‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Is Back, For Now… (Yawn)

Posted on by TL

From The Christian Science Monitor:

A federal appeals court in California granted a temporary stay on Wednesday, reversing aworldwide injunction against enforcement of the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

The action means the Pentagon’s ban on service members who are openly homosexual is, once again, in full force.

The policy was thrown into doubt last week when a federal judge in Riverside, Calif., declared the 17-year measure unconstitutional. As the government scrambled to halt the injunction, military recruiters for the first time began to consider openly gay recruits. Those efforts are now on hold.

In granting the stay, the three-judge panel of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals is allowing government lawyers more time to prepare their argument. The government is seeking a longer-term stay that would hold the injunction in abeyance for the duration of the appeal.

More.

Look.  There are already gays and lesbians serving in the military.  Gays and lesbians have shed  blood for the United States of America.

Really.

Let them serve.

Let them serve as they are.

State Sen. Toi Hutchinson To Be Inducted Into Rich Central H.S. Hall of Fame

Posted on by TL

It’s good news, and we offer congratulations to Sen. Hutchinson!

From ENEWSPF:

Rich Central High School will induct 14 into the school’s Hall of Fame.

“We, at Rich Central High School in Olympia Fields are very proud of all of our students, present and past,” the school said in a press release. “On Saturday, October 23rd we unite to honor some of our former students and their great accomplishments. This is a wonderful event for all of our communities to enjoy. Our Keynote speaker is Senator Toi W. Hutchinson – Class of “91 and we will be joined by several board members, mayors, aldermen and friends of Rich Central.  Our award winning RC Jazz Band, under the direction of Mr. Phillip Crews, will provide the entertainment.”

The following are the 2010 Hall of Fame inductees:

A. Jason Bonaparte ‘97
President, Bonaparte Corporation

Michael Brock ‘88
Owner, Pacesetter Ground Transport & Global Logistics

Glen Brooks, Jr. ‘88
Chicago Police Dept. Area Coordinator & Special Projects

Gene A. Cross  ‘89
Head Coach College Basketball

Linda R. Delaney Milam ‘84
Software Engineer for NASA at Johnson Space Center

Michael C. Garner, Jr. ‘97
Football All-Star & Community Volunteer

Gregg Garofalo ‘88
Attorney, Garofalo & Thiersch, P.C.

Chuck Greenberg ‘68
Grammy Award –Winning Musician

Col. Steven R. Grimes ‘71
Chief of Ophthalmology, COL, Medical Corps, US Army

Sen. Toi W. Hutchinson ‘91
Illinois State Senator, 40th District & Community Service Volunteer

Derrick Murphy ‘00
Community Service Volunteer & Professional Athlete

Thomas K.R. Stovall ‘97
Small Business Expansion Consulting

Angela K. Walker ‘89
American Cancer Society & Community Activist

Rachel W. Williams ‘88
Attorney, HR Director for Avatar Corporation

‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Is Now History

Posted on by TL

This today from the United States Department of Defense:

Openly gay men and lesbian women now can apply to join the military, Defense Department officials said today.

The department issued guidance Oct. 15 to process paperwork for openly gay men or lesbian applicants. The instructions come from a California federal judge’s decision that the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law is unconstitutional.

On Oct. 12, U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips enjoined DOD “immediately to suspend and discontinue any investigation, or discharge, separation or other proceeding that may have commenced under the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Act or its implementing regulations.”

Pentagon officials said the department will abide by the judge’s order, and that part of that compliance is allowing openly gay people to apply to join the military. But citing uncertainty over final disposition of the matter in the courts and on Capitol Hill, a DOD spokeswoman said potential applicants must be aware that the situation may change.

“Recruiters are reminded to set the applicants’ expectations by informing them that a reversal in the court’s decision of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ law/policy may occur,” Cynthia Smith said.

Phillips said yesterday that she is leaning against granting the government’s request for a stay of her order. The Justice Department has indicated it will appeal her decision declaring the law unconstitutional to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Defense Department wants a deliberative, long-range look at any changes in the law, said Pentagon spokesman Marine Corps Col. Dave Lapan. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates set up a working group to examine the ramifications of a possible repeal of the law that bars gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. The group is scheduled to submit its report Dec. 1.

“The review that is going on would look at all the far-ranging impacts of what changing the law would mean,” Lapan said.

A long-range plan for changing the law would include a period of transition to conduct training, to ensure that everybody was informed about new policies and procedures, Lapan explained.

“In the current environment with the stay, you don’t have the time to go through all these processes and make sure you determine what effect this has on housing, benefits, training on individuals across the board,” he said.

The legislative remedy would allow that work to move forward, Lapan said, as the department would have “the chance to study the impacts, to get the input from the force and to make adjustments and changes before an abrupt change in the law occurs.”

Lapan said it is too early to draw any conclusions about Phillips’ stay and what is happening in the force.

“I would caution against conclusions made from just a few days of having a stay in place,” he said. “A repeal of the law will have far-reaching effects. Now we are sort of in a holding pattern on discharges and proceedings related to enforcing the current law.”

Nod to ENEWSPF.

Retire From Chicago Politics in Style

Posted on by TL

Retire from Chicago politics in style.

Keep your campaign contributions.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Mayor Daley isn’t the only elected official who could retire from Chicago city government and take a pile of money in campaign cash with him.

Twenty-two of the city’s 50 aldermen also would be eligible, when they retire, to keep some or all of their campaign funds, a Chicago Sun-Times review finds. The amounts they could walk away from office with range from as little as $629 to $2.4 million.

When he retires next year, Daley can keep nearly $1.5 million or, if he chooses, do whatever he wants with the money, the Sun-Times has reported.

The amount of campaign money that the aldermen could keep is largely a matter of whether they took office — and took in campaign contributions — before June 30, 1998.

An Illinois law enacted that year barred state and local officials from converting campaign funds to personal use but also left an exception: Anyone who had money in their campaign accounts as of the 1998 date could keep the amount they had in the bank then whenever they eventually might retire.

Like Daley, four aldermen have announced they won’t run for re-election next year.

Too bad for those of us who contributed before 1998.

The numbers are incredible.

Check the Sun-Times.

Mark Kirk Bumbles Again: Exaggerates Role in Berman Bill

Posted on by TL

Yes, Mark Kirk did it again.

He claimed credit for something he did not do at all. Claimed credit for a bill the Democrats passed.

Mark Kirk claimed credit for a Democratic initiative.

Yet another Democratic wannabe.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Rep. Mark Kirk claims credit for being a driving force behind a bill signed into law this year that requires the president to crack down on companies doing business with Iran.

But the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Howard Berman, says Kirk is guilty of "exaggeration" when he says the "Kirk bill" became the "Berman bill" so it could pass the Democratic Congress.

"We didn’t even look at his legislation at the time," Berman said. "Our bill did so much more and went so far beyond his bill, I would have to put it in the context of an exaggeration."

Kirk told the Sun-Times editorial board last month, "The Iran Sanctions Bill, it was originally Kirk-Andrews, but if you were going to move it, that means you need to adjust to the power of the House. This legislation eventually became Howard Berman’s legislation, who is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He had my full approval in moving that forward under his badge."

For years, Kirk has been an apostle of trying to hold Iran’s feet to the fire by choking off its supply of gasoline. He passed a resolution this year to do that — H.R. 3081. (His staff had inadvertently listed the resolution as 3801 — a bill dealing with mortgages — on his campaign website but corrected it Monday morning after a Sun-Times story was published.) Kirk is listed as a co-sponsor of Berman’s bill.

"There is no doubt that Mark was a committed person on this idea, which wasn’t his idea, it was out there in the press," Berman said. "He introduced legislation in the previous Congress on refined petroleum products. He did chair a group I occasionally went to, the Iran Working Group.

"The bill that I was involved with, we didn’t even look at his legislation at the time. It was a much broader bill than his bill and, in fact, we were persuaded that while the refined petroleum sanctions were valuable and useful, Iran has a way of reducing its reliance on imported petroleum."

Illinois, you need to get it. Mark Kirk is not your man.

Alexi Giannoulias is the only coherent vote for United States Senate.

G.O.P. U.S. Senate Candidate Joe Miller’s Security Thugs Handcuff a Journalist

Posted on by TL

Can you say "Bill of Rights?"

My teapot boileth over.

From the Alaska Dispatch:

Alaska Dispatch founder and editor Tony Hopfinger was grabbed and handcuffed by a private security detail working for U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller on Sunday while trying to ask the Fairbanks Republican questions following a town hall meeting at Central Middle School in Anchorage on Sunday.

Hopfinger was reportedly pressing Miller on whether the candidate had ever been reprimanded for politicking while working at the Fairbanks North Star Borough in 2008. Alaska Dispatch and other media have sued for the release of records related Miller’s time at the borough. Various accounts of what happened next generally agree on this course of events:

  • Two or three bodyguards told Hopfinger to stop asking questions and to leave the building.
  • Hopfinger continued to ask questions while apparently videotaping the candidate.
  • Bodyguards told him that if he persisted they would arrest him for trespassing, but refused to identify themselves to Hopfinger.
  • Hopfinger asked why he was trespassing, as the event was at a public school. Seconds later, he was then put in arm-bar and later handcuffed and sequestered at one end of a hallway for at least 30 minutes. He was told, "You’re under arrest." 
  • Anchorage Police arrived on the scene shortly after.

I watched Joe Miller on CNN this afternoon as he was interviewed by John King. He danced like I’ve never seen a pol dance, refusing to answer question after question, finally admitting that "he was disciplined for the misuse of local government computers."

Watch below:

Alaska, prove you are still Americans. Do not vote for this man.

Vote for the very, very moderate-to-conservative Democrat who will represent all Alaskans well.

Vote for Scott McAdams.

It’s about Alaska.

Have You Met The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Behind Bars?

Posted on by TL

From The Economist:

THE Nobel peace prize committee’s announcement on October 8th that they are giving the award to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, will infuriate Chinese leaders. It may well give extra ammunition to hardliners in China who argue that the West is bent on undermining Communist Party rule. This is the same faction that argues the party should take advantage of the West’s economic malaise to assert its own interests more robustly.

China reacted with outrage in 1989 when the Nobel peace prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader in exile, to all appearances as a rebuke to the government for having crushed the Tiananmen Square protests earlier that year. Though China regards Tibet as an integral part of the nation, Mr Liu stands apart as an ethnic Han Chinese who has devoted himself to addressing the politics of China proper.

Mr Liu is precisely the kind of dissident that the party regards as most threatening. He is a seasoned campaigner, a veteran of the Tiananmen protests who has shown no sign of succumbing to the party’s intimidation in spite of three periods of incarceration over the past two decades (more than five years in total). He is a mildly spoken literary critic who has created the sort of consensus that is unusual to forge among China’s infighting intellectuals. Mr Liu’s Charter 08, a document that calls for democracy, was signed initially by more than 300 liberal thinkers (and then by thousands of others online). It struck a reasoned tone to which radicals and moderates alike could subscribe. The debate over “universal values” that it helped to fuel still rages within the party today.

More here.

Americans Agnostic About Gay Marriage: The Economist

Posted on by TL

From the Economist:

THE debate over gay marriage is at the heart of many races in America’s mid-term elections. On Sunday October 10th Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, said that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality was acceptable and that he would veto any gay-marriage bill. But that view places him in a minority. For the first time since the Pew Research Centre began conducting polls on the subject in 1995, fewer than half of Americans (48%) are opposed to gay marriage, while 42% are in favour. All religious groups are more accepting than they were in polls taken between 2008 and 2009. The most notable shift has been among white mainstream Protestants and Catholics, 49% of whom are now in favour, and that figure was even higher for those who attend church less than once a week.

American opinion on gay marriage

This is good news for our gay and lesbian friends.

Obama Related to Palin and Limbaugh, Franklin’s ‘Big Fat Idiot’

Posted on by TL

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Yup — the president has family ties to none other than Sarah Palin, according to the genealogists at Ancestry.com.

Obama and Palin are 10th cousins through a common ancestor named John Smith, a pastor and early settler in 17th century Massachusetts. Obama is related to Smith through his mother, as is Palin.

The president is also related to Rush Limbaugh, who’s a 10th cousin of the president — one time removed — through a common ancestor named Richmond Terrell, who was a large landowner in Virginia, also in the 17th century.

Hee hee hee.

(The ‘big fat idiot’ reference is in reference to Al Frankin’s wonderful book, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. I highly recommend it.)