Scalia at ranch with elite society; Bohemian Grove connection

Feb25

by Jon Rappoport


Scalia at ranch with elite society; Bohemian Grove connection

—name of traveling companion revealed—

—FBI admits it has done no investigation into Scalia’s death—

by Jon Rappoport

February 25, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)

The Washington Post has the story, 2/24, “Justice Scalia spent his last hours with members of this secretive society of elite hunters”:

“When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 12 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.”

“Cibolo Creek Ranch owner John Poindexter and C. Allen Foster, a prominent Washington lawyer who traveled to the ranch with Scalia by private plane, hold leadership positions within the Order. It is unclear what, if any, official association Scalia had with the group.”

“The society’s U.S. chapter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemian Club in San Francisco, which is associated with the all-male Bohemian Grove — one of the most well-known secret societies in the country.”

The Bohemian Club isn’t just “associated” with the Grove. The Club has two locations: in the city of San Francisco and outside the city at the 2700-acre Grove.

Interesting, to say the least, that the St. Hubertus hunting society launched itself in the US at the Club, and that members of St. Hubertus were at the Cibolo Ranch, where Scalia died.

The Post:

“Members of the worldwide, male-only [St. Hubertus] society wear dark green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website. Some hold titles, such as Grand Master, Prior and Knight Grand Officer. The Order’s name is in honor of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.”

Even more interesting is this quote from the Post:

“Law enforcement officials told The Post that they had no knowledge of the International Order of St. Hubertus or its connection to Poindexter and ranch guests. The officials said the FBI had declined to investigate Scalia’s death when they were told by the marshals that he died from natural causes.”

In addition to all the strange circumstances surrounding Scalia’s death I’ve detailed so far, now we have two degrees of separation from the Bohemian Grove, where the rich and powerful gather every summer, hold bizarre rituals, and chat about carving up ownership of the world…

And the FBI just ignores all this and accepts “death by natural causes.” No investigation.



For further information on the Bohemian Grove, there are many sources; for example: “Occult Activities at the Elite Bohemian Grove,” by Alex Jones, at Prison Planet; Mike Hanson’s book, “Bohemian Grove: Cult of Conspiracy.” Jones and Hanson infiltrated the Grove together and filmed the secret sacrificial ceremony, “The Cremation of Care.”

Note: Looking up Scalia’s traveling companion, C Allen Foster, on the last weekend of Scalia’s life, I notice Foster has argued at least one case before the US Supreme Court, while Scalia served as a Justice:

“Johnson v DeGrandy” (512 U.S. 997 (1994)) — Represented Hispanic republicans in Florida redistricting Voting Rights Act case in U.S. Supreme Court.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Source

.

The International Order of St. Hubertus

February 25, 2016 by Fred Clark 123 Comments


“Y’all haters corny with that Illuminati mess …”

News item: “Justice Scalia spent his last hours with members of this secretive society of elite hunters”


When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 12 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.

After Scalia’s death Feb. 13, the names of the 35 other guests at the remote resort, along with details about Scalia’s connection to the hunters, have remained largely unknown. A review of public records shows that some of the men who were with Scalia at the ranch are connected through the International Order of St. Hubertus, whose members gathered at least once before at the same ranch for a celebratory weekend.

Members of the worldwide, male-only society wear dark-green robesemblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website. Some hold titles, such as Grand Master, Prior and Knight Grand Officer. The Order’s name is in honor of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.

… The society’s U.S. chapter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemian Club in San Francisco, which is associated with the all-male Bohemian Grove — one of the most well-known secret societies in the country.

The Washington Post’s headline there is ambiguous, so let’s clear up what that means. This is not a fraternity for “elite hunters” — not a club that welcomes the most highly skilled hunters in the world. It is, rather, a fraternity for men who are economic elites and who also enjoy hunting.* It’s a boys-only Davos with long guns.

The Davos example is, I think, the best way to understand groups like this, and to think about what’s “secret” in such secret societies. Consider, for example, the Freemasons — who may be, oxymoronically, the best-known secret society. They meet in Masonic halls with big, public signs identifying them as such. And Masons themselves are not secretive about their membership in this secret society. They wear rings and often even get special license plates identifying them as members. They’re on Facebook. For members of a secret society, they’re remarkably open about it.

But the Freemasons also meet privately, in gatherings closed off from the rest of the public. Those “secret” meetings don’t strike most of us as nefarious because we know enough about similar gatherings of similar “societies” to have a pretty good idea of what goes on in such club meetings. I’ve been to Rotary luncheons with my dad. I’ve had friends who coached Little League for the Elks Lodge. I myself spent several years as a member of the South Philly Fast-pitch Softball League. So the Masons don’t worry me.

The Masons, though, are older and spookier than the Elks or the Rotarians. Those more recent middle-American civic clubs are not “secret societies” in the way the Freemasons are, with all the weird trappings and accoutrements of robes and Latin phrases and rumored rituals performed behind locked doors of which they may never speak outside. The forced pageantry of such rituals usually turns out to be rather silly or embarrassing (just ask David Cameron), but the idea of them is what gives secret societies their intriguing allure — both for members and for outsiders.

That’s why we’re fascinated by the weirder ritualistic details in this story about Scalia’s membership in the pretentiously titled International Order of St. Hubertus — by what Anil Dash yesterday aptly referred to as the creepily “Eyes Wide Shut s–t” in this story. (Bohemian Grove!) This forced mysteriousness has long provided fodder for the fantasies of opponents of such secret societies, but it’s a distraction from the real reasons we should be concerned about such groups.

Yes, the green-robed business is creepy and maybe makes you wonder if The Most Dangerous Game wasn’t actually a whistle-blowing memoir written to expose the initiation rite of its secretive leadership. But the truly creepy bit here doesn’t have anything to do with whatever secret rituals or whatnot these men engage in during the LARPing portions of their gatherings. The creepy part is what we know because they tell us: Some of the most powerful, wealthiest, whitest, Gentile males in the world regularly gather at luxury hunting lodges for a little bit of hunting and a whole lot of networking. This is one of the many unofficial channels through which they run the world.

These white men have a club and 99.99 percent of the world is not rich or powerful or white enough to belong to it. You will never be invited, or allowed, to join. Members of this club assist one another, promoting one another’s interests and working together to quash any potential source of discomfort or misfortune. That’s not the secret part, but that’s the scary part.**

The scary part isn’t a secretive conspiracy theory. The scary part is that the conspiracy isn’t a secret.

Consider this: In 2004, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving an attempt to make public the documents of a government energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. This didn’t involve any robes and rituals, but it did involve the Bush Administration arguing that its energy policy needed to be kept secret, and that the public had no right to know about the involvement of oil and coal companies in writing that policy. Three weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case —Cheney vs. USDC for District of Columbia — Dick Cheney went on a luxury hunting trip with fellow “elite hunter” Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia refused to recuse himself from Cheney’s case, and eventually sided with the majority in favor of Dick Cheney.

That’s not a secret conspiracy. It’s just how they do things. And it’s how they ensure that this is how things will always be done.

- – - – -A Video in original article was omitted, and is not posted here – - – - – - -

* I suppose the other possible meaning of “secretive society of elite hunters” would be some kind of revolutionary guild of shadowy figures who hunt elites. I smell a movie franchise here.

** I’m reminded again of a conversation with pastor/activist Gene Rivers after he returned from a gathering of the Aspen Institute — a think-tank network for economic elites that convenes at a luxury campus in Colorado. He’d been invited to participate in a panel on the Ten-Point Coalition, but stuck around for the rest of the gathering. And he said it terrified him. These were powerful people, he said, who gathered to envision and plan for the future. But in their vision of the future, there were no black people. They simply did not exist.

Source

.

.

With the tables turned, Obama now 'regrets' his 2006 Alito filibuster

Gregory Korte, USA TODAY

5:18 p.m. EST February 17, 2016



(Photo: Susan Walsh, AP)


WASHINGTON — President Obama has come to regret his decade-old filibuster of Justice Samuel Alito, the White House said Wednesday as Senate Republicans threatened to block his nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

The Alito nomination has become one of many historical footnotes that have taken on new relevance as Obama and the Republican-controlled Senate jockey for high ground in their battle over the election-year Supreme Court nomination. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest called Obama's decision to join in the filibuster of Alito in 2006 a "symbolic vote" based on specific objections to Alito's rulings as a lower court judge.

"What the president regrets is that Senate Democrats didn't focus more on making an effective public case about those substantive objections," Earnest said. "Instead, some Democrats engaged in a process of throwing sand in the gears of the confirmation process. And that's an approach that the president regrets."

At the time, Obama told ABC News that he supported the filibuster "because I think Judge Alito, in fact, is somebody who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values." Obama said the court needed to "provide some check on the executive branch, and he has not shown himself willing to do that repeatedly."

But during his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, now-President Obama already appeared to have misgivings, saying "last-minute efforts using procedural maneuvers inside the Beltway, I think, has been the wrong way of going about it."

And at a news conference on Tuesday, Obama said both parties bear some responsibility for the broken nomination process.

"I think what’s fair to say is that how judicial nominations have evolved over time is not historically the fault of any single party. This has become just one more extension of politics," he said. "What is also true is Justice Alito is on the bench right now."

Alito was confirmed by a vote of 58 to 42, one week after his confirmation cleared the Judiciary Committee.

USA TODAY

10 years after, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito makes his case
Obama also acknowledged a well-known secret of legislating: The opposition party often allows some senators to vote against a nominee, while also counting votes to ensure the confirmation goes forward. "And my expectation is, is that the same should happen here," Obama said Tuesday.

The issue of Obama's 2006 opposition to Bush's last Supreme Court nominee has re-emerged in the wake of Obama's intent to nominate a justice to replace the conservative Scalia. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested that the Senate won't even consider any nomination, saying it should be left to the next president to decide.

"There is a difference between the president's symbolic vote against President Bush's Supreme Court nominee and Republicans' reflexive opposition to the idea of President Obama even nominating anybody to the Supreme Court," Earnest said. "What Republicans are advocating is wrong and is inconsistent with the requirements of the Constitution, primarily because the wording of the Constitution is unambiguous and does not provide an exception for election years."

It's unclear how long it will take for Obama to put forward a name. Previous vacancies have taken about a month, although Obama already has a short list from his two previous nominations and appears anxious to move quickly once Scalia's funeral is over and the Senate returns from recess next week.

USA TODAY

Obama to visit Supreme Court Friday to pay respects to Scalia

The White House would not rule in or out any candidate for the nomination, except one: Obama himself.

"The president himself has said in the past that, while he obviously holds in high esteem those who dedicate their lives to serving the country on the Supreme Court, he envisions something different for himself once he leaves the presidency," Earnest said. "So I haven't asked him that direct question, but I think all the available evidence indicates that that option is highly unlikely."

Source

.

Antonin Scalia: The Constitution is 'dead'

'The judge who always likes the results he reaches is a bad judge,' Scalia said. | AP Photo

By KATIE GLUECK | 1/29/13 8:26 AM EST


Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says the Constitution is “dead, dead, dead,” rather than a “living document.”

“It’s not a living document,” Scalia said on Monday while speaking at Dallas-based Southern Methodist University, according to a report from the Dallas Morning News. “It’s dead, dead, dead.” 

He appeared with SMU law professor Bryan A. Garner, with whom Scalia has written books, as they also addressed keeping personal views out of legal interpretation.

“The judge who always likes the results he reaches is a bad judge,” Scalia said.

Scalia, a Reagan appointee, noted that he has not “expressed my views” on gay marriage and gun control, the report said.

Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/scalia-the-constitution-is-dead-86853.html#ixzz2JNEbOpvB

.

Scalia opens door for gun-control legislation, extends slow burning debate

Published July 30, 2012FoxNews.com





Read more

.

Cooperation in Evil

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 1, 2011

WASHINGTON

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

MAYBE it’s the Mario Lanza in him. But Nino Scalia relishes being operatically imprudent.

The Supreme Court justice’s latest supreme lapse of judgment involves poking his nose in a local legal wrangle about the place where I slept for four years: the Catholic University dorms.

In a speech last weekend at Duquesne University Law School, a Catholic institution in Pittsburgh, Justice Scalia defended religion in public life.

“Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent on diversity in all other aspects of life, seems bent on eliminating the diversity of moral judgment, particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” the devout Catholic said.

As an example, he cited the lawsuit filed by the “notoriously litigious” George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf against Catholic U.’s new ban on coed dorms.

In June, the president of Catholic U., John Garvey, wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal explaining why, as a father of five, he felt the need to resort to a “countercultural” and “slightly old-fashioned remedy,” ending 25 years of coed dorms. He said he believed single-sex dorms would “improve the practice of virtue,” reducing binge drinking and “the culture of hooking up.”

Using a formula that’s the inverse of “Sex and the City,” Garvey wrote: “Rates of depression reach 20 percent for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work.”

He made note of the sad slide from proud feminism to proud sluttiness. “I would have thought that young women would have a civilizing influence on young men,” he wrote. “Yet the causal arrow seems to run the other way.”

Banzhaf, who calls Garvey’s arguments “totally secular,” pronounced himself “astonished that a justice of the nation’s highest court would single out and prejudge a legal proceeding which could set an important precedent, and could one day even come before the U.S. Supreme Court.”

As the Supreme Court gets ready to go into session on Monday, its six Catholic justices were set to merge church and state by attending the traditional first-Sunday-in-October Red Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. (It’s hard to believe there’s no Protestant on the Supreme Court.) Through the years, the presiding clergy have aimed their homilies against abortion, gay marriage and “humanism.” Justices of other faiths have attended; but as Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate, “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stopped attending the Red Mass altogether after hearing her very first homily, which she has described as ‘outrageously anti-abortion.’ ”

In 2007, there was a kerfuffle about Catholic dominance on the court because the five justices who pushed to uphold the ban on “partial-birth abortion” were all Catholic men appointed by conservative presidents.

The church has aggressively meddled in politics on abortion, trying to defeat candidates who support abortion rights and prevent some liberal politicians from receiving Communion. But American bishops have been inconsistent in preaching their values.

They do not try to bring down politicians who supported the Iraq war, even though Pope John Paul II spoke out against it and sent a Vatican cardinal to warn W. that the war would be a “disaster” that would “destroy human life.” They do not express outrage at Republican audiences that cheer for executions, or target pols who brag on the death penalty, even though John Paul issued an encyclical against “the culture of death,” saying modern states have so many ways to protect citizens that the necessity for executions is “very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

Scalia, confident in his own infallibility, dissented. As he wrote in a religious journal in 2002, he does not find the death penalty immoral, and he believes that as the “minister of God,” government has powers to get “revenge” and “execute wrath.” He’s clearly more an Old Testament guy than New, or he would know that some prisoners get falsely accused and nailed to the cross (Matthew 26:59-66).

Now Scalia has dissented from the opinion of a second pope on the issue. Pope Benedict sent Georgia state officials a letter last month asking for clemency for Troy Davis, but the very Catholic Supreme Court denied a last-minute stay of execution.

In his Duquesne speech, Scalia said: “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign. I could not be a part of a system that imposes it.”

My family priest, Father Kevin O’Neil, teaches about “cooperation in evil” in Catholic moral theology. If you facilitate something that has been deemed wrong, like taking a human life, are you cooperating in evil?

Maybe the Supreme Court should ask itself that question. Are you “cooperating in evil,” Justice Scalia?



A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 2, 2011, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Cooperation In Evil.

Source

U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia defends Catholic believers

Wednesday, 28 September 2011 11:30


Written by Sheila Dabu Nonato, The Catholic Register

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

TORONTO - Critics often wonder how a Harvard-educated man like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia can believe in God. Scalia answers that being a devout Catholic does not mean you forgo your intellect or reason.

“A faith that has no reason is not sound,” Scalia said to a packed room of more than 200 lawyers and judges as keynote speaker following the 87th annual Red Mass on Sept. 22 at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto.

“That is why I am not a Branch Davidian,” he joked, with chuckles from the audience. (The Branch Davidians are the infamous sect notorious for the 1993 siege in Waco, Texas, where more than 80 people died during a standoff with the FBI.)

The talk, organized by the St. Thomas More Lawyers' Guild of Toronto, began with a 5 p.m. Mass at St. Michael's Cathedral celebrated by Archbishop Thomas Collins.

Historically, the Red Mass is celebrated annually in the Catholic Church for judges, lawyers, law school professors, students and government officials. It originated in Europe during the Middle Ages and borrows its name from the red vestments traditionally worn to symbolize the tongues of fire that descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost.

In his talk entitled "Note to the Wise: The Christian as Cretin,” Scalia noted the disdain and disbelief of the “worldly wise” who look down upon faithful Catholics as “simple-minded” and unsophisticated.

“To believe in traditional Christianity is something else,” Scalia explained, while standing beside a framed painting of St. Thomas More, patron saint of lawyers and judges.

Other core Christian beliefs such as the virgin birth, Jesus' divinity and His teachings on suffering are also regarded with skepticism in the “modern world.”

“Those who adhere to these traditional beliefs are regarded as simple-minded,” Scalia said.

On Christian martyrs and their undying belief in the Resurrection, he said, tongue-in-cheek, that critics thought it was "surely part of their clever plan to get themselves crucified."

The labels attributed to “fundamentalist Christians” can be “easily applied to traditional Catholics,” he added.

And what about those people who pray the rosary, kneel before the Blessed Sacrament, go on pilgrimages to Lourdes and Medjugorje “and (follow) indiscriminately, rather than in smorgasbord fashion, the teachings of the Pope,” he continued. “Surely, these people are simple-minded and easily led,” non-believers would argue.

Scalia said Thomas More's life is an example of courage. To his contemporaries and friends, the reason for More's death was “silly.”

“More went to his death to support the proposition that only the Pope could unbind Henry VIII's divorce,” he said.

Although the papacy at that time was corrupt, Scalia argued that More did not waver in his belief of the papal succession originating from Peter, the first pope. He was “seeing with the eyes of faith. He believed Peter was the rock of the Church.”

“As low as the papacy got, the Vicar of Christ alone, not the bishops of England have the power to unbind marriage,” he said.

Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1936 to Catholic parents who emigrated from Sicily. He married Maureen McCarthy when he attended Harvard and she was at nearby Radcliffe College. They have nine children. “Nino,” as he's known to friends and colleagues, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and was nominated as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986 by then President Ronald Reagan. Although his outspoken style has ruffled feathers, opponents admire his tenaciousness and formidable intellect.

Scalia is the leading jurist most identified with a formal textualist and originalist jurisprudence, meaning that he argues that judges should be guided by their decision-making through the plain meaning and original understanding of the Constitution as opposed to a “living constitution” which can be reinterpreted to the times. For example, he has argued that there is no constitutional right to abortion in the United States, saying the matter requires a political decision by other popular branches of the government.

Michael Obsorne, president of St. Thomas More Lawyer's Guild of Toronto, called Scalia “a true defender of justice and the rule of law.”

The guild, he said, believes that there is no contradiction between being a faithful Catholic and being a good lawyer or judge.

Phil Horgan, president of the Catholic Civil Rights League, said Scalia's talk complemented Collins' homily at the Red Mass, with both describing Thomas More as a “man of his age, sophisticated in the ways of the world and the court politics of the day.”

“But on the key issues, he chose not to abandon (his) core belief,” Horgan said.

Source


Bolds added by blogger.
.
P.S. Why was U.S. Justice Scalia discussing these personal and confidential matters (outside of the country) in Canada?
.

Sotomayor Gets Nearly $1.2M for Memoir

By AP Friday, May 27, 2011


Source: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2074493,00.html#ixzz1NgWyJrL0

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor appears on the second day of her Senate confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on July 14, 2009

Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2074493,00.html#ixzz1NgWedDdv

(WASHINGTON) — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor says she received nearly $1.2 million to write a memoir of her rise from a South Bronx housing project to the nation's highest court.

Sotomayor reported the payment for the as-yet untitled book from Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group in an annual report of personal finances, released Friday for the justice and her eight colleagues. Knopf revealed last July that Sotomayor had agreed to write the memoir, but the size of the advance had not been public.
(See: Sonia Sotomayor: Bronx (and Baseball) Role Model)

The book will come out simultaneously in English and in Spanish, but no release date has been set. Sotomayor is the court's first Hispanic justice. Her parents moved from Puerto Rico to New York after World War II.

Justice Clarence Thomas also received more than $1 million in advance of the publication of his book, "My Grandfather's Son," in 2007.

Thomas reported that his wife, Virginia, received salary and benefits from two conservative advocacy groups she created, Liberty Central and Liberty Consulting. The amounts were not disclosed; they are not required.

Two justices reported receiving royalties for books they published in recent years. Justice Stephen Breyer traveled the country to promote his new book "Making Our Democracy Work." He received nearly $60,000 in royalties.

Justice Antonin Scalia took in $38,000 for "Making Your Case," the book about legal advocacy that he co-wrote with Bryan Garner.

Breyer also reported selling his shares of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., valued at $15,000 to $50,000. The stock sale allowed Breyer to take part in the court's consideration of Wal-Mart's effort to end a massive sex discrimination lawsuit. The court is expected to decide that case by the end of June.

.

Scalia Lends Some Italian Help to Sotomayor

Monday, 07 Jun 2010 07:19 PM

WASHINGTON — It's not just what you say, but how you say it, Justice Antonin Scalia often advises lawyers.

So when Justice Sonia Sotomayor was having trouble with an Italian word Monday, she turned to Scalia, the court's resident language maven. And one New Yorker to another, they sorted it out right there on the bench in front of an amused audience.

Sotomayor hesitated as she was about to say the name of an Italian cruise line that figured in the opinion she was summarizing involving a woman who broke her leg on a cruise.

"Costa Cruises responded that she should have sued a related company called Costa — I'm going to ask my colleague Justice Scalia to say it right," Sotomayor said. The company's name is Costa Crociere.

"Kroo-chee-ER-ay," said Scalia, the son of a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College.

"Kroo-chee-ER-ay," the Bronx-born Sotomayor repeated, adding, "I want to put the Spanish accent on it." .

.

Source: http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/scalia-sotomayor-italian-help/2010/06/07/id/361310

.

Supreme Court Considers Federal Corruption Law

Posted:

12/7/09

This week the Supreme Court will consider three challenges to a federal corruption law that has been used to prosecute a number of fraud cases, including those of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former Illinois governor George Ryan and some Enron executives.

Critics claim the language of the law is too vague, but many prosecutors say they depend on it when going after crooked politicians and business executives, The Washington Post reported. The government is currently using the provision in its case against Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor accused of trying to sell President Obama's former Senate seat.

The controversy focuses on a phrase that says it is illegal for public or private employees to "deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." That ambiguous language has recently caused cases to get caught up in lower courts, bringing criticism from federal judges.

Justice Antonin Scalia has pushed for a review of the law, according to the Post. Scalia wrote it "invites abuse by headline-grabbing prosecutors in pursuit of local officials, state legislators and corporate C.E.O.'s who engage in any manner of unappealing or ethically questionable conduct."

After refusing to consider the law last term, the court has now agreed to review it starting Tuesday.

.
Source: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/12/07/supreme-court-considers-federal-corruption-law/

ANTONIN SCALIA'S THIRTY MINUTES OF FAME

Here's another installment from the Jesuit Desensitization (orientation) File:

Justice Scalia On The Record
60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl Interviews The Supreme Court Justice About His Public And Private Life


(CBS) His years at Xavier, where he went to mass at the church of St. Francis Xavier next door, deepened his Catholic faith.

Scalia says he gave the priesthood some thought.

"And decided no?" Stahl asks.

"And decided he was not calling me," Scalia explains.

"What is the connection between your Catholicism, your Jesuit education, and your judicial philosophy?" Stahl asks.

"It has nothing to do with how I decide cases," Scalia replies. "My job is to interpret the Constitution accurately. And indeed, there are anti-abortion people who think that the constitution requires a state to prohibit abortion. They say that the Equal Protection Clause requires that you treat a helpless human being that's still in the womb the way you treat other human beings. I think that's wrong. I think when the Constitution says that persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, I think it clearly means walking-around persons. You don't count pregnant women twice."

He's not the only Catholic on the court - there are four others. "I've sort of been pleased that has not be a big deal that there are five Catholics on the court. Because I don’t think religion is one of the things that divides us. I do think ethnicity is," Scalia says.

"But you could see that if there is a sixth Catholic on the court, that there would be some kind of protest out there," Stahl asks,

"Maybe. The next appointee to the court is going to be a female, Protestant Hispanic. If you could find that woman, she's in!" Scalia says, laughing.

His confirmation hearings in 1986 were a breeze, and the Senate vote was unanimous. Appointed by Ronald Reagan, he was sworn in at age 50, the first Italian-American to ever serve on the Supreme Court.

"I was astounded at the amount of mail I got from Italian-Americans who were so proud. And I think the reason is they have this Mafioso thing hung around their neck. You can have an Italian governor, but he can still be a crook. But an Italian Supreme Court justice, that meant a lot to them. It was a sign of integrity, of honesty, of intellectual accomplishment," Scalia says.

He met his wife Maureen in Cambridge when she was a senior at Radcliffe and he was in his last year at Harvard Law School. They have been married for 48 years and rarely disagree, they say.

"She says she could have married so-and-so…," Scalia says.

"Oh, not really," his wife replies.

"You do. You say that. And of course the reason she didn't was that 'so-and-so [was] wishy-washy,'" Scalia says.

"This is absolutely true. He will say, 'You would have been bored.' I say, 'Oh, that’s right!' I would have been bored," Maureen Scalia says. "I would have been bored."

But she says she hasn't been bored.

"Whatever my faults are, I am not wishy-washy," Antonin Scalia adds.

The marriage has flourished: they have 9 children and 28 grandchildren.

Why so many children?

"Well, as someone said, they’re both overachievers, I guess," Maureen Scalia jokes, laughing.

"Well, we didn't set out to have nine children. We're just old-fashioned Catholics, you know? Playing what used to be known as 'Vatican roulette,'" Scalia jokes.

Continued

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 " src="http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/common/images/v2/arrow_right.gif" align=absMiddle>

Produced by Ruth Streeter
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/60minutes/main4040290_page6.shtml

THOUGHTS ON SCALIA'S LECTURE

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Thoughts on Scalia's Lecture

I am just back from a lecture given by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at LSE. Strange to think that the only lecture I have attended so far at LSE is one by an American. Much of the audience was American and simply showed up to see what Scalia would talk about. His speech, although I forget the title now, discussed Scalia's well-known criticism of the Constitution as a living document as well as his disapproval of the role of the Supreme Court as moral arbiters.

He made the audience laugh with some good quotes:

-In response to a question on limiting the power of the state with some reference to the Nuremberg Trials, he said, "Hitler made a fine automobile."

-In reference to the overturning of sodomy laws (I forget where he was referring to specifically), he said he is willing to "accept that homosexual orgies eliminate social tension and ought to be encouraged." Irony, of course.

-I forget the specific quote exactly, but it's referenced in wikipedia. In reference to his criticism of the "Living Constitution, he says he's "skeptical that societies always 'mature,' as opposed to rot." That the Constitution was written and defined so that future societies couldn't do whatever they want.

-He also criticizes the politicizing of the process of nominating new Justices. Every nomination "is like a mini-constitutional convention." "It's crazy," he said.

-Oh, and on the topic of the profile of the next judge to be nominated, he said "Probably a woman. A Hispanic woman... that's Protestant." Haha.

As his speech progressed, I became increasingly uneasy about the future of law in the U.S. I don't know why exactly. Scalia is undoubtedly intelligent, witty, and sharp-tongued. I would not want to be on the receiving end, as some students were during the Q&A, of his criticism. The U.S. is in, if not safe hands (for some minorities), capable hands. But knowing his opinions on hot topics like abortion and same-sex marriage, although he didn't explicitly express them, is worrisome to me. To Scalia, that society (or at least parts) wants these to be legal is a sign of "rotting" than "maturing." True, Scalia is not final say on these issues, but it just struck a chord with me.

I think I need to be more politically active. I'm not apathetic by any means, but I feel like more is at stake than I first thought. How in jeopardy is Roe v. Wade right now? With aging Supreme Court Justices and the possibility of a conservative present appointing conservatively minded judges, it's certainly not in the clear. I don't know. I don't think about these things often enough, I suppose, and thinking of them now, I'm just a little worried. Lots of laws seem to be very abstract for people. They can get worked up about them but at the end of the day, they are unaffected by the ultimate consequences. It's easy to be that way, but fortunately or unfortunately, the issue of abortion is relevant to all women.

Anyways, some more uplifting stories to come at some time in the future when uplifting things occur.