As of today, only
one anti-war military family member has met with the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert to talk about the crisis in Iraq.
Georgia Stillwell used to live in Yorkville, IL and her son had Jean Hastert as a P.E. teacher. Years later, her son, Robert Stillwell, signed up to defend his country after Al Queda attacked the twin towers on 9/11.
Robert Stillwell is home safely, but he is suffering from PTSD. His mother, Georgia, noticed that something was different in his life and one thing led to another until she found herself joining Military Families Speak Out (MFSO).
The journey has taken her all over the country and today she helped me launch a Black & White campaign to keep the Iraq War at the forefront of the 2006 election.
Read below the fold to continue the discussion on making this a national campaign to make the war the defining issue in 2006.
While I was in Washington D.C. last month I stopped by the MFSO "Operation House Call" to thank them for their activism. I left my business card with a few of the family members and within 3 hours Georgia Stillwell called me to let me know that she had just met with Dennis Hastert. Below is a photo of Georgia and Hastert from the MFSO Website.
During the meeting, Hastert offered her son a job, but refused to call an end to the war in Iraq or do anything about PTSD. Of course this does not surprise me as Hastert did not have the backbone to stand up to Bush. He may as well have authored the "blank check" that allowed Bush to go to war in Iraq and ignore Afghanistan.
This weekend about 10 activist leaders from the 14th District got together with Ms. Stillwell and formulated a plan to make the Iraq War the defining issue for the 2006 election.
Today, we launched our campaign and called on activists to help further develop this idea. With less than 48 hours, we were able to put together a press conference, print up some placards and launch a campaign.
Here are a few photos from the press conference.
Howard Miller is the coordinator for Veterans for Laesch. Howard is backed up by another great Veteran who lives just outside the district, Dale Peters. We used Dale's signs on the parade float in the Montgomery Parade and Howard came out to talk about the financial cost of this war.
Next, Georgia shared her story with the audience.
Our video-editing person does not have the final video cut, but I wanted to get this discussion going. Georgia tells me that she is going to provide her own Blog tomorrow.
I wrapped up the presentation by making a pledge to "make this war a defining issue in the race against Dennis Hastert."
The main purpose of this diary is to ask people what they think of the "Black & White" theme. I have included several sample messages and I want to hear what other thoughts are out there on how do we make this a nationally coordinated campaign to take us into the fall election cycle. Here are some of the signs that we made to communicate the message.
The planning committee is going to do something on Sept. 21st across the district. I also want to see what other plans are out there for this date.
Respectfully,
John Laesch