Analysis

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White 

The American Family Association (AFA) kindly sent out an action alert yesterday to its concerned constituency warning about the coming Armageddon for our troops if the military policy banning gay people from openly serving in the military is repealed. It began thusly (emphasis mine):

Gays showering with straights? Absolutely.

If President Obama, congressional Democrats, and homosexual activists get their wish, your son or daughter may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals who may very well view them with sexual interest.

Talk about creating a hostile work environment for people who practice normative sexuality!

Wait, stop the presses. Did I just read that President Obama is trying to force our troops to have gay sex in the shower?! 

Of course, instead of imagining gay military porn as the AFA might want me to, I'm imagining the angry people who subscribe to this trash getting all riled up about those dirty homos and their sexy shower time after opening their inbox:

"No thank you, sir! I would much rather have my son or daughter continue to be forced to share military showers and barracks with repressed homosexuals! That's the only kind of naked homosexual I want to see.

...Er, not that I want to see naked homosexuals, of course. I mean, gross."

Who thinks this stuff up? Hopefully this will be a lesson to AFA President Tim Wildmon: Don't tell your supporters to imagine gay people, sculpted by military training, taking group showers. It makes them very uncomfortable, OK?

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

I imagine commentators all around the nation are looking at the Illinois lieutenant governor's race and shaking their heads, saying, "Only in Chicago could a guy who dates and threatens prostitutes, takes illegally-obtained steroids and tries to sexually assault his ex-wife win the Democratic nomination."

But I request a revision. The phrase should be, "Only in America."

The truth is, the disgraced Scott Lee Cohen, who used the Superbowl as a cloak of darkness under which to announce he's pulling out of the November elections, is fundamentally no different than Carly Fiorina or Michael Bloomberg. Their only real qualification for office is their money.

In a bizarre and painful-to-watch press conference at a bar on Chicago's far northeast side last night, Cohen announced his withdrawal, as his pre-adolescent son sat sobbing into the microphones lined up in front of his father.

The sad fact is that this whole ugly scene could've been avoided.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Every once in a while, Congress acts swiftly. But sometimes legislation alone is just not enough to get the job done.

It's hard to keep up with the flurry of bills proposed in the wake of the disastrous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court last month which allows virtually unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns. One congressman, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), has introduced six separate bills aiming to reduce the influence of corporations on American politics, which he wrapped together in a "Defend Our Democracy" package. Fixes to the problems posed by the ruling in Citizens United include giving shareholders a say in how a CEO spends the money of a given corporation and refocusing elections on public financing.

Yet the consensus seems to be that while legislative fixes will help stem the tide of corporate spending this election year, the root of the problem is much more systemic, requiring a constitutional amendment to remedy.

"I think we need a constitutional amendment to make it clear once and for all that corporations do not have the same free speech rights as individuals," Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said in his opening statement at a Senate Rules Committee hearing on the subject this week. "Big issues of fairness and justice sometimes demand nothing less... The government should stop tinkering around the edges of a system that is broken beyond repair."

Despite Kerry's stirring rhetoric, the tinkering continues.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Among the many names we have for lawyers -- solicitors, counselors, blood-sucking ambulance chasers -- there is one to which I would like to call the attention of the constitutional law professor we call president: advocate.

The word "advocate" has a long history in the practice of law, and the term is still used as a primary way to identify lawyers in at least a dozen countries. Indeed, etymological sources indicate that "advocate" may have originated as a legal term, dating back as far as the fourteenth century.

Now, I'm sure President Obama has access to a plethora of a very nice dictionaries. But in light of the squabbling rift between the White House and the Justice Department revealed today, it may be helpful to remember the advocacy role of the government's agency of attorneys.

National Public Radio (NPR) revealed a bombshell of institutional irritation this morning by quoting several unnamed sources at the Justice Department expressing frustration at being "muzzled by the White House, then clobbered by Congress" on the issue of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

As Democrats scramble to assemble a slate of legislative and constitutional fixes to counter the effects of the Supreme Court decision, conservatives suggest Congress allow even more money to flow into campaigns.

With the president's budget proposal and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" occupying the time of C-SPAN crews in the capital today, there may have been a perception that campaign finance reform took its dutiful place at the back burner of American political consciousness at a hearing in the Senate Rules Committee Tuesday morning. But Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) wasn't about to let that assumption stand.

"I really think they show that they care when given a chance," Durbin said of the American people. He countered the conventional wisdom that campaign finance reform is an "intramural issue."

Of course, interest in Durbin's long-time crusade for fair election financing (in the form of his Fair Elections Act) was helped along last month by a highly controversial decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that opened the floodgates, allowing corporations to spend virtually unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns.

"I thought [the Fair Elections Act] wouldn't go anywhere unless there was a major scandal," Durbin said. "But I think it was this case that was the scandal."

Durbin's act is just one of many proposed fixes to solve the many problems brought to light by the case.

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Will the decision by The Huffington Post, The New York Times and others to use Twitter as an advertising platform change the way we tweet the world?

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Like most writers, I was suspicious of Twitter at first. Always wary of mandated brevity, expression in 140 characters or less struck me as an exercise in ridiculousness.

I soon found that Twitter had very little to do with the 140-character news peg the media trumpeted about it in the early days. It was a community of "tweeple" who -- instead of e-mailing, messaging or posting -- were having online conversions by "tweeting."

Honestly, though, I probably wouldn't have even started if it weren't for my role at BuzzFlash. Turns out that Twitter is the perfect vehicle for BuzzFlash's snark. Tweeple seem to really thrive on the same sarcasm and irreverence that BuzzFlash had been cultivating for ten years with our headlines and blog.

BuzzFlash's Twitter persona has changed a little since it inception. We're still the snarkiest kid on the news block, but now we have begun to do give-aways from the store as well as just plain begging for our very existence. However, these developments are a result of our sorry financial situation, and do not arise out of any desire to use Twitter as a revenue-generating machine. If you were broke and having a conversation with (several thousand of) your closest friends, you'd probably mention it too.

What you wouldn't do is take money from a store in exchange for telling your closest friends to go shop there. That's where the community breaks down, and friendship becomes a financial transaction. And that's why tweeple are in an uproar over the latest attempts to monetize Twitter relationships.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White 

Perhaps, in a culture where one-third of women serving in the U.S. military can expect to be raped, I shouldn't be surprised when a Marine recruiter is charged with impregnating a 17-year old girl in a high school where he was recruiting students to serve. 

I'm not surprised. I'm outraged.

Nestled within a report released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a list of examples of different types of "recruiter irregularities" recorded in 2008. The list, which included recruiters lying to National Guard applicants about the realities of service, purchasing drugs with a Navy recruit and falsifying information in an Air Force application packet, made note of several instances of sexual misconduct, one of them the aforementioned incident that resulted in pregnancy.

The report does give examples of disciplinary action taken by the military, but does not connect that action with the abuse that precipitated it.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

For all the griping and nastiness we've seen in Washington over the past year, you wouldn't have known it to watch the State of the Union event yesterday. Oh sure, Obama's speech had some "grow the hell up" moments directed at both sides of the aisle.

The president started out asking his fellow politicians "to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; to give our people the government they deserve." At that point, the camera cut to Sens. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) shifting in their seats and scowling at the other side of the aisle.

But when it came to the actual rebuttal speech, the mood was different. From the similarities of the speech Obama gave to the one by the Republicans' chosen rebuttal-giver, newly-minted Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, one would think we're living in a one-party system. Maybe the GOP is actually taking Obama's renewed call for bipartisanship (yeah, he asked for that again) seriously this time.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Before it was even officially released, there was a great deal of giggling about the Declaration of Health Care Independence from Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). From "geese farts" to a mocking of her propensity to OVERCAPITALIZE WORDS, Bachmann's attempt to steal the State of the Union limelight was laughed offstage before she even got a chance to reveal it at a press conference this afternoon.

Granted, for something that was "supposed to shed the party of its 'party of no' label" it sure comes off as a Declaration of No, rather than one of independence.

Such is the life of a wanna-be teabagger.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

When Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy organization Public Citizen, told reporters last Thursday that "today is a day to shed a tear for our democracy," hyperbole was not on my mind.

There has been a broad range of reactions to last week's radical Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited corporate money to be spent on political campaigns. Activists are calling for changes to the way elections are financed, an increase in the power of shareholders to regulate the political spending of CEOs and even a Constitutional amendment in order to combat the ruling.

"This will dramatically change the landscape of our politics," said John Bonifaz, legal director for Voter Action, a nonprofit election integrity organization, in last week's press call shortly after the decision was announced.

This quick response was heartening to me, as I gloomily pondered the effect of these new campaign finance rules on the 2010 election cycle. Indeed, the big surprise came from those who had the audacity to argue that not only should corporations be allowed to spend whatever they want on campaigns, but that it really won't make any difference at all on American politics.

Cue spit-take.

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