Interest in conflicts
Scripsit Царь наш:
For your right-wing bias, HuffPo is lauding the serious investigative journalism of the Times for exposing how this is a clear conflict of interest for Justice Thomas, and suggests that the whole point of the recent decision to overturn corporate funding of political groups was conveniently timed to allow a stunt like this.
HuffPo, of course, is wrong on both counts. This poses no conflict of interest for Justice Thomas whatsoever, for we assume that Mrs. Thomas can think for herself, without her husband telling her what to do or say. If he formed a political action committee, odds are this would cloud his thinking. But his wife’s efforts are independent of her spouse. Yes, the Czar would feel the same way if Justice Roberts’s spouse formed a liberal-leaning action committee.
Your Volgi finds it most curious on how when Virginia Thomas starts some twinkie Tea Party group, it’s an insurmountable conflict of interest for Justice Thomas*, but when Tom Daschle’s wife serves for years as a lobbyist for Boeing, Lockheed, American Airlines, Indian tribes, phamaceutical companies, and a whole host of other heavily-regulated constituencies. it’s no big deal.
Or when Tom Foley makes his wife an unelected, unaccountable powerbroker on the Hill, it‘s well, just, you now, sort of curious.
Or when Michelle Obama is given a well-compensated but sketchy job (which disappeared when she went to Washington) at the heavily regulated and subsidized University of Chicago, which tripled her compensation in the year her husband was elected senator (whence he could and did send a million-dollar earmark to the hospital), it’s just another glorious step in the amazing career of our trail-blazing, fashion-model, have-it-all miracle Michelle. Quoth the media: You go, girl!
*Anybody else suspect that, given the archaic title for Supreme Court Justices and his well-known sense of humor, Clarence Thomas has at some point said to his clerks à la Sidney Poitier, “They call me Mister Justice!”
Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.