Thanks to the casting sensibility of Arianna Huffington, we learned that John McCain has been channeling Dr. Strangelove!  Duly inspired, Phillip and our Issues 2008 team jumped into action, and 24 hours later, here's the video!

Pass it far and wide and pitch us your casting ideas for John McCain in the comments.

Ryan was the first vet I interviewed that day at U.S. Vets. As I talked to him, I simply couldn’t believe that Ryan was just 21. It’s not that he didn’t look young, but the way he talked and what he was talking about reflected the experiences of someone much older.

By the age of 18, Ryan was fending for himself and figuring out what to do with his life while I was enjoying the training wheels/daycare we know as college. During his two and a half years in the Navy, Ryan was grappling with the forces of life and death. When he got out, Ryan was forced to experience the warped priorities of our government and face a country that claims to revere soldiers while leaving them out in the cold. At 21, I was coasting through my senior year of college, trying not to think about the future. At 21, Ryan had done what he was supposed to, but had no idea what the future held. At 21, Ryan was homeless, and the country he served didn’t give a damn.

At 21, Ryan is a guy who should have his whole future in front of him. He should be looking at a world of limitless possibilities. That’s what America is supposed to be all about, right? But because he served our country and because our government has little interest in supporting those who served, Ryan, at 21, is in trouble. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him. One slip up and he could be out on the streets again. He feels like the country he served has turned his back on him and that he has no place in it. Ryan wants to get a job, have a place to live, and be just like everyone else. He’s not asking for anything special. He’s trying, but his government isn’t helping. If it weren’t for the good people at U.S. Vets, it’s hard to know where Ryan would be right now. He might just be another statistic, another number lost to addiction, mental illness, or suicide. A number with no name or face.

Bill O’Reilly wants to pretend that everything is great. That homeless vets want to be homeless, that vets with substance abuse want to be addicts. He wants to blame Ryan’s problems on Ryan, not the system and people who ignore him. I don’t mean to diminish him, but Ryan is 21. He’s just a kid. Where were you and what were you doing at 21? What had you seen and experienced? What had your country done to you? Ryan served his country for 2 ½ years. His country said it would welcome him back with open arms and help him get a good job at a good wage so he could make a good living because he deserves it. At 21, Ryan is living at U.S. Vets in transitional housing while millionaires who never served like O’Reilly shit all over him.  

There’s something wrong with that picture. You know it. I know it. And Ryan knows it. In fact, Ryan has to live it.

If you want to help vets like Ryan, go to U.S. Vets and the Fitzgerald House. They spend every day doing what people like Bill O’Reilly won’t.

Now is not the time for progressives to be silent. With Clinton and Obama battling each other we MUST start telling the story of McCain and his support for war.

We have been barraged with folks asking us to take action. And we have.

In less than week, Jason, Leda, Philip and Lissette put together these two fantastic short videos. And we have a major BNF strategic campaign to reach hearts and minds.

We need $100,000 immediately (like in the next week), so we can continue making these high impact videos, full-time, around the clock.

Can you chip in $50? We've got to start now. Make an investment here.

While we're using a little HUMOR in our opening effort, the war is deadly serious, the deaths to Americans and to Iraqis. We have seen and experienced the terrible pain and suffering. But our job right now is to reach millions of people who have erected emotional walls to any more painful news of death and destruction. So we went to the personal, the cost to each and everyone of us. And we did it by hacking the techniques of Madison Ave, a joke that gets the attention, and then makes the point.

We're very excited about this campaign, so excited that we wanted to get you involved now before we even have a proper website set up for it. Please post a comment below with your ideas for future videos, a campaign song, a cartoon, and additional ways to get the word out.

Let's keep working together to tell America about John McCain's vision for our country: Less jobs, and more wars. I've got a hunch Joe Scarborough is going to regret ever making that joke.

Bill O’Reilly says he can’t find any homeless veterans. After a few hours of calling, I was able to find several hundred. One of them was Fletcher C. Hicklen.

To make FOX ATTACKS! “Non-Existent” Veterans, I had arranged to interview three veterans at U.S. Vets — an organization that provides treatment, transitional housing, and classes to homeless vets — but Fletcher wasn’t one of them. After shooting the interviews, my cameraman, Phil, and I walked around US Vets looking for a few vets who wanted to send a quick message to Bill O’Reilly. I met Fletcher in US Vets’ computer lab, where vets can learn how to use computers and have internet access.

Like most of the vets I met that day, Fletcher had a lot to say. He told me about how proud he was to serve. He told me what an honor it had been to shake the hand of George HW Bush when he came to Honduras aboard Air Force One to thank the troops stationed there. He also told me that vets get a “raw deal” in America and are not given the respect they deserve.

Fletcher also told me that he had spent many a night sleeping under a bridge when he was homeless in Michigan. He slept under a bridge where three men had frozen to death just a few weeks before. Fletcher told me he often went to sleep praying the same thing wouldn’t happen to him.

Sadly, there are tens of thousands of stories like Fletcher’s — and Bill O’Reilly is trying to ignore all of them from his windowless ivory tower. Does it help vets like Fletcher for BOR to tell millions of people that he doesn’t exist and that he doesn’t matter? Does it help America’s hundreds of thousands of vets when BOR tells his viewers that the government has no obligation or ability to help veterans who served their country (which BOR has not) and returned home mentally or physically scarred? Is it helpful for BOR and his viewers to blame homeless vets for their own homelessness?
 
Places like US Vets and the Fitzgerald House are dedicated to helping people like Fletcher. They know he exists, they know that the US government isn’t doing enough to help those like him, and they’re trying to give him a helping hand — not a hand out — so he can make a safe transition out of homelessness. The staffs at US Vets and Fitzgerald House spend every day helping the homeless vets that BOR wants so desperately to ignore. They spend their days dealing with the institutional problems that BOR wants to blame on the vets. They are picking up the considerable slack left by our government that claims to revere them. BOR wants to claim that addiction and mental illness are the main causes of homelessness among vets, instead of acknowledging that they are the symptoms of a system that does not help servicemen re-integrate back into society and get the services they have earned.

Fletcher is a proud man, and he deserves to be proud. He should not have to beg or wade through miles of red tape to get help — his country should offer it because he deserves it. And despite BOR’s assertions, Americans should be made MORE aware of the problem of homeless vets and what their suffering says about our country.

Sign the letter to Bill O'Reilly demanding he apologize to the "non-existent" homeless vets here.

To Bill O'Reilly:  Homeless veterans exist.  I met some. 

In a previous post, I wrote about Bill O’Reilly’s bizarre assertion that there are no homeless veterans in America. He made this claim on January 4, 2008 while talking about a speech by John Edwards where Edwards said that 200,000 vets are homeless on any given night in America. BOR continued to deny the existence of homeless veterans on January 16, 2008 during an interview with radio host Ed Schultz. This time, he added a caveat that if there are homeless veterans, “there aren’t many of them out there”. You can see both clips for yourself and read transcripts here, since I’m sure you’ll soon be hearing BOR complain, as he always does when he’s criticized for something he said, that he has been “taken out of context.” The context of these unedited clips is quite clear.

On both occasions, BOR was either ignorant to or consciously ignoring a recent study from the National Alliance to End Homelessness (using data from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau) that found:

In 2006, approximately 195,827 veterans were homeless on a given night — an increase of 0.8 percent from 194,254 in 2005. More veterans experience homelessness over the course of the year. We estimate that 336,627 were homeless in 2006.

Either that or BOR believes that 195,827 homeless veterans (and that number is surely low) is a small enough number of homeless veterans as to be insignificant. I have no idea what number of homeless veterans BOR considers to be “many” — 195,827 homeless veterans certainly seems like a lot to me.

BOR said that he couldn’t find any homeless veterans. Maybe he wasn’t looking in the right places. It took me less than a day to find several hundred.

I went to U.S. Vets in Inglewood, California. US Vets is the largest non-profit organization in the US dedicated to helping homeless and at-risk veterans with temporary housing, counseling, and employment assistance.  The facility currently houses up to 500 homeless veterans.

I talked to over a dozen homeless vets, some who had served as far back as the Korean War, and showed them the clips of BOR denying or dismissing their existence. The reactions to the clips were quite similar — a shaking of the head in disbelief, a derisive chuckle or snort, and a deep sigh when the videos were over. Some of the veterans couldn’t believe that anyone could be so clueless and naïve, while others wondered why BOR hadn’t bothered to do any research before making such a dubious claim. Twice.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to have sacrificed so much in service to your country, then to come home to find that the country you served has no interest in re-integrating you back into society. Then you can’t get a place to live because you don’t have a job, and you can’t get a job because you don’t have a place to live. Then some idiot with a TV show gets up in front of an audience of millions and says that you do not exist. Twice.

Let me be very clear: the veterans in this video are homeless. Soldiers are trained to adapt and survive, and many have adapted so they can survive being homeless. The men in the video may not be pushing shopping carts or sleeping out on the streets dressed in rags, but they are homeless. Through the work of U.S. Vets and the US Department of Veterans Affairs, these men have roofs over their heads, food, counseling, and a support system, but they are homeless. They have a temporary place to stay, but they do not have homes.

These veterans are homeless, they exist, and no matter what BOR says, there are way too many of them. These are proud men and women who need help and are often reluctant to ask for it. They do not need BOR saying that they do not exist or that there are so few of them that they don’t matter. 

FOX ATTACKS! “Non-Existent” Veterans only scratches the surface of the afternoon I spent at U.S. Vets. I plan to complete a longer video very soon that will include more of the interviews with these amazing people. It was an honor and a privilege to be in their presence and to hear what they had to say.

If you would like to learn more about U.S. Vets and make a donation, go to USVetsinc.org.