Rov_Scam
3hr ago
Trying to convince you that at least some country music is worth listening to requires knowledge of what kind of music you already prefer. That being said, as the resident music maven I feel obliged to give my opinion as someone who agrees that the TPUSA halftime country was garbage:
Emmylou Harris - Boulder to Birmingham
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
Here's the way I look at the whole dueling halftime show thing: Some people wanted a country music halftime show, and some wanted a Hispanic halftime show. They could have just gotten whatever version of the Texas Tornados is still touring and called it a day, and everyone would have agreed that it was the best halftime show ever. There could have even been a surprise appearance by Linda Ronstadt. And of course they would have performed their cover of Ely's "She Never Spoke Spanish to Me", which seems like a fitting commentary on the current situation, though I'm not sure exactly why.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
How do you get boomer conservatives to do something about this? Why do they just lay down and take it?
The kneeling scandal showed that people generally prefer watching and complaining to not watching. I know two people who have given up on the NFL for political reasons, but I get the impression that they weren't particularly big football fans before all of that. For most people, the personal enjoyment they get out of following a team and watching them every week is greater than whatever disgust they have for the infrequent intrusions of politics into the game, and until that changes, the NFL won't change.
This kind of attrition will only happen when the on-field product is affected, and that hasn't happened thus far. Bad Bunny's performance was 15 minutes when both teams were in the locker room. The kneeling happened before the games, and would have gone unnoticed had no one reported on it (even Kaepernick only talked about it after he was asked by a reporter). For instance, I used to watch NASCAR. I used to defend NASCAR to all the unsophisticated meatheads who told me that it wasn't a real sport and that it was less entertaining than watching paint dry. I was incredibly happy when it was gaining momentum in the mid-2000s. It went from being on TNN and ESPN to getting major network coverage, and while it was never going to come close to football, rivaling the popularity of baseball seemed a distinct possibility.
Then they decided to tinker with the format. The introduction of the Chase wasn't bad, but they kept tinkering with the format tho ensure maximum drama at the end of the season. Then they tinkered with the cars. Then drivers started getting into pro wrestling-style feuds. Then they decided to run the races in stages, and eliminate finishes under caution, and by this point my interest had eroded to the point that I had no idea what was going on. My father still watches religiously and defends almost every decision NASCAR makes. Yet when I go over there on Sundays and watch the end of a race with him I comment that the leader is too far ahead to allow the race to finish, so mum better be prepared to delay dinner for the inevitable caution, to which my father responds that that won't happen, only for there to inevitable be a crash and a green-white-checker finish. Every fucking time.
But I digress. Conservatives actively hating the NFL isn't going to do anything to change the NFL, because hating the NFL requires one to actually care about the NFL. And the NFL still makes money. For conservative ire to actually hurt the NFL it would have to be so pervasive that conservatives not only give up on it, but don't even care if it comes back. What we have now is akin to performatively breaking up with your girlfriend over some minor disagreement, but still taking her calls even though nothing has changed. I watched the Super Bowl with a lot of people who complained about the Bad Bunny performance and acted like they were owed another halftime show. But if they really cared that much they would have just stayed home and watched something else.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
No, I'm reducing American citizenship to the terms outlined in the Constitution and US law, which is the only definition that matters. What you're trying to do is introduce additional criteria that doesn't come from anywhere accept your own imagination to define American as that which conforms to your own biases of what Americans are supposed to be. Well, two can play at that game; for that matter, 200 million can play at that game, and you don't have any authority to make that determination over them. The only authority that matters in this case is that of the US government, and that is who I'll defer to on definitions of who counts as an American. You can't just invent your own definitions for things that are already well-defined because the implications make you uncomfortable.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
I understand your point, but I don't know how you can conclude that Roman Polanski is American. He only lived in the US for about five years.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
Sorry, he is. From the State Department website:
Puerto Rico comes within the definition of "United States" given in section 101(a)(38) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). A person born in Puerto Rico acquires U.S. citizenship in the same way as one born in any of the 50 States.
Puerto Ricans weren't granted citizenship by treaty but through the Jones Act in 1917. You can make the argument that gaining citizenship by statute isn't the same as being entitled to citizenship under the Constitution, but by that logic you'd have to concede that John McCain and Ted Cruz aren't Americans either. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was under US jurisdiction at the time but not an incorporated territory, and Cruz was born in Canada, a foreign country. Both rely on statutes outlining the circumstances under which children of US citizens born abroad can claim US citizenship.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
UTree is entertaining, but as someone who watches a lot of his videos, it's clear that he knows very little about football. He's basically a go-to if you want to hear a distilled version of three hours of sports talk callers.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I thought about speculating about what may have happened but I didn't because it would be just that, speculation. I don't know what happened, and the Beacon doesn't either, and can only point to lack of evidence, but the Oxford thing isn't something that's a matter of public record. The ministry thing is, but the article admits that the records only note the transfer and not the reason for it, and it could be that all the church knew was that he requested a transfer and was granted one. If the family was indeed receiving death threats it's certainly plausible that they didn't tell anybody and quietly requested a transfer. But I don't know, and unless one can find contemporaneous accounts that directly contradict the story, or find a relative who insists that Wes was never told that, it's not the kind of thing we can know. Even if it's false and the story was embellished through the generations, "Guy repeats family story without doing intensive historical research" isn't the kind of scandal that's going to sink a campaign.
Moore himself is one of young moderates who is seen as a rising star in the party. He's a YIMBY who is concerned about budget deficits and has a distinguished military record. He's somewhat pro Israel. George Clooney thinks he should run for president and he often gets named in the conversation, but he hasn't done anything to indicate he'd even be interested. Progressives don't like him because they live in a bubble where they think every Democrat is super far left, even though his views are more or less representative of the party as a whole. He's more or less the anti-Harris in the sense that he's a good speaker and has been pretty consistent throughout his career and doesn't sound like his positions are based on what some advisor told him played well in a focus group. As a Democrat I'd have no issue voting for him if he were the nominee, but I honestly don't know enough about him to say that I'd prefer him in a primary to a guy like Shapiro, though I'm biased in that regard.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
It would be easier for me to take your claim seriously if you hadn't said it like this:
The Washington Free Beacon has done two reports on Moore in recent months that are probably best considered bombshells and exclusionary.
His academic credentials appear to have been heavily fabricated.
A widely told anecdote about his ancestor fleeing from the KKK appears entirely fictious.
As for the first claim, the story says that he made some statements about his time at Oxford that the Beacon couldn't verify, other than that he completed a Masters program there but never received the actual diploma. And there's something about the dates not lining up with what we know about his life. There's probably some weird administrative explanation for this, but I'm not going to speculate. The article has a lot of weasely statements like
The problems start with confusion—which neither Moore's staff nor Oxford's registrars were willing or able to clear up—about when Moore completed his studies, when he received his degree, whether he submitted his thesis, and what the title of the work was.
I'd emphasize the "willing" part: They had questions. Moore's people didn't think a story in a right-wing publication was worth wasting the governor's time clearing up, so they took the path of least resistance and sent over written confirmation that he studied at Oxford. Oxford probably told them that they weren't in the business of disclosing student records to anyone who called. I don't know what the truth is here, but calling his academic credentials "heavily fabricated" is quite a stretch based on what we actually know.
The second item can be dismissed even more quickly, as it's the kind of family lore that most people aren't going to perform any serious research to confirm. But even still, the Beacon's reporting didn't actually reveal the story as fictitious, they just couldn't confirm it. And I don't know how they would be able to confirm it. The contents of sermons from black preachers in the South over 100 years ago weren't exactly comprehensively cataloged. Whether or not some random black guy got death threats in 1924 isn't the kind of thing that normally makes the public record. I don't know that political candidates at the state level are in the habit of performing independent research on stories their parents told them, but even if they are, there's nothing here that directly contradicts anything Moore said. The reporting certainly muddies the waters and casts doubt on the story, but again, that's a far cry from "entirely fictitious".
At this point, I know that you're going to argue that the specifics don't matter and that there's enough here to suggest that Moore has a problem of at least not being entirely truthful, and that this is in itself newsworthy. And I agree. The problem I have is that you claim
Our big media outlets just aren’t investigating (unless of course, it’s the Right).
While this is true with respect to the specific stories you mentioned, this isn't true with regard to the overall theme that Wes Moore may have engaged in some degree of fabulism. CNN ran a story questioning claims that he "grew up in" Baltimore. And if that seems too small potatoes for you, the New York Times ran a story about his incorrectly claiming that he was awarded a Bronze Star, and they had mentioned a number of such controversies in a piece on the 2022 primary. In other words, the mainstream media reported on Wes Moore's questionable relationship with the truth during a time when it actually mattered. Moore is running for reelection this year, but as an incumbent Democrat in a state with a heavy Democratic advantage, it's unlikely that a minor scandal like this is going to spark his downfall. The people with the most to gain here are his primary challengers; if this were that big a deal they'd certainly be trying to make some hay out of it.
But you don't seem to concerned about his reelection, because who actually cares about the Governor of Maryland anyway? No, your framing is in terms of the 2028 presidential election:
Those who have been following the upcoming election cycle may have noted that Wes Moore (current governor of Maryland) has quietly been dropped from top ten lists and is starting to be listed as someone who might not run.
We're at least a year out from when the first candidates will start declaring. Who were the top ten Democratic prospects at the beginning of 2018? I've looked, and I can't find anything. The few polls on the subject that were being conducted at the time were asking about far fewer than ten people, and those included Oprah Winfrey and The Rock. The earliest poll in which I can find ten candidates (February 2019) has the 9 and 10 positions occupied by Michael Bloomberg and Sherrod Brown, who both clock in behind Someone Else at 8 (the poll named 20 actual candidates). Only 11 candidates actually made it to the primaries, and that includes people like Tom Steyer and Deval Patrick. My point is that saying someone is in a top ten list doesn't mean much, and them dropping off a top ten list only means that they went from a fringe candidate to a non-candidate.
Finally, even if it turns out that Wes Moore fabricated this stuff, why does the right actually care? They are currently in thrall of one of the biggest pathological liars the office has ever known, and as far as I'm concerned they've forfeited the right to get on their high horse about whether it's really plausible that Wes Moore's great-grandfather got death threats from the Klan. Trump lied about his father being born in Germany and his grandfather being born in Sweden. He keeps insisting that his first inauguration parade was bigger than Obama's when it clearly wasn't, and he doubled down on the whole hurricane hitting Alabama thing. Almost as soon as he entered politics in 2015 he would say something on the campaign trail and when it became an issue he would deny that he said it, even though it was only a day or two before and was recorded on tape. Hell, just a couple weeks ago he had his press secretary denying that he said Iceland when he meant Greenland. I don't get how a publication like the Beacon can support Trump through the endless parade of bullshit, yet when Wes Moore says something it's a huge scandal because he didn't hire a genealogist to dig into 100 year old church records so he can verify something his parents told him.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Wouldn't it be the opposite? The grower could get aroused for the fitting and experience significant shrinkage when he gets out into the cold air.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
The thing about expressing a desire to be treated as such was more to account for people with an unintentionally androgynous appearance who are women under anyone's definition but for whom you wouldn't necessarily know it unless you were told. I wasn't referring to trans people who make no effort to appear as women. But when someone has a stereotypically feminine appearance, one generally assumes they are female and treats them as a woman, no? I know you probably think you can spot trannies a mile away, but I've known enough women who have a mannish appearance that I'm hesitant to start making assumptions about the shape of their genitalia. I'm guessing that for north of 99% of the women you actually deal with you don't give the matter a second thought.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Yes, and that's almost certainly the definition that you operate on, and that Marsha Blackburn operates on, and that Ketanji Brown Jackson operates on, despite her insistence that she doesn't operate on any definition besides perhaps a legal one. We can talk definitions until the end of time, but in the real world, when we have to make a decision whether to call someone sir or ma'am, we aren't asking to see their genitals or for chromosomal testing results and instead make a snap judgment based on their appearance.
I was a history major in college, and one of the biggest problems I have with non-professional pop historians (Howard Zinn, Jared Diamond, etc.) as opposed to academic historians who actually have formal training is that the former tend to invent just-so stories and compile evidence to support them, as though the truth of a thesis is determined by the number of footnotes. Meanwhile, there is so much counter-evidence available to anyone who does even a cursory investigation that the entire thesis can be dismissed entirely. One of the problems I always had with history writing is that every time I thought I had to develop a thesis I'd inevitably have to retool it after finding something that didn't fit, which happened about sixteen times per project. Hell, to give you a sneak preview to the next Pittsburgh series installment, I was researching the City Beautiful movement from the late-19th and early 20th centuries. The classic story is that the movement was inspired by the White City at the 1983 World's Fair in Chicago, but supposedly those in the know know that the real inspiration for the movement was the 1901 McMillan Plan to redesign Washington, D.C. Except a good number of buildings supposedly built as part of the movement predate the plan, and eliminating them seems wrong. Then again, there were antecedents and it only makes sense that they would get merged with the new movement, and now I've spent two hours researching a point from an introductory section that will nonetheless inform how I treat the rest of the piece. This is especially difficult because my normal instinct would be to "teach the controversy", which means writing six paragraphs to go in-depth on the history of a city planning movement because I want to use the movement's precepts as a framing device to describe a neighborhood. It's frustrating as hell, and it happens all the time. It would be a lot easier if I just put blinders on, limited myself to one sentence "The City Beautiful movement started with the White City at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago" and forgot about it. But then I might just be repeating a myth, and that's the last thing I want to do, put myself in the same league as Jared Diamond even though the stakes are a lot lower.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Okay, but I'll ask this question for the millionth time – what is gender identity?
When Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson for her definition of a woman during her confirmation hearing, Jackson gave a weasely answer that satisfied nobody and caused a minor kerfuffel over her need to defer to a medical professional a determination that the average person can make in five seconds. If Jackson wanted to turn the tables she should have confidently asserted that a woman was someone, anyone, who made it clear that they wished to be treated as such, whether explicitly or by adopting conventional gender norms. If Blackburn were smart she would leave it right there and change the subject, but she's a senator, and it's unlikely that she'd be able to resist pressing the issue further. Hell, in the real case she could have left it at that but had to press the issue further.
Since we all know that no definition that doesn't involve genetics or genitals is unacceptable to conservatives, there's a strong likelihood that the senator would have prodded in that direction, at which point Jackson could have told Ms. Blackburn that she assumed that she (Marsha Blackburn) was a woman despite never having seen her (Marsha Blackburn's) genitals nor though much about what they might look like. At this point Ms. Blackburn has no choice but to back off and change the subject, leaving Jackson with the last word, as the subject is, for all intents and purposes, now her (Marsha Blackburn's) genitals, unless of course Ms. Blackburn really wants her genitals to be the subject of senate confirmation hearings.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
It isn't quite analogous since adopted children don't automatically get citizenship. With most same-sex couples this isn't an issue because a typical scenario in e.g. the US would be that both the biological parent and the adoptive parent are US citizens and the child is born in the US. If a man who is a US citizen living in Europe marries an Italian widow and adopts her son, and an amended birth certificate is issued recognizing him as the father, the child will not be considered a native-born US citizen as he would if the man were the actual father. The child could get US citizenship through naturalization, but that would require the family to be living in the US. By the same token, the kid in the case in question could probably get Irish citizenship if they were actually living in Ireland, but they aren't and there's no indication that they ever plan to.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
That's not the issue here. The child can get citizenship through the biological mother or father, but the trans person doesn't want to register as the baby's father, and Ireland will only recognize the person who gave birth to the child as the mother.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Do people already forget the impacts of the drive to push more and more people into home borrowership twenty years ago, even resulting in significant impacts to government coffers as they were left picking up the pieces.
You don't even have to go back that far. The most recent appreciation in housing prices from the COVID era and renewed discussions on affordability directly stem from the wave of home purchases from the era of rock-bottom interest rates. It's basic supply in demand. Sale prices of homes are more reflective of mortgage payments than they are of the sticker price; it makes more sense to talk about a $1500/month house than a $250,000 house. This difference is especially clear in the Pittsburgh area, where houses just outside of Allegheny County command a price premium due to lower property taxes. If there's a class of people who couldn't afford a particular house at 7% but now can at 3.5%, the house is going to cost more.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Right, but that equity is only useful if you're going to sell it, or you need to borrow money and can afford to make the payments. If I were to buy a $100,000 house tomorrow, and I make the kind of money for which the loan is comfortably affordable but not so much that I could comforably afford a house worth much more than that, being able to borrow $900,000 isn't much of an advantage. Maybe if circumstances change such that I need to borrow money and I can get a better interest rate on a HELOC than I would on a personal loan, but even then the origination fees combined with the fact that the bank now has a lien on your house makes it a questionable decision unless the circumstances call for it.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
It's common, but I don't think you realize how many motions are filed in a typical case. Not many come with opinions, even the contested ones
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Except no such category of cases exists. There are categories of cases that are more likely to get an opinion, but that's no guarantee that you're going to get one, even if the trial judge really likes to hear himself talk. I have had a few cases where the judge wanted us to provide additional briefs on a relatively new argument we were making and I thought he might issue an opinion but he didn't, even though he seemed interested in the legal basis of a hearsay exception that he made up himself.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Let me offer a fanciful hypothetical (perhaps not as fanciful as a hypo about the Alien Enemies Act and the British invasion). Imagine that a federal judge decided that he would no longer offer any rationales for his decisions. He would simply invite the parties to court, listen to their arguments, and announce a judgment for the plaintiff or the defendant from the bench, and then adjourn court. Following that oral order, the clerk would enter a judgment for the prevailing party. The judge explains that he only needs to issue an order, and no statute requires him to explain his reasoning. The Circuit Court consistently reverses this judge's rulings, and grants writs of mandamus, but the judge continues his practice.
Sometimes I wish the Volokh conspiracy contributors wouldn't make it so patently obvious that they never practiced law a day in their lives.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
No, one wouldn't expect that. Orders from trial courts seldom come with opinions. I file hundreds of motions per year and exactly zero have ended in a written opinion. If I'm lucky I might get an explanation from the bench. Usually the judge doesn't say anything but that he'll take it under advisement and he signs an order prepared by counsel a week later.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Orders from trial courts only rarely contain opinions. The judge decided to write a brief opinion critical of the administration from putting him in a position where he had to issue the order. Why? Because he can. Judges make performative comments like this all the time, it just usually happens during motion arguments when nobody is there but the court staff and the attorneys.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
The 1948 Act's original purpose had nothing to do with churches; those attacks didn't start until the 1960s. It was originally passed in 1870 in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment and was revised in 1948 after renewed intimidation campaigns to prevent blacks from voting. I'm not aware of any cases that don't involve the right to vote, though there may be some. That particular count fails for two reasons. The first is that the statute requires a specific intent to violate a particular right. There's no evidence that the protestors specifically entered the church because they wanted to prevent the congregation from being able to practice their religion. To the contrary, pretty much everyone agrees, and the indictment even admits, that the intent of the disruption was to protest ICE; interfering with a church service was an incidental consequence. If I beat a guy up and he can't vote the next day because he's in the hospital, it certainly interferes with a civil right, but it's a lot different than if I beat him up specifically to prevent him from voting.
The more crucial reason, though, that the statute doesn't apply here, is because it generally doesn't apply to rights where the only constitutional protection is from state action. If a group of people is protesting on the street and counterprotestors show up and disrupt the protest, they're certainly interfering with the first group's First Amendment rights in much the same way that the anti-ICE protestors were interfering with the practice of religion when they disrupted the church service, but there's no civil rights violation there. The same holds true if it were a sanctioned protest on private property (say, in a shopping center parking lot) that was being disrupted.
I think it's more that they're the kind of sports that the average person can stomach watching for a few hours once every four years. I'm watching luge right now, but I wouldn't want to watch it every week.
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