Bribery arrests? They’re only for the little people.

Public domain art from ClipArt ETC [etc.usf.edu]

Bits and pieces from a  Los Angeles Times story by David G. Savage. It concerns a former Republican (natch!) governor of Virginia, one Bob McDonnell:

McDonnell and his wife were deeply in debt. Jonnie Williams, a free-spending Virginia businessman, offered to improve their "financial situation" if they helped promote his tobacco-based dietary supplement. 

Over two years, he secretly gave the couple more than $175,000 in loans, vacations and gifts, including a New York shopping spree by McDonnell's wife and an engraved Rolex watch for the governor.

[SNIP]

Prosecutors showed evidence that within minutes of speaking to Williams about personal loans, the governor called or emailed aides and state health officials, asking them to come to the governor's mansion to hear more about the dietary supplement. McDonnell used the governor's mansion for a product launch for the new supplement. And he carried a bottle of pills in his pocket and suggested state employees might want to try them.

[SNIP]

McDonnell was charged with bribery and corruption, and a jury convicted him in 2014 on 11 counts. A U.S. appeals court upheld the convictions and said the governor had taken bribes in exchange for "using the power of his office to influence governmental decisions."

But now the good part — good, that is, if you’re either a government official on the take, or a rich individual who wants to buy the law for your own benefit.

McDonnell has appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. He may  lose in the tied-up court now that Justice Scalia is dead. I sincerely hope so. But the sheer gall of his appeal is vomit-worthy. 

Moreover, the very fact that the Roberts Court would entertain such an appeal is worthy of a counter-appeal to God: “Dear Lord, don’t stop at Scalia. Please take Justice Roberts as well.” 

As the LA Times tells it:

"The possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials" is not evidence of bribery or corruption, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said two years ago in striking down the limits on how much in total a single donor may give to a field of candidates. "Ingratiation and access... are not corruption," he said, quoting from the Citizens United opinion
McDonnell's attorneys have latched on to that legal rationale to argue that doing small favors for big donors is protected under the 1st Amendment .

"Paying for 'access' — the ability to get a call answered or a meeting scheduled — is constitutionally protected and an intrinsic part of our political system," they said in their appeal. "If Gov. McDonnell can be imprisoned for giving routine access to a gift-giver, an official could equally be imprisoned for agreeing to answer a donor's phone call about a policy issue.”

Alas, McDonnell has been sentenced to a piddling two years for what has grown into an effort to subvert not only a bribery law, but the very basis of Democracy, which is that  government is not just for those who can afford to buy it. 

If it were up to me, McDonnell would spend his two years in solitary. Either that, or in a maximum security prison with other major felons, which he is.

And Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas would be in cells further down the solitary cell block.

Special thanks to “Comrade Misfit” at the Earthbound Misfit blog for taking note of this issue, which is how it came to my own cranky notice.

Inventor of the Psychic Ding gives two Supreme Court justices a super ding and demands their impeachment

Remember Mme. Galzogorist, the spelling-challenged fortune teller on the gritty Manhattan block where The New York Crank is headquartered? Remember her invention of the “Psychic ding” – a sort of mental curse that brings down psychic pain on less-than-loveable public figures?

Well, lately she’s been going a little bit overboard. It’s so bad that I tried to call the white-coated people from the hospital. I wanted to get her thrown in a locked ward and pumped full of Thorazine until she calms down. But as you’ll learn if you read on, my efforts were thwarted.

This all started when I interviewed Mme. Galzogorist about who might be the winner in the next Presidential race. Unfortunately, the subject matter quickly changed and my control over the situation deteriorated, as you’ll learn from the following transcript:

CRANK: Mme. Galzogorist, who will win the next Presidential election?

MME. G: I see a Democrat in the future. Unless that idiot lunatic Bloomberg rides in on Ralph Nader’s horse and screws up the election results. A thousand psychic dings on his head! May he wake up thinking bugs are crawling around under his skin. No, actually I think he already thinks that. May he wake up thinking toads and cockroaches…

CRANK: Please excuse me for interrupting, but let’s get back on the subject. You mentioned a Democrat. Which one? Hillary? Barak Obama? John Edwards?

MME. G: It doesn’t matter. The Supreme Court will decide that any Democrat who gets elected will be unconstitutional.

CRANK: On what grounds?

MME. G: They don’t need grounds. They’re making it up as they go along. May the brains of Alito and Roberts turn to mush. I’d wish that on Clarence Thomas, too, but he doesn’t seem to have a brain.

CRANK: What are you talking about?

MME. G: Impeachment. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. ought to be impeached for lying under oath. Until then, may an especially tough strain of cooties appear in their dreams to be inhabiting their scalps.

CRANK: What are you talking about?

MME. G: I’m talking stare decicis, the doctrine that you don’t change settled law. Both Roberts and Alito said under oath that they would abide by stare decicis in deciding cases. So far, they’ve overturned every settled cased they’ve considered. Their real abiding principal seems to be stare decicis my bigis behindis.

CRANK: But…

MME. G: Will you shut up and let me finish? We had an almost century-old ruling about prohibiting pricing fixing. They’ve overturned that. So much for free markets. Now manufacturers have another tool for screwing the consumer, thanks to Roberts and Alito, may Alito become increasingly aware that he is getting bald, and Roberts begin to believe that he is turning into Clarence Thomas.

We had a decades-old ruling that “separate-but-equal” segregated schools are not equal. Alito and Roberts overturned that. Welcome back, school segregation! What’s next, the legalization of lynch mobs? May Alito and Roberts have nightmares that they are getting hanged from trees! And may Thomas dream he is getting hanged from a high tech shoe tree.

Then there’s the First Amendment. If school kids express an opinion outside of class that their school principal doesn’t like, the Supreme Court has decided the First Amendment granting freedom of speech is invalid. May Roberts and Alito continually have nightmares that a fuzzy white fungus is growing in their throats and giving them laryngitis. And may the ghosts of their fathers regularly appear to them in dreams, reminding them that their names end in “Junior.” And may the public begin referring to them as, “the two juniors.”

CRANK: But what does this have to do with…?

MME. G: Oh shut your trap, Crank! Frankly, I don’t give Roe v. Wade another six months. May the two juniors both dream they’re in especially difficult labor, and wake up with murderous gas pains.

CRANK: Madame Galzogorist, you’re foaming at the mouth!

MME. G: Damn right I am! These guys are a menace. They don’t even support capitalism! They’ve reigned in the rights of stockholders to control corporate officers and boards that are robbing investors blind of their capital! May Junior and Junior grow to have such fear of pickpockets they will develop severe agoraphobia.

CRANK: So what you’re saying is…

MME. G: What I’m saying is, if you think the last Supreme Court invalidation of an election in which Gore won but lost was an abortion of democracy, wait until you see what these guys do even if the Democrats win by 70 percent! Impeach those liars now. Roberts and Alito. Junior and Junior. Impeach them for swearing falsely under oath to something their behavior almost immediately after appointment indicates was a total fabrication. They perjured themselves, Junior and Junior did. Perjury! Perjury! Perjury!

CRANK: Are you sure you…

MME. G: Of course, they’ll probably declare the impeachment proceedings unconstitutional, plunging the nation into civil unrest. Come to think of it, they probably want to bring back the Civil War, too.

NOTE: The New York Crank did what any alarmed citizen would do. I whipped out my cell phone and called 911. The paramedics arrived and trucked Mme. Galzogorist away to an under-funded city hospital. There she was declared normal and released after a lengthy rant to the staff psychiatrists concerning her fears that the court will declare health insurance unconstitutional. Oh and of course, they found she had no health insurance and billed her MasterCard $250,000 for the hospital visit. Since Mme. Galzorist cannot pay off the bill, she is being charged 25% interest a month. I hear that usury is again constitutional.