Miss America and Cries of Sedition - UPDATE

Apparently, Miss America has some class:
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You betcha Caressa Cameron's not picking political sides, but Miss America 2010 is willing to say she's a fan of the Palins.

"She's someone who cares about the world around her, and she comes from a pageantry background," Cameron said of Sarah Palin at a lunch hosted by Tammy Haddad at Cafe Milano on Monday. "It shows good light on the program in my opinion."

Like a young Palin, Cameron wants to be a TV reporter and saw opportunity in pageantry. As for whether she plays for the same team politically, Cameron's not saying.

"I guess I could say I'm a fan," Cameron said of Palin. "I'm a fan of anyone who is trying to work for the greater good of the people, period."

Cameron was definitive about one thing -- she has issues with partisan politics.

"I think the problem sometimes with people is that they are so concerned with their allegiance to their party that they forget what's right for the American people," Cameron told Yeas & Nays.

As for Bristol, they both advocate a similar line -- preventing unwanted teen pregnancies. And Cameron praised Bristol for her work to deglamorize the idea of being a teen mom.

"I'm sure she's getting flak in regards to probably being a hypocrite and saying, 'Oh, go be abstinent now,' " Cameron said. " ... But I think some of the best lessons are taught by people who have walked the road that you would rather not walk."
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Wow. Good on you, Miss America.

And Joseph Klein takes apart Joe Klein:
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Times columnist Joe Klein never misses an opportunity to make a fool of himself. His latest bufoonery was displayed on NBC’s April 18 edition of “The Chris Matthews Show.”

I did a little bit of research just before this show – it’s on this little napkin here. I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements, especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right up close to being seditious.

I suggest that next time Joe Klein do a more thorough research job and use a much larger napkin as a crib sheet. He might have discovered the discredited and short-lived Sedition Act, passed 22 years after the Declaration of Independence, which outlawed conspiracies “to oppose any measure or measures of the government” and made it illegal for anyone to express “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against Congress or the president.

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson opposed it.

James Madison had argued that the Sedition Act attacked the

right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people

As president, Jefferson pardoned all who were convicted under the Sedition Act and helped pay their fines. The law was off the books by 1802. As Jefferson said in his inaugural address, Americans have the right

to think freely and to speak and write what they think.

It looks like Joe Klein is on the side of the discredited Sedition Act, in opposition to Jefferson and Madison. Yet, ironically, he would have been punished himself for saying such “malicious” things against the Bush administration as:

I think this has been a profoundly un-American administration.

Joe sure sounds like he was using language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. Shame on him!

I’ll stick with Madison and Jefferson, who recognized the the right of the people to freely criticize their government. That applies to protecting Joe Klein and his leftist friends who railed against Bush for eight years or Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin who are railing against Obama’s big government policies today.

If Joe Klein had bothered to actually tune into Glenn Beck’s program, he would have heard Beck repeatedly quote this motto of peaceful protest from Mahatma Ghandi:

Use truth as your anvil, nonviolence as your hammer and anything that does not stand the test when it is brought to the anvil of truth and hammered with nonviolence, reject it.

Perhaps it is time for Joe Klein to lift his head out of his intellectual bog known as the Swampland blog. Perhaps he can then begin to understand that Beck, Palin and the Tea Party protestors embody what Jefferson and Madison’s concept of political dissent is all about.

UPDATE: Here's Glenn mocking Klein earlier this year: