or uncomfortable that truth may be. And while it is true the privately-owned, corporate news media have not always lived up to this standard, the press (print-news, in particular) is one of the few remaining safeguards to protect democracy and an open society. Indeed, as history has shown, when totalitarian forces shut down free countries, the press is typically the first institution that is silenced.

But Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on leakers has created a chilling effect.

According to Hedges in the aforementioned interview:

“If you talk to investigative journalists in this country, who must investigate the inner workings of government, no one will talk, even on background. People are terrified. And this is, of course… not really about AP. It’s about going after that person or those people who leaked this story and shutting them down. And this canard that it [the leaked information] endangered American life…there’s no evidence for this.”

Yet the “liberal” media seems more upset that the IRS singled out some right-wing political organizations attempting to pass themselves off as nonprofit, “social welfare” groups, than the DOJ’s gross violation of the First Amendment. Not to suggest, mind you, that liberal groups do not do the same thing. MoveOn.org, for instance, is registered as a tax-exempt, 501(c)(4) nonprofit.

Indeed, many media outlets are defending the DOJ’s move. The Nation’s Leslie Savan--who, like so many other reporters, lumps the genuine AP scandal in with the IRS and Benghazi pseudo-scandals--urges readers to “take a deep breath” (“Don’t Get Sucked Into Obama Scandal-Mania,” 5/16/13). She then, in classic liberal style, blames the phone records seizure on the Republicans. Savan writes:

“Republicans have made a fine art out of demanding Obama do something, then attacking him when he does… [N]ow the same Republicans, like Joe Scarborough, who were screaming for Obama to shut down national security leaks like the one in Yemen, are now screaming that he’s trampling on free speech.”

But Republicans’ double-standard opportunism—however hypocritical—while perhaps noteworthy, does not actually address the severity of the issue. Then again, I suppose that is the point—shoot the messenger, ignore the message.

Over at the left-leaning Daily Banter website, Oliver Willis decries the Associated Press—and the news media in general—for apparently believing they are above the law (“Dear Professional Press, You Aren’t Special,” 5/15/13). “The press does not have special powers not afforded to the rest of us,” Willis sneers. “If you have material relevant to a crime and think that magical source protection applies, there’s no constitutional right to a confidential source.”

Curious side note: Does Willis consider himself a member of the “professional press”? And, if not, does that mean he belongs instead to the class of “unprofessional” press? Just wondering…

Regardless of what Obama apologists and the outright uninformed may think, the U.S. news media does have freedom of the press protections. And this is not the first instance of blatant hostility to those protections on the part of the Obama White House.

New York Times editor, Andrew Rosenthal, sums things up best (“Did the A.P. Leak ‘Put the American People at Risk’?”, 5/17/13). Noting that the AP editors held off on publishing the insider account for five days at the request of the CIA, Rosenthal makes clear the nation was not “at risk.”

“Hyperventilating about threats to ‘the American people’ a year later is outrageous,” he writes. “Mr. Holder might have directed some of that energy into prosecuting crooked bankers and mortgage companies or, say, people who tortured prisoners.”

Adam Marletta is a freelance writer and the secretary of the Portland Green Independent Committee.

Current TV is dead. Long Live Indie Journalism

Womp womp.

So Al Jazeera, after acquiring Current TV, isn't going to be continuing with Current in any way shape or form.

So Current TV is officially going to be dead starting sometime this month.

Current long ago killed what made them different from the corporate-owned, top-down media structure we all know and loathe. What made them different?

In addition to having a voting system that allowed quality content to float to the top of the heap, and be featured on TV, they also had an editorial staff who also picked out quality content, and created quality news content. Their "Vanguard" journalists did an amazing job doing in-depth stories that the MTV-ized 24 hour news networks are too busy acting like highly distractable puppies with ADHA chasing a ball, to put the effort into producing. So too was the user-generated content. So, Current hired the assholes from MTV who MTVized the channel, and turned it all to vapid shit.

They died in effect, when they stopped featuring user-generated content that made its way up through the reddit-style voting of the online communtiy, and instead, through their "VCAM" project (Viewer Created Advertisement Material) asked us to make advertising for corporate bullshit like Axe Body Spray and Loreal Shampoo. Which wasn't as much user-participation as it was ad firms being incredibly lazy and stealing ideas from people too stupid to realize that they should get paid $40k a year to generate marketing materials.

The online community that had developed around open-source indie journalism, was left on a deserted island of a chatroom, abandoned. Without the ability to get your news stories covered by the channel, few people bothered to come on to the website. As the MTV-ization started, content that was getting voted up was vapid TMZ crap about celebrity culture. Gone were the 7 minute documentaries about arts, culture, science, news, sociological experiments, etc.

Things picked up a bit when they hired on the Young Turks, but the other shows, like Jennifer Granholm's "The Panic Room" (or whatever it was called) was pure, uncut, DNC propaganda, the sort of inane inside-baseball and horse-race bullshit about campaigning we can get anywhere else (mostly CNN, with their holographic sets, touch-screen maps and total lack of news content). Not coverage of issues, and not news, not things that make a difference in people's lives.

I think ultimately, the reason that Current failed so horribly, is that in each misstep along the way, they never really understood the value of what they had, they never understood what made them unique or important. They effectively cut off their own hands. So Al Jazeera America? Great! Al Jazeera has time and again proven themselves to be in line of what Current set out to be in the first place-- high-quality, boots-on-the-ground journalism.

So Current TV is dead. Long live Independent Journalism.

Musings on Why it's Not Easy Being Green

The Maine Green Independent Party held its annual state convention Sunday, in Belfast. Jill Stein, 2012 presidential candidate, delivered the keynote address. While many of the looming threats Stein outlined in her speech are dire (economic collapse, exploding student debt, a permanent low-wage economy, environmental crisis), she also offered attendees reason to take hope. Indeed, after nearly 30 years of struggling to defend our political legitimacy, it seems voters are finally listening to what the Greens have to say.

“We are not powerless,” Stein told the crowd. “We are so powerful the corporate media is afraid to talk about us.”

Media coverage of the Green Party tends to follow the pattern outlined in Gandhi’s famous saying, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The corporate media tried to ignore us for years. Now they seem to have moved on to the “laugh”phase.

This was largely the case with Stein’s campaign last year. ABC News political blogger, Matt Negrin dismissed not just the Greens but third-parties in general, claiming their ideas “tend to be a bit radical”(06/06/12). Those “radical” ideas include cutting the bloated, wasteful military-spending budget, legalizing marijuana (a concept now supported by a majority of Americans) and creating decent, well-paying jobs. He’s right--such common sense policies are way too radical for Disney-owned, ABC. In a follow-up article some weeks later (07/11/12), Negrin condescendingly calls third-party candidates a “fun footnote in U.S. presidential elections.”

In a rigged, one-party system where it is virtually impossible to vote against a Wall Street sponsored, corporatist candidate, the Green Party is the only genuine grassroots party that speaks for the citizens.“The politics of fear has given us everything we were afraid of,” Stein said. She is right: The corporate media are afraid of us. That is why they go out of their way to mock, ridicule and belittle us. The last thing they want is for informed, morally conscious voters to take us seriously.

And this sort of negative coverage is not limited to the national media. Bollard editor and Bangor Daily News blogger, Chris Busby has been waging a personal vendetta against recently elected Portland School Board member and Green, Holly Seeliger for several months now.

Two weeks ago, he devoted an entire column to discrediting her (“Taking ‘sexist’ back,” 04/25/13). In it Busby writes, without a hint of irony, of his detractors, “…the people who resort to personal attacks and name-calling are morons.” Yup. You’ve got that right, Chris.

To date, I have not read one substantive criticism Busby has of Seeliger’s politics, school reform proposals, or votes. His comments are almost exclusively about Seeliger’s hobby of burlesque dancing. If Busby has a legitimate gripe with an elected official, that is one thing. But he doesn’t. In fact, the man has nothing of substance to say about anyone or anything. If Holly were not a Green I highly doubt he would devote nearly as much ink to her.

Democratic apparatchiks like Maine Rep. John Hink persist in baselessly blaming Ralph Nader for throwing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. This argument ignores the fact that Al Gore won the election. It was the Supreme Court—engaging in the same sort of “judicial activism” its conservative members constantly decry by those on the left—that voted to end the Florida recount, thus handing the presidency to Bush. More importantly, this entire argument hinges on the presupposition that, had Nader not been an option on the ballot, Green voters would have automatically selected Gore as their default candidate. Some of them likely would have done so, yes. But most Greens I know do not compromise so easily. Had Nader not been running, it is more conceivable those voters would have simply stayed home.

Yet 13 years later this bogus notion that Nader“stole votes” from Gore refuses to die. (Point of clarification for liberals: Greens do not “steal” votes. They earn them.) Democrats hysterically trot it out every election cycle to scare progressives into voting against their own interests. Democrats’marginalization of Nader comes directly out of the Republican playbook: Shoot the messenger, ignore the message. It is the same tactic they have used more recently to smear Julian Assange (“Rapist!”) and Bradley Manning (“Angry gay!”). Nader’s public transformation from honored consumer advocate, to egomaniacal “spoiler” was no accident. The corporate-controlled Democratic Party orchestrated it.

As John Stauber writes in a recent article for Counterpunch (“The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats,”March 15-17, 2013):

“After the 2000 presidential election…rich liberal Democratic elite began discussing, conspiring and networking together to try and make sure that no scruffy, radical political insurgency like the Nader 2000 campaign would again raise its political head. They generally loved Al Gore, the millionaire technocrat, and they put in play actions which led to the creation of a movement of their own that aped the right-wing’s institutions.”

Being Green makes you something of a pariah not only in politics, but even in everyday social interactions. A recent encounter with BDN blogger, Carol McCracken at the grocery store, serves as a perfect example. “You’re a Green, huh?” McCracken sneered upon seeing my Maine Greens pin on my jacket. She then proudly informed me, “I never vote Green.”

I responded as I always do in these sorts of exchanges. I asked her, “Which of our Ten Key Values do you disagree with?”McCracken did not respond to my question, which indicates to me she is not familiar with any of the Key Values. (In other words, she has completely dismissed a political party she knows next to nothing about. Good to know she is such an informed voter.)

Instead she repeated robotically, “I never vote Green!” After Mrs. McCracken lectured me on how marijuana is the “gateway drug,” Congress Square Park should “absolutely” be sold to private realtors, and would-be City Councilor Wells Lyons (I hear he’s running again this year) is a “covert Green,” I managed to cordially end the conversation and escape to the check-out line.

This is the sort of treatment Greens receive on a regular basis. Even the seemingly innocuous act of grocery shopping turns into a political debate over our very right to exist. Of all my quirky, left-leaning pins and t-shirts, none provoke as much rage from liberals as the one that says simply, “Maine Greens,” with a hand-drawn dandelion flower.

To watch the video stream of the May 5, 2013 Maine Green Independent Party convention in Belfast, ME, click here.

This TED talk could turn every man into a feminist

I hope so.

Violence & Silence: Jackson Katz, Ph.D at TEDxFiDiWomen

Masters of Money part 3: Karl Marx

Karl Marx is still surprisingly relevant.