DL Open Thread Friday, March 22, 2024

Polling shows Americans have soured on the Supreme Court, the last institution that held the respect of a majority of the American public. Its approval rating started to slip a few years ago, but the decline accelerated with Dobbs and now stands at 40%. The conservative justices’ partisan leanings and love of graft are so brazen that reporters had little choice but to report on it, and far from lying low, the RWNJs who hijacked the federal court system are still at it. They have adopted new rules on reporting luxury trips: Judges who take a private jet can report it as the value of a first-class airline ticket. Likewise, a journey by private yacht can be treated as a cruise. The difference in value is easily googled.

Also, a case before SCOTUS aims to define bribery even more narrowly than it already is. Because money is speech, you see, and they want to draw a distinction between when it says “please” and when it says “thank you.”

Meanwhile, Democrats have proposed a special tax on the ultra-wealthy. Hardly any of their colleagues have signed onto the bills.

Crooks inn Congress cover boy Bob Menendez says he won’t run for re-election in the Democratic primary, but will run as an independent when he’s exonerated. Hey, by SCOTUS standards he’s clean as a motherfucking whistle.

The antitrust lawyers are suing Apple because the iPhone allegedly monopolizes the smartphone market. Apple shuts out competitors in all sorts of ways, a common thread among the tech companies that dominate the economy.

Minor league basketball is holding its equivalent of the FA cup, a single-elimination tournament with one ultimate champion (one difference: These minor leaguers aren’t paid). They call it March Madness, and it’s focusing attention on the sports gambling boom in the United States, especially as it comes on the heels of baseball’s biggest star, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher/slugger Shohei Ohtani, being linked to his interpreter’s multi-million dollar gambling debt.