I’m feeling punchy this morning so I’m using the featured image I use for my Shecky’s Quick Hitters post. Why am I punchy? The weather. A minor tropical system is moving east to west and is expected to bring New Orleans some heavy rain. Local governments and the media are treating this as a Hurricane rehearsal. That, in turn, has people on edge. Life is edgy enough right now without hearing about sandbags and shit. I’ll stick to punching bags.
Let’s get to the links.
We begin with our former publisher Allison Hantschel known to us as Athenae. I enjoyed being her second banana for 11 years before she peeled out of here. I’m not sure if that analogy worked but I’ll leave it on the ground and see if anyone slips on it.
Athenae has written a typically insightful piece about how the legacy media is treating a lunatic like a normie. The lunatic in question is the Kaiser of Chaos who was crazy in his first term and bat shit crazy in his second. He’s showing the sort of cognitive decline that Jake Tapper would be all over if Joe Biden were still the Oval One.
Allison’s piece is called The Sane-Washing of Mad King Trump.
Our second link is an profile by the NYT’s Jodi Kantor of Amy Coney Barrett. Justice ACB is something of a wild card on SCOTUS. She usually votes with the majority but is capable of surprising votes. She’s not exactly David Souter or Sandra Day O’Connor but we have to take what we can get in 2025. She’s the least bad of the 3 Trump appointees, which isn’t saying much.
I wish Kantor had spent more time pondering Amy Coney of Metairie, Louisiana. It may be a conservative town, but the people are friendly and polite. That seems to be how Justice ACB conducts herself on the bench. Enquiring minds would love to know what she thinks of Sam the Sham Alito who is a jerk from Jersey.
This musical interlude is about the OG Jersey, but it’s Thursday, so here it is:
Our third link is to a wonderful piece at Slate by Gerard N. Magliocca about one of my legal heroes, Justice Robert Jackson. Jackson wrote the definitive opinion about presidential power in 1952. The title of the piece says it all: A Supreme Court Justice Wrote the Greatest “No Kings” Essay in History.
Jackson’s position on autocracy was made clear by his role as the lead prosecutor at the first Nuremberg trial. He would be appalled by the rulings of the current court in favor of the King Of Pain:
Our fourth link comes from one of the finest legal reporters in the land, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. It’s an essay in praise of one of my favorite Senators, Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse. Whitehouse is a fighter not a folder, especially on the issues he’s most passionate about: climate change and dark money’s impact on the courts.
Dahlia drills down on a recent speech by the Senator in a piece titled: This Is the Most Inspiring Thing I’ve Heard About Democracy at the Supreme Court in Ages.
Inspiration is in short supply right now. Keep up the good work Dahlia and Sheldon.
Our fifth link is a swell piece by New York Magazine’s The Canadians Are Furious Trump accomplished what was once considered impossible: Our northern neighbors have united against us.
I’m furious too. Picking a fight with Canada is bad for the economy and makes no sense whatsoever. Then again, it’s Mad King Trump on his pretend throne who’s fighting with the best neighbor any country ever had. The stupidity, it burns.
Not even Gordon Lightfoot could read the Insult Comedian’s mind:
Let’s close on a lighter note. I’m enjoying the current season of HBO’s The Gilded Age. It is not, however, a realistic show. There’s a subplot about Jack, the footman, who has invented a new clock mechanism. He finally sold the idea patent and all in the last episode supposedly for $600k. That struck me as absurd because that would be the equivalent of up to $20 million smackers in 2025 dollars.
I’m not the only one who found that unlikely, so did Vulture’s Alex Zalben in a piece called, Wait, Jack Made How Much for His Clock?
That’s the last link. The last word goes to Johnny Ace: