The PBS moderator points out that this is not the first time that Ginni Thomas’s political activism has raised these questions of influence, and mentions a recent Affordable Care Act challenge. He doesn’t mention Bush v Gore or Trump’s Muslim ban case, but the point is made.
Then it’s time for the conservative defense of the victimized Thomases. At 2:44 Mr. Malcolm begins his master class in fancy legal footwork to dazzle an opponent and sway a jury. He doesn’t think Clarence needs to recuse just because his wife Ginni is an attorney and conservative activist consulting for multiple organizations with occasional business before the court (during Bush v Gore she worked for Bush). Malcolm flashes legal gold, worth every penny they pay him.
“Yes, look, I completely disagree with that. Ginni Thomas is not a lawyer, she is not a litigant, she does not work for any organization that is a party to any lawsuit. There’s no reason to believe that she is in any legal jeopardy, whatsoever.”
That’s why the Heritage Foundation pays him the big bucks!
If it’s good enough for the American Enterprise Institute website, why not Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post? Justice Biden must resign!
After all, one Supreme Court Justice has a wife who is a highly paid, prominent right wing extremist activist/consultant with clients’ cases regularly before the court and the other has a son who is a sleazy scumbag! Fair is fair.
from the AEI website
The Guardian reported that the AEI received $1.6 million in funding from ExxonMobil, and further notes that former ExxonMobil CEO Lee R. Raymond is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees.
Most people know by now that the so-called Pizzagate “scandal”, involving an imagined Hillary Clinton-run child sex trafficking ring in a DC pizza place, was bullshit. Hence the rise of Q, to prove that even though unfounded, it is a fact that a secret cabal of powerful extreme left-wing cannibal pedophiles (get it, moron, they’re SECRET, duh!) is actively opposing the greatest US president in history, who Jesus personally inserted as president to fight just such an evil antichrist cabal.
It makes as much sense as many other things, pulled directly out of a fevered hater’s ass.Let not “truth” be the enemy of effectively weaponized hatred!Hallelujah!
Great piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, by Radley Balko, on the mainstreaming of the insane QAnon conspiracy theory by the GOP. These amoral, madly ambitious fucks (lawmakers like insurrection abetters Hawley and Lyin’ Ted) know exactly what they’re doing.Here’s hoping there is a hell, these bastards definitely deserve VIP treatment down there in the eternally hot place.
This paragraph by Mr. Balko caught my eye, there are links to details on each of these outrageous stories in his opinion piece, linked below.
Of course sexual abuse of children is real, and it inflicts devastating, lifelong damage. But it is our very disgust at these crimes that allows opportunists to seize them for unrelated political ends. The result isn’t just unfair attacks against politicians or judicial nominees. It often means ruined lives. Parents have been accused of abuse and even prosecuted for innocuous photos of their young children. Children have been convicted and labeled as sex offenders for texting one another sexual explicit images of themselves. In Virginia, one prosecutor even asked a court’s permission to photograph a minor boy’s erect penis to prove the boy had sent an explicit photo to an underage girl.
You know, just asking the judge to let you photograph the kid’s erection, as you do when you hate fucking pedophiles, even the underaged ones.
All three vote in the solid 50 vote Trump Senate caucus, almost always, specifically to make sure every one of Biden’s initiatives and attempted reforms fails, but here they take the bravestand of announcing their yea vote for a supremely qualifiedcandidate several of their naysaying colleagues had previously voted for in her Appeals Court confirmation, in those cooperative days before MAGA and the plot to lynch democracy.
Regular profiles in goddamned courage.
On the bright side, the bought and paid for Democratic filibuster duo can fuck off on this vote.
Democrats need to pick up four or fiveseats in the Senate, in spite of corporate media and its relentless both- sidesism. Our democracy depends on it.
If, after a week of overeating, you had a particularly energetic evacuation, looked down into the bowl and asked the stinking output what it thought of the unionization of an Amazon sweatshop in Staten Island, it might say something like this:
“We are disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees. We’re evaluating our options, including filing objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence by the NLRB that we and others (including the National Retail Federation and U.S. Chamber of Commerce) witnessed in this election.”
Say what, shit? (strike a couple of matches here, hand on the flush handle)
The million dollar public relations team of the world’s greatest genius insists he knows better what is good for his employees than some so-called labor union that has no idea about their so-called concerns. We have an army of top lawyers on the payroll and will strenuously object to the overreach of socialistic New Deal agencies, whose time is over, thinking they can enforce rules we never agreed to. We are the most important business in the world today and are supported wholeheartedly by deeply conservative, anti-Communist, pro-corporate organizations that also have long despised the so-called right of fungible drone losers to collectively negotiate for so-called decent working conditions.
What never gets old is a high-minded party taking the high road in a fight with a psychopathic enemy. While the high-minded party cites respect for precedents, norms and common decency, the low-minded party, unhampered by any thought of fairness in a fight to the death, smiles as it straps on a switchblade-toed iron boot for below the belt kicking.
The meaning of Make of America Great Again, year 2000 model, while the final ruling in Bush v. Gore was pending:
The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said today that she was working at a conservative research group gathering resumes for appointments in a possible Bush administration but that she saw no conflict between her job and her husband’s deliberations on a case that could decide the presidency.
The comments from the justice’s wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, a former Republican Congressional aide, came as a federal judge in Nashville said Justice Thomas faced a serious conflict of interest as a result of his wife’s work for the Heritage Foundation.
The foundation has close ties to the Republican Party and would probably have a say in the hiring of key government officials if Gov. George W. Bush assumed the presidency. In e-mail distributed on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Mrs. Thomas solicited resumes ”for transition purposes” from the government oversight committees of Congress.
A decision by Justice Thomas to recuse himself could alter the outcome of the case now before the court, which is weighing whether to allow a manual recount of votes in Florida. On Saturday, by a vote of 5 to 4, the court blocked the recount for now. JusticeThomas, who was appointed to the court by President George Bush, Governor Bush’s father, was in the majority.If Justice Thomas were to recuse himself, it could result in a 4-to-4 tie in the case now before it, which would allow the ruling by the Florida Supreme Court to stand.
”There is no conflict here,” Mrs. Thomas said in an interview. She insisted that she rarely discussed matters before the Supreme Court with her husband and that Justice Thomas therefore should not consider recusing himself from the landmark case.
A spokesman for Vice President Al Gore said he had no comment on accusations of a conflict of interest. ”The Vice President has the highest regard for the independent judiciary, so we’re not going to comment on the various questions that have been raised,” said Mark Fabiani, a Gore campaign spokesman.
Ah! The fucking high road, boys and girls!Over and over.
It was surprisingly hard to find another source for this story I dimly recalled of the brilliant, unprincipled Scalia’s decision that he and Clarence Thomas would not recuse themselves from deciding the 2000 presidential election on 5-4 partisan grounds. It must have taken me ten minutes, and several searches to corroborate my recollection. The information below is pretty specific, and would not be hard to further verify, if anyone truly cared to. It supports with detail what I remembered of that stunning one-off Supreme Court overreach, the one that ushered in our age of neo-fascism/anything for a win, a savage, steel-toed kick to the groin, though arguably against the rules, is no disgrace, nor disqualifying, if the ref is on your side.
Besides Thomas, Scalia also took part in the decision while a close relative had a substantial interest in the outcome. Scalia’s son Eugene is a partner in the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where one of the senior partners is Theodore B. Olson, who argued Bush’s case before the Supreme Court.
Scalia refused to recuse himself from Bush v. Gore, although the lead lawyer for the plaintiff was, in effect, his son’s boss. He took the same position in the various legal proceedings that accompanied the impeachment of Bill Clinton, beginning with the Supreme Court’s decision to permit Paula Jones to proceed with her lawsuit against Clinton for sexual harassment, in which Olson provided legal assistance.
The personal conflicts-of-interest involving Thomas and Scalia were one-day wonders in the media, then quickly dropped after the two justices supplied Bush’s margin of victory in the 5-4 decision to halt the Florida recount. This kid-glove treatment is in marked contrast to the use of minor or even imaginary ethical infractions to witch-hunt cabinet-level officials during Clinton’s eight years in the White House.
Independent counsel investigations were carried out into the affairs of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, and, of course, Bill and Hillary Clinton, on much flimsier evidence than is already apparent in relation to the Supreme Court justices.
A friend, making the point that the left and the right both live in echo-chambers today, asked me if I believed things I heard from the media sources I generally trust. I told him I did. He smiled and rested his case — everybody on both sides faithfully believes the bullshit of their own political side. I smiled and let it slide, as we were having a nice dinner, and there was no need to further comment on this unending, rapidly escalating, dark money funded march to one-party rule, the open oligarchy that has been plowing ahead for decades here, during our long “culture war”. It occurs to me that next time we have dinner I have to clarify one thing.
When I read something that surprises me, or hear something that sounds too outrageous, or convenient, to be true, I consult the world’s knowledge base that is in my pocket. It is so fucking easy to find corroboration or refutation in a few seconds of research by looking at a few disparate sources. If Democracy Now!, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all agree that certain things actually happened a certain way, it’s a pretty safe bet they happened that way.
Certain claims are easy to dismiss out of hand, like the brief rumor during Donald Trump’s alarming rise to power that Trump and his friend Sheldon Adelson gang banged a thirteen year old girl — and videotaped themselves doing it. You wouldn’t put it past men of their high moral standing, maybe, but at the same time, I knew the story was clearly bullshit. That one I didn’t need to check. But there are claims that shock, like that all but twelve House Trumpists recently voted against lowering the price of insulin, and those claims are easy to find multiple sources to confirm or refute, or spin according to echo chamber. Verification takes literally seconds. Here you go:
So, yes, I generally trust Ari Melber, Mehdi Hasan, Amy Goodman or Glenn Kirschner, when they make statements about reality, or present complex issues. I generally dismiss the vapors that come out of things like furrow browed TV dinner heir Tucker Swanson Dansby Dickhead Carlson’s puckered blow hole. Make a false equivalence between these sources of information/disinformation if you like, but also, do an honest ten seconds work before accepting statements from any of those sources and we’ll compare notes afterwards. Then I’ll join you on your armed trip to that DC pizza place to liberate those child sex slaves Hillary and Barbara Streisand keep chained up there for Tom Hanks to molest and bleed, for his Satanic pleasure.
It is laid out clearly and succinctly in this short, illuminating lecture by master expository storyeller Sheldon Whitehouse. This is the latest installment of his series The Scheme, on the capture of the federal judiciary by the deep pocketed radical right, part 13, so far, and maybe the best, though every installment of this is great, memorable, important and well worth listening to.
gratuitousblahg 