#Jack Scalia

[camyfilms]

RED EYE 2005

You know what I think? I think you're not such an honest person. Because I've been following you for eight weeks now, and I never once saw you order anything but a fucking Sea Breeze!

[brokehorrorfan]

Fear City has been released on Blu-ray exclusively from Shout Factory. Limited to 1,800, the 1984 neo-noir exploitation thriller is available for $29.98.

Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, King of New York) directs from a script by frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John (King of New York). Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Scalia, and Melanie Griffith.

Both the theatrical and unrated cuts have been newly scanned in 2K from the 35mm interpositive. No other extras are included.

Features:

Theatrical cut (95 minutes)

Unrated cut (97 minutes)

There's a psychopath on the loose in Manhattan who is stalking and mutilating beautiful strippers employed by booking agents Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and Nicky Parzeno (Jack Scalia). But when the madman targets Matt's ex-girlfriend, Loretta (Melanie Griffith), he must confront his own violent past to stop the sadistic killer. Welcome to Fear City, where thrills are cheap, and human life is even cheaper.

[movies-to-add-to-your-tbw]

Title: Red Eye

Rating: PG-13

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jayma Mays, Jack Scalia, Robert Pine, Terry Press, Brittany Oaks, Laura Johnson, Max Kasch, Kyle Gallner, Angela Paton, Loren Lester, Suzie Plakson, Monica McSwain, Dane Farwell, Beth Toussaint, Adam Gobble

Release year: 2005

Genres: thriller, mystery

Blurb: An overnight flight to Miami quickly becomes a battle for survival when Lisa realises her seatmate plans to use her as part of a chilling assassination plot against the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. If she refuses to cooperate, her father will be killed. As the miles tick by, she's in a race against time to find a way to warn the potential victims before it's too late.

[oldtimesnew]

Sasson 1989

Jack Scalia

[movie-titlecards]

The Last Leprechaun (1998)

My rating: 2/10

Quite possibly the worst thing David Warner has ever been in, and that is a low, low bar to squeeze under.

[kwebtv]

The Star Maker - NBC - May 11 - 12, 1981

Drama (2 episodes)

Running Time: 192 minutes

Stars:

Rock Hudson as Danny Youngblood

Suzanne Pleshette as Margot Murray

Melanie Griffith as Dawn Barnett Youngblood

Teri Copley as Angel Parker

Jack Scalia as Vince Martino

Jeffrey Tambor as Harry Lanson

Cathie Shirriff as Susan Orwell

April Clough as Honey Potts

Kristian Alfonso as Kelly Blake

Titos Vandis as Edgar J. Winters

Ed McMahon as Lou Parker

Brenda Vaccaro as Dolores Baker

Frank Aletter as Harvey Denver

Fred Dryer as Milt Cooperman

Fred Sadoff as Dr. Don Gold

Jim Antonio as Fred Windsor

Dan Hamilton as Spiros Livadas

Lawrence Brame as Steve Brady

[screenshothaven]

The Last Leprechaun (1998)

[milliondollarbaby87]

Red Eye (2005) Review

When Lisa Reisert is kidnapped on a flight by stranger Jackson Rippner, she is threatened by the murder of her father to then help with the plot to assassinate a Homeland Security official. ⭐️⭐️ Continue reading Red Eye (2005) Review

[sesiondemadrugada]

Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023).

[sgiandubh]

The Lady and the Unicorn

This made the news a while ago, with the usual imbecile speculation on trademark infringement (that particular troll has no idea, of course, and I shall immediately explain what I think). Today, though, there seems to be some ironic reaction from S to the fact that Beyoncé's own white label bourbon, a supposed nod to her family's past, seems to closely mirror The Sassenach's bottle design:

People did not seem to have understood it at all, as they should have considered also the other story he immediately added to this one:

And of course, the Gay Troll went with her sad, tired, mendacious couplet about The Unicorn in the Room, heh. That particular cretin seems to have forgotten that a unicorn also means...

Or, for our beloved Spanish Mafia girls...

Of course, SS is still frolicking somewhere around the Minicorn Pasture (meaning that its market value would be, in my book, evaluated somewhere between 1 and 3 million USD - based on absolutely nothing else but common sense and my personal hunch), but his pun is just about S being confident that his business ventures will be successful, nothing more - as shown in the medals' story also featuring an unicorn, of course. And mark me, I see absolutely nothing hostile towards Beyoncé: it's just ironic and well, it has no legal implications whatsoever, as a design similarity does not qualify as a trademark or copyright infringement, except in very precise situations, such as when iconic brands are involved.

The above was not invented by me, but stated by the US Supreme Court, in its very recent (June 2023) decision in Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products, LLC (you can read it all here, including Justice Kagan's very clear legal opinion on SCOTUS' interpretation: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-148_3e04.pdf). In a nutshell, the design of a product will always be protected by the provisions of the Lanham Act, only if unfair use (such as a parody of the product by a toy maker, as in Jack Daniel's decision, or a close copycat) could dilute a 'famous mark' (meaning by this either cause unjustified prejudice or cause confusion among the consumers). In all the other situations, the SCOTUS' legally binding precedent, in the Wal-Mart Stores, Inc v. Samara Brothers, Inc affair (2000), applies:

Or, in Justice Scalia's unanimous opinion: 'design, like color, is not inherently distinctive' . Neither that horse, nor that unicorn, are yet iconic and therefore the trademark infringement discussion is empty and void. As is the slanderous insinuation that SS copied a Japanese whisky brand's bottle design - Suntory's Hibiki being the brand quoted by the Mordorian experts.

If anything, Suntory's Hibiki eerily resembles that FMN gin bottle design - but why embarrass ourselves with facts, huh?

as compared to...

[70s80sandbeyond]

Jay Acovone and Jack Scalia in "Hollywood Beat" (ABC, 1985)

[mariacallous]

Let’s just get this out of the way: you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Barrett, after all, was installed on the Supreme Court for the sole purpose of helping overturn Roe v. Wade — a smug little move that ensured a female justice joined the men in eradicating bodily autonomy for women. Lately, however, she’s broken with the MAGA majority on some things that are making her once-fervent backers furious.

Is Amy Coney Barrett our new David Souter, a Republican appointee who turned out to be a progressive jurist who routinely upheld liberal values? Or perhaps our new Anthony Kennedy, often the swing vote in 5-4 disputes, a theoretical median justice who could be persuaded to side with liberals if he got the spotlight? Or maybe she’s more like Chief Justice John Roberts, occasionally flipping sides to burnish her legacy?

Barrett is not really any of those. She likely aspires to be like her mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked. Scalia was a reliably hard-right conservative who was very occasionally a champion for good things like robust Fourth Amendment protections. Scalia sided with the liberal justices on three key cases that restricted the ability of police to perform warrantless searches, writing the majority opinion in each. When Barrett was on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, she sided with law enforcement nearly nine times out of ten, but she has joined the Court’s liberals on some Fourth Amendment cases.

What Barrett is not, most definitely, is a justice in the behavioral mode of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. She hasn’t adopted their trollish, pugnacious vibe and doesn’t quite seem to be taking her cues from the pages of the Daily Caller or the Federalist. Nor has she adopted Scalia’s habit of caustic mockery, but that might only be the case because while Scalia was lauded for that, women simply aren’t as free to behave that way. Instead, Barrett joined Justice Sonia Sotomayor for a public appearance where they insisted the Court is just chock full of collegial camaraderie.

“She checked identity politics boxes”

Right now, conservatives are mad because Barrett sided with Roberts and the Court’s liberals in the 5-4 decision requiring the administration to pay close to $2 billion owed to USAID contractors for work they had already completed.

Terminally online bottom feeders like Jack Posobiec, Laura Loomer, and Mike Cernovich smeared her as a “DEI hire.” Loomer even posted a picture of Barrett’s family, which includes two adopted Black children, just to make sure that everyone understood the DEI slam was not just misogynistic but also racist. Josh Blackman, a conservative law professor and commentator who enthusiastically backed Barrett’s nomination, now whines that she “had no business being appointed to the Supreme Court” and also that maybe she wasn’t even qualified for her seat on the Seventh Circuit.

Notably, Roberts doesn’t face as much ire as Barrett despite also occasionally siding with the liberals for rulings that infuriate conservatives, including in the USAID case. There are probably two reasons for this. First, Roberts is a white straight man, so he can never be tarred with the DEI brush or be told that he only got the job because he “checked identity politics boxes,” as Cernovich said about Barrett. As important, though, is that Roberts is not a Trump appointee, and therefore is not expected to show the same level of personal mob-style fealty required of Barrett.

Hence Blackman’s complaint that not only is Barrett not intellectually qualified to be on the Court but that he is “fairly confident she does not like President Trump.” The framing here is that Barrett owes her position to Trump and therefore owes him love, devotion, and voting in lockstep in return. It’s part of the right’s profound disregard for the separation of powers. They have no interest in a judiciary that is independent from Trump’s wishes.

It isn’t just the USAID case that has MAGA types calling for Barrett’s head. Internet randos were incandescent with rage that she didn’t vote to block Trump’s sentencing in his New York hush money criminal case earlier this year. In 2024, when she joined the liberals in dissenting on a voting rights case, MAGA luminary Cat Turd called her “Amy Commie Barrett.”

While the more low-rent MAGA commentators like Posobiec and Cernovich might be furious with Barrett, she hasn’t lost the support of the person who really matters. No, not Donald Trump, though he vaguely defended her, calling her a “very good woman” after the USAID decision. Leonard Leo, chair of the Federalist Society and the person who arguably has been the most instrumental in ensuring the Court’s lurch to the right, still thinks Barrett is doing swell, saying she is “in the vanguard of conservative jurisprudence on abortion, racial preferences, the administrative state, religious freedom, Trump immunity, guns and the Second Amendment” even after her vote on the USAID case. Ed Whelan, another former Scalia clerk best known for his unceasing devotion to smearing Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, is also still a big fan.

One thing right-wingers are correct about is that it is difficult to parse Barrett’s overall judicial philosophy. She definitely fancies herself as an originalist, the conservative legal philosophy that says the Constitution must be frozen in amber, interpreted only as it was at the time of its ratification. But she doesn’t love the Clarence Thomas approach to originalism, which cherry-picks the historical record to get a preferred result.

When it comes to reproductive health or LGBTQ cases, Barrett is a true blue hard-right conservative, refusing ever to recognize that denying people bodily autonomy is inherently bad. In the oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe, she blithely mused that since all states now have safe haven laws where people can surrender an infant without being prosecuted, was abortion really necessary? In 2023, she joined the rightwing majority in holding that a Christian website designer could discriminate against same-sex couples and refuse to work with them. She’s so far afield on trans issues that in a recent oral argument she seemed completely surprised that there is a long and vicious history of discrimination against trans people.

In contrast to voting in lockstep on those issues, Barrett has broken with the MAGA majority on two recent Environmental Protection Agency cases. She wrote the dissenting opinions, joined by the Court’s three liberal justices, in Ohio v. EPA and San Francisco v. EPA. But dissenting cost Barrett nothing. In both cases, there were already five votes from the Court’s other right-wingers, ensuring that the EPA’s ability to regulate smog and water quality was gutted even without her help.

That’s also the case with her dissent in Fischer v. United States. There, the majority narrowed the scope of the federal obstruction law used to charge many of the January 6 rioters. In dissenting, Barrett said that the rioters were undoubtedly blocking an official proceeding by, well, rioting. The next day, however, she turned around and joined the right-wingers in giving Trump sweeping presidential immunity for actions that incited that very riot, albeit favoring a slightly narrower approach.

As much as Trump supporters are currently howling about Barrett being a secret Democrat or whatever, the idea that Barrett is a reliable vote for liberals is just not accurate. In the 2023 term, she joined Alito and Thomas, the Court’s most conservative jurists, more than 80 percent of the time. She’s been a reliable conservative vote for ending abortion, ending affirmative action, and ending most regulations on guns.

All of this makes it difficult to guess whether Barrett will help serve as a bulwark against Trump’s worst excesses. She’s slightly more hawkish than her conservative colleagues on procedural issues, meaning she’s not always as ready to intervene to grant emergency relief without full litigation. However, just because she prefers that the Court take cases where a record has been developed at the lower court stage rather than ruling on them on the shadow docket doesn’t mean she won’t ultimately side with conservatives. In Kennedy v. Bremerton, the plaintiff was initially handed a procedural loss, but ultimately Barrett joined the right-wingers, upending the First Amendment by basically legalizing coerced Christian prayers in public schools.

A very slender reed of hope

Barrett could emerge as the median justice, the one representing the center of the Court’s ideology, a position that Justice Brett Kavanaugh has recently occupied. But that’s actually part of the problem.

The Court has lurched so far rightward that Barrett’s views are sometimes moderate in comparison to her more hardline colleagues, but that doesn’t mean she’s liberal or that she will consistently work to stop Trump’s worst excesses. It likely does mean, though, that she represents the best possibility for liberal outcomes at the Court and that litigants will need to court her as a possible swing vote the way they once did Anthony Kennedy.

Unfortunately, Kennedy was a swing vote on a Court otherwise split ideologically down the middle, meaning each side needed him for that critical fifth vote. Conservatives can lose Barrett and still have five votes. Barrett knows this, which makes her principled dissents ring a bit hollow.

Barrett can afford to make herself look moderate if doing so doesn’t result in Trump’s desires being thwarted. It’s not incorrect to say she might be the best hope for liberals, but that hope is a pretty slender reed.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jack Wheatley at MMFA:

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has come under criticism for its decision to deport more than 200 Venezuelan migrants, who the White House alleged are undocumented gang members, to a prison in El Salvador. Controversy ensued when the Trump administration allegedly refused to return planes carrying the deportees after Washington, D.C., District Court Judge James Boasberg issued an order temporarily blocking the deportations after he verbally ordered the flights to turn around.  Right-wing influencers and pundits quickly came to the administration’s defense, falsely claiming undocumented migrants don’t have or deserve the right to due process. They also attempted to justify the elimination of due process rights, falsely claiming these rights “did not matter” for January 6 defendants and President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration deported a number of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, potentially infringing on their rights to due process

The Trump administration arrested and subsequently deported more than 200 alleged gang members. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the “expedited removal” of Venezuelan migrants the administration suspects of involvement with the criminal gang, Tren de Aragua, which the State Department designated as a terrorist organization in February. According to Reuters, some experts have raised the alarm about the potential illegality of such deportations, with one law professor saying, “They are just making stuff up.” Notably, the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit to halt the deportations, questioned the Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act on due process grounds, as Reuters reports, “because they would not be able to challenge the determination that they are ‘alien enemies.’” [NPR, 3/18/25; Reuters, 3/18/25]

After the ACLU filed a lawsuit alleging that the migrants were being deprived of their rights to due process, Judge Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from carrying out the deportations and ordered the flights already in progress to be turned around. Despite Boasberg’s order, the White House “still deported some 250 people to El Salvador,” according to reporting by NPR. Following the White House’s alleged refusal to return deportation flights already underway, the Guardian reports that Boasberg “instructed the Trump administration … to explain why its failure to turn around flights carrying deportees to El Salvador did not violate his court order.” Right-wing and far-right media figures then attacked Boasberg for his order, calling the judge a “lawless clown,” urging the administration to “impeach and prosecute” him, baselessly claiming his order “risked putting American lives in danger,” and targeting the judge’s family. [ABC News, 3/15/25; NPR, 3/18/25; The Guardian, 3/20/25; Media Matters, 3/18/25]

On March 23, Trump's border czar Tom Homan told ABC News, “I don't care what that judges think, as far as this case,” seemingly contradicting other statements made by the administration that it would abide by court orders. When asked about due process rights, Homan answered, “Due process? Where was Laken Riley's due process?” [ABC News, This Week, 3/23/25, 3/23/25]

Due process rights for noncitizens are protected under the Constitution and supported by longstanding legal interpretation. The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states, “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia reaffirmed this right in the 1993 ruling on Reno v. Flores, in which Scalia wrote: “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.” [PBS, 6/25/18; U.S. Constitution, accessed 3/28/25]

Right-wing media declare that undocumented immigrants don’t deserve due process, while simultaneously falsely crowing that due process wasn’t given to Capitol Insurrectionists and Donald Trump.

[tofallatlastbutfair]

got an email, obviously hoped it was a comment on my fic bc that's my main source of serotonin these days, it's from fucking SCALIA LAW.

i will never look into Scalia Law School. I don't know jack shit about Scalia Law School and I prefer to keep it that way. I'd rather give up my lifelong dream and not be a lawyer at all than go to a school named after ANTONIN FUCKING SCALIA.

[oldtimesnew]

Jordache

[byneddiedingo]

Tom Berenger in Fear City (Abel Ferrara, 1984)

Cast: Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Scalia, Melanie Griffith, Rossano Brazzi, Rae Dawn Chong, Joe Santos, Michael V. Gazzo, Jan Murray, Janet Julian, Daniel Faraldo, Maria Conchita Alonso, Ola Ray, John Foster. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: James Lemmo. Production design: Vincent Joseph Cresciman. Film editing: Jack W. Holmes, Anthony Redman. Music: Dick Halligan. 

Abel Ferrara's style and ability to create an atmosphere almost manage to redeem the tawdry Fear City, but there's really no getting over the leaden familiarity of the story. Someone is mutilating and killing the dancers who work in New York City's strip clubs and the police, club owners, and managers of the women are unable to stop the carnage. Eventually, it falls to Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger), the co-owner of a talent agency that supplies the dancers, to search out the killer and deal with him. Rossi is a damaged man: an ex-boxer who killed a man in the ring and is tormented with guilt, but when the target becomes his ex-girlfriend Loretta (Melanie Griffith), he feels compelled to act. You can see from the start where the plot is going -- toward a showdown in a dark alley. It doesn't help that Rossi is at odds with the police officer in charge of the investigation, Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams), who hates Italians: "There's nothing I hate more than guineas in Cadillacs," Wheeler says, watching Rossi get in his car. Ferrara can sometimes be thuddingly obvious in exposition: We know from flashbacks what the cause of Rossi's guilt and depression is, but just in case we don't get it Ferrara needlessly inserts a scene in which we see newspaper clippings about the opponent's coma and death. More time might have been spent developing the character of the killer, who is just a figure out of a nightmare. The acting in Fear City is mediocre and there's more exploitative nudity than necessary in the dance club scenes, but the movie undeniably holds your attention.