Pennies from heaven

 Is there a website where billionaires can find out what right-wing justices want, so they don't duplicate their "largesse"?  Houses, RVs, vacations, cash, whatever -- like a bridal registry but for corruption?  I've searched "grift.com" and "supremecourt.gov.gimme" without success.  Thanks to Pro Publica and others we know who the generosos are and what they got by way of a thank-you letter, so there should be a way to keep them from tripping over one another.  Nobody wants to end up with a yacht or Gulfstream and nowhere to send it.  The gift-wrapping is a bitch.

Are we still supposed to pretend that the "conservatives" are not for sale?  How is the New York Times both-sidering this?  Sure, Clarence Thomas got 38 luxury vacations from his close personal billionaire friends, but didn't Sonia Sotomayor once accept a ride from a bodega owner when her car broke down?  Did she mention that on her annual financial filing?  Why not?  Tell Gym Jordan to call an emergency meeting of the Judiciary Committee, I smell impeachment.

More than half the country trusts this Supreme Court as far as they can drop-kick it and Joe Biden has shown no enthusiasm for the remedy of adding four seats to equal the thirteen appellate courts they supervise, so contempt for the law will probably continue to fester.  Sam Alito laughs out loud at the suggestion that "ethics" should apply to the Supremes, then packs for another private-jet trip to some Alaskan fishing "camp."  Back in what Charlie Pierce calls "the first Gilded Age" there were justices equally corrupt, but that's not much comfort now.  The sleaze and the hypocrisy are so discouraging that I gave up and went in search of foreign mishugas.  Now I feel a little better.

Mary Simon is Inuk and is the first indigenous Canadian to be appointed governor general, the largely ceremonial office which represents the British crown.  She speaks English and Inuktitut, but that's not good enough for a group of Quebecers who want her removed for lack of French.  I don't know what the governor general does when not presenting the Governor General's Awards for literature and the performing arts, but surely she has time to sit down with a French tutor or one of these programs like Rosetta Stone.  Or Quebecers could stop being dicks about this Francophone stuff.  The whole world speaks English.  Join us.

Fernando Villavicencio was running for president of Ecuador when he was assassinated after a campaign rally in Quito.  He was running on an anti-crime platform and not everyone appreciated it.  Up here we usually settle for character assassination, despite what Craig Robertson had in mind for "the Marxist Joe Biden."

If you think Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis hate asylum-seekers, you haven't paid enough attention to the Sunak government.  After dumping them onto barges and threatening them with Rwanda, the new plan is to ship them off to Ascension Island, a desolate rock in the south Atlantic that makes the Falklands look like central Manchester.   Eight hundred miles from Napoleon's last address on St. Helena and 1,400 miles from Brazil, it has a 1942-vintage airstrip and is popular with sea turtles and the telecommunications industry.  I guess that will teach desperate people not to flee violence and hunger when the Tories are fighting a grim general election.

Tragically, what Labour has in mind is not a hell of a lot better.  They'll go only as far as reducing the UK's reliance on foreign workers, a result of Brexit that nobody anticipated, apparently.  The phrase "small boats," once shorthand for The Miracle of Dunkirk, now refers to dark people nobody wants.  Britain only needs doctors, computer programmers and the like, and not many of them are risking death on the high seas in a leaky ferry to escape from Syria or Tunisia.

All right, now I'm depressed again.  It doesn't help that Robbie Robertson died yesterday.