Has the Supreme Court tipped its hand on gay marriage?

Yes, according to Adam Liptak:

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday not to delay same-sex marriage in Alabama offered the strongest signal yet that gay rights advocates are likely to prevail in coming months in their decades-long quest to establish a nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The court's decision came with a blistering dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas, who criticized his fellow justices for looking “the other way” as another federal court pushes aside state laws, rather than taking the customary course of leaving the laws in place until the court addresses larger constitutional issues.

Since October, when the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from rulings allowing same-sex marriages in five states, it has denied requests to stay orders requiring other states to let gay and lesbian couples marry. Largely as a consequence of the court’s inaction, the number of states with same-sex marriage expanded to 37 from 19, along with the District of Columbia, in just four months.

Last month, the court agreed to hear four same-sex marriage cases. They will be argued in April and probably decided in late June.

In dissenting from the unsigned order in the Alabama case on Monday, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, suggested that the court was poised to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, a question the court ducked in a pair of decisions in 2013.

Justice Thomas accused the majority of an “indecorous” and “cavalier” attitude in refusing to maintain the status quo in Alabama at least until the Supreme Court issues its decision in the four pending cases.

The oldest trick in the book...

The prisoners' we'll-give-you-booze-and-handcuff-you trick worked on these Brazilian prison guards!  From CNN:

Two women, dressed in skimpy, "sexy" police officer costumes, allegedly showed up at a prison in Brazil's interior Mato Grosso state on Thursday, according to local media reports.

The women talked guards into letting them inside and seduced them, spiking their drinks in the process, according to reports.

What happened next is what one might expect when strangers in lingerie appear unannounced at your work place: the guards were found the next morning, naked and handcuffed with little recollection of the night before.

And 26 prisoners had escaped from the prison, located in Nova Mutum, a small city near Cuiaba.

A spokesman for the Justice Secretariat of Mato Grosso, which oversees prisons, confirmed to CNN that officials found bottles of spiked whiskey and a pair of provocative, police-themed costumes next to the handcuffed guards, who were passed out.

"We assume that is what the women were wearing when they seduced the guards," spokesman Willian Fidelis said.

In other news, Alcee Hastings just crushed this dude from Texas:

Big federal bar shindig tonight

It's the 34th annual federal judicial reception.  Click here to get your tickets. 

I wonder if the judges like going to this thing or whether they dread it....

Hell hath no fury....

Congrats to Marc Caputo on his new gig at Politico. His parting piece with the Herald is fittingly on Ana Alliegro here:

David Rivera’s former girlfriend repeatedly told a federal grand jury that the ex-congressman was the mastermind behind a complicated campaign finance scheme that landed her and another in prison.

Nearly two dozen times, Ana Alliegro says, she testified that Rivera supplied more than $81,000 used in the crime, that he plotted the cover-up and he then helped her twice escape to a getaway in Nicaragua.

Yet she’s angry that Rivera has yet to be indicted, despite her hour-long Dec. 18 testimony and a mountain of evidence: corroborating witnesses, a trove of emails, a handwritten note from Rivera and even fingerprints. Also, a federal judge last year demanded that Rivera be named in open court.

“Are politicians above the law? I don’t get it,” Alliegro told the Miami Herald in an interview. Rivera, who has long maintained his innocence, couldn’t be reached.

Should the Yankees trade A-Rod?

Justice Sotomayor wouldn't say... but she answered lots of other questions yesterday in Palm Beach:

Being the first Hispanic justice of the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t the only characteristic that sets Sonia Sotomayor apart from her colleagues, the 60-year-old native New Yorker told a capacity crowd at the Palm Beach County Convention Center on Monday.

The most obvious differences are entertainment choices. “My colleagues all love the opera,” she said. “I like jazz and dance.”

But, she said, the key distinctions run far deeper.

“I come from a background they don’t,” she said. “It’s not just dancing salsa but a little bit from the passion of my personality.”

That passionate personality, which she said prompted Justice Antonin Scalia to dub her a “bulldog,” stems from her hard-scrabble life growing up in housing projects in the South Bronx as the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. While she got her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her law degree from Yale Law School, her Ivy League education came from scholarships, not birthright

She recalled cockroaches scurrying across the floor of her family’s “tenement” and mice nestled in boots kept in the bathroom on winter days. “You change, yes, but you don’t become completely someone else,” she said. “You carry with you that background.”

The luncheon speech, sponsored by the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches and the county bar association, attracted a record-breaking crowd of more than 1,200 people.

Shunning a podium, Sotomayor walked among the dozens of tables in the cavernous ballroom, offering her thoughts about TVs in the courtroom, judicial activism and even Billy Joel.