Several updates were made to this post, as more information was made available.
The following account is paraphrased from several posts by BrotherJonah today, including the following:
http://www.alfrankenweb.com/...
BrotherJonah shares a house in Colorado Springs, Colorado with a widow who he calls Miss Johnnie. He came home and found the woman was crying and showing him a table full of Chinese food. He thought one of our friends or my relatives had come over and bought for them.
Obama volunteers were canvasing in the area and knocked on the door of Miss Johnnie. She is a registered Republican, but told them she was supporting Obama. She then started to tell them her troubles, including how her husband was a Vietnam Vet who died of Agent Orange. One of the volunteers was a Marine and a Vietnam Vet. The volunteer then started making calls on his cell phone. Soon, he handed the phone to Miss Johnnie. It was Barack Obama.
The woman told Barack about her daughter Michelle, a Marine who had been deployed to Iraq twice, and whose scheduled discharge may be delayed because of the Stop Loss rules. She talked about her continous troubles with the VA concerning her husband's medical bills. She talked about the difficulty of getting the VA to cover medical expenses that she had paid out of pocket, and the nitpicky paperwork errors by the VA. She told him about her difficulty affording food.
About 20 minutes later a very large order of Chinese food came to the door.
The delivery man was a recent immigrant and didn't speak English, so he called his boss, who told them that the person ordering the food wanted it to be a surprise. Based upon more research by others, it appears that Obama was not the one who personally ordered the food, but instead it was his volunteers. BrotherJonah was not sure who ordered the food, because he was not home at the time. Earlier reports assumed incorrectly that Obama was the one who called in the order.
BrotherJonah was a roofer who became disabled, with injured feet. He was out scrounging for scrap metal today (against his doctor's orders), to get enough food money to last him and his landlady through the weekend. Brotherjonah came home and had only been able to buy a half gallon of milk, enough food for one meal and some cat food. Instead, they had enough food to last until Monday.
Brotherjonah wrote:
"He was there in a way that really counts. McCain has a fake falsified made-up "Joe the Plumber" who turns out to be a white-collar person named Sam and not even a plumber...
Obama now has Miss Johnnie the Viet-Nam Widow and a Real Joe the Ex-Roofer with Busted Feet. That's why Obama wins. He's Real, his concern for the people is Real, and the people who supporting him, WE'RE real too."
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I know BrotherJonah as a person who regularly posts on the www.alfrankenweb.com website. This account did not come from the campaign office or a reporter - it came directly from the disabled ex-roofer.
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Here's a photo of Obama making a phone call to a voter today. (Fourth photo)
http://www.democraticunderground.com...
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UPDATE from BrotherJonah:
I sent the link to this story to BrotherJonah and told him that many people were skeptical about his story. I asked him to provide some more information as confirmation. He read the comments on kos and here are some of things he wrote in response at www.alfrankenweb.com/forum, with some minor paraphrasing by me for clarity:
The restaurant is "Coal Mine Dragon" at 1720 W Uintah, Colorado Springs. The lady who runs it is Second Generation Chinese."
Brotherjonah says he thinks that Congressman Mark Udall (son of the great Mo Udall and current candidate for US Senate) was involved in getting Obama on the phone. Brotherjohan said:
"If it was merely the Volunteers calling in the food order, and the restaurant owner not getting it out clearly distinguished, that's still great.
We have one cat, Keenan ... we can't let him outside because our next-door neighbor is a Confirmed Cat-Kicker.
Last summer Miss Johnnie contracted Leishmaniasis ...They gave her Antibiotics for it, and for the Mycelin Resistant Staph Aureole that goes with it. This has affected her inner ear, because the antibiotics were so strong. At the time we thought it was her lymphatic cancer coming out of remission.
After Miss Johnnie's husband died, she was waiting on getting her Widow's Pension, the VA wasn't even acknowledging that her husband had died of Agent Orange.
It took a few years for that. That's when she had the lymphoma. She was out on the street while taking chemo.
Last year she started to try for her CHAMPVA benefits, so she could get meaningful health care. The ones who come to the forum to blast "Socialized Medicine" don't know the least part of what the hell they're putting out, or putting down. We had the paperwork and forms from the VA to take to the Air Force to get her Widowed Spouse ID card, to get the CHAMPVA started.
We rode the bus across town to Peterson AFB, they allowed her onto the base, but not me, made me get off the bus and wait outside. Which I prefer anyway, when I left the Air Force, I LEFT...
At the Admin building another Mercenary, not Air Force personnel, clerk told her that the VA was full of shit, everything changed with nine eleven, don't you know there's a war on yadda yadda and threatened to have her arrested. This year we finally got her ID card, got her CHAMPVA started.
Any Vets reading this, be-the-hell-ware because this is what they're fixin' to do to YOU next if McInasane gets in power.
So she's owed 11 years worth of reimbursement for all the medical care she had to pay for out of pocket, even with the next to worthless Colorado Indigent Care Program insurance (Look up "worthless" in the dictionary and right next to it will be a picture of CICP) one of those "Massive Entitlement Programs For Bums" that McCain bitches about.
She got some reimbursement but is owed about 5 times as much more. They keep bouncing her claims back, saying the forms are "incomplete".
Utter bullshit, because I went over their claim as to what information was missing, and it was all right there in the papers.
That's why I believe somebody from Mark Udall's office is going to give them a Nasty Note Monday.
The Health Care meltdown in Colorado is almost as bad as it was in Texas when I left. Privatized everything. Well, I can testify, it didn't work in Texas, and it surely ain't working in Colorado either.
I get SSI and Medicaid. Miss Johnnie gets a Widows pension and CHAMPVA.
I supplement it by repairing computers and selling them, and the Scrap Metal. I've been making more money off the scrap metal than the computers though. The internet is part of our Cable package.
And, it's necessary for the repairs I do to the computers, otherwise we would have ditched that part and just used dial-up.
The past month I haven't been able to scrap, doctor's orders. That drop in income brought us near the edge. On top of that, scrap prices are down, way down... and there's more competition for what scrap there is.
This is what's happening across America.
I find out on November 5th what exact kind of surgery is going to be needed, for the foot I thought was uninjured 16 years ago. I do know part of it is going to involve removal of a bone, the Cuboid. I won't have a leg to stand on.
It would be really really cool, you know, if this situation were anywhere near being unique. Fact is, it ain't.
Another person asked if he could send them some money. This was BrotherJonah's response:
Thanks, but we're getting there. You might need it yourself soon anyway.
Stocks are tanking like mad.
Gas prices are down to 3 a gallon but that's mostly because so much business, small and large, has crashed that there's a huge drop in actual consumption.
There's going to be money coming in, just a question of when. We both know how to make money, just we aren't going to try doing anything on credit, build from a cash-only base.
Miss Johnnie used to be a business owner, she and her husband did custom printing. Before his illness got to him they had over a million in the bank. That's how quick a catastrophic illness can do you down.
"Difficult" and "impossible" are two separate equations, if something is difficult that just means it's possible.
It's a challenge more than anything. I hope.
I've got good skills I can adapt, like these computer skills. This one I'm using now I built up from parts I salvaged, part of the scrap metal deal.
...I'm developing a base of people who will want to buy good computers, that'll do whatever they want, just at an amazingly lower price than they would pay to HP or Dell.
Now HP is closing down most of their local operations here, moving some to Albuquerque and some to iirc Little Rock.
But I'll adapt. Part of it is that I don't have a huge monetary investment in anything, mostly my investment has been in skills.
At least we have a plan, and are getting, slowly to be sure, but it is building up, the means to implement the plan.
Dire straits are familiar territory for me. At least I know my way around.
There's good coming onto the horizon."
"Obamas avoids comparing himself to Gandhi, but Gandhi campaigned on brotherhood, compassion and the notion that none of us is placed on this planet in a higher birth order, we're all equal... "
Here's my favorite line from BrotherJonah (Obama is on the Senate Committee that oversees the VA):
"If I'm not mistaken, some poor clerk at the VA in Denver is going to have a rude surprise Monday morning."
More at several posts at:
http://www.alfrankenweb.com/...
Morality is when you do good even when no one is watching.
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Update 2:
Some fellow bloggers who know Brother Jonah and a Kossack who lives in Colorado Springs are teaming up to make sure they are helped until Brother Jonah can literally "get back on his feet." check out:
http://www.dailykos.com/...