The BBC has a useful backgrounder on the subject of US “flag etiquette” which we’ve been puzzling over lately. It’s good to get it from the Beeb, as a neutral party.

The Flag Code covers all aspects of etiquette in relation to the Stars and Stripes, including how to behave when the anthem is played. The code is never enforced, however, and there is no punishment for breaching it.

The link is to a government site. What the government is doing issuing etiquette codes that aren’t enforced, I don’t really understand.

What to do if someone picks the Flag Song on the jukebox?

The code states that persons present are expected to stand and face the flag, if there is one. Civilians should stand to attention with right hand over heart, while military personnel in uniform and veterans should salute throughout. A recent amendment to the code said that military personnel out of uniform could also salute.

So it’s actually codified somewhere that we are supposed to put our hands on our chests when we hear that tune. I did not know that. I say it’s none of their business.

How long has the Flag Code been around?

Experts say that US flag etiquette is important because [it] was created out of respect for the country’s historical heritage.

But the code was first drawn up only in 1923 under the auspices of the American Legion, and only became law when the US was at war, in 1942.

The American Legion isn’t the boss of us.

Now the law, in 1942…I sort of get that, up to a point. In 1942 they didn’t know that Hitler would fail. They thought it was a lot more likely than it was before Germany invaded Russia and before Pearl Harbor, but they didn’t know. That was scary. I sort of get the urge to do everything they could think of to make sure Hitler failed, including motivational inspirational patriotic flapdoodle. But the fact remains that it’s none of their business. And it’s not 1942 now.

Robert Reich:

Not only is Trump raising the specter of electoral fraud by Democrats, but today Senate minority leader Harry Reid said Russia may try to manipulate voting results in favor of Trump. In calling for an FBI investigation, Reid noted (1) the threat of Russian interference “is more extensive than is widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results;” (2) Vladimir Putin’s “goal is tampering with this election;” and (3) Trump’s former and current advisers are closely connected to the Russian leadership.

“Trump and his people keep saying the election is rigged,” said Reid. “Why is he saying that? Because people are telling him the election can be messed with.” If Russia concentrates on “less than six” swing states, it could alter results and undermine confidence in the electoral system.

So that national anthem thing – first Gabrielle Douglas, now Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49ers (US football). Jon Schwarz at The Intercept explains something about the anthem.

“The Star-Spangled Banner,” Americans hazily remember, was written by Francis Scott Key about the Battle of Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812. But we don’t ever talk about how the War of 1812 was a war of aggression that began with an attempt by the U.S. to grab Canada from the British Empire.

However, we’d wildly overestimated the strength of the U.S. military. By the time of the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814, the British had counterattacked and overrun Washington, D.C., setting fire to the White House.

And one of the key tactics behind the British military’s success was its active recruitment of American slaves. As a detailed 2014 article in Harper’s explains, the orders given to the Royal Navy’s Admiral Sir George Cockburn read:

Let the landings you make be more for the protection of the desertion of the Black Population than with a view to any other advantage. … The great point to be attained is the cordial Support of the Black population. With them properly armed & backed with 20,000 British Troops, Mr. Madison will be hurled from his throne.

Whole families found their way to the ships of the British, who accepted everyone and pledged no one would be given back to their “owners.”

Men were trained to fight along with the British.

Then on the night of September 13, 1814, the British bombarded Fort McHenry. Key, seeing the fort’s flag the next morning, was inspired to write the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

So when Key penned “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,” he was taking great satisfaction in the death of slaves who’d freed themselves. His perspective may have been affected by the fact he owned several slaves himself.

Oooooooooooookay then – that’s not something I want to stand up for either, or stick my hand on my chest for, or sing.

In fact we need a new national anthem, yesterday.

(No, I didn’t know this. I’ve never really sung it much. It wasn’t a thing at school, and I don’t go to football games. I knew some of the first stanza, and that’s it.)

This is so good it should be in the Louvre.

Updating to add: Artist: tiggerthewing.

Oh thank god – at last women can eat cashews and walnuts. They’re more expensive than the men’s, of course, but at least we can have them.

The empowerment of sex work:

Lauren Darlington looked every bit the sweet 16-year-old with a mouth full of braces when her mum forged her birth certificate so she could work as a prostitute. Seven years later she is real, raw about her demons, blogging to touch others.

Her mother got half her earnings – in other words her mother was her pimp. That’s nice.

Lauren agreed to having sex for money – she wanted to get her mum out of financial trouble. But now, aged 23, she realises she was a vulnerable child and she is still paying the price and trying to make sense of the memories.

Looking back she can see she was being groomed, heavily influenced by adults she trusted. And the world of prostitution was glorified.

You mean the world of prostitution isn’t glorious? How can that be?

At the time Lauren and her mum were on welfare. Money was tight.

“They did a lot of drugs around me and one day on the way to her drug dealer’s place it came up that she was a prostitute. Mum blurted out she had been one before so could never again and the talk of the money and how ‘easy’ it was. I offered to do it for us. And that’s something I have always said and held guilt around. It was my choice.”

With a history of self harm and a fragile mindset, being plunged into the seedy adult world was damaging.

“I was hit, degraded, the mind games … I was 16 and looked it and covered in fresh scars. But I turned off. The Valium mum would give me and lack of sleep helped.”

The scars mark her razor blade slashes. Cutting her forearms and thighs was a way she tried to tell the world she was in serious trouble.

What trouble? Let’s not be sex negative here.

Eventually she told her father what was going on, and her mother was tried and convicted. They’ve reconciled. But women pimping out their daughters? Not cool. Not empowered.

H/t Rob

Guest post by James Garnett, a followup to his post yesterday.

We all know this, but it’s worth stating again: being able to build equity over time is a very important way that most of us are able to get ahead in the world. Working hard matters, too, but it’s not enough.

My father worked hard. On his return from naval service in the Korean War, he used the GI Bill to earn a degree in engineering. That got him a good job, with which he and my mother were able to buy a small home on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Over the years, they saved money and built home equity, and by the time the 1980’s rolled around they were able to put me and my two sisters through university using a combination of savings and equity loans.

And here we have Maine governor Paul LePage being “colorful.”

Paul R. LePage, the ever-combative Republican governor of Maine, refused on Friday to apologize to a Democratic state lawmaker for leaving a threatening and expletive-studded voicemail message that was criticized by some state Republicans and left top Democrats suggesting that Mr. LePage should resign.

You’ll be wanting to know what the expletives were. The Times doesn’t want to tell you, but I listened to a recording at Salon. The epithets were:

• You cocksucher.
• You little socialist son of a bitch cocksucker.

Not very gubernatorial, I think you’ll agree.

Mr. LePage did apologize in a statement Friday to the state for his choice of words in the voicemail message, but in a 35-minute news conference he said he was not apologizing directly to the Democratic state representative who was the target of his wrath, Drew Gattine. The governor said he was offended because he believed Mr. Gattine had called him a racist.

“I am enormously angry,” Mr. LePage said at his news conference, suggesting — perhaps not seriously — that he would step down if Mr. Gattine did as well. “I’m not shying away from what I called him.”

Precisely what Mr. LePage called Mr. Gattine is unprintable here, but, suffice to say, the profanity-laced voicemail message, which Mr. LePage left on Thursday and Mr. Gattine provided to The Portland Press Herald, was incendiary even by Mr. LePage’s uninhibited standards.

“Prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people,” Mr. LePage said in the message. “I’m after you. Thank you.”

It’s fine that Mr Gattine gave the recording to The Portland Press Herald, because the Gov told him to make it public.

After leaving the message Thursday, Mr. LePage told reporters from The Press Herald and the television station WMTW that he would like to have a duel with Mr. Gattine, saying he would point a gun directly between Mr. Gattine’s eyes.

That’s charming. I feel so proud of the United States these days.

The episode grew out of a town-hall-style meeting on Wednesday, where, according to The Portland Press Herald, Mr. LePage told an audience member that he kept a three-ring binder of photographs of arrested drug dealers in the state, which is in the grips of a heroin crisis, and that 90 percent of them were black or Hispanic.

Mr. Gattine said he believed Mr. LePage’s comments were racially charged, but he denied calling the governor a racist.

The Guardian has more on what the Gov said on Wednesday.

At a town hall event in North Berwick on Wednesday, LePage said the majority of drug dealers arrested in Maine were black or Hispanic in origin.

“I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison,” he said, “but they come. And I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ring binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn. I didn’t make the rules – I’m just telling you what’s happening.”

At a subsequent press conference, video of which was released by the Press Herald, he said: “Look, the bad guy is the bad guy. I don’t care what colour he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red.”

Addressing the state’s Republican house minority leader, Ken Fredette, a military lawyer, he said: “Don’t you? Ken, you’ve been in uniform. You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of colour or people of Hispanic origin.”

Um.

The BBC has details of what the Gov said after leaving that phone message.

He later invited reporters from the Press Herald and WMTW TV channel to an interview to explain the voice message, and told them he wished he could shoot Mr Gattine in a duel.

“I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” Mr LePage said.

“And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you… I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this legislature to help move the state forward.”

It’s the Era of the Bully.