Friday Mashup (7/10/09)

(Cleaning out my "in" bin again...).

I’m almost glad I came across this opinion column in the Christian Science Monitor (an otherwise sensible publication) written by David Rittgers, an Army Special Forces veteran and attorney affiliated with the Cato Institute (a clue right there as far as I’m concerned), who tells us as follows…

Washington – Congress seems intent on passing new hate-crime legislation. It may sound like a surefire way to tamp down on hate crime, but it won't work.

The law would expand federal jurisdiction from crimes motivated by the victim's race, color, religion, or national origin to include the victim's gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.

…

Scott Roeder is accused of shooting abortion doctor George Tiller to death; he is sitting in jail awaiting prosecution. The same goes for Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who shot up an Army recruiting station in Arkansas and killed Pvt. William Long. As soon as Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn is out of the hospital, he can join them.

It would have been more apropos of Rittgers to note an example of an LGBT individual here (to be honest given the proposed modifications), since the late Dr. Tiller, the two Army recruiters and the Holocaust Museum guard do not fall into that category as far as I know (though no one should be penalized for being straight either, I want to emphasize).

The point I want to make, though, is noted here (from a factsheet linked to this post)…

The Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 would direct federal resources to help local law enforcement fight violent hate crimes, and would let federal law enforcement step in when locals don’t.

Religious Right leaders choose to portray the hate crimes legislation as a “threat to religious liberty.”

They spread the lie that the churches will be silenced, and that church leaders and their supporters will be jailed for speaking out against homosexuality. The bottom line: This is all completely false. I urge my colleagues on the other side of this issue to stop bearing false witness against this legislation.

That was written by a member of African American Ministers in Action, a group that supports the legislation, by the way.

And as Think Progress notes from here…

…a federal hate crimes law already exists: Passed in 1968, it allowed federal investigation and prosecution of hate crimes based on race, religion, and national origin. The new law would simply add sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected groups,and allow local governments to get needed resources from the federal government for investigations and prosecutions.

As Think Progress tells us, the bill passed the U.S. House and awaits action from the Senate (where we can hope they take an altogether different view than Rittgers does).

This April New York Times editorial tells us the following…

In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, widely known as the motor voter law, to make it easier for eligible voters to register and to increase registration rates of traditionally underrepresented groups, including poor people.
In addition to requiring states to provide voter registration materials to people applying for and renewing driver’s licenses, the law requires states to offer registration forms at offices that administer public assistance such as food stamps and unemployment insurance.

States started out with some enthusiasm, but in recent years compliance has fallen sharply. Project Vote and Demos, public-interest groups that work for voting rights, studied the implementation of the motor voter law nationally from 1995 to 2007. In a 2005 study of 103 people leaving a Department of Jobs and Family Services office in Ohio, only three reported being given voter registration forms. Surveys conducted outside of public assistance offices in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland and other states found similar problems.

And an update from this week tells us the following…

Brenda Wright, director of the Democracy Program at the nonprofit group Demos, one of the groups behind (lawsuits filed by a coalition of groups across the country to force states to comply with the law), said 2.6 million people were registered through public assistance offices in 1995-1996, the first two years the law was in effect. But she said registration has dropped precipitously throughout the nation since then, as much as 90 percent or more in some states.

Wright said 2 million to 3 million more low-income people could be registered each year if all states followed the law.

The suits say that the states are violating the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as "motor voter" because it requires states to offer voter registration when residents are applying for a driver's license or state ID. To reach low-income citizens who are less likely to own vehicles, the law also requires that voter registration be distributed along with applications for public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid.

The coalition of advocacy groups, which also includes the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Project Vote and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, say most states have programs for driver's license registration, but many are ignoring the public assistance requirement.

I’ll keep on the lookout for further developments here (unfortunate that it took legal action to try and make states comply with the law, but there you are - and yes, I know I just referred to ACORN - "ooga booga!," wingnuts).

This tells us that US handgun demand is driving the world gun trade, though fortunately, as noted here, those supporting “concealed carry” rights are having a difficult time trying to get their way on college campuses.

Meanwhile in the realm of sanity, this tells us that the one-gun-a-month bill has passed the NJ “lege” and is currently sitting on Gov. Corzine’s desk (the Garden State would be the fourth in the nation to limit gun purchases in this manner).

Election year or no, sign this, Guv.

Finally, in the “Friday Funnies” department, I give you Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who compares our country at this moment to pre-WWII Nazi Germany here.

I’m not going to give DeMint’s lunacy a spec of credibility here, but I will only point out that the National Socialists Party (as noted here) rose to power through development of a cult of personality invested in its leader (Adolf Hitler, of course) and a loathsome intolerance (and avocation of violence of course) against those thought to be outsiders or not of their own kind for one reason or the other. And though there are some who argue that our current president is endowed with a cult of personality of his own (and Dubya wasn’t?), I believe that is where the comparison ends.



However, if DeMint is actually right (and God, let us hope history proves him wrong), then I would say that the “road map,” if you will, towards a dictatorship conceived by the Nazis is being followed more closely by the individuals shown above because of the symptoms on display in the video (who have more common cause with DeMint than they EVER will with Obama); happily THEIR party is out of power at the moment (and let us do what we can each and every day to make sure it stays that way).