Only weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to take the case, which had been making its way through the appellate courts, Cheney and Scalia chummed around on a private duck-hunting trip in Louisiana.

Cheney’s rationale for keeping his notes secret, he says, is that he doesn’t want to jeopardize future officers of the executive branch in their ability to hold similar clandestine proceedings, which would interfere with their ability to formulate policy. Cheney has been silent about bribery or collusion, nor did he give even a semblance of an argument as to why, in a democracy, secret energy policy deliberations are necessary. Who can blame him? With our media reasons and arguments are unnecessary. Cheney, like Scalia, practically part of the Bush administration, are of the Adolph Hitler school of lying: if you tell a lie make it a big one; the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed.
 

by Brad Russell
 

Don’t you love surprises? When Bush's energy policy was announced, it was an extended commitment to polluting fossil fuels, including tens of billions of dollars in subsidies and tax credits to the already stinking petroleum industry, resurrection of moribund nuclear power, with a token hand full of dollars for solar and alternate energy sources There was nary a word about conservation – which would, after all, interrupt the massive profits of Bush and Cheney’s friends - nor a peep about the environment.

Being a perjured judge goes hand-in-hand with being a lousy writer and Scalia does not disappoint. His written decision in this case sounds like the ramblings of a skid row drunk. To call him a liar is to pay the scoundrel a compliment. In short, he’s an unhinged lunatic. How his kind has come to positions of power and respect in what is supposed to be the greatest country in the world and the standard bearer for democracy is an issue so far out of the pale, only history knows; and she ain’t speaking just yet. Scalia is a piece of a puzzle of an administration completely out of control, a gang of thugs and neo-conservative extremists, hand on the button, that makes the time of the robber barons of the late 19th Century and the Tea Pot Dome era seem like the golden age of philanthropy.

I cannot even decipher Scalia’s lie in order to unravel it. Here is part of what he said in his written decision:

Recusal would in my judgment harm the court. If I were to withdraw from this case, it would be because some of the press has argued that the vice president would suffer political damage if he should lose this appeal…But since political damage often comes from the government’s losing official-action suits, and since political damage can readily be characterized as a stain on reputation and integrity, recusing in the face of such charges would give elements of the press a veto over participation of any justices who had social contacts with or were even known to be friends of, a named official.