Now I'm scared.

trashing restaurants & pub function rooms? that seems to be a thing for politically connected rich kids at OU - see "Bullingdon Club"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...

It's always nice to have someone who knows what he's talking about in comments, ...

Hey! I resemble that remark!

Crazy people
http://www.wnd.com/2014/10/...

Crazy person sues
http://www.freedomwatchusa....

Fuck me Agnes, speaking of Wallace and oppression of blahs Digby has a doozy this evening, from Larry Klayman:

Does anyone doubt that former Alabama Gov. George Wallace was a racist,
after he banned blacks from attending the state’s university in the
1960s? So too can anyone refute that Obama’s not even temporarily
banning West Africans from entering the United States is also as least
de facto racism, as this high risk caper puts whites and others at risk
at the expense of not even temporarily “inconveniencing” his fellow
Africans. Wallace and Obama are both despicable and both to be condemned
to the trash heap of history for their actions.

*headdesk**headdesk**headdesk*

Refusal to perform racial profiling is the new racism!

"Whites and others" are the victims of selective persecution!

"Obama... his fellow Africans"; nope, nothing racist about accusing someone of acting like all those other black people.

And it's not like you can point out the hypocrisy because they pride themselves on the strength of their ability to avoid reality and the virulence of their petulance.

We've had as many infected Texans travel by plane as we've had Liberians.

It's worth noting that, since Duncan died of Ebola back on October 8, some 425 Americans have been shot to death.

It's worth noting, but nobody notices.

Hmm, let's see what one radical Trotskyite had to say about the "general right" of "individuals" to "decide who they will serve":

"[I]f an inn-keeper, or other victualler, hangs out a sign and opens
his house for travelers, it is an implied engagement to entertain all persons
who travel that way; and upon this universal assumpsit an action on the
case will lie against him for damages, if he without good reason refuses to
admit a traveler." -Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

You'd think someone with an Oxford education might be aware of this, but...

Let the record show that Cookie claims a BA Oxon in "Modern History and Politics". And an MA. What he doesn't claim is an Honors degree, which makes it almost certain he finished with a lower second-class or third, or likely as not didn't attempt honors at all, while the MA is of course conferred automatically http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... three or four years after you graduate. His Oxford education is like George Bush's Yale, gentlemanly, but he's packaging it to make it look better for American readers. Indeed it may well be why he came to America in the first place, because he's not qualified for the sort of job he'd like in UK.

Radical Trotskyite is right: Once you somehow shoehorn Blackstone and his postmodernist "common law" into the American legal tradition, it's a slippery slope to the Second and Tenth Amendments not being treated as the entire content of the Constitution. And then where would we be? "Living Constitutionalism" and total chaos, that's where!

In fairness, the true Anglo-American legal tradition must preserve Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment for striking down affirmative action laws and emergencies where a Democrat might win a presidential election.

And then where would we be?

UP SHIT CREEK WITHOUT AN ASSAULT RIFLE.

How exactly do we imagine the First Amendment would have fared if it had been presented as a measure to privilege the communication rights of neo-Nazis over the feeling of Jews, or as an attempt to elevate into the national charter the right to burn the beloved American flag?

And how would miscegenation laws have fared if they'd been presented as being racist and backwards, huh? Where would our society have been if that had happened?

Look, I myself kind of think that asking somebody what their politics would've been if they had been born 50 years earlier is kind of a dumb gotcha question. What, I'm supposed to buy it when you tell me that you would've been the lone, brave voice in Texas government fighting against racial injustice, even at the cost of your job? If you were the kind of guy who would do that, You wouldn't be the attorney general in Texas in the 1950s.

But it's also deeply, deeply dishonest to discuss the civil rights movement without actually discussing American racism. It's not hard to find out why the Civil Rights Act was written the way it was, and it's not because Wendy Davis traveled back in time to argue against abstractions.

Also, what the heck is this:

Suppose that Abbott had said explicitly that he would have been duty bound to defend Texas’s miscegenation laws. Would that have made him Bull Connor? Or would that have made him a representative of the will of the people — a paid channel and nothing less?

Um... does Cook think Bull Connor was some kind of vigilante? Because the way I remember it Connor was also a government official. Why doesn't Connor get to play the "I'm nothing but a slave to the will of the people" card?

As usual, The People whose Will must be carried out are never the one's who want to end discrimination.

That's why (for example) it was suddenly a gross unjustice and trampling of the Will of the People when duly elected members of Maryland's legislature did the job they were duly elected to do and passed a law allowing equal marriage. So it went on the ballot and to this day I'm kind of surprised that Maggie Gargler and her pet rock Brian Brown didn't yell Shenanigans! and sue the state of Maryland, but they probably realized that there was no more money to be had out here and fucked off.

Another Alabama government employee: Jim Clark.

Why doesn't Connor get to play the "I'm nothing but a slave to the will of the people" card?

Because there's photographic evidence of him physically "curtailing the rights" of others. Can't bury the dogs and firehoses under a heap of abstractions...

I guess the issue is so much clearer if one is willing to consider some groups "the people" and other groups ... less so.

the ever-diminishing scope of private property rights

The stakes are low and the principle abhorrent, but it's vital that we can treat people like shit in our public establishments.

Oh, no no no because the free market will prevail once people learn of the rudeness and cease going to that restaurant but of course you'll have to hear about first-hand because the GOP will have passed laws banning criticism of companies from social media because freedom.

Thing is, Cookie, these arguments about hypothetical situations always come back to the same non-hypothetical fact that you're really, really desperate to find a loophole to re-introduce segregation. "Drop the act?" We've seen enough of your crap to know that it's not an "act". The rest of us figured this out in 1964: if your establishment serves the public and is directly or indirectly supported by public funding of transportation, commerce, or legal protection, it needs to be open to the entire public: http://www.law.cornell.edu/...

42 U.S. Code § 2000(a) is for Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

He's only refreshing to a journamalistic (sic) corps that worships bullies, as long as they're of the right (and the Right) political stripe.

It is like a theological question, but even more of a waste of time than Could God make a rock so heavy not even He could lift it. Could crusaders for expanded freedom (like MLK) make an America so free that some "states' rights" crusaders are no longer free? This is the pinhead they are all vexed on. Fifty years after lunch counters were integrated, these idiots can't notice reality didn't fall off its axis and spin the Earth straight into the sun; they're still struggling with "Yeah, but the principle that was violated, you see..."

Presidential recordings of LBJ on civil rights:

http://presidentialrecordin...

His elation did not last. Later that evening, in a mood described by White House aide Bill Moyers as “melancholy,” Johnson predicted that “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”4 That remark is one of the most telling (and frequently repeated) statements about race and politics from Johnson’s presidency. Unfortunately, those words were not recorded by any of the electronic equipment at the White House. Several hundred other conversations from that summer and fall, however, were captured by audio recorders, and the material on those once-secret recordings constitute one of the richest and most dramatic sources for exploring the politics of race in the Johnson era.

This digital volume documents almost two hundred presidential conversations involving significant discussions of race, politics, and the civil rights movement during the summer and fall of 1964.5With a few notable exceptions, all of those conversations took place over the telephone, with President Johnson usually speaking either at the White House or the LBJ Ranch in Texas. These calls occurred generally in three chronological periods. For July and early August, the tapes tended to archive Johnson’s responses to white anti–civil rights violence in Mississippi and Georgia and to civil disorders in New York City and several other northeastern cities. From early August to early September, they focused on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenge and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The final section of recordings, the smallest in size, covered aspects of the presidential campaign from the end of August to the election in early November.

6 July–5 November 1964

The volume begins in the midafternoon of 6 July, with President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy discussing the FBI’s “Mississippi Burning” case and the limits of federal authority in investigating the 21 June disappearance and presumed murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. It ends just before midnight on 5 November, two days after Johnson’s presidential victory, with the president chatting with National Urban League Director Whitney Young in the final conversation in a series of brief congratulatory calls with prominent black leaders. In between those moments, the White House Dictabelt audio recorders documented one of the United States’ most talkative presidents as he tried to implement the Civil Rights Act, negotiate his delicate relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., investigate high-profile civil rights murders by white supremacists, limit violence in ongoing school desegregation cases, and respond to racial unrest and civil disorders in northern cities.

The major topic of those tapes, though, was Johnson’s handling of the challenge posed by Mississippi’s Freedom Democrats.6 A primarily black-led group of civil rights activists from Mississippi, the MFDP intended to replace the white segregationists of the state’s regular Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention. Their struggle became one of the central national news stories of the summer. The telephone calls about the MFDP and almost every other recording in this volume show that Johnson’s early July concern about losing the South was not merely a lament about the long-term consequences of the Civil Rights Act, but about his immediate fears for his political future—and these conversations affirm that Johnson’s overriding concern in these months was to claim victory on 3 November.

the official UK page on the 2010 Equality Act

https://www.gov.uk/equality...

the 1976 Race Relations Act w amendments

http://www.legislationline....

but the UK passed their first Race Relations Act that prohibited discrimination in public places & services in1965 which was updated several times since

plus sex & disability discrimination laws that include employment & housing

& a sweeping Equality Act since 2010 that specifically prohibits refusing to serve gay people OR straights just as much

http://www.acas.org.uk/equa...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

has he been stuck in a time warp for the past 50 years at some alternate Oxford U?

Why do you think Cooke left the UK?

See: Andrew Sullivan.

Mr. Cooke's prose style might improve if he takes the stick out of his butt. I know this is just an excerpt, but I had a really hard time following his syntax. I wonder if he's using the same stick Bill Buckley had. Let's hope he washed it beforehand.

The syntax is impossible even in the original.

I've seen this movie before. It's from the '60s and it starred Lester Maddox.

Axiom #2: "You won't be needing that, so I'll just be taking it."

Maybe some new hipster glasses will help you remember?

He can just take them from S.E. Cupp.

2 girls,1 S.E. Cupp.

Hey, you can't make an omelet without selling your slaves' children to someone else first.

Axiom #3: Any nice thing that you have should have been mine in the first place, hand it over!

Axiom #3.1419213: If you have something nice (or merely not totally shitty), I really paid for it because mah hard earned tax dollarts welfare food stamps Obamaphones why can't poor people live on what they dig out of trashcans oogabooga [fart]!

Axiom #3.1419203:

Heretic!

It just goes on forever.

Also - I am relieved to see that 3C1W hasn't subjected himself to the horrors of original thought:

One day, no one thought of gay marriage (or few did). The next day, “civil unions” were the far-out, progressive position. The day after that, if you favored civil unions but not gay marriage, you were a Klansman. A Nazi. That’s where we are now. Try refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, or refusing to rent your hall for such a wedding. Just try it.

He could give Loyal to the Group of Seventeen some lessons on Correct Thought.

In this manner, too, have we come to discuss the ever-diminishing scope of private property rights, . . .

And to think it all started when those damn Yankees decided I couldn't own another human being. It's infringements like these that have led us to a place where I can't refuse to serve blacks at my lunch counter. Such fascism!