Yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it.

Even if Musk doesn't buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2022

He’s right.

I'm really surprised that the person who was a Delaware Senator for 35 years and spent his whole career defending banks and credit card companies — to the point of making it harder to discharge debt in personal bankruptcies — wasn't sincere in his pledge to cancel student debt: https://t.co/3o8ef8Q4aR

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 24, 2021

Francisco introduces Glenn Greenwald’s tweet thusly:

It took only two years to go from disappearing Milo and Alex Jones to banning content said to “amplify narratives that undermine faith in NATO.”

Imagine where the line will be two years from now.

It took only two years to go from disappearing Milo and Alex Jones to banning content said to "amplify narratives that undermine faith in NATO."

Imagine where the line will be two years from now.

Censorship is an intoxicating power that endlessly expands until it's smashed. https://t.co/ShrHhTqxGY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 24, 2021

HT: Bird Dog.

Glenn Greenwald, now exiled to Substack (and behind a Paywall), is pretty disgusted at how various arms of the establishment and the Deep State cooperated to keep voters in the dark.

All of these vital facts and questions about Hunter’s activities in China were largely suppressed from the voting population by the bulk of the U.S. media, working in tandem with Silicon Valley (which simply prevented the story from being discussed and shared on its key platforms), and the intelligence community. How was this accomplished? Largely through outright propaganda, a blatant two-pronged lie: that these materials should be ignored because they constitute “Russian disinformation.”

There has never been any evidence that Russia played any role whatsoever in these materials (The New York Times acknowledged that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop”). This newly disclosed criminal probe obviously constitutes very strong evidence of their authenticity, as was the confirmation at the time from several participants in the emails that they were genuine. Critically, not even the Bidens denied the materials from the laptop were authentic, as The Times noted last night in its story about the criminal investigation into Hunter: “The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the NY Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the [laptop] files upon which they were based.”

Even the letter used by these media outlets to peddle the “Russian disinformation” lie — from known liars: former CIA and other intelligence community leaders, who claimed that the Hunter laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information” — admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

In sum, we have the extraordinary historic disgrace of media outlets collaborating with the intelligence community in the weeks before a presidential election to manufacture and peddle a propagandistic lie to justify censorship of highly relevant materials about the presidential front-runner and his family’s efforts to profit off his name — namely, that the documents were not authentic but rather “Russian disinformation.” …

Leading up to the 2020 election, much of the U.S. media and Silicon Valley giants decided that ensuring Trump’s defeat was such an overarching goal, a moral imperative, that anything and everything was justified to achieve it — including uniting with the professional liars of the CIA to disseminate blatant falsehoods about the Hunter Biden materials in order to discredit them, lead the public to believe they should be ignored, and justify their own burying and censoring of these materials.

The identification of Valerie Plame, in connection with her arranging husband Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger for purposes of disputing Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake uranium procurement efforts, was the crime of the century in the opinion of the Left, and her terrible fate was headlined everywhere, including AOL.

A far more important, and far more covert, CIA officer, not someone merely working as an analyst, the same female CIA officer portrayed in “Zero Dark Thirty” as directly responsible for tracking down Osama, has been gleefully targeted this week for exposure by the same Left.

Jane Mayer, in the New Yorker, piously avoids referring to the woman by name, but specifically describes her career, mentions her rank and official function, and castigates her for her counter-terrorism activities, styling her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture.”

NBC’s Matthew Cole discussed that agent’s age, career, and congressional appearances in detail, blamed her for “deceiving Congress” and for the existence of a US “torture program,” and hinted repeatedly that she ought to have been prosecuted. But NBC, too, bowed to the CIA’s urgent wish to protect the anonymity of an important intelligence official and avoided publishing her name.

The establishment mainstream media is just a little too self-righteous to expose the identity of important US intelligence officials when the CIA begs them not to do so. Because, after all, they have less respectable allies, like Glenn Greenwald and Peter Maass’s The Intercept, pledged “to provide a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden” and “to produce fearless, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues” to do it for them.

Let’s hope the Left will be just as keen to punish CIA outings this time, if the next Republican administration should happen to arrange to have Mr. Greenwald frog-marched out of the homosexual ghetto in Rio de Janiero in handcuffs for this one.

One special bane connected with modern liberal society’s regime of excessive tolerance is the ease with which the sexually inverted neurotic can rise from his knees on the public lavatory floor to ascend his own personal pulpit in order to impersonate the post-menopausal female moral authority figure and social reformer.

Glenn Greenwald, for instance, is a particularly resilient example. Greenwald succesfully survived a scandal which resulted from his exposure for having persistently used “sock puppet” false identities to lavish praise on his own blog postings. He more recently attached himself to the cause of “whistle blowers” like Edward Snowden and acted as go-between between the latter and Establishment newspapers. Pimping US Intelligence secrets to the Guardian and the Times is the kind of thing which, in today’s world, makes one a hero in certain circles, and the next thing you knew Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar was writing a check for $250 million to buy Greenwald his own media organization. Who better to manage such a thing than the man renowned as “the left’s most dishonest blogger?”

Even Michael Kinsley cannot abide Greenwald’s abrasive sanctimony, and Kinsley took the occasion of the publication of Green wald’s recent Snowden book, No Place to Hide, to carpet bomb the scoundrel with a scathing review published, amusingly enough, in the same New York Times.

“My position was straightforward,” Glenn Greenwald writes. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them.” You break the law, you pay the price: It’s that simple.

But it’s not that simple, as Greenwald must know. There are laws against government eavesdropping on American citizens, and there are laws against leaking official government documents. You can’t just choose the laws you like and ignore the ones you don’t like. Or perhaps you can, but you can’t then claim that it’s all very straightforward.

Greenwald was the go-between for Edward Snowden and some of the newspapers that reported on Snowden’s collection of classified documents exposing huge eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, among other scandals. His story is full of journalistic derring-do, mostly set in exotic Hong Kong. It’s a great yarn, which might be more entertaining if Greenwald himself didn’t come across as so unpleasant. Maybe he’s charming and generous in real life. But in “No Place to Hide,” Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss, convinced that every issue is “straightforward,” and if you don’t agree with him, you’re part of something he calls “the authorities,” who control everything for their own nefarious but never explained purposes.

Reformers tend to be difficult people. But they come in different flavors. There are ascetics, like Henry James’s Miss Birdseye (from “The Bostonians”), “who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after 50 years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements.”

There are narcissists like Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. These are self-canonized men who feel that, as saints, they are entitled to ignore the rules that constrain ordinary mortals. Greenwald notes indignantly that Assange was being criticized along these lines “well before he was accused of sex crimes by two women in Sweden.” (Two decades ago the British writer Michael Frayn wrote a wonderful novel and play called “Now You Know,” about a character similar to Assange.)

Then there are political romantics, played in this evening’s performance by Edward Snowden, almost 31 years old, with the sweet, innocently conspiratorial worldview of a precocious teenager. He appears to yearn for martyrdom and, according to Greenwald, “exuded an extraordinary equanimity” at the prospect of “spending decades, or life, in a supermax prison.”

And Greenwald? In his mind, he is not a reformer but a ruthless revolutionary — Robespierre, or Trotsky. The ancien régime is corrupt through and through, and he is the man who will topple it. Sounding now like Herbert Marcuse with his once fashionable theory of “repressive tolerance,” Greenwald writes about “the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: Pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience and conformity.”
Continue reading the main story

Throughout “No Place to Hide,” Greenwald quotes any person or publication taking his side in any argument. If an article or editorial in The Washington Post or The New York Times (which he says “takes direction from the U.S. government about what it should and shouldn’t publish”) endorses his view on some issue, he is sure to cite it as evidence that he is right. If Margaret Sullivan, the public editor (ombudsman, or reader representative) of The Times, agrees with him on some controversy, he is in heaven. He cites at length the results of a poll showing that more people are coming around to his notion that the government’s response to terrorism after 9/11 is more dangerous than the threat it is designed to meet.

Greenwald doesn’t seem to realize that every piece of evidence he musters demonstrating that people agree with him undermines his own argument that “the authorities” brook no dissent. No one is stopping people from criticizing the government or supporting Greenwald in any way. Nobody is preventing the nation’s leading newspaper from publishing a regular column in its own pages dissenting from company or government orthodoxy. If a majority of citizens now agree with Greenwald that dissent is being crushed in this country, and will say so openly to a stranger who rings their doorbell or their phone and says she’s a pollster, how can anyone say that dissent is being crushed? What kind of poor excuse for an authoritarian society are we building in which a Glenn Greenwald, proud enemy of conformity and government oppression, can freely promote this book in all media and sell thousands of copies at airport bookstores surrounded by Homeland Security officers?

Read the whole thing.

No link, the author (wussy wimp!), finding himself under fire, deleted the tweet.

The sanctimonious left, represented by HuffPo, Salon, the Atlantic, &c. had a collective cow over liberal Time journalist Michael Grunwald’s Saturday tweet, which simply endorsed one more example of Big Government activism.

Grunwald’s employer released this statement:

Michael Grunwald posted an offensive tweet from his personal Twitter account that is in no way representative of TIME’s views. He regrets having tweeted it, and he removed it from his feed.

And Grunwald himself groveled at Twitter:

It was a dumb tweet. I’m sorry. I deserve the backlash. (Maybe not the anti-Semitic stuff but otherwise I asked for it.)

Myself, I paraphrased Grunwald’s tweet on Facebook last night, telling two liberaltarian friends who were indignant about the British government detaining Glenn Greenwald’s catamite for nine hours, that I can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Glenn Greenwald.

Glenn Greenwald

When representatives of the homosexual underworld rise from their knees on the mens’ room floor to ascend portable pulpits from which they begin grandiloquently moralizing, I always contend that the most extreme skepticism is in order.

Glenn Greenwald has also risen professionally recently from traditionally being described as the “Left’s most dishonest blogger,” renowned for shameless self-promotion and for sock-puppetry, i.e., praising and defending his own postings using false identities. Suddenly, almost overnight, today he has become an internationally-admired crusading journalist, the champion of individual privacy, protector of whistle-blowers, and critic of the tyranny of Barack Obama publishing from a lofty establishment perch, in the Guardian no less.

In evaluating the justice of Eric Snowden’s cause and the bona fides of the muculent Mr. Greenwald, I suggest noting this GifWatch article, which points out that Greenwald is a regular speaker at the annual get-together of the “International Socialist Organization (ISO)… one of America’s main Marxist ‘revolutionary’ parties… represent[ing] the ‘Marxist tradition, founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and continued by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky.’”

In 2011, Glenn Greenwald addressed his fellow revolutionary socialists, discussing Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki was an American naturalized Yemeni militant, an al-Qaeda regional commander and senior ‘talent recruiter’ and a terrorism planner who, prior to the attack, was corresponding with the Fort Hood shooter and who helped plan the attempted attack by the ‘Underwear Bomber‘.

Greenwald describes al-Awlaki as someone whose only crimes were ”speak[ing] effectively to the Muslim world about violence that the U.S. commits in [Yemen] and the responsibility of Muslims to stand up to this violence.”

In the same speech, Grrenwald expresses his hope for a weakening of the United States and its malign “imperialism”, and characterizes the 9/11 attacks by Al-Qaeda as very “minimal in scope”.

So, when you read Glenn Greenwald offering his own evaluation of the nature, scope, significance, and legal status of NSA surveillance activities and of the motives and perspective of Mr. Snowden, I suggest that you consider the record and the character of the source.

Hat tip to Clarice Feldman.

Lord knows, I don’t often agree with ultra-left blogger Glenn Greenwald about anything, but what do you know? Even the most unlikely of occurrences are possible in this best of all possible worlds.

Here‘s Glenn responding to the recent Rasmussen Poll finding national approval of Congress to have fallen to an all-time low of 9% by concluding the democrat House majority is safe in perpetuity and it’s time for moonbats to turn on the democrat party leadership and start defeating any democrat congressmen discernibly to the right of Leon Trotsky.

That’ll learn ’em. And those democrat leaders will then start obediently toeing the Party Line (and I don’t mean the democrat party line).

Many progressives and other Democratic supporters are reflexively opposed to any conduct that might result in the defeat of even a single, relatively inconsequential Democratic member of Congress or the transfer of even a single district to GOP control. No matter how dissatisfied such individuals might be with the Democratic Congress, they are unwilling to do anything different to change what they claim to find so unsatisfactory. Even though uncritically cheering on any and every candidate with a “D” after his or her name has resulted in virtually nothing positive — and much that is negative — many progressives continue, rather bafflingly and stubbornly, to insist that if they just keep doing the same thing (cheering for the election of more and more Democrats), then somehow, someday, something different might occur. But, as the cliché teaches, repeatedly engaging in the same conduct and expecting different results is the very definition of foolishness.

As foolish as it is, this intense aversion to jeopardizing any Democratic incumbents might be considered rational if doing so carried the risk of restoring Republican control of Congress. But there is no such risk, and there will be none for the foreseeable future. No matter what happens, the Democrats, by all accounts, are going to control both houses of Congress after the 2008 election. Their margin in the House, which is currently 31 seats, will, by even the most conservative estimates, increase to at least 50 seats. No advertising campaign or activist group could possibly swing control of Congress to the Republicans this year, and — given the Brezhnev-era-like reelection rates for incumbents in America — it is extremely unlikely that the House will be controlled by anyone other than Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi for years to come.

The critical question, then, is not who will control Congress. The Democrats will. That is a given. The vital question is what they will do with that control — specifically, will they continue to maintain and increase their own power by accommodating the right, or will they be more responsive, accountable and attentive to the political values of their base?

As long as they know that progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do, then it will only be rational for congressional Democrats to ignore progressives and move as far to the right as they can. With the blind, unconditional support of Democrats securely in their back pocket, Democratic leaders will quite rationally conclude that the optimal way to increase their own power, to transform more Republican districts into Blue Dog Democratic seats, and thereby make themselves more secure in their leadership positions, is to move their caucus to the right. Because the principal concern of Democratic leaders is to maintain and increase their own power, they will always do what they perceive is most effective in achieving that goal, which right now means moving their caucus to the right to protect their Blue Dogs and elect new ones.

That is precisely what has happened over the past two years. It is why a functional right-wing majority has dominated the House notwithstanding the change of party control — and the change in direction — that American voters thought they were mandating in 2006. As progressive activist Matt Stoller put it, “Blue Dogs are the swing voting block in the House, they are self-described conservatives, and they are perfectly willing to use their status on every action considered by the House.” The more the Democratic leadership accommodates the Blue Dog caucus — the more their power relies upon expanding their numbers through the increase of Blue Dog seats — the less relevant will be the question of which party controls Congress.

The linchpin for that destructive strategy is uncritical progressive support for congressional Democrats. That is what ensures that Democratic leaders will continue to pursue a rightward-moving strategy as the key to consolidating their own power. Right now, when it comes time to decide whether to capitulate to the demands of the right, Beltway Democrats think: “If we capitulate, that is one less issue the GOP can use to harm our Blue Dogs.” And they have no countervailing consideration to weigh against that, because they perceive — accurately — that there is no cost to capitulating, only benefits from doing so, because progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do. That is the strategic calculus that must change if the behavior of Democrats in Congress is to change.

Democratic leaders must learn that they cannot increase their majority in Congress by trampling on the political values of their own base.

Let’s hope the entire nutroots base, responds to Glenn in the manner of Molly Bloom:

I was a Flower of the mountains yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him and yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

Ann Althouse, responds to James Risen’s New York Times story on the left blogosphere’s recent conniption fit over Obama’s flipflop on FISA Telecom immunity:

You can’t please everybody, and if you want to be President, you really can’t please Greenwald, Hamsher, and Kos. Obama is taking the right position now, and he should defend it frankly.

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Andy Borowitz, at Huffington Post, was also impatient with the left.

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.

“Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes,” wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. “He must be stopped.”

——————————

The Wall Street Journal notices Obama’s speedy march toward the Center with slightly less congratulation.

We’re beginning to understand why Barack Obama keeps protesting so vigorously against the prospect of “George Bush’s third term.” Maybe he’s worried that someone will notice that he’s the candidate who’s running for it.

Most Presidential candidates adapt their message after they win their party nomination, but Mr. Obama isn’t merely “running to the center.” He’s fleeing from many of his primary positions so markedly and so rapidly that he’s embracing a sizable chunk of President Bush’s policy. Who would have thought that a Democrat would rehabilitate the much-maligned Bush agenda?

Take the surveillance of foreign terrorists. Last October, while running with the Democratic pack, the Illinois Senator vowed to “support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies” that assisted in such eavesdropping after 9/11. As recently as February, still running as the liberal favorite against Hillary Clinton, he was one of 29 Democrats who voted against allowing a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee reform of surveillance rules even to come to the floor.

Two weeks ago, however, the House passed a bill that is essentially the same as that Senate version, and Mr. Obama now says he supports it. Apparently legal immunity for the telcos is vital for U.S. national security, just as Mr. Bush has claimed. Apparently, too, the legislation isn’t an attempt by Dick Cheney to gut the Constitution. Perhaps it is dawning on Mr. Obama that, if he does become President, he’ll be responsible for preventing any new terrorist attack. So now he’s happy to throw the New York Times under the bus.

Next up for Mr. Obama’s political blessing will be Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy. Only weeks ago, the Democrat was calling for an immediate and rapid U.S. withdrawal. When General David Petraeus first testified about the surge in September 2007, Mr. Obama was dismissive and skeptical. But with the surge having worked wonders in Iraq, this week Mr. Obama went out of his way to defend General Petraeus against MoveOn.org’s attacks in 2007 that he was “General Betray Us.” Perhaps he had a late epiphany.

Look for Mr. Obama to use his forthcoming visit to Iraq as an excuse to drop those withdrawal plans faster than he can say Jeremiah Wright “was not the person that I met 20 years ago.” The Senator will learn – as John McCain has been saying – that withdrawal would squander the gains from the surge, set back Iraqi political progress, and weaken America’s strategic position against Iran. Our guess is that he’ll spin this switcheroo as some kind of conditional commitment, saying he’ll stay in Iraq as long as Iraqis are making progress on political reconciliation, and so on. As things improve in Iraq, this would be Mr. Bush’s policy too.

Mr. Obama has also made ostentatious leaps toward Mr. Bush on domestic issues. While he once bid for labor support by pledging a unilateral rewrite of Nafta, the Democrat now says he favors free trade as long as it works for “everybody.” His economic aide, Austan Goolsbee, has been liberated from the five-month purdah he endured for telling Canadians that Mr. Obama’s protectionism was merely campaign rhetoric. Now that Mr. Obama is in a general election, he can’t scare the business community too much.

Back in the day, the first-term Senator also voted against the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But last week he agreed with their majority opinion in the Heller gun rights case, and with their dissent against the liberal majority’s ruling to ban the death penalty for rape. Mr. Obama seems to appreciate that getting pegged as a cultural lefty is deadly for national Democrats – at least until November.

Andrew Sullivan momentarily paused in his perenniel campaign of demanding kinder treatment for cuththroats to second the leftwing blogosphere’s posterboy of prolixity, Glenn Greenwald, in attacking the amiable Glenn Reynolds.

According to Andrew Sullivan, Reynolds is guilty, forsooth, “of never challeng(ing) in any serious way the abuses of power in this administration nor the extremism of the Malkinesque blogosphere.”

Those who haven’t been drinking moonbat koolaid don’t actually believe this administration is guilty of abuses of power at all. Really, if anything, it is guilty of neglecting to prosecute and punish war-time sedition and treason.

And face it, Andrew, anyone still really libertarian is on the right, and not on the San Francisco-style left. A commitment to socialism at home and surrender overseas, even seasoned with debauchery, is not libertarianism, old boy. Barry Goldwater was right: There’s nothing wrong with extremism in defense of liberty. Those of us still libertarian, still on the right, respect and admire Michelle Malkin precisely because she is a fighter. In fact, as a symbolic rejoinder on this subject, I’m going to add this little item to my links collection today.

I can understand, of course, how Michelle Malkin would scare someone like you.

—————————————

Turning to that odious windbag Greenwald, aptly recognized by Charles Johnson as “the left’s most dishonest blogger” (a title not easily achieved):

On Tuesday, Greenwald indulged in a little gamesmanship, first pooh-pooh’ing the significance of last weekend’s ravings in Jeff Goldstein‘s Comment section by deranged (then University of Arizona Psychology Instructor) Deborah Frisch (who subsequently resigned), and then proceeding to claim rhetorically the moral high ground in order to equate an obvious exasperated rant by Mischa of Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler with Dr. Frisch’s sinister and highly disturbing comments, applying imagined violence and sexual acts to Mr. Goldstein’s children.

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Mischa’s rant:

So keep that in mind. Should we ever make the mistake of capturing any of the perpetrators of the war crime against PFCs Menchaca and Tucker alive, we can forget about interrogating them in order to catch the rest, according to the Supreme Whores. Well, unless they’re willing to give up information if we ask “pretty please?”, since anything other than that has been deemed illegal by those blackrobed tyrants. Are we exaggerating? Try doing anything to those mutilating darlings of the Supremes in order to extract life-saving intel from them, and then wait for the Supreme Whores to decide that you were “humiliating” them in doing so.

Five ropes, five robes, five trees.

Some assembly required.

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Personally, I have a lot more of a problem with the name-calling language “Supreme Whores,” than I do with the “five ropes, five trees… Some assembly required” rhetorical flourish at the end.

OK, Mischa’s posting is not an example of closely-reasoned and totally exemplary blogging, but the current debates over public issues and policy are often emotionally charged, and we all blog unevenly. Many bloggers occasionally descend to the literary form of the rant. But, frankly, the most lurid right wing rant has a tendency to resemble an example of the most dignified and restrained expressions of partisanship found on many of the left’s best known blogs. Mischa would have to chug down a lot of tequila shots, and be in a really bad mood, to come even close to Digby or Atrios on an average day.

Greenwald’s alleged outrage over Mischa’s post is just like the faux-pious nonsense from leftwing moonbats filling up my own Comments section over the Hadji Girl song: just a bunch of opportunistic righteous posturing, the left’s favorite form of self-gratification.

There is a great deal of difference between the downright spooky comments involving his kids that Jeff Goldstein was receiving over the weekend, ultimately accompanied by some very real Denial of Service attacks, and Mischa’s crack. The Supreme Court was not put out of action for a few days, and Justice Stevens didn’t lose any sleep wondering if Mischa was really serious about that tree and that rope.