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Baseball Crank on banning flag desecration:

Personally, I’m all in favor of keeping flag burning legal. Why stop the enemy from identifying himself? Every time some nitwit college student burns a flag on camera, that’s one less idiot who can ever run for public office.

I’ll co-sponsor that proposition, with a slight amendment: every time someone exercises their core First Amendment right to political expression and burns a flag at a public event, let’s make sure that their expression gets the maximum possible exposure. I’m talking front-page, above-the-fold, full-color newspaper coverage. I’m talking a website devoted to pictures, names, addresses, and maybe even phone numbers. Inspired by the Smoking Gun, we could call it the Smoldering Flag.

But, you say, might this not encourage people to burn flags for publicity? Absolutely. But the minimal - and I really do mean minimal - public harm that would result from this policy would be totally counterbalanced by the great public good of identifying those people angry and stupid enough to burn flags in public for any reason (save, of course, a flag disposal ceremony).