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Buzz, perspectives, insight and news from AlterNet

Conservative Bishop Denies Kennedy His Holy Cracker*
Posted by Joshua Holland on November 23, 2009 at 4:30 PM.

Boston Globe:

The war of words between the Catholic bishop of Rhode Island and US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy escalated yesterday when Bishop Thomas J. Tobin criticized him for disclosing a confidential request the prelate made in 2007 to stop receiving Holy Communion because of his stand on moral issues.

Tobin said he was disappointed the congressman had told a newspaper that he had been forbidden from receiving communion in Rhode Island because of Kennedy’s support of abortion rights. The bishop also accused the son of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of prolonging their public feud.

[...]

Tobin and Kennedy have been exchanging testy words for weeks. Earlier this month, the bishop, who was installed in 2005, disputed Kennedy’s contention that disagreeing with church hierarchy on matters like abortion rights makes him no less of a Catholic.

“Well in fact, congressman, in a way it does,’’ the bishop wrote in a commentary in the Rhode Island Catholic newspaper. “Your position is unacceptable to the church and scandalous to many of our members.’’

One of the bloggers over at Truthdig sounds the requisite note:

Hey, it’s their clubhouse and rules are rules—just as long as the church also denies communion to politicians who support the death penalty, cut poverty programs and covet thy neighbors’ wives.

Forgot to mention those who are gung-ho for perma-war!

* Kudos to Truthdig's blog for the headline "Give Kennedy His Cracker," presumably a reference to PZ Myers' "Cracker-gate" scandal.

Christians Rap About Not Having Sex: 'Gimme That Christian Side Hug!'
Posted by Tana Ganeva, AlterNet on November 23, 2009 at 4:00 PM.

Abstinence is hard, even when you really love Jesus. That's why seemingly foolproof methods for preserving the virginity of young, unmarried Christians -- like magic purity rings, or having them go on creepy dates with their dads -- seem to make teens have even more premarital sex: a 2009 study found that rates of teen pregnancy are much higher in religious communities, even when lower rates of abortion were accounted for.

But maybe that's just because most efforts to promote abstinence have one fatal flaw: none have a mechanism for ensuring that the genitals of unmarried Christians never align. Fortunately, some rapping youth pastors are on it.

"AWWWW YEAH! Y'all ready to party all up in here?!" yell the mostly white, Christian rappers in a YouTube clip of a live performance. "Gimme that Christian side hug! Gimme that Christian side hug!" they demand, pumping their fists in the air and bouncing a lot, in a very convincing approximation of what black, secular rappers do.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

The Most Racist Sheriff in America's Worst Nightmare: Meet Salvador Reza (Video)
Posted by Laura Flanders, GRITtv on November 23, 2009 at 3:21 PM.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a household name for all the wrong reasons. Known for accusations of racial profiling and immigration raids in Maricopa County, Arizona, Arpaio is held up as a hero by anti-immigrant groups but has created a climate of fear in his state, where the Latino community is afraid to call the police for common complaints for fear of deportation. Recently stripped of his federal authority to make immigration arrests, Arpaio continues to conduct raids and appears not to fear repercussions.

Salvador Reza, U.S. Air Force veteran, community organizer and renowned immigrants rights activist, joins Laura for an exclusive interview on Arpaio’s ongoing mistreatment of his community. Reza notes that the Obama administration, specifically Homeland Security secretary and former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, have mostly made symbolic moves to control Arpaio, but in practice allow him to do whatever he wants. Going forward toward immigration reform, Reza calls for nationwide action.

Thanks to Dennis Gilman for the video footage in this segment.

Sarah Palin Celebrates Her Humble Roots by Eating at a Restaurant That Serves a $25,000 Dessert
Posted by Byard Duncan, AlterNet on November 23, 2009 at 1:30 PM.

Sarah Palin, ever the faux-populist, has finally committed an act of absurdity that perfectly allegorizes her own political M.O.

Last week, while in New York City, Palin dined at Serendipity 3, a restaurant in one of Manhattan’s swankier sections. Serendipity 3 is known for hosting celebrities (others have included Zac Efron and Bill Clinton), but it’s not famous for that. It’s famous for the "Frrozen Haute Chocolate," a sundae composed of edible gold and 28 different cocoas from across the globe. This treat, which costs $25,000, holds the Guinness world record for most expensive dessert. It is eaten with a diamond-studded gold spoon and served with a side of $2,600 per-pound chocolate. At the base of the sundae’s goblet (it is served, by the way, in a goblet) is an 18-karat gold bracelet with 1 carat of white diamonds.

One can only assume that the banana leaves to be fanned with are sold separately.

So how does Palin’s stop at Serendipity compromise her everywoman persona? Let me count the ways. Not only was she in one of the more expensive corners of the Big Apple (a city she promised ‘true’ Americans she would not visit during her book tour, on account of its elites); she was dining at a restaurant where just one item costs more than what many of her supporters will make in a year. Maybe more than twice what some of them will make.

Of course, this sort of gleaming, gold-plated contradiction is nothing new for Palin. Even the most baby-witted of observers know that her two main recipients of polito-pandering (working class Americans, the corporations that routinely screw them over) don’t quite line up right. No, the beauty here is the symbolism of it all -- the sweet, flagrant absurdity: Underdog (dare we say it? "Rogue") politician, preparing to set out across America in a grassroots neo-conquest of a book tour, must first stop to fuel up for the harrowing journey. What better place to do so than at a restaurant whose finest dessert costs as much as a year of college?

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Gun Lobby's Absurd New Claim: Healthcare Reform Will Take Away Your Guns
Posted by , Think Progress on November 23, 2009 at 12:30 PM.

On Friday, Gun Owners of America sent out an action alert to its 300,000 members warning that the Senate health care bill "would mandate that doctors provide 'gun-related health data' to 'a government database,' including information on mental-health issues detected in patients, which could jeopardize their ability to obtain a firearms license." The alert also warned its membership that the "wellness and prevention" provisions in the health care bill would allow the Obama administration to issue a "no guns" decree:

Finally, as we have mentioned several times in the past, the mandates in the legislation will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database that was created in section 13001 of the stimulus bill. This includes any firearms-related information your doctor has gleaned ... or any determination of PTSD, or something similar, that can preclude you from owning firearms.

And, the special "wellness and prevention" programs (inserted by Section 1001 of the bill as part of a new Section 2717 in the Public Health Services Act) would allow the government to offer lower premiums to employers who bribe their employees to live healthier lifestyles -- and nothing within the bill would prohibit rabidly anti-gun HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from decreeing that "no guns" is somehow healthier.

The so-called "gun-related health data" is actually anonymous statistical information to help researchers develop health programs and initiatives that serve specific population groups or further the study of various conditions and medical needs. Section 2705 of the Senate health bill permits employers to vary insurance premiums by as much as 30 percent for employee participation in certain health promotion and disease prevention programs, but stipulates that the employer wellness program must be "based on an individual satisfying a standard that is related to a health status factor.” Gun ownership does not fall into this category.

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Is a Desperate Desire For Leadership Behind the Droves Of Americans Waiting to Meet Sarah Palin?
Posted by Gary Younge, Comment Is Free on November 23, 2009 at 11:30 AM.

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Obama Is Playing Politics With Gitmo
Posted by Nick Baumann, Mother Jones Online on November 23, 2009 at 10:30 AM.

Liberals have not done enough public wrestling with Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf's Time article on the ouster of White House counsel Gregory Craig. Perhaps that's because they don't want to deal with the article's troubling implications. As Kevin explains, Craig was "the White House lawyer tasked with dismantling Bush-era interrogation and detention policies. At first, Obama was on board with Craig's plans.  Then, reality set in."

By "reality," Kevin presumably means "political reality." Time says that as soon as Obama's positions on Bush era torture -- releasing the torture photos, for example -- became politically difficult, the president jettisoned them. He did this despite the fact that he had been "prepared to accept -- and had even okayed" those same positions "just weeks earlier":

First to go was the release of the pictures of detainee abuse. Days later, Obama sided against Craig again, ending the suspension of Bush's extrajudicial military commissions. The following week, Obama pre-empted an ongoing debate among his national-security team and embraced one of the most controversial of Bush's positions: the holding of detainees without charges or trial, something he had promised during the campaign to reject.

But perhaps the most damning part of the Time piece is this sentence, near the beginning, that summarizes exactly what has happened in Obama's White House:

[Obama] quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.

Take a minute to think about how the left would respond to this if Obama was a Republican president. Obama delegated the responsibility for determining what to do about detainees to his political advisers. If George W. Bush had charged his political advisers, including Karl Rove, with crafting such policy, the entire blogosphere would have melted down from outrage overload.

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Word "Canadian" So "Reviled in Some Places" that Visiting Canucks Say They're Americans
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on November 23, 2009 at 9:30 AM.

I'll confess that I own a backpack with a prominent Canadian maple leaf that I've lugged around Europe once or twice since the invasion of Iraq. Not as some kind of self-conscious act of political protest, mind you,  just to avoid the kind of casual sneers that were fairly common for U.S. travelers during the Bush years.

Perhaps that's why this story, from The Toronto Star, jumped out at me:

Canadian mining companies are facing allegations of abuse and assault on local citizens in dozens of developing nations.

[...]

The word "Canada" is so reviled in some places that traveling Canadians mask their citizenship by wearing American flags on their caps and backpacks.

Who'd have thunk it?

The allegations are severe: From Ecuador comes a lawsuit, filed in Ontario, alleging that in 2006 a Canadian company's armed security forces attacked unarmed locals with pepper spray first, then fired guns to dampen protest near a proposed mining site.

In El Salvador, allegations of violent attacks against anti-mining activists. In Mexico, allegations of human rights and environmental abuse that led a Mexican court to close a Canadian-owned mine.

[...]

The allegations of human rights abuses come from at least 30 of the world's poorest countries and have named companies of all sizes, from giant corporations to junior mining companies.

Thanks to reader Larry C. for flagging the article,which features some truly beautiful corporate propaganda.

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Credit Card Companies Are Using Dirty Tricks to Force Us to Pay Late Fees: Why Won't Congress Do Something?
Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo on November 23, 2009 at 8:30 AM.

I honestly believe that this is the kind of thing that affects people every day and is leading to a populist backlash. People not only blame those who do these things, they blame those who have the authority and power for failing to step in and stop it:

Three years ago, the Haggler's credit card bill seemed to stop showing up in the mail. Another month went by -- no bill. The month after that, still nothing. Each month, the Haggler would call the issuer, Bank of America, and pay over the phone, then ask the same question: "Why did you stop sending me a bill?"

We're still sending you a bill, came the company's reply each time.

Guess what? The company was right. It just was sending the bill in a restyled envelope, with no trace of "Bank of America." In other words, it looked like junk mail, and the Haggler kept throwing it away.

Now, the Hagglers can't prove it, but this seemed like a brilliant, low-cost way to pocket a fortune in late fees.

"We are not trying to fool people, and we don't change our envelopes on a regular basis," said Anne Pace, a company spokeswoman. She explained that the change in envelope design was prompted by the 2006 acquisition of several credit card companies, after which the envelopes of all customers were left blank "for the sake of consistency."

Consistency? It would be consistent, as far as B. of A. customers are concerned, to leave the envelope unchanged, no?

Seriously, the person who dreamed up the envelope switcheroo must wake up laughing. Ever since, the Haggler has held a grudging, vaguely appalled respect for credit card companies.

The same thing happened to me. The plain brown envelope looked like it was one of those car dealership "checks" that were all the rage before the credit crisis hit. And because I didn't realize the first month that I hadn't gotten my bill, it created a black mark on my credit for a late payment which resulted in a cascade of raised rates on several cards.

It was clearly a sneaky trick. Yes, it's my responsibility to know when my bills are due, but I had been in the habit of putting the bill into the "to pay" file and paying it on the following Monday. It didn't occur to me that the bill would suddenly come in an envelope with no return address or label on it that didn't look like a bill and so I tossed it into a junk pile and didn't look at it right away.

And that's what people are dealing with all the time as consumers, with their health insurance, their credit cards, their mortgages, their pensions -- overwhelming complexity designed to trip them up and cost them money or deny them benefits to which they believed in good faith they were entitled. And its all perfectly legal -- or at least there's no visible accountability for it.

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How Congress May Keep Bloggers Out of Jail
Posted by Ari Melber, TheNation.com on November 23, 2009 at 7:30 AM.

It's hard out here for a blogger.

And hard for online journalists, unemployed new media producers, and just about anyone else dabbling in journalism without professional backing.

Beyond the basic financial challenges, there is scant legal help for members of the new media, even though they face the same complex, pricey legal threats as traditional media. Plus extra threats -- like government attempts to out anonymous bloggers, which can cost a lot to fight in court.

On Thursday, however, it just got a little easier out here for a blogger. (h/t Jon Stewart.) The smart folks at Harvard's Citizen Media Law Project are launching a program of free legal services for online and citizen media. And I'm taking the liberty of substituting the word "free" for pro bono in their announcement -- us lawyers have trouble kicking the Latin:

We are [launching the] Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new [free] initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with [free] and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.

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Is Taxing Plastic Surgery Sexist?
Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe on November 23, 2009 at 6:30 AM.

Part of the funding for the Senate's health care bill will come from a 5% tax on cosmetic surgery. The tax would generate $5 billion over ten years, and would only tax procedures where surgery "is not necessary to ameliorate a deformity arising from, or directly related to, a congenital abnormality, a personal injury resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring disease."

It sounds fine and good on its face to tax unnecessary procedures -- especially those that are primarily accessed by the upper middle class. I couldn't find statistics on the average income of people who get cosmetic surgery, and certainly there are low and lower-middle income people who seek out cosmetic procedures, but by definition it seems like plastic surgery would be accessed most often by upper-middle and upper-class people (it is at least accessed disproportionately by white people). But 91 percent of cosmetic procedures are performed on women. While they're generally cast as simple vanity procedures, the fact is that women are under extreme pressure to maintain a particular physical appearance -- to look young, thin and attractive. Men certainly don't escape that pressure either, but women face it to a much higher degree. It seems a little unfair that women are inundated with messages that we need to constantly improve our physical appearance, and then taxed when we take steps to do just that. As Lindsay Beyerstein said on a feminist listserve I’m on, “It’s one of those classic sexist double binds: Society tells you that you have to look perfect and then sticks you with a ’sin’ tax when you do what’s expected of you. Boob jobs would titillate men AND subsidize their health care.”

On the other hand, I don't have much of a problem taxing luxury goods, so why not also tax luxury surgeries? And I know a lot of Feministe readers disagree with me on this one, but I’m also a proponent of taxing things like soda and cigarettes, which offer zero benefits but many health costs.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Lieberman's Latest B.S. Excuse for Opposing Health Reform
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on November 23, 2009 at 5:31 AM.

That Joe Lieberman would rather kill health care reform than let some consumer choose between competing public and private plans isn't exactly new. I continue to find it fascinating, though, to see his evolving explanations.

In June, Lieberman said, "I don't favor a public option because I think there's plenty of competition in the private insurance market." That didn't make sense, and it was quickly dropped from his talking points.

In July, Lieberman said he opposes a public option because "the public is going to end up paying for it." No one could figure out exactly what that meant, and the senator moved onto other arguments.

In August, he said we'd have to wait "until the economy's out of recession," which is incoherent, since a public option, even if passed this year, still wouldn't kick in for quite a while.

In September, Lieberman said he opposes a public option because "the public doesn't support it." A wide variety of credible polling proved otherwise.

In October, Lieberman said the public option would mean "trouble ... for the national debt," by creating "a whole new government entitlement program." Soon after, Jon Chait explained that this "literally makes no sense whatsoever."

Well, it's November. And guess what? We're onto the sixth rationale in six months. I actually like the new one.

"This is a radical departure from the way we've responded to the market in America in the past," Lieberman said Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press." "We rely first on competition in our market economy. When the competition fails then what do we do? We regulate or we litigate.... We have never before said, in a given business, we don't trust the companies in it, so we're going to have the government go into that business.."

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Glenn Beck Has a 'Plan' to Sell Books With March On Washington on the Anniversary of MLK Speech
Posted by Matt Corley, Think Progress on November 23, 2009 at 4:21 AM.

Yesterday, while promoting his latest book at “a festive campaign-style rally” in The Villages in Florida, Fox News host Glenn Beck announced that he was crafting “a 100 year plan” that will be “radical” and will “restore our nation to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting.” In his speech, which Media Matters captured on video, Beck told his followers, “we need to start thinking like the Chinese“:

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