Or so says Chief Justice Roberts in Morse v. Frederick. Justice Stevens' dissent is wonderfully mocking:

It is also perfectly clear that “promoting illegal drug use,” ante, at 14, comes nowhere close to proscribable “incitement to imminent lawless action.” Brandenburg, 395 U. S., at 447. . . . No one seriously maintains that drug advocacy (much less Frederick’s ridiculous sign) comes within the vanishingly small category of speech that can be prohibited because of its feared consequences. Such advocacy, to borrow from Justice Holmes, “ha[s] no chance of starting a present conflagration.” Gitlow v. New York, 268 U. S. 652, 673 (1925) (dissenting opinion). . . .

More . . .

Emily Yoffe wants to be infantilized:

Usually we want to protect our children from awful events, adjusting the message to suit their age. Certainly we tried to do that after Sept. 11. But an essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change.

Duck and cover Emily! Anyway, hopefully the adults in the country won't shy away from dealing with reality.

The Supreme Court has handed down its decision in Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, ruling that Flast taxpayer standing for Establishment Clause violations does not extend beyond a challenge to specific Congressional appropriations to discretionary Executive expenditures.

The opinions are very interesting at first blush. Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy, opine that Flast was directed very specifcally at Congressional action and that allowing challenges to discretionary Executive expenditures was too attenuated to provide standing. Justice Scalia and Thomas, in concurrence, argue that Flast is bad law and should be overruled. Interestingly, they argue that there is no basis for distinguishing taxpayer challenges to Executive expenditures from taxpayer challenges to Congressional appropriations as the harm is the same to the taxpayer. Nonetheless, even though Flast remains good law after Hein, the result in the case is the same.

The dissenters, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, believe Flast is good law, and like Scalia and Thomas, believe that Hein can not be distinguished from Flast. They also point to Bowen v. Kendrick, as the case controlling the result in Hein. I'll add to this post later as I get a chance to read the opinions more closely.

It is this mutation of American Exceptionalism that we all deplore. Roger Cohen was rightly concerned about this:

The manifold blunders of America in Iraq have made it unfashionable to recall such truths. Fashion is a poor compass. The next time a car bomb goes off, remember Saddon al-Saiedi, a 36-year-old Shiite army colonel, father of two, abducted by Saddam's goons on May 2, 1993, and never seen again. As he went, so went numberless others, without a bang. Totalitarian hell - malign stability - holds no hope. Violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than we have allowed.

Where is Cohen's concern about this?

In the most comprehensive accounting to date, six leading human rights organizations today published the names and details of 39 people who are believed to have been held in secret US custody and whose current whereabouts remain unknown. The briefing paper also names relatives of suspects who were themselves detained in secret prisons, including children as young as seven.

Dick Cheney's Washington, DC is closer to Saddam's Baghdad than he has allowed. When will Cohen write about his concern about the behavior of the Bush Administration?

Author Gore Vidal is said to be extremely upset and considering a lawsuit against a play that portrays him as coming on to Timothy McVeigh.

Edmund White's "Terre Haute," which recently finished a successful run in Britain, involves the relationship between a thinly veiled, Vidal-like writer named James and a McVeigh-like killer, Harrison. In one sexually charged scene, James comes on to Harrison during a prison visit, gushing: "If I thought you'd never know, I'd unzip that orange jumpsuit just a bit so I could see your chest. Touch it." The McVeigh character opens his shirt to show off his torso as a "gift" to the Vidal character.

Anything to make a buck off a dead person, I guess. I have no knowledge of Gore Vidal's sexual orientation, but I can assure you that had the real Timothy McVeigh ever heard a male say that to him, his response would have been quite different. In other words, McVeigh was straight with a capital "S."

I hate to say this about an execution, but it seems in the case of Chemical Ali, we've been here before, done that.

Ali Hassan al-Majeed -- a former general known as "Chemical Ali" -- received five death sentences for ordering the use of deadly mustard gas and nerve agents against the Kurds during the so-called Anfal campaign. Majeed and [Saddam] Hussein were cousins.

There was no great uproar, just some human rights groups protesting Saddam's executions, and I think you will see the same for Chemical Ali, albeit on a lesser scale.

He has 30 days to appeal his sentence.

Neither should have been tried by the Iraqi tribunal, but by an International Court. I doubt it will get the same media attention in the U.S. that Saddam's execution did.

The death penalty is barbaric, and what else do you expect of a country like Iraq. We've been there four years trying to instill democracy, and they sure haven't come very far. But then again, neither have we in the death penalty department.

I'd give him life without parole in a country where he knows no one. A very cold country, like Siberia. Maybe then he will have time to reflect on the egregrious acts of genocide he ordered or acquiesced in.

The second installment of the WaPo series on the evil that is Vice President Dick Cheney and his henchmen is up. The series is a journalistic tour de force. And it is appropriately sickening. A close and complete reading of the magnificent reporting by Bart Gellman and Jo Becker is required. Read this on Attorney General Gonzales from the second installment:

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA -- including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

. . . On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post. According to a former White House official with firsthand knowledge, they confronted Gonzales together in his office.

Rice "very angrily said there would be no more secret opinions on international and national security law," the official said, adding that she threatened to take the matter to the president if Gonzales kept them out of the loop again.

Please read both installments to fully understand what this Administration is, what is has wrought and what we are still dealing with.

In San Francisco today at the Gay Pride event, Elizabeth Edwards endorsed gay marriage:

"I don't know why someone else's marriage has anything to do with me," Mrs. Edwards said at a news conference before the parade started. "I'm completely comfortable with gay marriage."

John Edwards supports civil unions but not gay marriage. Why? According to Elizabeth,

He has a deeply held belief against any form of discrimination, but that's up against his being raised in the 1950s in a rural southern town."

I don't like that excuse. He seems to have broken the chains of the rest of his southern taboos, why not this one?

If you were the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, who would you like to have as a speaker at your conference? If you chose Bill O'Reilly, you hit the nail on the head. And O'Reilly provided his keen insight to the opinionmakers' convention and was right on point with them. He lectured on the news side of the operation:

O'Reilly contended that many newspapers are losing circulation because they've allowed the "liberal" ideology of their editorial pages to "bleed into news coverage" -- despite, he said, there being a greater number of "traditional conservatives" than liberals in the American population. The result? "Audiences are estranged from most major newspapers," O'Reilly told the columnist attendees. "They hate you. When someone hates you, they're not going to give you your money."

Honestly, any group that invites O'Reilly to speak at their gathering deserves what they get.

Greg Sargent gets a response from the Grey Lady:

We gave the Edwards camp ample opportunity to respond, and we quoted their full response in the article. The article focused on the activities of the Center for Promise and Opportunity, and how that benefited Mr. Edwards; it did not focus on the sister charity that provided the scholarship money. In fact, when it did mention that sister charity, it cast it in only a positive light, and noted how much it had given out in scholarships.

Greg notes that the egregious flaw of the article, the lede, remains unexplained:

So the Sunday shows told me. Yawn. Can Nader match his 0.5% showing of 2004? Does anybody really care?

Since there really is nothing of import or interest to say about Nader, I leave you an Open Thread.

So, take heart. And take a look around you. You live in a nation full of progressive-thinking, liberal-leaning, good-hearted people. Give yourself a pat on the back-you won! We won! Let's take a victory lap together and then get to work on fixing the Great Disconnect -how it is that, in a nation of lefties, the right hand controls everything. They do not represent the will of the people, and that has to change. Start acting like the victors you are and get out there to claim the country that is truly ours. -Michael Moore, "Dude, Where's My Country?"

Amanda Marcotte writes:

But I do think liberals who dislike Moore so strongly are genuine in their distaste and not just trotting it out to appear fair’n'balanced. And I think that Ezra’s review points to why—the overarching theme of Moore’s career has been an attack on American exceptionalism, . . . the belief that America is somehow better or at least different and can’t be held up to the same standards as other countries is endemic.

I am an American Exceptionalist, but not in the way Amanda describes. I hold America to higher standards. I expect the best from the United States. And, I think Michael Moore is an American Exceptionalist too. I think he argues that the United States SHOULD be better. I think that is the theme of his work. Not anti-Exceptionalism. Consider this from "Dude, Where's My Country?":