We respond…
I think that’s the right way to read this.
And also, now that he’ll have some other income starting — he doesn’t so much need whatever Powerline was paying him, likely per word, as a stipend.
As I say… what a kettle of fish.
Onward, grinning — but I am sure Paul Mirengoff (now the founding resident complainer), over at Ringside, is thrilled not to have to deal with Hayward’s over-sized ego — compared to whatever contribution he was making.
Yep. Out.
This is Bloomberg Law’s report, after listening in, as well.
And I agree — this one doesn’t sort itself readily — into the now tiredly-standard liberal/conservative buckets. I think the Chief Justice will lead (in favor of preserving due process of law) here — and only Alito / Thomas / Gorsuch might side with the Sacklers. But it is even possible that Gorsuch leaves Alito and Thomas as a minority dissent at 7-2. A victory for equal, and ordered, liberty under law. We shall see — here’s the bit ($$$ subs. req.):
…The US Supreme Court signaled a likely divide over Purdue Pharma LP’s $6 billion opioid settlement, as the justices weighed Biden administration contentions that the accord improperly shields the Sackler family members who own the company.
In a Monday argument that cut across the court’s normal ideological divides, some justices questioned whether the Sacklers should get the benefit of a legal shield when they haven’t filed for bankruptcy themselves….
Yes. I definitely see KBJ / Sotomayor / Kagan / The Chief as solid votes against the Sacklers’ nonsense — with even Kavanaugh and Gorsuch offering highly skeptical questions, and on due process grounds to boot, of the Purdue counsel. [Only Justice Barrett seemed relatively unbothered by the Sacklers’ gambit, so she’s a wild card. And we know Thomas / Alito are bought and paid for, on this issue.]
So… you never know — until the opinion bell rings. We shall, as ever… see, but (for now) I’ll say… “Vaya Con Dios“, Jamie Sprayregen. Onward.
नमस्ते
As I said before — AG Paxton is not much of a lawyer.
That’s been well known — for… well, decades.
But just now on Monday morning, he asked, of a busy Fifth Circuit, after a complete loss — and now just starting on his appeal — that “a ruling is requested by: 12/04/2023. Date of service: 12/04/2023….”
All… after 100% losing on the same motion, just mid-last week, at the USDC level — on clear black letter federal law (well settled for seventy years, no less!) — law he does not dispute… applies to these facts. Dang. Good luck with that one, son.
And so, the able Clerk of the Fifth Circuit just advised the apparent neophyte State Texas AG Paxton, in a corrective letter, as follows:
…Any party filing a matter outside normal business hours (M-F, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.) that may require the court’s immediate attention should call the emergency duty deputy and inform them of the filing, even if the matter does not qualify as an emergency under 5th Cir. R. 27.3. The emergency duty deputy can be reached at 504-XXX-XXXX [Redacted here]….
Hilarious.
UPDATED @ 2 PM EST — TX AG Paxton only has until this Friday at 5 PM, under a temporary administrative stay, to get a brief on file — and the CBP will oppose by then as well. Now you know, but that stay is very likely to be dissolved, by next Monday.
नमस्ते
Here is the link. And… here is the CSPAN link — if the Supremes’ own link is too clogged.
Once we are rolling, I may drop some comments, below:
…Waiting on the “Oyez”
➢ We are underway. Counsel for US Bankruptcy Trustee Harrington now setting the table….
➢ Chief Justice Roberts is now questioning him….
➢ Justice Gorsuch is now questioning regarding “major questions” doctrine. . . “Congress doesn’t hide elephants in mouseholes”, says counsel for Harrington.
➢ And Congress was clear: this is not authorized by the bankruptcy statutes — so as a “major question”, Congress already answered it. The answer is “No” — to the Sacklers’ gambit.
➢ Justice Sotomayor is now asking about how an “opt-in” process would work. But the US Trustee is pointing out that the Sacklers must contribute ALL their assets, not just 15%, if they want to be released in bankruptcy. That’s clear federal law.
➢ Justice Brown-Jackson is helping the US Trustee… by saying this “isn’t it true — that this is more than just trying to “torture” the word “appropriate”… into it is “appropriate” for the alleged wrong-doers to keep ~$15 billion — when they won’t enter bankruptcy themselves….”
➢ In the end, the way this would horribly impact injured Canadians (by depriving them of rights under local Canadian law, in Canada — in injury lawsuits against the Sacklers, directly) might be what may control the Supremes’ thinking….
➢ The US laws cannot extinuish claims against the Sacklers’ that arise in Canada, by Sacklers’ billions in sales, of Oxy- in Canada — where the Sacklers DO NOT SURRENDER ALL THEIR ASSETS to the US Bankruptcy courts (for delivery to the injury plaintiffs, globally)….
➢ There is a “constitutional due process problem” where people who are not even being allowed to ask to opt out, are bound — by someone (i.e., Sacklers) that reaps the benefit of the laws that they haven’t submitted to, themselves, says Justice Sotomayor. She is correct.
More soon. Smiling….
नमस्ते
Billings-puss writes tonight about an act of terror committed in 2015. It was deplorable, true.
But he faults BHO 44 and the FBI — for not stopping it — in advance.
During Tangerine’s four years, over 643 people were killed or injured, in mass shootings. Most by whyte males, and many for racial or religious reasons. Not a peep from Billings-puss — about DJT 45 or FBI failures.
Most notably, he said nothing of the Las Vegas mass shooting: a whyte guy with multiple AR-15s and thousands of rounds… murdered 59 innocents — and injured over 520 people. Insane!
He was… silent.
But only now — December 2023 — he looks back eight years, and to one incident?!
He didn’t complain about Dylan Roof (at Mother Emmanuel — inside a church!), or that Smith a-hole who plowed his car into a crowd in 2018 in Charlottesville.
One might suspect it’s more about demonizing brown and Black people, for Billinspuss, based on the actual evidence, and his conspicuous… silence for four long years… about whyte domestic terrorist acts.
Yep. Out.
Some times (actually, most times) John Hinderaker shades the data he cherry picks. But sometimes, he (and Breitbart) just outright… lie. This is one of those latter times.
The set up — Hinderaker quotes a deeply conservative think tank, the one that commissioned (i.e., paid for) a Gallup survey, designed by the think tank, itself. The questions clearly lead respondents to favor “conservative values” — in describing the mental health of their children.
But that’s not enough — for these jokers. They then… ignore the central learning of the actual data as collected. They ignore the one factor that MOST closely predicted whether children would, in adolescence, show signs of being unhappy — what they called “mental health problems”.
That single most important factor?
I’ve shown you the actual data, at upper right — in the graphic. It is whether the parents have a good internal relationship. Not, not, not whether they are “conservative” (as opposed to liberal). Note that the data on liberal v. conservative — almost completely falls inside the “fuzziness” range of each category… barely getting out of the realm of being statistically… meaningless. But the quality of the parents’ relationship is the single most important predictor (as the bottom graphic shows — and the two charts don’t appear until page 14 of the 16 page report — but they are right above and below each other). Which is to say that if you choose to report it the way Breitbart and John did — you’ve affirmatively chosen to lie about an already deceptively skewed study.
Here’s how any real data scientist would restate the observations these chuckleheads made:
…”As it happens, being raised by parents who self-report a low quality relationship with their partner is a much larger risk factor for mental health problems in adolescence than being raised in a low-income household with parents who did not attend college — and much larger than the small differences seen, due to the overall ideology of the household,” observed all competent adults — able to read studies with confidence levels….
Cheers, to you two chuckleheads!
Out — with Sacklers’ grilling due tomorrow at the Supremes, in the morning….
Ken Paxton, the AG (for now) in Texas, is not much of a lawyer.
But I will preserve here his seven page argument (for a complete history, of this lunacy) that for all the reasons on the clear black letter law (as opposed to the judge’s unsavory obiter dicta political speechifying) that USDC Judge Alia Moses DENIED him (and his keeper, TX GOP Gov. Abbott) an injunction last week — she ought to give him one… this week.
Yikes.
Who are these clowns?
Oh. Right.
These are the guys endorsing Tangerine for 2024.
Out.
नमस्ते
While trying to make up for his insipid post of last week, decrying a kids’ board book in a department store in Paris, at Christmas… today John offers some photos to show he actually did go inside the Louvre… for about 30 minutes.
He apparently did not see my favorite, the Musée d’Orsay (even though he had extra days there). He took in no street performances. He claims the 16th Arr. is the only place in Paris worth haunting — as it is home to almost all the far right factions, in Paris (western-most, on the map — and not surprisingly, suffering an about 30 per cent decrease in population over the last 50 years). What a provincial lil’ Dakota-bred gnome he is. Me? I prefer staying in the Fifth (when upscaling), or the Twelfth (when just bouncing in and out). [The Fifth is home to the Sorbonne University campus.]
All trivial, I know — but it does explain quite a bit about his inability to accept the jostling that all the rest of us… recognize as part of living in “the real world.”
My hunch is… he won’t see the Beyoncé “Renaissance” documentary either. But I did — with my adult daughter last night — it is… highly recommended!
Out.
Of course, the family is not personally appearing — but the bankruptcy lawyers for what was Purdue Pharma know what the real stakes are: over $6 billion being kept safe, and sheltered from any consequences of the family’s decision to push highly addictive opioids, branded as OxyContin® — not unlike street criminals — on the nation. And now hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, as a direct result.
Updated — listen to ScotusBlog’s ever capable Amy Howe on this whole debacle: “Purdue Pharma’s blockbuster opioid OxyContin first came on the market in 1996. The company conducted an aggressive marketing campaign for the drug, selling it as a relief option for a broad array of pain, from cancer to long-lasting sports injuries, and generating some $35 billion in revenue. The company suggested that because the drug was made with an outer coating to slowly release its active ingredient, it was less susceptible to abuse. But OxyContin proved to be highly addictive, leading to a serious public health crisis. Between 1999 and 2019, nearly a quarter-million people died from overdosing on prescription opioids like OxyContin, outstripping car accidents and gunshots as the leading cause of accidental death in the United States….
Purdue Pharma has twice pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges relating to its marketing of OxyContin. Along with members of the Sackler family, some of whom were actively involved in the development and marketing of the company’s drugs, it was also a defendant in thousands of lawsuits, seeking more than $40 trillion, accusing them of having deceptively marketed the drug….”
That is, Monday of this week, the Supremes will hear argument on whether victims’ families getting a little something shortly is better than making billionaires pay in full — perhaps more than a decade from now. But make no mistake: that is what the statute as written requires: pay in full — for frauds.
So it is my view that the Jamie Sprayregen long ago engineered ingenious gaming of the federal bankruptcy residual powers, in several cases, evolving and expanding over time (in judge made “law”) — that led to the free passes for billionaires who don’t even file a chapter personally… must end.
If keeping $6 billion is allowed as an outcome for depravity on this scale… we have failed, in our claim to be a society of ordered liberty, under the law — with equality before the law. [The people with the gold cannot be allowed to just make up the rules.] Here is the latest reply brief from the US Trustee opposing the giveaway to the billionaires:
…This case concerns the reorganization in bankruptcy of respondent Purdue Pharma L.P. and its affiliates, stemming from their role in fueling the opioid epidemic that has ravaged families and communities throughout the Nation. In approving Purdue’s reorganization plan, the court of appeals relied on residual provisions of the Bankruptcy Code, 11 U.S.C. 101 et seq., to validate a sweeping nonconsensual release of nondebtors’ claims against other nondebtors — the Sacklers and a host of associated individuals and entities. That release extends to claims based on fraud and other willful misconduct that could not have been discharged even if the Sacklers themselves had submitted to bankruptcy and thereby surrendered their assets for distribution to their creditors. The plan instead permits the Sacklers, who would otherwise face claims alleging damages in the trillions, to obtain full repose while keeping billions of dollars that they siphoned from Purdue in the years before these Chapter 11 proceedings….
[The] defenses of the Sackler release illustrate the radical nature of the power they would locate in a modest catchall provision of the Bankruptcy Code. The release here unequivocally involves direct claims against the Sacklers. Those claims are private property of those claimants, but the plan disposes of them as if they were property of the estate. The bankruptcy power to modify creditor-debtor relations does not include the nonconsensual restructuring of relations among nondebtors.
Plan proponents make an equally fundamental error by conflating the subject-matter jurisdiction of courts sitting in bankruptcy — the authority to hear claims related to the estate — with the authority to deem those claims resolved for $0 regardless of their merits under applicable state law. Plan proponents invoke necessity, but necessity cannot justify taking what is not theirs….
Now you know. The NYT also has a good story on the implications, this morning… onward.
नमस्ते
I am at a loss for words — to adequately describe the splattering of emotions I felt, the first time I heard a recording of her voice, singing Carmen.
It wasn’t this one, in the German video, below — it was of an earlier vintage, and on vinyl. But I almost leapt off the couch. And as said below — her radiance shown through — like a lantern on a fog shrouded night — in every photo ever published of her, and that glorious era — what came to be known as… Camelot:
. . .This Saturday sees the centenary of Greek-American soprano Maria Callas, born in New York on 2 December 1923….
The singer made her professional debut in early 1941 and rose to stratospheric levels of fame in the 1950s and 60s. She was famed for her Verdi, Puccini and bel canto singing, captivating stage presence with a personal life never too far from the celebrity spotlight….
The soprano frequently travelled between London, Milan and New York, living a life of glamour befitting the age and her celebrity status….
Utterly flawless….
नमस्ते
