This kind of thing portends the kind of petty mudslinging that will make this next presidential campaign one of the most acrimonious in US history. From the Washington Post:

Mitt Romney’s misfire on the national anthem

Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:02 AM ET, 02/06/2012

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“We are the only people on the earth that put our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem. It was FDR who asked us to do that, in honor of the blood that was being shed by our sons and daughters in far-off places.”

— Mitt Romney, Feb. 2, 2012

This is a strange one.

Kudos to Andrew Kaczynski at Buzzfeed for first spotting this claim, though it turns out that the former Massachusetts governor also said this at least once before, during a stump speech in Iowa in December.

The first part of this statement is simply wrong. As Kaczynski noted, Romney ran the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics and surely should have noticed the many athletes with their hands on their hearts during the playing of their national anthems.

We randomly searched YouTube for the playing of the national anthem for various countries and quickly found several examples, such as Japan and Brazil, that disprove Romney’s claim of American exceptionalism. (Mara Liasson of NPR sent us the Russia clip.)

Japan

Brazil

Russia

But what about the rest of Romney’s claim — did President Franklin D. Roosevelt institute this? The history on this salute is interesting, and actually has more to do with the Pledge of Allegiance than the national anthem.

 

 

The Facts

 

A spokesman for Romney did not respond to a query, but the candidate may be bringing this up to remind voters of a flap that occurred during the 2008 campaign, when then-candidate Barack Obama did not put his hand over his heart during the playing of the national anthem.

Obama later said that he had been taught as a child that the hand goes over the heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, but that it was optional during the national anthem.

Actually, the U.S. Flag Code says that, for civilians, the hand should go over the heart during both the pledge and the anthem. But the language is precatory (“should”), not mandatory (“shall”). In other words, Obama may have violated a patriotic custom enacted by Congress, but no legal sanctions are authorized for failing to put one’s hand over the heart during the national anthem.

The flag code was codified into law during Roosevelt’s presidency but he appears to have had little to do with it. Certainly, the hand-over-heart salute was not done “in honor of the blood that was being shed by our sons and daughters in far of places,” as Romney put it.

The problem was |the salute that had been traditionally associated with the pledge had begun to look very much like the Nazi salute — and the United States was then at war with Germany.

Francis Bellamy, who wrote the pledge in 1892, had included instructions for the salute while reciting the pledge. For decades, children were taught to salute the flag with their arms straight out, with the palm up. (Click here for images.)

Years later, German Nazis and Italian fascists adopted salutes that looked similar to the Bellamy salute. Increasingly, some school districts, especially in New York, became uncomfortable with using the Bellamy salute, according to Richard J. Ellis, a professor at Willamette University, in his 2005 book, “To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance.”

Some school districts dropped the Bellamy salute, but it did not become an issue until Congress in June of 1942 passed a law mandating the Bellamy salute for use with the pledge. Suddenly, school districts found themselves not in compliance with the law and backlash developed.

(There was also a counter backlash, led by the Daughters of the American Revolution, whichdecried changing an American tradition in response to the “propaganda [of] alien foes.”)

Ultimately, Congress amended the law just six months later, in December of 1942, and adopted what was known as the “hand-over-heart” salute, supposedly attributed to President Abraham Lincoln.

Ellis credits the inclusion of the “Lincoln salute” to the lobbying work of Gridley Adams, then head of the United States Flag Foundation. Adams was especially upset that the original version of the law said the U.S. flag always needed to be on a staff or hung flat against a wall — which had hurt flag sales. (Adams had promoted a flag that could be hung on a hook.) Ellis suggests Adams “seriously misled” Congress about whether the Lincoln salute had even been discussed at a 1924 flag conference that helped determine much of the flag code.

Roosevelt’s role, if any, appears to have been minimal, notwithstanding a Wikipedia entrythat, without citing a source, says he was responsible for the shift. (Roosevelt, after all, also had signed the first piece of legislation, which mandated the Bellamy salute with the pledge.)

Ellis, in an e-mail, said he was unaware of “any such declaration by him [FDR] or anybody in his administration” to call for Americans to put their hands over their hearts during the National Anthem. He noted that one historian wrote that the Star-Spangled Banner, which made its first appearance at a sporting event during the 1918 World Series, became ubiquitous during World War II in movie theaters and sporting events — especially because team owners did not want anyone to question the patriotism of the athletes who had not joined the military.

 

The Pinocchio Test

 

Romney managed to get just about everything wrong in this story, in what appears to be a misguided attempt to both promote American exceptionalism and ding President Obama.

 

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The Climber

(for my grandfather)

The slow

climb upward, out

of himself, into the clarity

of air remembered, tries his patience,

bends him double, breathless,

cuts, with the rungs

into his hands, dizzies him.

mornings, holding a cup

of cold coffee at the window

looking into the green

depths of the wood, sorting

the images; what he sees,

what he dreamed. This is the last

stage, the steepest terrain,

the strangest country.

He no longer remembers

what he has left, useless, broken,

behind him,  among his lost

comrades, among his dead

loves. Now he has turned

toward a brightness, the glow

he senses ahead, inside,

with the visions he discovers

in old age. Words escape him,

floating, disconnected,

across an emptiness so huge

he cannot imagine its end.

Pride has left him, prowess

is gone, no messages come

offering company or hope.

Yet he is happy. Astonished,

he deepens his solitude,

pulls in the lines, turns off

the phone, cancels the paper.

When the day ends, silencing

the house, he makes a fire,

melts into the darkness,

lifts his head up and sees,

shining ahead: the light,

the brightness of light,

the long day we call forever.

*

The Light

The light

fills him, rising

from inside, meeting, halfway,

the outer, the bright shell of the world,

its great sphere reduced

to the garden, the specificity

of each flower, the single

humming-bird on the shimmery air,

the injured cat who moves

slowly along the paths,

limping and wary. Time

does come round, returning,

and morning dazzles his eye,

the twisted oaks in the wood

creating tunnels of darkness

only the eye and small creatures

inhabit. This is his country,

grown bright in freedom,

where the bridge of is

leads over the abyss

and into the garden of gods.

Here: gems, gold and the Forms,

unbroken, original in splendor,

the remnants of Creation

caught on the fly, transfigured,

as bright as if they were new...

Can one dwell here, forever?

Or is this only a spasm, a glimpse

of the landscape ahead, an emptiness

brimming with light? Cry out

the question. No-one replies.

The cat has rounded a corner, is now

out of sight. The humming-bird

has vanished. The brightness

of the morning, as if behind his eyes,

lingers when he turns away.

--Peter Marin

Watched this am Bill Moyers & Co. and he had former Citigroup chair John Reed and Sen. Byron Dorgan on the breakdown of the banking system and the economic meltdown. What is amazing in their narratives is the fact that all this destruction of the economy with the repeal of Glass-Steagall is still going on and the Republican candidates keep parroting 'regulation' as one of the problems with the economy.

Big banks are rewriting the rules of our economy to the exclusive benefit of their own bottom line. But how did our political and financial class shift the benefits of the economy to the very top, while saddling us with greater debt and tearing new holes in the safety net? Bill Moyers talks with former Citigroup Chairman John Reed and former Senator Byron Dorgan to explore a momentous instance: how the late-90’s merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group – and a friendly Presidential pen — brought down the Glass-Steagall Act, a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression. In effect, says Moyers, they “put the watchdog to sleep.”

There’s no clearer example of the collusion between government and corporate finance than the Citicorp-Travelers merger, which — thanks to the removal of Glass-Steagall — enabled the formation of the financial behemoth known as Citigroup. But even behemoths are vulnerable; when the meltdown hit, the bank cut more than 50,000 jobs, and the taxpayers shelled out more than $45 billion to save it.

Senator Dorgan tells Moyers, “If you were to rank big mistakes in the history of this country, that was one of the bigger ones because it has set back this country in a very significant way."

Now, John Reed regrets his role in the affair, and says lifting the Glass-Steagall protections was a mistake. Given the 2008 meltdown, he’s surprised Wall Street still has so much power over Washington lawmakers.

“I’m quite surprised the political establishment would listen to groups that have been so discredited,” Reed tells Moyers. “It wasn’t that there was one or two or institutions that, you know, got carried away and did stupid things. It was, we all did…. And then the whole system came down.”

from billmoyers.com

At an event in Las Vegas this afternoon, Obama offered his most extensive rebuttal by far to the bogus GOP charge that the push for higher taxes on the wealthy is about “class warfare” and “envy.”

The whole thing is worth a watch — the tone was not one of outrage, but one laced with a good deal of mockery and derision:

Obama made what I think is his clearest case yet that the debate over whether to increase taxes on the wealthy is one that involves choices and priorities. He spelled out that if we don’t ask the wealthy for a bit more,either the deficit will go up, or the burden of doing all the sacrificing to bring it down will fall on those who are least equipped to bear it. He also framed a clear choice between keeping tax breaks for the wealthy and investing in “everything else,” a twist on the 99 percent versus one percent argument that didn’t sound personal at all and came across as eminently sensible and even undeniable. In this narrative, we face a stark choice: Either keep tax cuts for the rich, or invest adequately in the future viability of the whole country.

Obama also waded into the Elizabeth Warren argument — the case that people don’t get rich in a vacuum, and that the wealthy can afford to give a little more back to keep the society that helped enable their good fortune fuctioning smoothly:

“Each of us is only here because somebody, somewhere, felt a responsibility to each other and to our country and helped to create all this incredible opportunity that we call the United States of America. Now it’s our turn to be responsible. And it’s our turn to leave an America built to last for the next generation. That’s our job. And we can do it.”

I don’t know how decisive this particular argument will be to the outcome of the general election — the state of the economy on Election Day 2012 may trump all. But tax fairness and inequality will be important, and this argument seems like a clear loser for Romney, particularly given his own wealth and diminutive tax rate.

Indeed, all indications are that Romney is going to continue making the “envy” and “class warfare” barbs central to his case. But it’s getting harder to figure out who the intended audience for this line is at this point. Does anyone buy it? Given what polls tell us about the mood of the country right now, one wonders if any Republicans will ask themselves whether it’s really a good idea to rush headlong into the general election brandishing the small-minded “envy” and “division” argument against the case Obama made above.

By Greg Sargent |  02:40 PM ET, 01/26/2012

Univ. of Wisconsin prof Howard Schweber in Huffpost blasts away at Gingrich's main sales pitch to the right and the Tea Partiers: resentment. It seems to have a lot of force in today's crazily angry politics and Newt is resenter-in-chief for his Republican supporters:

As for the Tea Party voters, they are supposed to be looking for an outsider á la Ron Paul, not a man who has spent decades in Washington, first as a politician and then profiting from politics.

So what is going on? Simple. Gingrich does not share the evangelical or the Tea Party voters' values -- he shares their resentments. He resents the media ("elites"), the rich (the leadership of his own party), the Democrats (educated people), people who live in big cities (liberals), and of course, Obama, just as they do.

Gingrich and his supporters do not oppose Obama, they resent the fact of his existence. He will speak for his constituents by articulating their resentments in more strident, more combative, more articulate terms than they can themselves, which is why they find him brilliant. Ron Paul's supporters find him brilliant because he reduces the complexities of the world into easy soundbites. Gingrich does that too, but he does much more -- he tells them that their nastiest, darkest, angriest, most irrational self-indulgent justifications are 100%, absolutely right. It's a negative version of a politics of self-esteem: not that you are right to feel good about yourself, but that you are right to be resentful of everyone else.

The worldview is Manichean: Obama's economic policies are not mistaken, he is deliberately trying to make Americans poorer. Obama's foreign policy is not misguided, he is deliberately trying to surrender America to foreign powers. And Obama is not merely not one of the people, he wants to destroy American culture. It is a perfect expression of what Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style" in American politics. But it's a weirdly infantilized version of that style.

When Gingrich talks I hear Rowdy Roddy Piper in They Live: "I am here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I am all out of bubble gum." Gingrich is the WWF version of a national politician, playing out an over-the-top script where the championship belt would belong to us except we were cheated and the refs are crooked and this time we're bringing the folding chair into the ring and that'll show 'em! It's infantilizing in just the way that professional wrestling is pitched to a 12-year-old boy's sensibilities (have you seen those costumes?). Gingrich frequently give the impression of a child about to have a tantrum, and that's just fine -- tantrums are all about resentment. It's not quite the same thing as anger, not even righteous anger -- this is more personal, more envious, more spiteful. The difference between anger and resentment is the difference between "this injustice shall not stand" and "it's not faaaaairrr." Romney wants to be the grownup in the room -- Newt wants to be the bad boy in the corner.

And that's why these voters don't care that Gingrich was a Washington insider, or has a record on family values that would give pause to one of the Borgia popes. It's why they don't really care that he contradicts himself, or says crazy things. They want crazy. They want to hear their anger and resentment made into a national platform. They are the victims of an evil conspiracy -- no one plays the victim better than Gingrich when cornered -- and they resent it.

They don't really care what Gingrich says he will do, or whether it makes sense, or even whether they would approve of his policies or benefit from them. The are filled with resentment, and Gingrich has captured that voice. Romney can't project it, nor can Santorum or Paul. Plenty of the other candidates share the good-versus-evil absolutism, the paranoid style, the willingness to say anything no matter how crazy. But only Newt, Bad Boy Newt, Nasty Newt, the Grandiose One, the Historian (the guy has too many monikers to keep track of, we'll have to hold a contest) -- only Newt has captured the key emotive element that drives the Republican core this year: resentment. The hard right core of the Republican Party is filled with resentment, and they have found just the man to let us all know about it.

Howard Schweber

Huffington Post  1-24-2011

On holiday in Puerto Escondido, incredible beauty of the sea, the flawless ceaseless dimension of it, the power of the surf, the vast expanses of it give a lift one needs after too much inland time. The sea is an entirety that does not collapse except in those shoreward motions we call the waves. Puerto Escondido has one of the great beaches in Mexico. Fish is good, conversation with old friends is good, and the sun and sand mix with a power and a pleasure that is reassuring.

STRETCHED INTEGRITY

 

So many images flying about.

So much that staked a wizardry

inclusive of our trying to find something remarkable.

Not enough of all this to go around.

Or too much, too much that flies off.

Just wield your stretched integrity as best you can.

I might try to find myself included in your circus.

The re-adjustment that flies in the face of chasms

that have never been fully explored.

 

This ceremony we have concocted scrambles

the newfound itineraries of shame. Exaggerated,

the outcall that mangles infamy. The torrid

witless torment of these unrequited timings.

Just have your say, your way, your time

here with such uncertain consequences.  

The psyche is serious business, watch

where you are going.

--Bill Pearlman

1-5-2012

Krugman again talks of this endlessly overemphasized debt problem the right keeps foisting on the American populace. The point he makes is that the problems the economy faces are not debt-driven, and the budget deficit is not the primary issue political policy makers must face. But nobody on the Republican right seems to think clearly on this.

 

In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.

Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!

And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.

But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.

And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.