Supreme news

With today's news that the US Supreme Court is going to review the conviction of Conrad Black, it was timely to read this Jeffrey Toobin article about US Chief Justice John Roberts:

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

The word to describe this man is "toady".
This is a man who, as a district court judge, figured out a way to excuse the police for arresting a 12-year-old girl for eating a french fry on the subway.
As Obama himself observed when he voted against confirming Roberts as chief justice “It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak”
I think Conrad Black can book his flight.