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James Hamilton, M. D.

Mike McL., 

There has been a lot said and written about the crime committed by whomever leaked the SCOTUS brief, and rightly so. I would like to hear your professional  thoughts as to the legalities/ethics of those who first published the brief. I would assume that person or those persons should have been aware of the sensitive and illegal nature of what was revealed to them. 

Jim

Michael McLeod

Jim: I'll say, for starters, that I am glad, for her sake, that Ruth Bader Ginsberg isn't around to see this.

I'll say, for another thing, that we are living through a time when the rules have been suspended or ignored in politics. The composition of the court itself is due to one party refusing to play by the rules. Now, downstream, someone else has broken with codes of honor and precedent. 

I'm not taking sides. I'm just observing the two events in context.

We will, I am sure, discover in time who revealed the paperwork connected to the preliminary vote. 

Do I think that action was right or wrong? I've been turning it over in my head and I have yet to come up with an answer. 

In the meantime I know you had asked about the woke folk down here (I prefer "awakened" but that's just me) and I thought this fallout might interest you.

Last week, like the petty tyrant he is, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill dissolving Walt Disney World’s special district status, as retribution for the company’s decision to speak out against his bigoted “Don’t Say Gay” law. Set to go into effect next June, the move abolishes Disney’s self-governing jurisdiction, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, and no longer allows it to effectively run its own city in and around the theme park. That means the counties of Orange and Osceola would be required to pay for services like firefighting, which Disney currently covers, and would be on the hook for Reedy Creek’s roughly $1 billion in outstanding bond debt. In other words, DeSantis’s act of revenge would not only punish a private company for condemning his anti-LGBTQ+ law, it would likely punish Florida residents too, whose property taxes would go through the roof. Which is a pretty wild thing for a governor to do, particularly one from a party that talks a big game about “cutting taxes” and “free speech.” But all of this might be moot anyway, because Disney apparently knows Florida’s laws better than DeSantis and has said that actually, he can’t do jack unless he pays off Reedy Creek’s debts first, and until then, it’ll be business as usual in Mouse Town.

In a statement to its bondholders, reported by CNN, the Reedy Creek Improvement District pointed out that the 1967 state law establishing Disney’s special district states that Florida “will not in any way impair the rights or remedies of the holders…until all such bonds together with interest thereon, and all costs and expenses in connection with any act or proceeding by or on behalf of such holders, are fully met and discharged.” In other words, DeSantis’s attempt to dissolve the district is illegal unless he coughs up $1 billion first and because of that, Reedy Creek told bondholders, it’s not going anywhere.

“In light of the State of Florida’s pledge to the District's bondholders, Reedy Creek expects to explore its options while continuing its present operations, including levying and collecting its ad valorem taxes and collecting its utility revenues, paying debt service on its ad valorem tax bonds and utility revenue bonds, complying with its bond covenants and operating and maintaining its properties,” the district wrote in the statement.

Last week, amidst DeSantis’s petty act of retribution, Orange County tax collector Scott Randolph told The Washington Post, “Orange County is going to be stuck with $164 million or more per year in expenses with no revenue. So they’re going to have to raise property taxes. This is a huge tax increase on the citizens of Orange County that they’ll have to pay every single year.” Florida state representative Carlos Smith, also noted that, if dissolved, the hundreds of people who work for Reedy Creek—who are presumably Florida residents—will lose their jobs. Which is apparently fine with the governor, who reportedly has his sights set on the White House in 2024 and thinks operating like a dictator will appeal to the base, or at the very least, keep him in regular rotation on Fox News. “If Disney wants to pick a fight, they chose the wrong guy,” DeSantis wrote in a fundraising email to supporters on Wednesday last week. “I will not allow a woke corporation based in California to run our state.”

But apparently that “woke corporation” won’t be surrendering so easily!

James Hamilton, M. D.

Mike,

 I can understand the conflicts  a reporter could have with the SCOTUS story - protecting a source, freedom of the press, going with the story, etc. But since the info was illegally given out by the source, I wonder if the journalist could be prosecuted along with the source. 

Jim

Michael McLeod

Jim: I doubt it.

John Jackson

There is no law that requires that Supreme Court drafts or deliberations be kept secret - it’s a custom.  If the leaker is someone who had legitimate access to the draft, like one of the many young lawyers who work as clerks for the justices (as opposed to someone who stole it from a locked safe), it’s certainly a fireable offense but there will be no prosecution.           

This is a norm, however, which has been observed over the years.  But, as Mike points out, it’s not the first norm regarding the Supreme Court (and especially how Supreme Court justices are chosen), that has been flouted in recent years.                 

Michael McLeod

Chief Justice Roberts provided no details of how an investigation will proceed or how rigorous it might be, but he has rejected suggestions, made by conservative politicians and pundits, that he seek investigative help outside the judicial branch by enlisting help from the Department of Justice and F.B.I.

“There’s no criminal statute that I know of that makes this illegal — so what’s the point in bringing outsiders in?” said Paul Schiff Berman, a law professor at George Washington University who served as a clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Michael McLeod

               Garrison Keillor's column is nice today. His writing voice is so distinctive and consistent. I can't tell you how hard that is to pull off. Ditto about how he can also broach controversial subject in a casual, offhand way. There are certain writers I read to inspire myself and oil the mental machinery involved just before I sit down to write and he is one of them. I've said this before but Keillor is painfully shy and there is a note of that in this column.

I fancy myself knowing a lot of German and I should have figured it out from context too but I had to look up kulturkampf, which means "culture war" You're welcome. bitte schoen. 

Driving across Indiana 

I come from low-key Minnesotans who like to end a sentence with then or now — “So what are you up to then?” — which is intended to soften the question and avoid an accusatory tone and if you said, “Oh, just waiting to see what turns up,” they might say, “Sounds good then,” so when I heard that the Supremes plan to toss out Justice Harry Blackmun’s decision in Roe v. Wade, I thought, “So what kind of a deal is that then, for crying out loud,” which is my people’s idea of profanity but doesn’t call down fire and brimstone then.

He was a low-key Minnesota Republican who grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood of St. Paul and got scholarshipped to Harvard and returned to Minnesota to be resident counsel at the Mayo Clinic, and the heart of Roe v. Wade is the reluctance to interfere in a woman’s intimate life and dictate the answer to an agonizing question, which reflects a Midwestern temperament. We would interfere with a big kid bullying a little kid, or a child torturing an animal, or some other act of cruelty we witness, but the Mississippi law the Supremes are prepared to uphold is a radical invasion by the state of a woman’s life. That’s what sort of deal it is.

The Supremes at the heart of the majority are only fulfilling the purpose for which they were nominated by Mr. Trump, so the shock and alarm registered in the press is a little surprising. This is a dog bite that could’ve been foreseen long ago. And perhaps the court is prepared to do battle along other fronts in the culture wars that the rest of us are a little weary of. Maybe there’ll be dicta on gender, sexuality, the right of parents to censor schools, the right of politicians to not be contradicted, the right of Supreme Court nominees to misrepresent their views to the U.S. Senate.

Hundreds of acres of printed pages will be written about all of this but driving today across Indiana to the elegant town of Wabash, I feel that the country isn’t changed much by the Kulturkampf. This is a handsome town of ten thousand on the Wabash River and the visitor sees immediately that historic preservation is a spiritual value here. There’s an 1880 Presbyterian church, a 1920 J.C. Penney’s, an 1865 Disciples of Christ, a magnificent 1878 county courthouse with a bell tower that dominates. Perhaps some county commissioners have imagined replacing it with a Costco-style courthouse but they haven’t succeeded. There are two historic districts, one residential, one downtown, where students of architecture can walk by examples of classical architecture, where you could shoot a movie set in 1940. I’m staying in a 1906 hotel across from the Eagles Theatre of the same era. Clearly, generations of Wabashites have loved this town. My hometown destroyed all its most beautiful buildings and became dismal and decrepit. Wabash is pretty fabulous.

Maybe a huge mall will be built outside town but it’s hard to imagine Wabash giving up magnificence for modular. I walk around this town and sense my own conservatism. This is a town where people keep their houses nice and go next door to visit. These are my people. Tonight when I perform at the Eagles Theatre, I’ll ask the audience to sing “America” and they’ll know the words and sing it in harmony, and also “It Is Well With My Soul” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” I could live here happily.

My grandpa Denham left Glasgow in 1905 with his wife, Marian, and kiddies and moved to south Minneapolis and never looked back. His stepmother disapproved of him because Marian was pregnant when Grandpa married her. Mormons fled Illinois for Utah to escape persecution. Trans people may leave Kansas for New York or San Francisco to find people more like themselves. I live in New York because I love anonymity. If I lived here in Wabash, among my own people whom I love, I’d feel people staring at me, thinking, “Divorced. Twice. Left the Brethren. Used to drink a lot. And he wrote that stupid column about Roe v. Wade.” I walk around in New York, unself-conscious, enjoying odd accents, Asian faces, Orthodox schoolboys, confused tourists. Plenty of people will leave Mississippi and Texas to be free of the authoritarianism. The Alito court can have Mississippi and Texas and it can ban same-sex marriage and require teachers to teach from pre-1950 textbooks, but New York will still be New York, I’ll enjoy my anonymity, and when, as happened recently, a woman cashier says, “How are you, my dear?” it will touch my heart.

John Jackson

Tom Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, and a contributor to The Atlantic, specializing on issues involving Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security.  Here is his take (underlining is mine) on the impending overturn of Roe v. Wade, a 49-year precedent in American law - a 7-2 Supreme Court ruling with five of the seven yes votes provided by Republican-appointed Justices:

In general, I hate ever commenting on abortion…no one’s mind is ever changed, and the strongest arguments on both sides are morally agonizing. I believe abortion should stay legal, and the reality, no matter what I or Samuel Alito thinks or wants, is that abortion is not going to end in America or anywhere else.

It will just become costlier and more dangerous.

This is to me the salient point because I learned, after my mother passed away more than 20 years ago, that she nearly died from an illegal abortion in the late 1950s.

I have not written in detail about this before now, and I am not sure I ever will.   I will say this much: The impact of my mother’s abortion, both psychological and physical, stayed with her for the rest of her life, and I cannot imagine returning to the nightmare in which abortions still take place but more women die.

All I know is that I wouldn’t have wanted anyone but my mother making those decisions for her.  She suffered enough in a life that was full of hardship from her earliest childhood without having to explain herself to legislators who couldn’t have cared less whether she lived or died.

What happened to my mother makes me recoil from the tribal sloganeering and screaming and moralizing and finger-pointing that passes for “debate” in America, and I dread the social warfare that Alito and others are so eager to inflict on our country. The American right has long relied on abortion to rile up voters, and I inherently distrust its motives. 

Michael McLeod

You asked about leaks, Jim.

Here's the one to worry about.

From Thomas Friedman's column:

If you just followed news reports on Ukraine, you might think that the war has settled into a long, grinding and somewhat boring slog. You would be wrong.

Things are actually getting more dangerous by the day.

For starters, the longer this war goes on, the more opportunity for catastrophic miscalculations — and the raw material for that is piling up fast and furious. Take the two high-profile leaks from American officials this past week about U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war:

First, The Times disclosed that “the United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.” Second, The Times, following a report by NBC News and citing U.S. officials, reported that America has “provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike” the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. This targeting assistance “contributed to the eventual sinking” of the Moskva by two Ukrainian cruise missiles.

As a journalist, I love a good leak story, and the reporters who broke those stories did powerful digging. At the same time, from everything I have been able to glean from senior U.S. officials, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, the leaks were not part of any thought-out strategy, and President Biden was livid about them. I’m told that he called the director of national intelligence, the director of the C.I.A. and the secretary of defense to make clear in the strongest and most colorful language that this kind of loose talk is reckless and has got to stop immediately — before we end up in an unintended war with Russia.

The staggering takeaway from these leaks is that they suggest we are no longer in an indirect war with Russia but rather edging toward a direct war — and no one has prepared the American people or Congress for that.

.

Mark Schweickart

It's not that I don't appreciate the adult conversation here on the forum, but as you know, I have a propensity to post things to lighten the mood. So here's my contribution for today:

And if anyone doesn't get the joke here, see below for the Monty Python bit this is trying to parody.

John Maxwell

Michael McLeod

Funny. But this remains my fave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx_G2a2hL6U

Michael McLeod

Jim: When it comes to leaks, this one worried me far more that the other one we were talking about from the first moment I saw it. 

Apparently this columnist agrees with me:

"Things are actually getting more dangerous by the day.

For starters, the longer this war goes on, the more opportunity for catastrophic miscalculations — and the raw material for that is piling up fast and furious. Take the two high-profile leaks from American officials this past week about U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war:

First, The Times disclosed that “the United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.” Second, The Times, following a report by NBC News and citing U.S. officials, reported that America has “provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike” the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. This targeting assistance “contributed to the eventual sinking” of the Moskva by two Ukrainian cruise missiles.

As a journalist, I love a good leak story, and the reporters who broke those stories did powerful digging. At the same time, from everything I have been able to glean from senior U.S. officials, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, the leaks were not part of any thought-out strategy, and President Biden was livid about them. I’m told that he called the director of national intelligence, the director of the C.I.A. and the secretary of defense to make clear in the strongest and most colorful language that this kind of loose talk is reckless and has got to stop immediately — before we end up in an unintended war with Russia.

The staggering takeaway from these leaks is that they suggest we are no longer in an indirect war with Russia but rather edging toward a direct war — and no one has prepared the American people or Congress for that."

A

James Hamilton, M. D.

Mike, 

It probably is a sign of age but you are beginning to repeat yourself. Reference your posts #s 11086 and 11090!🙄

Jim

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

David Mitchell

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms.

Lots of interesting stuff lately.

From Abortion to Ukraine and the Militay Leaks to Derby Winner 80 to 1 "Rich Strike". OMG! He came from 16th place on the final turn!  

.. been wondering about those militay leaks myself lately - why on earth would we be disclosing any of our military information in public?  Yikes? Didn't they get that memo in Security 101?

But it's Mothers Day and it's been a challenging week, so I'd rather enjoy a bit of rest. 

Years ago, my kids were able to determine that my mental condition was quite out of balance as they observed me watching the likes of Second City TV (from Canada in the wee hours of Friday night/ Saturday morning), and this wonderfully wacky British show called Monty Python. (thanks to Mark and Mike for bringing them into the conversation).

But there was something from Brtish TV that pre-dated "Monty". I could only get it for about one or two seasons, but this one sketch still fills a memorable portion of my tiny and distorted brain cavity. A pair of guys who went by the name  "The Two Ronnies" came close to being the cleverest pair of comedians I have ever seen. 

Michael McLeod

Jim:

Good diagnosis.

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

In response to some of the comments made in post #11085..  
https://twitter.com/kathy4truth/status/1521468253268320256?s=21&t=UsgA2SaSFYBYEJDS510cnQ

Michael McLeod

If you'll pardon a humorous exchange on a deeply personal issue:

David Mitchell

More and more lately, I am comming to terms with the fact that I am aging.  I am certain that my mental capacities are diminishing.

So, here's one that really has me baffled. Can someone please explain to me how Pope Francis can blame NATO for Russia's invasion of Ukraine?

I could have sworn those were Russian tanks we saw massed on the border for months, and later they were Russian tanks we saw entering into, and attacking Ukrainian civilians.

I guess as we get older we get more and more confused.  

Michael McLeod

Even if you do not have a description you can read the washington post's pulitzer prize winning investigation of the Jan 6 riot.. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2022/05/09/pulitzer-prize-public-service/

James Hamilton, M. D.

Mike,

 Read it. I wonder if they (and the NYT) are going to return the Pulitzer they got in 2018 for the Russian Collusion stories.

Jim

Michael McLeod

I'll have them alert you Jim. Don't stay up late waiting.

In the meantime just think how much better things would be going for Putin if Trump had landed a second term.

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

I am thinking how much better things would be going for the Afghanistan women and children had Biden not been in the White House. 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/as-crisis-grips-afghanistan-the-taliban-tightens-their-draconian-rule  

James Hamilton, M. D.

Mike, 

You are correct! Putin would not have dared to invade Ukraine and still have had the Moskva!

Jim