R.I.P.s

[Mike from Boston]

Jack Riley, 95

The coach of the 1960 Gold Medal Olympic Hockey Team and longtime hockey coach at West Point.

[DzM]

Cancer takes another.

Dan Hick (of the Hot Licks), 74.

[Low D]

Cancer takes another.

Dan Hick (of the Hot Licks), 74.

Well shit, the last train to Hicksville has truly left the station. One of a kind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSQYzLbTCLA

[Low D]

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead Following 30-Year Battle With Social Progress.

[Sportin' Life]

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead Following 30-Year Battle With Social Progress.

I will restrain myself from doing the jiggery-pokery on his grave.

No, I will say that the guy was brilliant and a great writer, despite the fact that he consistently used those talents to the wrong ends.

[Low D]

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead Following 30-Year Battle With Social Progress.

I will restrain myself from doing the jiggery-pokery on his grave.

Well twitter ain't. Here are my favourites:

Justice Wainwright @JusticeBlaine
Antonin #Scalia requested cremation in his will, but millions of women will meet tomorrow to discuss if that's really best for his body.

Antonin Scalia ‏@SCOTUS_Scalia 19h19
I'm in a tough situation, because I don't want my wife to remarry but I do want someone supervising her reproductive choices

Don Nichols ‏@TheDairylandDon 20h20 hours ago
Instead of debating whether it's ok to celebrate someone's death, try not to live a life that makes people have that debate when you're gone

[NewJerseyRich]

Prayers are with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. A hero and voice of reason in time of lunacy and political correctness. He was unabashedly staunch in his opinions of which I share many. His briefs in dissent are epic. America is a little less bright in your absence sir. Godspeed.

[Sportin' Life]

I don't know the up and coming UK Indie band Viola Beach. But they all tragically passed away in a car accident.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... crash.html

[Low D]

Prayers are with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. A hero and voice of reason in time of lunacy and political correctness. He was unabashedly staunch in his opinions of which I share many. His briefs in dissent are epic. America is a little less bright in your absence sir. Godspeed.

Meh, I realize you may share some of his politics, but he's hardly a legal mind of the ages. I would call him an ideological hack. But then, U.S.America is so bloody partisan these days (decades) it's hardly even worth mentioning.

Good article on the US Supreme Court from a canuck perspective:

Nobody on Earth could make a good enough Supreme Court justice for Republicans [Don't worry, it slags off the Dems too]
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/u-s-suprem ... -1.3447962

[Mike from Boston]

Vanity, 57 Prince protege and actress

[Mike from Boston]

Well for many of us, Justice Scalia, will always be fondly remembered for his dissent against Obamacare.

[Sportin' Life]

I was going to let him lie, but the more I think about it he deserves a little Costello-style tramping of the dirt. Especially when I see him glorified. He was a hateful and vile man who never missed an opportunity to punch down.

He used his esteemed spot on the bench to give voice to the very clearly racist idea that black students aren't as smart as whites:

"There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well .. "

He was an awful homophobe, and he believed the US government should be allowed to make laws about how people have sex. He equated gay sex with bestiality and murder. He said, "States continue to prosecute all sorts of crimes by adults “in matters pertaining to sex”: prostitution, adult incest, adultery, obscenity, and child pornography"

Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.

“It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia told [freshman Duncan] Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”

And of course he thinks, aside from having sex, gays shouldn't get married.

He thinks it is fine to execute people with mental illness. "The fact that juries continue to sentence mentally retarded offenders to death for extreme crimes shows that society’s moral outrage sometimes demands execution of retarded offenders."

He also was fine with the occasional death penalty mistake: "This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent."

He had every right, and possibly even legal reason to rule against Obamacare, but make no mistake, his was a vote for judicial activism that would overturn a law that was enacted by representatives of the people. But he often abandoned his philosophy of 'originalism' when he felt he needed to make a political point. The idea that a corporation was a person (that can have a religion!) would have been at least as strange to the founders as the notion of a machine gun or an abortion.

[Low D]

Harper Lee, 89.

Proof that you need only do one truly great thing to be truly great.

[Low D]

Umberto Eco, Italian philosopher and author (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum), dead at 84 after a fight with cancer.

[Low D]

Ramon "Mongo" Castro, Fidel's older brother, dead at 91.