this extreme Supreme Court has taken us back 50 years when they overturned Roe v Wade last year…the vote was 7-2 on January 22, 1973 to affirm a woman’s right to choose…autonomy of her own body…last year took us back 50 years of “settled” law…this extreme Supreme Court has against thrown out, has gutted Affirmative Action, which has been around since 1961…I think we all saw this coming…but for myself, I thought maybe this court would uphold Affirmative Action…but I awoke this morning that this was not the case…this has been “a stab in the back” as Rev. Al Shapton calls it…it seemed that Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote about when they gutted the Equal Rights Act of 1964…Ruth wrote in her dissent “You don’t throw away your umbrella in the rain, just because you’re not getting wet…in the history of Affirmative Action, it took ten years to include WOMEN…from NPR by Nina Totenberg: “Supreme Court guts affirmative action, effectively ending race-conscious admissions: In a historic decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities across the country. In a decision divided along ideological lines, the six-justice conservative supermajority invalidated admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

The decision reverses decades of precedent upheld over the years by narrow Supreme Court majorities that included Republican-appointed justices. It ends the ability of colleges and universities — public and private — to do what most say they still need to do: consider race as one of many factors in deciding which of the qualified applicants is to be admitted.

Chief Justice John Roberts, a longtime critic of affirmative action programs, wrote the decision for the court majority, saying that the nation’s colleges and universities must use colorblind criteria in admissions.

Majority opinion

“Many universities have for too long…concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin,” he wrote. “Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Justice Clarence Thomas took the unusual step of reading from the bench parts of his lengthy concurring opinion.

Thursday’s decision, he wrote, “sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences. … Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution.”

As he has done before, Thomas, the second black justice appointed to the court, reiterated his long-held view that affirmative action imposes a stigma on minorities. “While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold our enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles that … all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”

Roberts, for his part, pointed to the court’s 2003 decision reaffirming the constitutionality of affirmative action programs, noting that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the court at the time, had suggested that there would have to be an end at some future point. That time has now come, Roberts said.

Opposing view

“It feels tragic,” said Columbia University President Bollinger, who has for 30 years been a leading proponent of affirmative action programs.

“It feels like the country has been on a course of choosing between a continuation of the great era of civil rights, and another view of ‘We’ve done this long enough, and we need a whole new approach.’ It’s now the second choice.”

That sentiment echoed Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent.

“The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society,” she wrote.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s first Black female justice, also chimed in, saying: “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

Indeed, the reality is that in those places where affirmative action has been eliminated, there has been a severe drop in minority, and particularly, African American, admissions. NYU law professor Melissa Murray was the acting dean at the University of California Berkeley in 2016 and 2017 when a state referendum barred the use of race in college admission decisions.

“There was an immediate drop off in the number of African American students that was both a confluence of the change in the admissions policy, but also African American students not wanting to go [to Berkeley] under those conditions,” she said. “People don’t want to be spotlighted. There is a kind of comfort in numbers, and it was very difficult for a very long time to recruit under those conditions.”

Indeed, the situation got so bad, she says, that she had to go to the president of the state university system to get permission to place clusters of African American students in classes, instead of “sprinkling them around,” leaving minority students alone to speak their mind when subjects of race were discussed.

Door is left slightly open

Now every school will be in that situation, or so it may seem.
The court did not entirely close the door to racial considerations in college admissions. As Roberts put it, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicants discussion of how race affected his or her life.” Nor did the court address the tactic of clustering minority students in classes.

What’s more, the court specifically left open the possibility that the nation’s military academies, because of their “distinct interests,” may be able to continue with their successful affirmative action programs, which have resulted in a very diverse officer corps.

“That issue is so sensitive because it raises the question of national security that the court has backed away from following its own logic,” said University of California Berkeley professor Jerome Karabel.

He notes that a similar logic might apply to police forces seeking to recruit minorities so as to ensure that a virtually all white force would not be policing a majority Black town.

For the nation’s colleges and universities, however, diversity will no longer be an acceptable rationale for taking race into account.

Broader impact

Thursday’s decisions are likely to cause ripples throughout the country, and not just in higher education, but in selective primary and secondary schools like Boston Latin in Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson high school in Virginia, and Bronx High School of Science in New York.

Ultimately, effects will be felt in every aspect of the nation’s economic, educational, and social life–from the Rooney rule that requires a minority applicant be considered in all NFL coach hiring decisions to employment and promotion decisions, DEI programs in schools and workplaces, and much more.

“We’re going to be fighting about this for the next 30 years,” said Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy.

Edward Blum, who for decades has been a one-man crusader against everything from the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act to affirmative action in higher education, plans to challenge some corporate boards on racial preference grounds, and he says he knows of other plans to challenge minority scholarship and fellowship programs.

UC’s Karabel notes that there are already employment lawsuits pending, and “by the logic of this decision, I would think that racial discrimination, as defined by the court, would be banned in employment as well.”

“It’s going to open a Pandora’s box across the country and across institutions and industries,” said Harvard co-counsel Bill Lee in an NPR interview last fall.

How the case came to be

The court’s decisions came in cases involving two elite institutions, one the oldest public university — the University of North Carolina — and the other, the oldest private university, Harvard. Blum, the anti-affirmative activist, likely chose these highly visible schools as his legal targets precisely because of their elite status.

UNC did not admit Black undergraduates until 1955, and then only after it was ordered to by the federal courts. Harvard, by contrast, became the model for affirmative action programs in 1978 when the Supreme Court cited the school’s consideration of race as similar to other traits the school relied on to ensure a diverse student body. Thus, the court said back then that race could be one of many factors that the school considered, just as other characteristics were considered — geography, or being raised on a farm, or special achievements in everything from science to athletics, or being a so-called legacy student, the son or daughter of someone who attended Harvard.

That system, reaffirmed twice by the Supreme Court, has remained in place not just at Harvard, but at most of the institutions of higher learning across the United States. Until Thursday, when the court — as it did last year in the abortion case — upended decades of its own precedents.

The court majority made clear that it agreed with Students For Fair Admissions, which sued Harvard and UNC, claiming, among other things, that the schools discriminated against Asian American students who had SAT and grade scores higher than any other racial group, including whites, and who made up, at Harvard, for instance, 29% of the entering class last year. SFFA asserted that the number should have been higher than that, though Asians are just 7.2% of the U.S. population.

Harvard, in defending its current iteration of affirmative action, noted that each class has only 1,600 slots, but, by the numbers, it has thousands of equally qualified applicants. In the class of 2019, for instance, it had 35,000 applicants, 3,700 of them with perfect math SAT scores; 2,700 with perfect verbal SAT scores, and more than 8,000 with perfect grade point averages. There are no similar figures for the most recent incoming class at Harvard, but the number of applicants in 2023 has nearly doubled in the last four years.

What the public thinks

The reaction to Thursday’s decision may be consternation in some quarters, but public opinion on affirmative action is not like abortion, a subject on which virtually every poll shows the public completely at odds with the court. Public opinion on affirmative actions is more nuanced and more mixed. Polls on the subject conflict: some show upwards of 60% approval for affirmative action programs, and others show less than 50% support.

Indeed, in liberal California, for instance, 57% of voters in 2020 cast their ballots against reinstating affirmative action in the state’s public colleges and universities.

Generally, polls show that public support for affirmative action has grown in recent years, but voters are conflicted on the subject, with the outcome depending on how the question is asked. A recent Washington Post-Schar School Poll found that 6 in 10 Americans say race should not be considered in college admissions. But when the question was asked a slightly different way, the numbers showed big majorities endorsing programs to boost racial diversity on campuses.

And yet no alternative to affirmative action has worked as well as some consideration of race.

College admission administrators say schools that have tried to raise the numbers of Black and Latin0 students without any consideration of race have found that no other criterion — class, or economic status, or programs like a guarantee of admission for students in the top 5% or 10% of their high school class — works as well.

“The research is exceptionally clear,” University of Texas professor Stella Flores, whose specialty is higher education and public policy, told NPR in an interview last fall. “There’s no other alternative method that will racially diversify a student body, other than the use of race as one factor of consideration.”

Court’s ‘double tak’

Harvard’s Professor Kennedy points to what he calls “double talk: in the Supreme Court’s Thursday opinion. Take two signs, he says: a sign that says “Black people stay out,” and contrast it with a sign that says “Black people welcome.”

“Both have race in them. Are they truly both racially discriminatory? The Supreme Court, at least on one side of its mouth, seems to say yes, they’re both racially discriminatory. But at the end of the Supreme Court’s opinion, it says, well of course one can look favorably on someone who’s overcome racial impediments.”

“I think we are at a very critical point,” said Columbia President Bollinger, who, earlier in his career, shaped the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan, a program that was upheld in 2003. He sees the landscape of admissions systems now shifting markedly, with “the demise” of school rankings, and less emphasis on standardized test scores. Columbia, he notes, has more veterans than any other Ivy League college. “I think there will be a lot of experimentation in admissions, as there should be over the next decade.”

The magnitude of Thursday’s decision was emphasized by the fact that, in all, six justices wrote separately. And three justices spoke for more than 40 minutes from the bench–the chief justice in the majority, Thomas concurring, and Sotomayor in dissent. Indeed, in print, the Supreme Court’s decisions, plus dissents and concurrences, reached a book-sized 237 pages.

Race has never been any easy subject for Americans to deal with, and it’s about to get a lot harder. ( Meghanlata Gupta contributed to this story. )”…

from The Daily Beast by Josh Fiallo: “Ketanji Brown Jackson Dismantles SCOTUS Conservatives in Blistering Dissent: “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” wrote the first Black woman to serve on the court.: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, pulled no punches when criticizing her conservative counterparts Thursday for ruling to ban affirmative action in American universities, saying they acted with “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness.”

Jackson did not hide her rage that the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, believed the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action admission policies were unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

“Our country has never been so colorblind,” Jackson wrote. “Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored, race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry.”

The court also ruled against Harvard, saying it can no longer enact stricter admission standards for Asian American students—an effort to help maintain diversity on campus. Jackson, who serves on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, recused herself from that ruling.

She was poignant in her dissent to Thursday’s ruling, writing that “no one benefits from ignorance.”

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” she wrote. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”

Also apparently enraged was Justice Sonia Sotomayor—the only justice remaining from the court’s landmark decision in 2016 that briefly upheld affirmative action’s legality in American universities.

In her own dissent, Sotomayor wrote, “entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today.” She also criticized the court’s majority for concluding that “indifference to race is the only constitutionally permissible means” to achieving racial equality in admissions.

“That interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not only contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history,” she wrote, “but is also grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation.”

She added, “Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgement of inequality.”

Sotomayor and Jackson’s opinions weren’t enough to trump the court’s 6-3 majority, which has recently upended several long-standing rulings, like abortion protections enacted by the court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the court’s majority felt universities must accept the most-qualified applicant without taking race into consideration, a potentially crucial blow to diversity in higher education.

“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote. “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

While Jackson criticized the ruling and its ability to erase race from admission decisions, conservative justices leaned into the notion of making the country more colorblind. Justice Clarence Thomas, who is Black, indicated in a concurring opinion that colorblindness was the whole point.

Thomas wrote that the majority decision “sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”

He added, “Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal.”

Jackson wrote that she couldn’t disagree more, saying affirmative action leveled the playing field for aspiring college students who’ve faced generational inequality.

“It is that inequality that admissions programs such as UNC’s help to address, to the benefit of us all,” she wrote. “Because the majority’s judgment stunts that progress without any basis in law, history, logic, or justice, I dissent.””…the “funny thing is that Justice Clarence Thomas has gotten traction from Affirmative Action all along his career…up until his appointment to the Supreme Court…that made him “good friends” with Harlan Crow, the billionaire, Hitler memorabilia collector…so he could get free rides and expensive vacations…Affirmative Action put him there…it’s disgustingly disheartening…

I went to see The Godfather Part II this evening at the Ambler…me and an almost full house to watch the second of three Godfather films…the first sequel to win Best Picture…Part II won Best Picture Oscar…Best Director for Frances Ford Coppola…Best Supporting Actor for Robert DeNiro…Best Screenplay Adapted from Another Material by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo from Puzo ‘s novel The Godfather…Best Original Score for Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola…and Best Art Direction for Dean Tavoularis and Angelo P. Graham: Set Decoration for George R. Nelson…from Wikipedia: “The Godfather Part II is a 1974 American epic crime film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The film is partially based on the 1969 novel The Godfather by Mario Puzo, who co-wrote the screenplay with Coppola, and it is both a sequel and a prequel to the 1972 film The Godfather, presenting parallel dramas: one picks up the 1958 story of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), the new Don of the Corleone family, protecting the family business in the aftermath of an attempt on his life; the prequel covers the journey of his father, Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro), from his Sicilian childhood to the founding of his family enterprise in New York City. The ensemble cast also features Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Morgana King, John Cazale, Mariana Hill, and Lee Strasberg.

Following the success of the first film, Paramount Pictures began developing a follow-up, with many of the cast and crew returning. Coppola, who was given more creative control, had wanted to make both a sequel and a prequel to The Godfather that would tell the story of the rise of Vito and the fall of Michael. Principal photography began in October 1973 and wrapped up in June 1974. The Godfather Part II premiered in New York City on December 12, 1974, and was released in the United States on December 20, 1974, receiving divided reviews from critics; its reputation, however, improved rapidly, and it soon became the subject of critical re-appraisal. It grossed $48 million in the United States and Canada and up to $93 million worldwide on a $13 million budget. The film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, and became the first sequel to win Best Picture. Its six Oscar wins also included Best Director for Coppola, Best Supporting Actor for De Niro and Best Adapted Screenplay for Coppola and Puzo. Pacino won Best Actor at the BAFTAs and was nominated at the Oscars.

Like its predecessor, Part II remains a highly influential film, especially in the gangster genre. It is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time, as well as the rare example of a sequel that may be superior to its predecessor. In 1997, the American Film Institute ranked it as the 32nd-greatest film in American film history and it retained this position 10 years later. It was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1993, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. The Godfather Part III, the final installment in the trilogy, was released in 1990: unlike the previous films, Part III received generally mixed reviews from critics.”

I’m always pleasantly surprised the audience applauds at the end of the film…a tribute to how great this film is… it was 3 hours and 22 minutes long…we definitely got our money’s worth…especially if you are a member…I was lucky enough to park across the street from the theater…found 2 quarters and a penny…excited to see the new Indiana Jones movie…The Dial of Destiny…tomorrow it open…the Godfather films takes us back more than 50 years ago also…but not in the horrible way that Affirmative Action took us back 50 years…

although I’ve been hearing about what’s happening in Russia…I don’t understand what happened except Putin is viewed as “weak”…could this be the end of his decades-long hold on Russia…even more a pariah on the world stage…I feel good about that…but at the same time scared at what he will do to lash out and show how tough he is…especially to Ukraine…and his unholy war against Ukraine…he thought he would take Kiev in a matter of days, he would be hailed as a liberator…how mistaken was he?…

I went to see Holiday…a film from 1938 with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant…one of four movies they made together…the movie was from a play by Philip Barry…who also wrote The Philadelphia Story, one other film with Katherine and Cary…a most wonderful film…high on my list of favorite movies…I hadn’t seen Holiday before…one of George Cukor’s direction of Hepburn…Cukor loved Katherine, they made 10 films together…and Holiday was the third of four films starring Grant and Hepburn, the others being Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940)…from Wikipedia: “Holiday (released in the United Kingdom as Free to Live) is a 1938 American romantic comedy film directed by George Cukor, a remake of the 1930 film of the same name.

The film tells of a man who has risen from humble beginnings only to be torn between his free-thinking lifestyle and the tradition of his wealthy fiancée’s family.

The film, adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman from the 1928 play of the same name by Philip Barry, stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and features Doris Nolan, Lew Ayres, and Edward Everett Horton. Horton reprised his role as Professor Nick Potter from the 1930 version.

Although Hepburn had been Hope Williams’ understudy in the original production of the play on Broadway, she only played the part for one performance. Screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart appeared in the original stage version as Nick Potter.

the plot – In the late 1930s, Jonathan “Johnny” Case (Cary Grant), a self-made man who has worked all his life, is about to marry Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), whom he met while on holiday in Lake Placid, New York. He knows very little about his bride-to-be, and is surprised to learn that she is from an extremely wealthy family, the younger daughter of banker Edward Seton (Henry Kolker).”

the Production – In 1936, Columbia Pictures purchased a group of scripts, including the script for Holiday, from RKO for $80,000. Although the film was intended to reunite The Awful Truth co-stars Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, George Cukor decided to cast Hepburn instead, and Columbia borrowed her from RKO, where she had just turned down the lead role in Mother Carey’s Chickens. Joan Bennett and Ginger Rogers were considered to play Hepburn’s role, and Rita Hayworth was tested for the role of Julia.

The character of Linda Seton, played by Hepburn, was loosely based on socialite Gertrude Sanford Legendre. Donald Ogden Stewart, who co-wrote the screenplay, had played Professor Nick Potter in the original Broadway cast. Katharine Hepburn had understudied the role of Linda Seton in the original Broadway cast. The working titles for the film were Unconventional Linda and Vacation Bound.

A scene that was to come before what is now the first scene of the film was set in the snows of Lake Placid, New York, but it was filmed in Bishop, California. The idea was to “open up” the stage play by utilizing an exterior scene, but when director George Cukor saw the scene, he did not like it and decided to cut it. A few still photographs, one of them on a lobby card that was distributed to theaters, are the only known remnants of this scene.

Reception – Holiday holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 23 professional reviews. Although both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety predicted the film would have great box-office appeal, Holiday was not a financial success. It was well received by critics who praised the “modernizing” of the screenplay into an implied “contest between a young New Dealer and an Old Reactionary.” The Hollywood Reporter went so far as to say it should “take its place in the parade of periodic hits, along with It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds, and The Awful Truth.”

Hepburn biographers have speculated that Johnny Case’s plans to give up working did not appeal to Great Depression audiences who were struggling to find jobs. Hepburn, at the time, had earned a reputation as box-office poison, causing her departure from RKO Pictures, but critics claimed the Holiday marked her comeback: “If she [Hepburn] is slipping, as Independent Theatre Owners claim, then her ‘Linda’ should prove that she can come back–and has.”

although Katherine Hepburn was considered “box office poison”…she has the distinction of having won 4 Best Actress Oscars…on view at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C…I googled why she was “box office poison”…from SlashFilm by Leigh Giancreo: “Why The Legendary Katharine Hepburn Was Declared ‘Box Office Poison’: Katharine Hepburn reigned over the big screen for six decades. She made a career out of playing fiercely independent women, from the young, outspoken Jo March in 1933’s “Little Women” to the obstinate heiress Tracy Lord in George Cukor’s “The Philadelphia Story.” When paired with her regular costar Spencer Tracy, Hepburn lit up their scenes together with their off-screen chemistry. Yet at one time the whip-smart actress was considered “box office poison” and had to muster all her self-reliance to mount a comeback.

The term “box office poison” had not existed before the late 1930s, according to Catherine Jurca, author of “Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year.” By 1938, movie attendance was in the pits. It wasn’t just because of the recession; industry heads were convinced that regular Americans were avoiding the theaters due to Hollywood’s depravity. “Hollywood 1938” describes how Oscar Doob, head of advertising at Loew’s, saw the moviegoing milieu at the time: “The dark, gloomy feeling that movies are on the downgrade; that it is a great risk to buy a movie ticket with all the chances against getting your money’s worth; that Hollywood is nuts; that the stars are poison; that show-business is racing to hell!”

Amid this pessimism in the movie business, the Independent Theater Owners Association took out a full page ad in the May 3, 1938 edition of “The Hollywood Reporter.” The ad blasted studios for producing big budget flops with overpaid stars “whose dramatic ability is unquestioned but whose box office draw is nil.” The trade group labeled a number of critically acclaimed actors as “box office poison,” including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and of course most infamously, Katharine Hepburn.

The theater owners weren’t off base in their criticism. By this time, Hepburn had starred in several critically acclaimed flops. Her slump at the box office appears to have started with 1935’s “Break of Hearts” and continued the following year with “A Woman Rebels,” a feminist melodrama about a woman who defies Victorian social conventions by raising an illegitimate child in Victorian England and becoming a journalist (via The Sunday Post).

The writer Graham Green praised her performance in “Break of Hearts” but also expressed why audiences, particularly men, might fear her, saying:

“Miss Hepburn always makes her young women quite horrifyingly lifelike with their girlish intuitions, their intensity, their ideals which destroy the edge of human pleasure.”

As Hepburn continued playing oddball heroines, her popularity may have faltered because she suffered from the same curse that has plagued so many women in the public eye: she was not “likable enough.” She defied the politeness that was expected of starlets, refusing to sign fan mail or schmooze reporters (via You Play the Girl).

The 1938 screwball comedy “Bringing Up Baby” looked like a departure from her recent roles playing tough women like Mary Queen of Scots. The playful film followed a madcap romance between Hepburn’s dizzy heiress and a straight man paleontologist played by a bespectacled Cary Grant, who showed off his acrobatics with hilarious pratfalls.

Hepburn was deemed “box office poison” by the trade group while the movie was still in production, which led RKO to shelve the film before spending more money on advertising (via AFI). It wasn’t until Hepburn’s then-lover, Howard Hughes, bought RKO and booked “Bringing Up Baby” for the Loew Circuit that the film saw the light of day. As with Hepburn’s recent works, the film received good reviews but poor attendance, losing more than $350,000.

Shortly after the trade group’s attack on her and other stars, Hepburn bought out her contract with RKO. After returning to her family home in Connecticut, she began strategizing her comeback. She reunited with playwright Philip Barry, who had written the play “Holiday,” the basis for Hepburn’s other 1938 film with Grant (via The Frick Pittsburgh). The two collaborated on what would become the Broadway play, “The Philadelphia Story,” with Hepburn cast as the lead, Tracy Lord. Following a smash hit run in New York, Hughes purchased the rights to the play for Hepburn, who convinced MGM to cast her in the film version. When the film premiered in 1940, The New York Times eschewed Hepburn’s old epithet: “…The way Miss Hepburn plays her, with the wry things she is given to say, she is an altogether charming character to meet cinematically. Some one was rudely charging a few years ago that Miss Hepburn was ‘box-office poison.’ If she is, a lot of people don’t read labels — including us.”

Hepburn never fit the mold of what Hollywood or America wanted her to be. When critics and trade groups called her “box office poison,” she countered by creating both a Broadway and film hit.

History has been kinder to Hepburn’s flops too; “Bringing Up Baby” is now seen as one of the wittiest screwballs ever produced and the foundation for generations of rom-coms. The film even spawned a quasi-remake, Peter Bogdonavich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” starring another idiosyncratic actress, Barbra Streisand, as its manic protagonist. In the end, watching Hepburn’s decades-long success must have been a bitter pill for Hollywood executives to swallow.”

there were a lot of people in the audience…I enjoyed Holiday very much…I viewed the film like a metaphor for the Republican and Democrats…the Republicans being enslaved by the almighty buck, while the liberal, progressive Democrats work for the good of themselves and others…it seemed to work for me as I thought about it…the home on Fifth Avenue, I think, was a gigantic mansion…opulent…and over the top…Cary goes around to the side door thinking his fiancee works there as a secretary or something…he knows little about her and he is surprised to see she is from an extremely wealthy family…I read that it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction by Stephen Goosson and Lionel Banks at the 11th Academy Awards…”the look of the film”…it lost to The Adventures of Robin Hood, the Errol Flynn Robin Hood…the year You Can’t Take It With You was Best Picture and Best Director for Frank Capra…Holiday was delightful…Katherine Hepburn’s “comeback”…hahahaha….no longer “box office poison”…

caught my 17th mouse!…ugh!…

more than trump himself…hoping his last 7 years of corruption…it will not blow over…his house of cards is falling apart…and accountability is at the doorstep of the crumbling house…at the same time, what has Leonard Leo wrought with the help of trump and Moscow Mitch to stack the Supreme Court…but it is Leonard Leo who Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times calls the “pairing” of billionaires with the Court’s “conservative” judges… what Bouie calls “The Billionaires Club”…here’s Jamelle Bouie’s Opinion from The New York Times, plain and simple: “Samuel Alito Joins the Supreme Court’s Billionaires’ Club:

The Supreme Court ethics crisis continues, not with Clarence Thomas but with his right-wing comrade, Justice Samuel Alito.

In 2008, according to a recent ProPublica investigation, Justice Alito took a trip to a more-than-$1,000-a-night luxury resort in a remote region of Alaska, arriving there on the private jet of Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican donor. If Alito had chartered the jet on his own dime, it could have cost him more than $100,000 for a one-way trip. Alito, however, flew free.Six years later, in 2014, Alito voted in Singer’s favor in a dispute between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. “The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion,” according to ProPublica.

In an unusual essay for The Wall Street Journal, Alito insisted that there was no corruption or undue influence. He said he had only spoken to Singer on a handful of occasions before the case in question and that his seat on the flight was of no ethical concern because it was “a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.”

As for the trip, Alito wrote that he stayed in a “rustic” and “modest one-room unit,” that the meals were “home-style fare” and that if there was wine served, “it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000.” Alito was adamant that he had no obligation to disclose any trip that he might have taken and that the facts at hand “would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”

Judging from the trips and gifts they have received, both Alito and Thomas appear to have been beneficiaries of something like a billionaire buddies program, in which they’re paired with a particularly generous friend. I say “paired” because these connections aren’t as spontaneous as they may seem.

If there is an evergreen presence in these stories concerning the court’s ethical entanglement, it is Leonard Leo, one of the longtime leaders of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization. Leo helped organize Alito’s fishing trip with Paul Singer; he can be seen (in a painting commissioned for the Texas billionaire Harlan Crow) vacationing with Clarence Thomas; and he was responsible for steering tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees to Thomas’s wife, Ginni. Last year, Leo turned his influence and ties into a $1.6 billion gift from a single donor to his Marble Freedom Trust — quite possibly the largest political donation in American history.

There’s no mystery to solve about Leo’s goals. He wants a conservative court to construct a conservative Constitution for the sake of a more conservative political order. But there is still a question to answer about his techniques and methods: What, exactly, is the nature of his relationship with Thomas, Alito and the other conservative justices on the Supreme Court, to say nothing of the federal judges he helped select and place as an adviser to President Donald Trump?

Here, I have a few thoughts.

Imagine for a moment that you are a conservative political activist with an abiding interest in constitutional law. You consider yourself an “originalist” or a “textualist” and oppose much of the constitutional jurisprudence of the 20th century, from the affirmation of deep federal intervention in the economy during the New Deal to the expansion of rights of bodily autonomy and personal freedom in the 1960s and ’70s. You want to rewind — to turn the constitutional clock to where it was before the age of liberalism.

You have set your sights on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary writ large. You have made it your mission to bring the court back to first principles or at least your first principles.

You did the hard work of political transformation and institutional change. You cultivated allies, created networks of like-minded individuals, recruited aspiring judges and politicians to the cause, and most important, you won elections. After more than a decade of struggle, despite the occasional setback, you had all the pieces in place: a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and a chance to undo Roe v. Wade.

And then it all fell through. Your conservative justices weren’t as reliable as you thought. They weren’t a single bloc. And three of them voted, against your hopes and expectations, to protect the constitutional right to an abortion. Yes, they might have opened the door to new limits, but what mattered most in 1992 — after 12 years of conservative rule — was that Roe still stood.

But this was just a battle — you could still win the war. So you regroup. You work and wait in anticipation of the time when you can replace your sometime friends on the court with more reliable conservatives. You won’t rely on a sense of mission or commitment to ensure loyalty among the judges and justices; no, you’ll resist the drift toward judicial independence by strengthening the ties between the men (and occasionally the women) and the movement. You’ll hold lavish events in their honor, give them awards, fund schools in their names, help their spouses find work and pair them off with a donor or two so that they can have a taste of the high life.

This isn’t quid pro quo — no one is trading favors or taking cash for judicial decisions — it’s like-minded people enjoying one another’s company and friendship. It is showering the most important allies you have with prestige and, crucially, the esteem of their peers. It’s creating a web of personal and emotional bonds in addition to political and intellectual ones.

Your beneficiaries are already on your side, of course — otherwise they wouldn’t be in the club in the first place — but they might be a little less willing to buck the views and prevailing sentiments of their fellow travelers. And if all this social scaffolding means that your justice is a little more likely to cast the right vote in the right case at the right time, then it is money well spent. Even better, there is more where that came from: more billionaires, more influence and more perks for the justices to enjoy while they attend to the work they were appointed to do.

Our hypothetical activist here is a mishmash of figures — Leonard Leo is too young to have been involved in the first phase of the conservative legal movement, leading up to the partial defeat of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But Leo, who is responsible for at least a third of the membership of the current Supreme Court, is our pioneer. He is the one who figured out the solution to the problem of the independent justice.”…meanwhile, before Alito came into the corrupt picture, Clarence Thomas and his wife “Ginni” have come under scrutiny after the ProPublica wrote about the Thomases’ corruption…all going on for decades…Leo paired Thomas with billionaire, Nazi memorabilia collector, Harlan Crow…”now” they are “close personal friends”…the Thomases enjoying free, expensive “hospitality”…nice work if you can get it…Chief Justice Roberts seems not to be “bothered”…says they have their own code of ethics…Roberts having his own skirting the issue with his wife’s more than lucrative, how about millions, job as a recruiter for large law firms…from Mark Sherman, Associated Press: back in May “Chief Justice John Roberts said Tuesday that there is more the Supreme Court can do to “adhere to the highest standards” of ethical conduct, an acknowledgment that recent reporting about the justices’ ethical missteps is having an effect on public perception of the court.

Speaking at a law dinner where he was honored with an award, Roberts provided no specifics but said the justices “are continuing to look at the things we can do to give practical effect to that commitment.”

He said he is “confident there are ways to do that consistent with our status as an independent branch of government and the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

The court has resisted adopting an ethics code of its own, and Roberts has raised questions about whether Congress could impose a code of conduct on the court.

All nine justices recently signed a statement of ethics that Roberts provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee. His remarks Tuesday suggested he knows that statement is not enough to quiet critics.

The chief justice’s remarks follow a series of stories, mainly by the investigative news site ProPublica, that have detailed lavish trips and other gifts provided to Justice Clarence Thomas by Republican megadonor Harlan Crow.

Democrats have used the revelations to call for stronger ethics rules for the Supreme Court, and the Democratic-controlled Senate has held two hearings on ethics issues in recent weeks. Republicans have defended Thomas.

Roberts, who has led the court since 2005, also said the hardest decision he has made as chief justice was to keep protesters away from the court last year, in the wake of the leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

“The hardest decision in 18 years I had to make was whether to erect fences and barricades around the Supreme Court. I had no choice but to go ahead and do it,” he said at the American Law Institute dinner in Washington.

The fencing was removed before the court’s new term began in October.”…gee, the hardest decision!…in the meantime, New York Rep. Dan Goldman, along with 18 House Democrats have written a letter to Chief Justice Roberts…from The Hill by Julia Shapero: “House Democrats call for independent investigation of Justice Clarence Thomas: A group of House Democrats on Tuesday called for an independent investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in the wake of reports about luxury gifts he received from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow.

Eighteen House Democrats, led by Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), urged Chief Justice John Roberts to establish an independent investigative body to probe alleged ethical lapses of the justices, specifically calling for a “substantial” investigation into Thomas.

They also recommended that the high court create an ethics counsel to advise justices about issues like disclosure requirements and recusal.

“It has become abundantly clear to us that the current internal mechanism employed by the Court is not sufficient to prevent either the real, or appearance of, impropriety of its members or to hold to account justices who break ethics rules,” the congressmen said in Tuesday’s letter.

Thomas has faced public scrutiny in recent months after reports emerged about undisclosed luxury vacations the justice received from Crow. The GOP megadonor also reportedly paid for the private school tuition of Thomas’s great-nephew and purchased several properties owned by Thomas and his family.

More recently, Justice Samuel Alito came under fire for accepting a fishing trip from billionaire hedge fund owner and GOP donor Paul Singer, whose hedge fund later had business before the court. ( to the tune of $2.4 Billion return )

“Despite the Court’s decision not to conduct a proper investigation into allegations of misconduct by Justices Thomas and Alito, we know that you possess the ability to do such an investigation when you desire,” the letter said.

The group of House Democrats pointed to the Supreme Court’s quick action in the wake of the leaked opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last May.

“We agree that the Dobbs leak was a serious matter that jeopardized the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and merited investigation,” the congressmen said. “But the allegations against Justices Thomas and Alito similarly pose grave threats to the legitimacy of the Court.”…so what are you going to do Chief Justice Roberts?…do you hope it will blow over?…seems like it!…oh, and by the way, it’s not working for trump either!…

Neal Katyal has argued over 50 times before the Supreme Court…he did so last December on the decision that came down today…from The Washington Post by Robert Barnes: “Supreme Court rejects theory that would have meant radical changes to election rules:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected what would have been a radical change in election law, dismissing the theory that state legislatures have almost unlimited power to decide the rules for federal elections and draw partisan congressional maps without interference from state courts.

The Constitution’s elections clause “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a 6-3 decision.

The decision was praised by Democrats and civil rights groups, more for firmly rebuffing what they viewed as an outlandish theory than for establishing new law. A wide coalition of scholars, liberal lawyers and conservative former judges had denounced the theory as unmoored and extreme.

Maintaining the status quo is seen as significant for a court that in recent years has constricted voting and election protections in federal law and the Constitution.

In a separate decisionearlier this month, however, the court relied on its previous interpretations of the Voting Rights Act to find the Alabama legislature drew congressional districts that unlawfully diluted the political power of its Black residents. After Tuesday’s decision, voting rights advocates and Democrats said the combined opinions give them hope of being able to successfully challenge some Republican-led redistricting efforts.

At the White House, deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton said, “We’re pleased that the Supreme Court rejected the extreme legal theory presented in this case, which would have interfered with state governments, which would have opened the door for politicians to undermine the will of the people and would have threatened the freedom of all Americans to have their voices heard at the ballot box.”

Some legal experts said Tuesday’s decision gives federal courts, including the Supreme Court, a bigger role to play in second-guessing state actions on election law, with few guidelines.

“We are going to see constant litigation around this issue in the 2024 elections until courts provide a more clear sense of the boundaries on state court decision-making,” said Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University.

The case at hand came from North Carolina, whose Republican legislative leaders advanced the theory that the Constitution assigns state legislatures almost exclusive authority to structure federal election rules, subject only to intervention by Congress.

The “independent state legislature theory” holds that that is the case even if legislative decisions result in extreme partisan voting maps for congressional seats and violate voter protections enshrined in state constitutions.

But six members of the court said the theory is wrong.

“The legislature acts both as a lawmaking body created and bound by its state constitution, and as the entity assigned particular authority by the Federal Constitution,” Roberts wrote. “Both constitutions restrain the legislature’s exercise of power.” He was joined by an ideologically mixed group of justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Roberts included an important caveat, however, one that could give federal courts an enhanced role in overseeing decisions made by state courts on election-related matters.

“Although we conclude that the Elections Clause does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law, state courts do not have free rein,” he wrote. State courts, he added, “may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”…Amen and Awomen to that!!!…

dinner with at Pam’s with Henry and Julia…we are all scattering north this weekend…kind of a farewell dinner, see you in July after our journeys…take care…I’m going to Keith’s on Peaks Island then to Alix’s near Belfast…Julia and Henry are going to Newport and Pam is visiting Mare and John in Connecticut…she’s going to see Elvis…Costello…”Angels want to wear my red shoes”…I title one of my prints that…it was a self-portrait…I love Elvis Costello…My Aim Is True…She…Peace, Love and Understanding…just what we need – peace love and understanding…

that’s trump before “an adoring crowd!”…Chris Christie slams trump and says “No one plays the victim card better than him.”…Bill Barr says trump is “toast” having been indicted and will be indicted two more times…and now a retired, conservative judge is speaking out again…Judge Michael J. Littig who advised Mike Pence that he definitely did not the power to overturn the 2020 election in trump’s favor…”Judge Luttig was appointed by George H.W. Bush and served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.”… Judge Littig has written an op-ed in The New York Times: “It’s Not Too Late for the Republican Party: Donald Trump this month became the first former or incumbent American president to be charged with crimes against the nation that he once led and wishes to lead again. He cynically calculated that his indictment would ensure that a riled-up Republican Party base would nominate him as its standard-bearer in 2024, and the last few weeks have proved that his political calculation was probably right.

The former president’s behavior may have invited charges, but the Republicans’ spineless support for the past two years convinced Mr. Trump of his political immortality, giving him the assurance that he could purloin some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets upon leaving the White House — and preposterously insist that they were his to do with as he wished — all without facing political consequences. Indeed, their fawning support since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol has given Mr. Trump every reason to believe that he can ride these charges and any others not just to the Republican nomination, but also to the White House in 2024.

In a word, the Republicans are as responsible as Mr. Trump for this month’s indictment — and will be as responsible for any indictment and prosecution of him for Jan. 6. One would think that, for a party that has prided itself for caring about the Constitution and the rule of law, this would stir some measure of self-reflection among party officials and even voters about their abiding support for the former president. Surely before barreling headlong into the 2024 presidential election season, more Republicans would realize it is time to come to the reckoning with Mr. Trump that they have vainly hoped and naïvely believed would never be necessary.

But by all appearances, it certainly hasn’t occurred to them yet that any reckoning is needed. As only the Republicans can do, they are already turning this ignominious ( deserving or causing public disgrace or shame ) moment into an even more ignominious moment — and a self-immolating (  a deliberate and willing sacrifice of oneself often by fire. ) one at that — by rushing to crown Mr. Trump their nominee before the primary season even begins. Building the Republican campaign around the newly indicted front-runner is a colossal political miscalculation, as comedic as it is tragic for the country. No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning.

The stewards of the Republican Party have become so inured to their putative leader, they have managed to convince themselves that an indicted and perhaps even convicted Donald Trump is their party’s best hope for the future. But rushing to model their campaign on Mr. Trump’s breathtakingly inane template is as absurd as it is ill fated. They will be defending the indefensible.

On cue, the Republicans kicked their self-defeating political apparatus into high gear this month. Almost as soon as the indictment in the documents case was unsealed, Mr. Trump jump-started his up-to-then languishing campaign, predictably declaring himself an “innocent man” victimized in “the greatest witch hunt of all time” by his “totally corrupt” political nemesis, the Biden administration. On Thursday, he added that it was all part of a plot, hatched at the Justice Department and the F.B.I., to “rig” the 2024 election against him.

From his distant second place, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida denounced the Biden administration’s “weaponization of federal law enforcement” against Mr. Trump and the Republicans. Mike Pence dutifully pronounced the indictment political. And both Governor DeSantis and Mr. Pence pledged — in a new Republican litmus test — that on their first day in office they would fire the director of the F.B.I., the Trump appointee Christopher Wray, obviously for his turpitude in investigating Mr. Trump. It fell to Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker, to articulate the treacherous overarching Republican strategy: “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”

There’s no stopping Republicans now, until they have succeeded in completely politicizing the rule of law in service to their partisan political ends.

If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges — not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 — fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself. Nor ought it be saved.

There is no path to the White House for Republicans with Mr. Trump. He would need every single Republican and independent vote, and there are untold numbers of Republicans and independents who will never vote for him, if for no other perfectly legitimate reason than that he has corrupted America’s democracy and is now attempting to corrupt the country’s rule of law. No sane Democrat will vote for Mr. Trump — even over the aging Mr. Biden — when there are so many sane Republicans who will refuse to vote for Mr. Trump. This is all plain to see, which makes it all the more mystifying why more Republicans don’t see it.

When Republicans faced an 11th-hour reckoning with another of their presidents over far less serious offenses almost 50 years ago, the elder statesmen of the party marched into the Oval Office and told Richard Nixon the truth. He had lost his Republican support and he would be impeached if he did not resign. The beleaguered Nixon resigned the next day and left the White House the day following.

Such is what it means to put country over party. History tends to look favorably upon a party that writes its own history, as Winston Churchill might have said.

Republicans have waited in vain for political absolution. It’s finally time for them to put the country before their party and pull back from the brink — for the good of the party, as well as the nation.

If not now, then they must forever hold their peace.”…I have the feeling that repugnant Republicans have already fallen over the cliff, that there is no turning back…they’ve gone too far…and are willing to crash and burn all for trump…who only thinks about himself…he doesn’t care a fig for anyone else…and all because they “fear” trump’s base…the 20% of the country which include white supremacists, anti-democracy, anti-rule of law racists…and they done all in their power to remain in power…especially voter suppression, making it harder and harder to vote…they have for decades had minority rule…the filibuster helping Moscow Mitch until he doesn’t need it to thwart democracy…or pass his tax breaks for the rich who put scads of money in this pocket, as well as other republicans…Republicans who side with the gun lobby to the killing of our children in schools across America…trading money for their defending guns and not Anerica’s children…guns are the number one killer of children in America…Moscow Mitch while stealing Obama’s right to name a Supreme Court justice by declaring that it shouldn’t happen in an election year…and then turn around and push through Amy Barrett a week before the 2020 election, forget election year because it didn’t suit him…so we end up with a conservative, corrupt majority in our highest court…funded by Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society…who also puts together his super-rich donors with Supreme Court justices…one of the comments ( which I agree with ) to Judge Littig’s article: “David Los Angeles: “It’s not too late for the Republican Party?”

I’m told writers don’t write the headlines. But everything in this essay (as well as in the behavior of nearly every Republican leader and a majority of voters, according to polls) suggests it is, in fact, too late. Even before the former president and his adherents, the party that purported to represent those who favor limited government, respected the rule of law and the will of the majority, and found guidance in faith had mostly abandoned its principles. Republicans have led the US into wars without end, recklessly tanking a once-balanced budget. Republicans refuse to credibly confront issues like climate, threats to democracy, health care. Republicans actively demean women, children, non-whites, the less fortunate, the military, the aging. Republicans crafted a culture that defends violence and worships guns. In fact, the greatest Republican accomplishments in my lifetime amount to lowering taxes for the rich and packing the Supreme Court with ethics-free ideologues who pass judgements that objectively lie far outside mainstream consensus. The actual left and right wings — God help us — are Democrats. It is already too late for the Republican party. Good riddance.”…yes, I say good riddance also…it is too late for republicans…

and lets not forget about trump’s supporters who either willingly or unwillingly allow him to fleece them…like lambs to the slaughter…from The New York Times by Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman: “

Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees.

The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into millions of dollars — as he prepares for at least two criminal trials, and whether his PAC, Save America, is facing a financial crunch.

When Mr. Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign, and a penny went to Save America.

But internet archival records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now his campaign’s share has been reduced to 90 percent of donations, and 10 percent goes to Save America…By the beginning of 2023, the PAC’s cash on hand was down to $18 million, filings show. The rest had been spent on staff salaries, on the costs of Mr. Trump’s political activities last year — including some spending on other candidates and groups — and in other ways. That included the $60 million that was transferred to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that is supporting Mr. Trump. And more than $16 million went to pay legal bills.”…trump’s grifting of his small time donors is truly astonishing…with automatic monthly deductions, the small print…trump had to return $12.8 million in refunds in 2021…

I enjoyed hearing that another super-supporter of trump’s lies is being sued…Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer is suing Kari Lake for defamation…from CNN by Fredreka Schouten: “Arizona GOP election official sues Kari Lake for defamation: A key GOP election official in Arizona is suing defeated gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake for defamation, arguing that her repeated false claims of malfeasance in the 2022 election have upended his life.

In the lawsuit, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer asserts that Lake, her campaign and an affiliated fundraising committee have spread “malicious falsehoods” that have made Richer and his family the targets of “threats of violence, and even death.”

Richer’s civil complaint represents an aggressive step by a fellow Republican to push back on Lake’s election claims, which have been rejected by the courts. Lake, a former local television anchor, has gained a loyal following among supporters of former President Donald Trump and is weighing a 2024 US Senate bid.

In his complaint, Richer zeroed in on Lake’s accusations – made at rallies and on podcasts and social media – that he intentionally caused printers in Maricopa County to jam on Election Day and inserted 300,000 bogus ballots into the vote count. An independent investigation found that older printers and longer ballots on heavier paper caused glitches at several precincts, but officials have said the problems did not prevent people from voting.

“This case is about a losing candidate for office refusing to accept the will of the voters and, instead, spreading malicious falsehoods to raise money and garner attention,” Richer wrote in an op-ed published Thursday in The Arizona Republic, explaining his decision to sue.

“Those falsehoods not only undermine confidence in our elections and our democracy, but they also cause harm to real people – like me,” he added.

Lake, who made denying Trump’s 2020 defeat a centerpiece of her campaign, lost the governor’s race in the battleground state last year to Democrat Katie Hobbs by a little more than 17,000 votes out of about 2.6 million cast. In May, a Maricopa County judge rejected the last of Lake’s remaining legal claims and affirmed Hobbs’ victory.

Lake is widely considered to be weighing a bid for the US Senate seat now held by Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who was first elected as a Democrat. Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego entered the race for the seat earlier this year.

A Lake spokesperson did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment Friday. On Twitter, Lake repeated her claim that she and Trump had won their respective elections and asked for donations to fight the lawsuit.”…Kari Lake has definitely gone over the cliff already…perhaps this lawsuit is a nail into her political coffin…she’ll be held accountable for her lies…and putting Mr. Richer and his family in danger…his office is heavily guarded…trump, say “I was indicted for you”?…he must realize how much legal hell he is in for?…

Ron DeSantis is claiming “immunity” to the Disney lawsuit…asking the court to dismiss the suit…from ABC News by Hannah Demissie and Will McDuffie: “DeSantis asks judge to dismiss Disney lawsuit, claims immunity: The company has accused the governor of illegal retaliation.: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday asked a federal court to dismiss The Walt Disney Co.’s lawsuit against him, which claims illegal retaliation over a political dispute.

In the motion, obtained by ABC News, DeSantis’ attorneys argue that he and the secretary of Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity are “immune” from the suit. (Disney is ABC News’ parent company.)

“Neither the Governor nor the Secretary enforce any of the laws at issue, so Disney lacks standing to sue them,” DeSantis’ lawyers write.

They add that DeSantis “is entitled to legislative immunity, which shields ‘both governors’ and legislators’ actions in the proposal, formulation, and passage of legislation.'”

DeSantis himself has contended the suit is without merit.

“I think it’s political,” he said in April.

In April, Disney sued DeSantis and other Florida officials over a campaign that the company alleged was “patently retaliatory, patently anti-business, and patently unconstitutional.”

Disney accused Florida of launching “a targeted campaign of government retaliation — orchestrated at every step by Gov. DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech — [which] now threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights.”

DeSantis and Disney have been at odds since 2022, after the company publicly criticized the Parental Rights in Education Law, which restricts content concerning sexual orientation and gender identity in some K-12 classrooms.

Critics labeled the law “Don’t Say Gay,” but supporters of the law say it allows parents to decide what their children can learn about certain subjects.

Disney’s suit states that after the LGBTQ-related law and subsequent controversy, DeSantis moved to take control over the special tax district around Disney parks in the Orlando area, which has allowed the company to essentially self-govern its operations there.

The Florida Legislature voted to dissolve the former board over the district and create a DeSantis-appointed Central Florida Tourism Oversight District in its place. ( ABC News’ Mark Osborne and Kiara Alfonseca contributed to this report. )”…weenie!!!…

I read that Angela Bassett and Mel Brooks along with editor Carol Littleton will all receive Honorary Oscars… Carol Littleton’s edit works include E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Big Chill, Places in the Heart, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist and Wyat Earp…Grand Canyon, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate…pretty impressive…especially THE BIG CHILL!!!…

Jennifer Rubin says Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is right about the Supreme Court being corrupt: “Opinion: Sheldon Whitehouse was right all along: The Supreme Court is corrupt: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been arguing for years that a flood of “dark money” flowing through right-wing front groups has corrupted the Supreme Court. Never has there been more evidence to bolster his claim.

Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told me in an extensive phone interview last week that Justice Samuel A. Alito’s Jr.’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal intending to pre-but a ProPublica story revealing he failed to disclose gifts from billionaire and right-wing donor Paul Singer and recuse from a case involving Singer was “very, very weird.” And it was not merely because he took to the op-ed pages of a sympathetic right-wing Rupert Murdoch newspaper as though he were a panicky politician trying to control the damage. (If that were his intent, it horribly backfired because the stunt only called attention to his angry response and the underlying charges. He managed to make it front-page news. ““If you were filing a pleading, this would have pretty much failed,” Whitehouse observed.)

The senator ticked off the problems with Alito’s argument: factual omissions (e.g., the standard for exempt gifts does not include transportation); Alito’s lame effort to turn an airplane into a “facility” to jam it into an exempt-gift category (“It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Whitehouse said); Alito’s plea that he couldn’t possibly have known Singer had a financial stake ($2 billion) in the outcome of a case before the court (although it was widely reported in the media); and the insistence that yet another billionaire was a “friend,” which somehow absolved him from his obligation to report gifts of “hospitality.” And, Whitehouse argued, it strains credulity that Alito (like Justice Clarence Thomas) could be confused about reporting requirements when there is a Financial Disclosure Committee expressly set up to help judges navigate these issues.

All in all, the poorly reasoned argument amounted to what Whitehouse called “a painful exhibit for an actual ethics code.” A bill he co-authored with Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), set to be marked up after July 4, would confirm that the code of ethics applicable to all judges applies to the high court, set up a process for screening ethics complaints and allow chief judges of the circuit to advise on how their circuits handle similar matters. This is “not remotely unconstitutional,” he noted. (Whitehouse wryly remarked that the last thing the justices want is a comparison to circuit courts’ conduct. “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is to lay a straight stick alongside it,” he said.) Whitehouse is merely asking for the court to develop a process that the judicial branch would oversee for the sake of restoring confidence in the Supreme Court.

Yet another poll, this time from Quinnipiac, shows the court’s approval at an all-time low — 29 percent. Don’t they care? Whitehouse surmises that some justices resent anyone questioning their conduct. But, more troubling, he worries that the chief justice has yet to promise a mandatory ethics scheme nor has there been “a chink in the Omerta armor” of the other justices. Any one of them could come forward to acknowledge the problem.

When asked to testify before Congress on ethics reform, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who heads the Judicial Conference, an entity created by Congress and dedicated to court administration — refused to come. Mind you, Roberts was not being asked to testify not about the court’s decisions or internal debates but about his own administrative role. Whitehouse said that Roberts’s refusal was “astonishing.”

Whitehouse has long maintained that the court’s unprincipled, outcome-oriented and partisan decision-making is very much linked to the ethics problems. “The ethics problem is not just relevant to expensive gifts and fancy vacations,” he told me. The ethics issues “don’t occur in a vacuum,” he said. They point to “a bigger enterprise whose purpose is to capture the court.”

Whitehouse explained that dark-money groups such as the Federalist Society, led for years by Leonard Leo, put together a list of acceptable high court nominees from which President Donald Trump picked three justices. A closely aligned entity, the Judicial Crisis Network, spent millions to help get the justices confirmed (while donating to Senate Republicans to guarantee their support). Leo and others in dark-money groups filed amicus briefs to advance their agenda. And then Leo set up cozy connections between the billionaire donors and the justices for “hospitality” from their “friends.” Leo arranged Alito’s fishing jaunt and helped set up Thomas with billionaire Harlan Crow. If you put together billionaires, dark money and “phony front groups,” you wind up in a “whole new world,” he argued.

Even if Whitehouse’s ideal ethics bill got passed (currently impossible with the GOP majority in the House and the filibuster in the Senate), major problems would remain with the court. Whitehouse does not — for now — want to “get out over our skis” in jumping to court expansion, one proposed solution to the court’s issues. The country isn’t there yet, in his view. However, “The public knows enough about the troubles at the court to support reasonable term limits.”

Whitehouse is well aware that the constitutionality of a statute imposing term limits would be challenged and, yes, would likely find its way up to this very Supreme Court. However, a case would likely start in district court and advance to a circuit court before reaching the high court. There would be full briefing, a factual record and decisions by lower courts. If, after all that, the Supreme Court nixed a widely popular term limits law, the public outrage and academic criticism would be intense. Indeed, the appetite for expanding the court might grow.

Despite this dreary and depressing state of affairs, Whitehouse remains undaunted. “We’re still finding out the facts,” he told me regarding the latest ethics scandal. He said he is confident that as the full story is brought before the public, the impetus to act on court reform, at least among Democrats, will intensify.

In the meantime, the best argument for court reform comes from Alito, whose arrogant, slipshod and unconvincing defense makes him the poster boy for serious court reform.”

in another opinion from Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post: “It’s time for Clarence Thomas to come clean: Justice Clarence Thomas has inflicted incalculable damage on the Supreme Court — damage that requires action by Congress and the chief justice to strengthen ethics rules. But Thomas himself could take an immediate step to repair the injury to what is left of the court’s reputation for independence and integrity by providing an accounting of the all-expenses-paid trips he should have reported — but didn’t — on decades of financial disclosure forms.

Yes, I know, little in Thomas’s history suggests he is inclined to go scouring his travel records. If he doesn’t, his colleagues — namely, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — should insist on it, and so should the Judicial Conference of the United States, the body charged with reviewing the justices’ financial disclosure forms.

Because it is clear that Thomas’s financial reports fell short of what the law requires, particularly on the issue of free travel on the private jet of Harlan Crow, the Dallas businessman and Republican megadonor whose generosity to Thomas and his wife, Ginni, was the subject of a jaw-dropping report by ProPublica.

On this subject, Thomas’s statement on Friday was unconvincing, blaming others for his missteps: “Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

Maybe he should have looked at the text. The ethics rules do carve out an exemption for personal hospitality. They don’t let justices use their rich friends’ planes as a personal taxi service, as Thomas appears to have done.

The ethics law that governs disclosure required of federal judges and other senior government officials makes an exception for “hospitality extended for a nonbusiness purpose by an individual, not a corporation or organization, at the personal residence of that individual or his family or on property or facilities owned by that individual or his family.” You’d have to stretch pretty far to consider a globe-spanning plane ride “hospitality” in the ordinary sense of that word, or to call Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet a “facility.” But if you did, you’d have to deal with this provision, specifying that “any food, lodging or entertainment received as personal hospitality of an individual need not be reported.”

The Judicial Conference, the federal judiciary’s policy-setting body, made the requirement to report transportation explicit last month, in amended guidance specifying that hospitality did not include “gifts other than food, lodging or entertainment, such as transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation.”

And consider the interpretation of the court’s preeminent textualist, Justice Antonin Scalia. In 2004, Scalia rejected arguments that he should recuse himself from a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney after they flew together on Air Force Two to a hunting trip in Louisiana. Scalia wrote that other transportation did have to be reported, but not government flights.

“That this is not the sort of gift thought likely to affect a judge’s impartiality is suggested by the fact that the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 … which requires annual reporting of transportation provided or reimbursed, excludes from this requirement transportation provided by the United States,” Scalia wrote. (Emphasis added.)

Indeed, Thomas himself apparently used to think Crow-paid travel was, in fact, “reportable.” In 1997, Crow flew Thomas on his plane to the exclusive Bohemian Grove club in California. But after the Los Angeles Times reported on the Thomas-Crow relationship in 2004, Thomas stopped reporting such gifts. What changed, other than the unwelcome publicity?

This isn’t the first time Thomas has been heedless of reporting requirements. In 2011, he amended years of financial disclosure forms because he had failed to list his wife’s employment with the Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College “due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” Seriously? The instructions aren’t difficult: You don’t have to report the amount of your spouse’s income, but you do have to say who’s writing the check.

The point — one seemingly lost on Thomas — is transparency and the underlying goal of generating trust in the judiciary. “Assuming that there is some ambiguity in the former version of the regulations, what is the more prudent course for a judicial officer who is interested in promoting public confidence in the judiciary?” asked Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for seven years on the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on Financial Disclosure. “In that context I would err on the side of reporting more rather than less,” added Fogel, now executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute.

Focusing on that point gets to the heart of how Thomas’s conduct is similar to that of his colleagues — and how it is different. All justices accept trips with travel and lodging reimbursed, and that is not a bad thing. Teaching law students, attending bar conferences, giving lectures — all of these are important activities that help educate the public about the too-opaque proceedings of the high court.

And all justices, let us hope, have friends. Often, unsurprisingly, these are friends who share their political and ideological outlook; birds of a feather get to flock together. Often, again unsurprisingly, these are friends in high places. As the years unfold, and careers prosper, the kind of people who make it to the Supreme Court have friends who reach other pinnacles of government or the private sector.

Donning a judicial robe does not require discarding these long-standing relationships; justices aren’t monks. But it does counsel taking care about appearances. Moreover, justices aren’t condemned to their preexisting social circles, but they need to take care that they’re not being lavished with favors and are not being used because of their exalted positions. The Crow-Thomas friendship — “Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends,” Thomas said in his statement — didn’t begin until after he joined the court. Beware new friends bearing yachts.

The wisdom of this advice was underscored last year, after reports about an Ohio couple recruited to befriend Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and his wife, Martha-Ann, as part of a Christian conservative organization’s “Operation Higher Court.” Defending the Alitos, the court’s legal counsel, Ethan V. Torrey, wrote Democratic lawmakers, “Relevant rules balance preventing gifts that might undermine public confidence in the judiciary and allowing judges to maintain normal personal friendships.”

Let’s be serious. Maintaining “normal personal friendships” doesn’t require spending nine days touring the Indonesian islands on a private yacht with a man who has spent millions promoting conservative causes. This torrent of largesse wouldn’t sit well if it were flowing from a Democratic activist to a liberal justice. It would be accurately understood for what it does: undermine public confidence in the judiciary.”

another opinion by Ruth Marcus: “Sam Alito and his fishy Alaskan getaway:

Another justice, another luxury trip, all expenses paid by conservative activists with ideological or financial interests before the Supreme Court.

This time, it’s Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the venue is an Alaskan fishing lodge, and the underwriters of the junket are hedge fund tycoon Paul Singer and businessman Robin Arkley II. Both are donors to the conservative Federalist Society and were joined on the 2008 fishing trip by Federalist Society official Leonard Leo. Leo was fresh off helping Alito get confirmed two years earlier.

The entitlement. The hubris. The tone-deafness about how accepting these perks is perceived by ordinary people who believe judges are neutral umpires just calling balls and strikes.

When ProPublica reported on Clarence Thomas’s far-flung and repeated vacations with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, the justice’s defense, if it can be called that, was that the Crows are among the Thomases’ “dearest friends” and that the acceptance of luxury travel (private jet flights, a yacht trip) was justified under the carve-out in federal ethics rules for acceptance of “personal hospitality.”

This time, in another story by ProPublica, the defense is, in part, effectively “I barely knew the guy when he offered me a spare seat on his private plane.” Heads, I travel; tails, you don’t know about it.

Of course, justices get to have friends, and spend time with them. Of course, it’s a good thing for justices to interact with lawyers, law students and the public. I don’t begrudge a bit of law-teaching in a pleasant European city. Everyone benefits — students, justices, the school.

But justices confronted with freebie travel must ask themselves: What would the public think if they knew I was at [insert name of luxury destination here] on someone else’s dime?

The Alito trip — “the only occasion when I have accepted transportation for a purely social event,” he claimed — is a case in point.

The resort at which he stayed, where rooms ran $1,000 a night, was owned by Arkley, a conservative California businessman and financial supporter of the Federalist Society. What is Alito’s relationship with Arkley? How could it possibly be acceptable to take this kind of gift?

The private-jet connection was even more questionable. At the time of the event, Singer, a hedge fund manager and major donor to Republicans and conservative causes, was embroiled in a high-stakes legal battle with Argentina, which had defaulted on its debt. Singer’s hedge fund was trying to force the country to pay up, in full. The dispute had already made its way to the Supreme Court once, the year before, and it was entirely foreseeable that the matter would be back before the court.

And so it was, eight times, including a June 2014 decision in which the court ruled 7-1, with Alito in the majority, for Singer’s firm. It ended up making Singer’s fund $2 billion.

Should Alito have recused himself, given Singer’s generosity? Some ethics experts quoted by ProPublica say so; Alito, in his astonishing pre-buttal published in the Wall Street Journal before the ProPublica story was posted, disputes that assessment. “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially,” he wrote.

But the public would not know to question Alito, because the justice didn’t deign to disclose Singer’s largesse. And his explanation for why he shouldn’t have stepped aside on his own beggars belief: “I was not aware and had no good reason to be aware that Mr. Singer had an interest in any party. … In the one case in which review was granted … Mr. Singer’s name did not appear in either the certiorari petition, the brief in opposition, or the merits briefs.”

Come on. Singer’s name was in the headline or lead paragraph of pretty much every news report about the case.

Conservatives seem to have worked themselves into a frenzy of injured outrage responding to the stories about some justices’ ethical lapses. Some reports indeed have strained to find scandal — the reactions to Neil M. Gorsuch’s real estate transaction and Jane Roberts’s headhunting income seem overblown. And some liberal critics of the court’s rightward lurch might find it convenient to seize on these lapses to augment doubts about the institution’s legitimacy.

But this is not a partisan issue. Unethical behavior is unethical no matter who commits it, and it does the institution a dangerous disservice to pretend otherwise.

The game here isn’t — at least it shouldn’t be — to figure out how much you can take in the way of freebies and keep that hidden. It should be to behave in a way that is above reproach and comply with the spirit of the ethics rules. Justices scouring the code for loopholes that seem to shield their bad behavior is not a good look.

How do you know you are in the wrong? When the ethics law clearly limits the personal hospitality exception to “food, lodging and entertainment” but you find yourself arguing that a private plane counts as a facility. (Another part of the law references “property or facilities owned by” the individual providing personal hospitality.) When you’re reduced to insisting that there wasn’t much of a benefit from flying at someone else’s expense because there just happened to be an open seat on the private jet.

The photograph at the top of the ProPublica story says it all: Alito and Singer, standing in front of a fishing boat, wearing waders and beaming as they hoist their Alaskan king salmon.

How nice for them. And how troubling for the rest of us chumps, who pay our own way and are naive enough to expect more from those who sit on the highest court in the land.”…

yeah, we are chumps…we let Moscow Mitch steal two seats on the Supreme Court, we let him stack the Court for his rich “conservative” buddies who had him and his fellow repugnant Republicans wheelbarrels full of money…they know they will get a great return on their investments…including the overturning of Roe v Wade…

a perfect day to lay low…stormy weather…I could hear thunder…and it was rainy all day…but warm…they only thing I did today was go to Aldi…I started buying things to take to Maine next week…potato chips, tortilla chips, nuts…stuff like that on my list…Saturday I’ll get cheeses from Aldi and tomatoes from Jack’s Farm Market…he has those beefsteak Jersey tomatoes…and I’ll buy stuff from Produce Junction…in the meantime, I found 7 quarters and two pennies…I hit the jackpot…better than a slot machine in Las Vegas…haha…and I’m looking forward to Friday…da da da daaa da da, da da da daaa da…Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny…I watched The Fly tonight with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis…it was pretty disgusting Goldblum turning into a fly…”Be afraid. Be very afraid.”…from Wikipedia: “The Fly is a 1986 American science fiction horror film directed and co-written by David Cronenberg. Produced by Brooksfilms and distributed by 20th Century Fox, the film stars Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis and John Getz. Loosely based on George Langelaan‘s 1957 short story of the same name and the 1958 film of the same name, The Fly tells of an eccentric scientist who, after one of his experiments goes wrong, slowly turns into a fly-hybrid creature.”…in sharp contrast, Moneyball…I had recorded it so I could watch it later…and today was later…Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, about the Oakland Athletics…from Wikipedia: “Moneyball is a 2011 American biographical sports drama film directed by Bennett Miller with a script by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin from a story by Stan Chervin. The film is based on the 2003 nonfiction book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”, by Michael Lewis. The book is an account of the Oakland Athletics baseball team’s 2002 season and their general manager Billy Beane‘s attempts to assemble a competitive team. In the film, Beane (Brad Pitt) and assistant general manager Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), faced with the franchise’s limited budget for players, build a team of undervalued talent by taking a sophisticated sabermetric approach to scouting and analyzing players. Philip Seymour Hoffman also stars as Art Howe.”..two good movies…a good day to watch movies or read a book…and put the corrupt Supreme Court on the back burner for today…

I watched last weeks, the Father’s Day Sunday Morning, today…it was the first time I took the time to watch it… I sorry it took so long…there were so many great segments…they celebrated “the really big show” that was on Sunday night…we all tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show…it’s 75th Anniversary…it was on from 1948 until 1971…Ed Sullivan’s talent was begin able to know talent…and put that talent on the air…he was “scolded” for having too many black acts on…but that’s where the hits were…he introduced us to Elvis…only showing him from the waist up…he introduced us to all kinds of acts…dish spinners…the puppet mouse Topo Gigio…The Supreme…The Temptations…and most famously, The Beatles…to an audience of screaming girls…they interviewed one of those teenagers…she said she couldn’t hear them because of the screaming…but she didn’t care…she just wanted to be in the same room, breathing the same air as the Beatles…I remember going downstairs to the TV room in my dorm…to watch the Beatles…I loved them… loved their music…some made fun of them…their mop heads…and when we see that today, their hair wasn’t that long…the became the greatest…influenced by the black pioneers of rock and roll, like Little Richard…and Chuck Berry…at the same time…Paul McCartney was taking pictures of his own…while the world was taking pictures of him and his fellow Beatles…he having an exhibition a the National Portrait Gallery in London…newly uncovered photos that he thought were lost…the photographs he took during their 1964 tour…the basis for a book “1964: Eyes of the Storm”…he talked with Anthony Mason about the exhibition while giving him a tour of the show…and his remembrances of taking the photos…the exhibition runs from June 28 through October 1…I’m surprised that Paul is a year older than me… born June 18, 1942…a Gemini…Paul was my favorite Beatle…although I loved the songs of George mostly…”the legacy of this entertainment kingmaker was bought by Andrew Solt for millions and with his son Josh Solt, now oversees the massive Ed Sullivan archives”…for future generations…

we have Paul R. Williams…”the Michael Jordan of African American architechs”…who designed 3,000 buildings in the Los Angeles area, most notably the Beverly Hills Hotel…his iconic signature showpiece with his actual signature signage…and ironic that he was not permitted to stay there because he was black…from Sunday Morning “One of Los Angeles’ most revered architects, Paul Revere Williams (1894-1980) designed homes ( Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Lon Chaney, Barbara Stanwyck ) and hotels known for their grace and elegance, as well as commercial buildings in many styles – some 3,000 buildings in all in the “classic Hollywood style”…Yet he made his name at a time when an African American architect was not expected to succeed.”…like he was not permitted to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he was not permitted to live in those areas in which he designed homes for the rich and famous…because “I am black”…his home was in a black area and is now being restored…

to tug at your heartstrings there were three segments…a daughter’s journey to do those things that were on her father’s “bucket list”…”Love is something that never dies”: Completing her father’s bucket list: When Laura Carney’s Dad was killed in a car crash at just 54 years old, he left behind a bucket list of items mostly unfulfilled. So, Carney set out to live her father’s unfinished life. She talks with correspondent Jim Axelrod about her task to complete her dad’s bucket list (including skydiving, driving a Corvette, and meeting a president) while learning how to re-think her approach to life – a healing process she documented in her book, “My Father’s List: How Living My Dad’s Dreams Set Me Free.”

“Answering pleas for help: In 2018 Steve Hartman met Ben Taylor, who had befriended a supposed scam artist messaging him from Liberia. Eventually, Taylor found a way to help that man help himself and his community. Recently Taylor received another message from Cameroon asking for money. And once again, Ben looked beyond what was apparently a scam, and found someone to help.”…he would make books of the person’s story, and sell them, giving the proceeds to the people who asked for his help…the woman from Cameroon needed money for an operation…she got the money from Taylor’s help…

“We’re gonna have to live in fear”: The fight over medical care for transgender youth: Six-tenths of a percent (0.006) of all Americans identify as transgender, including about 300,000 teenagers. At least 121,000 trans kids have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria – severe distress, even suicidal thoughts, related to their gender identity. But since 2021, 20 states have enacted full or partial bans of minors receiving care that doctors say could ease suffering and even save their lives. Correspondent Susan Spencer talks with family members trying to help their loved ones. She also talks with the president of a conservative advocacy group working to make health care for trans minors illegal.”…just like the Republicans war on woman, banning abortion health care…they make war on transgender youths…they “thrive” on telling other people what they can and cannot do with their bodies…leading with hate instead of love or even compassion…it’s disgusting…

as is disgusting, using the flag as a weapon…sound familiar?…”Weaponizing the American flag as a tool of hate:
In April 1976, as Boston was mired in demonstrations over busing to desegregate public schools, a Black Yale-educated lawyer was assaulted by a group of whites, including one man wielding an American flag. Correspondent Faith Salie talks with Stanley Forman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his photo capturing the attack, and with the victim, lawyer Ted Landsmark, about the flag, as an aspirational symbol, or a weapon.”… Landsmark was beaten and kicked and landed in the hospital…he was was offered an apology if he promised not to press charges…

Stanley Forman’s picture of a white Boston youth attacking a Black lawyer with an American flag won the photographer a Pulitzer Prize. STANLEY FORMAN

as an aside, although it wasn’t and American flag – the man, Daniel Joseph “DJ” Rodriguez, who tasered D.C. policeman, Michael Fanone, was sentenced to 12 years…from The New American Journal: “WASHINGTON, D.C. — A radical, right-wing militia member and avid Trump supporter from California who tased Metro Police officer Michael Fanone during the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in federal prison this week for assault and other charges and ordered to pay $96,927 to the victim and $2,000 in restitution to the Architect of the Capitol.

Daniel Joseph “DJ” Rodriguez, 40, of Fontana, California, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to 151 months in prison for conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding, obstruction of justice, and assaulting a law enforcement officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.”

notable deaths the past week…Daniel Ellsberg, the government analyst and whistleblower whose leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and Washington Post exposed “lies and deceptions” behind America’s military operations during the Vietnam War, died on Friday, June 16, at the age of 92.”…from Wikipedia: Daniel Ellsberg (April 7, 1931 – June 16, 2023) was an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers. ( The Post was the movie starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep was about the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. )

In January 1973, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a maximum sentence of 115 years. Because of governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering (which were committed by the same people who were later involved in the Watergate Scandal), and his defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed all charges against Ellsberg in May 1973.

Ellsberg was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2006. He was also known for having formulated an important example in decision theory, the Ellsberg paradox; for his extensive studies on nuclear weapons and nuclear policy; and for voicing support for WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. Ellsberg was awarded the 2018 Olof Palme Prize for his “profound humanism and exceptional moral courage.”

Ellsberg was the recipient of the inaugural Ron Ridenhour Courage Prize, a prize established in 2004 by The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation. In 1978, he accepted the Gandhi Peace Award from Promoting Enduring Peace. On September 28, 2006, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example”.^[120] He received the Dresden Peace Prize in 2016. He received the 2018 Olof Palme Prize and the 2022 Sam Adams Award.”

Two-time Oscar-winning actress and former Member of Parliament Glenda Jackson died Thursday in London at the age of 87…she won her Best Actress Oscars for Women In Love 1970 and A Touch of Class 1973…from Wikipedia: “Glenda May Jackson CBE (9 May 1936 – 15 June 2023) was a British actress and politician. She was one of the few performers to achieve the American Triple Crown of Acting, having won two Academy Awards, three Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. A member of the Labour Party, she served continuously as a Member of Parliament (MP) for 23 years, initially for Hampstead and Highgate from 1992 to 2010, and, following boundary changes, Hampstead and Kilburn, from 2010 to 2015.”

also, Cormac McCarthy, author of numerous books including No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses… Treat Williams, actor and Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Simon and Shuster…who recently hoped he would live to finish editing Robert Caro’s third book in his series started by The Power Broker…

an interesting death decision…some people donate their bodies to science…and some decide on “human composting”: The rising interest in natural burial: Natural organic reduction, more simply known as human composting, is a natural process that transforms the body into soil. It has become a recognized alternative to embalming, and a climate-friendly option compared to cremation. Correspondent Ben Tracy visits the Seattle funeral home Recompose, the first human composting facility in the country, and talks with those whose loved ones have gone through the process.”…interesting alternative…

Elissa and Pam and Aunt Lois and I went to dinner and a movie this evening…dinner at Ben and Irv’s…my usual, hearts of lettuce salad and a lean corned beef special…YUM…and the movie No Hard Feelings with Jennifer Lawrence…at the Penn Theater in Huntingdon Valley near Ben and Irv’s…No Hard Feelings from Wikipedia: “a 2023 American sex comedy film directed by Gene Stupnitsky from a screenplay he co-wrote with John Phillips. It stars Jennifer Lawrence (who also produces) as a down-on-her-luck young woman who answers a listing to date an introverted 19-year-old (played by Andrew Barth Feldman) in order to get him out of his shell prior to college. Laura Benanti, Natalie Morales, and Matthew Broderick co-star.”…first of all Matthew Broderick was good as the father of the introverted 19-year-old…I don’t usually like his recent acting…he was better as a kid…War Games and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off…he’s pretty good in No Hard Feelings…Jennifer Lawrence is wonderful!…”No Hard Feelings was released in the United States by Sony Pictures Releasing on June 23, 2023. It received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise aimed at Lawrence’s comedic performance.”…we love Jennifer Lawrence, No Hard Feelings is a double entendre…a little risque but funny…I recommend this film just for the laughs and situations…again, we love Jennifer Lawrence, who won an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook…set in Philadelphia…go see it…you won’t have any hard feelings…

caught another mouse…that makes 16…since I’ve lived here…

a number of characters, especially the motel court owner, Steve Carell say “I understand.”…but we don’t…we don’t need to understand…we just let Asteroid City unfold before us…with it’s pastel colors…and deadpan performances by all of Wes Anderson’s favorite actors saying their lines…a chorus in acting class all saying a truth –  “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”…Asteroid City is Star Studded: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan and Jeff Goldblum…I read that Bill Murray wasn’t in it because he contracted Covid before filming started…it’s a play within a play…Edward Norton plays the playwright, Conrad Earp…from black and white to yellow and turquoise…and silliness abounds…”You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”…but as Adrien Brody’s character, who is the director, Schubert Green, tells the main character Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck  “Just keep on telling the story. You’re doing great. You don’t need to understand it. Just keep moving forward.’’…let the play/movie unfold and let it take you where it’s going…Augie is a war photographer and father to Woodrow ( one of the the Brainiac Stargazer kids ) and Jones Hall, the actor playing Augie…the teacher June Douglas played by Maya Hawke is the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke…that’s cool…and we do have atomic explosions in the desert distance…a frequent occurrence…what they did in the desert of New Mexico…just to try out the bomb…and how we stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb according to Stanley Kurbrick…and we do have an alien…played by Jeff Goldblum…who poses for Augie to take his picture…the entire film is full of laughs and surprises…the motor court’s vending machines dispense cigarettes…martinis…and deeds to land near the city which is a motor court, a railroad stop, a gas station with one pump…and a stack of abandoned cars…all pastel of course…Rotten Tomatoes – Critics 75%, Audience 66%…”The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention (organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition) is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.”…if you’re a Wes Anderson fan… you’ll like this movie, just let it unfold over you…from Wikipedia: “Asteroid City is a 2023 American science fiction comedy-drama film directed and co-produced by Wes Anderson from a screenplay by Anderson and a story by Anderson and Roman Coppola. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, and Jeff Goldblum. Its metatextual plot simultaneously depicts the events of a Junior Stargazer convention in a retrofuturistic version of 1955, staged as a play, and the creation of the play.

The project was first announced in September 2020 as an untitled romance film, with Anderson writing and directing. Originally set for Rome, filming took place in Spain between August and October 2021, with cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman and COVID-19 safety precautions in place. Several sets in Chinchón, resembling a desert landscape and a mock train station, were used for the shoot. The post-production process included editor Barney Pilling and composer Alexandre Desplat in his sixth collaboration with Anderson. The official title was revealed in October 2021.”…especially funny is the song Dear Alien Who Art in Heaven…written by one of the students of June Douglas, Maya Hawke’s teacher character…written by Jarvis Cocker…

Elissa and I went to the 8:00 showing at the Ambler…they had a 7:00 showing also…I guess in anticipation of all the hype leading up to Asteroid City…it’s also playing at the Hiway…

after a desperate search, it became clear that the submersible Titan, which went missing on Sunday, shortly after it started its descent toward the Titanic wreckage, had experienced a “catastrophic implosion”…the five people aboard are presumed dead…after debris from the Titan was found near the Titanic wreckage…from The New York Times by Daniel Victor, Jesus Jimenez and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs: “Missing Titanic Submersible‘Catastrophic Implosion’ Likely Killed 5 Aboard Submersible: Pieces of the missing Titan vessel were found on the ocean floor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, the Coast Guard said. OceanGate Expeditions, the vessel’s operator, said, “Our hearts are with these five souls.”: After days of searching, no hope of finding survivors remains. Here’s the latest.

The five people aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday were presumed dead on Thursday, after an international search that gripped much of the world found debris from the vessel near the wreckage of the Titanic. A U.S. Coast Guard official said the debris was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”

On Sunday, a secret U.S. network of acoustic sensors picked up indications of a possible implosion in the vicinity of the submersible around the time communications with it were lost, a senior Navy official disclosed on Thursday. The search continued because there was no immediate confirmation that the Titan had met a disastrous end, according to a second senior Navy official. Both officials spoke anonymously to discuss operational details.

However, the revelation is likely to raise further questions about a vast, multinational dayslong search and rescue effort that has ended in failure.

Those presumed lost onboard were Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, the company that operated the submersible, who was piloting. The four passengers were a British businessman and explorer, Hamish Harding; a British-Pakistani businessman, Shahzada Dawood, and his teenage son, Suleman; and a French maritime expert, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site. (Read more about the lives that were lost.)

Here’s what  else to know: A remote-controlled vehicle had located the debris from the Titan, including the submersible’s tail cone, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the ocean floor, according to Admiral Mauger.

Leaders in the submersible craft industry warned for years of possible “catastrophic” problems with the vehicle’s design. They also worried that OceanGate Expeditions had not followed standard certification procedures.

OceanGate has provided tours of the Titanic wreck since 2021 — for a price of up to $250,000 per person — as part of a booming high-risk travel industry. The company has described the trip on its website as a “thrilling and unique travel experience.”

The Titan squeezed five passengers into a tight space with no seats, only a flat floor and a single view port 21 inches in diameter.”…the world clung to hope that the rescue of Titan would be found and saved…knowing that there was enough oxygen for 96 hours and limited water and provisions were on board…from The New York Times by Eric Schmitt: “The U.S. Navy, using data from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines, detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” in the vicinity of the Titan submersible at the time communications with the vessel were lost on Sunday, two senior Navy officials said on Thursday.

But with no other indications of a catastrophe, one of the officials said, the search was continued.

The data from the sensors was combined with information from airborne Navy P-8 surveillance planes and sonar buoys on the surface to triangulate the approximate location of the Titan, one of the officials said. The analysis of undersea acoustic data and information about the location of the noise were then passed on to the Coast Guard official in charge of the search, Rear Adm. John Mauger.

Because there was no visual or other conclusive evidence of a catastrophic failure, one of the officials said, it would have been “irresponsible” to immediately assume the five passengers were dead, and the search was ordered to continue even though the outlook appeared grim. Both of the Navy officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.

It was not immediately clear how widely the Navy’s acoustical analysis was disseminated among the search team, nor why the Navy had not made it public earlier. The Navy’s acoustic analysis from the secret sensor network was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.”…Rest in peace Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and Suleman Dawood…

severe weather in the South has killed a number of people…tornadoes, extreme heat and rainand hail the size of golf balls…death and destruction…

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been on a four-day state visit to the US…India has become the most populous country in the world…India, under Modi has become less democratic…his government, since 2014 has not only waged “war” against the “free press”, has sanctioned human rights violations against the country’s Muslims but also stifled opposition leaders…and continues to buy Russian oil…as well as arms…Modi has overseen the decay of democracy, not only stifling the press but also undermining the judiciary…and yet Modi has been welcomed on his state visit, addressed the joint session of Congress and had a state dinner at the White House…because we need India…right or wrong?…they are now buying arms from us…right or wrong?…I wonder if Gandhi would be ‘happy’ about how India has developed under Modi?…

more about Justice Alito…from CNN by Devan Cole and Audrey Ash: “Alito in the hot seat over trips to Alaska and Rome he accepted from groups and individuals who lobby the Supreme Court: CNN – Concerns about ethics and transparency at the Supreme Court have been reignited this week after Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged attending a luxury fishing trip on the private jet of a conservative hedge fund manager.

ProPublica detailed the 2008 trip with Paul Singer. Alito, the report said, did not report the trip or the flight he took on the private jet to Alaska on his annual financial disclosure, and also did not recuse himself from cases before the court involving Singer’s hedge fund. Alito denied any wrongdoing.

While much of the recent criticism about Supreme Court ethics and activities of justices has been leveled at Justice Clarence Thomas – for failing to disclose luxury travel and gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, a 2014 real estate deal he made with the billionaire real estate magnate, or Crow’s reported tuition payments for Thomas’ grandnephew – other justices have also come under scrutiny.

Last July, Alito was feted in Rome by Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative, which has in recent years joined the growing ranks of conservative legal activists who are finding new favor at the Supreme Court – and forging ties with the justices. The group’s legal clinic has filed a series of “friend-of-the-court” briefs in religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020.

After the high court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome to deliver a keynote address at a gala hosted at a palace in the heart of the city. It was his first known public appearance after the decision.

At the start of his speech, he thanked the group for the “warm hospitality” it provided to him and his wife, which, he later said, included a stay at a hotel that “looks out over the Roman Forum.”

During various parts of the address, he gleefully mocked critics of his ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What really “wounded” him, the conservative justice said, was when Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, “addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare ‘the decision whose name may not be spoken’ with the Russian attack on the Ukraine.”

Justices are often known for usually maintaining a low profile, and the court’s public information office in recent years has been less forthcoming about their public appearances. But the court’s ruling last year in the abortion case propelled the nine jurists and their rulings to new heights and fueled new questions about the justices’ behavior both on and off the bench.

Alito joined the majority in ruling in favor of the Religious Liberty Initiative’s position in several of the cases for which it submitted briefs, including the one that reversed Roe, which he authored, and a 2022 decision that said a high school football coach had the right to pray on the 50-yard line after games.

Stephanie Barclay, the Religious Liberty Initiative’s director, confirmed to CNN that the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome last year.

“Like the other speakers and panelists at the summit, Justice Alito’s transportation and lodging were covered and of course, he had meals provided like all attendees,” she said. “Unlike other speakers, no honorarium was given.”

The practice of paying for justices to travel around the world to speak is not uncommon for well-funded legal advocacy groups and law schools seeking to fete one of the nine jurists, and the rules of the judiciary’s policy-making body, the Judicial Conference, allow for such entities to reimburse justices for expenses stemming from such travel.

Alito stressed in a statement to CNN that his invitation to speak in Rome was not specifically from the initiative’s clinic, which submits the briefs to the court.

“My understanding is that Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative has a number of components, only one of which is a clinic that, like the legal clinics at many other law schools, files amicus briefs in the Supreme Court,” the statement said. “I was not invited to speak in Rome by the clinic.”

The majority of the justices met a deadline in early June to release their annual financial disclosure forms, but Alito – along with Thomas – got an extension, meaning more details about Alito’s 2022 travels will likely not be seen until after the end of the current Supreme Court term.

Alito’s decision not to disclose the 2008 trip with Singer on his annual financial forms at the time or recuse himself from cases concerning the billionaire’s hedge fund, has generated new controversy for the jurist, with lawmakers saying it underscores the need for ethics reforms at the court.

Barrett’s home sale

There are personal connections between the Religious Liberty Initiative and the high court as well.

A few months after Justice Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in at the Supreme Court in 2020, leaving her appellate court judgeship and job as a Notre Dame law professor, she sold her private residence to a recently hired professor who was taking on a leadership position at the initiative. Accountable.us, a left-leaning non-profit group, discovered the home sale.

Neither Barrett’s real estate deal nor Alito’s appearance in Italy appear to violate any of the court’s ethics rules, according to several experts interviewed by CNN.

“It raises a question – not so much of corruption as such, but of whether disclosures, our current system of disclosures, is adequate to the task,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University in St. Louis Law School professor who specializes in government ethics, of Barrett’s real estate transaction.

Accountable.us president Kyle Herrig said in a statement: “Every federal judge is bound to an ethics code requiring them to avoid behavior that so much as looks improper, except for Supreme Court justices. Chief Justice (John) Roberts has the power to change that, but so far he hasn’t shown the courage. If he fails to do his job, Congress must do theirs.”

The sale of Barrett’s South Bend, Indiana, home to Brendan Wilson, a Washington, DC, attorney who was moving to the state to work for the law school and serve on the initiative’s leadership team, for $905,000 was not required to be disclosed on annual financial forms at the court. Federal regulations exempt sales of the “personal residence of the filer and the filer’s spouse” from transactions federal judges are required to report.

The home sold in May 2021 and Wilson started at Notre Dame that August. In a news release from late 2021 announcing he and two others had joined the group, Wilson is quoted as saying, “When we were presented with the opportunity to move back to South Bend, and to work with the Religious Liberty Initiative, we both felt it was the prompting of the Holy Spirit.

But given Wilson’s role at the initiative and the work its legal clinic is involved in, some experts said the sale is yet another reason why some rules at the Supreme Court should be changed to provide the public with a more robust understanding of connections between the justices and those involved in legal advocacy before the nation’s highest court.

“The court, frankly, it faces a kind of legitimacy crisis because of the really dire weaknesses of its ethics,” Clark said. “It has the opportunity to address that legitimacy crisis by, you know, stepping up its ethics game – imposing on itself and then abiding by additional disclosure operations.”

At the court, even the slightest appearance of impropriety raises red flags with Democratic lawmakers and watchdog groups, some of which have lodged formal complaints against justices to the Judicial Conference for actions they deem problematic.

Barrett’s home sale to Wilson makes her the third member of the Supreme Court who has made money from property transactions with influential conservative figures or people with close connections to legal advocacy before the nation’s highest court.

Barrett did not respond to a request for comment.

After Thomas’ deal with Crow was revealed, Politico reported that Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a vacation home in 2017 he co-owned to the chief executive of a major law firm that has argued cases before the court and didn’t name the buyer in his disclosure forms.

Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University and a legal ethics expert, stressed that although Barrett’s home sale did not violate any rules, it presents a “perception problem” for a court already facing intense public scrutiny.

“It is addressed by the court being much more vigilant in guarding against perception problems created by (the justices’) financial wheelings and dealings and going the extra mile to make sure that they not only are clean, but look clean,” he said.

The initiative and lawyers associated with it have filed at least nine amicus briefs before the Supreme Court since the sale went through, urging rulings in favor of conservative positions on issues like abortion, school prayer, and coronavirus restrictions on churches.

Barclay told CNN that many people connected with the group help compile the briefs they submit to the court, but stressed that Wilson “really could not be further removed from Supreme Court litigation.”

A brief biography for Wilson on the group’s page says he is responsible “for the transactional component of the Religious Liberty Clinic.” A recent job posting from the RLI explained the clinic’s transactional component includes legal work advising religiously affiliated organizations.

Wilson did not respond to interview request from CNN.”

as if censuring Adam Schiff wasn’t enough, Lauren Boebert introduced articles of impeachment against Biden…it will be sent for review to the House Judiciary and Homeland Security committees…Boebert in her articles cited dereliction of duty and abuse of power related to Biden’s policy of the Southern border… Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, says that Boebert’s impeachment articles “has nothing to do with border security, calling it yet another attempt by Republicans “to distract from the legal peril facing their twice-impeached, twice-indicted party leader.”…this is how the repugnant Republican Party governs?…pathetic…it seems Boebert’s articles caused a riff with Marjorie Taylor Greene who wanted to introduce her articles of impeachment…who called who a bitch?…actually Greene called Boebert a “little bitch”…more projection by the GOP…no matter about their twice impeached, twice indicted ex-president and leading candidate…pathetic…

as life goes on the Kennedy Center honorees were announced…from The Washington Post by Travis M. Andrews: “Billy Crystal, Dionne Warwick, Barry Gibb to be Kennedy Center honorees: The 46th annual celebration of the performing arts will also salute Queen Latifah and Renée Fleming this December: When Dionne Warwick told her sons that she had been selected as a Kennedy Center honoree, “not only were they very happy about it, my eldest said, ‘Well, Mom, it’s about time.’”

“Everything happens when it’s supposed to, that’s my attitude,” Warwick said with a chuckle. “So I’m thrilled that they finally got it right!”

Warwick, 82, wasreferring to the 45-year tradition honoring, as the Kennedy Center phrases it, artists who have had “an impact on the rich tapestry of American life and culture through the performing arts.”

The 46th class of honorees also includes actor and comedian Billy Crystal, opera star Renée Fleming, Bee Gees singer-songwriter Barry Gibb, and hip-hop pioneer and actress Queen Latifah, the arts center announced Thursday.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” Crystal said. “There’s a real special thing about it, because it’s not a competition. It’s an appreciation.”

“It’s a pretty powerful night in America for American art,” Latifah said. “To be part of that is very profound.”

The Dec. 3 ceremony in the 2,364-seat Opera House will be hosted by former honoree Gloria Estefan and will also celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. A cadre of celebrity guests, top secret until the night of, will take to the stage to celebrate the honorees. The show will be broadcast later on CBS and streamed on Paramount Plus.

“I think it’s kind of fun to be celebrating hip-hop at the same time we’re celebrating a guy who made disco and pop music so ubiquitous,” Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter said, referring to Gibb. “Having three women who are so strong, who have remade themselves in so many different kinds of waysand have had such extraordinary careers is central to this as well.”

Every honoree in the 46th class is a multi-hyphenate (if not a multi-multi-multi-hyphenate). Crystal writes books, directs and acts. Fleming sings but also advocates for research at the intersection of arts, health and neuroscience. Latifah has dominated both airwaves and silver screens.

“These are artists who have not done just one thing, but have re-created themselves,” Rutter said. “To me, that’s what a true artist is: always discovering new art, trying to grow, trying to make the world a better place through their art, and I think that is really true about these five.”

“This is one of the honors we’ve been chasing for many years now,” Dionne Warwick said. So, naturally, she’s thrilled that “they finally recognized a body of work over these past 60 years.”

That body of work includes more than 100 million records sold and 60 hits on the charts — including 19 consecutive Top 100 singleswith the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David. She has used her music to power her activism, such as the first recording dedicated to AIDS awareness — the 1985 No. 1 hit “That’s What Friends Are For” with Gladys Knight, Elton John and Stevie Wonder.

Recently, Warwick has become known to a new generation as a beloved Twitter personality and “Saturday Night Live” character. She eventually made a surprise appearance on that show.

Now Warwick is ready for her moment on the Opera House balcony. But, she added, “a little sadness comes along with it as well, because both Burt and Hal are no longer with us to enjoy this with me. But, you know, they’re looking down smiling, I’m sure.”

Crystal, 75, was speechless when he learned of the honor, an unusual state for the lifelong entertainer. “I was just totally, totally in shock, I have to say. Immediately very emotional about it. I’m not a man of few words, but all I had was a few words. Which was ‘Really? Wow. Are you sure it’s not Bill Kristol, the Republican?’” he joked.

“I’ve been entertaining pretty much my whole life,” Crystal added. “And I thought about that instantly, about how fast this has gone.”

Crystal’s love of entertaining grew out of trying to make his parents laugh as a 5-year-old in their Long Island home. He would eventually embark on a career with a stint on SNL and as an acclaimed awards show host, a stand-up comic and star of such comedies as “City Slickers” and “When Harry Met Sally ….”

He would go on to write and direct films, write five books, appear on Broadway stages, win Emmy and Tony awards and, in 2007, receive the Kennedy Center’s other great honor, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

“It’s all just been this wonderful life, in all different areas and venues of entertainment and caring about people and trying to do the right thing,” Crystal said, emotion filling his voice.

The hardest thing about the honor, though, was knowing he was an honoree for six weeks but being able to tell only Janice, his wife of 53 years. (On Father’s Day, he broke down and told his daughters, but let’s keep that between us. “I couldn’t not tell them,” he said.)

Gibb, 76, also described being speechless upon hearing the news. “At this time of life, it’s not something you expect,” he said, describing his feelings as “stunned, proud and honored.”

Rated by Guinness World Records as one of the two most successful songwriters in pop history (the other being Paul McCartney),it’s not surprising Gibb is joining such musical legends as Herbie Hancock, Buddy Guy, Bruce Springsteen and McCartney himself as an honoree. He has won nine Grammy Awards, been inducted into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and been knighted in his homeland of England.

Gibb wrote songs for everyone from Frankie Valli to Diana Ross to fellow honoree Warwick, but he’s best known as a member of the Bee Gees, alongside his brothers Robin and Maurice.

“I think if the three of us would have been around today, it would have been the three of us,” Gibb said. “Maybe all four,” he added, referring to his younger brother Andy, who performed as a solo artist. Gibb is the last surviving brother.

The group, known for such hits as “Stayin’ Alive” and “To Love Somebody,” sold more than 220 million records and clocked 21 chart-toppers in the United States and Britain.

“How did we do all that?” Gibb joked. “It sounds exhausting!”

Latifah, 53, thought she might be a bit young to be named a Kennedy Center honoree, but then she reflected on the fact that her first album came out when she was 19. “I guess I did start kind of young,” she said. So maybe it’s right on time.

Or maybe a little late. Latifah said she wishes that her mom, who died in 2018, could see it happen.

“My [creative] partner Shakim was the one who told me, and he was one of my mother’s students,” Latifah said. “We’ve been together my whole career, so he just got a little teary-eyed as well and said, ‘I wish your mother could be here to see this. This is a really, really proud moment for us to see all that stuff that we started as teenagers paid off in such an amazing way.’”

Since that first record, Latifah has won Emmy and Grammy awards and been nominated for an Oscar. In addition to dominating the airwaves as the First Lady of Hip-Hop, she has built an impressive acting career with roles in such diverse movies as “Jungle Fever” and “Chicago” and the television show “The Equalizer.”

“Thank God for hip-hop,” she said. “It’s hip-hop music that opened the door for me to do everything I’ve done. I’m really grateful for this art form that we developed that allowed us to be able to move and shake around this entire globe.”

Opera star Fleming, 64, has sung just about everywhere with just about everyone. Nobel Peace Prize ceremony? Check. Buckingham Palace for Queen Elizabeth II? Check. At the Super Bowl? Check. With Luciano Pavarotti? Or Elton John? Or Andrea Bocelli? Or Sting? Or Joan Baez? Check. Check. Check. Check. Check.

That might be why the soprano became a goodwill ambassador for arts and health for the World Health Organization or earned five Grammys, the U.S. National Medal of Arts, the 2023 Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal and honorary doctorates from eight universities. The list goes on, but we don’t have Fleming’s lung capacity.

Even so, she was surprised when she got Rutter’s call while driving home from Lowe’s. “I said, ‘I’m running errands,’” Fleming recalled. “She just burst out laughing and said, ‘I love it when I make this call and someone’s running errands.’”

Fleming was surprised because she’s an adviser at the Kennedy Center and has performed there more than two dozen times, including at the 2004 Honors ceremony, and thought that might rule her out. But Fleming is glad it didn’t, saying that she’s “incredibly excited” to receive the Honors.

Maybe even more so since she knows the Kennedy Center so intimately. “That doesn’t take away from the thrill,” she said. “I think it adds to it because I know what an incredible honor it is.”…can’t wait until December to watch one of my favorite things in December…Love the Kennedy Center Honors…

and more life goes on…fun…Susan hosted the first Sandwich Club meeting…plenty of BLAT fixings, french fried and Ketel One Botanical Vodka…YUM!….fun evening which Julia and Maddy took the train out to Lafayette Hill… Elissa and I got there earlier after Pam…to have plenty of hors d’oeuvre while the other members of the newly formed Sandwich Club got together…YUM and FUN!…thanks Susan for hosting the first ever…

found 2 quarters and 3 pennies…

from Seeking Rents ( This is Seeking Rents, a newsletter and podcast devoted to producing original journalism — and lifting up the journalism of others — that examines the many ways that businesses influence public policy across Florida, written by Jason Garcia. Seeking Rents is free to all. But please consider a voluntary paid subscription, if you can afford one, to help support our work. )…by Jason Garcia: “Car dealers are lobbying to make sure consumers must keep haggling with high-pressure salesmen: Lobbyists for some of Florida’s biggest car dealerships have written legislation that would block consumers from buying electric cars directly from manufacturers like Ford and Honda.: Florida’s car dealers want to make you haggle with a high-pressure salesman if you want to buy a new electric car from a company like Ford or Honda.

Amid a growing national push to let more car manufactures sell electric vehicles directly to consumers, lobbyists representing some of the state’s biggest dealerships have written legislation that would strengthen a decades-old state franchising law that forces Florida consumers to buy most new cars through middlemen dealers, each of whom controls their own territory.

The bills (HB 637, SB 712) would cement the role of dealers in a variety of ways. For instance, they would make it illegal for car manufacturers to make their dealers set transparent, non-negotiable prices for vehicles — allowing the dealers to continue hiding prices and layering in lots of last-minute fees. They would also block manufacturers from making dealers establish clear and consistent terms for trade-ins, insurance and financing.

The bills would even prevent Floridians going directly to an established car company like Ford, ordering a customized car online, and choosing where to have it shipped for delivery.

“We want to make sure that dealers continue to be allocated vehicles — that we don’t become a system where the manufacturer directly takes reservations from customers…and then the customer tells the manufacturer, ‘Send it to this dealer, send it to that dealer,’” John Forehand, the general counsel for the Florida Automobile Dealers Association said in a video explaining the legislation.

Dubbed by lobbyists as the “Dealer Bill,” the legislation gets its first hearing Thursday morning in the House’s Regulatory Reform & Economic Development Subcommittee. The House version is sponsored by Rep. Jason Shoaf, a Republican from Port St. Joe.

One week after filing the Dealer Bill in the state House, records show Shoaf received a $10,000 campaign contribution from Braman Motors — the dealership company owned by billionaire magnate Norman Braman and one of the companies that helped write the legislation, according to the dealers association.

Shoaf is hardly unique. Records show that the Florida Automobile Dealers Association showered more than $1 million on Florida politicians over the past two years — which included $230,000 to committees controlled by Senate President Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples) and another $50,000 to Sen. Ben Albritton (R-Naples), the second most-powerful state senator. Braman Motors has plowed more than $600,000 more into Florida politicians over the same period.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, who would have to sign or veto this legislation, has raised more than $2 million from car dealers over the past two years — including $225,000 from Daytona Toyota, $75,000 from Norman Braman and Braman Motors, and $50,000 from Bozard Ford in St. Augustine. ( what do you think about the chances DeSantis will sign the bill into law?…I’d bet $2 Million on it. )

The “Dealer Bill” flies in the face of recommendations from independent economists, who say states should be loosening anticompetitive regulations that protect the profits of car dealers at the expense of higher prices for consumers — not strengthening them.

“All up and down the line, the dealers are getting protected in a variety of ways,” said Roger Blair, an economics professor at the University of Florida. “Part of the reason is that it looks appealing — that we’re protecting businesses from these big, bad manufacturers in Detroit or in Japan or in Germany….But, of course, it comes at the expense of the consumer. The consumer is charged more as a result.”

Blair was one of more than 70 professors around the country who signed an open letter in April 2021 urging states to let more car manufacturers sell directly to the public. The academics said direct sales would lead to lower prices for consumers while also driving more rapid adoption of electric cars, which replace the gas-guzzling vehicles that are intensifying climate change.“

The dealer protection laws were written for the mid-twentieth century,” they wrote. “It is time for a new approach.”

Cutting progress off at the pass

The legislation comes as car dealers across the country are scrambling to save themselves amid disruption in the car-buying business sparked by start-up electric-vehicle manufacturers like Tesla, Rivian and Lucid.

Because those newer car companies aren’t as encumbered by the same old franchising laws as traditional manufacturers, they have been able to sell cars straight to the public. That gives them an enormous competitive advantage: A 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Justice estimated that direct selling could cut the average cost of a car by $2,225 — nearly 9 percent per vehicle.

Now, more legacy carmakers want to emulate all or parts of the Tesla distribution model. Ford, for instance, announced plans last year to make its dealers commit to up-front, no-haggle pricing if they want to sell Ford’s new line of electric vehicles. Ford President and CEO Jim Farley has told investors that Ford’s distribution costs are about $2,000 per vehicle more expensive than Tesla’s.

Lobbyists for the car dealers, who started working on this year’s legislation nearly a year ago, are trying to cut plans like Ford’s off at the pass.

“We’ve really tried to anticipate the things that are happening in the market…and a lot of the things that we have in the bill actually address issues that are in the Ford EV program that came out of October,” Forehand, the dealers association general counsel, said in the video explaining the legislation. “We kind of knew where the manufacturers were headed, and we’ve done the best we can to cover those things up.”

Representatives for Ford and other individual car manufactures either declined to comment or did not respond to comment. But they’re expected to oppose this legislation.

“The automotive franchise system works well, but many of the laws governing it today are outdated, add unnecessary costs, and make it harder to adapt to changing market demands and customer expectations,” said Brian Weiss, a spokesperson for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an lobbying group for the carmakers.

It pays to the be the middleman

It’s probably worth remembering why buying a car is so much more painful than purchasing a refrigerator or a computer.

Decades ago, in the early years of the American car industry, car manufacturers started contracting with local dealers to sell their vehicles, both as a way to quickly raise money and in order to focus on their core business of building cars.

But there was an enormous imbalance of power: The “Big Three” automakers — Ford, General Motors and Chrysler — dominated the manufacturing market, whereas most dealerships were small, family-run operations. And the carmakers sometimes wielded their market power like a predator. During the Great Depression, Henry Ford allegedly kept his factories running at full capacity by forcing dealers to buy his cars even though they had no way to resell them.

Most states eventually passed laws to protect car dealers. Among other things, those laws prohibited manufacturers from flooding a market with new dealer franchises that encroach on existing dealer’s territory. They also prohibited car makers from bypassing dealers and selling directly to consumers themselves.

But the car business looks much different today. There are now more than a dozen major car manufacturers selling vehicles in the U.S

And the dealers have ballooned into big businesses. Publicly traded AutoNation Inc., which is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, did $27 billion in sales last year and turned a $1.4 billion profit.

Of the 80 largest privately held companies in Florida, 17 are car dealers, according to Florida Trend magazine. Thirteen of them did more than $1 billion in sales last year. The biggest — Morgan Auto Group of Tampa — did more than $5 billion in sales.

The state laws that protect the position of car dealers are similar to the Prohibition-era statutes that keep territorial beer and liquor distributors standing between brewers, distillers and the public. They’re why it takes years of lobbying in Tallahassee to make even a simple, popular change — like allowing a microbrewery to sell a 64-ounce growler of beer to a customer.

These state-sanctioned protection schemes are also incredibly lucrative for the middlemen.

In 2019, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper called “Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century” that used de-identified tax data to analyze how the top 0.1 percent of Americans by income make their money.

They found the list filled with car dealers and beverage distributors.

“A typical firm owned by the top 0.1% is a regional business with $20M in sales and 100 employees, such as an auto dealer, beverage distributor, or a large law firm,” they wrote.

‘The Politics of Crony Capitalism’

Ultimately, the car dealerships fear they would eventually be driven out of business if manufacturers were permitted to sell to consumers themselves — whether directly, as with online sales, or indirectly, by controlling key terms like pricing and financing.

But the dealers claim they aren’t just trying to protect their own investments and profits. They say they are trying to protect the car-buying public, too.

For instance, Ron Book, a lobbyist for AutoNation, said that keeping bricks-and-mortar dealerships in local communities ensures “accountability and responsiveness” for consumers.

“At the end of the day, the consumer is better served when there is one throat to choke here locally, not somebody far away,” he said.

The car dealers also argue that the current system leads to better prices for consumers.

The claim goes something like this: While each dealer for a manufacturer like Ford might have its own monopoly territory, they must still compete with Ford dealers in neighboring territories. But if Ford were allowed to sell directly to consumers, the company would elbow out independent dealers, leaving Ford itself as the only place to buy Ford vehicles.

“Our advantage is the fact that you guys all determine pricing for vehicles separate from other dealers who determine pricing. And that competition is what makes our system work,” Ted Smith, the president of the Florida car dealers association, said in one of the association’s videos explaining the bill. “If the factories take over those functions, we’re going to have one price — and it’s not going to be a good one for the customer.”

There’s just one problem with this argument: It’s “farcical,” according to Daniel Crane, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Michigan and the author of a 2016 paper chronicling the dealer industry’s lobbying efforts to stop even Tesla from selling directly to consumers.

“It is possible that retail distribution through independent dealers could lower prices to consumers, but only if the dealers were more efficient at retail distribution than the manufacturer,” Crane wrote his paper, which was called, “Tesla, Dealer Franchise Laws, and the Politics of Crony Capitalism.” “But, in that case, the manufacturer would have every incentive to distribute through dealers, which would increase its wholesale sales…and hence its profits.”…we’ll all be forced to let go of more of our dollars…and you thought you were paying more for eggs there for a while…consider your electric car…when the time comes…

repugnant Republicans censured Adam Schiff today…from The Washington Post by Amy B. Wang and Mariana Alfaro: “House passes measure to censure Adam Schiff: ( Schiff has said it was another bow to trump…trump, after the last vote to table the resolution failed last Wednesday…then trump told his Republican lackeys if they didn’t pass the censure, he would have them primaried…they then passed the resolution today…still bowing to the puppet master…could this be a distraction?…look over here, not over there at trump’s second indictment!…)…”The House on Wednesday passed a measure tocensure Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) for pressing allegations that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia, a week after a first attempt to censure Schiff was blocked.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) presided over the vote that fell largely along party lines, 213-209, with six Republicans voting “present” — including all GOP members of the Ethics Committee. Because six Republicans voted present, the majority threshold to pass the vote was lowered.

As the vote was finalized, Democrats filled the well of the chamber and surrounded Schiff. Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) led chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” against the Republican caucus, and other Democrats yelled out “cowards!” The protests forced McCarthy to stop and restart the reading of the resolution.

“I have all night,” McCarthy told Democrats.

Some Democrats questioned why McCarthy had not given the same treatment to Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who faces a litany of charges and who has repeatedly lied to the public and the House. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), an ally of Schiff’s, yelled out to McCarthy: “You’re weak! You’re pathetic!”

In response, Republicans shouted back at Democrats, with one yelling, “You all are jacka–es!”

As the speaker exited the floor, he was met with handshakes and slaps on the back from GOP lawmakers who congratulated him on the passage of the resolution.

Schiff, meanwhile, was embraced by Democrats, who also took photos with him and chanted his name.

While such a chaotic display hadn’t been seen on the House floor in recent history, decorum in the chamber has faltered since the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), the only Republican not part of the Ethics Committee who voted present on the resolution, lamented the disarray on the House floor. When asked why he voted present, Buck said Schiff wasn’t given “due process.”

“We haven’t heard his side of the story,” he said.

Buck said he’s long opposed kicking House members off committees. He said he was promised the House would address that issue but said it has not done so.

“We are spiraling to the bottom,” he said. “We should be striving to do better.”

A vote to table the resolution — or effectively kill it — failed early Wednesday afternoon on a 208-218 vote along party lines. The vote triggered an immediate debate on the censure measure, which the House voted on later Wednesday.

The resolution, sponsored by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), alleges that Schiff “spread false accusations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia” and abused his privileged access to classified information. It also says that Schiff “behaved dishonestly and dishonorably on many other occasions.”

The measure that passed Wednesday is similar to one the House blocked last week but did not include the possibility of a $16 million fine against Schiff. Luna had said that amount was half the cost of an investigation into the alleged collusion.

On the House floor Wednesday, Luna blamed Schiff for having “ripped apart American families across the country with repeated false narratives” and “sowing lasting division across our land.”

Democrats have dismissed the GOP’s efforts to censure Schiff as partisan retribution for trying to hold Trump accountable, as well as an attempt to distract Americans from Trump’s legal problems.

Ahead of the Wednesday vote to table the resolution, Schiff said the “false and defamatory resolution” came at considerable cost to the country and blasted GOP lawmakers for not instead censuring those in the body who had sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“Today, I wear this partisan vote as a badge of honor, knowing that I have lived my oath, knowing that I have done my duty to hold a dangerous and out-of-control president accountable — and knowing that I would do so again in a heartbeat if the circumstances should ever require it,” Schiff said on the House floor, to applause from his Democratic colleagues.

Last week, 20 Republicans voted with Democrats to table Luna’s first measure in a vote of 225-196. Two Republicans and five Democrats voted present.

In a statement Tuesday, Luna said “a majority of the 20” Republicans who had voted to table the first resolution would be changing their votes to support the measure this week.

“We have secured the number of votes needed to censure Adam Schiff and refer him to Ethics,” she said.

Luna’s measure is a privileged resolution, which means that under House rules, it had to be considered by Thursday.

“It is well within my right as a Congresswoman to file a privileged motion and hold Adam Schiff accountable for abusing and exploiting his official position and bringing dishonor to the House of Representatives,” she said.

Censures, which are rare in the House, are less severe than expulsion from the House but more severe than a reprimand. In the past three decades, only two lawmakers have been censured: then-Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) in 2010 for ethics violations and Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) in 2021 for tweeting an anime video that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and swinging swords at President Biden.

Schiff, who is running for Senate to replace the retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), has used the censure attempts to raise money for his Senate bid. In an email solicitation last week, he asked supporters to chip in at least $10 “to help my campaign fight back against these attacks.”

The California Democrat served as the lead manager in the 2020 Senate trial after Trump’s impeachment in 2019 for threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine as he sought political favors. He was removed this year from the Intelligence Committee by McCarthy, who accused him of having abused his power.

Schiff’s opponents in the 2024 Democratic Senate primary include Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee. His backers include Pelosi. ( Marianna Sotomayor and John Wagner contributed to this report.)”…

something’s fishy!…Supreme Court Justice Alito…from ProPublica by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski: “Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court: In the years after the undisclosed trip to Alaska, Republican megadonor Paul Singer’s hedge fund has repeatedly had business before the Supreme Court. Alito has never recused himself.: In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.

Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.

In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.

Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.

Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.

“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.

Justices are almost entirely left to police themselves on ethical issues, with few restrictions on what gifts they can accept. When a potential conflict arises, the sole arbiter of whether a justice should step away from a case is the justice him or herself.

ProPublica’s investigation sheds new light on how luxury travel has given prominent political donors — including one who has had cases before the Supreme Court — intimate access to the most powerful judges in the country. Another wealthy businessman provided expensive vacations to two members of the high court, ProPublica found. On his Alaska trip, Alito stayed at a commercial fishing lodge owned by this businessman, who was also a major conservative donor. Three years before, that same businessman flew Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, on a private jet to Alaska and paid the bill for his stay.

Such trips would be unheard of for the vast majority of federal workers, who are generally barred from taking even modest gifts.

Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society, attended and helped organize the Alaska fishing vacation. Leo invited Singer to join, according to a person familiar with the trip, and asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. Leo had recently played an important role in the justice’s confirmation to the court. Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo’s political groups.

ProPublica’s examination of Alito’s and Scalia’s travel drew on trip planning emails, Alaska fishing licenses, and interviews with dozens of people including private jet pilots, fishing guides, former high-level employees of both Singer and the lodge owner, and other guests on the trips.

ProPublica sent Alito a list of detailed questions last week, and on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s head spokeswoman told ProPublica that Alito would not be commenting. Several hours later, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Alito responding to ProPublica’s questions about the trip.

Alito said that when Singer’s companies came before the court, the justice was unaware of the billionaire’s connection to the cases. He said he recalled speaking to Singer on “no more than a handful of occasions,” and they never discussed Singer’s business or issues before the court.

Alito said that he was invited to fly on Singer’s plane shortly before the trip and that the seat “​​would have otherwise been vacant.” He defended his failure to report the trip to the public, writing that justices “commonly interpreted” the disclosure requirements to not include “accommodations and transportation for social events.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Singer told ProPublica that Singer didn’t organize the trip and that he wasn’t aware Alito would be attending when he accepted the invitation. Singer “never discussed his business interests” with the justice, the spokesperson said, adding that at the time of trip, neither Singer nor his companies had “any pending matters before the Supreme Court, nor could Mr. Singer have anticipated in 2008 that a subsequent matter would arise that would merit Supreme Court review.”

Leo did not respond to questions about his organizing the trip but said in a statement that he “would never presume to tell” Alito and Scalia “what to do.”

This spring, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas received decades of luxury travel from another Republican megadonor, Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow. In a statement, Thomas defended the undisclosed trips, saying unnamed colleagues advised him that he didn’t need to report such gifts to the public. Crow also gave Thomas money in an undisclosed real estate deal and paid private school tuition for his grandnephew, who Thomas was raising as a son. Thomas reported neither transaction on his disclosure forms.

The undisclosed gifts have prompted lawmakers to launch investigations and call for ethics reform. Recent bills would impose tighter rules for justices’ recusals, require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of conduct and create an ethics body, which would investigate complaints. Neither a code nor an ethics office currently exists.

“We wouldn’t tolerate this from a city council member or an alderman,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Thomas in a recent hearing. “And yet the Supreme Court won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem.”

So far, the court has chafed at the prospect of such reforms. Though the court recently laid out its ethics practices in a statement signed by all nine justices, Chief Justice John Roberts has not directly addressed the recent revelations. In fact, he has repeatedly suggested Congress might not have the power to regulate the court at all.

“We Take Good Care of Him Because He Makes All the Rules”

In the 1960s in his first year at Harvard Law School, Singer was listening to a lecture by a famed liberal professor when, he later recalled, he had an epiphany: “My goodness. They’re making it up as they go along.”

It was a common sentiment among conservative lawyers, who often accuse liberal judges of activist overreach. While Singer’s career as an attorney was short-lived, his convictions about the law stayed with him for decades. After starting a hedge fund that eventually made him one of the richest people in the country, he began directing huge sums to causes on the right. That included groups, like the Federalist Society, dedicated to fostering the conservative legal movement and putting its followers on the bench.

In the last decade, Singer has contributed over $80 million to Republican political groups. He has also given millions to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank where he has served as chairman since 2008. The institute regularly files friend-of-the-court briefs with the Supreme Court — at least 15 this term, including one asking the court to block student loan relief.

Singer’s interest in the courts is more than ideological. His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles. Singer has said he’s drawn to positions where you “control your own destiny, not just riding up and down with the waves of financial markets.” That can mean pressuring corporate boards to fire a CEO, brawling with creditors over the remains of a bankrupt company and suing opponents.

The fund now manages more than $50 billion in assets. “The investments are extremely shrewdly litigation-driven,” a person familiar with Singer’s fund told ProPublica. “That’s why he’s a billionaire.”

Singer’s most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court.

In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression. Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer’s fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespread media attention. Over 13 years of litigation, the arguments spanned what rights foreign governments have in the U.S. and whether Argentina could pay off debts to others before Singer settled his claim.

If Singer succeeded, he stood to make a fortune.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer’s fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

On July 8 of the following year, Singer took Alito to Alaska on the private jet, according to emails, flight data from the Federal Aviation Administration and people familiar with the trip.

The group flew across the country to the town of King Salmon on the Alaska peninsula. They returned to the East Coast three days later.

In Alaska, they stayed at the King Salmon Lodge, a luxury fishing resort that drew celebrities, wealthy businessmen and sports stars. On July 9, one of the lodge’s pilots flew Alito and other guests around 70 miles to the west to fish the Nushagak River, known for one of the best salmon runs in the world. Snapshots from the trip show Alito in waders and an Indianapolis Grand Prix hat, smiling broadly as he holds his catch.

“Sam Alito is in the red jacket there,” one lodge worker said, as he narrated an amateur video of the justice on the water. “We take good care of him because he makes all the rules.”

Other guests on the trip included Leo, the Federalist Society leader, and Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a prominent conservative appellate judge for whom Leo had clerked, according to fishing licenses and interviews with lodge staff.

On another day, the group flew on one of the lodge’s bush planes to a waterfall in Katmai National Park, where bears snatch salmon from the water with their teeth. At night, the lodge’s chefs served multicourse meals of Alaskan king crab legs or Kobe filet. On the last evening, a member of Alito’s group bragged that the wine they were drinking cost $1,000 a bottle, one of the lodge’s fishing guides told ProPublica.

In his op-ed, Alito described the lodge as a “comfortable but rustic facility.” The justice said he does not remember if he was served wine, but if he was, it didn’t cost $1,000 a bottle. (Alito also pointed readers to the lodge’s website. The lodge has been sold since 2008 and is now a more downscale accommodation.)

The justice’s stay was provided free of charge by another major donor to the conservative legal movement: Robin Arkley II, the owner of a mortgage company then based in California. Arkley had recently acquired the fishing lodge, which catered to affluent tourists seeking a luxury experience in the Alaskan wilderness. A planning document prepared by lodge staff describes Alito as a guest of Arkley. Another guest on the trip told ProPublica the trip was a gift from Arkley, and two lodge employees said they were told that Alito wasn’t paying.

Arkley, who does not appear to have been involved in any cases before the court, did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

Alito did not disclose the flight or the stay at the fishing lodge in his annual financial disclosures. A federal law passed after Watergate requires federal officials including Supreme Court justices to publicly report most gifts. (The year before, Alito reported getting $500 of Italian food and wine from a friend, noting that his friend was unlikely to “appear before this Court.”)

The law has a “personal hospitality” exemption: If someone hosts a justice on their own property, free “food, lodging, or entertainment” don’t always have to be disclosed. But the law clearly requires disclosure for gifts of private jet flights, according to seven ethics law experts, and Alito appears to have violated it. The typical interpretation of the law required disclosure for his stay at the lodge too, experts said, since it was a commercial property rather than a vacation home. The judiciary’s regulations did not make that explicit until they were updated earlier this year.

In his op-ed, Alito said that justices “commonly interpreted” the law’s exception for hospitality “to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.”

His op-ed pointed to language in the judiciary’s filing instructions and cited definitions from Black’s Law Dictionary and Webster’s. But he did not make reference to the judiciary’s regulations or the law itself, which experts said both clearly required disclosure for gifts of travel. ProPublica found at least six examples of other federal judges disclosing gifts of private jet travel in recent years.

“The exception only covers food, lodging and entertainment,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “He’s trying to move away from the plain language of the statute and the regulation.”

The Alaska vacation was the first time Singer and Alito met, according to a person familiar with the trip. After the trip, the two appeared together at public events. When Alito spoke at the annual dinner of the Federalist Society lawyers convention the following year, the billionaire introduced him. The justice told a story about having an encounter with bears during a fishing trip with Singer, according to the legal blog Above the Law. He recalled asking himself: “Do you really want to go down in history as the first Supreme Court justice to be devoured by a bear?”

The year after that, in 2010, Alito delivered the keynote speech at a dinner for donors to the Manhattan Institute. Once again, Singer delivered a flattering introduction. “He and his small band of like-minded justices are a critical and much-appreciated bulwark of our freedom,” Singer told the crowd. “Samuel Alito is a model Supreme Court justice.”

Meanwhile, Singer and Argentina kept asking the Supreme Court to intervene in their legal fight. His fund enlisted Ted Olson, the famed appellate lawyer who represented George W. Bush in the Bush v. Gore case during the 2000 presidential election.

In January 2010, a year and a half after the Alaska vacation, the fund once again asked the high court to take up an aspect of the dispute. The court declined. In total, parties asked the court to hear appeals in the litigation eight times in the six years after the trip. In most instances, it was Singer’s adversaries filing an appeal, with Singer’s fund successfully arguing for the justices to decline the case and let stand a lower court ruling.

The Supreme Court hears a tiny portion of the many cases it’s asked to rule on each year. Under the court’s rules, cases are only accepted when at least four of the nine justices vote to take it up. The deliberations on whether to take a case are shrouded in secrecy and happen at meetings attended only by the justices. These decisions are a fundamental way the court wields power. The justices’ votes are not typically made public, so it is unclear how Alito voted on the petitions involving Singer.

As Singer’s battle with Argentina intensified, his hedge fund launched an expansive public relations and lobbying campaign. In 2012, the hedge fund even attempted to seize an Argentine navy ship docked in Ghana to secure payment from the country. (The effort was thwarted by a ruling from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.) Argentina’s president labeled Singer and his fellow investors “vultures” attempting extortion; Singer complained the country was scapegoating him.

In 2014, the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter. It centered on an important issue: how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund’s legal maneuvers in U.S. courts. The U.S. government filed a brief on Argentina’s side, warning that the case raised “extraordinarily sensitive foreign policy concerns.”

The case featured an unusual intervention by the Judicial Crisis Network, a group affiliated with Leo known for spending millions on judicial confirmation fights. The group filed a brief supporting Singer, which appears to be the only Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief in the organization’s history.

The court ruled in Singer’s favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority. The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer.

“The tide turned” thanks to that “decisive” ruling and another from the court, as Singer’s law firm described it. After the legal setbacks and the election of a new president in Argentina, the country finally capitulated in 2016. Singer’s fund walked away with a $2.4 billion payout, a spectacular return.

Abbe Smith, a law professor at Georgetown who co-wrote a textbook on legal and judicial ethics, said that Alito should have recused himself. If she were representing a client and learned the judge had taken a gift from the party on the other side, Smith said, she would immediately move for recusal. “If I found out after the fact, I’d be outraged on behalf of my client,” she said. “And, frankly, I’d be outraged on behalf of the legal system.”

The law that governs when justices must recuse themselves from a case sets a high but subjective standard. It requires justices to withdraw from any case when their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the court allows individual justices to interpret that requirement for themselves. Historically, they’ve almost never explained why they are or are not recusing themselves, and unlike lower court judges, their decisions cannot be appealed.

Alito articulated his own standard during his Senate confirmation process, writing that he believed in stepping away from cases when “any possible question might arise.”

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Alito wrote of his failure to recuse himself from Singer’s cases at the court: “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”

Critics have long assailed the Supreme Court’s practices on this issue as both opaque and inconsistent. “The idea ‘just trust us to do the right thing’ while remaining in total secrecy is unworkable,” said Amanda Frost, a judicial ethics expert at the University of Virginia School of Law.

For Singer, appeals to the Supreme Court are an almost unavoidable result of his business model. Since the Argentina case, Singer’s funds were named parties in at least two other cases that were appealed to the court, both stemming from battles with Fortune 500 companies. One of the petitions is currently pending.

Grey Goose and Glacier Ice

The month after Singer got home from the 2008 fishing trip, he realized he had a problem. He was supposed to receive a shipment of frozen salmon from the Alaska lodge. But the fish hadn’t arrived. So the billionaire emailed an unlikely person to get to the bottom of it: Leo, the powerful Federalist Society executive.

“They’ve escaped!!” Singer wrote. Leo then sent an email to Arkley, the lodge owner, to track down the missing seafood.

The only clear thread connecting the prominent guests on the trip is that they all had a relationship with Leo. Leo is now a giant in judicial politics who helped handpick Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees and recently received a $1.6 billion donation to further his political interests. Leo’s network of political groups was in its early days, however, when he traveled with Alito to Alaska. It had run an advertising campaign supporting Alito in his confirmation fight, and Leo was reportedly part of the team that prepared Alito for his Senate hearings.

Singer and Arkley, the businessmen who provided the trip to the justice, were both significant donors to Leo’s groups at the time, according to public records and reporting by The Daily Beast. Arkley also sometimes provided Leo with one of his private planes to travel to business meetings, according to a former pilot of Arkley’s.

In his statement, Leo did not address detailed questions about the trip, but he said “no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip.”

He added that the public should wonder whether ProPublica’s coverage is “bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage this Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences.”

Arkley is a fixture in local politics in his hometown of Eureka, California, known for lashing out at city officials and for once starting his own newspaper reportedly out of disdain for the local press. By the early 2000s, he’d made a fortune buying and servicing distressed mortgages and also become a significant donor in national GOP politics.

As his political profile rose, Arkley bragged to friends that he’d gotten to know one-third of the sitting Supreme Court justices. He told friends he had a relationship with Clarence Thomas, according to two people who were close with Arkley. And the Alito trip was not Arkley’s first time covering a Supreme Court justice’s travel to Alaska.

In June 2005, Arkley flew Scalia on his private jet to Kodiak Island, Alaska, two of Arkley’s former pilots told ProPublica. Arkley had paid to rent out a remote fishing lodge that cost $3,200 a week per person, according to the lodge’s owner, Martha Sikes.

Snapshots from the trip, found in the justice’s papers at Harvard Law School, capture Scalia knee-deep in a river as he fights to reel in a fish. Randolph, the appellate judge who was also on the later trip, joined Scalia and Arkley on the vacation, flying on the businessman’s jet.

Scalia did not report the trip on his annual filing, another apparent violation of the law, according to ethics law experts. Scalia’s travels briefly drew scrutiny in 2016 after he died while staying at the hunting ranch of a Texas businessman. Scalia had a pattern of disclosing trips to deliver lectures while not mentioning hunting excursions he took to nearby locales hosted by local attorneys and businessmen, according to a research paper published after his death.

Randolph, now a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, did not disclose the trip. (Nor did he disclose the later trip with Alito.) Randolph told ProPublica that when he was preparing his form for 2005, he called the judiciary’s financial disclosure office to ask about disclosing the trip. He shared his notes from the call with a staffer, which say “don’t have to report trip to Alaska with Rob Arkley & others / private jet / lodge.” Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said, “I don’t understand how the staff member came to that conclusion based on the language in the statute.”

On June 9, Arkley’s group chartered a boat, the Happy Hooker IV, to tour Yakutat Bay. On the way over, Scalia and Arkley discussed whether Senate Republicans, then in a contentious fight over judicial confirmations, should abolish the filibuster to move forward, according to a person traveling with them.

A photo captures Arkley and Scalia later that day gazing off the side of the boat at the famed Hubbard Glacier. At one point, a guide chiseled chunks off an iceberg and passed them to Scalia. The justice then mixed martinis from Grey Goose vodka and glacier ice.

It remains unclear how Scalia ended up in Alaska with Arkley. But the justice’s archives at Harvard Law School offer a tantalizing clue. Immediately before the fishing trip, Scalia gave a speech for the Federalist Society in Napa, California. The next day, Arkley’s plane flew from Napa to Alaska. Scalia’s papers contain a folder labeled “Federalist Society, Napa and Alaska, 2005 June 3-10,” suggesting a possible connection between the conservative organization and the fishing trip.

The contents of that folder are currently sealed, however. They will be opened to the public in 2036.”…it stands to reason if you have a question whether to report the trip or not…of course you should report the trip…but to not report is suspect…and Alito’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is lame…he took the seat on the plane that would otherwise go empty…and he doesn’t remember if the wine was $1000 a bottle…the lodge was rustic…as if that makes the trip not worth disclosing…and just the fact that the common thread is Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society…who orchestrated the last 3 “conservative” justices to the Supreme Court…Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett…who all said that Roe v Wade was settled law and then voted to overturn that ‘settled law’ a year ago…it’s nice to have billionaire friends in high places or rather who take to you nice places with $1000 bottles of wine…

in a great move by Special Counsel Jack Smith, he has turned over those who will testify against trump in the Documents trial…their testimony included…getting ahead of turning over all the evidence…from CNN by Tierney Sneed and Katelyn Polantz: “Trump receives first batch of evidence against him in classified documents case, including audio tapes: Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing that hints that investigators collected for the case multiple recordings of the former president – not just audio of an interview Trump gave at Bedminster for a forthcoming Mark Meadows memoir.

Prosecutors in the filing used the plural “interviews” to describe recordings of Trump – made with his consent – obtained by the special counsel that have now been turned over to his defense team. It is unclear what the additional recordings may be of or how relevant they will be to the Justice Department’s case against the former president, though the recordings include the Bedminster tape where Trump speaks about a secret military document to a writer and others, the prosecutors said in the filing.

The prosecutors’ update to the court on Wednesday night marks another swift move toward trial, which the Justice Department has said should happen quickly, and captures at least some of the extent of the evidence investigators secured to build their historic case against Trump.

The first batch of discovery production – made up of unclassified materials – includes transcripts of witness testimony in front of the grand juries in Washington, DC, and Florida that were probing the mishandling of government documents from Trump’s White House. It also includes materials collected via subpoenas and search warrants; memos detailing other witness interviews given through mid-May in the investigation; and copies of the surveillance footage investigators obtained in the probe.

The first batch of evidence, provided on Wednesday, “includes the grand jury testimony of witnesses who will testify for the government at the trial of this case,” the special counsel’s office wrote.

“Defense counsel can contact the government to arrange for inspection of unclassified items seized at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022,” the filing said.

The new submission indicates that Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta has not yet received discovery, but the Smith team said they will promptly provide it once a lawyer enters an appearance for him in the case. Nauta is scheduled to be arraigned next Tuesday.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges Smith has brought against him, which include charges for willful retention of national defense information as well charges stemming from alleged obstruction of the investigation.”…

the Durham Report…trump for years has said wait for the Durham Report…from CNN by Zachary Cohen and Marshall Cohen: “Trump repeatedly claimed Durham would indict top Democratic politicians and officials from the FBI and DOJ for “treason at the highest level” and for committing the “crime of the century.” The Durham probe fell massively short of right-wing expectations.”…John Durham got away with $6 million of our taxpayers money…and came up with nothing…nada…nix…he was before Congress defending his investigation of the investigators…from CNN continued: “Special counsel John Durham defends his investigation and former Attorney General Bill Barr: Special counsel John Durham defended himself Wednesday amid sharp criticism from Democrats, and also rejected former President Donald Trump’s attacks on former Attorney General Bill Barr, who appointed Durham to conduct his investigation into the FBI’s Russia probe.

Durham is testifying publicly before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the details of his report that concluded that the FBI should have only launched a preliminary, but not full, investigation into connections between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

Despite repeated claims from Trump and Republicans that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the Justice Department, Durham said there wasn’t any political interference with his work. He testified that Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, didn’t block any of his moves, didn’t reach out to discuss the probe, and didn’t meddle with the investigation.

That stands in contrast with what Trump has promised to do if he wins back the White House next year: He said he’ll appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden and his family, directing an investigation against an opponent in a way that shatters longstanding norms, in place since the Watergate era, that have kept the White House away from specific criminal investigations.

Democrats were particularly critical of Durham’s handling of his own investigation, a concern he dismissed.

“My concern about my reputation is with the people who I respect, and my family, and my Lord,” Durham said responding to a House Democrat who accused him of running a biased investigation. “And I’m perfectly comfortable with my reputation with them, sir.”

Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee sharply criticized Durham, saying, “You got nothing,” in regards to the special counsel’s report.

“You had a good reputation,” Cohen said. “But the longer you hold on to Mr. Barr … your reputation will be damaged, as everybody’s reputation who gets involved with Donald Trump is damaged, he’s damaged goods. There’s no good dealing with him because you will end up on the bottom of a pyre.”

The top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee also slammed Durham, accusing the Trump-era prosecutor of weaponizing his “flimsy” probe to harass Trump’s opponents and generate headlines for “far-right conspiracy theorists.”

“Mr. Durham constructed a flimsy story built on shaky inferences and dog whistles to far-right conspiracy theorists,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York, said. “By prolonging his investigation. Durham was able to keep Donald Trump’s talking points in the news, long after Trump left office.”

Durham denied in his opening statement that politics motivated his investigations.

Durham also responded to Trump’s attacks on Barr, whom the former president has called a “gutless pig” and a “RINO.”

“In my experience, none of those are correct,” Durham told members of the House Judiciary Committee when asked about Trump’s incendiary attacks against his former attorney general.

While Durham has embraced many of Trump’s gripes about the Russia investigation, there were several key legal matters where Durham notably broke from the former president.

In addition to rejecting Trump’s insults against Barr, Durham said there was “substantial evidence” that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election. (Trump accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials.) He also said special counsel Robert Mueller was a “patriot” whom he had the “highest regard” for. (Trump has called Mueller a “national disgrace.”)

In May, Durham’s 300-plus page report was released stating that the FBI haphazardly used “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” to launch the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia. Durham said the FBI used a more careful standard when weighing concerns about alleged election interference regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The special counsel, however, did not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior and highlighting numerous errors and mishaps by the FBI team that handled the sensitive Trump-Russia probe.

The Durham probe fell massively short of right-wing expectations: For years, Trump repeatedly claimed Durham would indict top Democratic politicians and officials from the FBI and DOJ for “treason at the highest level” and for committing the “crime of the century.”

Durham scrutinized many of the Trump critics that the former president said should be investigated. In Durham’s report, he detailed how his team looked into roughly 30 distinct potential crimes by these figures, but they didn’t find enough evidence to bring any charges.

After four years, Durham only secured one conviction against a low-level FBI lawyer for doctoring one email related to the surveillance of an ex-Trump campaign aide. Durham’s jury trials against a Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer and Trump-Russia dossier source both ended with embarrassing acquittals last year.”…

I spent the afternoon and evening in Ambler…Rinagai and I went to see Casablanca and The Blued Brothers…two fabulous films in sharp contrast…Casablanca – the most beautiful love story set during World War II…I always must see this film when I can…to see the beautiful Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart at his best…”of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine!”…I always love when we win over the Nazis too…from Wikipedia: “Casablanca is a 1942 American romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz, and starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid. Filmed and set during World War II, it focuses on an American expatriate (Bogart) who must choose between his love for a woman (Bergman) and helping her husband (Henreid), a Czechoslovak resistance leader, escape from the Vichy-controlled city of Casablanca to continue his fight against the Germans. The screenplay is based on Everybody Comes to Rick’s, an unproduced stage play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The supporting cast features Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Dooley Wilson.

Much of the emotional impact of the film, for the audience in 1942, has been attributed to the large proportion of European exiles and refugees who were extras or played minor roles (in addition to leading actors Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre), such as Louis V. Arco, Trude Berliner, Ilka Grünig, Ludwig Stössel, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, and Wolfgang Zilzer. A witness to the filming of the “duel of the anthems” sequence said he saw many of the actors crying and “realized that they were all real refugees”.^[23] Harmetz argues that they “brought to a dozen small roles in Casablanca an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from Central Casting“.^[24] Even though many were Jewish or refugees from the Nazis (or both), they were frequently cast as Nazis in various war films, because of their accents.”…it won Best Picture, Best Director for Michael Curtiz and Best Screenplay for Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch…it has been voted the best screenplay of all time…and is regularly the Number 1 or 2 best film…then in sharp contrast…The Blues Brothers…from Wikipedia: “The Blues Brothers is a 1980 American musical comedy film directed by John Landis.^[4] It stars John Belushi as “Joliet” Jake Blues and Dan Aykroyd as his brother Elwood, characters developed from the recurring musical sketch “The Blues Brothers” on NBC variety series Saturday Night Live. The script is set in and around Chicago, Illinois, where it was filmed, and the screenplay was written by Aykroyd and Landis. It features musical numbers by rhythm and blues (R&B), soul, and blues singers James Brown, Cab Calloway (in his final feature film role), Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Chaka Khan, and John Lee Hooker. It features non-musical supporting performances by Carrie Fisher, Henry Gibson, Charles Napier, Kathleen Freeman and John Candy.

The story is a tale of redemption for paroled convict Jake and his blood brother Elwood, who set out on “a mission from God” to prevent foreclosure of the Roman Catholic orphanage in which they were raised. To do so, they must reunite their R&B band and organize a performance to earn the $5,000 needed to pay the orphanage’s property tax bill. Along the way, they are targeted by a homicidal “mystery woman”, Neo-Nazis, and a country and western band—all while being relentlessly pursued by the police.”…this too had the good guys win over the Nazis…love The Blue Brothers…no corruption here, you must remember this

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by

And when two lovers woo
They still say “I love you”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by

Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate
Woman needs man, and man must have his mate
That no one can deny

It’s still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by

Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate
Woman needs man, and man must have his mate
That no one can deny

It’s still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Herman Hupfeld

As Time Goes By lyrics © BMG Rights Management, CONSALAD CO., Ltd, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Sentric Music, Songtrust Ave, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc

    

just to let you know…$280 BILLION!…was grifted from Covid Relief Funds…and another $123 Billion was wasted or mis-spent…from the Associated Press by Richard Lardner, Jennifer NcDermott and Aaron Kessler: “The Great Grift: How billions in COVID-19 relief aid was stolen or wasted: WASHINGTON (AP) — Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.

Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.

Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.

All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.

An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.

That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.

How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.

There are myriad reasons for the staggering loss. Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.

“Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington. “Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.”…that’s just what the Associated Press has uncovered…more to come…just remember Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene R-Georgia had $183,504 in PPP ( Paycheck Protection Program ) loans forgiven…Congressman Kevin Hern R-OK had over $1 million in PPP loans forgiven…Congressman Mike Kelly R-PA had $987,237 in PPP loans forgiven…Congressman Matt Gaetz R-Florida had $482,321 in PPP loans forgiven…Congressman Markwayne Mullin, Republican Senator from OK had over $1.4 million in PPP loans forgiven…these same repugnant Republicans bitched and screamed about Student Loan Forgiveness..$20,000 for the most part…Republican hypocrites…super hypocrites…

even more Republican hypocrites, bitching about “the sweet deal” he got from trump appointed Federal Prosecutor, David Weiss…regarding Hunter Biden…from The Washington Post by Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein: “Hunter Biden reaches deal to plead guilty in tax, gun case: The president’s son would get about two years probation and enter a diversion program, people familiar with the negotiations said: President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would probably keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday.

Any proposed plea deal would have to be approved by a federal judge. Both the prosecutors and the defense counsel have requested a court hearing at which Hunter Biden, 53, can enter his plea.

The younger Biden’s attorney said the deal means the long-running criminal investigation involving the president’s son “is resolved.” But Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the lead prosecutor in the case, said the investigation “is ongoing,” suggesting that matters beyond the tax and gun issues are still under scrutiny.

The probe was opened in 2018, during the administration of President Donald Trump. Since 2020, Republican politicians have repeatedly accused Hunter Biden of broad wrongdoing in his overseas business deals and predicted that the Biden administration would be reluctant to pursue the case.

The terms of the proposed deal — negotiated with Weiss, a holdover from Trump’s administration — were quickly dismissed Tuesday by congressional Republicans, who vowed to continue investigating the Biden family.”…republican hypocrites anyone?…republicans – the investigation is ongoing, they’re still looking into Joe Biden…trump pissed that Hunter is going to jail…hutzpah!!!…while trump is getting the kid-glove treatment…no bail money, no mug shot, no travel restrictions, no surrendering his passport…they have been investigating Hunter for five years…and this is all they come up with…bupkis!…here’s what Joe and Jill Biden said through their spokesperson – “White House spokesperson Ian Sams declined to comment Tuesday other than to say that the president and first lady “love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life.”

John Eastman, another trump lawyer – everything trump touches dies…finally facing a reckoning…From Politico by Kyle Cheney: “Eastman plan to keep Trump in power faces a reckoning, as authorities seek his disbarment: Disciplinary proceedings began Tuesday against John Eastman, the legal architect of Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.: The fringe legal theory that former President Donald Trump deployed to subvert the 2020 election faced withering scrutiny Tuesday from California legal authorities who want to disbar its key architect: attorney John Eastman.

Eastman’s bar trial, on charges that he committed professional misconduct by fomenting efforts to obstruct the election of President Joe Biden, comes as both he and Trump await word on whether they’ll be criminally charged for the scheme. But on Tuesday, California bar authorities made sure that Eastman’s legal theory itself would face its own thorough reckoning for the first time since Jan. 6, 2021.

In fact, Duncan Carling, trial counsel for the California State Bar, emphasized that Eastman’s plan all along had been to avoid ever having a court pass judgment on the legitimacy of his effort to keep Trump in power. Eastman’s plan “was baseless, completely unsupported by historic precedent or law and contrary to our values as a nation,” Carling said, promising that the two-week trial would expose Eastman’s conduct as “fundamentally dishonest and intended to disrupt the lawful certification of the winner of the 2020 election.”

Special counsel Jack Smith is probing whether Trump, Eastman or other allies broke laws in their bid to subvert the election, and he’s hauled in an astonishing string of high-level Trump aides and allies, including former Vice President Mike Pence, to testify before a grand jury. And a federal judge has already declared that Eastman and Trump likely joined a criminal conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election. But bar proceedings have helped shine a public light on the shadowy orbit of lawyers who sought to aid his effort to cling to power.

Rudy Giuliani’s law license was temporarily suspended in Washington, D.C. after bar proceedings found him culpable for misconduct in his efforts to overturn Pennsylvania’s votes. Jenna Ellis admitted to making numerous false statements about election fraud during her own negotiations with Colorado bar authorities. And similar proceedings are pending against former Justice Department attorney Jeff Clark, who has been fighting to get federal courts to intervene in the process.

But Eastman’s proceedings will focus more on the central element of Trump’s bid to remain in power — the plot to pressure Pence to single-handedly overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021. Pence’s refusal inflamed a violent mob that gathered outside the Capitol and surged past police lines and into the building.

Presiding over the trial is State Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland, who will ultimately determine whether Eastman should face the ultimate professional sanction.

Bar authorities say Eastman’s scheme began after basic legal challenges to the election results failed to influence the outcome — despite Trump’s repeated efforts to sow false claims of election fraud. Eastman spent much of December 2020 urging state legislatures in at least five states won by Biden to appoint “alternate” presidential electors. Those “dueling” slates, Eastman contended, would trigger a chance for Pence to either declare Trump the victor or simply delay the count altogether by citing the controversy. Then, Eastman theorized, GOP-controlled states would have more time to consider whether to declare Trump the winner and invalidate Biden’s victory.

But no legislatures adopted Eastman’s strategy, so the attorney shifted to an even riskier course. Eastman encouraged Pence to consider slates of electors filed by pro-Trump activists in seven states Trump falsely claimed to have won. Eastman said that even without the backing of a state government, those slates could be used to trigger the same controversy for Pence he had already been envisioning.

Pence aides, including his counsel Greg Jacob, resisted this plan sharply, claiming Pence lacked legal authority to carry it out and warning that no courts would ever uphold the plan.\Carling, in fact, noted that Eastman’s plan, by design, was never supposed to end up in court — precisely to avoid an adverse ruling. Rather, Eastman wanted key actors in the scheme to simply assert their power to take his preferred actions — and hope the courts would stay out of it, resorting to their typical hesitance to wade into conflicts between the other branches of government.

According to Eastman, however, his advice — no matter how unorthodox — was “tenable” legal advice, not something that should be punished, even if it turned out to be wrong or misguided. He contends there were legitimate, contested interpretations of the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — which govern the counting of electoral votes — and that a “good-faith” dispute should not result in professional consequences.

“What you’ll hear from Dr. Eastman in that role is that he was not there to steal the election … the focus was on ensuring the election was properly and legally certified and votes were properly counted,” said his attorney, Randall Miller.

Eastman spent Tuesday defending his claims of voter fraud in Georgia, which he made during a public hearing of Republican state legislators, as well as in litigation aimed at overturning the results of the election in court. Bar attorneys pressed Eastman on his basis for estimating that more than 60,000 underage people were improperly registered to vote when the real number was far smaller.

Eastman also said he couldn’t recall the details of a phone call he had with Trump and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel in December 2020, advising the party to help with Trump’s efforts to assemble “contingent” presidential electors.

Notably, Eastman expressed no regret or misgiving about the course of action he pressed among state lawmakers, Pence, Trump and others, despite the chaos it helped unleash.

Eastman also refused to back away from his suggestion last year to Wisconsin state lawmakers that it may be possible to decertify the 2020 election and remove Joe Biden. Pressed on this theory, Eastman agreed it would be “uncharted territory” but that he thought it was a legitimate potential outcome.”…they should all be disbarred or in regard to the fake electors, thrown out of Congress or their respective states…for treason!!!…

one year ago Roe v Wade was overturned…a lot of water under the bridge…ugly water…and do the repugnant Republicans care?…they’re reaping what they have sowed…and we find out how corrupt the Republican appointed Supreme Court Justices are…and how much the Federalist Society has determined this corrupt Court…money talks…and crawls on its belly like a reptile…an ugly reptile…

found out how much my silver coins are worth…I’ve saved them for years…and that Indian head nickels aren’t worth anything but a nickel…same with dollar coins…just face value…

found a quarter and four pennies today in my travels to Walgreens and the Ambler to see Tokyo Stories…a documentary about an exhibition at the Ashmolean Gallery in Oxford…part of Exhibitions On Screen…”Based on a major exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford, Tokyo Stories spans 400 years of incredibly dynamic art – ranging from the delicate woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, to Pop Art posters, contemporary photography, manga ( comics or graphic novels originating from Japan ), film, and brand-new artworks. The exhibition was a smash-hit five-star success and brought a younger and more diverse audience to the museum. The film uses the exhibition as a launchpad to travel to Tokyo itself, and explore the art and artists of the city more fully.” …from Amber Theater: “This beautifully illustrated and richly detailed documentary provides a portrait of Tokyo, Japan – a city which has undergone constant renewal over its 400-year history, resulting in one of the world’s most creative, dynamic, and fascinating cities. TOKYO STORIES explores the art and artists of the city more fully, looking at works ranging from the delicate woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, to Manga, and brand-new artworks that were created on the streets…directed by  David Bickerstaff”…beautiful exhibition…from beginning to end…I especially liked the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige…and the contemporary art and photographs…