Posts Tagged ‘Dan Aiello’

Reactions to Harvey Milk Day

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Journalist Dan Aiello, writing at California Progress Report, has a great piece with some notable reactions to the signing, by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of a bill honoring Harvey Milk with a “special day of significance” in California:

The governor’s endorsement comes just one year after Schwarzenegger vetoed similar legislation intended to create “a special day of significance” for the slain civil rights leader. Schwarzenegger’s veto message then: Milk should be honored, but locally, not statewide.

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Openly gay State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) authored the Harvey Milk Day legislation both years.

“It is certainly appropriate the first openly gay elected official in our State, someone who literally gave his life in service to his community, should be recognized in this way,” Senator Leno told the California Progress Report.

“We’re just really thrilled that this day has come,” said Alice Kessler, chief lobbyist for Equality California which sponsored the legislation.

“This is historic. It’s the first time in our country’s history that a member of the LGBT community has been honored like this,” said Kessler. “And to have a Republican governor signing this bill shows us that equality is not just a partisan issue.”

Aiello interviewed Harvey Milk’s nephew Stuart Milk:

Stuart Milk echoed Kessler’s praise for the Governor, while also praising all of those involved with SB 572’s passage, including Senator Leno and Kessler. “The first person I called was Alice Kessler. Alice has really been, along with Mark Leno and all of the legislative folks, Alice really has been kind of the Shepard of this bill. It was Alice who kept the train on the tracks when others lost faith and I’m really thankful for her.”

Milk had even more profound praise for Senator Leno. Calling the Senator “incredibly modest, like Harvey,” Milk told CPR, “He deserves tremendous credit. This and so many things that have occurred in support of LGBT causes happen because of Mark. Senator Leno is very much a politician in the style of my uncle,” said Milk.

“So often our stories have been left out of the history books,” Geoff Kors, Executive Director of Equality California told the BAR. “This bill will ensure we remember and honor Harvey Milk the way we honor Martin Luther King and Caeser Chavez.”

In the piece, Stuart Milk pays homage to San Francisco Mayor George Moscone who was also gunned down by Dan White, and both Leno and Milk speculate about what Harvey Milk would have made of this historic development. Read their thoughts and more — including the bitter reactions of certain fundamentalist, conservative religious leaders — at Dan Aiello’s article. Check it out.

Meeting the Wirthlins … all over again

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Everything To Do With Schools … the Sequel (video: Yes on One at YouTube)

If the video above looks just a tad familiar, that’s because, despite all the Catholic and Mormon money and influence that’s being funneled into Maine by out-of-state organizations like New Jersey’s National Organization for Marriage and Colorado’s Focus on the Family, this anti-equality clip is not much more than a re-release of the same bag of tricks and baloney the Yes on Prop 8 campaign trotted out in California last year, when they dragged a couple of lawsuit-crazed irrelevancies known as the Wirthlins to the Golden State and made believe that California classrooms are subject to Massachusetts law.

Everything To Do With Schools … the Original (video: Yes on Prop 8 at YouTube)

Jeremy Hooper, writing at Good As You, has more information about the teacher in the ad, who works for a private Christian school:

That they are using Charla Bansley in the “teacher” role, making it sound as if she’s just some layperson. In truth, Ms. Bansley is the state director of the Concerned Women For America of Maine, and has appeared onstage at many Stand For Marriage Maine rallies. She has made her interest clear time and time again.

And while she is a teacher, she doesn’t teach at a public institution. She teaches at Calvary Chapel Christian School. A Christian school where she is already freely stifling pro-gay speech, at least according to one of her very own students.

Jeremy has much much more about this right-wing ringer posing as a public school teacher at his blog.

Finally, since everything old is, apparently, brand spanking new all over again, here are some excepts from my 2008 posts when the Mormons and their buddies brought the Wirthlin dog and pony to California to eliminate, by any prevarication necessary, the existing right of loving couples of the same-sex to marry:

Meet the Wirthlins, Tuesday, 21 October 2008

According to a ProtectMarriage press release, the tale of the Massachusetts couple proves “that children in Massachusetts are already being taught about gay marriage in public schools.”

While the Wirthlins seem like a nice couple, they can only speak of their experience with Massachusetts law, because California law is entirely different.

Today the Vote No on Prop 8 campaign reported the comments of California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, current President of the State Board of Education Ted Mitchell, former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin and former President of the State Education Board, Reed Hastings.

The four said the latest Yes on Prop ad is “clearly false.”

The Wirthlins hit the road for hate, Saturday, 25 October 2008

Dan Aiello, writing in the Bay Area Reporter, has taken a closer look at the Wirthlins, who are currently being bussed from church to church across California by Protect Marriage to support Proposition 8, which would eliminate marriage equality in California. Aiello uncovers a number of details about the couple that the Yes on 8 folks would rather remain unmentioned.

Voters in Maine would be well advised to get familiar with this nice Mormon couple and their shadowy, well-financed friends who’ve popped into the Pine Tree State to tell Mainers how to think about things like justice, fairness and equality.

Ending the gay blood donor ban

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

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California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco)
(photo: Dan Aiello)

Dan Aiello, writing at California Progress Report, provides a status update on AJR 13 — a measure that would put California on the record as opposing the ban on blood donations by gay and bisexual men. In addition, Aiello has extensive background information on how the policy came into being and why it needs to be revoked.

Ending the Federal Ban on Gay Blood Donations

On Tuesday the Assembly Judiciary Committee passed AJR 13, the U.S. Blood Donor Nondiscrimination Resolution (Ammiano-D), leapfrogging the legislation over the heads of Republican committee members’ who were united in opposition.

If approved, AJR 13 would call upon the nation’s Food and Drug Administration to end its more than quarter century ban on gay men donating blood to the nation’s blood banks.

The decades-old federal blood donor ban was introduced as a way to assure the U.S. public that the nation’s blood banks were safe at the genesis of the AIDS epidemic here, according to author Randy Shilts pioneering chronicle of the health crisis, And The Band Played On. But according to Shilts research, medical experts have argued since its inception the ban did little more than discriminate and for more than two decades mandatory blood screening has rendered the ban useless.

Freshman assembly member Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has decided 26 years of discrimination is long enough.

“Blood has no sexual orientation and the FDA should have no discrimination,” Ammiano explained. “I hope President Obama hears our call to change this shameful and discriminatory practice immediately so we can save more lives.”

Sponsored by Equality California, the bill could lead to the elimination of the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on donations of blood by healthy gay and bisexual men:

“No healthy and willing donor should ever be turned away,” said EQCA Executive Director Geoff Kors. “This policy unnecessarily discriminates against gay and bisexual men as it provides zero additional protection to our blood supply. To the contrary, the result of this discrimination is fewer units of medically necessary blood.”

Under existing federal rules, any man who has had a sexual relationship with another man in the past 31 years is automatically prevented from donating blood at any facility, regardless of personal health. The law prevents innumerable gay and bisexual men who are otherwise healthy from contributing to the nation’s blood supply, which faces chronic shortfalls due to a lack of donations.

I asked Aiello exactly how this clearly discriminatory policy came into being and what, ultimately, the consquences were. He told me:

The FDA banned gay donors fully aware the measure would not make the U.S. blood supply any safer, but at the same time would appear to the public as action while appealing to the moral majority coalition that was the core of the Reagan coalition. Blood, almost always donated, had a production cost of $10 dollars in 1983. The Stanford University Hospital test employed and proven effective at the time of the ban, would have added $6 dollars to the cost of every donation. At a time when the total number of reported AIDS cases was less than the total number of Americans who died in plane crashes, the administration saw the public concern as unwarranted and the cost of screening too high given the relatively few reported AIDS cases. In fact, the June, 1983 ban was announced only a month after the nation’s first reported transmission of the virus contracted by transfusion.

Although the Reagan administration chose cost over safety, the public was not as trusting. And once Stanford Hospital began screening all blood for AIDS and Hepatitis, other bay area hospitals found it increasingly difficult to attract surgery patients when the safer alternative nearby. In the end, it was the consumer who directed policy, and Reagan’s feeble blood ban law was forgotten. But it has remained on the books continuing to remind us who was blamed for the epidemic. Americans came to believe gay men, regardless of lifestyle or health status, were the rats who carried this plague. It is a belief many Americans still have, one supported by this 26 year old edict.

(emphasis: mine)

Now, over a quarter of a century later, Aiello notes:

The American Association for Blood Banks, America’s Blood Centers and American Red Cross support the repeal of the ban some of their members helped to enact, calling the current lifetime deferral for gay and bisexual men “medically and scientifically unwarranted.”

Confronting Schwarzenegger’s budget cuts

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

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Protestors in Sacramento question the governor’s veto power
(photo: courtesy of Dan Aiello)

Today, California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, took his blue pencil and vetoed a number of desperately needed California programs. These line item cuts will adversely effect seniors, the disabled — including people living with AIDS, the poor and the young. Leave to The Terminator to describe this shambolic patchwork of legerdemain in theatrical terms — “the good, the bad and the ugly.”

Dan Aiello, writing at California Progress Report, has filed a report on the immediate reaction in Sacramento:

Protestors, Legislators Question
Governor’s Veto Power

At the same time Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was sitting down before reporters inside the capitol today to sign a package of 27 bills intended to balance a budget he called “good, bad and ugly,” a budget-signing protest was underway on the north side of the capitol by a coalition educators, child welfare, senior services and healthcare advocates – angered by the additional cuts the governor made to the legislature-approved bills in order to balance the budget and create a half-billion dollar emergency funds reserve.

Schwarzenegger claimed the additional cuts were necessary after the legislature failed to pass two revenue generation measures – one to open a new offshore oil drilling lease off the Santa Barbara coast (that would have raised approximately $1 billion dollars) and another to requisition funds from local governments – included in last week’s budget deal.

Schwarzenegger used his veto power to make an additional $489 million dollars in cuts. He also borrowed $50 million from one of the state’s special funds and found another $117 million dollars in savings from money not spent in the last fiscal year to close the $156 million dollar budget gap and create a $500 million dollar emergency reserve.

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Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) also questioned the legality of Schwarzenegger’s actions in a statement released today. “The Senate held the line and passed a budget revision package with a sufficient reserve that met the Governor’s test. We question whether the majority of these vetoes are legal,” read Steinberg’s statement. While “The governor has the right to blue pencil an appropriation,” stated Steinberg, “the funding levels identified in the budget revision in many cases are not new appropriations. This is not the last word.”

Steinberg vowed, “We will fight to restore every dollar of additional cuts to health and human services.”

There is much more at the link.

It is imperative that Governor Schwarzenegger not have the final say and that these line item cuts not be allowed to stand. It is not hyperbole to describe the Governor’s cuts as life-threatening. Today’s demonstration in Sacramento is, one hopes, only the beginning of an uprising against this madness.

California HIV emergency

Friday, June 12th, 2009

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AIDS budget cut protest in Sacramento on 10 June 2009 (photo: Dan Aiello)

I had a CT scan and doctor appointments yesterday because I have pneumonia and I’ve had constant fevers for the last three weeks. I forgot to bring the mail in until late last night, and I discovered that, as part of Arnie and the Teabaggers’ New Deal for People with AIDS, the State of California has cut my health benefits. The California and San Diego County slime-balls who make these decisions slithered into hiding and let the Social Security Administration deliver the bad news:

The State of California will no longer pay your Medicare medical insurance premiums after June 2009. You must pay the premiums beginning July 2009.

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If you want to cancel this insurance [and have no fucking insurance whatsoever], please contact the local Social Security at the telephone number and address below.

The State of California didn’t start paying these insurance premiums until a few months ago. They stepped in and took over the payments when, after trying to use a redetermination of eligibility to throw me out of the MediCal program (MediCaid everywhere else), they discovered how financially fucked I actually am.

I’ve become a master of living on nothing. I simply don’t spend a dime unnecessarily. I will tighten my belt again and I’ll survive. That might not be true for many of the individuals who face even harsher cuts or whom the State of California will simply throw out of the state’s AIDS/HIV and MediCal program like trash. The appeals judges, in my personal experience, simply tell the victim that the state can do anything it wants. It has the law on its side.

More on the AIDS-care meltdown in California

Veteran reporter Rex Wockner has a must read  post up on the insanity that is now taking place in California:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed, and the California Legislature is considering, draconian cuts to all types of HIV-related funding in the near-bankrupt state.

In the worst-case scenario, which is still not off the table, slashes to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program could result in thousands of Californians who make less than $41,600 per year losing access to the state-provided drugs that suppress HIV and keep them alive.

Go and read the rest of Rex’s post now!

Then read Rex’s: What is Arnold smoking now?