We Have To Stop This Shit

More election tampering.

I admit that I went immediately to the part of the story where they identified the culprit's party affiliation.

And now I can use this example to assert my that my reaction would be the same in any case - anyone caught fucking with an election deserves to burn.

Democrat, Republican, Bull Moose, Whig, Sandanista, Likud - doesn't matter. Shit's gotta stop.

Michigan official gets house arrest for 2020 ballot sabotage yesterday

FLINT TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — A local official in Michigan accused of breaking a seal on a ballot box in her own election to ensure that votes couldn’t be recounted was sentenced Monday to six months of house arrest.

Kathy Funk, a Democrat, must wear an electronic monitor and also write a public apology for her actions in 2020 as the Flint Township clerk.

In January, Funk pleaded no contest to misconduct in office. A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is used as such at sentencing.

Funk had won the Democratic nomination by just 79 votes out of about 5,300. A recount was not conducted, and she subsequently won the general election that fall. Investigators say she sabotaged the ballot box after the primary election, an act that would make those ballots ineligible for a recount.

Funk, 59, initially told state police she thought someone had broken into the township hall and damaged the seal on the ballot container.

At her sentencing, Judge Mark Latchana admonished Funk for her break-in theory.

“I’m sure there’s a segment of the population that thinks you should be locked up for calling into question the integrity of an election,” Latchana said Monday. “And if we had unlimited jail space, perhaps that’s true. But we don’t.”

Funk quit her township position in 2021 for a bigger job as elections supervisor for Genesee County, 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Detroit, but she was dismissed last year while her criminal case was pending.

For The Record

New York Magazine's Intelligencer listed some of the damning text messages that made it impossible for DumFux News to defend itself against the defamation suit brought against it by Dominion.

Here's a nice little sampling.

Tucker Carlson

On Fox News’ Arizona call:
“We devote our lives to building an audience and they let Chris Wallace and Leland fucking Vittert wreck it,” Carlson texted in a group conversation with Ingraham and Sean Hannity roughly two weeks after the election. Vittert was a Fox News reporter who was frequently criticized by Trump, and he left the network in April 2021 for NewsNation.

On hating Trump:
“I hate him passionately … What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” Carlson texted a colleague on January 4, days prior to the riot at the U.S. Capitol. He added, “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

On the antics of Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood:
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson texted Ingraham on November 18.

In a message from November 4, Carlson texted a colleague that there was “no doubt there was fraud” in the election. “But at this point, Trump and Lin and Powell have so discredited their own case, and the rest of us to some extent, that it’s infuriating. Absolutely enrages me.”

In a text on November 9, Carlson referenced Powell’s Dominion claims, commenting, “The software shit is absurd.” (Carlson then said on television that night, “We don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged. We don’t know. We ought to find out.”)

In a text on November 22, Carlson also called Powell a “cunt.”

On Trump skipping Biden’s inauguration:
“Hard to believe. So destructive,” he texted a staffer on November 10. “It’s disgusting. I’m trying to look away.”

On the prospect of ditching Trump coverage on Fox:
Two days before the Capitol riot, Carlson wrote to a colleague that “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.” The day after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, he texted his producer that “Trump has two weeks left. Once he’s out, he becomes incalculably less powerful, even in the minds of his supporters. He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.”

Rupert Murdoch, Fox Corporation chairman

On Hannity’s and Ingraham’s on-air claims of election fraud:
“Maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” Murdoch wrote the day after Biden’s inauguration in an email to Fox CEO Suzanne Scott. “All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump … but what did he tell his viewers?”

On the infamous Rudy Giuliani press conference with the hair dye:
“Stupid and damaging,” Murdoch wrote to a friend on November 19, the day of Giuliani’s meltdown. “The only one encouraging Trump and misleading him. Both increasingly mad.” Murdoch said he had heard that Trump was “apparently not sleeping and bouncing off walls” and that he worried about “what he might do as president.”

On calling the election for Biden:
“I hate our Decision Desk people!” Murdoch emailed former New York Post editor Col Allan on the day the election was called. “And pollsters! Some of the same people I think. Just for the hell of it still praying for Az to prove them wrong!” Later that day, he emailed his son Lachlan, writing that Fox News “should and could” have called the election for Biden before any other network. “But at least being second saves us a Trump explosion!”

On how to handle Trump postelection:
“The more I think about McConnell’s remarks or complaint, the more I agree,” Murdoch wrote in an email on Biden’s Inauguration Day. “Trump insisting on the election being stolen and convincing 25 percent of Americans was a huge disservice to the country. Pretty much a crime. Inevitable it blew up Jan. 6th. Best we don’t mention his name unless essential and certainly don’t support him. We have to respect people of principle and if it comes to the Senate, don’t take sides. I know he is being over-demonized, but he brought it on himself.”

Laura Ingraham, Fox News host

On pressure from Fox News executives:
“We are officially working for an organization that hates us,” Ingraham texted Carlson and Hannity on November 16.

“Why would anyone defend that call?” Hannity asked in response, referring to the early decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden.

“I’m disgusted at this point,” replied Carlson.

“I think the three of us have enormous power,” Ingraham wrote. “We have more power than we know or exercise.”

Suzanne Scott, Fox News CEO

On the Arizona call on Election Night:
“Listen, it’s one of the sad realities: If we hadn’t called Arizona those three or four days following Election Day, our ratings would have been bigger,” Scott said in a Zoom meeting on November 16. “The mystery would have been still hanging out there.”

“Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief,” Scott texted Fox co-chair Lachlan Murdoch two days after the election. “It’s a question of trust — the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”

On how the network should proceed postelection:
“Audiences don’t want to see too much of the Mayor Pete’s and Coons etc in the news hours,” Scott wrote to Fox News president Jay Wallace. “Need to be careful about bookings next 2 months - especially in news hours.” Scott had forwarded Wallace an email from Rupert Murdoch, in which he observed that Fox News was losing to CNN in the ratings.

On how fact checking Trump is “bad for business”:
“This has to stop now,” Scott wrote in an email to a network vice-president in early December, referring to anchor Eric Shawn’s fact-checking of Trump. “This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”

Bill Sammon, former Fox News managing editor

On the mess inside Fox News:
Sammon oversaw the Fox News Decision Desk on Election Night. He retired in January 2021 amid heated Republican criticism over the call that Biden would win Arizona.

“More than 20 minutes into our flagship evening news broadcast and we’re still focused solely on supposed election fraud — a month after the election,” Sammon texted editor Chris Stirewalt. “It’s remarkable how weak ratings makes good journalists do bad things.” Sammon added, “In my 22 years affiliated with Fox, this is the closest thing I’ve seen to an existential crisis — at least journalistically.”

Chris Stirewalt, former Fox News politics editor

On the fallout from election coverage:
“What I see us doing is losing the silent majority of viewers as we chase the nuts off a cliff,” Stirewalt responded to Sammon’s texts. Stirewalt, who made the decision that Fox News would call Arizona for Biden on Election Night, was removed from his job in January 2021 for the controversial (but correct) choice.

Bret Baier, Fox News host

On the difficulty of defending the Arizona call:
“I know You guys are feeling the pressure,” Baier wrote to Fox News executives two days after the election. “But this situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable … I keep on having to defend this on air. And ask questions about it. And it seems we are holding on for pride (I know the confidence you say you had and the numbers — but it’s at least within the realm of possible that he closes the gap now). And It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg. And we put it back in his column. The better we are. In my opinion.”


Raj Shah, Fox Corporation senior vice-president

On Rudy Giuliani:
During Giuliani’s infamous press conference during which hair dye ran down his face, Shah texted to an unnamed respondent or respondents: “This sounds SO FUCKING CRAZY btw.” When a deputy wrote back that Giuliani “looks awful,” Shah remarked, “he objectively looks like he was a dead person voting 2 weeks ago.”

After the press conference, a Fox News reporter appeared on the network and cast doubt on some of Giuliani’s claims. Shah then texted the deputy, “This is the kinda shit that will kill us. We cover it wall to wall and then we burn that down with all the skepticism.”

On Fox News’ favorability rating dropping dramatically after the election:
In an internal message, Shah shared a survey with colleagues showing that the network’s brand was “under heavy fire from our customer base.” In a different email, he wrote, “We are not concerned with losing market share to CNN or MSNBC right now. Our concern is Newsmax and One America News Network … I’d like to get honest/deeper feedback from Fox viewers on the brand, the handling of the election, if they feel like they have been somehow betrayed by the network.”

In a memo from Shah to Lachlan Murdoch on November 13, Shah wrote that “Fox News is facing a brand crisis” and “open revolt.” He added that the “precipitous decline in Fox’s favorability among our core audience… poses lasting damage to the Fox News brand unless effectively addressed soon.”

On Sidney Powell:
In another message to senior colleagues, Shah called Powell’s election-fraud claims “totally insane” and “just MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.” Shah also told his bosses in a November 23, 2020 email that, “We encouraged several sources within the administration to tell reporters that Powell offered no evidence for her claims and didn’t speak for the president.”

Maria Bartiromo, Fox News and Fox Business Network host

On not wanting to acknowledge Biden’s win:
“I want to see massive fraud exposed,” Bartiromo texted Steve Bannon a week after the election, adding that she instructed her team to hold off on referring to Biden as “president-elect” — “not in scripts or in banners on air. Until this moves through the courts.”

Abby Grossberg, Maria Bartiromo’s producer

On how to cater to audiences postelection:
“Our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition,” Grossberg texted Bartiromo, who had asked whether she should have covered the topic on a recent show. Grossberg later added that Fox viewers “still have hope.”

On March 20, Grossberg filed a lawsuit against Fox News, alleging the network had pushed her into giving misleading testimony in the Dominion case in an attempt to set her and Bartiromo up as patsies.

Gary Schreier, Fox Business Network SVP

On Mario Bartiromo’s false allegations of election fraud:
After Bartiromo tweeted a baseless allegation on November 5 about Democrats adding “vote dumps” overnight, she left Twitter for the conservative platform Parler. “How about get off social all together,” Fox Business News President Lauren Petterson wrote to Schreier. He responded: “I mean if you say crazy wrong shit on Parler is that better just because Parler won’t flag you?”

Today's Debunkment

Actually, a blast from the past.

It starts out with a good explanation of the Marginal Tax Rate Increase, and the Wealth Tax.

AOC proposed an increase to 70% for anything over $10M in a year:

• So you pay the usual 37% on everything up to $10,000,000.00 (that's 37% assuming your clever tax accountant can't jigger up a way to exempt it)

Warren's proposal of a Wealth Tax:

• 0% tax on anything up to $50,000,000.00
• 2% on everything over that

Sorry not sorry, but I'm not going to believe you'd be plunged into destitution if we forced you to live on 63% of $10M, plus 30% of another $10M.

You can't live on $750,000 a month? You're gonna have to scrimp? Maybe give up HBO?

Give it a fuckin rest.

Robert Reich:

More On Guns

Gun Freaks keep cycling thru various memes, and today it looks like "The Nazi death camps were a direct result of the Jews giving up their guns."

On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars

Bernard E. Harcourt, Columbia Law School

Abstract
Say the words "gun registration" to many pro-gun Americans and you are likely to hear that one of the first things that Hitler did when he seized power was to impose strict gun registration requirements that enabled him to identify gun owners and then to confiscate all guns, effectively disarming his opponents and paving the way for the Holocaust. One of the more curious twists in the historical debate, though, is that the most vocal opponent of this argument is also pro-gun. It is the National Alliance, a white supremacist organization. According to them, "German Firearms legislation under Hitler, far from banning private ownership, actually facilitated the keeping and bearing of arms by German citizens by eliminating or ameliorating restrictive laws which had been enacted by the government preceding his." So which pro-gunner should we believe?

Following Germany's defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic passed very strict gun control laws in an attempt both to stabilize the country and to comply with the Versailles Treaty of 1919 – laws that in fact required the surrender of all guns to the government. These laws remained in effect until 1928, when the German parliament relaxed gun restrictions and put into effect a strict firearm-licensing scheme. These strict licensing regulations foreshadowed Hitler's rise to power.

If you read the 1938 Nazi gun laws closely and compare them to earlier 1928 Weimar gun legislation – as a straightforward exercise of statutory interpretation – several conclusions become clear. First, with regard to possession and carrying of firearms, the Nazi regime relaxed the gun laws that were in place in Germany at the time the Nazis seized power. Second, the Nazi gun laws of 1938 specifically banned Jewish persons from obtaining a license to manufacture firearms or ammunition. Third, approximately eight months after enacting the 1938 Nazi gun laws, Hitler imposed regulations prohibiting Jewish persons from possessing any dangerous weapons, including firearms.

The difficult question is how to characterize the Nazi treatment of the Jewish population for purposes of evaluating Hitler's position on gun control. Truth is, the question itself is absurd. The Nazis sought to disarm and kill the Jewish population. Their treatment of Jews is, in this sense, orthogonal to their gun-control views. Nevertheless, if forced to take a position, it seems that the Nazis aspired to a certain relaxation of gun registration laws for the "law-abiding German citizen" – for those who were not, in their minds, "enemies of the National Socialist state," in other words, Jews, Communists, etc.

Here, then, is the best tentative and bizarre conclusion: Some of the pro-gunners are probably right, the Nazi-gun-registration argument is probably wrong. What is clear, though, is that the history of Weimar and Nazi gun laws has not received enough critical attention by historians. What we really need now is more historical research and reliable scholarship.

A Word On Management

I confess to having been a near-fanatical devotee to the short-sighted, and borderline demonic pronouncements of Ayn Rand.

30 years ago, I finally started to see the faulty reasoning of Rand's "Objectivism", and I won't bore the hell outa everybody with those details. Suffice to say her philosophy insists on sprinting to The Logical Extreme, which is where even good ideas go to die in sometimes epic implosions.

With Ayn Rand, you get things like this:

What the boss says goes.

Rule 1: The boss is always right

Rule 2: If the boss is ever wrong, refer to rule 1

While there's an element of truth to it, there's no room in that cutesy shit for the kind of clear-eyed, pragmatic reasoning that a Randian likes to believe he's mastered.

The most glaring of such reasoning is: The boss does not exist in a vacuum, where he needs no help from anyone.

The only pure rugged individualist is a hermit who starts out naked and alone, and somehow manages to make or otherwise acquire everything he needs all by himself with no help or input of any kind from anyone else - weapons, tools, food, clothing, shelter - all of it.

Wanna know why you never heard of such people? Because they all died before they could get their genetic material into any succeeding generations. Every one of them ended up scattered across the landscape in piles of leopard shit - or bear shit, or fellow-hominin shit - and in very short order.

We are all descended from people who knew how to cooperate - people who knew collaboration and collective action were essential to our survival as a species.

So - New Rules:

1. The boss can be wrong, and the employees can be right. So it's best if everybody gets the benefit of the doubt, and we can hash it all out as we go.

2. Although this is a business and not a democracy, it's a business that exists within a democracy, and democracy is not a business. We all have rights that are not relinquished in exchange for a paycheck.

3. Earn cookies, get cookies. Earn shit, get shit. And that goes for bosses and employees alike.

 That's it - let's get back to work.

Gun Worship

Gun Idolatry Is Destroying the Case for Guns

David French is a New York Times Opinion columnist. He is a lawyer, writer and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a former constitutional litigator, and his most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”

On June 26, 2018, our family experienced one of the most terrifying nights of our lives. It began with a strange and chilling direct message to our son — an image of three Klan hoods. That was strange enough, but sadly not all that surprising. From the moment that I’d first expressed opposition to Donald Trump and Trumpism, our multiracial family (my youngest daughter, who is adopted, is Black) had faced an avalanche of threats, doxxing and vile racism.

Alt-right trolls had photoshopped images of my daughter into gas chambers and of her face onto old pictures of slaves. They had placed images of dead and mutilated Black Americans in the comments section of my wife’s blog. The threats had not stopped after Trump won. If anything, by 2018 they had escalated once again. So the Klan hoods sent to my son — which would have been chilling under any circumstances — were particularly ominous. What happened next was worse.

Within moments, my son received another message, a picture of a road several miles from our house. Then another picture arrived. A road sign. This one was closer. Someone seemed to be coming to our home.

This was not the first such incident. A few years earlier, a man had driven to our house, positioned his car to block our driveway, confronted my wife and kids and demanded to see me (I wasn’t home). He was later seen driving slowly around the parking lot of my kids’ school.

I was born in Alabama and grew up in Tennessee and Kentucky. As a son of the South, I was no stranger to firearms. We had a gun in our home. I learned to shoot at a young age. So did my wife. After the episode of the man demanding to see me, she not only bought a handgun, she attended multiple classes to train in armed self-defense.

So, yes, we had guns. And when my son received the Klan hood messages — as well as in other similar situations — we were glad we did. While we scrambled to determine whether the Klan hoods and street sign images were truly threatening or intended to be merely harassing, and while we considered whether to call the police (we did), I knew that we would not be defenseless if the threat were real and if our stalkers arrived before the police.

Thankfully, no one came to our house. It was likely just more harassment, but the presence of a police car outside our home may have deterred something more serious. I share this story to make two disclosures: Yes, we own guns. And yes, I support gun rights, not just for hunting or shooting sports, but for the purpose of self-defense. I’ve written in support of gun rights for years. I grew up in a culture that approached firearms responsibly, safely and with a sober mind. They were a tool — a dangerous tool, to be sure — but nothing more. In a fallen and dangerous world, a responsible, trained gun owner could help keep his or her family safe.

But the gun rights movement is changing. In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence. As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. “Guns” have joined “God” and “Trump” in the hierarchy of right-wing values. At the edges, gun owners have gone from defending the rights of people to own semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s to openly brandishing them in protests, even to the point of, for example, staging an armed occupation of parts of the Michigan Capitol during anti-lockdown protests.

But we’re now facing something worse than gun idolatry. Too many armed citizens are jittery at best, spoiling for a fight at worst. In recent days we’ve seen a rash of terrible shootings by nervous, fearful or angry citizens. A young kid rings the bell on the wrong door and is shot. A young woman drives into the wrong driveway and is shot. A cheerleader accidentally tries to get in the wrong car and is pursued and shot, along with her friend. A basketball rolls into a man’s yard, and a neighboring 6-year-old girl and her father are shot.

All of these episodes occurred over the course of just six days.

Yet even worse than such shootings, which occurred because of fear or sudden rage is the phenomenon that begins with a person who seems to want to fight, who deliberately places himself in harm’s way, uses deadly force and then is celebrated for his bloody recklessness. Take Kyle Rittenhouse. At age 17, Rittenhouse took an AR-15-style weapon to a riot in Kenosha, Wis., to, he said, “protect” a Kenosha business.

When you travel, armed, to a riot, you’re courting violent conflict, and he found it. He used his semiautomatic weapon to kill two people who attacked him at the protest, and a jury acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. But the jury’s narrow inquiry into the moment of the shooting doesn’t excuse the young man’s eagerness to deliberately place himself in a situation where he might have cause to use lethal violence.

And what has been the right’s response? Rittenhouse has gone from defendant to folk hero, a minor celebrity in populist America.

Or take Daniel Perry, the Army sergeant who was just convicted of murdering an armed Black Lives Matter protester named Garrett Foster. Shortly after the conviction, Tucker Carlson effectively demanded a pardon. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas responded the next day, tweeting that “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”

Yet Abbott ignored — or did not care — about the facts exposed at trial. Perry had run a red light and driven straight into the protest, nearly striking Foster’s wife with his car. Witnesses said Foster never pointed his gun at Perry. Even Perry initially told the police he opened fire before Foster pointed his gun at him, saying, “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”

But the story gets worse. In social media messages before the shooting, it was plain that Perry was spoiling for an opportunity to shoot someone. His messages included, “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex” and “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

That is not a man you want anywhere near a gun. Kyle Rittenhouse is not a man you want anywhere near a gun.

Our nation’s gun debate is understandably dominated by discussions of gun rights. But it needs to feature more accountability for gun culture. Every single feasible and constitutional gun control proposal — including the red flag laws that I’ve long advocated (which allow law enforcement to remove weapons from people who broadcast deadly intent or profound instability) — will still leave hundreds of millions of American guns in tens of millions of American hands.

I shared the account at the beginning of this piece to help explain to opponents of gun rights that there are times when a firearm can be the only thing that stands between profound evil and the people you love. I also share it to tell my gun-owning friends that I get it. I understand. I’ve faced more threats in the last few years than they might experience in 10 lifetimes.

But this I also know: Gun rights carry with them grave responsibilities. They do not liberate you to intimidate. They must not empower your hate. They are certainly not objects of love or reverence. Every hair-trigger use, every angry or fearful or foolish decision, is likely to spill innocent blood.

Moreover, every one of these acts increases public revulsion of gun ownership generally. The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land. America will change and gun rights will diminish. And the gun owners and advocates who fail to grasp the moral weight of their responsibility will be to blame.

How Great I Art

A special thank-you from Elmo.

This was prompted by another stupid argument over vaccinations - between normal people, and those who think biology works according to their paranoid fantasies.

I get so fucking sick of this fight, but I can't justify retiring from the field, and ceding the ground to the Foil Hat Gang.

Moving Against Corruption

A long sad story of woe and intrigue.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Calls For DOJ Investigation Of Clarence Thomas’ Hidden Gifts

“I’m urging the Judicial Conference to step in and refer Justice Thomas to the Attorney General for investigation,” the senator said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on the body overseeing the federal judiciary to refer Justice Clarence Thomas to the Department of Justice for investigation into his failure to properly report gifts from a billionaire benefactor.

“It would be best for the Chief Justice to commence a proper investigation, but after a week of silence from the Court and this latest disturbing reporting, I’m urging the Judicial Conference to step in and refer Justice Thomas to the Attorney General for investigation,” Whitehouse said in a statement released Thursday night.

Whitehouse, joined by other Democrats, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), previously called on Chief Justice John Roberts to investigate Thomas’ failure to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow. Those gifts, uncovered by ProPublica, included multiple expensive luxury vacations on Crow’s superyacht for Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, and regular use of Crow’s private jet. Thomas did not disclose these gifts in his mandated annual personal financial reports.

In addition to the luxury vacations and private jet use, Crow purchased Thomas’ ancestral home in Georgia, where his mother still resides, from him for an inflated price, ProPublica reported on Thursday. While Thomas had listed his interest in the home on his financial reports in the past, he did not disclose the sale to Crow as required by law.

Whitehouse and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) sent a letter to the Judicial Conference on Friday asking it to “refer Justice Thomas to the Attorney General for further action.”

The letter states: “Potential violations of disclosure laws by officers of the highest court merit serious investigation, and it is well past time for the Supreme Court to align with the rest of the government on ethics requirements.”

Supreme Court justices are required to disclose certain gifts and sales under federal ethics laws. In the past, some gifts of lodging and hospitality provided by friends were exempt from disclosure. Thomas claims that he believed that he was not required to disclose the travel, lodging and food provided by Crow.

In March, the Judicial Conference, the body that sets rules for the federal judiciary, updated its disclosure guidelines to clarify that justices must report gifts of lodging and hospitality not provided at a personal residence owned directly by the gift-giving individual and private travel to such locations.

The financial disclosure law that Thomas is alleged to have violated states that justices must “knowingly and willfully” fail to report gifts that should have been disclosed. Such a violation may result in fines up to $50,000, or, if the violator falsifies a report, not more than one year in prison.

The Judicial Conference is the body designated by ethics law to refer members of the judiciary to the Attorney General for investigation.

Whitehouse’s call for a referral for investigation into Thomas follows a similar letter to the Judicial Conference sent by the ethics watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. That letter noted that Thomas previously disclosed similar gifts of travel from Crow, but stopped disclosing them after the Los Angeles Times reported on his relationship with the billionaire in 2004. This sudden change in disclosure “demonstrated knowledge of the requirement” that he disclose such gifts, a precondition for guilt under the ethics law.

The CLC letter also notes that Thomas has a long history of failing to disclose gifts and income. In 2011, Thomas amended 20 years of his financial reports to account for his failure to disclose his wife’s income at various conservative political and educational institutions despite previously properly disclosing such income.

It has been 54 years since the Justice Department opened an investigation into a sitting Supreme Court justice.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Justice Abe Fortas to replace the retiring Earl Warren as Chief Justice. A bitter campaign to defeat the liberal justice’s nomination to lead the court, fueled in part by the antisemitism (Fortas was Jewish) of Southern segregationists like Republican Strom Thurmond and Democrat James Eastland, commenced.

Fortas’ nomination was ultimately blocked by a filibuster, but he remained on the bench as an associate justice. In the process, Thurmond attacked Fortas for receiving $15,000 paid by his former corporate clients and legal partners for nine speeches at American University.

In 1969, news reports revealed that Fortas received a $20,000 annual retainer from the family foundation of financier Louis Wolfson beginning in 1966. Wolfson had been convicted of illegal stock trading and appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court. The court didn’t take the case and Fortas didn’t take part in its consideration, but the payments created an appearance of corruption.

The Justice Department opened an investigation into Fortas after assistant attorney general and future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist convinced President Richard Nixon that it would be legal to do so. Fortas ultimately resigned his seat after Attorney General John Mitchell threatened to indict him for tax fraud if he did not do so. The ethics law that Thomas is alleged to have broken was extended to cover judges following the revelations of payments to Fortas and other justices.

The campaign against Fortas was the beginning of the conservative push to take over the Supreme Court. It provided Nixon with two open court seats, first the Chief Justice seat being vacated by Warren and then Fortas’. Nixon appointed Warren Burger to replace Warren while attempting to fill Fortas’ seat with a Southern conservative segregationist in order to fulfill a campaign promise to Thurmond, but the Democratic Senate blocked him twice.

This episode launched the judicial wars that culminated in the conservative triumph after President Donald Trump replaced the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg with the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The shift in the court to the right elevated Thomas from the margins to the center of a court bloc aimed at rolling back the 20th century decisions pronounced by the likes of liberals like Fortas. But now he faces a similar controversy for breaking a law passed in Fortas’ wake.

SCOTUS Is A Problem

I hate writing that: "SCOTUS is a problem".

One of the main bulwarks in preserving a democracy is an independent judiciary. If the bad guys convince people that's fucked up, then they're miles closer to their goal of tearing it all down and replacing it with plutocratic rule.

My paranoid suspicions about The Plutocracy Project get really complicated when I think that by acknowledging what seems obvious, I could playing into the bad guys' hand. "They" need me to think SCOTUS is the problem, so I'll be more willing to let somebody throw it over in favor of something they say will be better, but I'm so totally convinced is bound to be vastly worse.

Which puts me back to my default: The bad guys are gunning for my democracy, with the usual playbook.

1. Fuck up some government thing
2. Wait, while DumFux News amplifies it, stoking the rabble
3. Point at it and say, "Oh look - wow - it's really fucked up. Vote for me and I'll fix it for you"

The main thing that has to be achieved in order to topple a government is to make people lose faith in that government. And in this case, we're not talking about just changing the guys running the government - we're talking about shit-canning democracy and changing over to a plutocratic regime where government does nothing but protect corporate assets abroad, keep people in line here in USAmerica Inc, and settle contract disputes among the Controlling Interest Class.

So guess what - SCOTUS is all fucked up. Or so people think - and it seems they're correct. At least for now. Maybe. Remains to be seen. Or not.

Shit makes my head hurt.

We have to keep reminding ourselves to defend the institution by politically moving against the people who're fucking it up.

Opinion The Supreme Court delivers a sigh of relief — and an outrageous dissent

Justice Clarence Thomas has gotten the attention of late due to questionable ethics. But it’s high time Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. received the scrutiny he deserves. Alito’s dissent in the mifepristone case has served up yet another example of his intemperate, partisan rhetoric.

On Friday, the Supreme Court instituted a stay that could last well over a year (until a final decision from the high court on the merits) in a case brought by forced-birth advocates to ban the safe and effective abortion and miscarriage drug mifepristone. While the action temporarily suspends a preposterous opinion from U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk reversing the Food and Drug Administration’s two-decades-old approval of the drug (at the behest of certain antiabortion doctors and groups), the decision was not unanimous. Alito and Thomas would have allowed the indefensible ruling by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to stand.

In the rush to celebrate the failure of medical zealots (this time) to dredge up an antiabortion activist in robes to countermand the FDA, Alito’s dissent shouldn’t be ignored, for it perfectly encapsulates the degree to which he’s become “unmoored from reason,” as legal scholar Norman Eisen tells me.

The opinion is so lacking in judicial reason and tone that Supreme Court advocates and constitutional experts with whom I spoke were practically slack-jawed. They cite a batch of objectionable arguments and remarks in his dissent.

Here’s what the Supreme Court abortion pill ruling means and what’s next

First, Alito’s dissent begins with an extended, bitter and unnecessary rant about the shadow docket (the use of emergency rulings that have major policy consequences without the benefit of full briefing). He has railed at critics before, but now he cannot restrain himself from venting in an actual opinion. He goes on at length to recall the accusations, choosing to single out a warning against overuse of the motions docket from none other than Justice Amy Coney Barrett. (That alliance might be on the rocks.) It’s entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand and, as with so much of Alito’s writing, utterly intemperate.

But it gets much worse. Alito has the temerity to assert that there would be no irreparable injury in denying the stay because “the Government has not dispelled legitimate doubts” — by whom? where does this standard come from? — “that it would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases, much less that it would choose to take enforcement actions to which it has strong objections.” This unprecedented attack on the government’s obedience to court rulings — based on nothing — is out of order. There is zero evidence — stray pundits and legislative backbenchers don’t count — that the Biden administration would essentially put itself in contempt of court.

Moreover, Alito’s dissent demonstrates that he does not care one whit about the women affected if the drug were suddenly made unavailable. (At least he’s consistent; he also utterly ignored the interests of women in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, giving them no weight in contrast to the seemingly inviolate interest of states in commandeering women’s reproductive choices.) Their irreparable harm doesn’t register.

Next, consider Alito’s hypocrisy in accusing the government of “leveraging” (i.e., judge shopping) by going to a court in the 9th Circuit to obtain a contrary opinion, thereby setting up a conflict between circuits. It takes some nerve to make that accusation, given how the case began when antiabortion activists searched out a single-district division in Amarillo, Tex., where they were certain to draw a judge who embraces their cause.

Finally, Alito dishonestly asserts that a stay isn’t needed because this will all get decided quickly at the 5th Circuit or at the Supreme Court — probably in the government’s favor. (“Because the applicants’ Fifth Circuit appeal has been put on a fast track, with oral argument scheduled to take place in 26 days, there is reason to believe that they would get the relief they now seek — from either the Court of Appeals or this Court — in the near future if their arguments on the merits are persuasive.”)

First, even if it is a matter of days or weeks, women denied the medication will of course be harmed. (See above: Women’s interests don’t count.) Second, any appeal to the Supreme Court and resolution on the merits will take months and months. This simply will not be all wrapped up, as he suggests, “in the near future.” Third, the far-right 5th Circuit is almost certain to rule against the government, so relief will not be forthcoming from that court. And finally, Alito already (prematurely and utterly improperly) seems to tell us that the Supreme Court is going to toss the case. We can only surmise that his fellow justices left him under no illusion that this case will succeed as a backdoor to a national ban on medical abortions.

Looking at the entirety of Alito’s dissent, constitutional scholar Leah Litman reels off the outrages, including the plaintiffs’ sprint to Amarillo, the “whataboutisms” in the shadow docket and the “willful blindness to the effects of the Fifth Circuit ruling.” She adds, “It reads like a Fox News grandpa’s rant.” She points to the irony that the author of Dobbs, which stressed the role of states and elected branches, now is “most eager to support federal courts ordering bans on medication abortion protocols.”

“There is some real chutzpah,” she adds.

It’s interesting that this judicial travesty came after the delay in releasing the decision (originally due Wednesday), possibly as a courtesy to Alito from his colleagues. Next time, for the sake of the court, the rule of law and even Alito, the court might not give him the time he needs to embarrass himself.

Babies Not Having Babies

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I think my only push-back on this piece by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington is the fact that it's coming from someone at the University Of Chicago, which traditionally, is not exactly a hotbed of progressive thinking on sociological subjects. Color me skeptical.

That said, she's not sounding like the usual conservative dick, trying to tell young people they're overreacting or that liberals are being all squishy or some shit.

She's reporting what she's hearing from the people who're going to decide where we live out our old-age. We should probably listen, and take it to heart.

Opinion Don’t want a baby because of climate fears? You’re not alone.

As a college professor, I’m used to hearing young people’s anxiety and even anger about climate change. One of the most striking trends is the number of students who have told me they feel robbed of the ability to have children, cheated out of parenthood by decades of climate denial and inaction by baby boomers and their own Gen X parents.

My students are not alone. A global survey in 2021 of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 shows how widespread these sentiments are. Close to 60 percent told researchers they felt “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. More than half feared the security of their family would be threatened in the near future, and nearly 4 in 10 said they were “hesitant to have children.”

That’s an awful lot of people. But many older Americans argue that this is absurd, even morally suspect — from Fox News hosts suggesting that even questioning whether to have children amounts to “civilizational suicide,” to commentators in the New York Times who have acknowledged the reality of climate change but then dismissed concerns about the future of the environment in favor of the hope children offer. In both instances, parenthood becomes a moral referendum, separating those who affirm the value of human life, or the value of American civilization, from those who don’t.

But the decision not to have children in the face of crisis is nothing new. In fact, the impulse can be traced not only to our human ancestors but also beyond the human species.

The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has observed that mothers of all kinds, human and otherwise, make choices about how many children they will raise and when, based on ecological and historical circumstances. Primates have been seen to abandon babies born in moments of food shortages or environmental distress, the pressure to survive in their given habitat overriding any reproductive instinct or maternal bond.

Today, we tend to talk about reproductive decisions as though they take place in a vacuum, where all options are available to all people, and the choice you make is determined only by your desire: Do you want to have a child? But for centuries, reproductive decisions have been constrained by people’s economic, material and environmental conditions.

For instance, when Mormon settlers moved into Southern Paiute lands in Utah in the 1850s, bringing violence and disease, births in the tribe plummeted, and not just because women who might have borne children were killed. “My people have been unhappy for so long,” a Paiute woman wrote in 1883; after decades of war, death and loss, “they wish to disincrease, rather than multiply.”

People from marginalized communities have long had to weigh their desire for children against the safety and sustainability of the lives they imagined those children would lead. In the face of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings and racism, “Black people of the not-too-distant past trembled for every baby born into that world,” Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote in 2019. “Sound familiar?”

In the spring of 1969, a college graduate named Stephanie Mills made the connection between environmental concerns and reproductive choice explicit, when she delivered a dark commencement speech at a small college in Oakland, Calif. “I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is have no children at all,” Mills said. “As an ex-potential parent, I have asked myself what kind of world my children would grow up in. And the answer was, ‘Not very pretty, not very clean. Sad, in fact.’”

Mills gave her speech — and, in the next year, dozens of talks like it — at a portentous moment for environmental activism and contraceptive technology. The Food and Drug Administration had approved the first form of hormonal birth control in 1960, and by the end of the decade, millions of women were relying on the pill to put off having children — or, like Mills, to avoid having them.

This was also just as the American environmental movement was gaining steam. The spring after Mills gave her commencement speech, an estimated 20 million Americans would take part in events for the inaugural Earth Day — a victory, however symbolic, for environmental causes. But onstage in 1969, Mills was far more optimistic about contraception than she was about the promise of environmentalism. Her speech was titled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax.”

Should you not have kids because of climate change? It’s complicated.

To today’s environmentally minded observers, the fact that young people are considering having fewer children might seem like a good thing. Population is a driver of climate change, they might say, and the carbon footprint of a baby born in the United States is gigantic; having one fewer child cuts emissions far more than giving up airplanes, meat or automobiles.

But that kind of thinking — blaming individuals having babies for societal ills — has been used to fuel population control measures with distinctly authoritarian, racist or eugenicist flavors. It also misses the point. My students aren’t talking about the carbon footprints of babies. They’re talking about grief, about a future that has been lost.

If politicians and policymakers want to encourage young people to become parents — and it seems they very much do — history suggests there’s a better path than the one too many of them are pursuing: revoking our right to reproductive autonomy, making birth control harder to access and abortion a crime.

Instead, they should convince us that climate change is being taken seriously as a threat — that the environment we and our children must live in is in good, capable, rational hands.

We have to make better

short-term decisions,

in order to have

a more positive impact

in the long term.

Because those decisions

don't just determine

how our children will live -

they determine how

our children will die.