Supreme Court justices get candid about their legitimacy crisis

(Permanent Musical accompaniment To the latest article of the week from the blog’s favorite living Canadian)

The brave people of Mississippi Free Press have put together a useful timeline of the massive scandal regarding the embezzlement of TANF funds which The shenanigans of Brett Favre are only a part, but a considerably ugly part. And it’s not just about the volleyball stadium either.

At the end of the year, Brett Favre’s charity for ‘disadvantaged children’, Favre4Hope, donated $60,000 to the Oak Grove Booster Club and $12,500 to the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation, documents show. subsequent charities. The Daily Beast would report years later in September 2022 that Oak Grove’s donation was to support the high school’s volleyball facility. The donation from the USM Athletic Foundation is similar to the $12,000 Favre’s charity donated to the foundation a year earlier in 2014.

Money meant to help the poor and needy through the pandemic is being redirected to a university’s athletic foundation with a $103.5 million endowment? Tremendous. Nor was Favre the only pig at the watering hole, even though he was the most famous.

For the first time, [Mississippi Department of Human Services] transfers large lump sum payment to Nancy New Mississippi Community Education [Center] using TANF funds. The $4.9 million transfer is for Families First For Mississippi projects. This is the first in a series of lump sum payments that MCEC will receive under John Davis’ tenure at MDHS.

New will become the center of the scam, especially on the side of Favre. Meanwhile, among people living in poverty, who were supposed to get the TANF funds in the first place, things are not going as planned.

ThinkProgress announces that the Mississippi Department of Social Services approved applications for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families for only 167 of 11,700 families who applied in 2016. The 1.42% acceptance rate is the lowest in the country for the welfare program, which at the time gave poor families who met strict criteria just $170 a month for a family of three. This is despite the fact that Mississippi is the poorest state in the country.

What can I tell you? They should have learned to play volleyball.

It is a scandal as vast as it is revolting. It is also further proof that federal block grant programs are an unlimited invitation to cheap governors and their local henchmen to loot the national treasury. That must be why so many Republicans love them.

I grew up in and around Massachusetts politics, and I’ve never seen anything like it. OK that works, I saw diagrams who were a bit like that, but very few who were so brazen in their theft, and very few who were so directly for the money supposed to help the poor. Our thieves in office have stolen from the public treasury, both from the rich taxpayers and from the poor taxpayers. Picking the pockets of the desperate and needy should be a gospel thing.

I feel very good about the fact that, outside of the wingnut-osphere, conservative outrage at Lizzo and The Crystal Flute draws such open, ridiculous mockery. Maybe people are realizing that the conservative stance on almost every social and cultural issue is only worth drowning out in the laughter of people who live, you know, in the real world. And I’m a pretty big fan of little Jemmy, and I didn’t know anything about the crystal flute.

Thank you, Lizzo, and the Library of Congress! Long may they both salute.

Choose Weekly WWOZ to click: “Short Dress Gal” (Don Vappie): Yeah, I still love New Orleans.

Weekly visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1956, is an Italian jazz band play underwater. Ignore the narrator’s desiccated British spirit and instead marvel at the technique of unloading the boat by sinking it under the passengers. It was apparently One thing that persisted nowadays. True genius never dies, and the story is so cool.

For my part, I am happy to see Judge Elena Kagan hits back to Judge Sammy “Strip-Search” Alito and his Federalist Society loving monkeys. Whereas Dobbs draws all the attention, the final weeks of last term have been an orgy of conservative political dream shots, and there could very well be a truckload of them to follow. And Alito is damn smug about it. kagan said,

“The worst times [in the court’s history] There have been times when judges have even essentially reflected all of a party’s views or ideology in their legal rulings. What creates reservoirs of public trust is that the court acts as a court and not as an extension of the political process. Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves when they do not act as courts, but instead stray into places that appear to be an extension of the political process or where they impose their own personal preferences. If, over time, the court loses all connection with the public and with public opinion, that is dangerous for democracy.

This, of course, looked up Alito’s nose like an anthrax probe. He retorted:

“It goes without saying that everyone is free to disagree with our decisions and to criticize our reasoning as they see fit. But saying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line.

What line, Sparky, and why you get to draw it? Chief Justice John Roberts also expressed his disapprovalbut he’s as relevant to the Supreme Court these days as Miguel Cabrera, so who really cares what he thinks?

Anyway, welcome aboard, Madam Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. May you eat all their lunches.

Is it a good day for dinosaur newsspace.com? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

The discovery reveals that major impacts during Earth’s prehistory were not isolated events. Instead, these asteroid strikes were accompanied by a series of smaller hits both here and on the moonwhose surface is littered with more than 9,000 craters left by space rock impacts[…]The age of some of the lunar glass beads indicates that they were created around 66 million years ago, around the time the dinosaur killer asteroid, known as the Chicxulub impactor, struck Earth in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The impact led to what is known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which eventually killed off three-quarters of all life on Earth, including non-avian dinosaurs.

Fascinating news, especially in a week in which NASA’s DART finally recovered theirs for dinosaurs against flying space rocks. They lived then, and wherever their souls went later, I bet they are happy now.

I’ll be back Monday to see how things went in Florida and the Carolinas. (Hopefully the answer won’t be “at sea.”) Be well and play well, ya bastids. Stay above the snake, and wear the fucking masks, get the fucking hits, even the fucking boosters, and especially the new booster. And spare a minute for the people of Ukraine, Western Alaska, Puerto Rico and Florida as well.