As promised, our new address is http://seminal.firedoglake.com

Update your bookmarks and we’ll see you all over there!

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.

We’ve got some big news: By the end of this weekend, The Seminal will be part of the Firedoglake family.

This move has been in the works for quite some time, and everyone here is very excited about it. We will be joining the community site currently knows as the Oxdown Gazette (the name after we move over will be The Seminal).

Oxdown is a special place. First, it’s a community blog platform, which means anyone, not just designated authors, can write posts (called “diaries”). Those posts are displayed for all to see and comment on, and they can be put directly on the front page of the blog by editors for extra promotion. That means everyone here who currently reads and comments will be able to write their own blog post if they choose, meaning a lot more meaningful interaction both with folks here and folks already participating in the Oxdown community.

Second, Oxdown is connected to the larger Firedoglake ecosystem. Firedoglake is an extremely well respected progressive blog run by Jane Hamsher. She already has a pool of stellar writers working with her, and in short order, she’s built an extremely active community and a voice known for rebel rousing, pushing the progressive envelope, and moving elected officials to do the right things - all of which fits squarely within what we’re trying to do at The Seminal. Being part of Firedoglake also means particularly noteworthy posts of ours can be featured on the front page of Firedoglake, a huge platform with the means to drive media narratives, affect policy, and engage with a huge audience.

In short, we’ll be able to do two things better at the new Seminal: We’ll be able to reach a larger audience, and we’ll be able to grow a bigger and more vibrant community.

So, when you come to this site later this week and are redirected to our new location, don’t be surprised. We’ll all still be writing over there, just with more means at our disposal. And we look forward to hearing from you on the new platform, too!

Our new URL will be http://seminal.firedoglake.com

We’ll see you there!

How are you celebrating our nation’s birth? I’m watching stuff explode!

Americans want health care reform with a strong public option, as poll after poll after poll has shown. So we might expect that if roughly 70% of Americans want the public option, 70 US senators would line up to vote for the kind of solid, cost-effective legislation that will soon come out of the Senate HELP Committee. Unfortunately, even with the Democratic caucus soon to hit 60 votes in the Senate, we still don’t know where many Democrats stand on the critical question of support for a strong public option.

Democrats who waver on this issue need to hear our voices telling them to stand with President Obama and their party’s leadership to back a strong public option. Pressure from constituents can help make the difference in this battle.

One of those wavering Democrats is Arksansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, and a group of activists have come together to air ads telling her to support the public option. Please consider making a donation to help them place these ads, and be sure to vote for your favorite ad of the three they’re considering.

Why target Lincoln? Two reasons: “Blanche Lincoln is on the health sub-committee of the Senate Finance Committee and she’s running for re-election in 2010.”

John Amato and Jane Hamsher have more background on the campaign.

Please consider donating. The fight over a public option is critical for building a progressive mandate to govern, for Democrats’ electoral chances, for public debate over the role of government in our country, and for defining the role of grassroots progressives in the current political climate.

To expand on that last point, all the good guys are playing an important role right now - the President, Senators Kennedy, Dodd, and others, think tanks and organizations in DC like the Center for American Progress and Campaign for America’s Future, unions like SEIU and the groups in the AFL-CIO coalition, and brave progressives in the House. Grassroots activists have their own unique but crucial role to play: criticizing and pressuring the wavering Democrats that others cannot openly target. Supporting grassroots campaigns like this is the best way that citizen activists can affect the debate and support progressive champions and causes at this pivotal moment.

Today, Health Care for America Now released a short (well, 40 page) report [pdf] on insurance industry abuses. It’s not new information per se, more of a compendium of insurance industry bad practices over the last few years.

The list of abuses covered in the document is criminal. Here’s the table of contents:

• Insurers Leave Patients with High Out-of-Pocket Costs
• Insurers Deny Coverage for Medically Necessary Care
• Insurers Discriminate Against Women
• Insurers Wrongly Drop People’s Coverage
• Insurers Scam People Through Marketing Abuses
• Insurers Defraud Taxpayers
• Insurers Reward Employees for Denying Coverage
• Insurers Export Dollars Over State Lines to Help Affiliated Companies
• Insurers Reward CEOs for Bad Practices
• Insurers Deny Emergency Care
• Insurers Overcharge Small Businesses
• Insurers Collude With Some Providers to Drive Up Prices
• Insurers Prevent Doctors from Delivering Care They Feel Is Best for Their Patients
• Insurers Delay Reimbursement to Patients and Providers
• Insurers Deny Rural Americans Good Coverage
• Insurers Oppose Steps to Create Health Security

To add to this, just yesterday, the insurance industry admitted under oath in Congress to dropping people’s coverage when they got sick. That practice is illegal, and yet they do it anyway. Watch:

It is insane that Members of Congress, after seeing all this, still defend the insurance industry. They still bellyache that the industry won’t be able to compete with a public health insurance option. And they refuse to give you the choice to drop the criminal insurance industry if you want to.

It’s galling that Congress can be so in the pocket of the insurance industry when faced with these criminal abuses. It’s galling that Congress still trusts them to provide health care to most of America, and is actively working to weaken a public health insurance option with triggers or co-ops. These companies cannot be trusted, period, and we Americans should have the right to choose to get out from under their thumb if we want.

Add in the latest polls and this gets way worse. Yesterday, NBC and the Wall Street Journal found that 76% of Americans support the choice of a public health insurance option. Anyone who is against this is putting profits before people.

That’s what this is about - choice. Do you trust the insurance industry? If not, why are you forced to buy their products and live by their rules? Shouldn’t you be able to vote with your feet and choose something else?

If you think so, email your Members of Congress and ask them where they stand on a public health insurance option and what kind of public option they stand for. It’s crucially important we get these answers.

(Sometimes the only reasonable response to farcical world events is humor - ed.)

Various agencies and periodicals reported on June 12 that 13, or maybe 17, Uighur (pronounced wee-gurr) prisoners from the camp at Guantanamo Bay will be resettled in the Pacific island republic of Palau. The men, who are from Xinjiang province in western China, speak a Turkic language. They were “captured” by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001. Probably they had come to the area to train for attacks against Chinese police and officials.

In 2008 the Bush administration decided after a mere seven years in captivity that the Uighurs were not “enemy combatants” as far as the U.S. was concerned. But if they were sent back to China, they would surely be treated even worse than they were in Gitmo. Hence a search began for some place that would take them; after 100 countries refused, the quest ended with a warm reception by a “tropical tourist getaway,” Palau. Life there, among some 20,000 mostly Christian inhabitants, will be a little different from what the Uighurs knew before 2001. Urumqi, the dusty capital of Xinjiang province, is known as “the most remote city from any sea in the world.”

Obviously this occasion calls for a song, so here it is.

Wastin’ Away not in Uighurville (lyrics by R. Thurston, with apologies to Jimmy Buffett)

Wastin’ away I’m not in Uighurville
Where are my lost camels and sand?
Some people say Mr. Obama’s to blame
But I recognize Dick Cheney’s hand

Wastin’ away and it’s not Uighurville
Can’t go home now I’m banned
In Kabul they sold me
To Cuba they told me
But Gitmo was not quite the real promised land

Wastin’ away and not in Uighurville
My AK’s not at hand
They say I’m in Palau
And where the hell’s that now?
Their pig meat is not the food I had planned

Wastin’ away I’m far from Uighurville
Wishin’ for that old Taliban
My guards are all meanies
They’re wearing bikinis
Somehow it’s just not Afghanistan.

The American Medical Association is now saying it is willing to collude with insurance industry near-monopolies in an effort to prevent real competition and choice from entering the marketplace in the form of a public health insurance option:

Nielsen also said doctors and insurers need to change their “wildly adversarial” relationship marked by lawsuits over reimbursement rates and other issues. That’s prevented sharing patient data and ranking doctor performance that could help improve care and hold down costs, she said.

“Doctors are dispirited and depressed and it is going to take a lot to try to make them listen to their better angels and have trust where trust has not been rewarded in the past,” Nielsen said in a speech at the meeting, held by America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s trade group.

Obama said in a June 3 letter to the Senate Finance and Health committees that a government plan would help reduce the number of uninsured people.

“This will give them a better range of choices, make the health-care market more competitive and keep insurance companies honest,” Obama wrote.

That, right there, is the basic conflict. The AMA (which hardly represents the view of all doctors) and the insurance industry say we should trust them. They will use their market monopolies to make sure everything is ok for us, the little guy. Should we trust them? Or should we force them to make everything right by us by making them compete.

I think the history of the insurance industry and the AMA speaks for itself.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

Since I heard that Dr. George Tiller was murdered, I have been thinking about how to respond to this outrage.  I have been doing some writing, arguing that it is past time for supposedly responsible leaders in the Republican party to renounce incendiary rhetoric that equates abortion with murder and provides a justification for those who kill doctors.  Another thing we can do is support health care providers who make sure women get safe medical care, and support the activists who defend womens’ rights.  There’s a great event on June 25 that gives you the chance to do both of these things–it’s Choice USA’s Generation to Generation celebration.  Choice USA is an organization dedicated to developing young pro-choice leaders on college campuses and in communities.  (Full disclosure–my wife is a board member).

Anyways, if you’re in DC and want to come by to support Choice USA’s work, it’s Thursday, June 25 at 6:30 pm at the K Street lounge, 1301 K Street, NW.  Tickets are $50, so hopefully that doesn’t break the bank–all proceeds go directly to supporting Choice USA’s trainings and programs for young activists.  You can check out more information here.

Seeing as politicians have largely agreed that the public health insurance option will be part of reform in some way or another (see: Republicans looking for compromises on the issue, though it’s not a real compromise), a lot of talk has turned to how to pay for health care reform.

It’s a good question, but there’s also a good answer. And that answer is largely what President Obama ran on during the campaign: tax the rich just a little bit more.

The Center for Tax Justice has released a report called “Progressive Revenue Options to Fund Health Care Reform,” [pdf] which Health Care for America Now is supporting. The report proposes a wealth of options to pay for health reform that don’t involve, say, taxing your employer health benefits.

Here’s how we could raise $1 trillion+ with progressive policies, in convenient chart form:

If you want (lots) more detail, avail yourself of the full report.

This all fits in within the larger framework of shared responsibility. Everyone should shoulder the burden of health care costs. Individuals should pay based on their ability to pay (no free rides), business should either help provide their employees with health care or pay the government to provide it for them, and government should chip in to make health care accessible and affordable. To add to that, those of us in society with the most should pay a bit more to give health care to those of us with the least.

The taxes we’re talking about here are not onerous: 1% more for the Medicare tax. 8% for capital gains. And eliminating loopholes and giveaways to big business. It’s time these levels of society paid their fair share.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)