“Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows.”

Politico reports with a link to a long draft opinion of the Court written by Justice Alito.

This is so shocking I have difficulty believing it’s real. The top of NYT is blithe coverage of the Met Gala, replete with a photo of Hillary Clinton in a shiny vivid red dress, Hillary who would have had 3 Supreme Court nominations giving the Court a 6-3 liberal majority averting this calamity… this seeming calamity.

ADDED at 8:41: The NYT is now covering the story in “Leaked Supreme Court Draft Would Overturn Roe v. Wade/A majority of the court privately voted to strike down the landmark abortion rights decision, according to the document, obtained by Politico.”

Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.

The leak seems designed to create pressure on the Justices to step back from the precipice.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about whatever you like.

It was an awfully dull sunrise today, so let me give you this photo of the rabbit in the rye — not ryegrass, rye, the grain —  that we planted in our front yard:

"Estranged parents often tell me that their adult child is rewriting the history of their childhood, accusing them of things they didn’t do, and/or failing to acknowledge the ways in which the parent demonstrated their love and commitment."

"Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship. Both sides often fail to recognize how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half century.... Deciding which people to keep in or out of one’s life has become an important strategy to achieve that happiness....

"But there is one thing I haven’t done. Will not do. Will never do. Will grow angry enough at you to throw spitballs at you if you ask me to do."

"And that’s move my seat on a plane to accommodate you so that you can sit with your friends or family or concubines or whoever else you’re flying with. Your grandma’s on the flight with you and you want to sit next to her? Granny should’ve taught you to plan ahead. Maybe Granny wants a break from her thoughtless progeny. You ever think about that? Of course not, because you’re thoughtless. You’re separated from your 6-year-old son? Braylin has to learn to fend for himself. Plus, this ain’t Antarctica. It’s an 80-minute, temperature-controlled trip to Albany on a flying couch. He’ll be fine next to his new Uncle D. Your grandma’s on the flight with you and you want to sit next to her? Granny should’ve taught you to plan ahead."

Writes Damon Young, author of "What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays," in "No, I will not switch airplane seats with you" (WaPo). He had me at "Braylin has to learn to fend for himself."

Anyway, though Young is extra generous to people in other situations, he hates flying. It's "a thoroughly uncomfortable experience" for him. It's "vaguely fascist." And he needs his window seat because he's got a big head that must lean against the wall.

"For years, Boston has allowed private groups to request use of the flagpole to raise flags of their choosing. As part of this program, Boston approved hundreds of requests..."

"... to raise dozens of different flags. The city did not deny a single request to raise a flag until, in 2017, Harold Shurtleff, the director of a group called Camp Constitution, asked to fly a Christian flag. Boston refused. At that time, Boston admits, it had no written policy limiting use of the flagpole based on the content of a flag. The parties dispute whether, on these facts, Boston reserved the pole to fly flags that communicate governmental messages, or instead opened the flagpole for citizens to express their own views. If the former, Boston is free to choose the flags it flies without the constraints of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause. If the latter, the Free Speech Clause prevents Boston from refusing a flag based on its viewpoint. We conclude that, on balance, Boston did not make the raising and flying of private groups’ flags a form of government speech. That means, in turn, that Boston’s refusal to let Shurtleff and Camp Constitution raise their flag based on its religious viewpoint 'abridg[ed]' their 'freedom of speech.' U. S. Const., Amdt. I." 

Writes Justice Breyer, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, in Shurtleff v. City of Boston, issued this morning. Justice Alito has a concurring opinion, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, and Justice Gorsuch has a concurring opinion that is joined by Justices Thomas and Alito. Justice Kavanaugh also has a concurring opinion.

You might wonder whether the Establishment Clause can justify viewpoint discrimination, but that's been dealt with in the past. That's why all the Justices agree: precedent. 

The text (at the link) includes this photo of the site of the flagpoles, Boston City Hall, which is ludicrously ugly:

 

"What a fucking joke -- that this person is now running a so-called 'anti-disinformation' Board inside the Department of Homeland Security."

What a fucking joke -- that this person is now running a so-called "anti-disinformation" Board inside the Department of Homeland Security.

But it's not just her: the ones who created this and are supporting it are also aggressive disinformation agents:https://t.co/O8zNimxvK8

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 2, 2022

"Many students today go quickly to the position that there is such a thing as hate speech, that they know it when they see it that and it ought to be outlawed."

"For me that’s a topic to teach, not to simply honor or denounce. I’m revealing myself here as a person whose chords and arpeggios and scales are always the history of political thought: John Stuart Mill’s 'On Liberty' is the place to start. He says that the line between your freedom and its end is where it impacts on another’s freedom. That’s the question with hate speech: When does it do that? I’ll also mention Charles Murray. That’s tricky, because his science has been discredited by his peers, and his conclusions are understood by many as a form of hate speech, because he makes an argument about the racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society. It feels terrible to give him a podium and a bunch of students who would sit and imbibe that as the truth. I think if Murray is invited to campus, you can picket him, you can leaflet him, but I don’t think it should be canceled. The important thing is for students to be educated and educate others about the bad science, the discrediting of his position, and then ask, Why does he survive in the academy, and why does that bad science keep getting resuscitated? Those are important questions for students to ask and then learn how to answer. That’s what’s going to equip them in this political world."

Said Wendy Brown, the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, quoted in "Why Critics of Angry Woke College Kids Are Missing the Point" (NYT).

A "very distinguishable voice."

I'm reading "American Idol winner Laine Hardy arrested after allegedly spying on woman/Louisiana college student found hidden audio recording device and told police she feared musician planted it there" (The Guardian). 

She... confronted Hardy, who said he left a “bug” in her room that he had since thrown into a pond, police said. Allegedly, Hardy later put his confession in writing in a social media message the woman ultimately provided to investigators.... 

The woman used Google to determine the device [she found under her bed] was actually a voice-activated recorder like the one Hardy is alleged to have claimed to have thrown in a pond.... 

Police alleged that officers heard Hardy’s “very distinguishable voice”....

He won "American Idol" with that voice, and now that voice — along with his confession — identifies him to the police.

In happier days:

"He was coming from another planet. He was reporting from something no one was seeing."

"Out of a group of idiosyncratic people, he was the most idiosyncratic. He was so interior that he made comics grow up.” 

Said Art Spiegelman, quoted in "Justin Green, Who Put Himself Into His Underground Cartoons, Dies at 76/'Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, his epic autobiographical story of Catholic guilt and neurosis, 'made comics grow up,' a colleague said" (NYT). 

The first page of Mr. Green’s book shows Binky naked, his hands bound and his feet shackled, confessing: “O, my readers, the saga of Binky Brown is not intended solely for your entertainment, but also to purge myself of the compulsive neurosis which I have serviced since I officially left Catholicism on Halloween, 1958.” 

Binky’s misadventures begin when, as a boy, he breaks a statue of the Virgin Mary while playing baseball inside his house. The book takes him through young manhood, as he deals with bullies, nuns (“fascistic penguins,” in his words), priests, fears stoked by supernatural church doctrines that are “asserted as empirical fact,” his impure thoughts and his sexuality.

It's just by chance that I've begun the day writing about the Weather Underground and underground comics. To mark this accidental theme, I'll show you this definition of "underground" from the OED:

This is a stick-up.

I'm reading "Like Marie Antoinette," a book review written by Mario Puzo in 1968 and published in the NYT. The book under review is "The Jeweler’s Eye," by William F. Buckley Jr. 

There are a lot of things I want to blog about this morning, so why am back in 1968? It's because of the first thing I wrote about this morning, the NYT obituary for Kathy Boudin. I was struck by the sentence, "During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige." Stickup? That strikes me as gangster slang, lacking the formality I would expect from the NYT in the account of this event that took place 4 decades ago.

Does the NYT generally use "stickup" to describe serious matters? I searched its archive, and the Mario Puzo article caught my attention:

"On a March day in 1970, Ms. Boudin was showering at a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village when an explosion collapsed the walls around her."

"She and fellow extremists had been making bombs there, the intended target believed to have been the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. Three of them were killed on the spot. A naked Ms. Boudin managed to scramble away with a colleague and found clothes and brief refuge at the home of a woman living down the block. She then disappeared.... 'The very status of being underground was an identity for me,' she recalled years later.... That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men. The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown..... At her sentencing, [she said] ... 'I was there out of my commitment to the Black liberation struggle and its underground movement. I am a white person who does not want the crimes committed against Black people to be carried in my name.'" 

From "Kathy Boudin, Radical Imprisoned in a Fatal Robbery, Dies at 78 /She had a role in the Brink’s heist by the Weather Underground that left two police officers dead. But she became a model prisoner and, after being freed, helped former inmates" (NYT).

At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can talk all night.

Today, I have 10 selections from TikTok — all chosen to delight and amuse. Tell me what you like best.

1. Samoyed in a backpack.

2. A very old Scottish lady tells a joke.

3. Italian husband has a strong opinion about ordering a cappuccino after lunch. 

4. Nudging into other people's neighborhood Facebook group.

5. Finally, enough time has passed that young people can genuinely love a 1970s kitchen.

6. The "Dad Awards" nominees for "Worst Case of Mistaken Identity."

7. Elon Musk is not into extending the human life span.

8. Beer!!!

9. How far would you go to restore an old doorbell? 

10. It is impossible to know how deeply geese love the sound of a harmonica.

"Whoever thought we’d see the day in American politics when a senator could be openly bisexual but a closeted Republican?”

Quipped Trevor Noah, about Kyrsten Sinema, at the White House Correspondents' dinner, quoted in "Trevor Noah roasts lawmakers on both sides of aisle in correspondents’ dinner remarks" (The Hill).

"The world is different than it was when I was a little kid. What I always thought was funny as a little kid isn’t necessarily the same as what’s funny now."

"Things change and the times change so it’s important for me to figure it out. I think it’s a sad dog that can’t learn any more. I don’t want to be that sad dog and I have no intention of it."

Said Bill Murray, quoted in "Bill Murray admits behaviour on set towards a woman led to halt to film/Actor describes incident that took place during production of Being Mortal as a ‘difference of opinion’" (Guardian).

"This is the first time the president has attended this dinner in six years. It’s understandable. We had a horrible plague – followed by two years of Covid."

Quipped President Biden at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, quoted in "A horrible plague, then Covid’: Biden and correspondents joke in post-Trump return to normality/White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is first attended by a sitting president in six years after Donald Trump’s snubs, then pandemic" (Guardian). 

Perhaps the biggest laugh came when Biden made light of the “Let’s Go Brandon” slogan, which has become rightwing code for swearing at him. “Republicans seem to support one fella, some guy named Brandon. He’s having a really good year and I’m kind of happy for him.”