(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

Things got feisty in the Supreme Court on Friday. The carefully manufactured conservative majority refused to hear an appeal from an Alabama Death Row inmate named James Barber, who had based his appeal on Alabama's proven incompetence at killing people. From NBC News:

Barber had argued that the execution would violate his right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution's Eighth Amendment. His claim was raised in light of the state's problems executing three inmates last year. Two of those executions, those of Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith, were ultimately called off when prison officials could not access a suitable vein. Another inmate, Joe James, was put to death only after a three-hour delay. The state subsequently reviewed its procedures, which was enough to convince the Supreme Court and lower courts that the execution could go ahead. The Supreme Court's brief order did not explain its reasoning in allowing Barber's execution.

Nevertheless, the Court's liberal justices went to town on the decision to let Barber die. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor ran down Alabama's sorry recent history of botched executions.

Just two months later, in November, Alabama tried to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith. Medical personnel spent an hour repeatedly puncturing Smith’s elbows, arms, and hands in their attempts to locate a vein. Eventually, they tilted him upside down, bringing his feet above his head. Smith reported that they began injecting an unknown clear substance into his neck area. Finally, medical personnel attempted a central line procedure, which involves trying to insert a longer catheter into a large vein in the torso before it enters the heart. The IV team’s move from his extremities to his collarbone to attempt the central line procedure terrified Smith because he had no idea what was happening. The repeated needle insertions in that area felt like “‘stabbing.’” After the central line procedure failed, the execution was called off...This court’s decision denying Barber’s request for a stay allows Alabama to experiment again with a human life.

Sotomayor excoriated her colleagues for allowing Alabama another shot at human experimentation without even examining the Eighth Amendment issues raised by Barber. Things are getting ferocious among the Nine Wise Souls.

In other legal news, Judge Aileen Cannon scheduled the Pool Shed Papers trial for next May, which is a long ways off, but is still before the Republican National Convention, which is a good thing. It's probably the best that the prosecution could have hoped for. From the Washington Post:

Picking a date — which could still be delayed depending on pretrial motions and other issues — was complicated. Trump was indicted on state charges earlier this year in New York and is scheduled to stand trial there in March. On top of that, Trump’s attorneys wanted Cannon to take into account his busy campaign schedule.

Oh, please. He's running a campaign as the world's most sophisticated getaway vehicle. And, believe it or not, the legal team from Camp Runamuck is still trying to get Fulton County DA Fani Willis knocked off the phony-electors case.

Trump’s attorneys accuse Willis, who is seeking a second term as district attorney in the 2024 election, of retweeting “requests for followers and campaign donations which referenced her prosecution of this investigation.” They cite an influx of donors from outside Georgia to her reelection campaign last year and claim the fundraising violates professional ethics and should disqualify her from the case.

Willis, meantime, has remained busy. From the Guardian:

In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August. The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.

That bit about the Georgia racketeering statute is intriguing. It is going to be an amazing spring.

Ten years or so ago, my daughter and I caught Tony Bennett at a lovely venue in upstate New York. A friend got us backstage and we met the singer. My daughter, who was a 1940s Manhattan lounge singer in a previous life, was wonderfully starstruck and Mr. Bennett was more gracious than he was reputed to be, and he was reputed to be gracious to a fault. It was a big moment for both of us. In addition to being a glorious singer, Tony Bennett stood up when it would have been easier not to do so. He joined Dr, King in the Selma-to-Montgomery March, which was a genuinely dangerous enterprise. From NBC News:

"When the march started, I had a strange sense of déjà vu," Bennett wrote in his 304-page autobiography. "I kept flashing back to a time twenty years earlier when my buddies and I had fought our way into Germany." Serving in World War II, Bennett's friendship with a Black servicemen was condemned by white Army officers. "It felt the same way down in Selma: the white state troopers were really hostile, and they were not shy about showing it," Bennett wrote. "There was the threat of violence all along the march route, from Montgomery to Selma, some of which was broadcast on the nightly news and really helped to make the country aware of the ugliness that was still going on in the South."

At the end of the March, a woman named Viola Liuzzo drove Bennett to the airport. She was going back when Klansmen blew her head off on the highway.

And, of course, there was always the voice, the one that even Sinatra envied. He shared it with generations of fans and other artists. His duets with k.d. lang are still golden. And, at an off-campus bar in Milwaukee, we always played "I Left My Heart In San Francisco," but we also played the flip, which remains my favorite track by this glorious, freedom-loving man. RIP, Mr. Bennett. The world swings just a bit less.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Chicken Heads" (Mighty Joe Young): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1923, are the British troops coming home from occupying Istanbul. Charles Harington — the Pathe caption writer spelled it wrong — had made his mark in World War I by detonating 19 land mines outside Messines in Belgium. Estimated at a million pounds of TNT, It was the biggest explosion in history prior to the atomic bomb. It was Burnside's mine outside Petersburg, except this one worked. It killed 10,000 Germans. From National Geographic:

“For me the most outstanding aspect of the detonation of the Messines mines is that they literally changed the face of the earth,” said Nigel Steel, a senior historian at Imperial War Museums in London and co-author of Passchendaele: The Sacrificial Ground. “It had a devastating effect on the Germans. With so many mines going off, one after the other, none of them knew how many more there were to come and whether they too were about to be killed by a cataclysmic explosion from deep within the bowels of the earth.”

History is so cool.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Smithsonian:

Now, a new analysis has confirmed that a vast “underground labyrinth” of passageways exists below the site, according to a statement from a team of researchers. The team found the tunnels beneath the ruins of Mitla, an ancient city in present-day Oaxaca. Mitla served as a religious center for the Zapotecs, a group that emerged from Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley around the sixth century B.C.E. The city’s stunning above-ground mosaics and murals still stand at the site.
In addition to local lore, historical accounts support tales of the tunnels. Writing in 1674, a Dominican chronicler named Francisco Burgoa described an extensive cavity in the earth at Mitla, which a group of Spanish missionaries decided to explore. But when they descended into the maze, “such was the corruption and bad smell, the dampness of the floor, and a cold wind which extinguished the lights, that at the little distance they had already penetrated … they resolved to come out, and ordered this infernal gate to be thoroughly closed with masonry,” wrote Burgoa, per a translation. The missionaries sealed all entrances to the tunnel network, which the Zapotecs had called Lyobaa, or “place of rest.”

Damn missionaries were such killjoys.

Hey, NPR, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!!!!

A remarkable new fossil, originating in the early Cretaceous some 125 million years ago and now described in the journal Scientific Reports, also supports this shifting view. It consists of two intertwined skeletons — an upstart mammal sinking its teeth into a much larger dinosaur. "Our best guess is that the mammal was in the middle of attacking the dinosaur," says Jordan Mallon, one of the authors of the new study and a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature...The fossil is preserved in stunning detail due to the nearby eruption of an ancient volcano, which caused ash and sudden mud flows to preserve everything in the area. They would have buried the early horned dinosaur and mammal instantly, Mallon says, in the middle of the attack.

See, ya big bastids. Mammals can kick a little ass, too, and we're still here, being happy now because you lived then.

Next week, Rep. Tim Burchett is going to run a hearing in the House on UFO'S, and I can't wait. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline. Wear the damn masks. Take the damn shots, especially the damn boosters. And spare a moment for the people of Ukraine, and for the people of the earthquake zone in Turkey and Iraq, and for the people in the flood zones in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Kentucky, and for everyone who is suffering from the worldwide heat crisis, the first of many crises stemming from the climate crisis, and for all our LGBTQ+ fellow citizens, who deserve so much better than this.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
CHARLES P. PIERCE

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.