The Frankish Reich

I have an in-law who's doing the same thing. He never drank Bud Light, but now he's researching what other products Anheuser Busch has bought out. Guess what? They got his favorite microbrew! He won't drink that now. Sometimes having a beer is just having a beer, and not making a political statement one way or the other. Many years ago a college friend's parents refused to drive German cars because of Nazi connections. They bought him a Saab. I think he really wanted an Audi, but he had to drive a Saab. Quite a way to live your life.

I thought you deemed this thread closed? What's next, performative ignorance in the manner of our carpetbagging Tarheeler? I can hardly wait. EDIT: mic drop ineffective when speaker bends down to pick up mic and adds, "and just one more thing ..."

[At this point, The Frankish Reich suddenly realizes he has been attempting to engage in a rational discussion with "Chris Farley," remembers who Chris Farley was, realizes why poster has chosen such name, and aborts further attempts]

Well, this is a list of things that disgust you. Which ones should be available to children with parental consent, and at what age? And if certain things (you mention pornography) shouldn't be available to children below a certain age, what efforts should the state make to ensure that? Should everyone have to register with a website, showing ID, authorizing a search of your credit history? These are good and important questions. Again ... think! Don't just do the old man sideways wave of disgust.

Here's what I'm trying to get you to think about. Stop resisting; I think you can do it. There's two things going on in this thread. - There's disgust, and perhaps a little eye-rolling fun, about various things that are thought to be gross excesses of the LGBTQ acceptance movement. That's o.k. People are allowed some of that. I don't particularly like when it's mean-spirited, but making fun of going topless at the White House is fair game. So are a lot of other things here. - There's also a bleed-over into law and politics. That's where you should be ready to have a reasoned discussion. If you honor the rights of parents to decide what's best for their children, then be ready to argue when and why the government should be allowed to override parental choices for their children. If you ask me the same kinds of questions I asked you, I will be happy to give a reasoned response, based on some kind of moral philosophy and grounded in U.S. constitutional law. So if you're doing "disgust" or "making fun of excess," well, just say that. But I'm seeing disgust turning into proposed legislation all over the place. And that's when we should have a fair fight. That's the American tradition.

Well at least this one should be right up your alley: D. You are appalled by the creation of "LGBTQ+ Summer Camps" for kids. You do not believe parents should have the right to send their LGBTQ+-identifying children to such camps, even if both parents want to do so; therefore, you would be in favor of a Wisconsin state law banning such camps. In California, some parents of LGBTQ+-identifying children wish to enroll those kids in "conversion therapy." California has sought to ban this. Is California justified in seeking to override the choice of the child's parents? If not, then why would Wisconsin be justified in banning LGBTQ+ Summer Camps? Extra credit: explain your limiting principle for when State intervention in the parents' decision on how to raise their child is warranted and when it is not.

So please answer: A. Parents of 13 year old pregnant girl support her decision to have an abortion. State of Mississippi says we can't let you do that. Do you agree with the parents or with Mississippi? B. Parents of ultra-orthodox Jewish girl want to take her out of NYS school requirements and to put her into their own system where she will be taught traditional housewife skills and not English/Math/Science/Social Studies. New York State officials object. Who do you support? C. Parents of 15 year old boy want to send him to Christian Summer Camp where he will be taught, among other things, that homosexuality is a grave sin and that the Bible authorized severe punishment up to and including death. Boy says he is gay and does not want to attend. Who do you support?

So clicking through, I see: - Parents are CHOOSING to send their kids to this camp. - No one is FORCING parents to send their kids to this camp. Would I have wanted to send my kids to this camp? No. But then again, I didn't have kids in this situation. At one point does someone else get to override parents' rights to determine what kind of camp they want to send their kids to? I mean, isn't the whole thing here about asserting the rights of parents against governmental/public school efforts to expose them to something their parents object to? So I guess it's ok to override the will of the parents when it conflicts with the opinions of the majority of the society? So if the majority of the society thinks all kids should be vaccinated against COVID, apparently the parents should have no right to override this? So now you see why someone outside the right-wing echo chamber may start to doubt your motivations, and to question whether you are really about parental choice or whether it's about something else entirely.

These people are being played by the same Republican political consultants who successfully played them before. Back then it was the Defense of Marriage Act and all the state laws/referendums against same-sex marriage that were calculated to turn out the vote in the Bush 43 days. It worked then, so why not go back to the same playbook now?

I see that guy anywhere near a parade this month, I'm thinking "oh, he must be IN the Pride Parade." Every man hates what he has to deny.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint: the rainbow flag is a good flag because it is simple in design and representation. It was meant to say something like "all of us united like the constituent colors of the spectrum." The addition of the little triangle messes us the design and the message, implicitly taking out the trans (or whatever exactly it's supposed to mean) from the unified spectrum.

Sometimes a flag is really just a banner. I've known a lot of these flag purists in my time. They're always ready with citations to that flag code - the United States flag has to be flown higher than the state flag, etc., etc. The rainbow flag isn't a state or national flag. Neither is the EFF BIDEN flag that seems so popular at many child-centric events. The Faux Outrage Machine churns on.

I go there to post about Ken Dorsey's offensive scheme. And to fly my Bills flag just slightly higher than my hammer and sickle flag. There's an alterna-Irv there standing at the ready to shout me down.

Then what are you doing here on a Bills fan forum? Maybe you'd be a better fit on the reddit/WhyIAmACommunist forum.

How do you know I didn't? -/s/ Vlad

If you read the recent Tennessee case (or a good summary of it) shooting down the effective ban on drag performances, you'll see the point: under the old "I know it when I see it" Supreme Court doctrine, states and cities can ban or put restrictions on "obscenity," which is typically defined as something meant to appeal to what's called the "prurient interest." In other words, something that's done for sexual titillation rather than for some other purpose. And common sense laws do recognize that distinction. The Tennessee case makes it clear that while there may be obscene drag shows, that's not necessarily the case, and even a wholesale prohibition on drag performances where children may be present run afoul of the first amendment. And that's where a lot of these laws are a type of conservative virtue signaling that would ban some community theater from doing a painful version of Mrs Doubtfire just as much as they'd ban drag queens (or indeed anyone) engaging in simulated or real sex acts on stage.

Oh, I don't know, maybe she a couple things to be proud of ...

I can agree with that. A weekend is fine. That's what it always was, even when I lived in SF. But there's holiday creep everywhere. I think I've got about 60 days before the Halloween Superstore opens up again.

Remember: the Principal is your pal. (Mrs. Lafferty, 4th grade, sends her regards) And my dad was born a lefty. But played baseball righthanded. Why? No one could afford those rare gloves for lefthanders.

Oh, I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of excess out there. But the general principle of "Pride" is kind of the same as when we celebrate other identity-centric days or months. St. Patrick's Day, Columbus Day, Black/Hispanic/Asian Pride, etc.

He kind of did suck (it's hard to separate it from a team in disarray in general though); if he was still performing at a SB contender level, I'm guessing we'd have seen a different ending to his story.

Not just modern-day Unitarians. Thomas Jefferson believed that too. I mean, not just that Jesus was a "good guy," but that the moral philosophy of Jesus was a code to strive to live by. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, is one of two religious works constructed by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson compiled the manuscripts but never published them. The first, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1804, but no copies exist today.[1] The second, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting with a razor and glue numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson's condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine

I worked for Barr's DOJ the first time around, under Bush 41. He was viewed as an honest broker, clearly a Republican (of course) who supported executive authority under the constitution, but not someone with any political ambition of his own (could a guy who looks and talks like him ever be elected anything in post-media saturation America?) or any particular axe to grind. When Trump brought him in after Sessions, that was still the general perception of Barr: boring, predictable, a straight shooter. No one's reputation survives intact after working for Trump. But let me try to explain the kind of law geek perception of how I see him now. Barr has always been consistent on one thing: a clear constitutional theory that Executive power must be asserted and protected. The strongest perspective on this is called the unitary executive theory: all of the Executive power is vested in the President; hence, all our post-FDR administrative state creations ultimately exist at the pleasure of the President, who has an inherent power to override administrative agency decisions and to replace administrative agency officers. Barr isn't the classic unitary executive theorist, but he was highly influenced by that concept when it came to the forefront under Reagan. So how does that explain his actions? How does it explain his seeming defense of Trump up until the election, and then his seeming abandonment of Trump afterwards? It's really not that hard to explain. Barr believes in protecting the authority of the Executive, of The Presidency, not necessarily of the human embodiment of that authority (President George H.W. Bush, President Trump, etc.). He was excoriated for his pre-release spin on the Mueller Report. And of course, it was a bit of spin. But in there too was a defense of the Executive's authority to do certain things no one else in our constitutional system is allowed to do -- strong-arming foreign government (Ukraine) for an arguable diplomatic/military advantage, even if that also brought a possible election campaign advantage. The Executive is authorized by the constitution, Article II, to do a whole lot of things that in the abstract may seem unseemly or even undemocratic. And Barr consistently defends Executive Authority. When I was in law school, the conservative take on things was that the powerful Executive we had up through LBJ had been supplanted by a kind of Legislative Supremacy after Watergate, as Congress asserted its supposed constitutional authority in all sorts of areas it previously kept out of; conservative thought the War Powers Act, for example, was unconstitutional. Conservatives therefore wanted to tilt the balance back toward Executive authority. Barr was part of that movement. So what about the post-election mess? There's really nothing inconsistent in Barr's behavior unless you believe that he should be acting as a political loyalist rather than as a strong-Executive constitutionalist. He saw nothing exceptional about the 2020 election that would have warranted the extraordinary measures Trump and his supporters were advocating. And what about the national security-related papers? Again, those papers belong to The Executive, to The Presidency, to the Article II constitutional Office, not to Donald J. Trump individually. He is therefore not bothered at all by the assertion of Executive authority under the Biden Administration demanding that they be returned. And he seems genuinely flabbergasted by Trump's refusal to do so quickly, honestly, and completely. And again: he doesn't care about his public reputation. His defense (and that's what it was, not officially but in fact) of Trump's actions in the first impeachment basically destroyed his ability to go back to the private sector and resume making big bucks. He didn't care. He will never hold elected office; no one would vote for a lumpy old Eyore-voiced character like him. He could have been a hero to Trumpies by supporting the election fraud claims. He never needed that or wanted that. He doesn't need to be loved. In today's world, where everyone wants attention and to be treated like someone's hero, that's kind of an admirable trait.

And it's not just Trump's unwillingness to listen to the advice of people who know what they're doing. It's also the insane (dementia? psychiatric disorder? both?) idea that he seemingly convinced himself of - the Q Anon concept that he would somehow be "restored" to the Presidency. Yes, I believe his behavior started to show that he at first used the Q Anon nuts in a selfish/disingenuous attempt to further his political career, but that at some point he actually started to believe his own bs. So since I'm kinda/sorta still the once and future President, I can continue to do what a President can do. Read or watch Bill Barr's assessment of this uniquely childish person.

And again, the outgoing President himself is not expected to read the Presidential Records Act. That's what the White House Counsel and/or the National Archives officials advise him on! But the absolute refusal to take sensible advice is the defining characteristic of Donald J. Trump and the Trump Administration. He didn't like what his advisors/cabinet officials were telling him? "You're Fired!" And that's how he winds up getting indicted. Damn fool gonna damn fool.