Rov_Scam
1hr 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
2hr 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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.
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.
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