The high court's reputation was already sullied by the right-wing majority's grotesque record of non-sensical rulings and lies told during confirmation hearings. Now its credibility may never recover from what the Thomases have wrought. Without a strict code of conduct, the court is in a sense free to be lawless.
The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, has stated he is watching the hearings, that the Department of Justice will follow the facts and the law and charge the perps (my term, it fits Trump like an size XXXXL orange jumpsuit!) on all levels, including those not present at the actual scene of the seditious insurrection.
The Guardian routinely produces such fine journalism as this, but I remain deeply skeptical of their equally routine "knee jerk critiques" of every single aspect of how the State of Israel has dealt with being a democracy, a flawed democracy like all the rest, but a democracy, in that particular neighborhood.
On this kind of reporting, and the war in Ukraine, etc., they are very useful sources.
What's "her position" other than "freelance right-wing troublemaker"? As far as I can tell, there's nothing unusual about the way she's using her position, and I don't believe her position is going to protect her if it turns out she's broken some laws. How has she been using her husband's position? For sure she gets a lot more press than she would if she were married to, say, a district court judge in the Midwest, but that says more about the press than it does about her or her activities. As far as consequences go, I'm more interested in how her husband has used *his* position, which comes with infinitely more power and prestige than "freelance right-wing troublemaker."
Happy Father’s Day, Lucian. Ginni is no original thinker. She had to be deprogrammed to extract her from the Lifesprings charlatans. Being a True Believer this time around means deprogramming is useless. She and Clarence deserve each other, but we deserve neither one of the lower-tier grifters. Run Ginni run.
We can only hope and pray that DOJ grows a pair and starts actively going after and charging these political celebrities with the crimes the evidence overwhelmingly suggests these Big Lie advocates committed.
Once again the American people are seeing first hand how the law applies to the regular Joes and Jills and those “special” people in politics.
I’m no lawyer but I can read and understand a law statue and the Constitution.
As Mike Doonesbury once said “guilty guilty guilty.”
^^^^ Not behind a paywall, and here's a classic also no longer behind a paywall at the London Review of Books --- all New Yorkers or those with any attachment to the city (my own father grew up in Bound Brook, N.J.) will especially relish this:
How fitting on this Father's Day that the great Woody Guthrie, who lived for a time in housing owned by Trump's vile and odious father, wrote "Old Man Trump"!
I dearly wish I could write songs like Woody, have to remain content to share the same birthday and point interested observers and change agents of legal, progressive change, to articles like Mr. Blumenthal's, etc.
Scathing lyrics, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
Somewhere a US Bureau of Corrections Superintendent considers what kind of hell Ginna Thomas will bring to him. Here is a woman so invested in childish fantasy. One wonders how sterile her life must be to have such a need for absurd fantasy. Judge Thomas must know that many days in the last years of his life will be spent in the visitor's room at a federal prison, listening to more insanity.
And May the Kraken pull her and her traitor friends down with her.
If these shitheads get away with this, our democracy dies.
And, btw, I wrote to Creighton University (a Jesuit school) and the Pope re: their alumnus, Ginni, and there has been NO RESPONSE. Religion apparently has NOTHING to do with character or values.
Is there anyone in the right wing crazy people section that wasn't in on the plot? I mean,there's nearly a thousand people so far, and that's only half of it.
I actually think that if we really want to look hard at this, we can assume half of Congress and the SC were actively rooting for a coup.
Our democracy is teetering, and I don't give it more than half a chance. That's why the DOJ MUST prosecute everyone involved, including people like Ginni Thomas who (even as the wife of a SC justice) is not above the law.
Prosecute every single one of them-to the fullest extent of the law, no matter who it is-Trump or Madison Cawthorn, (who isn't going to be in office much longer anyway) anyone who had a finger near the goodie box, take them down.
That's the only way we'll be able to rescue this exercise in democracy from dissolution.
I'm not too hopeful right now because it seems there's more of them than there are of us. Sad. We used to be better than this.
Not sure their Chamber of Commerce will ever completely accept the brutally honest core of veritas in Sherwood Anderson's best seller!
It's Father's Day, I was allowed --- when I turned sixteen --- to read this, and other books equally candid, on my father's bookshelp, thanks pop!
He also had copies of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. I raced through the first , and read William Shirer's intensely gripping account of the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party with growing alarm (it was August , 1968, so just a month and a half after RFK's assassination --- but as LA County Coroner Thomas Noguchi's paintstaking autopsy showed, not by Sirhan's shots --- and the mayhem in Chicago, officially termed a 'police riot' in a subsequent government investigation, was a week away, along with the Russian tanks in Prague, invading Czechoslovakia)
Cannot recommend another "not behind a paywall" text highly enough: from project gutenberg:
Is Tomorrow Hitler's?, by a reporter who interviewed Hitler and was based in Germany for years, H.R. Knickerbocker:
Start reading that (with intro by John Gunther) and you will see why I think it is still relevant, though published after the author's speaking tour across the USA before Pearl Harbor, arguing that we would have to get into the war, there was no avoiding it,.
The crucial question was when -- now, while the "Thousand Year Reich" was still contending with occupying Europe and the resistance from Great Britain, or possibly after they had won those campaigns? When the Nazis were stronger, or sooner, when we could go from our borderline de facto state of war in the North Atlantic to a declared war and full throttle?
We seem to have been lulled over the decades into a kind of complacency, as if it was "fated' the Allies would defeat the Axis Powers. It's really very strange. Talk about "20-20 hindsight"!
Caveat! This is off the top of my head, before my first cup of coffee;
Remember, there were around seventy (70) witnesses in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly after midnight , very early Wednesday morning June 5, 1968, after Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D. NY) won the California Democratic primary, this becoming a kind of consensus "main threat" to win the presidential nomination and thus probably face Republican Richard M. Nixon in the fall.
Those many witnesses to the murder allowed for verification of LA County Medical Examiner Thomas Noguchi's central forensic conclusion: powder burns on RFK's jacket, and repeated test firings to try to reproduce the 'stippling' effect, indicated the fatal shot was fired from no further than 3 to 5 inches away. Ergo, one must ask where the eyewitnesses placed Sirhan Bishara Sirhan in the pantry. The short answer is: no closer than three entire feet away, at any time, and most had him closer to five feet away. Remember: Sirhan was seized by the pantry chef and "walled off" to some extent, very quickly, by RFK's security guards. Last minute hire, Ace Security Agency guard Thane Eugene Cesar, allegedly with ties to organized crime in his past, was immediately behind Senator Kennedy as the entourage entered the pantry to go for a post-election interview. He's the more likely assassin. Sirhan's trial was a farce - his defense attorneys barely put on a defense at all. Now all this would already be enough to raise credible suspicions that there was a conspiracy - apparently some thirteen (13) shots were fired, Sirhan's .22 held eight (8), LAPD destroyed some 2700 photos {EDIT: it was "only around 2400 photos, but you could practically open an extensive investigation of the LAPD's role in this post-assassination time period based on that egregious destruction of relevant evidence alone, ofc ourse!) of the crime scene a few months after the assassination, that crucial evidence was burned in a hospital incinerator - that's on the public record, although covered up for years afterward. For more look here:
I submit it is a scandal in American journalism rivaling its worst lapses , that this absurdly weak rush to judgment was allowed in both the JFK and RFK assassinations (and yes, in Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, there's plenty about that on this linked site , kennedysandking dot com!) and so little attention paid to, for example, this complete evisceration of the coverup by Lisa Pease. She spent over ten years {EDIT: She spent around twenty (20) years on this careful study of an important political assassination) writing it, studied mountains of primarty and secondary sources, did her "due diligence" witness interviews, interviews with individuals connected to the murder and the investigations and the trial and the appeals, etc.
There are many paths into the labyrinth of the "60s Assassinations," and that website is one of the most careful and credible.
EDIT: I only started in becoming deeply suspicious of "officially established facts" about the political murders of prominent pprogressive leaders, based on published evidence about the "60s Assassinations," because Drake University, located in my hometown, had a set of the 24 Warren Commission volumes, and after work nearby, I would often borrow one or two (to be read only within the library) and started evaluating the texts for myself, with guidance from the books already published by Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher.
But that was also after four years studying the standard Western philosophy texts --- assigned texts ---at Macalester, so I had some useful critical thinking skills to deploy. I also sat nervously through the draft lottery some years earlier, wondering if I would need to head to Canada or elsewhere, but my number was (I think) around 226. What a system!
As John Kerrey summed it up before a congressional hearing, "Who wants to be the last one to die for a mistake?"
Wow. I discarded all "conspiracy theories" back in my Catholic youth. But then pictures would later pop up of JFK and Sinatra... Thanks for the questions.
Happy Belated Father’s Day! Glad your household is back to “normal”.
Ginni T is a hack for the Repubs, the GQP. She just happens to be married to the only black male justice on SCOTUS, who never should’ve been there to begin with. But I digress. I would say Ginni used her influence and her money (or others $$) to write the texts and pay for transportation for these jerk-off Proud Boys and/or Oath Keepers. I will betcha that she and Clarence share checking and savings accounts and he knew what was going on. The problem with Clarence is he doesn't realize he’s not a white supremacist! See, Ginni has made him wear blinders so he just didn't know he was different. Not to upset his “bride” (as he calls her), he plays dumb. Well, he’s not all that dumb. He is, however, involved in the coup and no one can tell me he didn’t know. Ginni can’t keep her mouth shut and I simply cannot wait for her to testify to the 1/6 committee or to the DOJ prosecutors. Let the games begin!
I've said it before so might as well say it again -- all tRump and his cronies and lickspittles did for months after the election was try to overturn that election. They weren't managing the country; they didn't give a damn about ongoing problems in the economy or public health or foreign affairs. All they did was scheme and conspire to install tRump as de facto dictator, for life apparently.
All these people -- starting with Don Benito Trumpolini -- should be at least horsewhipped, tarred and feathered, and run out of the country on a rail. Where's old-timey justice when you need it?
The high court's reputation was already sullied by the right-wing majority's grotesque record of non-sensical rulings and lies told during confirmation hearings. Now its credibility may never recover from what the Thomases have wrought. Without a strict code of conduct, the court is in a sense free to be lawless.
Agreed. The lesson we should learn in all of this is that the Robert's Extreme Court is above the law.
Because it thinks it *is* the law.
From too big to fail we’re now witnessing too big to charge. Oh, how I hope I’m wrong.
The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, has stated he is watching the hearings, that the Department of Justice will follow the facts and the law and charge the perps (my term, it fits Trump like an size XXXXL orange jumpsuit!) on all levels, including those not present at the actual scene of the seditious insurrection.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/19/trump-charges-january-6-hearings-capitol-attack
The Guardian routinely produces such fine journalism as this, but I remain deeply skeptical of their equally routine "knee jerk critiques" of every single aspect of how the State of Israel has dealt with being a democracy, a flawed democracy like all the rest, but a democracy, in that particular neighborhood.
On this kind of reporting, and the war in Ukraine, etc., they are very useful sources.
I think the Garland skeptics and critics will be shocked when it's all said and done.
Bet they won't admit it, though. They'll swear they knew it all along.
Eagerly waiting.
Another Mueller would kill Democracy!
Oh Lord, put Ginni in jail and impeach her husband, Amen.
Neither one will ever happen.
You don’t believe in the efficacy of thoughts and prayers?
HA!
Amen and Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!
There has to be some consequences of using her position, and her husbands in a violent seditious activity.
What's "her position" other than "freelance right-wing troublemaker"? As far as I can tell, there's nothing unusual about the way she's using her position, and I don't believe her position is going to protect her if it turns out she's broken some laws. How has she been using her husband's position? For sure she gets a lot more press than she would if she were married to, say, a district court judge in the Midwest, but that says more about the press than it does about her or her activities. As far as consequences go, I'm more interested in how her husband has used *his* position, which comes with infinitely more power and prestige than "freelance right-wing troublemaker."
Alas, no, there doesn’t!
I fear you are right 😢😢‼️
Happy Father’s Day, Lucian. Ginni is no original thinker. She had to be deprogrammed to extract her from the Lifesprings charlatans. Being a True Believer this time around means deprogramming is useless. She and Clarence deserve each other, but we deserve neither one of the lower-tier grifters. Run Ginni run.
We can only hope and pray that DOJ grows a pair and starts actively going after and charging these political celebrities with the crimes the evidence overwhelmingly suggests these Big Lie advocates committed.
Once again the American people are seeing first hand how the law applies to the regular Joes and Jills and those “special” people in politics.
I’m no lawyer but I can read and understand a law statue and the Constitution.
As Mike Doonesbury once said “guilty guilty guilty.”
Mark Slackmeyer
How do people with such obvious mental deficiencies ever get awarded college degrees, much less law degrees?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginni_Thomas
See DeSantistan, run by a Harvard Law grad, a Trump Lite who could win in this insanity!
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/19/trump-charges-january-6-hearings-capitol-attack
^^^^ Not behind a paywall, and here's a classic also no longer behind a paywall at the London Review of Books --- all New Yorkers or those with any attachment to the city (my own father grew up in Bound Brook, N.J.) will especially relish this:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n04/sidney-blumenthal/a-short-history-of-the-trump-family
How fitting on this Father's Day that the great Woody Guthrie, who lived for a time in housing owned by Trump's vile and odious father, wrote "Old Man Trump"!
I dearly wish I could write songs like Woody, have to remain content to share the same birthday and point interested observers and change agents of legal, progressive change, to articles like Mr. Blumenthal's, etc.
Scathing lyrics, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
Somewhere a US Bureau of Corrections Superintendent considers what kind of hell Ginna Thomas will bring to him. Here is a woman so invested in childish fantasy. One wonders how sterile her life must be to have such a need for absurd fantasy. Judge Thomas must know that many days in the last years of his life will be spent in the visitor's room at a federal prison, listening to more insanity.
LOCK HER UP. LOCK HER UP.
And May the Kraken pull her and her traitor friends down with her.
If these shitheads get away with this, our democracy dies.
And, btw, I wrote to Creighton University (a Jesuit school) and the Pope re: their alumnus, Ginni, and there has been NO RESPONSE. Religion apparently has NOTHING to do with character or values.
Perhaps donations are the key here.
And this seeming contradiction explains why the evangelists can love DJT like the second coming of You-Know-Who..
Is there anyone in the right wing crazy people section that wasn't in on the plot? I mean,there's nearly a thousand people so far, and that's only half of it.
I actually think that if we really want to look hard at this, we can assume half of Congress and the SC were actively rooting for a coup.
Our democracy is teetering, and I don't give it more than half a chance. That's why the DOJ MUST prosecute everyone involved, including people like Ginni Thomas who (even as the wife of a SC justice) is not above the law.
Prosecute every single one of them-to the fullest extent of the law, no matter who it is-Trump or Madison Cawthorn, (who isn't going to be in office much longer anyway) anyone who had a finger near the goodie box, take them down.
That's the only way we'll be able to rescue this exercise in democracy from dissolution.
I'm not too hopeful right now because it seems there's more of them than there are of us. Sad. We used to be better than this.
Cawthorn--haven't heard a thing from that snot-nosed little putz since he lost the primary.
Just saw an article today claiming he will probably be re-elected. ???
Employee of the Month at Chick-Fil-A????
😆
Red State gerrymandering is already in place.
Dangerous times for the Republic.
So, America wants to know, did Ginni succumb to Clarence's overtures with references to Long Dong Silver?
Hmmmm…. Maybe, but they’re against abortion and birth control and they have no kids. Maybe they have an unconsummated “marriage of true minds?”
Possibly, but they sure wouldn't be the first right-wing moralizers to inveigh against certain practices in public while indulging in private.
Imagine they were YOUR parents!!!
For some reason that reference reminds me of the classic book Winesburg, Ohio.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winesburg,_Ohio
Not sure their Chamber of Commerce will ever completely accept the brutally honest core of veritas in Sherwood Anderson's best seller!
It's Father's Day, I was allowed --- when I turned sixteen --- to read this, and other books equally candid, on my father's bookshelp, thanks pop!
He also had copies of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. I raced through the first , and read William Shirer's intensely gripping account of the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party with growing alarm (it was August , 1968, so just a month and a half after RFK's assassination --- but as LA County Coroner Thomas Noguchi's paintstaking autopsy showed, not by Sirhan's shots --- and the mayhem in Chicago, officially termed a 'police riot' in a subsequent government investigation, was a week away, along with the Russian tanks in Prague, invading Czechoslovakia)
Cannot recommend another "not behind a paywall" text highly enough: from project gutenberg:
Is Tomorrow Hitler's?, by a reporter who interviewed Hitler and was based in Germany for years, H.R. Knickerbocker:
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66251
Start reading that (with intro by John Gunther) and you will see why I think it is still relevant, though published after the author's speaking tour across the USA before Pearl Harbor, arguing that we would have to get into the war, there was no avoiding it,.
The crucial question was when -- now, while the "Thousand Year Reich" was still contending with occupying Europe and the resistance from Great Britain, or possibly after they had won those campaigns? When the Nazis were stronger, or sooner, when we could go from our borderline de facto state of war in the North Atlantic to a declared war and full throttle?
We seem to have been lulled over the decades into a kind of complacency, as if it was "fated' the Allies would defeat the Axis Powers. It's really very strange. Talk about "20-20 hindsight"!
Ever notice that not one 1968 review ever begins with the North Korean capture of USS Pueblo?
"after RFK's assassination --- but as LA County Coroner Thomas Noguchi's paintstaking autopsy showed, not by Sirhan's shots" ...tell me more Richard
Caveat! This is off the top of my head, before my first cup of coffee;
Remember, there were around seventy (70) witnesses in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly after midnight , very early Wednesday morning June 5, 1968, after Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D. NY) won the California Democratic primary, this becoming a kind of consensus "main threat" to win the presidential nomination and thus probably face Republican Richard M. Nixon in the fall.
Those many witnesses to the murder allowed for verification of LA County Medical Examiner Thomas Noguchi's central forensic conclusion: powder burns on RFK's jacket, and repeated test firings to try to reproduce the 'stippling' effect, indicated the fatal shot was fired from no further than 3 to 5 inches away. Ergo, one must ask where the eyewitnesses placed Sirhan Bishara Sirhan in the pantry. The short answer is: no closer than three entire feet away, at any time, and most had him closer to five feet away. Remember: Sirhan was seized by the pantry chef and "walled off" to some extent, very quickly, by RFK's security guards. Last minute hire, Ace Security Agency guard Thane Eugene Cesar, allegedly with ties to organized crime in his past, was immediately behind Senator Kennedy as the entourage entered the pantry to go for a post-election interview. He's the more likely assassin. Sirhan's trial was a farce - his defense attorneys barely put on a defense at all. Now all this would already be enough to raise credible suspicions that there was a conspiracy - apparently some thirteen (13) shots were fired, Sirhan's .22 held eight (8), LAPD destroyed some 2700 photos {EDIT: it was "only around 2400 photos, but you could practically open an extensive investigation of the LAPD's role in this post-assassination time period based on that egregious destruction of relevant evidence alone, ofc ourse!) of the crime scene a few months after the assassination, that crucial evidence was burned in a hospital incinerator - that's on the public record, although covered up for years afterward. For more look here:
www.kennedysandking.com/robert-f-kennedy-reviews/lisa-pease-a-lie-too-big-to-fail-the-real-history-of-the-robert-kennedy-assassination
I submit it is a scandal in American journalism rivaling its worst lapses , that this absurdly weak rush to judgment was allowed in both the JFK and RFK assassinations (and yes, in Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, there's plenty about that on this linked site , kennedysandking dot com!) and so little attention paid to, for example, this complete evisceration of the coverup by Lisa Pease. She spent over ten years {EDIT: She spent around twenty (20) years on this careful study of an important political assassination) writing it, studied mountains of primarty and secondary sources, did her "due diligence" witness interviews, interviews with individuals connected to the murder and the investigations and the trial and the appeals, etc.
There are many paths into the labyrinth of the "60s Assassinations," and that website is one of the most careful and credible.
EDIT: I only started in becoming deeply suspicious of "officially established facts" about the political murders of prominent pprogressive leaders, based on published evidence about the "60s Assassinations," because Drake University, located in my hometown, had a set of the 24 Warren Commission volumes, and after work nearby, I would often borrow one or two (to be read only within the library) and started evaluating the texts for myself, with guidance from the books already published by Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher.
But that was also after four years studying the standard Western philosophy texts --- assigned texts ---at Macalester, so I had some useful critical thinking skills to deploy. I also sat nervously through the draft lottery some years earlier, wondering if I would need to head to Canada or elsewhere, but my number was (I think) around 226. What a system!
As John Kerrey summed it up before a congressional hearing, "Who wants to be the last one to die for a mistake?"
Wow. I discarded all "conspiracy theories" back in my Catholic youth. But then pictures would later pop up of JFK and Sinatra... Thanks for the questions.
Happy Belated Father’s Day! Glad your household is back to “normal”.
Ginni T is a hack for the Repubs, the GQP. She just happens to be married to the only black male justice on SCOTUS, who never should’ve been there to begin with. But I digress. I would say Ginni used her influence and her money (or others $$) to write the texts and pay for transportation for these jerk-off Proud Boys and/or Oath Keepers. I will betcha that she and Clarence share checking and savings accounts and he knew what was going on. The problem with Clarence is he doesn't realize he’s not a white supremacist! See, Ginni has made him wear blinders so he just didn't know he was different. Not to upset his “bride” (as he calls her), he plays dumb. Well, he’s not all that dumb. He is, however, involved in the coup and no one can tell me he didn’t know. Ginni can’t keep her mouth shut and I simply cannot wait for her to testify to the 1/6 committee or to the DOJ prosecutors. Let the games begin!
Hope the team that produced Gaslit gets on Frau und Herr Thomas.
glad you have electricity again. missed your voice. And, happy fathers day
Shall we make bets on whether she doesn't/does show up? We can reconvene afterward and take a tally.
I've said it before so might as well say it again -- all tRump and his cronies and lickspittles did for months after the election was try to overturn that election. They weren't managing the country; they didn't give a damn about ongoing problems in the economy or public health or foreign affairs. All they did was scheme and conspire to install tRump as de facto dictator, for life apparently.
All these people -- starting with Don Benito Trumpolini -- should be at least horsewhipped, tarred and feathered, and run out of the country on a rail. Where's old-timey justice when you need it?
Oh, those photos of IL Duce hanging upside down!