“You should get a one-year jail sentence if you do anything to desecrate the American flag,” former (and possibly future) president Donald Trump told the hosts of Fox & Friends on July 25.

In a rare moment of at least partial agreement with Trump, likely Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris says “I condemn the burning of the American flag. That flag is a symbol of our highest ideals as a nation and represents the promise of America. It should never be desecrated in that way.”

Both were referring to pro-Palestinian protesters who stole flags from in front of Washington, DC’s Union Station before burning them.

I condemn that too, by the way — not because flags were burned, but because those flags apparently didn’t belong to the people who burned them.

The standard defense of flag-burning, affirmed by the US Supreme Court, treats flag-burning as  “speech” that enjoys the protection the First Amendment.

Well, OK, I get that. Whether it’s technically “speech” or not it’s at least expressive conduct, and I’m all for freedom of non-violent expressive conduct.

But to me, what it’s really about is property rights.

If you own a piece of cloth — even a piece of cloth with a particular pattern on it that makes it into what my friend and fellow political writer Kent McManigal calls a “Holy Pole Quilt,” possessing quasi-religious-relic qualities to certain cultists — it’s yours.

Not Donald Trump’s.

Not Kamala Harris’s.

Yours.

You don’t get to ride in their limousines; they don’t get to tell you what to do with your flag.

The exceptions to that rule are simple, and should be obvious:

You don’t get to strangle someone with your flag.

If you want to burn it, you have to do so in a way that doesn’t endanger the lives or property of others.

Apart from exceptions of that type, what you do with it is your business and no one else’s.

If you want to “desecrate” it in some way — burn it, draw a thin blue line across it, cut it up to make yourself a g-string — have at.

Personally, I use two flags (one “American” and one representing my favorite college football team) as window curtains. Want them? Molon labe!

If you steal someone else’s flag, that’s a crime and you’re a thief … just as it would be a crime and you would be a thief if you stole a candy bar, a coffee cup, or a Corolla. The penalty (return or restitution, and perhaps punitive damages) should be the same for all four crimes.

I’d rather burn every flag in the country than watch Trump and Harris wrap themselves in those flags to score cheap political points with low-IQ, short attention span voters.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Following Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from a seemingly doomed re-election campaign, Democrats instantly re-focused on picking/backing a new candidate (at the moment, vice-president Kamala Harris seems well on her way to nailing the nomination down), while Republicans took up the cry “if he’s unable to run, he’s unable to serve, and should resign or be removed.”

I’m not seeing much speculation — yet — from either camp on the equally interesting subject of  what Joe Biden’s final six months in office might look like.

There’s an old, apparently incorrect but highly applicable, western saying that the Chinese word for “crisis” embodies the written characters representing “danger” and “opportunity.”

The “danger” part of the Biden equation is easy to see: To the extent that his Democratic successor gets blamed for his mistakes, anything he does could potentially damage that successor’s prospects in November.

But what if Biden doesn’t believe Harris (or some other prospective nominee) can win the election anyway? What if he believes he’s a true “lame duck?”

If that’s the case, he doesn’t need to give a [word that rhymes with “duck”], does he? He can do as he pleases without facing much in the way of consequences.

The overbearing 21st century power of the imperial presidency, combined with extreme unlikelihood that a Democratic cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him, or a a split Senate convict him upon impeachment, leaves him sitting pretty to do things he couldn’t do if he was worried about his re-election (or his chosen successor’s election).

On the trivial end, he could, for example, pardon his son Hunter, recently convicted on (wholly unconstitutional) federal gun charges. Heck, he could probably sell pardons and other executive branch favors to the highest bidders without worrying much about how that looked.

He could also do more consequential things.

For example, in his meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, he could put his foot down: No immediate and unconditional Gaza ceasefire, no more US weapons (and the usual welfare checks might get lost in the mail, too).

He could pick up the phone and tell Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy something similar: Open real peace talks with Moscow or the weapons shipments stop.

He could re-commit the US, fully and unconditionally, to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the “Iran Nuclear Deal.”

He could end the US embargo on Cuba and fully normalize diplomatic relations with its regime.

Of course, he could go in the opposite direction, dragging the US into all-out wars with any or all of several adversaries. But based on his decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan instead of nullifying his predecessor’s deal  with the Taliban, I suspect there may be a “peace president” trapped in the body of America’s current “war president.”

In fact, the Afghanistan withdrawal had me thinking, at the time, that he INTENDED to be a one-term president with a “peacemaker” legacy.

Now he has multiple opportunities to be exactly that … if that’s what he wants.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On July 19, users of about 8.5 million Windows users worldwide faced the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death.” As I write this column, many remain down. Microsoft has issued a manual fix for machines that aren’t able to automatically recover, but it’s a black eye for Microsoft and for Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity firm whose fault software update caused the outages.

While 8.5 million may not seem like a lot of machines in the scheme of things (about a billion and a half PCs run Windows 10/11, not counting older versions of the operating system), it wasn’t the number so much as the user identity that mattered.

The victims weren’t, for the most part, kids playing Minecraft. They were corporate customers — airlines, banks, hospitals, hotels. Flights were canceled. Account holders couldn’t access their bank accounts online. Surgeries were postponed.

My knee-jerk reaction, I confess was: Well, yeah … NEVER trust Windows or Crowdstrike (I’m a long-time Linux user and consider Crowdstrike’s close relationship with, and willingness to manufacture cybersecurity scams for, the Democratic Party suspect).

But I quickly realized that WAS just a knee-jerk response. The real lesson is: Widespread and exclusive reliance on single systems is a bad idea.

This outage didn’t affect MacOS, it didn’t affect Linux (and variants such as ChromeOS), and it didn’t affect cybersecurity software other than Crowdstrike’s product.

It did, however, affect the CUSTOMERS of businesses using the Windows/CrowdStrike combo on centralized systems.

For example, four US airlines had to cancel flights.

Why were they all using the same OS/security software combo?

And why didn’t they have backup systems, running different OSes and different security software, that could be quickly brought online to work from the same data sets as the usual systems if something like this happened?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen lots of loud calls for government to impose various top-down, one-size-fits-all “cybersecurity” solutions.

This outage demonstrates the problem with that idea.  Various government operations, including 911 call centers, fell victim to the problem. Requiring private sector entities to use government-approved “solutions” would expose even more users to problems hitting those “solutions.”

In the future, we can expect more, not fewer, collapses of computer systems and networks. Putting all our eggs in one operating system / cybersecurity basket is just asking for worse and more widespread disruption.

Unfortunately, as an individual user, you remain continually vulnerable to mistakes and poor decisions made upstream from your home PC desktop.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY