Bad Crow Review: Don't Know Nothin'
that you don't know in your heart; yesterday's newsletter today
Links are at the end.
Shirley, everybody knows by now that the not-so-supreme not-so-court-like panel declined to protect Trump’s perfect tax returns from a House panel.1 What some readers may not recall is that about 20 months ago, former Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr. acquired eight years of similar records from Trump’s accounting firm.2
What does it mean that no criminal case has yet arisen from the records Vance obtained and his successor presumably still has? Yr. editors have no clue. We’re just sayin’.
Back in the early days of this’ere newsletter yr. editors were persuaded that the newly announced railroad workers contract settlement was not in fact settled and would rear its head again, which it has done on several occasions when rank and file workers in some of the unions rejected it, and now once more.3
Train and engine service members of the transportation division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART-TD) narrowly voted to reject the deal. That unit, which includes conductors, brakemen and other workers, joins three other unions in rejecting a deal brokered via a board appointed by U.S. President Joe Biden.
"There's a lot of anger about paid sick leave among the membership" who kept goods flowing during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Seth Harris, a professor at Northeastern University.
Labor unions have criticized the railroads' sick leave and attendance policies and the lack of paid sick days for short-term illness. There are no paid sick days under the tentative deal. Unions asked for 15 paid sick days and the railroads settled on one personal day.
At bottom the dispute is a matter of railroad companies believing that worker needs should be subordinate to their own because the rails provide a vital national service, while workers think that because without them railroads can’t carry so much as a goddamn feather, they should get a fair deal.
The Intercept on the peculiar tunnel-like nature of Elon Musk’s free-speech vision:4
Shortly after firing Twitter employees who criticized him on social media as well as privately on the company’s Slack, self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk began reversing Twitter suspensions of prominent right-wing accounts that had previously violated Twitter’s policies. These include the accounts of former President Donald Trump, who incited a violent insurrection; Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, who repeatedly spread Covid-19 misinformation; and Project Veritas, which posted private information about a Facebook exec.
Musk has not, however, reversed the suspension of Distributed Denial of Secrets, the nonprofit transparency collective that distributes leaked and hacked documents to journalists and researchers. During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, DDoSecrets published BlueLeaks, a set of documents from over 200 law enforcement agencies that revealed police misconduct, including spying on activists. Revelations from BlueLeaks were widely reported in outlets including The Intercept, The Associated Press, The Guardian, The Daily Dot, The Hill, Business Insider, The Nation, Mashable, The Daily Beast, and Reuters. (I’m an adviser to DDoSecrets.)
In response to apparent pressure from law enforcement, Twitter not only permanently suspended the @DDoSecrets account, citing its policy against distributing hacked material, but also took the extraordinary step of preventing users from posting links to ddosecrets.com. If you try tweeting DDoSecrets links or even sending them to someone in a direct message, Twitter shows the error message: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”
What do they call it when the interests of the national security state and corporations coincide?
Herschel Walker … ah, never mind.
Dahlia Lithwick in Slate points out,5 in reference to the recent NY Times story on Alito leaking the Hobby Lobby decision,6 that the reason some members of the Supreme Court seem unable to identify corruption when they see it is that they themselves are utterly corrupt.
The fact that some of the justices believe that “casual” and “social” relationships with lobbyists, activists, and interested parties who have business before the court are appropriate and acceptable is the problem, because it means they cannot be trusted to avoid such contacts. The problem is that the same justices who keep blaming their colleagues and the press and the American public for broad declining trust in the institution seem to have no comprehension of what kinds of behaviors appear to be inappropriate because they actually are inappropriate. Traffic court judges in towns with four stoplights know better than to drink and vacation and shoot with interested parties before them, much less set aside choice seats for big ticket cases. Evidently it’s different when the interested parties are rich.
What the Wrights and the other donors purchased when they bought access to Supreme Court events and parlayed that access into lavish vacation homes and dinners was not unlawful. But it was, and is, within the power of the justices who benefited from all of these efforts to have avoided them. They did not because they seem to have believed that they were engaged in acts of casual friendship. That is frankly just sad (emph. ours), at a personal level. But it also tells you all you need to know about why this court will keep burning its own legitimacy candle at both ends. They don’t even recognize it as a problem. The unfettered and lucrative sucking up, lobbying, and currying of favor—and the attendant rewards—are all recast as harmless socializing.
Lithwick is clearly not courting any dinner invites.
The Bats, “Heart Attack and Neon,” which will probably not reappear here; The Paranoid Style, “For Executive Meeting;” The Embarrassments, “God Help Us;” Elf Power playing us out with “Artificial Countrysides.”
That, comrades, is all we got: bringing you yesterday’s newsletter today. Be well, take care.
I'm not so sure the Justices thought they were dealing in casual friendships. I'm sure that's what they claimed.
They've been there for quite awhile but they know that the rest of society doesn't look at it that way and, like Donald Trump, they seem to crave approval.