🏳️‍🌈#LGBTVoices Celebrates Pride🏳️‍🌈
LGBT+ REPRESENTATION IN MEDIA

Felice Picano’s memoirs: Ambidextrous and Men Who Loved Me.

Groundbreaking memoirs chronicle growing up gay pre-stonewall, through gay liberation and into the AIDS plague crisis. A genesis of gay literature.

#Pride Born in 1944, Felice (pronounced “feliz”) Picano grew up around NYC. He was an extremely gifted student, graduating Cum Laude from Queens College in 1964, at the age of 20, with English Dept Honors.

He had some notion of becoming an author, but wouldn’t begin writing for 10 yrs.

🏳️‍🌈#LGBTVoices Celebrates🏳️‍🌈
FIFTY YEARS OF PRIDE

Today: How to Survive a Plague

By the end of the 20th century, 33 million people were living with HIV, and 14 million had died world wide.

Today, 1 in 7 infected are unaware of their status.
HIV is still a killer.
#Pride
1) HIV appears to have originated with the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), and jumped to human infection through the consumption of wild chimpanzees. It mutated to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus by the early 20th century.

By the early 70’s, infections were global.
2)

🏳️‍🌈#LGBTVoices Celebrates🏳️‍🌈
FIFTY YEARS OF PRIDE

Today: Coming Out

Whether gay, lesbian, bi, trans, asexual, or any shade of the rainbow, more people are coming out than ever.

Coming out means standing up for your rights & increasing the visibility of LGBT+ people.
#Pride
1) At a time when LGBT+ rights, some very recently gained, are under threat, visibility in our community is crucial.

The more people that come out, the better chance people have of knowing LGBT+ people. Knowing people makes it harder to hate them.
2)

Some say that elections aren’t as important as other issues.

This attitude led many not to vote for Hillary out of ideological purity. 2 GOP additions to SCOTUS later, and Roe v. wade is in jeopardy.

Remember that when someone says impeachment is more important than elections. While 70% of Dems favor impeachment, 2/3rds of Americans are against. Most importantly, independents, whose votes we need, are narrowly against, more so in swing states like PA, MI, and WI.

fivethirtyeight.com/features/would…

We worked hard to build a Dem majority in the House, including many hard fought red districts, put in peril if Dems start impeachment now.

When facing real electoral consequences, why insist on impeachment now if we have no chance of removing Trump without the Senate?
1) 3 mos of House control, televised hearings continue to expose Trump’s lawlessness. Dems prepare for hard court fights over subpoenas, particularly the full Mueller report.

The narrative that Dems are idle, not using every practical tool available to them, is false.
2)

I’m worried about some tweets I’m seeing. #Resisters attacking blue candidates or insisting on only support candidates of a certain identity.

I’m not saying discussion about privilege is invalid. But for god’s sake, where do you think this rhetoric comes from? Who benefits?
1) In 2016, Russia stoked divisions between the left and center flanks of our party. We all took the bait, myself included. In the end, enough people in 3 states voted 3rd party, or stayed home to sink a close race.

In 2018, we united and won. That is our way to victory in 2020.
2)

Asylum seekers are legal immigrants, and our country IS NOT too full to recieve them.

Immigrants contribute to our nation culturally and economically, new consumers that expand our econ.

Fear of demographic change fuels anti-immigration sentiment.
They’re just not white enough. The Trump admin has been busy limiting LEGAL IMMIGRATION:
💢Refugee admissions lowest since 1980, even as America caused the violence most flee from.
💢Slowing lawful immigration to a crawl. Green Card backlog increased by 35% since 2016.
💢Unconstitutional Muslim ban.

Trump’s incoherence on free speech: gagging Doctors’ counsel on patients’ right to abortions, while promoting payed hate speech at colleges.

Anyone can speak freely on campuses, but hate mongers don’t have the right to be payed for it.

Free speech =/= state sponsored hate. Trump brought Hayden Williams to the CPAC stage.

Williams, not a student, was attacked by a student at UC Berkeley while distributing right wing pamphlets.

The student was arrested & charged, Berkeley released a statement of commitment to free speech.
berkeleyside.com/2019/03/03/uc-…

Cohen’s House testimony yesterday was damning to Trump, & Republicans are shook.

They spun conspiracy theories, pretending Cohen couldn’t be taken seriously as a convicted liar, conveniently forgetting his lies, & their obstruction, were to protect Trump from his own crimes.
1) The bombshells:
💥Cohen heard Roger stone give Trump advanced notice on wikileaks posting of the stolen DNC emails, something Trump reportedly denied in sworn written testimony, and Mueller has the phone records!

💥Cohen’s perjurious testimony was edited by Trump’s lawyers.
2)

Cardinal George Pell, former adviser to Pope Francis, is the highest ranked cleric convicted of sexually abusing children. On the heels of a Vatican meeting on sexual abuse where, absurdly, no zero-tolerance policy toward child rape was issued. 1)

bbc.com/news/world-aus… 2 prominent Cardinals reject the notion that the power of the clergy empowers abusers, and blame child rape on gays.

Surprised that the Catholic church scapegoats the LGBT community for their own abuse?

Embracing hate is just another form of abuse. 2)

bbc.com/news/amp/world…

NYT reports that Trump asked Matthew Whitaker to put his ally Geoffrey Berman, who had already recused himself, in charge of the Cohen investigation.

OBSTRUCTION: Trump was implicated as a co conspirator.

PERJURY: Whitaker claimed he’d had no talks with WH on investigations. NYT has several officials with direct knowledge of a call between Trump and Whitaker about putting Geoffrey Berman of SDNY, a recused ally, in charge of the Cohen investigation.

That makes SEVERAL instances of Trump committing obstruction, some publicly.

nytimes.com/2019/02/19/us/…

In 1962, JFK set a goal to land men on the moon by decade’s end. Meeting it developed tech that powers our age.

Climate change is our generation’s moon shot. Not a challenge harder or too costly to meet, but a chance to develop the energy that will power this century. Big goals we’ve met:
Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo program cost $200 bil in 2019 dollars.
New Deal = $653 bil.
The US won WW2 for $4 tril over 4 years.

The estimated cost for converting to 100% renewables is $2 tril in 10 yrs, same as GOP tax cuts for the rich in one bill.

Rumor has it that AMI may have blackmailed Bezos to stave WaPo’s coverage of MBS’s ordered murder of Jamal Khashoggi, rather than to protect Trump.

I’d argue that Trump’s, MBS’s & Putin’s interests are intertwined. To further one is to further all, against American interests. Feds are determining whether AMI violated an immunity deal by blackmailing Bezos. Ronan Farrow has also come forward with a claim of attempted blackmail.

AMI avoided prosecution by cooperating with an investigation into the bribery of Trump’s mistresses.

cnbc.com/2019/02/08/jef…

Matthew Whitaker’s testimony before Congress was inconsistent, evasive, and belligerent.

He stated that he hadn’t meddled in the Mueller investigation, & has not briefed Trump or anyone in the WH on it.

If he lied, as multiple leaks indicate, it’s perjury before Congress. Chairman Nadler informed Whitaker that he will be compelled to provide sworn testimony in the coming days during which he must answer the questions he evaded, declare exec privilege (which the Trump admin hasn’t declared yet) or face subpoena.

washingtonpost.com/world/national…

In the first 15 mins, Whitaker evades, tries to shut the chairman down for going over his 5 mins, and makes an ass of himself.

Nadler makes it clear that a subpoena is forthcoming, gives Whitaker a few days to get his shit together.

We’re off to the races! pscp.tv/w/by2YcTFlZGpu…

The richest 1% of Americans now makes over 25 times more than the other 99%.

With ballooning cost of health care, education, and cost/living, this is an unsustainable trend.

Philanthropy failed us. The solution, as it was during the largest econ growth in history, is taxes. 1) Watch Michael Dell of Dell Computers made a fool of by MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson.

Notice that even Heather Long, econ correspondent of WaPo thinks the high tax rate was for “a brief moment in the 1980’s.”
2)

https://twitter.com/redball2/status/1088657696260120576/video/1

The denizens of the Reptile House are puzzled as Fed workers face evictions and line up at food banks.

Larry Kudlow, net worth $25 mil praises them for working for free.🤷‍♂️

Wilbur Ross, net worth $700 mil, thinks they should just get high interest loans.🤷‍♂️

Cold callous creeps. Ross thinks workers living paycheck to paycheck could just take out a high interest loan.

He also thinks the loss of income for 800,000 workers isn’t a major drag on the economy.

It’s projected to cost $6 bil by Fri, but he’s only the commerce sec. 🤷‍♂️

Roger Stone is under arrest!!!

Indictment by Robert Mueller 👇

The Covington Diocese has been in the news before.

In May, openly gay valedictorian Christian Bales was barred from speaking at Holy Cross HS, for a speech deemed “too political” for praising the activism of young gun reform advocates.
1)
abcnews.go.com/US/valedictori… Teachers from the Diocese of Covington stood by and condoned students harassing and intimidating native elders while shouting “build the wall,” but common sense gun reform is too political?

Say, do you think it had something to do with Christian being gay? 🤔
2)

Steve Mnuchin was unable to explain to Congress why Trump plans to lift sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, who attacked US elections in 2016.

Pelosi said it was one of the worst briefings they’ve received from the admin.

Steve says we should trust the Pres.

Oversight’s a bitch, huh? Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed a classified briefing given Thursday by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as "stiff competition" for "one of the worst classified briefings we have received from the Trump administration."

cbsnews.com/news/nancy-pel…

GOP Accomplishments of 2018:
💢3 Gov shut downs over bullshit.
💢A combined tax heist and trade war that has wrecked the US economy.
💢Allowing the violence against women’s act to expire.
💢A Stock Market unraveling we haven’t seen since the last GOP Pres crashed it.
1) 💢Worst Dow Jones Dec since 1931.
💢a steep rise in hate crimes.
💢10,000 legal, asylum seeking children separated from families and imprisoned.
💢Loss of health insurance for 3 million Americans by gutting ind mandate.
💢Abdication of duty of Congressional oversight.
2)