FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/28/23.

But I think you know/That I can't let go

It’s the weekend – let’s be re-creative! One of the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entries from this week that I’m unlocking is an open call for your favorite cover versions of songs – especially ones that go the extra mile to get something new out of the originals. I already posted my top pick (The Residents’ eerie “Viva Las Vegas”) but I have to admit the prize could as easily go to the tune up top here, Erasure doing “Take a Chance On Me.” It’s so breezy, so sweet, so gay! But your choices are at least as valid, let’s hear ‘em. 

The other REBID freebie is one of my scenes in the Catholic Conservative Rectory, with Mr. Justice Boof Kavanaugh sharing drinks and colloquy with the Elders of the Comedy Irish. Poor Boof is back in the news because some folks have noticed that back in 2018, as Above The Law bluntly states, “The Senate Fucked Up The Kavanaugh Investigation” by tossing credible testimony about the now-Associate Justice exposing himself at a party at Yale. Of course, most of us knew the Senate was bum’s-rushing the guy onto the Court at the time – what do you think the protests were about?

(Lagniappe: Here’s one of my White House scenes with Kavanaugh from the reign of the former guy. Lotta laughs if your sense of humor tends toward the mordant. You ought to subscribe.)

Speaking the shitshow that is the current SCOTUS, Jamelle Bouie is very good this week on how it’s rotting from the head. Polls show the rest of the country has some idea how bad it is, too. I can imagine Roberts putting a tail on Alito to make sure he doesn’t fuck up the mifepristone case like he probably did Dobbs, but I don’t see the trajectory turning around anytime soon and there’ll be plenty of opportunities (like Moore v. Harper) for them to speed the decline. Pack that shit already. 

UPDATE. No sooner do I mention how fucked up the SCOTUS cons are when...

Justice Samuel Alito: ‘This Made Us Targets of Assassination’
The author of the Dobbs abortion ruling answers attacks on the court’s ‘legitimacy.’ He says he thinks he knows who leaked the draft and is certain about the motive.

Yes, the guy who almost certainly muscled his fellow wingnuts by leaking his own draft decision on Dobbs is granted a high perch in the Wall Street Journal to say it musta been a lib:

He’s certain about the motive: “It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft . . . from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside—as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”

How brave he and his fellow wingnuts were to resist! But as the previously cited poll results show, that's not how Mr. and Mrs. America see it -- they find the Supremes, rather than their critics, untrustworthy. Rather than reason with these commoners -- ha ha I know; like they read the Wall Street Journal! -- Alito rages how unfair it all is:

“We’re being bombarded with this,” Justice Alito says, “and then those who are attacking us say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’ Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re—day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”

Alito cries about how no one defends him and his buddies -- even the bar associations (“if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks”) -- how he has to be "driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force," and how hard he has to work on his decisions, etc. Surely he doesn't sound like an old autocrat who need not answer to any authority and who is hated by the people he purports to serve, eh?