Category Archives: David Letterman
Flag Burning
Trump tweet of the week: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences, perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail!”
The Huffington Post reported that most people think President-elect The Donald goes too far. They think flag burners should keep their citizenship. However, they’re cool with the jail part.
Flag Burning
Justice Scalia, for his part, wasn’t cool with either jail or loss of citizenship for burning a flag. Here are a few lines from a Pittsburgh Post Gazette editorial on Scalia’s opinion of flag burning:
“If I were king,” the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said in an interview, “I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag. However, we have a First Amendment, which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged. … Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn’t just mean written words or oral words. … Burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea.”
The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning is a protected form of free speech. And Salon said Trump was cool with that when he appeared on The David Letterman Show in 2015.
Of course, the court also ruled that campaign issue advocacy spending by corporations and unions is a protected form of free speech. We know Hillary’s not cool with that. The Citizens United case involved a movie critical of her. Here’s the trailer.
My favorite example of the exercise of free speech by flag burning occurred at the RNC convention in Cleveland last summer. The burner became the burnee. He caught himself on fire.
Blizzard Bust
Boston got busted but the blizzard was a bust in New York. Central Park got about 8 inches of snow. Not bad but not very historical. “Potentially historical” is how the National Weather Service predicted the blizzard. That caused Louis C.K. to write, “Well I didn’t know you could call a thing historic if it hasn’t happened yet.” His Madison Square Garden show got cancelled.
The New York Post‘s John Podhoretz said, “don’t blame the media, blame the politicians.” Governor Cuomo shut down the subway system for the first time in 101 years – “because he wanted to”. Now that’s historical. Podhoretz called NY Mayor DeBlasio a “6-foot, 5-inch wagging finger, ordering everybody to go inside and stay inside if they knew what was good for them”.
Kevin Williamson summed it up in National Review. “If you happen to be a power-hungry politician, a state of emergency is a very useful thing”.
President Obama’s 72 Million Virgin Voters
I take a back seat to no one when it comes to behaving like a 12 year old, but then I’m not asking for the keys to Air Force One.
If you’re interested, here are links to the president’s “bullshitter” comment, the Lena Dunham “lose your voting virginity to Obama” ad, a Rich Lowry column on the same, and a really creepy kid hymn that is so over the top it almost makes you wonder if a Romney department of dirty tricks produced it.
