Meanwhile, McConnell refuses to commit to having hearings if another spot on the court opens up during Biden’s term in office.
Celebrate now, it’s only going to get uglier.
Careful with the choking recommendation, though. Marjorie Taylor Greene has reported Jimmy Kimmel to the Capitol Police for a joke where he seemingly wished she could meet up with Will Smith.
That’s right. now she wants the Capitol Police on her side.
brightmoonsays
Yesss! Good . She’s better qualified than either Kavsnsugh or Barrett . MTG is just an unfunny joke !
brightmoonsays
Wow look how I typed that ! Kavanagh
Walter Solomonsays
Was there any doubt she would be confirmed? I wasn’t fooled by all of the hamming it up for the cameras and throwing red meat to the base. It was pretty obvious she had the votes.
lotharloosays
Very good news even though this supreme court is not going advance any progressive cause any time soon, obviously.
… Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who purposely made the entire country – including the President and his nominee, watching from the Roosevelt Room in the White House – wait more than 16 minutes until he showed up to cast the final vote, a “no.” Sen. Paul wasn’t even dressed in a suit, he wore “casual attire” and had to vote from off the Senate floor, just one more on a pile of indignities he inflicted on what many experts have said is one of the most qualified people ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court.
Except for Mitt Romney, who can be seen standing and applauding while Ted Cruz and others walk out.
Jeebus, I never thought I would actually feel some respect for old Mitt. I guess the bar is set really low these days.
As for Rand Paul, I heard he was late because his hair got out of the yard and bit one of the neighbors.
Reginald Selkirksays
I was watching Idiocracy (tubitv.com) and an ad came on featuring Mike Huckabee. How appropriate.
PaulBCsays
feralboy12@11 Don’t give Romney too much credit. He’s the same old 47%-of-Americans-are-moochers, corporations-are-people, dog-abusing scion of a wealthy businessman/politician who believes he’s a “self-made” man.
The fact that most of his GOP colleagues have gone headlong into fascism isn’t really enough to recommend him. It is a little bit, granted. Romney has a kind of integrity and steadfastness that most Republicans lack, and I respect that just as far as it goes. But the fact I can say that only shows how bad everyone else is.
It’s kind of like asking me if I can come up with something good to say about Albert Speer. Compared to other Nazis? Well, how about we just don’t go there.
Rieuxsays
I like Jackson just fine, but according to me the best element of this news is that we finally know for sure that the world has survived the staggering selfishness of Stephen Breyer. That willfully blind narcissist should have retired in 2013 (at age 76), should have retired in 2014 (77), and should have retired in 2021 (83!), but instead he bet a staggeringly valuable SCOTUS seat on his ability to keep breathing AND, most recently, the ability of EVERY Democratic U.S. Senator from a red state (or even a purple or blue one in which the machinery of Senate succession is in Republican hands—and oh, by the way, Democratic U.S. Senators as a group are currently extremely OLD) to keep breathing. We are indescribably lucky that he won the bet, but he should be forever disgraced for daring to place his seat at so much risk.
I think it’s a horrendous failing of far too many of us on the left that we don’t consider retention of U.S. Supreme Court seats as one of the most morally urgent matters in the entire world.
StevoRsays
@ ^ Rieux : I agree on the importance of retaining SCOTUS seats but think you might be being a bit harsh on Breyer there and misplacing the blame on him for waiting to retire excessively over the Repugs and their appalling hypocritical and Democracy-perverting tactics. I think the R’s and their Murdoch driven culture wars deserve most of the blame here. At the time could breyer have known how unjustly and disagracefully the Repug Congress would act on SCOTUS appointments. Something which still badly needs fixing BTW.
PS. Do you blame RBG too? She almost won her gamble here – just not quite and then McConnell etc .. imposed the Handmaiden Of’Barrett on the world to join the boozy rapist.(Do I really need the “alleged”” given the witness evidence of this victim? I 100% believe?) Imagine if she’sdlasted those few months longer and Biden got to appoint two SCOTUS justices in his first year or so.. instead of the aterrocity we got.
birgerjohanssonsays
Fight fire with fire.
Spread a meme that Kavanaugh is a secret muslim.
If that does not bring out murderous extremists, spread a rumor he was a muslim, but is now an apostate. That will bring out the other kind if dangerous kooks.
birgerjohanssonsays
Future statement by Marjorie Taylor Greene om Fox News:
“Why has KBJ still not denied the widespread allegations she is an alien shape-shifting reptile? I am just asking.”
birgerjohanssonsays
In regard to people behaving in a creepy way; the GOPers are quick to accuse everyone the don’t like of being pedophiles. And now there is a leaked audio of Tucker Carlson saying he likes young girls.
I hope he meant over-18 teenagers, but it still seems creepy.
Surely, now some of the Republicans will chastise him for the statement.
… … (crickets)…
daniel hedricksays
Ms Ketanji is by far the worst ever choice for the Supreme Court in the history of United States, by passing countless number of Black Men and women who are way more qualified and truer to their Constitutional obligation. We now have a Woke, Marxist disrupter who can’t even define the term Woman and is most certainly a friend of sexual perverts & pedophiles. Have you even glanced at the cases she presided over… OMG!
Unfortunately for America, YOU got what YOU voted for.
FJB4EVER!
Susan Montgomerysays
@16. Like I said before, she probably got GOP support solely because this will get the useless idiots into a paranoid rage.
StevoRsays
@ 19. daniel hedrick : It is Ketanji Brown Jackson, Jackson being her surname. Not ketanji which is her Christian (first) name. She’s far better qualified than Amy Comey Barrett and a far better human being than the boofing drunken rapist who nearly murdered Christine Blasey Ford according to her testimony – which I and other decent humans believe. You don’t?
She’s not “Marxist” and it seems you have no idea what that word actually means.
So, to use an Ockerism, suffer in ya jocks ya dropkick!
Rieuxsays
StevoR @15: “The Repugs and their appalling hypocritical Democracy-perverting tactics” are extraordinarily well-known quantities and have been for decades. (Among a vast number of other signposts on this road, Bush v. Gore was decided well over twenty years ago, and Stephen Breyer had a front-row seat for that.) The notion that Breyer or any other public official can be absolved of moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions because of the utterly foreseeable behavior of Republicans is nonsensical, if not indeed outrageous.
We are all morally responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions. Breyer, like everyone else in the world who understands extremely basic facts about actuarial science, American government, and American politics, knew perfectly well that deciding not to retire in 2014 and 2021 meant subjecting us all to the severe risk that he would forfeit his Court seat to a right-wing fanatic. The notion that he should not be held responsible for what he did (unlike the drunk driver who happens to make it home without killing anyone) is ludicrous.
Do I “blame RBG too?” My lack-of-God—that’s the kind of question that leads to facepalms so severe that facial bones get fractured. As of 2014, Justice Ginsburg’s final opportunity to retire while Democrats held both the White House and Senate, the Justice was eighty-one years old and already a veteran of two bouts with life-threatening cancer, both of which had required invasive surgery. Thousands of liberal activists, not to mention the then-President of the United States, implored her to retire so that she could be replaced with a progressive jurist (certainly a woman, and probably a woman of color) before the 2014 election placed the Democratic Party’s Senate majority at dire risk. She refused, the Republicans took the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016, and Ginsburg failed to survive even for the surprisingly short period—six years—that it took for the Democrats to re-establish the White-House-and-Senate perfecta they held until January 2015. And thus she gifted the world Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Every single operative detail of the Russian roulette game Ginsburg and Breyer each placed the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans in—the Justices’ actuarial likelihood of dying, the inevitability of the blockade Republicans would set up to ensure that they were replaced with right-wing fanatics, and the likelihood that it would take the Democrats many years to win back the presidency and Senate to prevent such a blockade—were entirely foreseeable, indeed actually known, to both Justices in 2014. Those obvious realities, indeed, are what led Barack Obama and thousands of others of us to beg Ginsburg to leave office that year.
Should Ginsburg be held morally responsible for the blatantly foreseeable consequences of her actions? The fact that the question even needs to be asked is mind-blowing. Roe v. Wade is very likely to be overturned within the next several weeks, and a number of other landmark decisions (Obergefell, Griswold, Loving, Brown….) are very possibly next. When these decisions fall and millions of human beings’ fundamental legal rights go up in right-wing smoke, it will be precisely this variety of incomprehensible moral blindness that is a central reason why. The notion that vastly powerful public officials have a moral responsibility to subordinate their selfish careerist ambitions to the fundamental rights of millions of innocent people is apparently utterly foreign to you and far too many others on the left, and now Roe is dead-letter.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If progressives merely apply utterly straightforward moral reasoning to the realities of American politics and government, we’re capable of setting a clear social more that progressive jurists (especially ones on the Supreme Court) have an indisputable obligation to leave office at a time that ensures they will be replaced by younger progressive jurists. But that also means the pathetic and logic-assaulting denial that Ginsburg and Breyer flatly disgraced themselves in 2014 must end. Insisting on blinding oneself to the indisputable outrages that those two staggeringly powerful people carried out (and one just happened to get away with, thanks to dumb luck) does little more than pave the road to autocracy.
Fuck, yes. And I’ve been told to fuck off for saying that about the sainted Ginsburg. But the fact is she put her own legacy at risk, and handed a 6-3 Supreme Court to the Republicans, because of her ego.
She almost won her gamble here
The stakes in her gamble were the well-being of millions of Americans. That’s inexcusable.
StevoRsays
@ 22. Rieux : So your blaming left leaning (in USA terms) Justices for the actions of reich wing Repugs? Letting the latter off the hook in the process.
Would it have been a good idea tactically for Breyer & RBG to have timed their retirements better? Sure. Does that make what the Repugs did here their fault? Definitely not! Do we get to tell Breyer and RBG what dto do with their lives and careers so that we gain from it and isist they do as we choose rather than they do? Don’t think so. Do we have opinion and a right to them over what they choose to do? Sure.
My view, you are blaming the wrong people here.
StevoRsays
@ Rob Grigjanis : So what the Repugs choose to do is RBG’s fault? Their disgusting, appalling, evil behaviour is on her for ..choosing her own time to retire or not?
Ditto Breyer.
Are they saints? No.
Do they deserve the majority of the blame for actions other people are responsiible for & have control over? Also no in my view.
I think its fair to criticise them and think they should have retired sooner but not to go the OTT extent you do and NOT to focus solely on them and blame them for what the hypocritical, toxic, Trumpist Repugliklan shitstains choose to do.
Susan Montgomerysays
@25 Yes, we do. If they’re in positions of power like they were, then we’re absolutely right to insist that they put the good over the country over their own fragile egos.
Rob Grigjanissays
StevoR @26: What was OTT? We all know the Republicans are toxic. Ginsburg knew that as well, and what the consequences would be if she died during Trump’s term.
Again thank you so much for making so much perversion possible, as this will be a real opportunity for God’s judgment…
daniel hedricksays
I worked for MySpace as an Information Security Expert in helping them identify Child Groomer’s which resulted in many prosecutions, now that same technology will likely be used to define “opportunities”. Is there an app for that, Kinder? How low can we go? I am sure a lot lower. Again, I really want to thank this very small community for exposing the joy experienced when pedo’s can rejoice and go free by someone that is now considered “Supreme”. What a sadddddddddddd day.
What would Thomas Sowell say? I know you don’t know, but I plan on asking him. Unfortunately, you will never get that chance.
Walter Solomonsays
Who invited this “daniel hedrick” cretin to the BBQ? This obvious troll is way too obvious.
And as usual the terrified visitor can’t actually describe anything like grooming in sex/gender education. Daniel has to hide that the “anti-groomers” are the ones using force with library purges, to pressure society when it comes to sex and gender.
Rieuxsays
StevoR @25-26: Given that “letting ‘reich wing Repugs’ off the hook” is incoherent nonsense that has no effect on anything, while the retirement decisions of purportedly progressive Justices and judges demonstrably have overwhelming consequences for the entire world, I think we’ll continue applying ordinary moral expectations to these massively powerful officials. As I pointed out (and you ignored), setting a social more that progressive jurists are obligated to schedule their retirements so as to prevent the forfeiture of powerful federal-court seats to the right wing has massive stakes in the real world. Your thoughtless whining doesn’t.
Not only were Ginsburg’s and Breyer’s decisions wrong, Ginsburg’s was (and Breyer’s could easily have been) unspeakably destructive—and as a result the thing that people who actually care about human lives do is take steps to try to prevent similar misconduct in the future. The more widespread the idea that those two disgraced themselves by clinging to office after 2014, the less likely that Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson will make the same outrageous mistake when their actuarial-table time comes. You should care about this, but your comments suggest that you simply don’t.
Walter Solomonsays
Rieux @33
Not only were Ginsburg’s and Breyer’s decisions wrong, Ginsburg’s was (and Breyer’s could easily have been) unspeakably destructive
For what it’s worth, both sides are capable of making those mistakes. Case in point, Clarence Thomas. He’s elderly, in poor health, and currently involved in a scandal thanks to his wife. Despite this, he seems to be determined to remain on the Court until his cold corpse needs to be scraped from his seat.
Rieuxsays
Walter @34: That’s nice, but it doesn’t change the moral picture at all. Ginsburg and Breyer had (and Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson, and a large number of progressives on lower federal courts now have) a pressing moral obligation to get out while the getting was/is good. Thomas’s arguable disregard of a mirror-image (im)moral imperative might mean that the cause of human rights gets a lucky break within the next handful of years, but that doesn’t make progressive jurists’ obligation any less urgent.
Oh, I think I see now – the inclusion of Jackson suggests you meant when the time comes in each individual case. The “that doesn’t make progressive jurists’ obligation any less urgent” threw me off.
Holy crap, now MTG is fingering the FBI in the Jan. 6 plot.
We must investigate how much involvement the FBI had in any part of J6.
From planning to incitement to those responsible for not securing the Capitol with the National Guard to actual involvement, all must be held accountable.
She’s also assuming that because none of the defendants in the Kidnap Michigan’s Governor plot were found guilty, they are all innocent and were set up by the FBI.
Yes, that FBI. That notorious nest of left-wing radicals.
Wait, didn’t Trump delay in calling in the National Guard?
Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas is posing for pictures with Herschel Walker, who apparently won the Horatio Alger award. They repeated the false claim that he was valedictorian of his high school. Also seeming to ignore the fact that this rags-to-riches story spent his whole life on athletic scholarship.
I’m sure he’s humble about it, though, and attributes his success to being favored by the creator of the universe.
Christ, I need to get high(er).
Walter Solomonsays
Rieux @35
Fair enough. That being said, there’s no sense in crying over spilled milk. RBG is dead and Breyer will soon be retired. You can only hope that the justices we have now will make like O’Connor and read the writing on the wall when it’s their time go.
Rieuxsays
SC @38: Yes, that’s right. Jackson is 51, so she has many years before actuarial and political reality will justify making demands on her to retire. But that day will come. Doing what we can to convince every progressive federal judge, and especially the Supreme three, not to make the same deadly mistake Ginsburg made seems to me extremely important.
Rieuxsays
Walter @40: “You can only hope that the justices we have now will make like O’Connor and read the writing on the wall when it’s their time go.”
No, that is precisely wrong. “You can only hope” is an absurd counsel of surrender. There self-evidently are things we can do that will incentivize progressive jurists—most importantly Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson—to take seriously the factors that Ginsburg and Breyer so disgustingly did not.
One very obvious thing we can do is treat Breyer, for the rest of his life, like the narcissist disgrace that he is. He played Russian roulette with his Court seat, and he should pay dearly for it in the court of progressive public opinion for the remainder of his days. He should be universally regarded on the left (and around the world) as persona non grata, as an object lesson in what NOT to do with a precious SCOTUS seat. He should die unmourned.
Then, Roe v. Wade is extremely likely to be overturned within the next month or so—with Ginsburg’s gift to the world, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, very possibly casting a crucial vote in the majority. In the eyes of the progressive world, the pages of the Court’s opinion should therefore be watermarked with the sentence “RUTH DID THIS,” preferably in blood. Coathangers should be renamed “Ginsburgs.” The central element of Ginsburg’s legacy should permanently be recognized as paving the way for a right-wing takeover of American jurisprudence (and, all too possibly, of American government).
If the progressive world reacted in that kind of way to Breyer and Ginsburg’s misconduct, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would notice. They would get a message about the manner in which the civilized world expects them to safeguard the enormous power that has been entrusted to them. They would hear that comporting themselves in the manner that Ginsburg and Breyer did is absolutely impermissible—and will lead to the younger three being disgraced in the same manner that Ginsburg and Breyer, by all rights, should now be.
“Ho hum, ‘spilled milk,’ all we can do is hope that the next overwhelmingly powerful officials to reach retirement age don’t behave quite so abominably” is simply not the way that morally serious people deal with matters of earth-shattering importance. What we do right now matters, not least because judges care about what the public thinks of them.
Roe is going to die, and a long list of other fundamental rights will be not far behind it. The desolation that the Barrett majority visits on humanity is going to be extreme. And a prime reason it’s all going to happen is that putatively progressive people insist on addressing these issues with a staggering level of myopia and thoughtlessness.
unclefrogysays
yes I do worry about the power of the conservatives as a whole and their voice in the court but I cannot criticize anyone of them for gambling on how long they will live against the ebb and flow of political fortune and their own desire for justice. when you gamble you sometimes do not win. For all the blaming and carping the court would not be made up as it is today with out the able assistance of Mitch McConnell.
there does seem to be some smoke coming from the direction of “one of the Justices lately wonder what will become of that?
Matthew Curriesays
Quick response to Hedrick. Oh wait a second, that’s too impolite to print….I’ll just say I did indeed get what I voted for, and am glad I got what I imagine you voted against. I hope it happens again and again.
blfsays
I’m curious if teh “hedrick” troll realises the rubles they are being paid are basically worthless.
StevoRsays
@ Rieux #42 & various :
Blame people for what they personally choose to do and say themselves sure.
Yes, it was a mistake for Breyer and RBG to delay their retirements and not time them better. Not that RBG chose when she died.- she didn’t. Yes, its fair to criticise them for that. But I think you go way over the top in doing so because they didn’t put the worst SCOTUS Justcies on the bench. The Repubs / Trump / that reichwing misJustice-Justices selecting group did.
Blame The handmaiden OfBarret and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on those individuals and those who appointed them and rammed them through Congress on onto the SCOTUS – and that would be the Republicans esp Mitch McConnell & Trump.
RBG didn’t do that. She didn’t want that. To blame what others did there on her (& applies to Breyer similarly) is I think pretty unfair. She couldn’t control the Repugs or Moscow Mitch and what she argued against and tried to stop them albeit not in ways that meet your approval.
That’s my view and why anyhow.
PaulBCsays
StevoR@46
Blame The handmaiden OfBarret and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on those individuals and those who appointed them and rammed them through Congress on onto the SCOTUS – and that would be the Republicans esp Mitch McConnell & Trump.
We can blame (or “credit” for those so inclined) the Federalist Society not only for getting these three on SCOTUS but for creating them in the first place. It is no accident that there is a crop of jurists of a particular age and academic pedigree ready to assume seats in the judiciary. This is part of a plan that was hatched 40 years ago and has been frighteningly successful. I mean, that would sound like a kooky conspiracy theory except that there is an open paper trail to demonstrate it.
But I am not going to limit the blame, because the rightwing movement was simply working hard to advance its own interest. On the contrary, I’m in awe of their steady timetable and execution.
The real blame lies on those I agree with for letting themselves be blindsided. We should not have assumed that McConnell had any principles that would cause him either to accept Obama’s replacement for Scalia nor stop Trump from replacing RBG. His only principle is the exercise of pure power, and he’s good at it. RBG should have stepped down. She was great but not irreplaceable. Breyer should have earlier, and we’re just lucky he did it soon enough. On the other side, look at Anthony Kennedy. He probably would have liked to stay in SCOTUS a little longer but simply ran the numbers.
We’re not dealing with people who respect our supposed standards of behavior. If this was clear to me, and I only follow politics out of outrage, not interest, then it should have been clear to those in the Senate, on SCOTUS, and in the White House who have made their careers in government.
Let’s face it. The right has been eating our lunch for decades, and it’s not because they’re evil (though they are) but simply because they are much better players.
w00t! (2007 word of the year; call me old-fashioned)
I doubt that McConnell has any objection to her confirmation, he just has to “vice signal” to his base that he is sufficiently racist.
Definitely a clenched tentacle salute from this old timer.
After all the Reich-wing talking points that got weaponized by GQP inquisitors, am surprised that any GQP Congresscritters voted to confirm her.
Meanwhile, McConnell refuses to commit to having hearings if another spot on the court opens up during Biden’s term in office.
Celebrate now, it’s only going to get uglier.
Careful with the choking recommendation, though. Marjorie Taylor Greene has reported Jimmy Kimmel to the Capitol Police for a joke where he seemingly wished she could meet up with Will Smith.
That’s right. now she wants the Capitol Police on her side.
Yesss! Good . She’s better qualified than either Kavsnsugh or Barrett . MTG is just an unfunny joke !
Wow look how I typed that ! Kavanagh
Was there any doubt she would be confirmed? I wasn’t fooled by all of the hamming it up for the cameras and throwing red meat to the base. It was pretty obvious she had the votes.
Very good news even though this supreme court is not going advance any progressive cause any time soon, obviously.
Within seconds [of the final vote], Senate Republicans got up and walked out.
Except for Mitt Romney, who can be seen standing and applauding while Ted Cruz and others walk out.
Jeebus, I never thought I would actually feel some respect for old Mitt. I guess the bar is set really low these days.
As for Rand Paul, I heard he was late because his hair got out of the yard and bit one of the neighbors.
I was watching Idiocracy (tubitv.com) and an ad came on featuring Mike Huckabee. How appropriate.
feralboy12@11 Don’t give Romney too much credit. He’s the same old 47%-of-Americans-are-moochers, corporations-are-people, dog-abusing scion of a wealthy businessman/politician who believes he’s a “self-made” man.
The fact that most of his GOP colleagues have gone headlong into fascism isn’t really enough to recommend him. It is a little bit, granted. Romney has a kind of integrity and steadfastness that most Republicans lack, and I respect that just as far as it goes. But the fact I can say that only shows how bad everyone else is.
It’s kind of like asking me if I can come up with something good to say about Albert Speer. Compared to other Nazis? Well, how about we just don’t go there.
I like Jackson just fine, but according to me the best element of this news is that we finally know for sure that the world has survived the staggering selfishness of Stephen Breyer. That willfully blind narcissist should have retired in 2013 (at age 76), should have retired in 2014 (77), and should have retired in 2021 (83!), but instead he bet a staggeringly valuable SCOTUS seat on his ability to keep breathing AND, most recently, the ability of EVERY Democratic U.S. Senator from a red state (or even a purple or blue one in which the machinery of Senate succession is in Republican hands—and oh, by the way, Democratic U.S. Senators as a group are currently extremely OLD) to keep breathing. We are indescribably lucky that he won the bet, but he should be forever disgraced for daring to place his seat at so much risk.
I think it’s a horrendous failing of far too many of us on the left that we don’t consider retention of U.S. Supreme Court seats as one of the most morally urgent matters in the entire world.
@ ^ Rieux : I agree on the importance of retaining SCOTUS seats but think you might be being a bit harsh on Breyer there and misplacing the blame on him for waiting to retire excessively over the Repugs and their appalling hypocritical and Democracy-perverting tactics. I think the R’s and their Murdoch driven culture wars deserve most of the blame here. At the time could breyer have known how unjustly and disagracefully the Repug Congress would act on SCOTUS appointments. Something which still badly needs fixing BTW.
PS. Do you blame RBG too? She almost won her gamble here – just not quite and then McConnell etc .. imposed the Handmaiden Of’Barrett on the world to join the boozy rapist.(Do I really need the “alleged”” given the witness evidence of this victim? I 100% believe?) Imagine if she’sdlasted those few months longer and Biden got to appoint two SCOTUS justices in his first year or so.. instead of the aterrocity we got.
Fight fire with fire.
Spread a meme that Kavanaugh is a secret muslim.
If that does not bring out murderous extremists, spread a rumor he was a muslim, but is now an apostate. That will bring out the other kind if dangerous kooks.
Future statement by Marjorie Taylor Greene om Fox News:
“Why has KBJ still not denied the widespread allegations she is an alien shape-shifting reptile? I am just asking.”
In regard to people behaving in a creepy way; the GOPers are quick to accuse everyone the don’t like of being pedophiles. And now there is a leaked audio of Tucker Carlson saying he likes young girls.
I hope he meant over-18 teenagers, but it still seems creepy.
Surely, now some of the Republicans will chastise him for the statement.
… … (crickets)…
Ms Ketanji is by far the worst ever choice for the Supreme Court in the history of United States, by passing countless number of Black Men and women who are way more qualified and truer to their Constitutional obligation. We now have a Woke, Marxist disrupter who can’t even define the term Woman and is most certainly a friend of sexual perverts & pedophiles. Have you even glanced at the cases she presided over… OMG!
Unfortunately for America, YOU got what YOU voted for.
FJB4EVER!
@16. Like I said before, she probably got GOP support solely because this will get the useless idiots into a paranoid rage.
@ 19. daniel hedrick : It is Ketanji Brown Jackson, Jackson being her surname. Not ketanji which is her Christian (first) name. She’s far better qualified than Amy Comey Barrett and a far better human being than the boofing drunken rapist who nearly murdered Christine Blasey Ford according to her testimony – which I and other decent humans believe. You don’t?
She’s not “Marxist” and it seems you have no idea what that word actually means.
Nor is she a friend of “perverts or pedophiles” – citations needed for that slander. OTOH, your idol Trump was great pals with the Epstein’s & then there’s the likes of Gaetz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz#Federal_investigations_into_sex_trafficking) and Roy Moore ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore_sexual_misconduct_allegations ) and, oh yeah, the extra-marital affairs your child abusing “smart” mate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Enyart#Corporal_punishment ) had before he killed himself (and who knows how many others) through his own ideologically motivated rejection of medical science and rational health measures to stop covid.
So, to use an Ockerism, suffer in ya jocks ya dropkick!
StevoR @15: “The Repugs and their appalling hypocritical Democracy-perverting tactics” are extraordinarily well-known quantities and have been for decades. (Among a vast number of other signposts on this road, Bush v. Gore was decided well over twenty years ago, and Stephen Breyer had a front-row seat for that.) The notion that Breyer or any other public official can be absolved of moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions because of the utterly foreseeable behavior of Republicans is nonsensical, if not indeed outrageous.
We are all morally responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions. Breyer, like everyone else in the world who understands extremely basic facts about actuarial science, American government, and American politics, knew perfectly well that deciding not to retire in 2014 and 2021 meant subjecting us all to the severe risk that he would forfeit his Court seat to a right-wing fanatic. The notion that he should not be held responsible for what he did (unlike the drunk driver who happens to make it home without killing anyone) is ludicrous.
Do I “blame RBG too?” My lack-of-God—that’s the kind of question that leads to facepalms so severe that facial bones get fractured. As of 2014, Justice Ginsburg’s final opportunity to retire while Democrats held both the White House and Senate, the Justice was eighty-one years old and already a veteran of two bouts with life-threatening cancer, both of which had required invasive surgery. Thousands of liberal activists, not to mention the then-President of the United States, implored her to retire so that she could be replaced with a progressive jurist (certainly a woman, and probably a woman of color) before the 2014 election placed the Democratic Party’s Senate majority at dire risk. She refused, the Republicans took the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016, and Ginsburg failed to survive even for the surprisingly short period—six years—that it took for the Democrats to re-establish the White-House-and-Senate perfecta they held until January 2015. And thus she gifted the world Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Every single operative detail of the Russian roulette game Ginsburg and Breyer each placed the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans in—the Justices’ actuarial likelihood of dying, the inevitability of the blockade Republicans would set up to ensure that they were replaced with right-wing fanatics, and the likelihood that it would take the Democrats many years to win back the presidency and Senate to prevent such a blockade—were entirely foreseeable, indeed actually known, to both Justices in 2014. Those obvious realities, indeed, are what led Barack Obama and thousands of others of us to beg Ginsburg to leave office that year.
Should Ginsburg be held morally responsible for the blatantly foreseeable consequences of her actions? The fact that the question even needs to be asked is mind-blowing. Roe v. Wade is very likely to be overturned within the next several weeks, and a number of other landmark decisions (Obergefell, Griswold, Loving, Brown….) are very possibly next. When these decisions fall and millions of human beings’ fundamental legal rights go up in right-wing smoke, it will be precisely this variety of incomprehensible moral blindness that is a central reason why. The notion that vastly powerful public officials have a moral responsibility to subordinate their selfish careerist ambitions to the fundamental rights of millions of innocent people is apparently utterly foreign to you and far too many others on the left, and now Roe is dead-letter.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If progressives merely apply utterly straightforward moral reasoning to the realities of American politics and government, we’re capable of setting a clear social more that progressive jurists (especially ones on the Supreme Court) have an indisputable obligation to leave office at a time that ensures they will be replaced by younger progressive jurists. But that also means the pathetic and logic-assaulting denial that Ginsburg and Breyer flatly disgraced themselves in 2014 must end. Insisting on blinding oneself to the indisputable outrages that those two staggeringly powerful people carried out (and one just happened to get away with, thanks to dumb luck) does little more than pave the road to autocracy.
OT
Seth Meyers has a must-see comment on GOP moral consistency
https://youtu.be/yEkqvt2cxHU
StevoR @15:
Fuck, yes. And I’ve been told to fuck off for saying that about the sainted Ginsburg. But the fact is she put her own legacy at risk, and handed a 6-3 Supreme Court to the Republicans, because of her ego.
The stakes in her gamble were the well-being of millions of Americans. That’s inexcusable.
@ 22. Rieux : So your blaming left leaning (in USA terms) Justices for the actions of reich wing Repugs? Letting the latter off the hook in the process.
Would it have been a good idea tactically for Breyer & RBG to have timed their retirements better? Sure. Does that make what the Repugs did here their fault? Definitely not! Do we get to tell Breyer and RBG what dto do with their lives and careers so that we gain from it and isist they do as we choose rather than they do? Don’t think so. Do we have opinion and a right to them over what they choose to do? Sure.
My view, you are blaming the wrong people here.
@ Rob Grigjanis : So what the Repugs choose to do is RBG’s fault? Their disgusting, appalling, evil behaviour is on her for ..choosing her own time to retire or not?
Ditto Breyer.
Are they saints? No.
Do they deserve the majority of the blame for actions other people are responsiible for & have control over? Also no in my view.
I think its fair to criticise them and think they should have retired sooner but not to go the OTT extent you do and NOT to focus solely on them and blame them for what the hypocritical, toxic, Trumpist Repugliklan shitstains choose to do.
@25 Yes, we do. If they’re in positions of power like they were, then we’re absolutely right to insist that they put the good over the country over their own fragile egos.
StevoR @26: What was OTT? We all know the Republicans are toxic. Ginsburg knew that as well, and what the consequences would be if she died during Trump’s term.
Here is exactly what devilution looks like: https://t.co/XOuuX6by4w
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/this-literal-witch-is-the-poster-child-for-floridas-anti-grooming-law/
Again thank you so much for making so much perversion possible, as this will be a real opportunity for God’s judgment…
I worked for MySpace as an Information Security Expert in helping them identify Child Groomer’s which resulted in many prosecutions, now that same technology will likely be used to define “opportunities”. Is there an app for that, Kinder? How low can we go? I am sure a lot lower. Again, I really want to thank this very small community for exposing the joy experienced when pedo’s can rejoice and go free by someone that is now considered “Supreme”. What a sadddddddddddd day.
What would Thomas Sowell say? I know you don’t know, but I plan on asking him. Unfortunately, you will never get that chance.
Who invited this “daniel hedrick” cretin to the BBQ? This obvious troll is way too obvious.
And as usual the terrified visitor can’t actually describe anything like grooming in sex/gender education. Daniel has to hide that the “anti-groomers” are the ones using force with library purges, to pressure society when it comes to sex and gender.
StevoR @25-26: Given that “letting ‘reich wing Repugs’ off the hook” is incoherent nonsense that has no effect on anything, while the retirement decisions of purportedly progressive Justices and judges demonstrably have overwhelming consequences for the entire world, I think we’ll continue applying ordinary moral expectations to these massively powerful officials. As I pointed out (and you ignored), setting a social more that progressive jurists are obligated to schedule their retirements so as to prevent the forfeiture of powerful federal-court seats to the right wing has massive stakes in the real world. Your thoughtless whining doesn’t.
Not only were Ginsburg’s and Breyer’s decisions wrong, Ginsburg’s was (and Breyer’s could easily have been) unspeakably destructive—and as a result the thing that people who actually care about human lives do is take steps to try to prevent similar misconduct in the future. The more widespread the idea that those two disgraced themselves by clinging to office after 2014, the less likely that Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson will make the same outrageous mistake when their actuarial-table time comes. You should care about this, but your comments suggest that you simply don’t.
Rieux @33
For what it’s worth, both sides are capable of making those mistakes. Case in point, Clarence Thomas. He’s elderly, in poor health, and currently involved in a scandal thanks to his wife. Despite this, he seems to be determined to remain on the Court until his cold corpse needs to be scraped from his seat.
Walter @34: That’s nice, but it doesn’t change the moral picture at all. Ginsburg and Breyer had (and Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson, and a large number of progressives on lower federal courts now have) a pressing moral obligation to get out while the getting was/is good. Thomas’s arguable disregard of a mirror-image (im)moral imperative might mean that the cause of human rights gets a lucky break within the next handful of years, but that doesn’t make progressive jurists’ obligation any less urgent.
What swine these Republicans are:
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/rand-paul-torched-on-twitter-after-attempting-to-stall-scotus-confirmation/
Kagan is 61. She’s like four years older than Kavanaugh.
Oh, I think I see now – the inclusion of Jackson suggests you meant when the time comes in each individual case. The “that doesn’t make progressive jurists’ obligation any less urgent” threw me off.
Holy crap, now MTG is fingering the FBI in the Jan. 6 plot.
She’s also assuming that because none of the defendants in the Kidnap Michigan’s Governor plot were found guilty, they are all innocent and were set up by the FBI.
Yes, that FBI. That notorious nest of left-wing radicals.
Wait, didn’t Trump delay in calling in the National Guard?
Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas is posing for pictures with Herschel Walker, who apparently won the Horatio Alger award. They repeated the false claim that he was valedictorian of his high school. Also seeming to ignore the fact that this rags-to-riches story spent his whole life on athletic scholarship.
I’m sure he’s humble about it, though, and attributes his success to being favored by the creator of the universe.
Christ, I need to get high(er).
Rieux @35
Fair enough. That being said, there’s no sense in crying over spilled milk. RBG is dead and Breyer will soon be retired. You can only hope that the justices we have now will make like O’Connor and read the writing on the wall when it’s their time go.
SC @38: Yes, that’s right. Jackson is 51, so she has many years before actuarial and political reality will justify making demands on her to retire. But that day will come. Doing what we can to convince every progressive federal judge, and especially the Supreme three, not to make the same deadly mistake Ginsburg made seems to me extremely important.
Walter @40: “You can only hope that the justices we have now will make like O’Connor and read the writing on the wall when it’s their time go.”
No, that is precisely wrong. “You can only hope” is an absurd counsel of surrender. There self-evidently are things we can do that will incentivize progressive jurists—most importantly Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson—to take seriously the factors that Ginsburg and Breyer so disgustingly did not.
One very obvious thing we can do is treat Breyer, for the rest of his life, like the narcissist disgrace that he is. He played Russian roulette with his Court seat, and he should pay dearly for it in the court of progressive public opinion for the remainder of his days. He should be universally regarded on the left (and around the world) as persona non grata, as an object lesson in what NOT to do with a precious SCOTUS seat. He should die unmourned.
Then, Roe v. Wade is extremely likely to be overturned within the next month or so—with Ginsburg’s gift to the world, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, very possibly casting a crucial vote in the majority. In the eyes of the progressive world, the pages of the Court’s opinion should therefore be watermarked with the sentence “RUTH DID THIS,” preferably in blood. Coathangers should be renamed “Ginsburgs.” The central element of Ginsburg’s legacy should permanently be recognized as paving the way for a right-wing takeover of American jurisprudence (and, all too possibly, of American government).
If the progressive world reacted in that kind of way to Breyer and Ginsburg’s misconduct, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would notice. They would get a message about the manner in which the civilized world expects them to safeguard the enormous power that has been entrusted to them. They would hear that comporting themselves in the manner that Ginsburg and Breyer did is absolutely impermissible—and will lead to the younger three being disgraced in the same manner that Ginsburg and Breyer, by all rights, should now be.
“Ho hum, ‘spilled milk,’ all we can do is hope that the next overwhelmingly powerful officials to reach retirement age don’t behave quite so abominably” is simply not the way that morally serious people deal with matters of earth-shattering importance. What we do right now matters, not least because judges care about what the public thinks of them.
Roe is going to die, and a long list of other fundamental rights will be not far behind it. The desolation that the Barrett majority visits on humanity is going to be extreme. And a prime reason it’s all going to happen is that putatively progressive people insist on addressing these issues with a staggering level of myopia and thoughtlessness.
yes I do worry about the power of the conservatives as a whole and their voice in the court but I cannot criticize anyone of them for gambling on how long they will live against the ebb and flow of political fortune and their own desire for justice. when you gamble you sometimes do not win. For all the blaming and carping the court would not be made up as it is today with out the able assistance of Mitch McConnell.
there does seem to be some smoke coming from the direction of “one of the Justices lately wonder what will become of that?
Quick response to Hedrick. Oh wait a second, that’s too impolite to print….I’ll just say I did indeed get what I voted for, and am glad I got what I imagine you voted against. I hope it happens again and again.
I’m curious if teh “hedrick” troll realises the rubles they are being paid are basically worthless.
@ Rieux #42 & various :
Blame people for what they personally choose to do and say themselves sure.
Yes, it was a mistake for Breyer and RBG to delay their retirements and not time them better. Not that RBG chose when she died.- she didn’t. Yes, its fair to criticise them for that. But I think you go way over the top in doing so because they didn’t put the worst SCOTUS Justcies on the bench. The Repubs / Trump / that reichwing misJustice-Justices selecting group did.
Blame The handmaiden OfBarret and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on those individuals and those who appointed them and rammed them through Congress on onto the SCOTUS – and that would be the Republicans esp Mitch McConnell & Trump.
RBG didn’t do that. She didn’t want that. To blame what others did there on her (& applies to Breyer similarly) is I think pretty unfair. She couldn’t control the Repugs or Moscow Mitch and what she argued against and tried to stop them albeit not in ways that meet your approval.
That’s my view and why anyhow.
StevoR@46
We can blame (or “credit” for those so inclined) the Federalist Society not only for getting these three on SCOTUS but for creating them in the first place. It is no accident that there is a crop of jurists of a particular age and academic pedigree ready to assume seats in the judiciary. This is part of a plan that was hatched 40 years ago and has been frighteningly successful. I mean, that would sound like a kooky conspiracy theory except that there is an open paper trail to demonstrate it.
But I am not going to limit the blame, because the rightwing movement was simply working hard to advance its own interest. On the contrary, I’m in awe of their steady timetable and execution.
The real blame lies on those I agree with for letting themselves be blindsided. We should not have assumed that McConnell had any principles that would cause him either to accept Obama’s replacement for Scalia nor stop Trump from replacing RBG. His only principle is the exercise of pure power, and he’s good at it. RBG should have stepped down. She was great but not irreplaceable. Breyer should have earlier, and we’re just lucky he did it soon enough. On the other side, look at Anthony Kennedy. He probably would have liked to stay in SCOTUS a little longer but simply ran the numbers.
We’re not dealing with people who respect our supposed standards of behavior. If this was clear to me, and I only follow politics out of outrage, not interest, then it should have been clear to those in the Senate, on SCOTUS, and in the White House who have made their careers in government.
Let’s face it. The right has been eating our lunch for decades, and it’s not because they’re evil (though they are) but simply because they are much better players.