Look at that fish!
It’s beautiful. That’s the only thing I care about in this photo — I want someone to buy me a fishing junket to Alaska. My dad managed to make a few salmon fishing trips in his last years, and I think they made him happy.
By the way, the guy on the right is a supreme court judge. He got flown on a private plane to this fishing camp, with a billionaire, Paul Singer, footing the $100,000 bill. It paid for Singer to do that, since he had several cases before the court, and got favorable rulings. That fish is a bribe.
It’s looking like Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society goon, is hooking up each Supreme Court appointee with their very own billionaire sugar daddy. Clarence Thomas got one, Sam Alito got one, I wonder whose patronage each of the other judges got? Somebody had to have paid off Kavanaugh’s loans. I’d like to know who. Let us know who bought each member of the Supreme Court.
Still, that is a magnificent King Salmon. That’s the price of a corrupt judge? OK, maybe some ethics rules would be good.
F ing L..
SCOTUS corrupt as fuck.
Why do Americans put upwith and allow this again?
@1: Because we have the best government that money can buy.
… and Kagan refused to accept bagels from high school friends because of the ethical concerns.
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/kagan-bagels-clarence-thomas-rcna83707
Yet she still signed the ethics statement along with the other justices instead of pushing them to adopt the same guidelines and enforcement of all other federal judges.
Poor fish. Even wasps recognize each other. So fish probably know when they’re about to die. And painfully so.
StevoR @ #1 — We don’t “allow” it. I’m not sure what our options are. How do people where you live prevent these things from happening?
i still wanna know who paid off kennedy to retire when he did, just before the wisconsin gerrymandering bill came up. he spent case after case asking for an algorithmic solution to fair district assignments, and wisconsin finally got to the court…
and just as it did, he quit. the case ended in a 4-4 tie, passing but without the precedent kennedy was so keen in his past decisions to actually writing.
the timing of his resignation just as that case came up for decision really pissed me off.
I’m wondering of that fish will be consumed or mounted on the wall of Alito’s office. I was hoping consumed, as he might choke on a fish bone.
acroyear #6 — I thought the pressure on Kennedy was to get him out so they and Chump could get a younger Federalist Society approved judge in place while the gettin’ was good, which they did. The Wisconsin gerrymandering case may have just been a lucky coincidence.
A couple of years ago my organization created a video slide show clearly illustrating all the corruption of the alleged ‘supreme’ court. It re-named scotus to the more accurate SCROTUM It is now out of date and incomplete due to all the recent corruption by some of the alleged ‘justices’ uncovered I’m updating that video and will republish it in the next few days.
I can understand the billionaires’ point of view: once you’ve bought democracy and got away with it, it only makes sense to buy justice too. All they need now is a private army to defend them against the howling mob of peasants armed with torches and pitchforks rising up against them (assuming said howling mob can get off its lardy arse and haul itself away from the billionaire-owned TV stations telling them everything is just fine).
Looks like someone’s already taken a step in that direction, setting a precedent, maybe buying a favour…
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/us/politics/noem-south-dakota-troops-donation.html
Rich Woods, one cannot buy a democracy and get away with it unless one buys off controlling interest in at least two out of three branches.
By my calculations, SCOTUS justices seem to be the more expensive investment, congresscritters go for cheap and only chumps invest in the POTUS.
BTW proper salmon -like we have at Atlantic-adjacent waters- return year after year, mating and surviving, unlike the weird fish you have.
I grew up near a big river. In the old days, the farmhands had it written in their contract they would only have to eat salmon twice a week.
.
It is a waste to eat a fine specimen of the size shown- it would be better to let it live and have more high-quality offspring.
.
Having read about the American South I assumed it is perfectly normal for judges to have economic interests associated with court cases.
You know, like being a part owner of companies that use labor from chain gangs.
Lovely PZ a fisherman? No, no, say it isn’t so…
nomdeplume, of course he is! How else did he wrangle all of those zebrafish?
@14 Same place he got the crocoducks….
robro@5,
Not having your top judges directly appointed by politicians would be a start.
Alito claims his fishing trip was okay because his seat on the plane would have been empty anyway. It turns out that was a lie. He bumped a 9 year old Make-A-Wish kid who wanted to go fishing before he died to get that seat.
KG @ #16 – Well that should be simple enough. I’m sure the politicians will just willingly give up that role.
Oh, by the way, there’s some question about a real estate deal with Amy Coney Barrett after her appointment.
robro@18,
You asked@5:
You need to consider my #16 in that context. StevoR lives in Australia, where I had assumed that (as in the UK) the top judges are not directly appointed by politicians, but it turns out that I was wrong about that.
I guess changing the system of appointing the Supremes and other top judges in the USA would require a constitutional amendment, but in any case, my hunch is that the current constitutional dispensation in the USA is, one way or another, not long for this world.
Only one small problem. If one replaces politician appointed justices with appointed otherwise, how are they appointed? Popular vote?
That’s working ever so well with the leadership now. Maybe we can get a dozen MTG’s as justices next.
@20:
In the UK we used to do “Judges choose new judges”, which was good for independence but not so good for representation.
We changed that to “an independent panel consisting of both judges and non-judges filters open applications”, which improves the latter.
In theory a particular government minister can mess around with the recommendations (and was more able to do so under the earlier system), but it is a fairly strong norm that they should not do so, one that has unlike many others survived quite well so far, even in the face of the “enemies of the people” ranting from the tabloids during brexit.