Haven’t been able to post here in a while because our PC has been out of order and blogging from a Blackberry is not easy. We finally have a loaner.
We’ve been hearing a lot from Representative Peter Roskam lately, trash-talking the recently passed health insurance reforms that were signed into law by President Obama. Roskam has gone on record as wanting to strip his constituents of the new benefits they obtained in that historic legislation and he has been using the taxpayer-funded resources of his office and friendly corporate media to wage a misinformation campaign regarding the new law.
We were excited to find this video last night of Peter Roskam’s opponent Ben Lowe speaking on health care in America. Listen to what a real leader sounds like, then go and help Ben become a voice for working people in Congress.
6th District Representative Peter Roskam has been been demonstrating all the gravitas of a preteen girl of late in his contest with Rep. Darrell Issa and other Republicans to win the most Facebook friends and Twitter followers. While the nation faces numerous crises, we find Roskam Tweeting about episodes of Lost in an effort to become the House’s top Twit. We suspect that there might be better uses for his time and for our tax dollars.
More important though than Peter Roskam’s little popularity contest is the way Roskam is using both new social media and cooperative traditional media outlets to market lies about recent and pending legislative measures such as health reform and financial regulation. Roskam has turned the relationship between a Representative and his constituents upside down. Rather than listening to his constituents and bring their concerns back to Washington, Roskam is instead using media to market to his constituents a predetermined set of Republican objectives aimed at preserving the the GOP program of corporate deregulation that has been so disastrous to our country. And Peter Roskam has shown no reluctance to use lies and scare tactics – his endless repetitions of the lies about the fictional bailout provision in proposed financial reform bill is just one example.
It is time we had a serious leader and legislator as our Representative in Washington and not just a shill for big Wall Street banks and multi-national corporations. Someone willing to confront systematic economic injustice and the evolving global environmental catastrophe. We have such a person in candidate Ben Lowe from Wheaton. We encourage everyone to get to know Ben.
In the meantime, maybe we could make this GOP social media obsession work for constituents. How about every time Peter Roskam meets with a bank lobbyist or defense contractor he earns a Foursquare badge and we get a Twitter alert? Could revolutionize transparency in government.
There is no uncertainty what Peter Roskam will do when the Democratic healthcare reform package comes to a vote, probably later this week. Roskam will vote “no”. Roskam vote will be just the culmination of a year of effort on his part to block the President and Congress from doing anything meaningful to help Illinois residents who are suffering because the can’t afford to purchase healthcare insurance, because they have a pre-existing condition that makes getting coverage impossible, or because the insurance they have won’t pay for the care they need.
Roskam has not only argued against healthcare reform in Committee and on the House floor. No, rather than listen to his constituents and understand their needs, he has undertaken an intensive misinformation campaign designed to promote fear and confusion about the Democratic plans amongst his constituency. And he has used your tax dollars in this war of deception, spending them on huge volumes of direct mail, robo-calls, and town hall meetings designed only to air his point of view. Why is he doing this? First and foremost to cause the President to fail for political gain – a failure on health reform may make other Democratic reforms on immigration and finance more difficult and improve Republican prospects in the 2010 election. And, of course, because it is the will of the big insurance companies who help fund his campaign.
If Roskam is successful in his efforts, and the Democratic healthcare plan fails, thousands will continue to die and suffer needlessly due to lack of care. The bill that is expected to emerge this week will not be a perfect solution. A single-payer plan or national health service would do more to improve quality and reduce costs, but this is a huge first step.
More troubling than Roskam sure “no” vote at this point is an expected “no” vote by Democratic Representative Luis Gutierrez, of the 4th Congressional District in Chicago. Representative Gutierrez is a fine and principled legislator who is an outspoken advocate for badly-needed immigration reform. Representative Gutierrez is rightly upset that the healthcare reform plan on the table would exclude undocumented immigrants from coverage. This exclusion is not merely unjust, it is also bad policy. It will continue to force undocumented immigrants to use emergencies rooms for care. Care rendered will be less effective and more expensive than it would if these workers were included in reform plans. And undocumented workers tend to be younger and healthier than the population at large so their addition to risk pools could reduce premiums for everyone.
Representative Gutierrez is also upset because he feels that President Obama abandoned his pledge to make immigration reform a top priority during his first year in office. We too are disappointed, but I’m not sure that candidate Obama had any real sense of how difficult the healthcare fight would be or of the depths to which the Republican Party would sink in obstructing the Democratic agenda. We think it unlikely that the President could have, practically speaking, advanced immigration reform during the first year but we don’t see that as an abandonment by the President of the cause.
But whether that is true or not, we feel certain that Representative Gutierrez has the potential to kill both immigration reform and healthcare reform in one fell swoop, along with the rest of the Democratic agenda, if he casts a “no” vote on healthcare reform as he has suggested he may do. If healthcare reform fails, we believe that it is over. Neither immigration reform nor any other progressive reform is likely to go anywhere, and Representative Gutierrez will likely end up fighting for immigration justice with a Republican Congress and a Republican President hostile to immigrants.
So, Illinois, Peter Roskam already has his mind made up. Calling him will do you know good. Please call Representative Gutierrez instead and thank him for standing up for immigrants while asking him to change his mind and vote “yes” on healthcare reform. His contact information can be found here.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has made the news in the past few days with his call for a Jihad on the nation of Switzerland. Gaddafi’s call was in response to a recent approval by Swiss voters of a ban on the erection of minarets.
Gaddafi, who’s full title is Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, said the following:
“Let us wage jihad against Switzerland, Zionism and foreign aggression,”
“Any Muslim in any part of the world who works with Switzerland is an apostate, is against Muhammad, God and the Koran.”
Now we believe that the Swiss minaret ban is misguided and an affront to religious liberty. But we deplore the unhinged Gaddafi’s call for holy war.
We are a little curious, however, what our Republican Congressman, Peter Roskam, thinks about Gaddafi’s actions.Voters in the 6th District may not realize that Peter Roskam is personally acquainted with Gaddafi. Roskam traveled to Libya in 2008 as part of a Congressional delegation led by Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan. Listen to Peter Roskam talk about his meeting with Gaddafi on WLS AM’s Don Wade & Roma show on April 2, 2008:
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The same day, Roskam wen ot WIND’s Big John & Cisco Show to talk about Gaddafi and Libya again:
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So why did Roskam go off to Libya and meet with Gaddafi and then come back and begin a tentative rehabilitation of the terrorist leader in these radio appearances?
Well, there’s the oil. They don’t call the GOP the “Gas & Oil Party” for nothing. Libya sits on huge reserves of oil and natural gas and there’s no doubt that the GOP’s clientele in the oil industry want a piece of that action.
And then there’s the campaign contributions. Yes, Gaaddafi’s Libya is a contributor to Roskam’s reelection campaign, albeit inirectly. Records made available by Congress and made accessible in the Sunlight Foundation’s Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker show that Roskam & his staff had numerous contacts in 2008 with members of the Livingston Group, a lobbying form acting on behalf of the government of Libya, and that that firm, acting on behalf of it’s client, wrote at least 3 checks to Roskam’s re-election campaign. The livingston Group was seeking a normalization of U.S. trade relations with Libya, something that Roskam talks about as being desireable in his radio appearances. The data made available by Sunlight ends with 2008 so we have no knowledge of any ongoing relationship between Roskam and agents of the Libyan government.
Gaddafi in Libya. Uribe in Colombia. Micheletti in Honduras. Roskam sure does seem to have a thing for the world’s thugs and strongmen. We find it not a little disquieting.
Peter Roskam has still not signed on as a cosponsor of H. Res 1064 condemning the pending Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill that we first wrote about on February 15th. The bill, currently pending in the Ugandan legislature, is expected to come to a vote sometime early in March. The Ugandan measure criminalizes homosexual acts and applies lifetime imprisonment and even the death penalty in some cases.
(A) all people possess an intrinsic human dignity, regardless of sexual orientation, and share fundamental human rights;
(B) the ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009’ introduced in the Ugandan Parliament, which includes the extreme penalties of death and life in prison, poses a serious threat to the life, liberty, and security of the person and, if enacted, would set a troubling precedent for other countries; and
(C) the requirement that individuals report suspected homosexual individuals to the Ugandan Government could undermine Uganda’s efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, and interfere with care and counseling by family members, doctors, pastors, teachers, and others; and
(2) calls upon the President and the Secretary of State to–
(A) impress upon the Ugandan Government the United States belief in the intrinsic human dignity of all Ugandans, regardless of sexual orientation;
(B) express unequivocal United States opposition to the ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009’ introduced in the Ugandan Parliament; and
(C) ensure that resources committed to the global HIV/AIDS response are utilized in a manner that is efficient, effective, and appropriate to the local epidemiology of the disease, including in Uganda.
So why won’t Peter Roskam sign on to show his support. He’s had plenty of time to do so. Why he’s already signed on to a resolution introduced on February 24 recognizing the 189th anniversary of the independence of Greece (yes, the 189th anniversary, not the 15oth, not the 200th) so he could have easily gotten his name on 1064.
We think the reason is partly Roskam’s hyperpartisan nature (he almost never crosses the aisle to support Democratic initiatives, even no-brainers like this one). More importantly, we believe that Roskam has a fundamental hostility to gay rights (he voted against hate crimes legislation, he voted against employment non-discrimination) and a deafness to human rights concerns in general. We also believe that he is sympathetic to the Christian extremists like Rick Warren and Sen James Inhofe who have stirred up an anti-gay hornets nest in Uganda. Both Warren and Inhofe have, after pressure, renounced the Ugandan bill. We think Peter Roskam needs to do the same.
Please contact Peter Roskam and ask him to cosponsor H. Res. 1064. You can reach him at (630) 893-9670 in Bloomingdale or at (202) 225-4561 in Washington.
The resolution in question is H. Res. 1064 – Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009″ under consideration by the Parliament of Uganda, that would impose long term imprisonment and the death penalty for certain acts, threatens the protection of fundamental human rights, and for other purposes. It was introduced on February 3rd by Representative Howard Berman, a Democrat from California’s 28th District. As of this writing, only a single member of Mr. Roskam’s Republican party has signed on as a cosponsor – Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida’s 18th District.
The meat of the resolution is as follows:
Resolved, That the House of Representatives–
(1) strongly believes that–
(A) all people possess an intrinsic human dignity, regardless of sexual orientation, and share fundamental human rights;
(B) the ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009’ introduced in the Ugandan Parliament, which includes the extreme penalties of death and life in prison, poses a serious threat to the life, liberty, and security of the person and, if enacted, would set a troubling precedent for other countries; and
(C) the requirement that individuals report suspected homosexual individuals to the Ugandan Government could undermine Uganda’s efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, and interfere with care and counseling by family members, doctors, pastors, teachers, and others; and
(2) calls upon the President and the Secretary of State to–
(A) impress upon the Ugandan Government the United States belief in the intrinsic human dignity of all Ugandans, regardless of sexual orientation;
(B) express unequivocal United States opposition to the ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009’ introduced in the Ugandan Parliament; and
(C) ensure that resources committed to the global HIV/AIDS response are utilized in a manner that is efficient, effective, and appropriate to the local epidemiology of the disease, including in Uganda.
We think that there is little to complain of in that text – unless, of course, one believes that gay people should be put to death. Peter Roskam has never been friendly to legislation granting equal rights to gay people, but this is a wholly different matter. Mr. Roskam should run, not walk, to get his name added as a co-sponsor. A similar resolution is pending in the Senate.
American right-wing Christian extremists appear to have been at least influential in the origins of the Ugandan bill. These include Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Pastor Rick Warren of California’s Saddleback Church and author of The Purpose Driven Life. Both Inhofe and Warren have finally, after considerable adverse press coverage, publicly denounced the Ugandan bill and denied any role in it’s genesis. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has done some excellent reporting documenting their connections to Uganda and to leaders involved in propagation of the bill. A couple of her videos can be found at the end of this post.
The Oklahoman reported that Republican Senator Inhofe has made at least 20 trips to Africa since 1999 at a cost to taxpayers of more than $187,000, another example of the GOP’s stwewardship of your tax dollars. Inhofe has publically referred to the trips as “a Jesus thing” . According to journalist Jeff Sharlet, both Inhofe and David Bahati, the Ugandan who authored the bill, are members of a secretive Christian group known as “The Family” and Inhofe and Bahati were close.
A number of other members of the House and Senate are involved in The Family, including Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, with whom Peter Roskam traveled to Honduras last fall. After that trip, Roskam remarked that “Senator DeMint is so grounded and wise and I came away just very, very impressed with him.” We are unaware of any direct ties between Peter Roskam and The Family.
