Attorney General Holder Throws His Support Behind Hate Crime Legislation

By Learned Foote- Talk Radio News Service

Attorney General Eric Holder urged Congress Thursday to pass the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, a bill that would expand the authority of the federal government to prosecute hate crimes, and include “gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability” in the protected classes. 

“Perpetrators of hate crimes seek to deny the humanity that we all share, regardless of the color of our skin, the God to whom we pray, or the person who we choose to love,” said Holder during testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Holder noted that a similar bill reached Congress in 1998, but has never passed. “The legislation has been stalled far too long, and it’s time to act,” said committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). 

The bill is named after Matthew Shepard, a gay man from Wyoming who was brutally killed in 1998.

Several senators asked whether the legislation would violate the First Amendment, which protects free speech. Holder said that only crimes involving “bodily injury” fall under the scope of this legislation, and even the incitement of violence would not be prosecuted under the bill.

“We’re looking at people who actually commit physical acts of violence,” said Holder. “However deplorable ... speech with which I would vehemently disagree [is] not cognizable under the statute.” 

Republican Senators repeatedly criticized Holder for not providing statistics or documenting a trend indicating that state and local authorities do not sufficiently address these crimes. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) noted that the Shepard murder was a “crime that should have been vigorously prosecuted, and it was.” 

Holder responded that “what we’re looking for is an ability in those instances, those rare instances, where there is an inability or unwillingness by state or local jurisdiction to proceed, that the federal government...would be able to fill that gap.” 

Sessions also expressed concern about “how [the U.S. is] picking and choosing the people who receive the extra protection” afforded by hate crime legislation. Holder replied that such laws should “protect groups of people who are ... the subjects of violence simply because of who they are.” 

Ron Paul Calls For The Federal Reserve To Increase Transparency

By Learned Foote- Talk Radio News Service

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) recently introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act to House, a piece of legislation that calls for a stronger audit of the Federal Reserve along with a "detailed report to Congress.” The bill currently has 241 co-sponsors.

During a forum at the Cato Institute, Paul said he originally decided to run for Congress in the 1970s due to his interest in monetary policy, which is conducted by the Federal Reserve. “I’ve been talking about it for decades, and arguing that we had a financial system that was very fryable, very vulnerable, and it was the Fed that was creating the bubbles. Therefore we should be looking into it and preventing these problems rather than waiting for cataclysmic financial crisis to hit.”

Gilbert Schwartz, Former Associate General Counsel to the Federal Reserve, appeared alongside Paul, argued that the Fed is responsible for the financial crisis to some degree, he praised the “flexibility that the Federal Reserve exhibited in terms of their willingness to make sure that the economy—not just the U.S. economy, but also the world financial system—did not collapse.”

Schwartz went on to explain that the Fed understands the growing demand for transparency. He cited recent financial statements released by the Fed, saying, “clearly the message is getting to the Fed, and... this indicates at least some degree of attempt by the Fed to: one, be responsive to that criticism, and number two, probably to thwart the legislation that would otherwise subject them to GAO [U.S. Government Accountability Office] audit.”

Paul said that his bill will “open the books,” but not necessarily affect monetary policy. “It’s less confrontational for those who want to design regulations and deal with with monetary policy, and I think that’s why we’re getting such bipartisan support.” Paul believes, however, that if the audit is conducted, public opinion will turn against the Fed and monetary policy will be substantially challenged.

Ron Paul attributed the bills' support to the changing landscape of the economic system. “It had to do with the TARP funds,” Paul explained. “There are a few spammers out there that are interested in what I’ve been doing, and they’re letting their Congressmen know."

Online Atlas Illustrates HIV/AIDS Prevalence Across The Nation

By Learned Foote - Talk Radio News Service

Today the National Minority Quality Forum launched a Web site featuring a National HIV/AIDS Atlas, a mapping project created with the assistance of the School of Public Health and Health Services at George Washington University.

The atlas, available at http://hivmap.org, maps the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in terms of geography, creating a color-coded map that allows its users to organize the data in terms of age, gender and ethnicity. “If we think of the AIDS pandemic as a global wildfire, then the way that you fight a wildfire is to identify the hot spots, and to put them out,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

The NMQF has created atlases charting diabetes and chronic kidney disease for professional use, but the HIV/AIDS atlas is their first atlas to provide information to the general public. “We felt that every community ought to know its status,” said Dr. Gary A. Puckrein, the President and CEO of the National Minority Quality Forum.

To create the map, the NMQF requested data from the departments of health in every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and New York City. Twenty-nine of these 54 departments provided information at the county level, and New York City had information detailed enough to compare various zip codes.

The NMQF found that just 20 counties in the U.S. are responsible for fully 40 percent of the country's HIV/AIDS cases. Two hundred counties have 80 percent of the cases. “You wouldn’t have gotten that before the data was sort of pulled together and aggregated that way,” said Puckrein. “That says that we’re dealing with something that’s highly localized.”

The NMQF announced the project from Washington, D.C., where about three percent of current residents have HIV/AIDS. "When you're looking at an atlas of HIV in this country, we are standing on ground zero," Weinstein said.

The NMQF created the atlas partly to provide hard data to assist community-based organizations and advocacy groups. The data is gathered by county lines, but the atlas also provides rough approximations that organize the data according to congressional districts, and the site also provides contact information for U.S. Representatives.

“This is the way you do health care in the 21st century,” said Dr. Puckrein. “Now you actually know where HIV and AIDS are in America.”

The atlas web site launched at 10 a.m. on Monday morning, and according to a spokesperson for the National Minority Quality Forum, received over 17,000 hits in the first six hours.

Sen. Vitter (R-La.) Criticizes Plan To Increase The Fed's Powers

Senator David Vitter (R-La.) argued that Obama's plan to increase the power of the Fed and link some of its behavior to Treasury approval could go too far in collapsing the distinction between the Federal Reserve and the government. (0:34)

Regulation Reform Could Grant The Fed New Powers

By Learned Foote- Talk Radio News Service

At a hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner answered questions about the proposal for a "sweeping set of regulatory reforms" announced on Wednesday by President Obama.

All of the senators agreed that regulatory reform was long overdue, but several questioned the expansion of power granted to the Federal Reserve under this proposal.

Geithner said that this proposal will not address every problem of the financial system, but is instead designed to cope with the major causes of the financial crisis. Geithner argued that the regulatory system failed due to the absence of an overarching regulator guarding the system as a whole, in order to identify concentrated systemic risk to the financial system.


"Risk to our system can come from almost any quarter," said Geithner. "We must be able to look in every corner and across the horizon for dangers, and our system was not able to do that."

He proposed a Financial Services Oversight Council, consisting of the heads of all regulatory agencies to identify gaps in the the government supervisory framework. However, he argued that a committee should not regulate the largest, most complicated institutions. Geithner said that the Federal Reserve could best take on that regulatory role, with a "carefully designed, modest amount of additional authority." He noted that some powers would also be taken away from the Fed under this proposal.

Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) said that the proposal would grant "extraordinary authority and power" to the Fed, and quoted the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, who had previously stated that giving the Fed too many responsibilities could interfere with its ability to regulate monetary policy. Dodd also criticized the track record of the Fed in the past. Dodd noted that Congress gave authority to the Fed to regulate mortgages in 1994, and yet they "dropped the ball entirely" by failing to address the mortgage crisis in a timely manner.

The senators also expressed wishes that the Fed should remain an independent entity, and a few criticized certain provisions that would require the Fed to obtain the permission of the executive branch to lend money to institutions unregulated by the Fed, a move that some argued would politicize the policies set forth by the Fed.