Back during the health care debate, I argued on these pages that a mandate without (at least) a public option was a mistake. I thought that forcing people into the private health care market, without at least giving them a public option, was immoral. Little did I imagine that it might also be unconstitutional. But now the Supreme Court may rule that way. They seem to be leaning that way. Then what will we do? What is our Plan B?

I’m sure the President and Senate Democrats have people furiously working on that now. I hope different people than the ones who advised them to give up on single payer and the public option without a fight! Meanwhile, since no one has blogged on this site lately, I’ll throw out a half-baked idea – I’ll think out loud for a moment. Let’s let states decide by referendum whether to join one of two blocks. One block will adopt a single-payer system, or at least Obamacare with a public option. The other will adopt a Paul Ryan plan – one that is exactly like the status quo, only without Medicare and Medicaid. Joining one block or the other will have to be binding for a long time, at least a decade, and we may have to restrict the benefits of moving between blocks, so that refugees from the red states don’t bankrupt the blue ones, or (ha ha!) vice versa.

Who can forget the video of John McCain croaking “Bomb Bomb Iran” to the tune of Jan and Dean’s “Barbara Ann?” It’s election season again, time for all good Republican candidates since Reagan to call for immediate war with Iran. Of course they don’t mean it. Never have. Iran intentionally leveraged the hostage crisis to help Reagan get elected, and the grateful Reagan administration sold arms and technology to Iran in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. While talking tough about Iran, George W. Bush did them the greatest favor in their history: he turned Iraq, Iran’s former nemesis, into a satellite of Iran. Now, as usual, we have Iran acting especially aggressively during an election year. Who knows what the Republicans have promised them this time? Or maybe Iran still owes them for the Iraq War. Or maybe Iran just likes the Republicans, since Iran and the Republicans share the same social agenda and the same theory of the (NON-) separation of church and state.

For many years candidates from the American far right have claimed exclusive ownership of Christianity. Rick Santorum, who recently called President Obama’s Christianity “phony,” is only the latest example. Many Christians who are not on the political far right, including me, find this offensive. But from our point of view it’s really far worse than just offensive; it harms Christianity, which is our religion too, both from within and without. It harms it from within by cheapening it, turning it into an instrument of secular power, dividing the Christian community in novel new ways, and teaching millions of Christians to read the Bible through party-colored glasses. It harms it from without because millions of non-Christians accept the far right’s claim to own Christianity, and for that reason they see Christianity as a great enemy of reason and progress; they see Christian leaders as insincere demagogues; and they see ordinary Christians as narrow-minded simpletons.

That political power can be bought and sold in America is nothing new. Most of our founders were local financial elites who rebelled against the advantages held by the greater financial elites who controlled our mother country: Great Britain. In order for their rebellion to succeed, they needed a great deal of help from non-elite American colonists, most of whom were small farmers, small businessmen, and artisans, with no skin in the game. To get their help, Congress (which was then, as now, mainly representative of only the wealthiest Americans) had to offer ordinary people exciting new political rights. Although it tried hard, Congress couldn’t completely withdraw these offers at the end of the war, and the resulting compromise – thanks especially to George Washington – was the basics of what we now know as the United States of America.

Since then the U.S.A. has always been more or less schizophrenic in its attitudes about distributive justice (who deserves which parts of our financial pie). This can be traced to the majority of the founders, who were the wealthiest colonists. They were sure that they deserved to be much wealthier than their fellow Americans – even if they inherited most of their advantages (as they usually did) – yet they were also sure that they did not deserve to be small fry compared with their counterparts in Great Britain, who also inherited most of their advantages. Their arguments were incoherent. How can a minor noble, or freeman, maintain that his heredity makes him far more deserving than his subjects but also complain because it makes him inferior to his hereditary superiors? The only thing that got America past this logical incoherence was a practical alliance between our wealthy and middle classes. The American wealthy have always had undo political influence, but they have had to maintain a strong middle class in order to defend their practical position. Now, for the first time in our history, this is no longer true. In the new global economy they no longer need American workers, and they rarely need well-informed American votes. Most of the time they can simply purchase the political outcomes they desire. Candidates for office cannot get elected without their help, and through ownership of the media they have near total control of the majority of public opinion. Recognition that this is our current situation is the root cause of the “Occupy” or “99%” movement. The future of our country as a democracy depends on the success of this movement.

President Obama was a successful candidate for office on the proposal that he would end the Bush tax cuts for those who earn more than $100,000 per year. Soon the proposal moved to $250,000. Now it’s over a million and rising, and still the Bush tax cuts haven’t ended for anyone. I think that $100,000 was a generous number and we should get back to it.

Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY was a big part of the push to raise the bar above a million. He said: "it is hard to ask more of households that make $250,000 or $300,000 a year. They are not rich, and in large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that's associated with wealth in America." According to the New York Daily News, he went on to say that taxing those who earn less than $1 million would hurt small business. This is all pure nonsense, although I think Schumer may not know it. Like most Senators from both parties, he is too wealthy to know much about American life.

Wednesday was an informative day for observers of the death penalty in America. Georgia executed Troy Davis and Texas executed Lawrence Russell Brewer. Based on the crimes for which they were convicted, anyone would have guessed that Brewer’s execution would be the big national story. His crime was one of the biggest news stories of 1998. He and two other white supremacists chained a handicapped African America, James Byrd, to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him to death near Jasper, TX., for no reason except that Byrd was an African American who was easy to victimize. That is the only reason that I, and many others, have ever heard of Jasper, TX, and it ruined the name Jasper for me (sorry Angelo!). That crime more than any other, even more than the Matthew Shepard case, launched the movement for special hate crime legislation in America.

Despite the high profile of Brewer’s crime, it was Davis’s execution that captured all of the media attention Wednesday. Davis’s alleged crime was heinous, the murder of an off-duty police officer, but it was never national news, like Brewers’. What made Davis’s execution so much more newsworthy than Brewer’s was that there were doubts about Davis’s guilt – serious doubts! Over a million people, including leading liberals and conservatives, signed petitions calling for a stay of execution and a re-examination of his case. An interesting sub-plot to these cases was that the family of the victim in the Davis case, where there was so much doubt about his guilt, was pro-capital punishment and claimed that they needed Davis’s death to get on with their lives. The family of James Byrd, on the other hand, was opposed to capital punishment and tried to save the life of Brewer, his murderer, even though there was no doubt about Brewer’s guilt.

I have no time for a blog, as we are busy preparing for Irene here. But I just saw the headlines and I saw that Ron Paul is speaking out against any national response to Irene. No surprise there: he’s a libertarian. Then I made the mistake of reading on, and I was floored. I have to say something! Paul said that he has special expertise on this subject because Galveston County, a frequent target of hurricanes, is inside his Texas district, AND he said “"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960,” …back when the federal government stayed out of these things according to Paul.

EXTRAORDINARY THAT HE WOULD DARE SAY 1900! Does he not know that the Galveston hurricane of 1900 was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, that more than 6,000 Galvestonians died in it (more than twice as many Americans as were killed on 9/11), that because of the magnitude of that disaster our national government got involved in hurricane prediction and protection, especially in the building of sea walls to protect populous, hurricane-prone places like Galveston, and that the sea wall they helped build on Galveston afterwards has prevented tragedy on a similar scale there in several big hurricanes in the twentieth century and one in the twenty-first. Does he really know anything about Galveston, which is in his district? Or is he being intentionally insensitive, in the name of his libertarian principles, about Galveston and the year 1900, because he really believes in some sort of Social Darwinist kind of libertarian natural selection?

Some of my favorite ideas about justice come from the American political philosopher, John Rawls (1921 – 2002). I am especially fond of Rawls’s position on the just distribution of resources:

Social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity. (A Theory of Justice, Harvard: Belknap Press, 1971, p. 83)

Moses Maimonides (1135 – 1205) was one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of all time. Rabbi and philosopher, and author of the still popular Guide for the Perplexed, he lived his whole life in Muslim countries, in an era when Muslim countries were generally much more tolerant towards Judaism than were Christian countries. About his thought, one thing is clear: he would have opposed Israel's recent attacks on Gaza.

Maimonides made lasting contributions to our best thought on many subjects. One of these subjects was morality in siege warfare. His moral principles of siege warfare are admired and endorsed by many leading just war theorists, today, and I think that his arguments prove that Israel’s current military actions in Gaza are immoral. In particular, I appeal to his absolute condemnation of “four-sided sieges” – sieges in which the besieging power forces non-combatants to stay and suffer the fate of the besieged.

Last year Army 1st Lieutenant, Ehrin Watada, refused an order to deploy to Iraq because he believes that the U.S. war effort there is "illegal and immoral". He has no shortage of vocal supporters and critics. However, his case raises important problems that are not yet getting the public attention they deserve. I will say something about two of them, one in this blog and one in the next.