In a world full of hate and blame, an occasional seed of hope flowers. One Miami woman is spreading some of that very hope. Through her story Maria Mejia is opening the eyes of the ignorant and hateful. By exposing her own pain she is enabling young and old to see HIV/AIDS positive people in a totally different light. From teenage runaway to advocate, she has found a way to change her world while attempting to change ours.
commentary.
It’s a choice between fascist kitten-crushers and freedom.
Joe Lohta thinks it’s just fine for subway trains to crush little kittens. Not a problem. Fat Cat Catsimatidis thinks it is reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk kids if they wear their hat backwards. Those are not exaggerations folks – they are quotes.
I’d like to say a few words about the present election. It’s an important one. It is the first real chance citizens of New York have had in years to repudiate the Bloomberg/ Kelly policies that have turned the city into a police state where innocent citizens are routinely spied on, stopped, searched and harassed and where over 86,000 young people have been slapped with an arrest record for having a small amount of marijuana – regardless of the fact that the New York state legislature de- criminalized small amounts over thirty years ago.
Lohta has made it quite clear he is a Bloomberg clone. He plans to keep Kelly in place and continue the same policies unchanged. Catsimatidis, who may yet run as an independent, is as tone deaf and ignorant as a wanna- be politician could possibly be and wants to go even farther down the repression path. In one category only is Catsimatidis the clear winner: he has got to be by far the bone ugliest candidate to stand for any office in living memory. The man looks exactly like a great, bloated toad and has a similar cold blooded personality. “Cats” as he likes to be called, is a billionaire, having made his money in the notoriously difficult grocery business.
Getting that rich in an industry that operates on a 2 or 3 percent profit margin argues a cut- throat morality that is not perhaps just what one would want in a person who will be responsible for the needs of the poor, the sick, the left- out minorities and the homeless. We have seen under Bloomberg how such people were treated – as if they did not exist or at best were an annoyance to be dealt with by pricing them out of the city altogether.
Early on in the race, it looked like City council president Christine Quinn was in the lead for the Democratic nomination. That has not turned out to be the case and a good thing too. Quinn, an out-lesbian, used her sexual orientation to bag the important gay- block vote in earlier elections and then did nothing at all for the LGBT community. In serving the needs of homeless LGBT youth, Quinn has been no help whatever. In stopping police dept. entrapment of gays on phony soliciting charges, she was useless and silent. If she thought speaking out for marriage equality was going to get her points she was badly mistaken. In this day and age in New York, that’s about as controversial as speaking out for apple pie.
As of this writing, it looks like the Democratic candidate will be Bill DeBlasio, who presently holds the office of New York City Advocate. DeBlasio is committed to booting the arrogant fascist, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly (and we can only hope it is a boot with a steel toe) and ending the grotesquely unconstitutional practice of stop and frisk. Not only is this practice a violation of citizen’s rights it has been demonstrably ineffective (except for boosting marijuana arrests.) DeBlasio’s commitment to a diverse, multi- cultural city is not mere rhetoric. His bi-racial family shows he lives it as well as talks it. We hope our readers in New York will turn out in force to vote for DeBlasio.
commentary.
It’s a choice between fascist kitten-crushers and freedom.
Joe Lohta thinks it’s just fine for subway trains to crush little kittens. Not a problem. Fat Cat Catsimatidis thinks it is reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk kids if they wear their hat backwards. Those are not exaggerations folks – they are quotes.
