Hilltop hero Zerqa Abid, who has dedicated her life to helping thousands of young people on the Westside, is threatening a hunger strike if the City does not take more action to curb increasing violence by young people.

Last Friday, following three homicides over two days of young people in the Hilltop, Abid and the Hilltop Youth Social Justice Collaborative held an emergency press conference.

“There are 10,000 children at risk in our neighborhood,” said Abid, founder and director of My Project USA. “We cannot just be patiently waiting on the promises and talk we’ve been given for a year.”

But the City has given millions since 2021. This May, $16 million in funding was announced for summer youth programs, with $8 million of this allocation going to anti-youth violence programs.

But many are asking, is it enough? What’s more, they ask, who’s getting the money and is their advocacy effective?

Ready, aim, fire:

“I believe in Jesus, guns and babies.”

So declares Kandiss Taylor, GOP candidate for governor of Georgia, in a campaign ad.

Or how about: “I’m Eric Greitens, Navy SEAL, and today, we’re going RINO-hunting.” This is not about killing rhinoceroses. “RINO” stands for Republican in Name Only – you know, anti-Trumpers. Greitens, former governor of Missouri, who resigned in the wake of a sexual abuse allegation, is now running for the Senate – running fully armed and dangerous as hell, at least according to his little TV ad, which features him and a bunch of guys dressed up in camouflage outfits, fully armed, kicking someone’s door open, tossing in a smoke bomb.

ON JUNETEENTH WE VISIT AUSTRALIA, DEFUND THE FASCISTS & SAVE PACIFICA RADIO

We open the GREE-GREE zoom #99 with CLAIRE ATKIN of Check My Ads and its brilliant, cutting-edge campaign to strip internet-based income from fascist media mavens like Steve Bannon.

Launched in early June, Claire’s pathbreaking strategy includes grassroots campaigning against the violent-laced hate-mongering of the extreme right  wing.

Claire is followed by LEHMAN WEISCHSELBAUM’s call for whistleblowers to unearth fraud and theft in the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House.

Wednesday, June 22, 7:30pm, Two Dollar Radio Headquarters, 1124 Parsons Ave.

Join author Kim Kelly for a moderated discussion led by the Ohio AFL-CIO and hosted by Two Dollar Radio Headquarters. Suggested donation is $10, 100% of which will go to the Central Ohio Worker Center!

Kim Kelly is an independent journalist, author, and organizer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has been a labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018, and her writing on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Baffler, The Nation, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Esquire. She has also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV. Previously she was the heavy metal editor at VICE’s Noisey, and a leader in the VICE Union. She is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Freelance Journalist Union, an elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE).

For all her decades of experience in politics and the ways of Washington, D.C., nothing had prepared Lady Bird Johnson for the role of First Lady. She and her husband were elevated to their offices under the worst circumstances imaginable. On the airplane ride back from Dallas, she visited Jackie Kennedy who was in the hold of the plane with the casket. Lady Bird told her, "Oh, Mrs Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to be vice president and now, dear God, it's come to this." We. Mrs. Johnson seemingly sublimated her husband’s wishes to hers. But as Julia Sweig shows us, LBJ’s political career was her career too. Indeed, she sometimes referred to his office as “our presidency.” If Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, was the second most powerful person in Washington during his brother’s presidency, Lady Bird Johnson played that same role in her husband’s administration.