I see that you arrived none too soon. (Glad you made it.)

I wonder if personal use of a Mexican flag were illegal then wouldn't possession also be illegal (except for medicinal use)? Also, flying a POW-MIA black flag will get your ass three years in a POW camp.

Who initiated the conversation with the rental car guy?

Did he literally say you should leave the country?

Do you have a standard retort to such a suggestion?

He overhead me talking about it, so he joined in.

He did say that, but to be truthful it was hard to tell if he was talking about me, or the bar owner. He was using the word "you," but that can of course be generalized.

My response was that I love this country, and one of the things I love about it is the first amendment.

On a side note, it's not a crazy reaction for a non-legally inclined person to read the federal statute as an enforceable law. While a little bit of thinking on the matter will clearly indicate that you're right, most people don't really understand how judicial interpretation effects these things and certainly don't have the ability to actually look up legal precedents.

That being said, CNN is a big enough place that they should have called a lawyer. Perhaps Toobin, he seems to know what he's talking about.

You are right, it's not a crazy reaction. Still, they should be aware of their limitations in interpreting the law.

Look at that guy's beard! Someone should cut that off with a bowie knife!

Look at that guy's beard! Someone should cut that off with a bowie knife!

Good suggestion. Tell you what: go find the guy, pull out your "bowie knife", cut his beard off yourself and then let us all know how that worked out for you.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Is Bowie knife not the correct term?

The quotation marks imply that it's not.

It certainly looked like the type of knife that I, in my head, refer to as a Bowie knife. I acknowledge, though, that I'm not sure whether I've really heard the term used in a coherent fashion since I was in middle school. My grasp on what a Bowie knife might actually look like is admittedly limited.

What's the proper term for the form of knife depicted in the video?

Looked like a standard Army field knife to me.

There is no single knife that you can point to and say "that's a bowie knife". Jim Bowie designed several different iterations of his famous knives and it didn't take long for knife makers of the day to start calling any big knife a "bowie" knife to take advantage of the (in)famous knife fighter's reputation.

Under common usage, many large bladed knives are incorrectly called "bowie knives" but that particular one only vaguely resembles any of Mr. Bowie's designs and the typical "bowie knife" had a much larger blade than modern combat knives.

Putting aside the bowie knife etymology story for a second (which i actually do find fascinating. no sarcasm intended) I remember noting when I drove into baja last year that under mexican law it is illegal to put an image of the flag of any nation other than mexico on your car, and the police can pull you over for it and give you a ticket. This seems like a good excuse for harassing out of towners, but I wonder if drivers of dark green cars are ever told they have to cover up their giant car-sized flag of Libya.

I went to Mexico in an RV for Labor Day once. While there, we bought a giant Mexican flag and lashed it to the RV. From then on, anytime we passed a checkpoint or some guards they waved us through. It was awesome.

Back to the flag incident, it freaks me out how irrational people are getting on the illegal problem. People are celebrating this crazy knife wielding dude with the abe lincoln beard. This is not a solution people. You can't just "send them back to Mexico". We can't just build a fence. And it is crap like this that does not make me proud to be an American. And yes, i know all countries, especially Europe (which I am now a citizen of as well!), have these same problems.

Oh, Jon, I miss having you around on a regular basis...

Regarding the flag regulations, isn't it technically "suggested" (quotes merely for emphasis) that people take down their American flags every night and NOT put them up on a rainy day? Maybe those rules are pretty old school (I recall a rotating "flag duty" in elementary school to take the flag down at the end of the day), but I think it would be better and more "respectful" if people adhered to those suggestions. It seems so hypocritical and lazy-American-like to get all hyped up about a Mexican flag over an American one, which to me seems a prime illustration of WHY this country is so cool, or at least was so cool.

And I bet a good amount of money there are Italian and/or Irish flags floating higher up on a pole outside of some other businesses somewhere in this country, but it hasn't made nat'l news.

I consider myself a legally inclined layperson, and I would certainly interpret the flag code cmonk linked to as binding, in the absence of other information. The local TV people probably didn't know any better.

That said, it seems like you could be charged with vandalism for cutting down someone else's flag.

Anyway, flag laws and anti-Hispanic-immigrant fervor are both big red herrings designed to keep us from noticing that our country is drifting toward fascism and a growing gap between the classes.

A growing gap between classes could be drifting us towards hard core communism, too. Gotta watch out for the back door communists, you're never expecting them.

Oh, I wasn't trying to imply a causal relationship between the two. Though you could certainly argue that keeping poorer people ignorant is good for power-grabbers.

Drudge doesn't really "retract" things. He's mostly just posting links so I'm not even clear that he's obliged to do so (even morally). Most of the time he's not a news source per se, he's a news aggregator. I'm not sure aggregators have much in the way of journalistic-ethical obligations.

He did retract his Sidney Blumenthal wife-beating allegations back in the day, but that was one of the rare instances in which he was producing original content.

If the federal flag code was binding by law, Dubya would have been charged years ago when he was photographed signing a flag, and every business which used a flag in its advertisments would be fined, because that's in it too.