If history were written without bias, we would mark the beginning of the U.S. civil rights movement as 1947: the year Jackie Robinson, the subject of the popular new movie, 42, broke major league baseball’s “color barrier.”

Filmed under the working title, “Mr. Rickey and Mr. Robinson,” 42tells the story of two highly religious Republicans, one white and one black, who had the courage to change American society. Unfortunately, the movie ignores both the religious convictions and political views of baseball owner Branch Rickey, a white lawyer from Ohio, and Brooklyn Dodgers first-baseman Jackie Robinson, a black athlete from Cairo, Ga. Yet, their religious and political beliefs are crucial to the story.

Jackie Robinson in 1954. (Photo by Bob Sandberg, Look photographer, via Library of Congress)

Remember, the year was 1947: the year before President Harry Truman ordered the military desegregated; seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision; eight years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., public transit bus; 10 years before President Dwight Eisenhower utilized the 101st Airborne to enable the Little Rock Nine to attend Central High School; 16 years before Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his memorable I Have A Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington; and nearly two decades before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were adopted.

The times were not yet “a changing,” and Rickey and Robinson had little more than their beliefs to sustain them.

Rickey’s story begins in 1903 when, as a 22-year-old head coach, he took his Ohio Wesleyan University baseball team to South Bend, Ind., to play Notre Dame. When the team arrived at the old Oliver Hotel to check in, the hotel manager reportedly told Rickey, “I have rooms for all of you except for him”—pointing to catcher Charles Thomas, who was black.

“Why don’t you have a room for him?” Rickey asked. ...

"Because our policy is whites only,” the manager replied.

After some back-and-forth, the hotel manager agreed to let Thomas stay there: in Rickey’s room.

Rickey sent his players to their rooms. When he got to his room, Thomas was sitting on a chair sobbing, pulling at his hands.

“He looked at me and said, ‘It’s my skin. If I could just tear it off, I’d be like everybody else. It’s my skin, it’s my skin, Mr. Rickey!”’

Thomas later became a successful dentist. He never forgot his coach and Rickey never forgot that experience.

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Men who are strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state, researchers claim.

According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data.

"This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power by several Internal Revenue Service agents," the complaint reads. "No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search. IT personnel at the scene, a HIPPA facility warning on the building and the IT portion of the searched premises, and the company executives each warned the IRS agents of these privileged records," it continued.

According to the case, the IRS agents had a search warrant for financial data pertaining to a former employee of the John Doe company, however, "it did not authorize any seizure of any healthcare or medical record of any persons, least of all third parties completely unrelated to the matter," the complaint read.

The class action lawsuit against the IRS seeks $25,000 in compensatory damages "per violation per individual" in addition to punitive damages for constitutional violations. Thus, compensatory damages could start at a minimum of $250 billion.

Flash forward to 2012. America had at that point been in an undefined "war on terror" for 11 years -- the same amount of time from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that greatly expanded the Vietnam War to the 1975 fall of Saigon. Just as during the 1960s and early 1970s, this terror war had provided government with an excuse to greatly expand its domestic spying on American citizens -- some of that through a law called the Patriot Act and some of it even more dubious, constitutionally.

Then, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press published an article about the Obama administration's conduct of its war in a country that we'd never declared war on (it was Cambodia in 1969, but Yemen in 2012) and Obama's Justice Department -- for reasons not yet fully known -- went crazy over the leak. This, then, is a reminder of why history matters so much.

Because if we're not careful... it repeats:

There's every reason to believe that Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on this unwarranted assault on the First Amendment, and if so, he ought to be canned (hasn't he overstayed his welcome, anyway?). Also, you might try to excuse this as a one-off, an ill-advised but isolated incident.

Except that it's not.

Since the day he took office, the Obama administration has undertaken an assault on government whistleblowers -- people informing citizens of what their government doesn't want them to know -- that surpasses anything that Nixon or any other president has done. Since 2009, the Obama administration has brought espionage charges against six whistleblowers. And most of these whistleblowers have been criticizing that way that America conducts its neverending war of the 21st century. One, Thomas Drake, blew the whistle on the illegal warrantless wiretapping that began under George W. Bush. John Kiriakou dropped the dime on illegal U.S. torture -- and was sent away to prison, even as the perpetrators of torture from Dick Cheney to John Yoo continue to walk freely among us.

Nixon had Daniel Ellsberg, and Obama has Bradley Manning of Wikileaks. Okay, so they didn't break into the office of Manning's psychiatrist, but they have detained Manning in a solitary confinement that a UN torture expert called "cruel, inhuman and degrading." Do you feel better about that? Because I don't. The war on whistleblowers, the treatment of Manning, and now this investigation of journalists are all hallmarks of a White House that promised transparency but has been one of the most secretive -- all to the detriment of the public's right to know.

Let's be clear -- this is about Obama... and it is about much, much more than Obama. It is yet another example of how the national security state that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia's own Benjamin Franklin tried to warn us about -- trading liberty for security, and geting neither. To the conservatives reading this, who warn so much about big government running amok...here it is. To the liberals reading this, who thought that one man named Barack Obama could change the system, he couldn't. Only we, the citizens, can truly change things.

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

“For the average American out there, for the 85 and 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, this thing’s already happened. And their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better and more secure than it was before. Full stop. That’s it. They don’t have to worry about anything else.”

Obama, in his comments, suggested that only small segment of the population — those with no insurance or poor insurance — will have to worry about the impact of implementation. But there are a variety of studies and reports that suggest that, beyond those groups, some 10 million people face the prospect of losing their current health care.

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent estimate, by 2018, after the law is fully implemented, 8 million people will be dropped from their employer health plans and 3 million people will shift out of private plans. The number of uninsured would drop by 27 million, while 10 million will be added to Medicaid and 27 million people will participate in health care exchanges. (The White House notes that the number of people overall receiving employer-provided health insurance will increase — and 92 percent of Americans will be insured.)

Not all of the people who shift out of private plans are currently in bad plans; some may simply be priced out of the market as rates increase. (We had explored this issue before.) For instance, Maryland’s biggest health insurer has proposed raising premiums for individual policies by an average of 25 percent next year, arguing that its costs will increase under the health care law.

Indeed, a University of Chicago study found that more than half of individual plans do not meet standards for minimum coverage under the law, and experts say many of those plans could disappear. CNN Money reported that 15 million Americans currently buy policies on the individual market

Federal budgets are always peppered with money for pet projects. What sets the Abrams example apart is the certainty of the Army's position.

Sean Kennedy, director of research for the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste, said Congress should listen when one of the military services says no to more equipment.

"When an institution as risk averse as the Defense Department says they have enough tanks, we can probably believe them," Kennedy said.

Congressional backers of the Abrams upgrades view the vast network of companies, many of them small businesses, that manufacture the tanks' materials and parts as a critical asset that has to be preserved. The money, they say, is a modest investment that will keep important tooling and manufacturing skills from being lost if the Abrams line were to be shut down.

The Lima plant is a study in how federal dollars affect local communities, which in turn hold tight to the federal dollars. The facility is owned by the federal government but operated by the land systems division of General Dynamics, a major defense contractor that spent close to $11 million last year on lobbying, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The tanks that Congress is requiring the Army to buy aren't brand new. Earlier models are being outfitted with a sophisticated suite of electronics that gives the vehicles better microprocessors, color flat panel displays, a more capable communications system, and other improvements. The upgraded tanks cost about $7.5 million each, according to the Army.

The Army's plan was to stop buying tanks until 2017, when production of a newly designed Abrams would begin.

I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.

One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”

The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”