This week Justice Stephen Breyer announced that he’s retiring creating a vacancy on the Supreme Court. In choosing Breyer’s replacement President Joe Biden reiterated a campaign promise to appoint a black woman to the Court. This is 100% the right thing to do & 100% the wrong thing to say. It undermines the candidates, making them appear lesser by dint of being considered from a vanishingly smaller pool. Had Biden said nothing he’d end up nominating a black woman, but by announcing his narrow scope he opened himself to absurdly hypocritical attacks from The Fox News Party, which clearly forgot that Ronald Reagan made a campaign promise to nominate a woman to the court, then did so. Democrats & messaging…they really are like Charlie Brown, Lucy, & the (American) football.

It seems Breyer’s decision to step down was based in part on the Court’s recent fact-free decisions about federal mask mandates. Apparently he can’t conscience continuing to serve with a room full of craven ideologues who put the Heritage Foundation agenda (to which each of the 6 conservatives are beholden) ahead of reality itself. Sad.

Also, at age 83, he is well aware of the political dirty tricks that have put those 6 conservative justices on the court despite Republicans having won the popular vote just once since 1988. If he waited he'd risk the Dems losing the Senate allowing Mitch McConnell to hijack the Court further. The most egregious dirty trick immediately followed the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of 2016. Mere hours after the news broke then-Senate Majority Leader McConnell proudly proclaimed that he would block any nominee selected by then President Barack Obama saying it was standard practice to not nominate or confirm Supreme Court Justices in an election year. He got away with it, in part because he has no principles & in part because the Democrats were overconfident that America was not as deplorable as it actually is. After The Orange Menace proved them wrong, McConnell changed Senate rules eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, paving the way for Republicans to seat 3 very young hard-right Justices & likely shaping the Court for the next 30 years (fun fact: McConnell’s hand-wringing about the Democrats attempt to change Senate rules for voting rights legislation is the shameless hypocritical cherry on top of his cheating). His excuse for blocking Garland was bullshit then, & became real time, how-do-you-live-with-yourself bullshit when he not only allowed confirmation hearings for Trump’s 3rd nominee a mere 5 weeks before the 2020 election, he rushed through an unqualified hard right religious cultist to replace the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who had died that September. President Obama’s eminently qualified moderate jurist respected on both sides of the aisle, Merrick Garland, never even got a hearing, & now we have a court that represents the opposite of American voters’ Presidential preferences over the past 30+ years. Yay democracy!

In other news BAGeL Radio turns 19 this coming Tuesday, 2/1/22. Months of insomnia in 2002 gave me the time to digitize my music collection, assemble gear, & write tons of pre-emptive anti-war opinion pieces, out of those wee hours efforts the station was born in a bedroom in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco on 2/1/03.

Today we will debut new music for you including new music by Alex the Astronaut (Sydney, Australia, @ATheAstronaut), Artsick (Oakland, CA, @ArtsickBand), Kids On A Crime Spree (Oakland, CA), The Wedding Present (Leeds, England, @WeddingPresent), & Yard Act (Leeds, England, @YardActBand).

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Videos

480 Minutes / Year 18 - Episode 4/771