Ann's Mega Dub: If they had hearts, imagine what they might accomplish

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

If they had hearts, imagine what they might accomplish

BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX & THOMAS FRIEDMAN IS A GREAT MAN & ANN'S MEGA DUB -- THE KOOL AID TABLE

PROFESSIONAL UGLY WOMAN CAITLYN JENNER BROUGHT MORE DISGRACE TO THE KARDASHIAN FAMILY BY INSISTING GAY PEOPLE HAD HIJACKED GAY RIGHTS AND THAT THEY ARE "THE RADICAL RAINBOW MAFIA." CALLING HER AN "IDIOT" IS NOT DEADNAMING HER, RIGHT?

"DOMESTIC TERRORISTS" IS WHAT THE BITTER 73-YEAR-OLD CALLED THEM.

OF COURSE, CAITLYN HERSELF WAS DECLARED A "TRANSGENDER TERRORIST" IN THE COMEDY FILM CLASSIC "BROS."

AND, OF COURSE, CAITLYN HERSELF KILLED KIM HOWE AND MANAGED TO AVOID PRISON TIME.

REACHED FOR COMMENT BY THESE REPORTERS -- MUST CREDIT BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX & THOMAS FRIEDMAN IS A GREAT MAN & ANN'S MEGA DUB -- CAITLYN DECLARED, "WE LIVE IN A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY CALLED AMERICA WHERE WE ARE FREE TO RUN OVER WHOMEVER WE WANT. I CAN STILL TASTE THE BLOOD FROM MY FIRST KILL."

IN OTHER NEWS, MEGYN KELLY CONTINUES RIPPING INTO DYLAN MULVANEY FOR BEING A PRETTIER WOMAN THAN MEGYN IS. REACHED FOR COMMENT BY THESE REPORTERS -- MUST CREDIT BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX & THOMAS FRIEDMAN IS A GREAT MAN & ANN'S MEGA DUB -- MEGYN ROARED, "I AM SATAN! AND THE LEFT SIDE OF MY FACE IS HIGHTER THAN THE RIGHT SIDE! I TRY TO CONCEAL MY ADAM'S APPLE BECAUSE IT IS THE VORTEX INTO HELL! I USED TO BE ON FOX AND NBC! I USED TO BE ON FOX AND NBC! YOUTUBE IS THE ONLY PLACE WORSE THAN HELL!" AND THEN MEGYN VANISHED INTO A PUFF OF SMOKE AS ALL THE MUNCHKINS CAME OUT OF HIDING AND BEGAN DANCING AND SINGING AGAIN.

FROM THE TCI WIRE:

Starting with Crooked Clarence who put a price on justice. Erin Snodgrass (INSIDER) reports:

Juan Williams, a political analyst at Fox News, as well as a decades-long friend to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, expressed his support f0r an investigation into the conservative justice following a recent spate of corruption allegations.

Thomas is facing renewed scrutiny following the revelation last week that the he sold his childhood home to GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow — and never disclosed the sale.

The ProPublica report came days after the outlet first reported that Thomas has been accepting and failing to disclose several luxury vacations from Crow for years. While Thomas defended the undisclosed trips by citing an ill-defined "personal hospitality" exemption included in disclosure requirements, the real estate revelation has thus far been harder to explain away.

CNN reported on Monday that Thomas plans to amend his financial disclosure forms to accurately reflect the real estate deal, but four ethics law experts told ProPublica last week that the justice likely violated a federal disclosure law that was enacted in the wake of Watergate, sparking public pressure for an official investigation into Thomas' financial dealings, as well as growing calls for his resignation and impeachment.

Wow. Juan's done more than 'legal expert' Jonathan Turley. Turley's dismissed this. Turley's acted as though it's normal. And then he's avoided it. He promotes himself as some sort of Constitutional expert but he is just a scared little rabbit, afraid he might weigh in wrong and be dropped from the FOX "NEWS" payroll. Claims to cover the courts but can't really explore Crooked Clarence.

At THE NEW REPUBLIC, Alex Shephard addresses conservatives (Jonathan Turley became one when FOX "NEWS" tossed enough money at him) who minimize Clarence's crooked actions:

Thomas may not have deliberately changed his votes at Crow’s behest, but a chummy relationship between a right-wing megadonor who literally funds organizations that appear before the Supreme Court and a justice on that court, involving the bestowing of many lavish gifts—which said justice then hides from the public—is clearly crooked. Crow’s relationship with Thomas is based entirely on the former’s wealth and the latter’s influence. It obviously speaks to Thomas’s own contempt for his critics and opponents: He is identifying as a member and agent of a vast right-wing machine. He is, more importantly, using his position in government to enrich himself—it is obvious that Thomas would not be the beneficiary of Crow’s largesse if he were not on the Supreme Court.

That all of this is amoral on its face should be clear to anyone who values a functional democracy. Having a member of the Supreme Court hobnobbing around and taking all kinds of presents from a billionaire megadonor goes against bedrock principles of self-government. A civic-minded judge or lawmaker labors diligently to avoid even a hint of impropriety; Thomas has done no such thing and instead has gleefully filled his pockets. The idea that Shapiro—or anyone else—knows Thomas’s heart is silly. It’s also irrelevant: We don’t need to connect the dots to determine which bronze gnome wrought which Supreme Court decision. The appearance of a conflict of interest is sin enough.

To accept what Thomas and Crow have cooked up between themselves is to accept rampant corruption on the Supreme Court, full stop. It shows that the court has no ability to police itself and no interest in doing anything that might ameliorate the continued and growing influence of right-wing megadonors on its justices—particularly Thomas. Undoubtedly Crow and Thomas’s close relationship has influenced the justice’s thinking. Surely Crow has expressed his opinions on ideological matters during those many hours they’ve spent together, sunning in the Riviera.

Crow derives a benefit from keeping Thomas steeped in lavish gifts—all that boodle may not be necessary to push Thomas to rule a certain way, but it sure helps influence other people in Crow’s orbit. He can present himself as someone who has the ear of one of the most powerful jurists in the country. He can also send the message that there are rich rewards to be reaped by staying in the plutocrat’s good graces. And so the failure to do anything about Thomas and Crow’s relationship sends a message to right-wing justices everywhere. If you hold the line—and rule in the manner Crow prefers—you too can one day rake in gifts, vacations, playdates, and weird trips to an absurd “park” containing dozens of statues of fallen dictators. Corruption is welcome. Thomas may not have changed any of his votes at Crow’s behest—but that doesn’t mean others won’t.

This is a serious issue. Clarence should be resigning. Instead, he acts like he's done nothing wrong while he further sullies the reputation of The Court. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern (SLATE) note:

When news broke last week, by way of dogged reporting in ProPublica, that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted decades’ worth of hospitality from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, that this same donor had funded his wife’s legal and political activities and in fact helped pay her salary, and that Thomas had disclosed none of this, our suggestion that the justice had clearly broken the law was dismissed as left-wing “smear.” ProPublica’s new reporting, dropped on Thursday, showed that the same billionaire donor, Harlan Crow, spent $133,363 purchasing several properties co-owned by Thomas, and that these sales were never disclosed. As our colleagues at Slate confirmed this week, Thomas’ mother actually still lives in the property owned by Crow, to which he has made valuable improvements (in addition to buying the house next door and dispensing with previously troublesome neighbors). Unlike the rules around the undisclosed luxury travel reported last week, ProPublica could not find a single ethics expert willing to squint and hop on one foot in a way that would make the failure to report the real estate transaction seem arguably lawful. The court has not responded in any way to the latest revelations. Defenders of Justice Thomas somehow continue to urge that this is a smear campaign by liberals.

In a way, the fact that money went from Harlan Crow’s pocket to Thomas’ mom’s house seems less horrifying than last week’s superyachts and half-million-dollar luxury air travel. Who among us wouldn’t want a billionaire to evict the noisy neighbors who were keeping our mothers up late? But it helps to parse out what mattered about both Thomas stories and what is mostly a distraction. That Thomas is a “hypocrite” for claiming to like parking outside Walmarts to commune with real people while secretly indulging his taste for luxe global travel? Doesn’t really matter. Harlan Crow’s penchant for cunningly little embroidered Nazi table linens? Weird, surely, but materially inconsequential. The Wall Street Journal editorial board’s claim that Thomas is a good and great man being tarnished by “left-leaning” ProPublica (which, let’s recall, is actually founded by former Wall Street Journal folks)? Whatever.

What mattered last week and what still matters this week is whether the Crow/Thomas dealings can be seen as classic quid pro quo (or perhaps quid pro Crow) corruption. We too often think this can only happen in a scene in which cartoon ducks with big sacks of cash pay politicians to do their bidding, which is never how this actually happens. And the longstanding defense to those claims is that Justice Thomas is too independent a thinker and jurist to be influenced by gifts of bibles and vacations and rent-free housing. But what this new reporting shows—and what actually matters—is that Crow and those like him, who have poured billions of dollars into funding cases before the court, campaigns to seat certain justices on the court, and crusades to keep other justices off the court, turn out to just own the whole building. In tandem with the Leonard Leos and Mark Paolettas who have been rendered in art for all eternity, the Harlan Crows are the actual landlords of the houses where the six conservative justices seemingly get to live rent-free.

If you’re defending Thomas’ unlawful refusal to disclose these transactions by saying he’s too famous/powerful/important/busy/put-upon to disclose these transactions, you are missing the point. Disclosure laws aren’t tawdry “gotcha” traps that form the basis of smear campaigns. Disclosure rules are the only means of transparency in a world of increasingly broken democratic systems. Citizens United and its dismantling of campaign finance reform? Justified on the grounds that disclosure rules suffice to ferret out corruption. We don’t demand that public figures deal honestly with the public because we are mean; we do it because law and democracy rise and fall on knowing who paid who for what.

Someone should print that last paragraph and tape it to Turley's office door.

Speaking of his office door, let's be honest. We raise our kids with the hope that they'll have better lives. Why would we then send them to George Washington University? We want the best for them and now that Turley's transitioned into a hate monger, why would we send our kids there? We got them to 18 and ready for college -- an accomplishment, yes. We didn't do that to turn them into soulless hate merchants. We want them to hope for the future. They won't get a hope at an institution that allows a transphobe and homophobe like Turley to flourish. These are our treasured loved ones. They're too important to have their minds put in the hands of a monster so we need to avoid not just George Washington University's law school, but the whole university. And that probably means our donations need to drop when it comes to George Washington University -- give less or, better yet, none at all.

I'm workshopping it, I've got a series of lunches coming up about how we best use our money to invest in colleges and which investments are betraying our youth. Anyway, Khaleda Rahman (NEWSWEEK) notes:

Following The Washington Post's report, lawyer David R. Lurie tweeted: "Thomas's disregard for legal disclosure mandates exemplifies the attitude of the Supreme Court's extremist majority toward the citizens to whom they issue increasingly imperious dictates: Contempt."

Newsweek reached out to Lurie via Twitter and a Supreme Court spokesperson via email for comment.

Lurie also warned that the nation's federal courts are "living on borrowed legitimacy" in a post for journalist Aaron Rupar's Public Notice newsletter last week.

He wrote that "the corrupt conduct of Justice Thomas demonstrates, some members of the Trump Era judiciary appear to believe there is no longer a need for them even to maintain an appearance of judicial probity."

He noted that Thomas had not recused himself from election cases following the 2020 election even though his wife, Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist, had reached out to the Trump White House and lawmakers to urge them to attempt to overturn election results.

"We now know that — even as Ginni Thomas was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from 'family friend' Harlan Crow — Thomas himself was receiving lavish gifts of travel and other benefits from the billionaire, a right-wing activist, with an intense interest in the subject matters of many cases that come before the Court," Lurie wrote.

At The Brennan Center for Justice, Michael Waldman explains:

The Supreme Court keeps tripping over its own robes. Last week, ProPublica revealed that a conservative megadonor has been secretly subsidizing the lifestyle of Justice Clarence Thomas. In a rare public statement, the justice claims he asked others on the Court and in the judiciary, who assured him he need not disclose such beneficence.

It’s not clear which is worse: if this is true, or if it isn’t.

Thomas said all this merely involved “personal hospitality” from a friend (albeit a billionaire who befriended Thomas only after he was appointed to the Court). That might evoke a dinner party or a weekend at a friend’s lake house. Hardly: Thomas frolicked on Harlan Crow’s superyacht, flew on his personal jet, vacationed at his private resort, and traveled with him to Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in California. According to ProPublica, the largesse was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Thomas claimed to want to avoid chichi vacations. “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.” They say hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

This all shows the perils of DIY ethics. The Supreme Court is the only court in the country with no enforceable code of ethics. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has pointed out that the Court quickly launched a formal investigation of the leak of the Dobbs decision last year. It could do so again. If the Court will not craft a set of ethics rules — and pronto — Congress can and should do so.

Congress should also investigate. There’s ample precedent: Justice Abe Fortas, too, was found to be receiving support from a wealthy benefactor, and the controversy proved so intense that he resigned.

But beyond stronger rules, the scandal shows how lifetime tenure can engender justices with a startling sense of entitlement and a belief that they are beyond accountability. Thomas almost certainly knows that cavorting around the globe in a superyacht isn’t “personal hospitality” in the spirit of current rules. After briefly disclosing the trips and causing a minor stir in 2004, he decided it would be better to keep them to himself. He was confident he could avoid consequences.

Where did that confidence come from? At least in part from the assurance that comes with years of accumulated power and influence.

Few government jobs anywhere in the world are quite like that of U.S. Supreme Court justices: nine unelected people who dictate wide swaths of national policy. And if they’re put on the Court at a young age, they get to do so for many decades with no real risk of removal. Only one justice has ever been impeached (Samuel Chase in 1804). None has ever been convicted. Supreme Court justices are, in this way, more akin to royalty than public servants. Only a single U.S. state mirrors the federal system — the rest have either fixed terms or mandatory retirement.

We can make a change, as I recently argued in the Los Angeles Times. There is a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of term limits for Supreme Court justices. Justices would serve for up to 18 years, with each president allowed two appointments per presidential term. I describe all this in my upcoming book, The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America.

Term limits would ensure that the composition of the Court better mirrors the preferences of American voters and stop presidents from influencing national policy decades beyond their terms in office. Term limits would also prevent any individual from accumulating unaccountable power, as Thomas seems to believe he has.

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