Posts from — November 2007

“Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.”

- Henry Hyde

“There are so many women on the floor of Congress, it looks like a mall.”

- Henry Hyde

“In creating a presidential system, the framers invested that office with extraordinary powers. If those powers are not exercised within the boundaries of the rule of law, if the president breaks the law by perjury and obstructs justice by willfully corrupting the legal system, that president must be removed from office. We cannot have one law for the ruler and another law for the ruled. This was once broadly understood in our land. If that understanding is lost or if it becomes seriously eroded, the American democratic experiment and the freedom it guarantees is in jeopardy”.

- Henry Hyde

I received a note from Larry Bodine today asking me to post a note about an upcoming Jill Morgenthaler reception and fundraiser. Because I think it is important for folks to meet all the candidates, I am very happy to oblige. I’ll be there, incognito, in my Jackie O sunglasses and scarf.

Will be happy to extend the same courtesy to Stan, and yes, even you Peter, for your public events.

Meet The Candidate Fundraiser and Reception for
JILL MORGENTHALER for Congress

When: Friday December 14, 2007 - 7 to 9 PM
Where: My home at 691 Wingate Road, Glen Ellyn

All DuPage Democratic candidates and Precinct Committeemen are especially invited.
The requested donation is $20.

We’ll have plenty of coffee, cookies, snacks and Democrats.

Yours,
Larry Bodine
Democratic Committeeman
Precinct 45
691 Wingate Road
Glen Ellyn, IL 60137
630.942.0977
LarryBodine@Comcast.net

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On the first day of July (2007), Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them “7-Eleven workers” and “Sodomites.” The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a “good church” like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.

The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.

“We don’t want to fight you either,” one of them replied in English. “We just want your faggot friend.”

One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.

Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.

In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking “Russian Baptists” and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.”

After a couple years of fundamentalist and Slavic Christian virulent anti-gay protests at almost every Sacramento gay event in the region,” said local gay rights activist Michael Gorman, “what the gay community has feared for some time has finally happened.”

The story above is excerpted from a longer article at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report. I quote it at length because I want readers to understand what hate crimes look like and then look at Peter Roskam’s stance on anti-hate crime legislation.

Satender Singh’s death appears to be a direct result of the hatred against gays that is being whipped up by Christian extremist groups. SPLC notes one in particular called Watchmen on the Walls, whose co-founder, Scott Lively, authored a book which claimed that gays were responsible for the Holocaust. SPLC has posted a video of Lively giving an alternate history of Singh’s death to an audience of followers in Russia in August. It is pretty chilling.

On November 19, the FBI released its annual Hate Crime Statistics report for 2006. According to a story on the release by the Washington Post, hate crimes reports were up by 8%. But as the Post has also reported, the reports are pretty spotty because the reporting by local law enforcement agencies is not mandatory. Mississsippi, for example reported no hate crimes at all.

Democrats in Congress have recently taken action to address the problem of hate crimes. H.R. 1592: Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007 was introduced in the House in March, 2007. The bill seeks to offer Federal assistance to local law state and local law enforcement agencies in the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes. Its provisions include:

• Defining a hate crime as “a violent act causing death or bodily injury because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability of the victim”.
• Amending the federal criminal code to make violent hate involving firearms, explosives or incendiary devices punishable by a fine or a prison term of up to 10 years.
• Providing funding to state and local programs combating hate crimes committed by juvenilles.
• Allowing the Attorney General to provide technical, forensic, prosecutorial, or other assistance in the criminal investigation or prosecution of hate crimes by state and local jursidictions.

Some Christian groups are portraying this legislation as an attempt to stifle free speech and free exercise of religion by Christians and other religious groups. Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council has produced a video denouncing the bill as an attempt to silence the church by legislating against “thought crimes”. Ironically, even many black pastors are opposing the law on the grounds that it will prevent them from preaching against immorality.

H.R. 1592, however, specifically provides that “that nothing in this Act shall be construed to prohibit expressive conduct or activities protected by the First Amendment.” The bill does nothing to prevent Christian extremists from preaching hatred. It only provides for prosecution of those who act out that hatred in a violent manner.

President Bush has expressed his opposition to H.R. 1592 and threatened to veto, citing the lack of any persuasive demonstration of any need to federalize such a potentially large range of violent crime enforcement”. Apparently gay men getting their heads bashed in is not persuasive. Anyone can look at the history of the struggle for black civil rights in the South and understand that local jurisdictions are often unwilling or unable to take steps to protect their citizens. Bush also cited the potential unconsitutionality of the legislation but given our long history of federal civil rights legislation, this excuse doesn’t seem to hold water. This appears to be an attempt to placate Christian extremists by refusing to extend the protections enjoyed by other citizens to gay people.

Predictably, Peter Roskam opted to support Bush’s stand, voting against passage when the bill came before the House on May 3rd. His web site appears to be silent on the issue. Apparently, it was not considered an issue of importance. The bill went to the Senate where it was attached to the 2008 defense authorization bill which is now in conference.

Peter Roskam owes an apology to his constituents for refusing to extend the protection of the Constitution to all of the citizens of his district. I hope that our Democratic candidates will take a strong stand against hate crimes.

I learned from reading Illinois Review that Peter Roskam’s one-time boss Tom Delay had been in Lombard recently to “celebrate Jesus” and to help kick off a kooky website that Jesus has apparently recently established in Wheaton.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting and I wonder if Tom explained how Jesus, working through the prophet Jack Abramoff, led him to make it possible for garment workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas Islands to legally work in horrendous sweatshop conditions, free from interference by the Congress or U.S. labor regulators. Delay reportedly described the situation on the Islands as a “a perfect petri dish of capitalism”. Apparently Delay and Jesus hoped to eventually phase in these types of working conditions here on the mainland.

Now don’t get me wrong. As much as I disagree with Peter Roskam, he seems to be a person of honesty and integrity and worthy of respect. I don’t wish to smear him by association with someone he worked for a long time ago. What I am hoping for, what I want in my Congressman, is for him to stand up to the kind of intolerance being promoted by folks like the Culture Campaign and to temper his insistence on market-only solutions and to work to protect those who are vulnerable in society, like those workers in the Northern Marianas. The only aim of a post like this is to goad him in that direction. When I see that kind of movement maybe I’ll change the name of this site to “Re-elect RubberStampRoskam”

This Thanksgiving, Peter Roskam is very concerned about the safety of air travel. So concerned that he has sent a letter to the FAA, questioning whether some recent near misses involving air traffic controllers at Aurora were the result of controllers being stretched too thin by reduced staffing levels. But voters should realize just how unconcerned Peter was back in September when he voted against H.R. 2881: FAA Reauthorization Act of 2007.

In addition to funding the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) through 2011, including funding for the modernization of the air traffic control system, H.R. 2881 provided for the following:

• An increase in the number of aviation safety inspectors in the Flight Standards Service
• An assessment of training programs for FAA air traffic controllers
• Requirement that air carriers formulate plans as to how they will provide food, water, and medical treatment to passengers “stuck on the tarmac” for extended periods of time.
• Hikes aviation fuel taxes a few cents per gallon with the increase dedicated to air traffic control modernization

Frankly, I don’t understand how to explain Peter’s vote on this bill except as another “rubber stamp” approval of White House policy. President Bush was opposed to the bill and threatened to veto it due to its failure to embrace his preferred system of user fees for funding the FAA. Other White House objections were related to a requirement for a Consumer Complaint Hotline and the requirement that airlines submit plans regarding caring for passengers stuck on grounded aircraft. The plan for FAA funding favored by Roskam and Bush is that favored by large commercial airlines. It seems to me that their position on H.R. 2881 is best seen as just another example of their support for the interests of large corporations over those of consumers.

Photo by Tobi Elder, courtesy of U.S. Army

In an op-ed on his Congressional web site dated November 21, Peter Roskam attempts to defend his votes regarding services for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The piece of legislation that Roskam refers to in his article is H.R. 2642, FY2008 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act. As Roskam notes, the bill would have provided, among other items, the following spending for veterans:

• $4.1 billion to improve VA facilities, hospitals and clinics
• $600 million for PTSD and traumatic brain injury research and care
• $2.9 billion for general mental health care and substance abuse treatment
• $480 million for prosthetic research

In addition, the bill would have provided, according to Roskam, $21.4 billion for facilities to house and train active duty military personnel abroad and at home.

The history of the bill is pretty hard to follow at least for an amateur like me, but it at some point became combined into a larger spending bill, as Roskam states. This was H.R. 3043, Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008, which has been referred to in a previous post on this site. 3043 was sent to the President and was vetoed and Congress failed to override that veto. It is not entirely clear to me from the reading I have done whether, the provisions of 2642 were included in that veto but I think not. I think they were pulled out before the bill went to the President.

Roskam asserts his support for the original spending measure but his objection to its incorporation into the latter bill, calling it “a massive spending bill filled with unnecessary pork.”

Ok. So we have Representative Roskam and President Bush saying that they will support funding for these services for veterans, but only on their own terms. And they accuse Democrats of holding up funding by refusing to accede to their wishes for a bill without unrelated earmarks.

I have a problem with this explanation.

It seems that the Republican party has very suddenly found religion on earmarks since the Democrats came into the majority. The last few years under a Republican majority has been a virtual orgy of pork. Take for example the 2005 highway bill which was, according to the Boston Globe, at $286.4 billion, the most expensive piece of public works legislation in U.S. history. It included funding for snowmobile trails in Vermont, horse facilities in Virginia, the National Packard Museum in Ohio, and, notably $231 million for the infamous “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska. This was approved by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bush. And this is just a single example. Federal spending, under President Bush and a Republican Congress, adjusted for inflation grew at a faster rate than under any President since LBJ - increasing an average of 5.3% per year during Bush’s first 6 years in office, all while they were making huge irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy.

Earmark reform legislation introduced by Senator McCain with bipartisan co-sponsorship died in the Republican dominated 109th Congress. This is not the party of fiscal prudence that Bush and Roskam purport it to be and their arguments to this effect should not be taken seriously. Earmarks were just fine when the Republicans were in charge. Now they are using earmarks as an excuse to obstruct Democratic progress and holding funding for veterans hostage in the process.

If President Bush and Peter Roskam want to maintain the occupation of Iraq, in defiance of the will of the American people, and to maintain the steady stream of veterans returning home with serious physical and mental health problems or to jobs that have disappeared, then they need to provide services for those veterans and they don’t get to dictate the terms.

If Peter Roskam is serious about increasing transparency and controlling earmarks and wants to introduce meaningful legislation to that effect, I’m all for it. In the meantime, he and the President need to stop holding up funding for Veterans.