The Supreme Court: Clarence & Ginni Thomas Jet Set Edition

[d10]

@McTrollson

It’s funny how the flag of Lebanon has an overtly Christian symbol even though the country is a mishmash of all kinds of religions.

So like the US flag in a few years?

[Danspartan]

@d10

So like the US flag next year?

Fyp

[goofy]

lmao (gift link):

The Alitos, the Neighborhood Clash and the Upside-Down Flag

Justice Alito, who did not respond to questions for this article, has in recent weeks given his own explanation of what happened.

There are some differences: For instance, the justice told Fox News that his wife hoisted the flag in response to Ms. Baden’s vulgar insult. A text message and the police call — corroborated by Fairfax County authorities — indicate, however, that the name-calling took place on Feb. 15, weeks after the inverted flag was taken down.

And beyond that, Alito’s wife is, shocker, a fucking psycho

The inauguration of President Biden, held three days later, was attended by six Supreme Court justices. Justice Alito and two others skipped it out of concerns about Covid, a court spokeswoman said at the time. That day, Ms. Baden and her then-boyfriend decided to drive past the Alito home. “There was a part of me that’s like, let’s see what’s going on,” Ms. Baden said.

Mrs. Alito happened to be standing outside. According to interviews with Ms. Baden and her husband, as well as messages they sent to friends at the time, Mrs. Alito ran toward their car and yelled something they did not understand. The couple continued driving, they said, and as they passed the Alito home again to exit the cul-de-sac, Mrs. Alito appeared to spit toward the vehicle.

The couple, still shaken by the Capitol riot, said the encounter left them feeling uneasy and outmatched by the wife of someone so powerful.

The same day, a Washington Post reporter who had heard about the inverted flag arrived to ask about it. Mrs. Alito looked upset, yelled that the flag was a “signal of distress,” then shouted about a dispute with neighbors, according to an article published on Saturday.
…
The conflict then seemed to quiet down. But on Feb. 15, the couple were pulling in trash bins when the Alitos, who seemed to be on a stroll, appeared. Mrs. Alito addressed the pair by name, used an expletive and called them “fascists,” the couple told The Times and said in texts at the time. Justice Alito remained silent, they added. The Alitos began to walk away.

That was when Emily Baden snapped, she said. She does not remember her precise words, but recalls something like this: How dare you behave this way. You’ve been harassing us, over signs. You represent the highest court in the land. Shame on you.

Ms. Baden said that she — not her partner, as Justice Alito recalled — used the lewd expression. “I will fully cop to that,” she said. A neighbor standing in the street, who asked not to be identified because of the friction on the block, said he heard her say the word too.

[Danspartan]

What two pieces of shit. Gotta be some fun swapping going on with the Thomases.

[Spinetta]

Alito Refuses Calls for Recusal Over Display of Provocative Flags

[goofy]

bsky link

[hammypotter]

Soromayor obviously staying in it for the love of the game, siding with the NRA on a first amendment (lol) claim against a New York State government official.

[McTrollson]

lol he really is just blaming his wife, what a stand-up kinda guy.

southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social)

[goofy]

As others have pointed out, Alito is trolling by making such a big deal about his respect for a woman’s equal right to choose…what flags to raise

(also unless he’s alleging a separate instance where that woman’s husband also yelled “c—” at his wife, seems like he’s reiterating the same lies about the timelines & causation that led to the upside down flag)

[pvn]

Alito going with the “I am a huge cuck” defense

[goofy]

Not as big of a cuck as Dick Durbin:

Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social)

Ah, well, he tried!

[Surf]

“NO ADDITIONAL STEPS I COULD HAVE TAKEN”

That is just incredible, I literally can’t stop chuckling every time I read that line

[goofy]

Trump Judges Went On A Luxury Trip — And It Doomed A Major Biden Policy

What was eye-catching was her explanation of why. In her ruling, Mizelle wrote she had consulted the Corpus of Historical American English, an academic search engine that returns examples of how words and phrases are used in select historical texts. Mizelle searched “sanitation,” a crucial word in the 1944 statute that authorizes the CDC to issue disease-prevention rules, and found it generally was used to describe the act of making something clean. “Wearing a mask,” she wrote, “cleans nothing.”

Searching large linguistic databases is a relatively new approach to judicial analysis called legal corpus linguistics. Although it has gained in popularity over the last decade, it is barely discussed outside of an enthusiastic group of right-wing conservative legal scholars. Which raises the question: How did this niche concept wind up driving such a consequential decision in the country’s health policy?

Now, new disclosures seen by HuffPost shed some light. Just weeks before she issued the ruling, Mizelle had discreetly attended an all-expenses-paid luxury trip from a conservative group whose primary mission is to persuade more federal judges to adopt the use of corpus linguistics. For five days, Mizelle and more than a dozen other federal judges listened to the leading proponents of corpus linguistics in the comfort of The Greenbrier, an ostentatious resort spread out over 11,000 acres of West Virginia hillside.

Trump appointed Mizelle to the federal bench in late 2020 over objections from the American Bar Association that she had not been practicing law long enough to be qualified. A search of her other rulings found she had never previously applied corpus linguistics.

[SensiblePerson]

Lovely, “semanticsing” in its worst form now loose in the federal judiciary.

[Danspartan]

A mask is a filter. Filters are used to…

Clean things

[McTrollson]

Has a single Dem politico called for Thomas/Alito to resign?

[pvn]

they’ve frowned a lot and even written a letter!

[feedthabeast]

Hold up - you have to give them some credit. They even tried writing a letter to their boss!

[SensiblePerson]

Nice one from the local political cartoonist:

Alito is unflagging in his refusal to recuse

[goofy]

A Northern District of Texas judge (not Kacsmaryk, but same district!) did something that made even the Fifth Circuit be like “dude, no”:

Fifth Circuit blocks religious-liberty training order in Southwest Airlines case

Three-judge panel (one GWB appointee, two Trump) decided 3-0 “lol what the fuck is this shit”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit blocked a district court judge’s order that lawyers for Southwest Airlines attend “religious-liberty training” from Alliance Defending Freedom as part of a contempt order, holding that the judge’s sought sanction is likely unconstitutional.

If forced to attend the training, a three-judge panel that included all Republican appointees held on Friday, “The Southwest attorneys … would likely suffer a violation of their constitutional rights.”

U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr, a Trump appointee, had mandated the training last summer in an order issuing sanctions against the airline for its response to a loss at trial in a religious discrimination case brought by a flight attendant, Charlene Carter, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the order, Starr specified that the airline’s lawyers were to attend eight hours of “religious-liberty training” to come from the far-right Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom.