Judy Baar Topinka discussed with me, on Sunday, what she would do regarding payments on unconstitutional grants of tax dollars to houses of worship, parochial schools and religious ministries, if she were to be elected as the next Comptroller of the State of Illinois.

Judy told me that it would be up to the Attorney General to decide if the grants were constitutional and, if the Attorney General affirmed the constitutionality of the grants, she would pay them.

While her answer sounds reasonable, that's not the way it works in State Government.

Judy Baar Topinka will announce, at a campaign rally, today, that she is a candidate for the Republican nomination for Illinois State Comptroller.  I will be there to ask her what her position is on a very important facet of that job.

What would a Comptroller Topinka do if she is asked to pay on the blantantly and unambiguously unconstitutional grants to religious organizations that are contained in the notorious Capital Bill?  Would she pay them, or refuse to do so the way that Dan Hynes refused to pay on the unconstitutional grant of one million of our tax dollars to Pilgrim Baptist Church?

What would a Comptroller Topinka do if similar grants are authorized by a future Illinois Governor, the Capital Development Board, the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity or the Illinois General Assembly?

I'll let you know what her answer is, or if she ducks and refuses to answer, in a follow-up report.  That report will now be published on Wednesday.

Topinka is a former Illinois State Treasurer and has been a talk show host for several years on AM 1530 WJJG, where I did the Morning Drive Show and worked from 2001 to 2007.

Overshadowed Productions, a Christian missionary theater production company, has asked for a grant of $450,000 from the Village of Itasca, a suburb of Chicago located three miles west of O'Hare International Airport in Dupage County, on the east side of Interstate 290 at Thorndale Avenue.

At this week's Itasca Village Board meeting, Overshadowed president Reba Hervas, who attended Bob Jones University and who is the wife of Itasca Village Attorney Charles Hervas, asked that her Christian ministry be given the tax dollars to assist them with the cost of purchasing a permanent home in the village.

According to their web site, Overshadowed's purpose is "to point the way to Christ" and their mission is to provide "drama that is overshadowed by the truth and power of God and His Word, the Bible."

The money Mrs. Hervas requested would come from taxes that the Village has collected from guests staying in Itasca hotels.  The hotel tax money, however, is intended to be used to promote tourism, not Christianity, in Itasca.

The Bolingbrook Babbler, "Bolingbrook's first and only true tabloid," has published the amazing account of a debate, which supposedly took place earlier today, between a prominent Chicago-area atheist and a space alien who is a Christian.

The article, by Babbler editor William Brinkman, is entitled Atheist Rob Sherman debates Space Pope!  Web exclusive.

The "Clow UFO Base" mentioned in the story is a reference to Clow International Airport, a general aviation airport in Bolingbrook, a suburb located 30 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.  The "Flying Sherman Object" mentioned in the story apparently is a reference to the Flying Sherman-ator, pictured above.

I thought that the story was funny.  I hope that you enjoy it, too.

State Rep. Suzi Bassi R-54. Photo from General Assembly web site, www.ilga.gov.

The Regional Transportation Authority ("RTA") is demanding that the Illinois General Assembly (state legislature) terminate free rides for seniors, as reported in this story in the Chicago Tribune, because the program is costing the RTA tens of millions of dollars each year that they don't have.

House Bill 4654, which would take away free rides from seniors, was introduced on October 15, 2009, by State Representative Suzi Bassi, a Republican from the Palatine area.

I say that the free rides for seniors program should be kept going, for four very important reasons, and pay for it with the tens of millions of dollars that the Illinois General Assembly has unconstitutionally granted to religious organizations.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has filed her long-awaited Brief of the Appellant with the 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals in the Illinois Student Prayer Act mandatory public school "Moment of Silence" case.  This is the case in which my daughter, Dawn Sherman, successfully sued to stop Buffalo Grove High School from wasting her time, each morning, by making her stand around and do nothing, during instructional time paid for by the taxpayers, when Dawn wanted to be studying and learning.

The Appeals Brief is 63 pages long, so it's going to take me a little while to read it before I give you my initial impressions on it.  My attorney for the Moment of Silence litigation, Richard Grossman, gets even longer to say what he thinks.  He gets 30 days to file his Reply Brief with the Appellate Court on Dawn's behalf.

The State of Illinois has cancelled the Grant Agreement to donate 1,000,000 tax dollars to Pilgrim Baptist Church.  The money was intended to pay for part of the cost of rebuilding a church with a predominately African American congregation, located on the South Side of Chicago, after it was destroyed by a fire in January, 2006.  Ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich had promised the money to the church, a week after the fire, as a way to pander for Black votes during his campaign for re-election leading up to the March, 2006, Primary Election.

All that's left of Pilgrim Baptist Church, 3301 S. Indiana, Chicago, are the front and side walls, which are supported by scaffolding. Photo by Rob Sherman.

I filed suit in State Court to block the grant, just days after the Grant Agreement was signed, citing Article Ten, Section 3, of the Illinois Constitution, which unambiguously states, in pertinent part, "No grant of money shall ever be made by the State to any church."  Section 11-301 of the Illinois Code of Civil Procedure (the body of State laws that governs how State courts operate) permits any citizen to file suit "to restrain and enjoin the disbursement of public funds by any officer or officers of the State government."

Handling the litigation for me was attorney Richard Whitney, the Green Party candidate for Illinois Governor in both the 2006 and the 2010 election.

The highly regarded Buffalo Grove Village Board of Trustees did a lot of things right, Monday night.  They listened to the concerns about flaws in their proposed Recall ordinance expressed by about a dozen speakers, including me, from the audience of close to 200 residents, and took those concerns very seriously.  Village President Elliott Hartstein persuaded the Board to postpone the effective date of the proposed ordinance to no earlier than January 1st, so that there would not be an immediate rush to try to get a referendum to recall an elected official on the February, 2010, Primary Election ballot, since referendum questions need to be placed on the ballot 65 days before an election.  Village Attorney William Raysa directed the Board to delete from the proposed ordinance the provision that would ban recalled officials from holding public office in the village for four years, which addressed the concern that I raised to the Board that it's unconstitutional to have an election in which the community is allowed to vote to cancel a person's civil rights, without cause.  Most importantly, Trustee Beverly Sussman succeeded in persuading the rest of the Village Board that, in any recall, a reason for the recall needs to be stated on the Notice of Recall and the Recall Petitions.  This addressed the other main concern that I raised with the Board, which was that, without a reason, Recall referendum questions could be placed on the ballot without cause -- purely for the politcal purpose of reversing the results of an election to get rid of a political opponent -- thus resulting in defensive Recall campaigns to get three other elected officials on the recall ballot before they got you on the ballot, since the Illinois Election Code law on Submitting Public Questions limits to three the number of referendum questions that can appear on the ballot in any one election.

The ugly, destructive campaign to be able to screw your political enemies before your political enemies screw you, resumes at 7:30 p.m., Monday night (October 5, 2009), at the upcoming Buffalo Grove Village Board meeting (agenda).

The Board of Trustees will consider adopting this Recall Ordinance, which would allow residents to seek to oust up to three elected officials at any regularly scheduled election.  Election law limits to three the number of referendum questions that can appear on the ballot at any one election.

Unfortunately, there are members of the Village Board who seek to use lawyer tricks to undo the results of the fair election that was held, earlier this year, at which time Lisa Stone was elected to be a Village Trustee.  The Recall Ordinance would allow the target of the ordinance, Trustee Stone, or any other elected officials, such as the main backers of the Recall Ordinance, to be ousted purely for political reasons, as no justification, such as misconduct, is required to place a recall referendum on the ballot.