One of my all-time favorite Supreme Court decisions is West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette, a 1943 ruling that it was unconstitutional for the West Virginia Board of Education to require public schoolchildren to salute the flag.  The case was brought when Jehovah’s Witnesses (who have initiated several important cases involving constitutional issues) objected to the Board’s order, which required schoolchildren to make a “stiff-arm” salute, raising their right hand, palm up, while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Several children had been expelled for refusing to salute the flag in school, and parents had been prosecuted for promoting delinquency.

I have nothing against patriotism; what bothers me, and what bothered the Court in Barnette, is compelled patriotism, where the state requires a show of patriotism, and punishes those who do not want to comply.  It’s always seemed odd to me that some people think patriotism can be mandated.  Forced shows of patriotic feeling make me think of Orwell’s 1984.  It seems especially ironic for a country that subscribes to extremely worthy ideals of freedom to seek to compel patriotism from its citizens.

The Barnette Court ruled that West Virginia violated the childrens’ First Amendment free speech rights by trying to force them to utter a “credo of nationalism”; by compelling speech they did not believe in.  The Court’s opinion contains a number of profoundly worded statements, but the one that always gets me is this: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”  That pretty much sums up what it means to be free in America: the government cannot force us to believe what we do not believe, cannot force us to say what we do not want to say.  This is freedom of thought, freedom from Orwell’s thought police.

It’s always been odd to me that one of the places where you’re most likely to run into a required show of patriotism is at a baseball game.  I’ve been a baseball fan since I was about 7, and it’s always seemed odd to me that everyone is required to stand for the National Anthem.  I just don’t like compelled displays of patriotism, and I’ve noticed that people who don’t stand, or don’t take off their hats, sometimes get a talking to from an usher (it happened to a friend of mine a few weeks ago).

Now, that’s relatively minor stuff, and doesn’t implicate the First Amendment–by definition, only the government can violate the First Amendment, and most ballpark ushers either aren’t government employees or are off the clock.  Sometimes, however, constitutional issues do crop up at the ballpark.  Last August, a fan at a baseball game says he was kicked out of Yankee Stadium by a police officer because he left his seat to use the bathroom during the seventh inning playing of God Bless America.  The police officer, unlike the usher, is a government agent, so the fan had a basis for claiming that constitutional rights were at stake.  Today, it was announced that the lawsuit was settled, though the city did not admit liability.

I do not begrudge the fan his $10,001 recovery or his attorneys at the NY Civil Liberties Union the $12,000 they will receive in legal fees (based on the 9 years I spent as a litigator, I’m pretty confident that fee is not excessive based on the time the attorneys must have spent on the case).  However, it might have been nice to see an eloquent court opinion in this case, quoting the Barnette decision.

As I noted last week, the overwhelming majority of Americans favor substantial change to the health care system, including the public option.  Even though Republicans are taking the unpopular position of opposing the public option, even though Republicans have no plan of their own to fix the problems millions of Americans are dealing with, they do have a few things going for them.  First, drug and insurance companies are spending millions of dollars on lobbying aimed at scuttling the public option and influencing members of Congress.  Second, the traditional media is failing to report fairly and accurately on debate.

I noticed one more problem tonight: even supporters of reform who favor a public option don’t know how to play the rhetoric game.  Republicans are masters of this–they have made phrases like “tax and spend liberals”, the “war on terror”, and “socialized medicine” into effective rhetorical tools in the health care context and beyond.  Supporters of reform need to stop accepting the Republicans’ terms of debate.  On tonight’s “The Ed Show”, Ed Schultz and Katrina vanden Heuvel, two supporters of the public option, lost a rhetorical battle with Republican Sen. John Barrasso, who opposes the public option.  Several times, Sen. Barrasso charged that health care reform promises a “government takeover” of the health care system, even suggesting that a single payer system is in the offing.  Pure fantasy.    No one on the Democratic side has managed to make single payer part of the debate.  The question is whether reform will include a public option, which would allow Americans to choose a government plan, but would not require it.  If people are happy with their current health insurance, they can keep it–whether it is provided by a private or public insurer.

Schultz and vanden Heuvel failed to make this point.  Schultz debated Sen. Barrasso directly, and simply failed to point out that Barrasso was creating a straw man by insisting that reform is about single payer and “government takeover” of health care.  Vanden Heuvel came on just after Sen. Barrasso finished his rhetorical sleight of hand and she too failed to point out that the senator’s argument depended on a red herring.

I’m no expert on health care reform, but I know that if supporters of the public option allow opponents of the idea to frame the debate in terms of a threatened government takeover aimed at socialized medicine, they have given up ground unnecessarily.  It’s time to call opponents of reform out and insist that debate is based on facts, not fantasies about proposed reforms that are simply not on the table.

Less than five months ago, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal argued that the Republican party had gotten away from its supposed core principles: “limited government, fiscal discipline, and personal responsibility.”  He promised, “on behalf of our leaders in Congress and [his] fellow Republican governors” that “our party is determined to regain your trust.”

How’s that been working out?  There are just 22 Republican governors nationwide: in the past two weeks, two of those 22, Sanford and Palin, demonstrated an utter failure of personal responsibility (in very different ways, of course–Palin didn’t have an affair, she merely walked away from the oath she swore when taking office as governor).  Senator Ensign, who held a top leadership post in the Republican caucus, also recently demonstrated his failings on the personal responsibility front.  All three were considered possible presidential contenders in 2012 (Bill Kristol is performing rhetorical gymnastics in an effort to argue that Palin is somehow still in the mix and Palin’s photo is still prominently featured on the Republican Governors Association website atop the declaration that “the GOP comeback begins now”).

So far, Jindal’s pledge on behalf of his fellow Republicans doesn’t seem to be working out very well.  In less than five months, Jindal’s fellow Republican governors are failing the personal responsibility test at nearly a 10% rate.  A top Senate leader has failed as well.  Does the party get another do-over?

The truth is that Republican slogans about their devotion to limited government, fiscal discipline and personal responsibility have been empty claims for the past 30 years.  Republican presidents left Democrats huge deficits.  The only time we have seen a balanced budget in recent years was under a Democratic president.  Republican claims of limited government were undermined by the party’s position on abortion and LGBT rights, as well as the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance, torture of detainees and other excesses of executive power (some of which, unfortunately, are being continued by Obama).  Recent events make clear that Republicans have no monopoly on personal responsibility (as we learned from past trespasses as well e.g. the Gingrich, Livingston, Foley, Craig, and Vitter episodes, to name a few).

I don’t think this is a good thing.  A credible opposition party is something I’d like to see, as it would put positive pressure on Democrats to craft better policies.  The current Republican party doesn’t fit the bill.

In what an Alaska television station describes as a “stunning development”, Sarah Palin announced today that she will step down as governor in a few weeks, resigning her office with about a year and a half left in her term.  Palin didn’t exactly give a clear explanation as to why she is stepping down–she said she had decided not to run for re-election, but it’s not clear why that led her to resign now, with a year and a half left in her term.  Republican consultant Mike Murphy described her actions as setting new standards in erratic behavior.  MSNBC is reporting that other Republicans are describing the announcement she made today as “bewildering”.

We’ll have to see if there is more to come in terms of an explanation as to why Palin is stepping down.  It strikes me that this is further evidence that John McCain took an enormous gamble on behalf of the American people when he selected Palin as a running mate.  During the campaign, she demonstrated she was woefully unprepared to be first in line to succeed the president, should that be required.  Her decision today, described by Murphy as incredibly erratic, provides another reason to be thankful she and McCain were defeated last November.

Politico is reporting that the Washington Post circulated a flier offering lobbyists off the record access to elected officials as well as the paper’s own reporters and editors–at a price ranging from $25,000 to $250,000.  The first access-for-sale event the Post had in mind was aimed at the topic of health care reform.  One lobbyist who received the offer apparently passed it along to a reporter  with Politico, providing the understated observation that it would be a conflict for the paper to charge for access to its health care reporting and editorial staff.  It’s not clear whether any elected officials, or administration officials, had agreed to be there, but that would certainly be disturbing, to say the least, if it’s the case.

In a post yesterday, I noted that, while there is overwhelming support for health care reform, including the public option, the fight for reform has been a difficult one, in part, because of the traditional media’s failure to accurately and fairly report on the issue.  I wrote about one Post reporter, Ceci Connolly, who has falled short of that standard.  Connolly says she was told she would be invited to the event the Politico reported on.  That’s disturbing.

The Post’s crass offer should remind us of larger problems: (1) that political access seems to be for sale to those who can afford it (and unavailable to those who cannot) and (2) traditional media types seem to have a pretty cozy relationship with the elected officials they cover, as has been noted in other contexts.

The term “follow the money” is associated with Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Nixon administration’s malfeasance at the Watergate and beyond wide open (though it’s not clear the reporters themselves came up with this term).  Woodward and Bernstein stand for the ideal that media ought to hold elected officials accountable.  The Politico story about today’s Post suggests the paper would rather connect elected officials with lobbyists, in exchange for a fee.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a conference Pat Buchanan’s group, the American Cause, recently held.  The conference featured a panelist who describes himself as a “white nationalist” and has argued that the Republican party should focus on its base: “white Americans.”  Reading about the conference and Buchanan’s organization got me curious: what else is Buchanan up to?  I went to the American Cause’s website, and started reading through Buchanan’s columns.

Turns out he is using his organization’s website to make wildly extreme, ultra-reactionary arguments against evolution and in defense of a man the Simon Wiesenthal Center says committed “unspeakable crimes” as a Nazi death camp guard.  That man is John Demjanjuk.  In 2002, a U.S. federal court found that reliable evidence supports the conclusion that Demjanjuk was an armed guard at Sobibor, a death camp where 250,000 people were murdered.   German prosecutors say they have hundreds of documents and a number of witnesses that prove Demjanjuk’s involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews in 1943.  The head of the special German office investigating Nazi crimes says there is “no doubt” Demjanjuk is responsible for these murders.  Demjanjuk was recently deported from the U.S. and is in a German prison awaiting trial on charges that he was an accessory to these 29,000 murders.

Now, it’s important to note that, in 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court threw out Demjanjuk’s conviction for war crimes committed by the notorious Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, a different death camp.  The Israeli court found that new evidence suggested Ivan the Terrible was another man–however, according to BBC News, the court was careful not to declare Demjanjuk innocent, pointing to “ample evidence that he had served as a guard in concentration camps other than Treblinka.”

I fully believe that Demjanjuk has a right to a fair trial, and he will receive one.  However, these are very serious charges, and they hardly sound frivolous.  It’s hard to say Demjanjuk is being railroaded or persecuted–unless you’re Pat Buchanan, that is.  Buchanan wrote a column in April, entitled “The True Haters”, that implicitly compares Demjanjuk to Jesus Christ.  Buchanan paints Demjanjuk as a victim of relentless persecution, focusing on the fact that Demjanjuk’s conviction in 1993 was thrown out.  Buchanan leaves out crucial points: (1) the Israeli court that threw out Demjanjuk’s conviction did not say he was “innocent” and noted there was evidence he was guilty of other crimes (2) German prosecutors say there is “no doubt” that Demjanjuk is criminally responsible for 29,000 murders, pointing to hundreds of documents and a number of witnesses backing up their case and (3) the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has been involved in the Demjanjuk case for many years, has concluded he committed unspeakable crimes during the Holocaust.

Why does Buchanan completely ignore the evidence against Demjanjuk?  Why does he paint Demjanjuk as a victim, grotesquely and bizarrely calling him “the American Dreyfus”?  (Dreyfus was a French Jewish military officer who was convicted of espionage charges against a backdrop of anti-Semitism: Dreyfus’s name stands for injustice based on prejudice against Jews).  Why did he go so far as to compare Demjanjuk to Christ, saying that Demjanjuk was the victim of “the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago“?  (This is a particularly explosive comparison, given the centuries-old slander that the Jews killed Christ: is Buchanan suggesting that the Jews are similarly trying to kill Demjanjuk?)

I can’t say what motivates Buchanan, but his tendentious defense of an accused Nazi war criminal makes me ill.  As I asked before, how is it that Buchanan is able to market himself as a mainstream commentator?

Update: hat tip to Philip Klein, who eloqently exposed Buchanan’s “vile defense” of Demjanjuk back in April.

When it comes to important change that requires political action, success never seems to be easy.  Consider womens’ suffrage, Social Security, the abolition of slavery, federal anti-discrimination laws (we’re not all the way there on these yet).  Reactionaries opposed each of these measures, and made it incredibly difficult for liberals to achieve these basic norms we now take for granted.

I guess that achieving a modern, rational health care shouldn’t be any different–and it hasn’t been.  It’s clear that there’s nothing easy about health care reform, despite the fact that Americans overwhelmingly support substantial change to the health care system, including the so-called “public option”–the idea that a government insurance plan ought to compete with private insurers.

Why is it so hard to achieve something that most Americans support?  Opponents of change are skillful marketers.  While they may not have much to offer when it comes to substance, but they have proven skillful at crafting slogans that dominate debate–scary sounding terms like “socialized medicine” are trotted out at every turn.

Another thing opponents of what is essentially popular reform have going for them is the traditional media.  Media Matters is shining a much-needed light on how this is playing out.  As Media Matters points out, it’s not too much for us to ask that the media report accurately and fairly on health care reform.  Unfortunately, things aren’t working out that way at the Washington Post.  The Post’s Ceci Connolly recently wrote that Change Congress interim chief executive Adam Green was, in an interview, “hard pressed to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan...”  Green counters that Connolly didn’t ask him about the substance of the health care reform, she asked him about the politics, and when he gave her an answer on the political front, she wrote that he had failed to answer on the substance.  (Media Matters also points out that it’s pretty easy to find an eloquent substantive argument for the public option, if that’s what Connolly was looking for–by leaving this out, she made it seem that there simply is no substantive argument for the public option).

I don’t think Connolly has any sinister motive–as Green put it, she simply doesn’t understand the debate over health care, and she falls back on comfortable, but inaccurate shibboleths: for example, she wondered why Green was “attacking [his] friends” by holding Senate Democrats accountable for taking money from insurance companies.

It may not fit Connolly’s script to acknowledge that not all Democrats are on the progressive side of the health care debate, but it happens to be reality.  As she continues to cover this critical debate, I hope that she, and the Post, will give careful consideration to the serious questions Media Matters has raised about her reporting.

The NY Times has a piece in today’s paper entitled “Journalism Rules Are Bent in News Coverage from Iran.”  The piece questions the accuracy of news reporting on recent events in Iran that is based on “anonymous Twitter messages”, blogging and “unverified videos.”  The Times piece calls this type of reporting evidence of a “publish first, ask questions later” approach to journalism.

I think it’s absolutely fair for the Times to ask questions about the sources for news coming out of Iran, but I also think they’re incorrectly suggesting that the axiom “check the source” especially applies to reports associated with new media.  Let’s not forget the Times’ failure to consider the source when it uncritically published reports by Judith Miller and others that accepted at face value the Bush administration’s misinformation about WMD in Iraq The Times ultimately conceded that its coverage of the buildup to the war in Iraq was “not as rigorous as it should have been.”  It admitted that reporting had often depended on “Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change in Iraq” whose credibility “c[a]me under increasing public debate.”  That’s putting it mildly.

I think it’s a great idea for the Times and others across the media spectrum to be skeptical, to ask questions, to consider and check the source when it comes to recent events in Iran.  I just hope that this scrutiny is not limited only to reporting that involves new media and is not limited to recent events in Iran .

As Gov. Sanford confessed his affair during a press conference yesterday, he made a comment I found very revealing.  He said that “God’s law is indeed there to protect you from yourself.”

I have a friend (who I’ll refer to as Pat) who was raised in a traditional Christian household.  Pat was taught that pre-marital sex was wrong–so wrong, in fact, that those who engage in pre-marital sex will go to hell.  Pat told me that Sunday school teachers would drive this point home in detail, explaining what it would be like to burn in hell.

Not surprisingly, Pat was terrified of pre-marital sex.  Also not surprisingly, Pat ended up having pre-marital sex.  Pat now has some pretty confused ideas about sex and about self.  Pat has also had trouble forming relationships.

I think this is the mode of faith Gov. Sanford was referring to when he spoke of religion as something that is there to “protect you from yourself”.  Some people, certainly not all people of faith, are afraid of themselves, of their human passions and feelings, of sex themselves.  They learn that sex is bad, and they believe, like Gov. Sanford, that religious laws are intended to repress human passions and feelings–because, the implication is, human beings cannot do this on their own.  They believe that fear can help them to be good.

This approach–the idea that faith can be based on fear, that religion means repression of self–obviously doesn’t always work.  It didn’t work for Gov. Sanford.  It didn’t work for my friend.  It didn’t work for Sen. Ensign.

Joe Lieberman once said that morality is impossible without religion.  I disagree–I think human beings, with or without religion, are capable of understanding that extramarital affairs are wrong, hurting and embarrassing your loved ones is wrong.  But one thing is clear: religious faith does not guarantee morality.  Another thing is clear from Gov. Sanford’s remark about God’s law.  We ought to be asking questions about a fear-based view of faith that has affected every aspect of politics from stem cell research to marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples to policy in the Middle East.  What does it mean to teach people that fear ought to make them good?  What about abstinence-only education, a policy choice flowing from a fear-based view of faith?  It teaches people to fear themselves, fear their bodies, fear contraception, but, of course, does not actually stop people from having pre-marital sex.

Perhaps something positive can come from Gov. Sanford’s statement about faith and fear.  It’s time to make policy choices based on reason and common sense, not on a fear-based view of faith that, especially when it comes to sexual matters, leads to bad policy choices.  It’s ok to be human–people make mistakes, as Gov. Sanford did, as we all do.  It’s time for people like Gov. Sanford to stop insisting that Americans live by a religious code that aims to make sexuality taboo.

Last month, the crew on Morning Joe “had a field day”, in Free Republic’s view, over the NY Times’ decision not to put a story about Nancy Pelosi accusing the CIA of lying on the front page.  Joe, Mika, and the rest were slavering over the Pelosi story, and couldn’t get enough of what they saw as the Times’ bias in burying the story on page A 20.

The Morning Joe crew are pulling a NY Times themselves when it comes to the Gov. Sanford story.  The explosive account of the Governor’s affair is all over the media, receiving prominent coverage–but not on Morning Joe.  It didn’t even make the headlines that Mika read at the top of the hour, and it took 20 minutes before anyone mentioned the story (it’s 8:20, and Mika just said they’d talk about this “after the break”).

The Morning Joe crew did the equivalent of placing the Sanford story on p. A 20–they put it on at 8:22.  Not exactly a coincidence–the Joe crew has had Sanford on a number of times, and Scarborogh has told the governor that he ought to run for president.