A Miserable New Supreme Court Decision Makes It Clear That Conservative Justices Don’t Think Racism Exists

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

The Supreme Court on Thursday came to the very edge of an outright hooley. Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the unusual step of reading her dissent in the case of Mullin v. Doe in which the carefully manufactured conservative majority virtually eliminated the Temporary Protected Status program.

Justice Sam Alito took an elbow from Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent, which concentrated on Alito's blithe dismissal of any racial motivation in removing their TPS status from Haitian migrants who came here after a devastating earthquake. Kagan chose to slap back by citing, at length, the various racially inflammatories that came so easily to the current president of the United States.

The Haiti plaintiffs have yet another claim that is likely to succeed: that race entered into the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation, in violation of equal protection. Our decision in Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U. S. 252 (1977), supplies the standard for assessing that claim. The Haiti plaintiffs must show (here, must show as a likelihood) that a racially “discriminatory purpose” was “a motivating factor” in the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation. Critically, “a motivating factor” does not mean the sole fac tor, or even “the dominant or primary one.” Id., at 265. One factor among many is enough when the factor is racial to presumptively establish an equal protection violation.

...

It is more than plausible: Even putting the clear-error standard aside, the Haiti plaintiffs have carried their burden. The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print. (Indeed, one measure of the President’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful.

So here are some of those statements. Hai ians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” And: Ha tians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”

The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not “overtly racial,” but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.) The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community. No very “sensitive inquiry,” of the kind Arlington Heights compels, is needed to see them for what they are; judges, as we often say, are “not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,” Department of Commerce. The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.

Remember. Nothing is About Race because nothing ever is About Race. And Sam Alito probably drinks his post-prandial brandy out of Roger Taney's grinning skull.

What in the unholy fck is this about, and how much does this administration spend every month on armbands and shiny leather boots? From StatNews:

The Trump administration released a memo last week that seeks to upend landmark disability laws and court rulings that prioritize people with disabilities receiving care while living in their community instead of at institutions like nursing homes.

The memo—written by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel in response to an inquiry from White House officials—breaks with decades of disability law and practice and argues that the “integration mandate” is not actually a mandate, especially for people with “severe mental illness or disabilities.”... The memo publicly signals the Trump administration’s stance on the rights of people with disabilities, especially their right to be not segregated in institutions to receive necessary care, several legal experts say. They expect the Justice Department to pull back from its longstanding role as the federal enforcer of the so-called Olmstead claims that place institutionalized people with disabilities back into their communities, and they also worry that the memo tees up an attempt to dismantle the Olmstead decision.

And who is the brainiac behind this sudden abandonment of the rights of the disabled, and where did she learn her craft?

Disability law experts were generally unimpressed with legal arguments laid out by Lanora Pettit, the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote the memo. Pettit came to the position in 2025 after spending several years in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.

The giant petri dish wherein grow bad political ideas and stupid cruelty for its own sake, Texas has become a genuine threat to the body politic.

WWOZ Pick to Click: "Take Yo Praise"(Camille Yarborough): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1928, Benito Mussolini dumps 31 million tons of water from Lake Nemi because he wanted to see if Emperor Tiberius' floating palaces sank there 1,700 years before. The floating palaces were actually elaborately appointed ships and Mussolini's long shot actually worked. Over the next two years, the ships were discovered and their artifacts were sent to museums. The ships themselves were destroyed during World War II. History is so cool.

Some serious ratfcking occurred in Michigan this week as an anonymous caller accused Pete Buttigieg of "unspeakable violent crimes" committed against his two twins. Buttigieg was told to stay away from the twins for 24 hours while Michigan authorities conducted their mandatory investigation. From Politico:

“For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen,” Buttigieg wrote. “We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime.” Michigan State Police confirmed in response to questions about the Substack post that they had responded to an anonymous report this week, which they determined to be false. “False reports are dangerous and divert law enforcement officers and Child Protective Services workers from responding to legitimate emergencies and protecting vulnerable children and families,” Shanon Banner, spokesperson for the state police, said in a statement.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2028 presidential campaign. Strap in.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found. From MIT News:

Now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a quasar flickering from the very early universe. The scientists traced the light from the quasar back to the “cosmic dawn,” just 850 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery represents the earliest flickering quasar detected to date. “Although there have been a lot of quasars found in the cosmic dawn, this is the first time we actually see one flickering,” says Gene Leung, a postdoc in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. The quasar’s flicker enabled the researchers to determine that, surprisingly, the ancient quasar’s whirlpool of gas and dust, known as an accretion disk, resembled a flat pancake, similar in shape to that of more modern-day quasars.

And this teaches us what?

Their findings add to a longstanding mystery in cosmology: Why do supermassive black holes exist so early in the universe’s history? Physicists have assumed that a flat accretion disk reflects a relatively mature black hole that is in a calm and stable state. Black holes that are just starting to form, like those in the very early universe, should be more unsettled systems, with accretion disks that appear more puffy and chaotic.

Okay, so humans know something about the universe that they didn't know before. That is more than enough.

Hey, Smithsonian. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

A fossil of the odd creature was unearthed at a site littered with ancient bird bones, many of which are clumped in what resemble pellets coughed up by modern owls. Paleontologists had long suspected that a predator must have hunted the birds, but no one had found evidence of it. Now, they may have identified the culprit: a newly described species called Jian changmaensis.The dinosaur belonged to a group of velociraptor relatives known as microraptors. The work, published in the Annals of Carnegie Museum on June 4, marks the first clear evidence of microraptors outside of northeastern China and, even though the new species is a non-avian dinosaur, could help uncover the evolution of birds.

Busted, beeyotches! And it only took us 120 million years. We are happy now.

I'll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of the Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people and the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornados in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, and the Legionnaire's disease outbreak in Harlem, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they're getting.