Following is a statement from Lynn Tramonte, Director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance

Cleveland Heights — Bless his heart. Somebody fire up the Facebook Live. The self-styled “Joe Arpaio of Ohio” is feeling left out of the immigrant demonization debate.

Nancy Pelosi is having peace activists charged with felonies for nonviolent activities in front of her San Francisco home, and yet not having them investigated for, much less charged with what she has publicly accused them of, namely working for both Russia and China.

Heather Phipps is being represented in court by civil rights attorney Walter Riley. She allegedly splashed washable red paint on Pelosi’s garage door last week. A few drops of the paint accidentally got on a policeman’s uniform. The Pelosis are claiming that the damage to their garage door exceeds $400, and thus Heather committed a felony. The drops of paint on the policeman’s uniform are being used to also charge her with battery. Meanwhile Cynthia Papermaster, coordinator for CODEPINK in the Bay Area, is being charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly leaving red handprints on the garage door. The washable paint was completely washed off by evening.

Do I Want to Know

I was waiting anxiously for Jean to come home from school. Mr. Jimmy had beaten her home, and I was staying quiet in my room because I didn’t want to speak with him yet. Finally, she came bouncing in the room and I jumped up from the bed to greet her.

“Wait until you see what I found today!”

“Wait until I put my books down. Why you leave school early again?” Jean dropped her books on the dresser top and flopped down on her bed.

“I wasn’t feeling good.”

“You just didn’t want to take that English test. Stop lying.”

“If you already knew, why ask me?  Look at what I found!”

“What you find?”

“A picture in Mr. Jimmy’s room.”

“What! No, you didn’t go into his room when he wasn’t home!” Jean jumped up from the bed.

“Keep your voice down, he’s home now. He left his door unlocked so I just went in and looked around and found this picture.”

 I pulled out the picture from under my pillow and gave it to Jean, who looked at it for a few seconds, and then handed it back to me.

“It’s a picture of Mr. Jimmy when he wasn’t fat. So what?”

"If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long," famed linguist and cultural critic Noam Chomsky wrote in an essay published in Z Magazine in October 1997. 

 The essay, entitled, 'What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream", appeared before social media took off to the point it became essential to the formation of our modern culture. 

 Facebook arrived in 2004. A year later, YouTube was launched, followed by Twitter, now X. 

 With time, what may have started as creative or even juvenile digital phenomena became defining elements in our perception of ourselves, each other and the world at large. 

 Before the exponential growth of social media, the internet had numerous, but understandable, challenges pertaining to access, rules and regulations, financial viability, copyrights, social inequality and the like. 

Sunday, February 18, 2024 at 6 PM
Thompson Park - 1189 Dennison Ave
Columbus, OH 43201

Stand with the family of Casey Goodson Jr. and demand an immediate retrial of Jason Meade.