Guest Contribution

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Bill Berkowitz
 
If you think that the debate over health care reform has taken some decidedly nasty, and often unexpected, turns, just wait until the issue of immigration returns to the spotlight on Capitol Hill. Imagine rowdier Town Hall meetings and a slew of anti-immigrant tea parties. As Al Jolson, one of the early 20th century's stars of vaudeville, might have put it, "you ain't seen nothing yet!"
 
While the national debate over immigration may be a ways off, an assortment of evangelical Christian organizations are already at odds over the issue.
 
In early October, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) -- which has over 40 member organizations and is made up of nearly 30 million U.S. evangelicals -- passed a resolution endorsing "comprehensive" immigration reform. "The Bible does not offer a blueprint for modern legislation, but it can serve as a moral compass and shape the attitudes of those who believe in God," the NEA resolution stated.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Carl Finamore

In exactly one month, San Francisco's proud, illustrious Palace Hotel will celebrate the centennial anniversary of its 1909 reconstruction after the city's devastating earthquake three years earlier. At the time of its original construction in 1875, it was considered the largest and most glamorous hotel in the world, hosting for several decades a series of world prominent guests including U.S. presidents, Wall Street magnates and Hollywood's biggest stars.

But there is little to celebrate for approximately 350 hotel employees who face the dim prospect of substantially increased healthcare premiums demanded by owners who brandish the typical impersonal Wall Street investment name tag of Cerberus Capital Management.

The Palace is actually managed by Starwood Hotels and Resorts, a more marketable personal moniker but with the same corporate one-way cash/flow mentality as their Cerberus bosses. Starwood earned $180 million in profits during the first nine months of 2009 and their stock price increased 85% since January.

Yet, following the same pattern as several dozen other premier hotels in the city, the Palace refused to accept a one-year contract offer from UNITE-HERE, Local 2, that the hotel workers' union says will cost less than 2% of payroll.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Jeff Fleischer

Any good statistician will preach the value of "sample size," of making sure there are enough relevant results before proclaiming a trend. It's why pollsters require a certain number of respondents and why good sportswriters know not to get too excited when a young player has one good week.

In today's politics, unfortunately, hyperbole continues to stick such sober analysis in the corner. And so it was with Election Night 2009, when cable news and both parties tried desperately to tie a few races into some kind of national narrative. Now that the time for knee-jerk overanalysis has passed, it's clear such a narrative doesn't really work.

The idea that two gubernatorial races -- state, not federal offices -- were inherently referenda on the Obama presidency never made much sense regardless of their outcomes. You wouldn't know it from watching Fox, whose over-the-top glee was well parodied on "Saturday Night Live" the following weekend. In The New York Times, Gail Collins gently mocked the "semiconsensus across the land that the myriad decisions voters made around the country this week all added up to a terrible blow to the White House." Treating a few scattered races in an off-year election with low turnout as a national trend is just bad punditry.

Which isn't to say Republicans don't have reason to celebrate their victories in Virginia and New Jersey, or that Democrats lack potential reasons to worry.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Bill Berkowitz

If Bill Robinson gets his way, Wakita, Oklahoma, a small town near the Kansas border consisting of 380 residents, will be the home of the first all-Christian prison in the U.S. Robinson, who runs a Dallas-based outfit called Corrections Concepts Inc. (CCI), hopes to have the facility up and running within 16 months.

Located in Grant County and founded in 1898, Wakita (pronounced Wok-ih-taw) was "featured in the 1996 blockbuster movie 'Twister' starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in which [the town] was destroyed by an F4 tornado …," according to Wikipedia.

OneNewsNow, a news service of Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, recently reported that while there are a number of prisons with "Christian or faith-based units," no prisons have "an all-Christian staff." "All of the employees will be Christians," Robinson said. "We have an opinion letter from the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] that says we can do that." Christian guards and staffers would supervise volunteering inmates.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Sabrina Shankman and Olga Pierce of ProPublica

Using results from a questionnaire we did with American Public Media's Public Insight Network , we're looking at how the proposed health care reforms will actually affect people facing common health care coverage situations. This is the second in a series (Part 1).

Fairfield Lighting and Design, Office Manager Barbara D'Agostino

Location: Fairfield, Conn. Employees: 12 (10 receiving health insurance) Sales: $2 million annually Payroll: $384,000 annually

Their story:

Fairfield Lighting and Design has been in business since 1972, but it is struggling to cope with tough economic times. It has 12 employees, whose average wage is about $20 an hour. Because of the recession, opportunities to work overtime have dwindled, and the regular hours of some employees have been cut.

The recession has also made it difficult to keep paying their health care costs: Fairfield offers health insurance to 10 of its employees, at a company cost of $550 per employee each month.

The costs to each employee are relatively low. They pay only 20 percent of the premium, or $110 per month. Their co-payments are $15 to see a doctor or $500 for a hospital, and medications cost them $15, $25, or $50, depending on the type of drug.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Bill Berkowitz

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon-owned The Washington Times fired three top executives on Monday, November 7, "amid reports that the paper's top editor might also be leaving," The New York Times reported. However, despite billion dollar losses, a series of editorial shakeups over the past few years, the tough economic climate for newspapers in general, and ownership by the controversial Moon, it doesn't appear that the paper will cease operations anytime soon.

The dismissed included Thomas P. McDevitt, the president and publisher who was a former pastor at Washington's Unification Church, Keith Cooperrider, the chief financial officer, and Dong Moon Joo, the chairman. Jonathan Slevin, a former vice president of the paper, was named acting president and publisher, and the paper retained the business consulting firm, Tatum, according to the NYT.

(In October, The Washington Times' Julia Duin reported that Moon had "turned over day-to-day control of the church and financial empire he founded to a daughter and three sons." Hyun Jin "Preston" Moon, 40, is chairman of News World Communications, the parent company of The Washington Times, United Press International, and other media properties. In addition, he leads The Washington Times Foundation.)

The newspaper also reported that the paper's executive editor, John Solomon, who came over from The Washington Post in early 2008, is weighing whether to step down.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Richard A. Stitt
 
The charge by all too many Republicans that Barack Obama is a Muslim justifies the hatred that spews from their racist, right-wing, paranoid mob of teabaggers and birthers. It feeds into the vitriol that keeps the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq going on precisely because they perceive these wars to be religious battles between the righteous, the Republicans, and those who disagree with them, the infidels.
 
We heard this proclamation early in the Iraq War when General William Boykin, dressed in full uniform, stood behind a church lectern and stated, "George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States….he was appointed by God." In denouncing Islam, Boykin added, "My God is bigger than his God. I knew my God was a real God, and his was an idol."
 
Thus, their mission was stenciled in place for the justified torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. They, the Islamic people, were inferior people whose god was an idol. Therefore, the God-appointed G. W. Bush became the Crusader-In-Chief with unlimited, divinely endowed authority to kill whomever he so desired. And kill he did.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Michael Winship

ATHENS, GREECE - Last Sunday, we visited the ruins of ancient Delphi, two hours or so from here in the Greek capital, an extraordinary site at the base of Mount Parnassus overlooking the Pleistos Valley, almost half a mile below. You could see the acres of olive trees there. The Ionian Sea shimmered on the horizon.

Legend has it that Zeus released two eagles from the opposite ends of the earth. They met at Delphi, determining that it was the center, the so-called navel of the world.

Delphi and its temples were where the famous Oracle lived, uttering its often ambiguous and mysterious predictions through a priestess who spoke on its behalf -- but, our guide claimed, only after inhaling sulfuric vapors from a hole in the earth and chewing laurel leaves to get into the proper psychotropic mood.

During the Persian Wars, the guide said, Athenians asked the Oracle how to protect themselves from being attacked by the enemy. The Oracle replied, "A wall of wood alone shall be uncaptured." Many of the Athenians figured that meant they should seek protection behind a formidable wooden barricade. Makes sense, but the Persians seized the city anyway. Such is the price of being logical -- in my experience, it's always a mistake to take a priestess imbibing laurel leaves and sulfur too literally.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Bill Berkowitz

After a much publicized HBO documentary, a feature story in People magazine, an appearance on Oprah, an aborted church-supervised restoration program and travels around the country, Ted Haggard has decided its time to convene a prayer group in the living room of his house.

Haggard, the former head of the National Association of Evangelicals and founder and pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, who resigned those posts after revelations of his sex and drugs scandal came to light three years ago, recently sent out a tweet announcing the upcoming: "For those of you who love the Word and payer (sic), Gayle and i are having a prayer meeting at our place next Thursday [November 12] at 7:00. You are welcome!"

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Jacqueline Marcus

We don't have to be economists to know that when most of the nation's treasury is going to support an indefensible and indefinable war for the last nine years, something's going to give. The dam broke. We're sinking. Today's The New York Times reports that unemployment rose to 17.5%, but not a word about the largest war budget in the history of this nation and how it's contributing to economic despair and unemployment. Not a word. Worse still: very little on how the war is driving soldiers off the deep end: suicide, violence. The media focus has been on the general theme of America and Violence. Meanwhile, no one wants to point to the Pentagon Elephant in the room: This unending occupation that, of course, (wink-wink) has nothing to do with oil or drug investments in Iraq's oil and Afghanistan's poppy fields, is unleashing a horrific domino effect on the enlisted soldiers and on the economy. Few are growing super rich while millions of Americans are falling in the abyss of a Great Depression.

The ruthless robbery of the U.S. treasury for the Few at the expense of the Many is beyond unconscionable. While these robbers of our treasury are having lavish parties on private islands, millions of children in this country are starving. There are no words to describe the shocking arrogance on the part of the war profiteering and Wall St. thieves who didn't honestly earn this vast amount of billions and billions of dollars: they out-and-out stole it from the public treasury, compliments of the Bush and Obama Administrations.

Anna Quindlen argues in her Newsweek article, "Did the President Keep His Promises?" that we should be skeptical about the way government works. If so, our expectations for change would not be so high. In other words, it's not Obama's fault that he hasn't changed the business-as-usual operations in D.C., nor should he be blamed for helping the super rich much more than the average, working American. Ah! It's the SYSTEM! The Process!

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