BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White When she heard about the boom chemicals being used to disperse oil from the sunken rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the thoughts of Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) were far away. She was thinking about her hometown Santa Barbara in the late 1960s when Union Oil’s Platform A had [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White In the first of what will be an ongoing series of hearings on the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, leaders at BP, Transocean and Halliburton played an interesting form of the ever-popular corporate blame game. In news accounts previewing the hearing before the Senate Energy Committee [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White Quick. Someone strip Joe Lieberman of his citizenship before he causes actual damage to the country. Oh, wait. I forgot; we don’t engage in that kind of Orwellian nonsense in this country. Yet. You probably heard about the latest idea from the “independent” senator from Connecticut (who seems to [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White Today the House Administration Committee heard testimony on the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections, or DISCLOSE Act (HR. 5175). As the legislation was written in response to the changes made to campaign finance as a result of the Supreme Court ruling on the Citizens [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White There are a lot of elements to President Obama’s healthcare reform bill that are complete and total hand-outs to megacorporations that feed off of the misery of the American people. Now that the ping-pong-like process of legislative action on the measure is finally complete, I thought I’d look at [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White The Senate passed a bill yesterday that would mean a person found with a small amount of crack and a person carrying 18 times as much cocaine would be sentenced to the exact same amount of jail time. The strangest thing is that lawmakers called it the “Fair Sentencing [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White This morning a very salient question was tweeted by Nate Silver’s always insightful blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, that really got me thinking: @fivethirtyeight: Per @QuinnipiacPoll, voters support jobs bill 72-22. Why again do Dems feel the need to compromise on the estate tax? Hmm. Maybe because if they don’t compromise every [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]