MEET MIKE McINTEE, NETROOTS HERO FROM MINNESOTA, LIKES: RAMONES, THE TWINS, COLEEN ROWLEY

I hope you already know who Mike McIntee is-- or at least know his work. Mike is a big supporter of Coleen Rowley's and a couple months ago he took the Blue America "Have You Had Enough?" song and did an animated video for it. People were so enthusiastic that requests have flooded in for similar videos for candidates across the country. Mike's clip suggesting it's time to throw Denny Hastert out and replace him with John Laesch has been played more than almost any other political video on YouTube. Tens of thousands of people have watched Mike's clips for Charlie Brown, Victoria Wulsin, Jerry McNerney, Mike McGraw, Bill Winter, Carol Voisin, Chris Murphy, Wendy Wilde, Robert Rodriguez, David Roth, Roger Sharpe, Joe Sestak, Angie Paccione, Steve Porter, and other progressive Democrats in every part of the country. Yesterday he whipped one up for Kirsten Gillibrand, the most recent Blue America guest at Firedoglake.



A few days ago Mike saw one of the smear campaign ads paid for with the huge corporate bribes John Kline spent the entire last two years amassing. And Mike isn't the only person in Minnesota to notice the bullshit Kline was spewing. The Minnesota Monitor wrote about it and then Mike did a video about it. I think you'll dig it as much as I did:




Mike got so creative and productive because, like so many of us, he got majorly pissed off at the Bush Regime and the rubber stamp Republicans enabling his reactionary agenda. "They've been ripping away the institutions, laws and principles that have made this country great," Mike told me. And he's pissed off that the poor in his native Minnesota pay nearly twice as much as the rich in taxes and fees as a percentage of their income. "I've seen firsthand how the mantra of 'me first' is killing this country."

Mike comes from a background in TV news and he's got 25 years of experience, working at local stations from Harlingen, Texas to Minneapolis, covering wars, floods, riots, politics, disasters, and stories about cute puppies. He even ran a national TV news network-- the All News Channel-- on DirecTV. "Media consolidation undermined our channel and I had to lay everybody off when Hubbard Broadcasting sold the bandwidth to Fine Living Television. That was about three years ago. I spent the next year finding jobs for all of my former employees. Then I reinvented myself, learned how to do non-linear editing and launched a company intent on producing relevant media people really cared about. At first we produced family history videos, but then branched out into podcasting and online videos. The technology had changed enough that it was time to democratize broadcasting-- which is now my mission."

All those years in TV news prevented Mike from getting too involved with politics. "Now that I'm out of TV news, I'm making up for lost time. I help our Eagan/Burnsville Democratic-Farmer-Labor party with communications. I'm a delegate and I push for changes in the party to put people with vision and backbone in leadership positions. I blog. I podcast. I challenge the local reporters to do a better job and to quit glossing over the issues." And he's been one of the back-bones of the entire Blue America campaign for 2006. Mike's 47, loves the Ramones and lives and dies for Twins baseball.