El Barrio, aka Spanish Harlem, is in the New York State 68th Assembly District. An incumbent who is in there now, a career politician whose dad basically handed him the job like Bush handed off to Bush, is being challenged by a very qualified candidate named Daby Carreras.
This candidate is as real as it gets. He is not just talking about issues, he is an issue. The man has jumped in to help in times of crisis, working with the Salvation Army to increase their cooling stations in the past, and has over time given gallons of blood. Not just blood, but very needed white blood cells that save lives - so much so that he has maxed out his life time allowance - which is 12 quarts.
His site has just gone live and I think it is about to go viral, not like COVID 19 viral but in a good way viral. He is already like the de facto assemblyman because he is not just asking for votes but he is giving away things on his sight.
He sees the real needs, the everyday reality that a career politician who has not worked a real job does not. So he is already noticing the effects of this virtual lock down and wants to help people - right now, not just months from now if he wins, he is here for us now.
On his site are articles about things to do to find safe space and have fun, even do some learning and teaching of your kids, in this desperate time. He is giving away maps to families in need, giving away stamps so kids can learn, and if people need masks etc that too he is hip to.
I liked the article about rooftops. I have one that I used to be able to visit, but after COVID 19 it got shut down. Which gave everyone less space. Most landlords lock down the roof tops on the people who are already in a lock down in their apartments and this city is getting really hard to live in. So the article talking about negotiating roof top access to people in this time - and for the future - shows that Daby is the guy to vote for.
The same article talks about roof top gardening, and that is a real +, something to do other than surf the net in your cell, I mean apartment, but when we can't go out or go up it might as well be a cell, freedom is relative I guess, sorry if I diverge but I was really missing my roof top privileges when I read that article. And if I could grow something up there, NYC gets lots of sun so tomatoes would be great, it would make my life a little easier.
Some people think that a politician ought to talk about taxes more and one person asked why the site did not mention taxes. If they really want taxes and a site that talks about taxes, check out the incumbent I don't even want to mention his name here because on the subject of taxes I am paying his salary and he is not giving blood, giving away maps, thinking about all the kids and their parents and how there needs to be a way to walk around, have fun and learn some things.
It's hard to be happy about anything these days but I am happy to hear that Daby Carreras is running and so here is his unusual and very useful website - www.votedaby.com
He has a link on it to another useful website - but I'll put it here as well - www.centralparkmap.info
I hope these help and if you live in Spanish Harlem/El Barrio I hope you help this guy out and vote for him.
The new president of New York’s Metropolitan Republican Club boasted to members about advising a far-right group in Germany that endorses shooting migrants and forgetting the Holocaust, and flirts with Nazis.
Ian Walsh Reilly was elected last Wednesday to lead the club, which has counted Theodore Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller, and Michael Bloomberg as members. Unlike those moderate Republicans, Reilly is a full-throated supporter of the far-right. Serving previously as the club’s chairman, he’s believed to have invited Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes to speak to the club in October, which led to a violent melee between Proud Boys and antifascists outside.
Reilly told prospective voters during the club’s elections last week that his support for the far-right wasn’t limited to the United States.
“Last year I founded a consultancy with a friend who is also active in GOP politics. The Yorkville Group is what we called it,” Reilly said. “It has provided services, not just to statewide candidates like [New York candidate] Jonathan Trichter, but to international political parties like Alternative fur Deutschland.”
Trichter said he had nothing to do with Reilly.
“To be clear, Ian Reilly never provided any services to my campaign,” Trichter told The Daily Beast. “He didn’t work for it. He didn’t volunteer for it. He didn’t even lick an envelope for it.”
As for Alternative for Germany (Deutschland), it was founded in 2013 as an anti-European Union party. Since then it has since adopted an anti-immigration platform, stating in its election manifesto that Muslims “are a big danger for our state, our society, and our values.” In 2016, AfD’s then-leader advocated for shooting asylum-seekers, while his deputy wrote on Facebook that police should be authorized to shoot at migrant women with children. Last week, Germany’s domestic security agency announced plans to put parts of AfD under surveillance, accusing the organization of fostering “an anti-immigration and particularly anti-Muslim attitude.”
AfD also flirts with Nazis, publicly blowing Hitler dog whistles in a country where symbols of the monstrous regime are outlawed. At a party march in Chemnitz last year, AfD members marched together with neo-Nazis. And last month, the party was “indefinitely” banned from Holocaust remembrance services at the Buchenwald concentration-camp memorial in central Germany after an AfD leader there said Berlin should “make a 180 degree change” to its policy of commemorating the Holocaust.
Reilly told The Daily Beast on Wednesday night that said he supports border security in the U.S., but “does not agree with” AfD’s stance of shooting migrants. He downplayed his firm’s work with AfD, saying it was “actually not that great.”
“Originally one of the members was going to come to the United States and what we were going to do was help them meet with members of Congress,” said Reilly, who added that no payment occurred. “It didn’t happen, but we’re open to it happening again.”
Despite the deal allegedly falling through, Yorkville’s website lists AfD as a client.
“It wasn’t that I went after them, it was that someone who was part of the party knew I would be able to help them get access,” Reilly continued. “Since it’s such a new party, they would have wanted access to discuss who they are… what they represent. They are a very pro-American party, a lot of these people.”
When asked whether he planned to coordinate outreach with European right-wing networks while helming the Met Club, Reilly answered with a blunt “no.”
Reilly was the club’s chairman when it invited McInnes in October to give a speech in which he simulated the assassination of a 1960s Japanese socialist. Following the speech, police said McInnes’ followers attacked several antifa supporters on the Upper East Side, which led to the arrest of nine Proud Boys members.
“I think the fact it was so closely timed to an election, it would have been better not to have that event at that time,” Reilly told The Daily Beast.
Though there are dueling accounts over Reilly’s role in inviting McIness, he did receive the endorsement of another controversial nationalist: Milo Yiannopoulos.
Sean Gallup/Getty
With a political history that includes laundering white-supremacist talking points and encouraging “vigilante squads to start gunning down journalists,” Yiannopoulos posted on Facebook a link to the Met Club’s website, encouraging his 2.3 million followers to “join by midnight” and “vote by proxy for Ian Reilly in the January election.” On Reilly’s Facebook page, the two appear together in a photo smiling.
The contest between Reilly and Robert Morgan was unusually heated for an establishment Republican club on the Upper East Side.
“There were very personal attacks with very loud tones and aggressive body language,” club member Corina Cotenescu, who is leaving the organization, said of last week's election. “Sadly a house divided against itself will not stand… Ian divided the club in my opinion.”
Morgan’s son, Robert, serves on the club's executive committee and told The New York Times he estimated 500 new members joined the Met Club by the end of December. By contrast, the club only had 300 members at the start of the month.
“We just can’t let the ballot box in effect be stuffed by false claims,” wrote Manhattan GOP Chairwoman Andrea Catsimatidis in an email imploring conservatives to vote for Morgan.
Rilley beat Morgan 324 to 270.
“For the election itself, it was really reaching out to the different networks I had access to through friends and finding conservative Republicans who would be willing to join the club because they were ideologically in line with the club and its mission,” Reilly told The Daily Beast.
Catsimatidis did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment, though Reilly said they had reconciled since the election. The two sat together for President Donald Trump’s speech at the organization’s State of the Union watch party on Tuesday night, posing for pictures together afterward.