Analysis

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

There's an internal and external fight over the direction of atheism. That the conflict between so-called "new atheism" and standard-bearers of the movement was a topic of discussion at the Atheist Alliance International annual convention is no surprise. But why were "high-profile defendants of faith convened" at Brigham Young University last month in search of a response to new atheism?

To get an idea of what religious experts are saying about this new movement, let's take a look at the "Think Again" segment of Foreign Policy magazine this month. Though the feature generally comes off as a provocative and thoughtful look at conventional wisdom, the latest submission has a ways to go in terms of challenging the status quo.

Karen Armstrong, an author of numerous books on religion, takes umbrage with the insistence of these so-called new atheists that God is dead, should be uninvolved in political affairs, breeds violence and intolerance, is the opiate of the masses, is misogynistic, the enemy of science and incompatible with democracy.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

At the beginning of July, I posed a somewhat rhetorical question attempting to gauge exactly how much we should give up for robust healthcare reform, asking, "If it takes selling out pro-choice advocates in order to get a healthcare system that covers everyone adequately, is that a fair trade-off?"

I got a good bashing from readers who didn't get the point of my article that "to sacrifice low-income women for the sake of healthcare reform is a bastardization of the idea of healthcare reform as a whole." They were so upset that anyone would even ask that question on BuzzFlash that they immediately reacted to the headline as a "stupid idea" and asked why not just bring back slavery?

Despite the inattention to detail, I did appreciate the passion of our readers on the issue. That passion may not extend to your representatives in Washington, even if you live in Santa Barbara, CA.

Less than one month after I posed that question, Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) decided that such a political calculus should be made. In explaining an amendment that she herself labels as a "compromise," she said that the "hope was that we could continue the current ban on federal funding for abortion so the issue wouldn't bog down the overall health reform legislation."

Technorati Tags: Analysis mandate capps amendment compromise NOW abortion choice life reproductive health care insurance family women

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Now that she knows the Capitol so well, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has decided she's going to use her spare time on the Hill to give tours. Along with a press conference this coming Thursday, she's inviting all of Sean Hannity's minions viewers to join her in a fun-filled field trip where she'll help them find their representatives (and more importantly, "the whites of their eyes") and talk to them about healthcare reform.

"We can walk together through Cannon, Longworth, Rayburn, walk through the capitol, sit in the gallery," Bachmann promised under a banner scrolling "Universal Nightmare" last Friday on Hannity's America. "I'm asking people to come to Washington D.C. by the carload, and next Thursday at noon I'll be at a press conference on the steps of the Capitol. I'd love to have every one of your viewers join me so we can go up and down through the halls, find members of Congress, look at the whites of their eyes and say, 'Don't take away my healthcare!'"

Awesome, I love guided tours! I'm not sure what this all has to do with healthcare, though. Maybe these friendly constituents are offering free glaucoma exams to their hard-working representatives?

Hmm. Maybe Bachmann is just trying to find a good way to spend all that extra time she has since she clearly isn't planning on reading the healthcare bill before she votes against it? Because there's most assuredly not enough time to do that (except there is, but whatever).

Well, see for yourself (the D.C. invite comes in at about the five-minute mark of this nine-minute interview, and the emphasis is mine):

Technorati Tags: Analysis bachmann. michele bachmann health care reform government lobby HR 3962 socialist nancy pelosi congress obama

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

I sincerely doubt that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has checked out eHow.com's list of ten steps to becoming president of the United States. But if she had, she'd know she's a little behind the curve. While she is over 35 years old and a citizen born in the U.S. who has been a resident for the past 14 years, anyone can tell you there's more to it than that.

While she hasn't quite started step two -- "hold a law degree" -- she is coming out with a memoir (which is not on the list). She's also working on making that ghostwritten book a bestseller, even if she has to give it away.

As BuzzFlash editor Mark Karlin pointed out last week, Palin is selling her new book, Going Rogue: An American Life at a whopping 69 percent discount, even though it won't be officially released until mid-November. As a veteran of both the right-wing industrial complex and the book-selling industry, he notes that giving it away is a classic strategy to appear more popular than you are. It's easy to have a best seller, in other words, when your product is always on sale.

As of Thursday afternoon the book was still available for pre-sale at Amazon.com for $9. If you pair it with Glenn Beck's new tome, Arguing With Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government as Amazon suggests, you could be eligible for FREE super saver shipping! Whoopie! Or, you can get a membership to Newsmax with this special Palin book deal, which markets itself as "much cheaper than Amazon" (using the full price of "almost $29" to make $10.92 cheaper than $9.

Of course, the memoir's impending release has sparked some unwanted parody.

Technorati Tags: Analysis sarah palin palin going rouge going rogue AK governor president 2012 election book memoir amazon fundraiser

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Tuesday night Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called a bluff. The question now becomes: Is this a fluke, or a trend in the making?

In a long fight to extend jobless benefits for the almost 9.8 percent of Americans who are unemployed, Republicans have made every effort to slow the process in the Senate. After being presented with crazy amendments addressing some of the GOP's favorite new obsessions such as ACORN, the bank bailout and immigration, Reid basically said, "To hell with it" and called for a cloture vote.

It's about time, and not a second too soon for the growing numbers of unemployed.

Cloture, as many of you know, is a vote to end discussion and move on to a floor vote on the merits of the proposed legislation. It is why those oft-mentioned 60 votes (the number required to come to such a conclusion in the Senate) are so important these days.

The vote on whether to consider HR 3548, the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009, in the Senate was 87 to 13, moving the bill toward final consideration on the Senate floor. The bill has changed since its original passage in the House last month, so a reconciliation process will be necessary in which the two houses of Congress must agree on a compromise.

Surprisingly, the Senate bill is more generous than the House version. The House voted to extend benefits for 14 weeks only to states with high rates of unemployment (above 8.5 percent), paid for by extending the unemployment taxes already being paid by businesses. But the Senate bill proposes to extend benefits for 14 weeks to all states and for 20 weeks to states with the high unemployment rate of 8.5 percent singled out by the House.

But while Senate Democrats have been working to make the bill more helpful for unemployed citizens, Republicans of that same chamber have been dragging their feet with the help of unrelated amendments.

"Republicans decided to make a political statement by demanding completely irrelevant amendments -- amendments that have little, if anything, to do with unemployment or even the economy generally -- and they decided that the political statement was more important than helping their constituents afford to pay bills," Reid said.

Technorati Tags: Analysis unemployment benefit jobless cloture debate filibuster reid republican senate vote GOP bill health care gov

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Yesterday when I was downtown interviewing protesters at the Showdown in Chicago, which continues today, I asked Keith Scribner, president of UE local 1174, how the protests against the big banks were different from the healthcare protests earlier this year. He looked at me with this surprised expression and confessed that he was entirely unprepared for that question.

I tried to explain what I meant, making note of how the tea party protests and the townhall participants screaming about a takeover of our healthcare system garnered a whole bunch of media attention. How did he see their "grassroots" as different from the grassroots movement he was a part of that day? Still, I got nothing.

Was I the only one who remembered those sticky August days?

A member of the media who was packing up his video camera within earshot nodded sympathetically and said he knew what I was asking about. Poor guy; he probably had to spend his summer interviewing those anti-everything teabaggers.

At least the people protesting at the annual conference for the biggest bank lobby in the country Monday had a target: The American Bankers Association and their efforts to shut down badly-needed reforms were clearly in need of a little shame, and the coalition of groups gathered in downtown Chicago this week were not shy about handing it out.

Technorati Tags: Analysis bank regulator too big to fail showdown chicago bailout financial bair loan reform wall street ABA debate

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Thursday afternoon, I received an "official ballot" from MoveOn.org. Oh no! Have I been asleep for the past year? Is it almost Nov. 2, 2010?!

No, not to worry. Move On was simply asking me to vote on whether they should "refuse to support the reelection of any senator who helps block an up-or-down vote on a healthcare reform bill with a public option."

Apparently the decade-old political action committee is collecting non-transferable ballots from its members through Sunday night, after which they will presumably act on what the preponderance of votes tell them.

I've been tangentially critical of Move On in the past, but I've held off in print because I think they're pretty darn good at what they do every two years at the ballot box. That doesn't mean my office mates at BuzzFlash HQ don't hear my rants from time to time when Move On sends me, say, an e-mail that says this:

Hi, I'm the public option, and I need your help. Sen. Reid supports me, but we need his help to fight off a "trigger proposal" that could kill me through indefinite delay. Can you call him today?

Geez, when did Move On replace its policy team with the folks who brought you Schoolhouse Rock?

Technorati Tags: Analysis move on health care reform debate public option vote ballot 2010 blue dog election reelection support dem

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Sometimes all it takes is a few minutes with a researcher to find out that you're spending too much time watching congressional testimony.

While politicians strive to make this healthcare reform debate about the always sympathetic middle class, as well as about what people who already have private insurance will gain, it seems they're failing to mention a growing segment of the population: uninsured, low-income families.

Thus, it was refreshing and depressing at the same time to hear Laura Lein -- dean of the University of Michigan's School of Social Work and co-author of Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low Wage Work -- address some of the unheard issues in the healthcare debate. The talk was sponsored by Women Employed, a national organization advocating for women's economic advancement founded here in Chicago in 1973.

Now that it's abundantly clear that we're not getting a single-payer system out of the current healthcare reform initiative, questions must be addressed regarding who will be eligible for subsidized healthcare, and how they'll prove that eligibility. Simply looking at the many problems Lein's research has identified with eligibility requirements, it appears that we have a long and difficult road ahead of us in implementing healthcare reform (if we get it).

Technorati Tags: Analysis health care insurance low income medicaid family women employed single payer opt immigration eligibility work

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

This may sound like the warning of an alarmist, but your ability to read the words I'm writing is already in danger, and the government has finally decided to decide whether or not it wants to do anything about it. Of course, Glenn Beck believes that decision is the end of the Internet as we know it.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is scheduled to vote Thursday on whether or not to begin a rule-making process on the issue of net neutrality.

What is net neutrality? Well, Science Progress has an informative but concise primer on the issue here that outlines the controversy and explains the stakes held by the government, communications companies and consumers:

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet; all content on the Internet is equally accessible, and once a person pays for access to the Internet, they alone get to choose how they use it... Internet users and their advocates generally favor net neutrality, while telecom companies see it as a threat to their use of their own property.

Or, as put even more simply by this About.com article: "Net neutrality means that Internet service providers and network owners concern themselves only with efficiently moving bits -- not with the content embodied by the bits."

The attempt to turn this into a conservative conspiracy theory has been tough, so defenders of Big Telecom had to call in the experts in whipping up unfounded fears: Glenn Beck and FOX News.

Technorati Tags: Analysis free press net neutrality FCC glenn beck beck FOX internet telecommunication corporation speech freedom cable

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

If anything demonstrates the mainstream media's capability to ignore pertinent information and instead regurgitate conventional political wisdom, it's the reporting on opinion polls.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday was widely reported as evidence that support for the public option has returned. Though it's only 5 percent higher than it was at what the Post calls its "summertime lows" of 52 percent this summer, the Post declared that support has "rebounded." Ah, what a difference a few percentage points make.

But what I found truly amazing was that a certain type of public option had the support of more than three-fourths of respondents. Even more shocking was that 56 percent of Republicans support this type of public option. More than half of self-identified Republicans, of the party that brought deathers and tenthers to this debate, support the public option? How could this be? The Washington Post explains:

If a public plan were run by the states and available only to those who lack affordable private options, support for it jumps to 76 percent. Under those circumstances, even a majority of Republicans, 56 percent, would be in favor of it, about double their level of support without such a limitation.

OK, so it's not the public option progressives have been hoping for, or even the one they've been willing to compromise for. As far as I can tell (because the poll itself merely asked about support for a plan run by states available strictly to those who lack affordable private options, not a specific proposal), they're not talking about the opt-out plan lauded by progressive lions such as Paul Krugman, Howard Dean and Nate Silver as a good compromise.

Technorati Tags: Analysis healthcare insurance public option baucus poll republican support state bipartisan government run opt out GOP