Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I don’t understand all the outrage about the flag at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house. If the flag had not flown, would you have thought that Alito’s rulings are any less partisan?

Oscar Levant to George Gershwin: “Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over, would you fall in love with yourself again?”

When we have visited a continuing care retirement community or a life plan estate or what I refer to as a place to die, a person showing us around always points out at least one library to us. However, on our last two visits, our marketing person referred to them as “libaries.” Should that affect our decision about whether we want to move there?

“Her brain is a cage of canaries.” Virginia Woolf referring to a Russian ballerina.

We had dinner with a couple who lived in a place to die. They were charming. One had been a hairdresser who was an expert in sign language for the deaf. She signed for Red Skelton shows at Atlantic City. She told us that the comedian had a following among the deaf because he did much pantomime and included a sign language “translator” for his stage shows. I found this interesting, but I also found it unsettling that our dinner companion referred to the performer as Red Skeleton.

Conservatives say that if Trump is elected, Democrats should be criminally prosecuted. I agree. If a Democrat falsifies records about hush money payments to an adult film actress to affect an election, those Democrats should be prosecuted.

“The nail that sticks up will be hammered down. Japanese Proverb.” Nami Hirahara, Snakeskin Shamisen: A Mas Arai Mystery.

A friend whom I am sure thought he knew the answer asked if anyone besides Trump had been prosecuted for falsifying business records as a felony. I did a little internet search. I quickly found one site that reported, “New York state has arraigned almost 9,800 cases involving the same charge since 2015.” Another site stated that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had filed 120 cases of falsified business records in the several years before Trump was indicted, all of them felonies based on the concealment or commission of other crimes. A third site concluded, “Prosecution of falsifying business records in the first degree is commonplace and has been used by New York district attorneys’ offices to hold to account a breadth of criminal behavior from the more petty to simple to the more serious and highly organized. We reach this conclusion after surveying the past decade and a half of criminal cases across all the New York district attorneys’ offices.”

Stephen Colbert in his role as a right-wing blowhard said, “I don’t believe in the facts. The facts are liberal.”

I did an internet search for how to pronounce Swiatek. I still don’t know how.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Job Comes with Pay, Power, Prestige . . . and Criticism . . . . and Billionaires’ Gifts (concluded)

So. Back to Justice Alito. Life tenure and unchecked decisions might lead you to think that Supreme Court justices would not be affected by criticisms. You would be wrong. (See the AJsdad.blog, March 11, 2022, “ACB Told Us So” and the post of March 2, 2022, “Partisan Hacks, Comprised Of”.) Recently Samuel Alito has given us an example of judicial thin skin. A respected news organization uncovered information that Alito had taken an undisclosed expensive vacation paid for by a billionaire who has interests with cases before the Supreme Court. That news organization did the professional thing by asking Alito for comments before publishing the report. Alito blew them off. Instead, before the news report was published, he placed a prebuttal in the Wall Street Journal.

Alito, echoing an earlier defense by Clarence Thomas of similar behavior, said that the trip did not have to be disclosed because it was “personal hospitality.” We can all understand that. I certainly accept personal hospitality, but I wonder about it in Alito’s circumstances. At least in my circumstances, such hospitality is reciprocal. Someone entertains me with dinner or drinks or lodging, and almost always I have reciprocated in some fashion. I wonder: How often has Samuel Alito invited the billionaire over for dinner? Is it “personal” if the hospitality is only in one direction? Alito did not disclose such reciprocity if it has happened.

Alito’s WSJ rebuttal also said that he had merely filled a seat that otherwise would have gone empty on the billionaire’s private jet, implying that somehow plunking his behind there really cost the billionaire nothing. However, I know that seat was not offered to me, and I doubt that it was offered to you. But somehow it was offered to Alito. Hmmmm.

Alito went on to justify his failure to recuse himself from the cases that involved the billionaire’s interests. Alito said the billionaire’s name was not on the court papers and, furthermore, there is no reason ever to conclude that he might be biased. Hey, he barely knows the guy he said. Alito saw no possible contradiction between the trip being “personal hospitality” yet barely knowing the billionaire. Perhaps one might conclude that he was invited on the trip because he was a Supreme Court justice???

Alito’s defense petulantly implied, “How dare you criticize me!” Right wingers, including the Wall Street Journal editorial page, have more explicitly promoted this message. The pundits proclaim that the story about Alito is partisan, published with the express purpose of undermining the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. ProPublica, the organization that performed the Alito investigation, is a nonprofit not aligned with any political party. It is well regarded; it has won a half-dozen Pulitzer Prizes as well as other awards. And, ironically, its founding editor came from the Wall Street Journal.

The critics claiming partisanship have not claimed that ProPublica got the facts wrong. This reminds me of watching Stephen Colbert playing the role of the right-wing bloviator on Comedy Central who said, “I am against the facts because the facts are liberal.”

Moreover, it seems laughable that the conservatives would attack the reporting about Alito as an attack on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. Those same pundits have regularly attacked Biden, and no doubt before that, Obama and probably Bill Clinton, if they are old enough. By their logic, those criticisms were attacks on the legitimacy of the presidency. I think, however, we can all agree that the presidency has survived. So much so, that a slew of conservatives want to be president. Reporting about Alito will not destroy the legitimacy of the Court. If one of those right wingers becomes president, he or she will have no difficulty in finding people to put on the Supreme Court.

If perception of the Supreme Court’s impartiality is harmed by this contretemps, however, it will not be because of the messenger, the accurate investigative reporting. It will be because of Samuel Alito’s (and Clarence Thomas’s) actions. Apparently he believes that unless there is evidence that he took a quid pro quo, he did nothing wrong. We should trust him and the institution he is part of even if the lavish fishing trip looks fishy. Alito rejects the two-millennia-old, conservative advice contained in Caesar’s-wife admonition. Appearances do not matter to Alito and his defenders.

Alito also seems unaware of basic human nature. Who you hang out with affects your views. If I spend most of my time with Tamil Tigers, you can expect me to have different opinions and ideas than if I am a regular at an Iowa quilting circle. Without being consciously aware of it, we soak up all sorts of things from those we converse, sing, worship, or play with.

Normal people want to be liked by those they spend time with. This highlights a great problem with our nation today. The rich have always had outsized power in our government, but especially since the Supreme Court has lifted and relaxed limits on campaign spending, politicians have needed more and more money. Government officials, as a result, spend more and more time with the ultra-rich, and in the normal course of human events, that, at least subtly, affects how they see the world. And now we find out that justices of the Supreme Court also spend time with that tiniest fraction of the upper one percent. When was the last time you did? There are fewer than a thousand billionaires out of our vast population. You are less likely to encounter a billionaire than a deer on the highway. What are the odds that out of mere happenstance, two billionaires from that tiny population only out of feelings of bonhomie have become friends with two Supreme Court justices?

And while I expect those whom I hang out with affect my views in all sorts of ways, I would think I would be especially attentive to those who had given me gifts valued at more than six figures. (Of course, I do not know that from personal experience. How often have you received a gift of more than $100,000?) I think it would be natural to want that person to like me. Apparently, Alito would like you to believe that his nature is different.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

 The pop-up ad asked, “What happens when you take a testosterone supplement?” The answer according to the ad: a young blonde appears. She has melon-sized breasts and hard nipples and is clothed in a dress so tight that it gives a lasting impression of the melon-sized breasts and hard nipples.

Don Everly died recently. His younger brother Phil died even earlier, seven years ago. Many, including me, loved much of their music, but I am willing to bet that I am one of the few who bought the Everly Brothers album “Both Sides of an Evening” because it had their version of “Mention My Name in Sheboygan.”

There is little to admire in China’s criminal justice system. On the other hand, I recently read that a mainland Chinese person was convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” If this crime were not used in China to prosecute journalists and if it could be confined to politicians and some of my neighbors, I might like it.

America has become increasingly “divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” Stephen Colbert.

Each tennis player had won a point. The umpire intoned the score: “Fifteen all.” Would it be more grammatically correct or more accurate if she had said, “Fifteen both”?

A columnist excoriated Biden for imposing the vaccine mandates because as a candidate he said that would not require the injections. I thought of the words of Bernard Berenson: “Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.”

A woman at a protest against covid vaccine mandates was wearing a tee shirt reading “My Body My Choice.” I wondered, but doubted, that the woman was also pro-choice because I have seen similar tee shirts at rallies promoting abortion rights.

The Senator said that our withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan was “clearly and fatally flawed.” I wondered what he meant. A fatal flaw, I thought, means that such-and-such an event cannot happen because of the inherent flaw. And yet, the withdrawal occurred. Perhaps he meant that the withdrawal was clearly and fundamentally flawed.

It seemed odd that he was putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a picnic table in a neighborhood park. As I got closer, I saw that the pieces were too small for a puzzle and thought he was doing some sort of work with beads, but there was also an Exacto knife and a pair of scissors. I passed him and then looked over his shoulder. Intent on his project, he did not notice me, but I asked, “Is that leather?” He looked up and said that he was cutting up Air Jordans. I could now see that he had almost finished creating a portrait of Michael Jordan from intricately-cut pieces of the man’s shoes. He told me that the picture would also have a basketball, which he was going to create by cutting up pieces of a real basketball. I asked if he sold his art, and if so, where. He said that he did sell his creations and was going to do so on an app that was not yet functioning. I asked if he was often in this park. He said, gesturing at the building to the north, “Yes. My son goes to school there.”  I looked again at the work in progress and said, “That’s cool,” but embarrassed myself a bit by adding, “man.” He, however, just smiled, looking pleased when I said that I would see him again.