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Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut





 Pendix wrote:
Rosebuddy wrote:
Alex Jones was banned from Twitter . . .

Um, I do hate to come out of lurking for what is probably a minor point; but I'm seeing this repeated at lot here. And; as far as I can tell; Twitter is the one social media platform that has not (yet) banned Alex Jones & Infowars.

Am I wrong about this?


So. . . quick google search and it seems you are correct good sir/ma'am

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/now-even-youporn-has-banned-alex-jones-but-hes-still-on-twitter/


For those work blocked, or maybe cannot see the link. . . You Porn has blocked content featuring Jones and his show, but thus far twitter has not.
   
Made in us
Legendary Master of the Chapter





Chicago, Illinois

 Pendix wrote:
Rosebuddy wrote:
Alex Jones was banned from Twitter . . .

Um, I do hate to come out of lurking for what is probably a minor point; but I'm seeing this repeated at lot here. And; as far as I can tell; Twitter is the one social media platform that has not (yet) banned Alex Jones & Infowars.

Am I wrong about this?


Nope your not wrong, but even porn websites are banning him.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/alex-jones-infowars-app-apple-google_us_5b694ec3e4b0de86f4a4bc1d

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/now-even-youporn-has-banned-alex-jones-but-hes-still-on-twitter/


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Ensis Ferrae wrote:


For those work blocked, or maybe cannot see the link. . . You Porn has blocked content featuring Jones and his show, but thus far twitter has not.


DARN YOU BEAT ME TO IT!

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/07 23:27:15


From whom are unforgiven we bring the mercy of war. 
   
Made in gb
Ultramarine Librarian with Freaky Familiar





Mario wrote:
Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Rosebuddy wrote:
 warhead01 wrote:

Have you heard the wonderful things Sarah Leong has to say about white men?
You mean Sarah Jeong, who wrote that white men should live underground like goblins because she kept getting far worse racist rape and death threats from white men.


Racist abuse justifies a racist response?
Can't take a joke? People are really getting PC about humour these days. I hear growing a thicker skins helps?


So its OK to make these remarks about Black People? Hypocrite. You don't oppose racism, you're just a partisan who opposes racism when its the other side that does it, then turns a blind eye to your own side in an argument.

Thats a double standard. I'm asking that we apply the same universal standard to everyone. Either these remarks are racist, or they are not racist. Regardless of who says them, and who the target ethnicity is.

So which is it?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/07 23:31:23


 
   
Made in us
5th God of Chaos! (Ho-hum)





Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/manafort-defense-questions-star-witness-gates-about-secret-life-idUSKBN1KS10W

Hooboy... any business/tax/banking attorneys on OT forum? (polonius? Frazzled??).

So, cliffnotes so far: The "star witness" Gates testified that him and Manafort conspired to break laws...
Yet Gates admitted that he embezzled from Manafort to support a secret life and his own lifestyle.

...not such a tidy case.

Seems Manafort is guilty as all hell though.

Live Ork, Be Ork. or D'Ork!


 
   
Made in gb
Ultramarine Librarian with Freaky Familiar





 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Rosebuddy wrote:
 warhead01 wrote:

Have you heard the wonderful things Sarah Leong has to say about white men?
You mean Sarah Jeong, who wrote that white men should live underground like goblins because she kept getting far worse racist rape and death threats from white men.


Racist abuse justifies a racist response?


You have to understand that she's frustrated though. Sure, it's a gakky reply, but I have it from a very good source that people who are frustrated, afraid or otherwise under pressure make dumb decisions, and that we should show understanding towards such people.


If that is a not-so-subtle-dig at our private conversation over PM, then you have fundamentally misunderstood what I was trying to impress upon you.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/07 23:36:53


 
   
Made in us
Legendary Master of the Chapter





Chicago, Illinois

 whembly wrote:
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/manafort-defense-questions-star-witness-gates-about-secret-life-idUSKBN1KS10W

Hooboy... any business/tax/banking attorneys on OT forum? (polonius? Frazzled??).

So, cliffnotes so far: The "star witness" Gates testified that him and Manafort conspired to break laws...
Yet Gates admitted that he embezzled from Manafort to support a secret life and his own lifestyle.

...not such a tidy case.

Seems Manafort is guilty as all hell though.


They also had to call recess after the attorney for the defense asked Rick Gates if he had been interviewed by Robert Mueller.

Also According to John Bolton :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/08/07/john-bolton-admits-it-the-north-korea-summit-was-a-bust/?utm_source=reddit.com&utm_term=.d4ae830a49b9

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/07 23:41:09


From whom are unforgiven we bring the mercy of war. 
   
Made in us
5th God of Chaos! (Ho-hum)





Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

 Asherian Command wrote:
 whembly wrote:
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/manafort-defense-questions-star-witness-gates-about-secret-life-idUSKBN1KS10W

Hooboy... any business/tax/banking attorneys on OT forum? (polonius? Frazzled??).

So, cliffnotes so far: The "star witness" Gates testified that him and Manafort conspired to break laws...
Yet Gates admitted that he embezzled from Manafort to support a secret life and his own lifestyle.

...not such a tidy case.

Seems Manafort is guilty as all hell though.


They also had to call recess after the attorney for the defense asked Rick Gates if he had been interviewed by Robert Mueller.

Er... why would that be objectionable? He leads the prosecution... o.O

Live Ork, Be Ork. or D'Ork!


 
   
Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut




North Carolina

 whembly wrote:
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/manafort-defense-questions-star-witness-gates-about-secret-life-idUSKBN1KS10W

Hooboy... any business/tax/banking attorneys on OT forum? (polonius? Frazzled??).

So, cliffnotes so far: The "star witness" Gates testified that him and Manafort conspired to break laws...
Yet Gates admitted that he embezzled from Manafort to support a secret life and his own lifestyle.

...not such a tidy case.

Seems Manafort is guilty as all hell though.


Regarding Manafort’s tax evasion it’s a very tidy case and it would be remarkable if he avoided a conviction on those counts. In terms of proving Manafort did nefarious political things it was always going to be difficult to get a clear answer about that from this case.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur
 
   
Made in us
Legendary Master of the Chapter





Chicago, Illinois

 whembly wrote:
 Asherian Command wrote:
 whembly wrote:
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/manafort-defense-questions-star-witness-gates-about-secret-life-idUSKBN1KS10W

Hooboy... any business/tax/banking attorneys on OT forum? (polonius? Frazzled??).

So, cliffnotes so far: The "star witness" Gates testified that him and Manafort conspired to break laws...
Yet Gates admitted that he embezzled from Manafort to support a secret life and his own lifestyle.

...not such a tidy case.

Seems Manafort is guilty as all hell though.


They also had to call recess after the attorney for the defense asked Rick Gates if he had been interviewed by Robert Mueller.

Er... why would that be objectionable? He leads the prosecution... o.O

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/the-trump-campaign-was-just-referenced-for-the-first-time-at-paul-manafort-trial/

we don't know why. It might be because of an ongoing investigation.

https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/manafort-trial/index.html



From whom are unforgiven we bring the mercy of war. 
   
Made in us
5th God of Chaos! (Ho-hum)





Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

Heh:
https://thinkprogress.org/clarence-thomas-most-important-legal-thinker-in-america-c12af3d08c98/

Awesome news from thinkprogress.

*whistling happily*

**yes, I do read lefty/liberal sites... if for nothing else to find gems like this one.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/08 00:12:09


Live Ork, Be Ork. or D'Ork!


 
   
Made in se
Ferocious Black Templar Castellan






Sweden

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Rosebuddy wrote:
 warhead01 wrote:

Have you heard the wonderful things Sarah Leong has to say about white men?
You mean Sarah Jeong, who wrote that white men should live underground like goblins because she kept getting far worse racist rape and death threats from white men.


Racist abuse justifies a racist response?


You have to understand that she's frustrated though. Sure, it's a gakky reply, but I have it from a very good source that people who are frustrated, afraid or otherwise under pressure make dumb decisions, and that we should show understanding towards such people.


If that is a not-so-subtle-dig at our private conversation over PM, then you have fundamentally misunderstood what I was trying to impress upon you.


It wasn't, it was a not-so-subtle callback to when other posters called me sanctimonious for telling them that they should be ashamed for arguing for Boer Wars-style concentration camps for Muslims after one of the attacks in London and you argued that those posters, while wrong, were afraid and frustrated and that we should take their fear seriously. I figured the same should apply even more so in this case, as personal death threats are a bit more specific than a terror attack targeting random people.

For thirteen years I had a dog with fur the darkest black. For thirteen years he was my friend, oh how I want him back. 
   
Made in us
Shas'ui with Bonding Knife







I hope you're being sarcastic. But if you're not, have you ever bothered to read an article you have ever posted?
Spoiler:

Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker in America
The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.
IAN MILLHISER
JUL 3, 2018, 8:00 AM
SHARE
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Justice Clarence Thomas (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS (PHOTO BY WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES)
Justice Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker of his generation, and the most significant judicial appointment of the last forty years.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

CREDIT: AP
How Conservatives Abandoned Judicial Restraint, Took Over The Courts And Radically Transformed America
There is a commonly held view that Thomas is an intellectual lightweight. Radical and far-too-quiet on the bench. Idiosyncratic and lacking in influence. A fairly persistent take on Thomas’ career holds that he’s lived in the shadow of Justice Antonin Scalia, and his views were, at most, an exaggerated version of Scalia’s originalism.

This view of Thomas is wrong.

It is true that Thomas had little influence on the men and women he’s served with for years. No other member of the Court joined his opinions suggesting that federal child labor laws and the ban on whites-only lunch counters are unconstitutional — though there’s a very real risk that Neil Gorsuch will be the first. No other justice agrees with Thomas that the First Amendment does not apply to high school students.

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But if you’re asking how effectively Thomas helped sway Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy to his own views, you are asking the wrong question. In a series of opinions joined by no other justice, Thomas waged a quiet war of ideas against twentieth century liberalism — and he won the hearts of a legion of conservative law students. Many of those former students are now old enough to be judges.

As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.

Unmentionable ideas
To understand just how much Thomas shaped America’s legal debates, it’s helpful to turn the clock back to 1991 — the year Thomas joined the Supreme Court — and then to turn it back a little further, to an age when Thomas’ views were ascendant.

A hundred years ago, the Supreme Court held that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional. Hammer v. Dagenhart rested on a now-discredited distinction between laws that regulate “commerce” — which the Court defined narrowly to include little more than the transit of goods — and other activities such as manufacturing, mining, or agriculture.

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Congress could regulate the transit of goods but not the production of them, according to Dagenhart, which is why a ban on child labor could not stand. The ban, according to the justices of another era, “does not regulate transportation among the States, but aims to standardize the ages at which children may be employed in mining and manufacturing within the States.” That was not allowed.

Jo Hudson, a "back-roper," stands next to a machine that dispenses thread, in the "mule room" at the Chace Cotton Mill in Burlington, Vermont. (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
JO HUDSON, A "BACK-ROPER," STANDS NEXT TO A MACHINE THAT DISPENSES THREAD, IN THE "MULE ROOM" AT THE CHACE COTTON MILL IN BURLINGTON, VERMONT. (PHOTO BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Dagenhart is now taught in law schools as anticanon — the kind of decision that stands as an example of how judges should never behave. Clarence Thomas thinks this case was correctly decided.

At the time of the framing, Thomas claimed in his concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez, “the term ‘commerce’ was used in contradistinction to productive activities such as manufacturing and agriculture.” It’s a wordy statement that reveals little to readers who aren’t familiar with early twentieth century case law, but it is very much an explicit endorsement of the rule announced in Dagenhart.

Nor would child labor laws be the only casualties in Clarence Thomas’ America. If Congress’ power were limited in the way Thomas describes, bans on employment discrimination would also fall — except maybe in industries such as shipping that involve actual transit of goods across state lines — as would civil rights laws banning whites-only lunch counters. The federal minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, various laws protecting workers benefits, federal overtime laws, and the Affordable Care Act would all cease to exist.

When Thomas joined the Court in 1991, there was broad consensus that cases like Dagenhart were wrong. Such a broad consensus, in fact, that the case’s defenders were relegated to the fringes of the legal academy.

President Reagan promised to appoint judges who would exercise “judicial restraint.” President George H.W. Bush, who appointed Thomas, said that he would “appoint people to the Federal Bench that will not legislate from the Bench.” No politician in their right mind wanted to be associated with the view that judges should strike down most of the twentieth century.

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Nor did legal elites believe, in the years before Thomas’ ascension to the bench, that the judiciary should declare war on the New Deal or the Great Society. In the final year of the Reagan administration, the Justice Department published a set of “Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation,” which laid out the administrations’ preferred way of reading the Constitution and instructed DOJ lawyers to make arguments consistent with this reading.

Yet, as I discuss in my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, the Reagan administration’s vision for the Constitution was a picture of moderation when compared to Thomas’. The Guidelines did not claim that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, for example, though it did suggest that state governments should be allowed to pay their workers less than the minimum wage. And the Guidelines explicitly endorsed a 1966 Supreme Court decision upholding the Voting Rights Act — the same Voting Rights Act that Thomas voted to gut in 2013.

Thomas, in other words, was a man ahead of his time. He showed a conservative movement, that primarily aspired to weaken the judiciary, that it could have much larger ambitions. He taught them that, if they were determined enough, conservative judges could build a bridge back to the Gilded Age, frogmarch the nation across this bridge, and then burn it behind them. And, while Thomas’ longest-serving colleagues reject this vision, the next generation of conservative judges view it as an inspiration.

Playing the long game
“I’ve given up on the current generation,” Justice Antonin Scalia once told a room of law students. “But the kids in law school, I think there’s still a chance,“ he added. “That’s who I write my dissents for.”

Indeed, Scalia pioneered the art of the punchy, nasty, unforgettable dissent. He introduced the legal world to phrases like “jiggery-pokery” and “pure applesauce.” When the Court struck down a law that effectively criminalized gay sex, Scalia complained that his Court “has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” When it reaffirmed the right to have an abortion, Scalia claimed that “the best the Court can do to explain how it is that the word ‘liberty’ must be thought to include the right to destroy human fetuses is to rattle off a collection of adjectives that simply decorate a value judgment and conceal a political choice.”

Thomas takes a different approach. While Scalia traded in barbs and insults, Thomas’ opinions read, well, like judicial opinions. Where Scalia appealed to cultural grievances and a sense of victimhood, Thomas writes like he is the picture of reasonableness, simply trying to restore lost truths that his colleagues ignore.

Thomas’ Lopez opinion, the one where he endorses the same legal theory that was once used to strike down child labor laws, begins with a seemingly mild (and rather dubious) claim that “our case law has drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause.”

Yet, where the two men disagreed, Thomas, and not Scalia, appears to have won the battle for the soul of conservatism.

Consider the question of agency regulation — an extraordinarily important area of the law where Scalia and Thomas had wildly different views for most of the former’s career.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN
The Little-Noticed Conservative Plan To Permanently Lock Democrats Out Of Policymaking
Congress is not an especially nimble body, even when it isn’t completely dysfunctional. It is not possible for a cacophonous body of 535 lawmakers to update America’s environmental laws every time technology changes. Or to constantly update labor laws to account for inflation. Or to keep abreast of the latest vehicle safety innovations. If Congress had to enact a new law every time an industry regulation needed to be tweaked, many coal plants would likely be using the same technology they used in the 1980s.

Which is why the Clean Air Act delegates the task of keeping up on new technological developments to the Environmental Protection Agency. One provision of this law, for example, requires EPA to determine “the best system of emission reduction” that is both cost effective and feasible given existing technology, and to set standards ensuring that certain sources of pollution achieve similar levels of emission reduction. Congress sets the overarching policy — that standards should continually be updated to reflect new innovations — but the EPA implements this policy through a series of regulations.

For most of his time of the bench, Scalia was a staunch defender of this allocation of power. Among other things, he was one of the Court’s most outspoken defenders of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a Supreme Court decision holding that courts should typically defer to regulatory agencies when the statute authorizing the agency to regulate is ambiguous.

Thomas, meanwhile, wants to blow up the regulatory state and spit on its ashes. Thomas doesn’t simply want to overrule Chevron, he wrote in 2015 that “generally applicable rules of private conduct” can only be created by an act of Congress and that any decision that “involves an exercise of policy discretion. . . requires an exercise of legislative power.” Under Thomas’ vision, laws like the Clean Air Act simply cannot exist.

Though Scalia’s view of the administrative state largely prevailed while Scalia was on the high Court, Thomas’ view is now ascendant. At the annual meetings of the conservative Federalist Society, the legal group responsible for choosing many of Trump’s judicial nominees, the Society’s leading lights speak of dismantling agency regulation with the kind of obsessiveness normally associated with Humbert Humbert and Captain Ahab.

Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat Senate Republicans held open for a year until Trump could fill it, campaigned for his current job by writing concurring opinions embracing Thomas’ skepticism of agency regulations. At least one judge that Trump is reportedly considering for the Court’s current vacancy, Judge Raymond Kethledge, appears to be aping Gorsuch in an effort to catch the White House’s eye.

Indeed, even retiring Justice Kennedy, the last vestige of conservative moderation on the Supreme Court, wrote an opinion attacking Chevron on his way out the door.

The war against the administrative state approaches its final skirmish. Thomas is about to win.

Kneel before Zod
Thomas’ superpower is his ability to reframe life-and-death legal battles as an academic debate about history. By framing Lopez, for example, as a search for “the original understanding of the Commerce Clause,” rather than as a moral defense of striking down child labor laws, Thomas shifts responsibility for his decisions off himself and onto the framers. And he shows other conservatives how they can do the same.

Thomas is able to absolve himself of responsibility, moreover, despite the fact that he is a terrible historian.

Consider Thomas’ dissenting opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.

In Brown, a majority of the Court joined Justice Scalia’s opinion striking down a California law banning the sale of “violent video games” to minors — on the grounds that this law violates the First Amendment. Thomas disagreed, claiming that “the practices and beliefs of the founding generation” did not “include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.”

Thomas’ Brown opinion, moreover, built on his concurring opinion in Morse v. Frederick, where he argued that “the First Amendment, as originally understood, does not protect student speech in public schools.”

The justice rooted both opinions in his belief that seventeenth and eighteenth century adults lorded over children like petty tyrants. Thus, Thomas writes in Morse that private school “teachers managed classrooms with an iron hand,” and he writes in Brown that puritan fathers “ruled families with absolute authority.” Thomas cites to centuries-old parenting guides with names like “The Well-Ordered Family” and “A Family Well-Ordered.” He quotes a 1692 text warning that “by hu-mouring and cockering” their children, parents “’poison’d the fountain’ and later ‘taste[d] the bitter waters.’”

All of this is very interesting, but it is unclear why any of it matters. That is, even if Thomas is correct that the founding generation “believed parents to have complete authority over their minor children and expected parents to direct the development of those children,” why does it follow that the founding generation would have let the government restrict children’s speech — especially outside of settings like the classroom where discipline is required?

A 1692 guide on parenting provides no more insight into how the framers understood the First Amendment than a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting offers insight into whether Roe v. Wade is correctly decided.

Nevertheless, if you are asking whether Thomas is right or wrong about how the First Amendment was originally understood, you are again asking the wrong question. Originalism — the theory that the Constitution must be read solely through the lens of its original history — has never been a constraint on judicial discretion. And judges who identify as originalists have never been particularly skilled at constructing history.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Lana Harris
Gorsuch will make liberals miss Scalia
Scalia, unlike Gorsuch, came from a humbler era for judicial conservatives.

Justice Hugo Black, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, used originalist arguments to sweep away attacks on the New Deal and to reinvigorate the Bill of Rights. Justice Scalia used it to counsel judicial restraint in opposition to Roe v. Wade. More radical conservatives like Thomas and Gorsuch use originalism to justify sweeping away the very same legal framework that was built by men like Justice Black.

The genius of Clarence Thomas isn’t that he is a great historian. It is that he knows how to comb the historical record for sources that agree with him. And, once he finds them, he can claim that any precedent he disagrees with is inconsistent with “the original understanding” and must be swept away.

First as tragedy, then as farce
Clarence Thomas is 70-years-old. He’s served on the Court for half of his adult life, and he spent most of that time writing lonely opinions joined by no other justice.

But the times are a changing. Last year, at the Federalist Society’s annual lawyers’ convention, a triumphant Gorsuch addressed an adoring crowd. “Tonight I can report,” the Man Who Is Not Merrick Garland proclaimed to thunderous applause, “a person can be both a committed originalist and textualist and be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Since joining the Court, moreover, Gorsuch tacked to Thomas’ right in an important constitutional case — authoring a love letter to the Gilded Age that not even Thomas would join. In the coming age, Thomas could soon be the Court’s center, and men like Gorsuch could take on Thomas’ traditional role as the radical dissenter.

Justice Stephen J. Field
JUSTICE STEPHEN J. FIELD
America has seen this movie before, and it did not end well the first time. One of Abraham Lincoln’s worst decisions as president — an error in judgment rivaled only by Lincoln’s willingness to accept the white supremacist Andrew Johnson as his 1864 running mate — was Lincoln’s appointment of Justice Stephen Johnson Field to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Like Thomas, Field spent much of his long career on the bench writing dissenting opinions and concurrences urging his colleagues to lurch further to the right. Field stood up for price gouging businesses and against farmers. He railed against public health laws. And he labeled a modest income tax on upper-income earners an “assault upon capital” which “will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.”

Field did not live to see the Supreme Court’s opinions striking down minimum wages, protections for unions and child labor laws, but he did more than anyone in America to lay the groundwork for these decisions.

Thomas also may not live to see his final triumph. And when it does come, it may not be a complete victory. It is unclear that there will ever again be five votes to abolish child labor laws.

But Thomas did something far more important than winning any one legal victory. He taught his fellow conservatives how to dream again. He showed them that there is an alternative to judicial restraint, and made them hunger for a world where conservative principles are imposed on the nation by judicial fiat.

For a quarter century now, young members of the Federalist Society have opened up their Constitutional Law textbooks, read Thomas’ solo dissents, and wondered “why not?” The oldest of these former law students are now in the prime of their careers — ripe for appointment to the federal bench. And there is an entire generation of them waiting for their turn to rule.


Here's some of the important bits however since I assume you don't have a long attention span:
The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

Nor would child labor laws be the only casualties in Clarence Thomas’ America. If Congress’ power were limited in the way Thomas describes, bans on employment discrimination would also fall — except maybe in industries such as shipping that involve actual transit of goods across state lines — as would civil rights laws banning whites-only lunch counters. The federal minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, various laws protecting workers benefits, federal overtime laws, and the Affordable Care Act would all cease to exist.


In short, they're not phrasing it as a good thing. It's like saying Stalin was the most influential man of the 20th century. Arguably true, but not exactly a compliment because of what he did.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/08 00:15:59


DQ:90S++G++M----B--I+Pw40k07+D+++A+++/areWD-R+DM+


bittersashes wrote:One guy down at my gaming club swore he saw an objective flag take out a full unit of Bane Thralls.
 
   
Made in us
5th God of Chaos! (Ho-hum)





Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

 Wolfblade wrote:

I hope you're being sarcastic. But if you're not, have you ever bothered to read an article you have ever posted?
Spoiler:

Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker in America
The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.
IAN MILLHISER
JUL 3, 2018, 8:00 AM
SHARE
Facebook
Twitter
Email
Justice Clarence Thomas (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS (PHOTO BY WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES)
Justice Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker of his generation, and the most significant judicial appointment of the last forty years.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

CREDIT: AP
How Conservatives Abandoned Judicial Restraint, Took Over The Courts And Radically Transformed America
There is a commonly held view that Thomas is an intellectual lightweight. Radical and far-too-quiet on the bench. Idiosyncratic and lacking in influence. A fairly persistent take on Thomas’ career holds that he’s lived in the shadow of Justice Antonin Scalia, and his views were, at most, an exaggerated version of Scalia’s originalism.

This view of Thomas is wrong.

It is true that Thomas had little influence on the men and women he’s served with for years. No other member of the Court joined his opinions suggesting that federal child labor laws and the ban on whites-only lunch counters are unconstitutional — though there’s a very real risk that Neil Gorsuch will be the first. No other justice agrees with Thomas that the First Amendment does not apply to high school students.

Advertisement
But if you’re asking how effectively Thomas helped sway Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy to his own views, you are asking the wrong question. In a series of opinions joined by no other justice, Thomas waged a quiet war of ideas against twentieth century liberalism — and he won the hearts of a legion of conservative law students. Many of those former students are now old enough to be judges.

As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.

Unmentionable ideas
To understand just how much Thomas shaped America’s legal debates, it’s helpful to turn the clock back to 1991 — the year Thomas joined the Supreme Court — and then to turn it back a little further, to an age when Thomas’ views were ascendant.

A hundred years ago, the Supreme Court held that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional. Hammer v. Dagenhart rested on a now-discredited distinction between laws that regulate “commerce” — which the Court defined narrowly to include little more than the transit of goods — and other activities such as manufacturing, mining, or agriculture.

Advertisement
Congress could regulate the transit of goods but not the production of them, according to Dagenhart, which is why a ban on child labor could not stand. The ban, according to the justices of another era, “does not regulate transportation among the States, but aims to standardize the ages at which children may be employed in mining and manufacturing within the States.” That was not allowed.

Jo Hudson, a "back-roper," stands next to a machine that dispenses thread, in the "mule room" at the Chace Cotton Mill in Burlington, Vermont. (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
JO HUDSON, A "BACK-ROPER," STANDS NEXT TO A MACHINE THAT DISPENSES THREAD, IN THE "MULE ROOM" AT THE CHACE COTTON MILL IN BURLINGTON, VERMONT. (PHOTO BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Dagenhart is now taught in law schools as anticanon — the kind of decision that stands as an example of how judges should never behave. Clarence Thomas thinks this case was correctly decided.

At the time of the framing, Thomas claimed in his concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez, “the term ‘commerce’ was used in contradistinction to productive activities such as manufacturing and agriculture.” It’s a wordy statement that reveals little to readers who aren’t familiar with early twentieth century case law, but it is very much an explicit endorsement of the rule announced in Dagenhart.

Nor would child labor laws be the only casualties in Clarence Thomas’ America. If Congress’ power were limited in the way Thomas describes, bans on employment discrimination would also fall — except maybe in industries such as shipping that involve actual transit of goods across state lines — as would civil rights laws banning whites-only lunch counters. The federal minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, various laws protecting workers benefits, federal overtime laws, and the Affordable Care Act would all cease to exist.

When Thomas joined the Court in 1991, there was broad consensus that cases like Dagenhart were wrong. Such a broad consensus, in fact, that the case’s defenders were relegated to the fringes of the legal academy.

President Reagan promised to appoint judges who would exercise “judicial restraint.” President George H.W. Bush, who appointed Thomas, said that he would “appoint people to the Federal Bench that will not legislate from the Bench.” No politician in their right mind wanted to be associated with the view that judges should strike down most of the twentieth century.

Advertisement
Nor did legal elites believe, in the years before Thomas’ ascension to the bench, that the judiciary should declare war on the New Deal or the Great Society. In the final year of the Reagan administration, the Justice Department published a set of “Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation,” which laid out the administrations’ preferred way of reading the Constitution and instructed DOJ lawyers to make arguments consistent with this reading.

Yet, as I discuss in my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, the Reagan administration’s vision for the Constitution was a picture of moderation when compared to Thomas’. The Guidelines did not claim that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, for example, though it did suggest that state governments should be allowed to pay their workers less than the minimum wage. And the Guidelines explicitly endorsed a 1966 Supreme Court decision upholding the Voting Rights Act — the same Voting Rights Act that Thomas voted to gut in 2013.

Thomas, in other words, was a man ahead of his time. He showed a conservative movement, that primarily aspired to weaken the judiciary, that it could have much larger ambitions. He taught them that, if they were determined enough, conservative judges could build a bridge back to the Gilded Age, frogmarch the nation across this bridge, and then burn it behind them. And, while Thomas’ longest-serving colleagues reject this vision, the next generation of conservative judges view it as an inspiration.

Playing the long game
“I’ve given up on the current generation,” Justice Antonin Scalia once told a room of law students. “But the kids in law school, I think there’s still a chance,“ he added. “That’s who I write my dissents for.”

Indeed, Scalia pioneered the art of the punchy, nasty, unforgettable dissent. He introduced the legal world to phrases like “jiggery-pokery” and “pure applesauce.” When the Court struck down a law that effectively criminalized gay sex, Scalia complained that his Court “has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” When it reaffirmed the right to have an abortion, Scalia claimed that “the best the Court can do to explain how it is that the word ‘liberty’ must be thought to include the right to destroy human fetuses is to rattle off a collection of adjectives that simply decorate a value judgment and conceal a political choice.”

Thomas takes a different approach. While Scalia traded in barbs and insults, Thomas’ opinions read, well, like judicial opinions. Where Scalia appealed to cultural grievances and a sense of victimhood, Thomas writes like he is the picture of reasonableness, simply trying to restore lost truths that his colleagues ignore.

Thomas’ Lopez opinion, the one where he endorses the same legal theory that was once used to strike down child labor laws, begins with a seemingly mild (and rather dubious) claim that “our case law has drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause.”

Yet, where the two men disagreed, Thomas, and not Scalia, appears to have won the battle for the soul of conservatism.

Consider the question of agency regulation — an extraordinarily important area of the law where Scalia and Thomas had wildly different views for most of the former’s career.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN
The Little-Noticed Conservative Plan To Permanently Lock Democrats Out Of Policymaking
Congress is not an especially nimble body, even when it isn’t completely dysfunctional. It is not possible for a cacophonous body of 535 lawmakers to update America’s environmental laws every time technology changes. Or to constantly update labor laws to account for inflation. Or to keep abreast of the latest vehicle safety innovations. If Congress had to enact a new law every time an industry regulation needed to be tweaked, many coal plants would likely be using the same technology they used in the 1980s.

Which is why the Clean Air Act delegates the task of keeping up on new technological developments to the Environmental Protection Agency. One provision of this law, for example, requires EPA to determine “the best system of emission reduction” that is both cost effective and feasible given existing technology, and to set standards ensuring that certain sources of pollution achieve similar levels of emission reduction. Congress sets the overarching policy — that standards should continually be updated to reflect new innovations — but the EPA implements this policy through a series of regulations.

For most of his time of the bench, Scalia was a staunch defender of this allocation of power. Among other things, he was one of the Court’s most outspoken defenders of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a Supreme Court decision holding that courts should typically defer to regulatory agencies when the statute authorizing the agency to regulate is ambiguous.

Thomas, meanwhile, wants to blow up the regulatory state and spit on its ashes. Thomas doesn’t simply want to overrule Chevron, he wrote in 2015 that “generally applicable rules of private conduct” can only be created by an act of Congress and that any decision that “involves an exercise of policy discretion. . . requires an exercise of legislative power.” Under Thomas’ vision, laws like the Clean Air Act simply cannot exist.

Though Scalia’s view of the administrative state largely prevailed while Scalia was on the high Court, Thomas’ view is now ascendant. At the annual meetings of the conservative Federalist Society, the legal group responsible for choosing many of Trump’s judicial nominees, the Society’s leading lights speak of dismantling agency regulation with the kind of obsessiveness normally associated with Humbert Humbert and Captain Ahab.

Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat Senate Republicans held open for a year until Trump could fill it, campaigned for his current job by writing concurring opinions embracing Thomas’ skepticism of agency regulations. At least one judge that Trump is reportedly considering for the Court’s current vacancy, Judge Raymond Kethledge, appears to be aping Gorsuch in an effort to catch the White House’s eye.

Indeed, even retiring Justice Kennedy, the last vestige of conservative moderation on the Supreme Court, wrote an opinion attacking Chevron on his way out the door.

The war against the administrative state approaches its final skirmish. Thomas is about to win.

Kneel before Zod
Thomas’ superpower is his ability to reframe life-and-death legal battles as an academic debate about history. By framing Lopez, for example, as a search for “the original understanding of the Commerce Clause,” rather than as a moral defense of striking down child labor laws, Thomas shifts responsibility for his decisions off himself and onto the framers. And he shows other conservatives how they can do the same.

Thomas is able to absolve himself of responsibility, moreover, despite the fact that he is a terrible historian.

Consider Thomas’ dissenting opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.

In Brown, a majority of the Court joined Justice Scalia’s opinion striking down a California law banning the sale of “violent video games” to minors — on the grounds that this law violates the First Amendment. Thomas disagreed, claiming that “the practices and beliefs of the founding generation” did not “include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.”

Thomas’ Brown opinion, moreover, built on his concurring opinion in Morse v. Frederick, where he argued that “the First Amendment, as originally understood, does not protect student speech in public schools.”

The justice rooted both opinions in his belief that seventeenth and eighteenth century adults lorded over children like petty tyrants. Thus, Thomas writes in Morse that private school “teachers managed classrooms with an iron hand,” and he writes in Brown that puritan fathers “ruled families with absolute authority.” Thomas cites to centuries-old parenting guides with names like “The Well-Ordered Family” and “A Family Well-Ordered.” He quotes a 1692 text warning that “by hu-mouring and cockering” their children, parents “’poison’d the fountain’ and later ‘taste[d] the bitter waters.’”

All of this is very interesting, but it is unclear why any of it matters. That is, even if Thomas is correct that the founding generation “believed parents to have complete authority over their minor children and expected parents to direct the development of those children,” why does it follow that the founding generation would have let the government restrict children’s speech — especially outside of settings like the classroom where discipline is required?

A 1692 guide on parenting provides no more insight into how the framers understood the First Amendment than a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting offers insight into whether Roe v. Wade is correctly decided.

Nevertheless, if you are asking whether Thomas is right or wrong about how the First Amendment was originally understood, you are again asking the wrong question. Originalism — the theory that the Constitution must be read solely through the lens of its original history — has never been a constraint on judicial discretion. And judges who identify as originalists have never been particularly skilled at constructing history.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Lana Harris
Gorsuch will make liberals miss Scalia
Scalia, unlike Gorsuch, came from a humbler era for judicial conservatives.

Justice Hugo Black, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, used originalist arguments to sweep away attacks on the New Deal and to reinvigorate the Bill of Rights. Justice Scalia used it to counsel judicial restraint in opposition to Roe v. Wade. More radical conservatives like Thomas and Gorsuch use originalism to justify sweeping away the very same legal framework that was built by men like Justice Black.

The genius of Clarence Thomas isn’t that he is a great historian. It is that he knows how to comb the historical record for sources that agree with him. And, once he finds them, he can claim that any precedent he disagrees with is inconsistent with “the original understanding” and must be swept away.

First as tragedy, then as farce
Clarence Thomas is 70-years-old. He’s served on the Court for half of his adult life, and he spent most of that time writing lonely opinions joined by no other justice.

But the times are a changing. Last year, at the Federalist Society’s annual lawyers’ convention, a triumphant Gorsuch addressed an adoring crowd. “Tonight I can report,” the Man Who Is Not Merrick Garland proclaimed to thunderous applause, “a person can be both a committed originalist and textualist and be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Since joining the Court, moreover, Gorsuch tacked to Thomas’ right in an important constitutional case — authoring a love letter to the Gilded Age that not even Thomas would join. In the coming age, Thomas could soon be the Court’s center, and men like Gorsuch could take on Thomas’ traditional role as the radical dissenter.

Justice Stephen J. Field
JUSTICE STEPHEN J. FIELD
America has seen this movie before, and it did not end well the first time. One of Abraham Lincoln’s worst decisions as president — an error in judgment rivaled only by Lincoln’s willingness to accept the white supremacist Andrew Johnson as his 1864 running mate — was Lincoln’s appointment of Justice Stephen Johnson Field to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Like Thomas, Field spent much of his long career on the bench writing dissenting opinions and concurrences urging his colleagues to lurch further to the right. Field stood up for price gouging businesses and against farmers. He railed against public health laws. And he labeled a modest income tax on upper-income earners an “assault upon capital” which “will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.”

Field did not live to see the Supreme Court’s opinions striking down minimum wages, protections for unions and child labor laws, but he did more than anyone in America to lay the groundwork for these decisions.

Thomas also may not live to see his final triumph. And when it does come, it may not be a complete victory. It is unclear that there will ever again be five votes to abolish child labor laws.

But Thomas did something far more important than winning any one legal victory. He taught his fellow conservatives how to dream again. He showed them that there is an alternative to judicial restraint, and made them hunger for a world where conservative principles are imposed on the nation by judicial fiat.

For a quarter century now, young members of the Federalist Society have opened up their Constitutional Law textbooks, read Thomas’ solo dissents, and wondered “why not?” The oldest of these former law students are now in the prime of their careers — ripe for appointment to the federal bench. And there is an entire generation of them waiting for their turn to rule.


Here's some of the important bits however since I assume you don't have a long attention span:
The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

Nor would child labor laws be the only casualties in Clarence Thomas’ America. If Congress’ power were limited in the way Thomas describes, bans on employment discrimination would also fall — except maybe in industries such as shipping that involve actual transit of goods across state lines — as would civil rights laws banning whites-only lunch counters. The federal minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, various laws protecting workers benefits, federal overtime laws, and the Affordable Care Act would all cease to exist.

Of course I've read it.

And no, not sarcastic.

I particularly enjoyed this blurb:
As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.

Live Ork, Be Ork. or D'Ork!


 
   
Made in us
Shas'ui with Bonding Knife






 whembly wrote:
 Wolfblade wrote:

I hope you're being sarcastic. But if you're not, have you ever bothered to read an article you have ever posted?
Spoiler:

Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker in America
The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.
IAN MILLHISER
JUL 3, 2018, 8:00 AM
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Justice Clarence Thomas (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS (PHOTO BY WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES)
Justice Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker of his generation, and the most significant judicial appointment of the last forty years.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

CREDIT: AP
How Conservatives Abandoned Judicial Restraint, Took Over The Courts And Radically Transformed America
There is a commonly held view that Thomas is an intellectual lightweight. Radical and far-too-quiet on the bench. Idiosyncratic and lacking in influence. A fairly persistent take on Thomas’ career holds that he’s lived in the shadow of Justice Antonin Scalia, and his views were, at most, an exaggerated version of Scalia’s originalism.

This view of Thomas is wrong.

It is true that Thomas had little influence on the men and women he’s served with for years. No other member of the Court joined his opinions suggesting that federal child labor laws and the ban on whites-only lunch counters are unconstitutional — though there’s a very real risk that Neil Gorsuch will be the first. No other justice agrees with Thomas that the First Amendment does not apply to high school students.

Advertisement
But if you’re asking how effectively Thomas helped sway Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy to his own views, you are asking the wrong question. In a series of opinions joined by no other justice, Thomas waged a quiet war of ideas against twentieth century liberalism — and he won the hearts of a legion of conservative law students. Many of those former students are now old enough to be judges.

As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.

Unmentionable ideas
To understand just how much Thomas shaped America’s legal debates, it’s helpful to turn the clock back to 1991 — the year Thomas joined the Supreme Court — and then to turn it back a little further, to an age when Thomas’ views were ascendant.

A hundred years ago, the Supreme Court held that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional. Hammer v. Dagenhart rested on a now-discredited distinction between laws that regulate “commerce” — which the Court defined narrowly to include little more than the transit of goods — and other activities such as manufacturing, mining, or agriculture.

Advertisement
Congress could regulate the transit of goods but not the production of them, according to Dagenhart, which is why a ban on child labor could not stand. The ban, according to the justices of another era, “does not regulate transportation among the States, but aims to standardize the ages at which children may be employed in mining and manufacturing within the States.” That was not allowed.

Jo Hudson, a "back-roper," stands next to a machine that dispenses thread, in the "mule room" at the Chace Cotton Mill in Burlington, Vermont. (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
JO HUDSON, A "BACK-ROPER," STANDS NEXT TO A MACHINE THAT DISPENSES THREAD, IN THE "MULE ROOM" AT THE CHACE COTTON MILL IN BURLINGTON, VERMONT. (PHOTO BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Dagenhart is now taught in law schools as anticanon — the kind of decision that stands as an example of how judges should never behave. Clarence Thomas thinks this case was correctly decided.

At the time of the framing, Thomas claimed in his concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez, “the term ‘commerce’ was used in contradistinction to productive activities such as manufacturing and agriculture.” It’s a wordy statement that reveals little to readers who aren’t familiar with early twentieth century case law, but it is very much an explicit endorsement of the rule announced in Dagenhart.

Nor would child labor laws be the only casualties in Clarence Thomas’ America. If Congress’ power were limited in the way Thomas describes, bans on employment discrimination would also fall — except maybe in industries such as shipping that involve actual transit of goods across state lines — as would civil rights laws banning whites-only lunch counters. The federal minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, various laws protecting workers benefits, federal overtime laws, and the Affordable Care Act would all cease to exist.

When Thomas joined the Court in 1991, there was broad consensus that cases like Dagenhart were wrong. Such a broad consensus, in fact, that the case’s defenders were relegated to the fringes of the legal academy.

President Reagan promised to appoint judges who would exercise “judicial restraint.” President George H.W. Bush, who appointed Thomas, said that he would “appoint people to the Federal Bench that will not legislate from the Bench.” No politician in their right mind wanted to be associated with the view that judges should strike down most of the twentieth century.

Advertisement
Nor did legal elites believe, in the years before Thomas’ ascension to the bench, that the judiciary should declare war on the New Deal or the Great Society. In the final year of the Reagan administration, the Justice Department published a set of “Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation,” which laid out the administrations’ preferred way of reading the Constitution and instructed DOJ lawyers to make arguments consistent with this reading.

Yet, as I discuss in my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, the Reagan administration’s vision for the Constitution was a picture of moderation when compared to Thomas’. The Guidelines did not claim that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, for example, though it did suggest that state governments should be allowed to pay their workers less than the minimum wage. And the Guidelines explicitly endorsed a 1966 Supreme Court decision upholding the Voting Rights Act — the same Voting Rights Act that Thomas voted to gut in 2013.

Thomas, in other words, was a man ahead of his time. He showed a conservative movement, that primarily aspired to weaken the judiciary, that it could have much larger ambitions. He taught them that, if they were determined enough, conservative judges could build a bridge back to the Gilded Age, frogmarch the nation across this bridge, and then burn it behind them. And, while Thomas’ longest-serving colleagues reject this vision, the next generation of conservative judges view it as an inspiration.

Playing the long game
“I’ve given up on the current generation,” Justice Antonin Scalia once told a room of law students. “But the kids in law school, I think there’s still a chance,“ he added. “That’s who I write my dissents for.”

Indeed, Scalia pioneered the art of the punchy, nasty, unforgettable dissent. He introduced the legal world to phrases like “jiggery-pokery” and “pure applesauce.” When the Court struck down a law that effectively criminalized gay sex, Scalia complained that his Court “has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” When it reaffirmed the right to have an abortion, Scalia claimed that “the best the Court can do to explain how it is that the word ‘liberty’ must be thought to include the right to destroy human fetuses is to rattle off a collection of adjectives that simply decorate a value judgment and conceal a political choice.”

Thomas takes a different approach. While Scalia traded in barbs and insults, Thomas’ opinions read, well, like judicial opinions. Where Scalia appealed to cultural grievances and a sense of victimhood, Thomas writes like he is the picture of reasonableness, simply trying to restore lost truths that his colleagues ignore.

Thomas’ Lopez opinion, the one where he endorses the same legal theory that was once used to strike down child labor laws, begins with a seemingly mild (and rather dubious) claim that “our case law has drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause.”

Yet, where the two men disagreed, Thomas, and not Scalia, appears to have won the battle for the soul of conservatism.

Consider the question of agency regulation — an extraordinarily important area of the law where Scalia and Thomas had wildly different views for most of the former’s career.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN
The Little-Noticed Conservative Plan To Permanently Lock Democrats Out Of Policymaking
Congress is not an especially nimble body, even when it isn’t completely dysfunctional. It is not possible for a cacophonous body of 535 lawmakers to update America’s environmental laws every time technology changes. Or to constantly update labor laws to account for inflation. Or to keep abreast of the latest vehicle safety innovations. If Congress had to enact a new law every time an industry regulation needed to be tweaked, many coal plants would likely be using the same technology they used in the 1980s.

Which is why the Clean Air Act delegates the task of keeping up on new technological developments to the Environmental Protection Agency. One provision of this law, for example, requires EPA to determine “the best system of emission reduction” that is both cost effective and feasible given existing technology, and to set standards ensuring that certain sources of pollution achieve similar levels of emission reduction. Congress sets the overarching policy — that standards should continually be updated to reflect new innovations — but the EPA implements this policy through a series of regulations.

For most of his time of the bench, Scalia was a staunch defender of this allocation of power. Among other things, he was one of the Court’s most outspoken defenders of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a Supreme Court decision holding that courts should typically defer to regulatory agencies when the statute authorizing the agency to regulate is ambiguous.

Thomas, meanwhile, wants to blow up the regulatory state and spit on its ashes. Thomas doesn’t simply want to overrule Chevron, he wrote in 2015 that “generally applicable rules of private conduct” can only be created by an act of Congress and that any decision that “involves an exercise of policy discretion. . . requires an exercise of legislative power.” Under Thomas’ vision, laws like the Clean Air Act simply cannot exist.

Though Scalia’s view of the administrative state largely prevailed while Scalia was on the high Court, Thomas’ view is now ascendant. At the annual meetings of the conservative Federalist Society, the legal group responsible for choosing many of Trump’s judicial nominees, the Society’s leading lights speak of dismantling agency regulation with the kind of obsessiveness normally associated with Humbert Humbert and Captain Ahab.

Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat Senate Republicans held open for a year until Trump could fill it, campaigned for his current job by writing concurring opinions embracing Thomas’ skepticism of agency regulations. At least one judge that Trump is reportedly considering for the Court’s current vacancy, Judge Raymond Kethledge, appears to be aping Gorsuch in an effort to catch the White House’s eye.

Indeed, even retiring Justice Kennedy, the last vestige of conservative moderation on the Supreme Court, wrote an opinion attacking Chevron on his way out the door.

The war against the administrative state approaches its final skirmish. Thomas is about to win.

Kneel before Zod
Thomas’ superpower is his ability to reframe life-and-death legal battles as an academic debate about history. By framing Lopez, for example, as a search for “the original understanding of the Commerce Clause,” rather than as a moral defense of striking down child labor laws, Thomas shifts responsibility for his decisions off himself and onto the framers. And he shows other conservatives how they can do the same.

Thomas is able to absolve himself of responsibility, moreover, despite the fact that he is a terrible historian.

Consider Thomas’ dissenting opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.

In Brown, a majority of the Court joined Justice Scalia’s opinion striking down a California law banning the sale of “violent video games” to minors — on the grounds that this law violates the First Amendment. Thomas disagreed, claiming that “the practices and beliefs of the founding generation” did not “include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.”

Thomas’ Brown opinion, moreover, built on his concurring opinion in Morse v. Frederick, where he argued that “the First Amendment, as originally understood, does not protect student speech in public schools.”

The justice rooted both opinions in his belief that seventeenth and eighteenth century adults lorded over children like petty tyrants. Thus, Thomas writes in Morse that private school “teachers managed classrooms with an iron hand,” and he writes in Brown that puritan fathers “ruled families with absolute authority.” Thomas cites to centuries-old parenting guides with names like “The Well-Ordered Family” and “A Family Well-Ordered.” He quotes a 1692 text warning that “by hu-mouring and cockering” their children, parents “’poison’d the fountain’ and later ‘taste[d] the bitter waters.’”

All of this is very interesting, but it is unclear why any of it matters. That is, even if Thomas is correct that the founding generation “believed parents to have complete authority over their minor children and expected parents to direct the development of those children,” why does it follow that the founding generation would have let the government restrict children’s speech — especially outside of settings like the classroom where discipline is required?

A 1692 guide on parenting provides no more insight into how the framers understood the First Amendment than a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting offers insight into whether Roe v. Wade is correctly decided.

Nevertheless, if you are asking whether Thomas is right or wrong about how the First Amendment was originally understood, you are again asking the wrong question. Originalism — the theory that the Constitution must be read solely through the lens of its original history — has never been a constraint on judicial discretion. And judges who identify as originalists have never been particularly skilled at constructing history.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Lana Harris
Gorsuch will make liberals miss Scalia
Scalia, unlike Gorsuch, came from a humbler era for judicial conservatives.

Justice Hugo Black, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, used originalist arguments to sweep away attacks on the New Deal and to reinvigorate the Bill of Rights. Justice Scalia used it to counsel judicial restraint in opposition to Roe v. Wade. More radical conservatives like Thomas and Gorsuch use originalism to justify sweeping away the very same legal framework that was built by men like Justice Black.

The genius of Clarence Thomas isn’t that he is a great historian. It is that he knows how to comb the historical record for sources that agree with him. And, once he finds them, he can claim that any precedent he disagrees with is inconsistent with “the original understanding” and must be swept away.

First as tragedy, then as farce
Clarence Thomas is 70-years-old. He’s served on the Court for half of his adult life, and he spent most of that time writing lonely opinions joined by no other justice.

But the times are a changing. Last year, at the Federalist Society’s annual lawyers’ convention, a triumphant Gorsuch addressed an adoring crowd. “Tonight I can report,” the Man Who Is Not Merrick Garland proclaimed to thunderous applause, “a person can be both a committed originalist and textualist and be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Since joining the Court, moreover, Gorsuch tacked to Thomas’ right in an important constitutional case — authoring a love letter to the Gilded Age that not even Thomas would join. In the coming age, Thomas could soon be the Court’s center, and men like Gorsuch could take on Thomas’ traditional role as the radical dissenter.

Justice Stephen J. Field
JUSTICE STEPHEN J. FIELD
America has seen this movie before, and it did not end well the first time. One of Abraham Lincoln’s worst decisions as president — an error in judgment rivaled only by Lincoln’s willingness to accept the white supremacist Andrew Johnson as his 1864 running mate — was Lincoln’s appointment of Justice Stephen Johnson Field to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Like Thomas, Field spent much of his long career on the bench writing dissenting opinions and concurrences urging his colleagues to lurch further to the right. Field stood up for price gouging businesses and against farmers. He railed against public health laws. And he labeled a modest income tax on upper-income earners an “assault upon capital” which “will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.”

Field did not live to see the Supreme Court’s opinions striking down minimum wages, protections for unions and child labor laws, but he did more than anyone in America to lay the groundwork for these decisions.

Thomas also may not live to see his final triumph. And when it does come, it may not be a complete victory. It is unclear that there will ever again be five votes to abolish child labor laws.

But Thomas did something far more important than winning any one legal victory. He taught his fellow conservatives how to dream again. He showed them that there is an alternative to judicial restraint, and made them hunger for a world where conservative principles are imposed on the nation by judicial fiat.

For a quarter century now, young members of the Federalist Society have opened up their Constitutional Law textbooks, read Thomas’ solo dissents, and wondered “why not?” The oldest of these former law students are now in the prime of their careers — ripe for appointment to the federal bench. And there is an entire generation of them waiting for their turn to rule.


Here's some of the important bits however since I assume you don't have a long attention span:
The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

Nor would child labor laws be the only casualties in Clarence Thomas’ America. If Congress’ power were limited in the way Thomas describes, bans on employment discrimination would also fall — except maybe in industries such as shipping that involve actual transit of goods across state lines — as would civil rights laws banning whites-only lunch counters. The federal minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, various laws protecting workers benefits, federal overtime laws, and the Affordable Care Act would all cease to exist.

Of course I've read it.

And no, not sarcastic.

I particularly enjoyed this blurb:
As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.


So despite the fact that Thomas is an idiot and an obvious shill, it's a good thing that he's the influence on the next generation? I mean, I guess we didn't REALLY need workers rights, or anti discrimination laws... (/s)

And again, the article isn't praising Thomas, it's pointing out how damaging his views are.

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 Wolfblade wrote:
 whembly wrote:
 Wolfblade wrote:

I hope you're being sarcastic. But if you're not, have you ever bothered to read an article you have ever posted?
Spoiler:

Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker in America
The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.
IAN MILLHISER
JUL 3, 2018, 8:00 AM
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Justice Clarence Thomas (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS (PHOTO BY WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES)
Justice Clarence Thomas is the most important legal thinker of his generation, and the most significant judicial appointment of the last forty years.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

CREDIT: AP
How Conservatives Abandoned Judicial Restraint, Took Over The Courts And Radically Transformed America
There is a commonly held view that Thomas is an intellectual lightweight. Radical and far-too-quiet on the bench. Idiosyncratic and lacking in influence. A fairly persistent take on Thomas’ career holds that he’s lived in the shadow of Justice Antonin Scalia, and his views were, at most, an exaggerated version of Scalia’s originalism.

This view of Thomas is wrong.

It is true that Thomas had little influence on the men and women he’s served with for years. No other member of the Court joined his opinions suggesting that federal child labor laws and the ban on whites-only lunch counters are unconstitutional — though there’s a very real risk that Neil Gorsuch will be the first. No other justice agrees with Thomas that the First Amendment does not apply to high school students.

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But if you’re asking how effectively Thomas helped sway Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy to his own views, you are asking the wrong question. In a series of opinions joined by no other justice, Thomas waged a quiet war of ideas against twentieth century liberalism — and he won the hearts of a legion of conservative law students. Many of those former students are now old enough to be judges.

As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.

Unmentionable ideas
To understand just how much Thomas shaped America’s legal debates, it’s helpful to turn the clock back to 1991 — the year Thomas joined the Supreme Court — and then to turn it back a little further, to an age when Thomas’ views were ascendant.

A hundred years ago, the Supreme Court held that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional. Hammer v. Dagenhart rested on a now-discredited distinction between laws that regulate “commerce” — which the Court defined narrowly to include little more than the transit of goods — and other activities such as manufacturing, mining, or agriculture.

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Congress could regulate the transit of goods but not the production of them, according to Dagenhart, which is why a ban on child labor could not stand. The ban, according to the justices of another era, “does not regulate transportation among the States, but aims to standardize the ages at which children may be employed in mining and manufacturing within the States.” That was not allowed.

Jo Hudson, a "back-roper," stands next to a machine that dispenses thread, in the "mule room" at the Chace Cotton Mill in Burlington, Vermont. (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
JO HUDSON, A "BACK-ROPER," STANDS NEXT TO A MACHINE THAT DISPENSES THREAD, IN THE "MULE ROOM" AT THE CHACE COTTON MILL IN BURLINGTON, VERMONT. (PHOTO BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Dagenhart is now taught in law schools as anticanon — the kind of decision that stands as an example of how judges should never behave. Clarence Thomas thinks this case was correctly decided.

At the time of the framing, Thomas claimed in his concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez, “the term ‘commerce’ was used in contradistinction to productive activities such as manufacturing and agriculture.” It’s a wordy statement that reveals little to readers who aren’t familiar with early twentieth century case law, but it is very much an explicit endorsement of the rule announced in Dagenhart.

Nor would child labor laws be the only casualties in Clarence Thomas’ America. If Congress’ power were limited in the way Thomas describes, bans on employment discrimination would also fall — except maybe in industries such as shipping that involve actual transit of goods across state lines — as would civil rights laws banning whites-only lunch counters. The federal minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, various laws protecting workers benefits, federal overtime laws, and the Affordable Care Act would all cease to exist.

When Thomas joined the Court in 1991, there was broad consensus that cases like Dagenhart were wrong. Such a broad consensus, in fact, that the case’s defenders were relegated to the fringes of the legal academy.

President Reagan promised to appoint judges who would exercise “judicial restraint.” President George H.W. Bush, who appointed Thomas, said that he would “appoint people to the Federal Bench that will not legislate from the Bench.” No politician in their right mind wanted to be associated with the view that judges should strike down most of the twentieth century.

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Nor did legal elites believe, in the years before Thomas’ ascension to the bench, that the judiciary should declare war on the New Deal or the Great Society. In the final year of the Reagan administration, the Justice Department published a set of “Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation,” which laid out the administrations’ preferred way of reading the Constitution and instructed DOJ lawyers to make arguments consistent with this reading.

Yet, as I discuss in my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, the Reagan administration’s vision for the Constitution was a picture of moderation when compared to Thomas’. The Guidelines did not claim that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, for example, though it did suggest that state governments should be allowed to pay their workers less than the minimum wage. And the Guidelines explicitly endorsed a 1966 Supreme Court decision upholding the Voting Rights Act — the same Voting Rights Act that Thomas voted to gut in 2013.

Thomas, in other words, was a man ahead of his time. He showed a conservative movement, that primarily aspired to weaken the judiciary, that it could have much larger ambitions. He taught them that, if they were determined enough, conservative judges could build a bridge back to the Gilded Age, frogmarch the nation across this bridge, and then burn it behind them. And, while Thomas’ longest-serving colleagues reject this vision, the next generation of conservative judges view it as an inspiration.

Playing the long game
“I’ve given up on the current generation,” Justice Antonin Scalia once told a room of law students. “But the kids in law school, I think there’s still a chance,“ he added. “That’s who I write my dissents for.”

Indeed, Scalia pioneered the art of the punchy, nasty, unforgettable dissent. He introduced the legal world to phrases like “jiggery-pokery” and “pure applesauce.” When the Court struck down a law that effectively criminalized gay sex, Scalia complained that his Court “has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” When it reaffirmed the right to have an abortion, Scalia claimed that “the best the Court can do to explain how it is that the word ‘liberty’ must be thought to include the right to destroy human fetuses is to rattle off a collection of adjectives that simply decorate a value judgment and conceal a political choice.”

Thomas takes a different approach. While Scalia traded in barbs and insults, Thomas’ opinions read, well, like judicial opinions. Where Scalia appealed to cultural grievances and a sense of victimhood, Thomas writes like he is the picture of reasonableness, simply trying to restore lost truths that his colleagues ignore.

Thomas’ Lopez opinion, the one where he endorses the same legal theory that was once used to strike down child labor laws, begins with a seemingly mild (and rather dubious) claim that “our case law has drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause.”

Yet, where the two men disagreed, Thomas, and not Scalia, appears to have won the battle for the soul of conservatism.

Consider the question of agency regulation — an extraordinarily important area of the law where Scalia and Thomas had wildly different views for most of the former’s career.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN
The Little-Noticed Conservative Plan To Permanently Lock Democrats Out Of Policymaking
Congress is not an especially nimble body, even when it isn’t completely dysfunctional. It is not possible for a cacophonous body of 535 lawmakers to update America’s environmental laws every time technology changes. Or to constantly update labor laws to account for inflation. Or to keep abreast of the latest vehicle safety innovations. If Congress had to enact a new law every time an industry regulation needed to be tweaked, many coal plants would likely be using the same technology they used in the 1980s.

Which is why the Clean Air Act delegates the task of keeping up on new technological developments to the Environmental Protection Agency. One provision of this law, for example, requires EPA to determine “the best system of emission reduction” that is both cost effective and feasible given existing technology, and to set standards ensuring that certain sources of pollution achieve similar levels of emission reduction. Congress sets the overarching policy — that standards should continually be updated to reflect new innovations — but the EPA implements this policy through a series of regulations.

For most of his time of the bench, Scalia was a staunch defender of this allocation of power. Among other things, he was one of the Court’s most outspoken defenders of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a Supreme Court decision holding that courts should typically defer to regulatory agencies when the statute authorizing the agency to regulate is ambiguous.

Thomas, meanwhile, wants to blow up the regulatory state and spit on its ashes. Thomas doesn’t simply want to overrule Chevron, he wrote in 2015 that “generally applicable rules of private conduct” can only be created by an act of Congress and that any decision that “involves an exercise of policy discretion. . . requires an exercise of legislative power.” Under Thomas’ vision, laws like the Clean Air Act simply cannot exist.

Though Scalia’s view of the administrative state largely prevailed while Scalia was on the high Court, Thomas’ view is now ascendant. At the annual meetings of the conservative Federalist Society, the legal group responsible for choosing many of Trump’s judicial nominees, the Society’s leading lights speak of dismantling agency regulation with the kind of obsessiveness normally associated with Humbert Humbert and Captain Ahab.

Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat Senate Republicans held open for a year until Trump could fill it, campaigned for his current job by writing concurring opinions embracing Thomas’ skepticism of agency regulations. At least one judge that Trump is reportedly considering for the Court’s current vacancy, Judge Raymond Kethledge, appears to be aping Gorsuch in an effort to catch the White House’s eye.

Indeed, even retiring Justice Kennedy, the last vestige of conservative moderation on the Supreme Court, wrote an opinion attacking Chevron on his way out the door.

The war against the administrative state approaches its final skirmish. Thomas is about to win.

Kneel before Zod
Thomas’ superpower is his ability to reframe life-and-death legal battles as an academic debate about history. By framing Lopez, for example, as a search for “the original understanding of the Commerce Clause,” rather than as a moral defense of striking down child labor laws, Thomas shifts responsibility for his decisions off himself and onto the framers. And he shows other conservatives how they can do the same.

Thomas is able to absolve himself of responsibility, moreover, despite the fact that he is a terrible historian.

Consider Thomas’ dissenting opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.

In Brown, a majority of the Court joined Justice Scalia’s opinion striking down a California law banning the sale of “violent video games” to minors — on the grounds that this law violates the First Amendment. Thomas disagreed, claiming that “the practices and beliefs of the founding generation” did not “include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.”

Thomas’ Brown opinion, moreover, built on his concurring opinion in Morse v. Frederick, where he argued that “the First Amendment, as originally understood, does not protect student speech in public schools.”

The justice rooted both opinions in his belief that seventeenth and eighteenth century adults lorded over children like petty tyrants. Thus, Thomas writes in Morse that private school “teachers managed classrooms with an iron hand,” and he writes in Brown that puritan fathers “ruled families with absolute authority.” Thomas cites to centuries-old parenting guides with names like “The Well-Ordered Family” and “A Family Well-Ordered.” He quotes a 1692 text warning that “by hu-mouring and cockering” their children, parents “’poison’d the fountain’ and later ‘taste[d] the bitter waters.’”

All of this is very interesting, but it is unclear why any of it matters. That is, even if Thomas is correct that the founding generation “believed parents to have complete authority over their minor children and expected parents to direct the development of those children,” why does it follow that the founding generation would have let the government restrict children’s speech — especially outside of settings like the classroom where discipline is required?

A 1692 guide on parenting provides no more insight into how the framers understood the First Amendment than a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting offers insight into whether Roe v. Wade is correctly decided.

Nevertheless, if you are asking whether Thomas is right or wrong about how the First Amendment was originally understood, you are again asking the wrong question. Originalism — the theory that the Constitution must be read solely through the lens of its original history — has never been a constraint on judicial discretion. And judges who identify as originalists have never been particularly skilled at constructing history.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Lana Harris
Gorsuch will make liberals miss Scalia
Scalia, unlike Gorsuch, came from a humbler era for judicial conservatives.

Justice Hugo Black, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, used originalist arguments to sweep away attacks on the New Deal and to reinvigorate the Bill of Rights. Justice Scalia used it to counsel judicial restraint in opposition to Roe v. Wade. More radical conservatives like Thomas and Gorsuch use originalism to justify sweeping away the very same legal framework that was built by men like Justice Black.

The genius of Clarence Thomas isn’t that he is a great historian. It is that he knows how to comb the historical record for sources that agree with him. And, once he finds them, he can claim that any precedent he disagrees with is inconsistent with “the original understanding” and must be swept away.

First as tragedy, then as farce
Clarence Thomas is 70-years-old. He’s served on the Court for half of his adult life, and he spent most of that time writing lonely opinions joined by no other justice.

But the times are a changing. Last year, at the Federalist Society’s annual lawyers’ convention, a triumphant Gorsuch addressed an adoring crowd. “Tonight I can report,” the Man Who Is Not Merrick Garland proclaimed to thunderous applause, “a person can be both a committed originalist and textualist and be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Since joining the Court, moreover, Gorsuch tacked to Thomas’ right in an important constitutional case — authoring a love letter to the Gilded Age that not even Thomas would join. In the coming age, Thomas could soon be the Court’s center, and men like Gorsuch could take on Thomas’ traditional role as the radical dissenter.

Justice Stephen J. Field
JUSTICE STEPHEN J. FIELD
America has seen this movie before, and it did not end well the first time. One of Abraham Lincoln’s worst decisions as president — an error in judgment rivaled only by Lincoln’s willingness to accept the white supremacist Andrew Johnson as his 1864 running mate — was Lincoln’s appointment of Justice Stephen Johnson Field to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Like Thomas, Field spent much of his long career on the bench writing dissenting opinions and concurrences urging his colleagues to lurch further to the right. Field stood up for price gouging businesses and against farmers. He railed against public health laws. And he labeled a modest income tax on upper-income earners an “assault upon capital” which “will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.”

Field did not live to see the Supreme Court’s opinions striking down minimum wages, protections for unions and child labor laws, but he did more than anyone in America to lay the groundwork for these decisions.

Thomas also may not live to see his final triumph. And when it does come, it may not be a complete victory. It is unclear that there will ever again be five votes to abolish child labor laws.

But Thomas did something far more important than winning any one legal victory. He taught his fellow conservatives how to dream again. He showed them that there is an alternative to judicial restraint, and made them hunger for a world where conservative principles are imposed on the nation by judicial fiat.

For a quarter century now, young members of the Federalist Society have opened up their Constitutional Law textbooks, read Thomas’ solo dissents, and wondered “why not?” The oldest of these former law students are now in the prime of their careers — ripe for appointment to the federal bench. And there is an entire generation of them waiting for their turn to rule.


Here's some of the important bits however since I assume you don't have a long attention span:
The oft-misunderstood Justice has single-handedly reshaped the way conservatives think about the law. God help us.

No justice did more to reshape the way thousands of the nation’s top lawyers think about the law. No justice did more to shape a political movement’s sense of what it can achieve through litigation. If President George H.W. Bush had chosen someone other than Clarence Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court, the world might look vastly different today.

And American democracy would be much safer.

Nor would child labor laws be the only casualties in Clarence Thomas’ America. If Congress’ power were limited in the way Thomas describes, bans on employment discrimination would also fall — except maybe in industries such as shipping that involve actual transit of goods across state lines — as would civil rights laws banning whites-only lunch counters. The federal minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, various laws protecting workers benefits, federal overtime laws, and the Affordable Care Act would all cease to exist.

Of course I've read it.

And no, not sarcastic.

I particularly enjoyed this blurb:
As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.


So despite the fact that Thomas is an idiot and an obvious shill, it's a good thing that he's the influence on the next generation? I mean, I guess we didn't REALLY need workers rights, or anti discrimination laws... (/s)

He's from the school of thoughts to interpret the damn laws and don't ask the judiciary to *fix it* for you. That's the job of the legislature.

And again, the article isn't praising Thomas, it's pointing out how damaging his views are.

Oh, I know that. I disagree with many points the author has made...

I think after the midterm, Thomas will retire.

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Oh, I know that. I disagree with many points the author has made...

I think after the midterm, Thomas will retire.


Well having read up Clarence I can see why the author would dislike him. But the article's title is a mess that doesn't elude to the point of the article.

As sarcasm is really hard to detect on text.

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 whembly wrote:

Oh, I know that. I disagree with many points the author has made...

I think after the midterm, Thomas will retire.


What points are there to disagree with? Safer democracy? Yeah, having people argue that we should have second class citizens, or discriminate against a group is good for democracy, right? That kids should not be allowed to take dangerous jobs (i.e. factory jobs)? Yup, safer without those laws!

I'm not sure how you can honestly respect Thomas. He's an idiot, a fool, and has proven this time and again by directly arguing against almost every law that promotes basic human rights or decency.

DQ:90S++G++M----B--I+Pw40k07+D+++A+++/areWD-R+DM+


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 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Rosebuddy wrote:
 warhead01 wrote:

Have you heard the wonderful things Sarah Leong has to say about white men?
You mean Sarah Jeong, who wrote that white men should live underground like goblins because she kept getting far worse racist rape and death threats from white men.


Racist abuse justifies a racist response?


You have to understand that she's frustrated though. Sure, it's a gakky reply, but I have it from a very good source that people who are frustrated, afraid or otherwise under pressure make dumb decisions, and that we should show understanding towards such people.


If that is a not-so-subtle-dig at our private conversation over PM, then you have fundamentally misunderstood what I was trying to impress upon you.


It wasn't, it was a not-so-subtle callback to when other posters called me sanctimonious for telling them that they should be ashamed for arguing for Boer Wars-style concentration camps for Muslims after one of the attacks in London and you argued that those posters, while wrong, were afraid and frustrated and that we should take their fear seriously. I figured the same should apply even more so in this case, as personal death threats are a bit more specific than a terror attack targeting random people.


Then in that case we're in agreement, I think. I still stand by that argument I made in the past (which I had forgotten about, and thought you were referring to our PM's).

But it does hinge on whether or not one accepts that Sarah Leong's remarks were wrong. I'm not arguing that we should not be understanding given the pressure she was under, I'm arguing that her remarks are wrong. As were those remarks about internment.

Whether or not one should be understanding of the people making these remarks is a separate question.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2018/08/08 00:50:45


 
   
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Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

 Wolfblade wrote:
 whembly wrote:

Oh, I know that. I disagree with many points the author has made...

I think after the midterm, Thomas will retire.


What points are there to disagree with? Safer democracy? Yeah, having people argue that we should have second class citizens, or discriminate against a group is good for democracy, right? That kids should not be allowed to take dangerous jobs (i.e. factory jobs)? Yup, safer without those laws!

I'm not sure how you can honestly respect Thomas. He's an idiot, a fool, and has proven this time and again by directly arguing against almost every law that promotes basic human rights or decency.

Thomas follows the textualist/originalist views in determining the constitutionality of such laws. If you understood these principles, then you'd know he's not wanting all those things you've accused him of wanting. Philosophically, his jurisprudence is to call "balls and strikes" of said laws... not to fix it. The legislatures are best equipped to fix flawed laws, not the judiciary. Simply because the legislatures are more susceptible to voters accountability... rather than the life-termed judiciary.








Automatically Appended Next Post:
Prestor Jon wrote:
 whembly wrote:
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/manafort-defense-questions-star-witness-gates-about-secret-life-idUSKBN1KS10W

Hooboy... any business/tax/banking attorneys on OT forum? (polonius? Frazzled??).

So, cliffnotes so far: The "star witness" Gates testified that him and Manafort conspired to break laws...
Yet Gates admitted that he embezzled from Manafort to support a secret life and his own lifestyle.

...not such a tidy case.

Seems Manafort is guilty as all hell though.


Regarding Manafort’s tax evasion it’s a very tidy case and it would be remarkable if he avoided a conviction on those counts. In terms of proving Manafort did nefarious political things it was always going to be difficult to get a clear answer about that from this case.

So... since its so bad... in that it's likely a life sentence.

Manafort may not have anything worth to *give* to Mueller that's worth pleading out to lesser charges (remember, he was barely on campaign for 2or3 months)...

...Or...

Manafort has some guarantees from Trump that a pardon is coming (this is my bet).

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/08 01:20:50


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Prestor Jon wrote:
 Ouze wrote:
Cool, we're still doing that stupid "both sides are equally bad" nonsense. Let's never, ever stop doing that.


They may not be equally bad but they’re both still bad. The lesser of two evils is still evil. They don’t have to be equally bad for neither of them to be worth voting for. Both Bush43 or Obama may be better than Trump but I didn’t vote for any of the 3 and I wouldn’t today either.


That's worked out pretty well for us, currently - I don't like brussel sprouts, so it doesn't matter if I get arsenic or sprouts. Well, when you don't care, you might get the arsenic.

"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without", if we're throwing out generic aphorisms.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2018/08/08 01:53:27


 lord_blackfang wrote:
Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.

 Flinty wrote:
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 whembly wrote:
 Wolfblade wrote:
 whembly wrote:

Oh, I know that. I disagree with many points the author has made...

I think after the midterm, Thomas will retire.


What points are there to disagree with? Safer democracy? Yeah, having people argue that we should have second class citizens, or discriminate against a group is good for democracy, right? That kids should not be allowed to take dangerous jobs (i.e. factory jobs)? Yup, safer without those laws!

I'm not sure how you can honestly respect Thomas. He's an idiot, a fool, and has proven this time and again by directly arguing against almost every law that promotes basic human rights or decency.

Thomas follows the textualist/originalist views in determining the constitutionality of such laws. If you understood these principles, then you'd know he's not wanting all those things you've accused him of wanting. Philosophically, his jurisprudence is to call "balls and strikes" of said laws... not to fix it. The legislatures are best equipped to fix flawed laws, not the judiciary. Simply because the legislatures are more susceptible to voters accountability... rather than the life-termed judiciary.

No, he portrays everything as violating the original framework because the original framework doesn't explicitly say X or Y or Z. It's how he tried to justify opposing child labor laws, and supporting segregation for example.

DQ:90S++G++M----B--I+Pw40k07+D+++A+++/areWD-R+DM+


bittersashes wrote:One guy down at my gaming club swore he saw an objective flag take out a full unit of Bane Thralls.
 
   
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 Ouze wrote:
Prestor Jon wrote:
 Ouze wrote:
Cool, we're still doing that stupid "both sides are equally bad" nonsense. Let's never, ever stop doing that.


They may not be equally bad but they’re both still bad. The lesser of two evils is still evil. They don’t have to be equally bad for neither of them to be worth voting for. Both Bush43 or Obama may be better than Trump but I didn’t vote for any of the 3 and I wouldn’t today either.


That's worked out pretty well for us, currently - I don't like brussel sprouts, so it doesn't matter if I get arsenic or sprouts. Well, when you don't care, you might get the arsenic.

"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without", if we're throwing out generic aphorisms.



Oh, can I try!

"No matter how the wind howls, the mountain can not yield".

So, no matter the whataboutism you hear, you don't have to believe it. Shocking!

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So much winning right now :

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/07/putin-trump-arms-control-russia-724718

Vladimir Putin presented President Donald Trump with a series of requests during their private meeting in Helsinki last month, including new talks on controlling nuclear arms and prohibiting weapons in space, according to a Russian document obtained by POLITICO.

A page of proposed topics for negotiation, not previously made public, offers new insights into the substance of the July 16 dialogue that even Trump's top advisers have said they were not privy to at the time. Putin shared the contents of the document with Trump during their two-hour conversation, according to a U.S. government adviser who provided an English-language translation.

POLITICO also reviewed a Russian-language version of the document, which bore the header in Cyrillic “Dialogue on the Issue of Arms Control." The person who provided the document to POLITICO obtained it from Russian officials who described it as what Putin had conveyed to Trump in Helsinki.

The White House declined to comment on the document Tuesday, aside from denying that Trump had received any actual paperwork.

The memo points to a surprising normalcy in the priorities that Putin brought to the meeting, which included a willingness to extend a series of landmark nuclear treaties and pursue new weapons limits. Such issues have been standard fare in Russian-U.S. dialogue for decades — though they’ve been overshadowed of late by rising tensions over topics like Syria and Ukraine, as well as bipartisan complaints in Washington about Trump’s refusal to challenge Putin's denials that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election.

The new details provide evidence that Putin remains interested in maintaining the two nations’ traditional cooperation on nuclear weapons despite all their other friction, said one participant in recent unofficial arms control talks in Moscow.

“This is, ‘We want to get out of the dog house and engage with the U.S. on a broad range of security issues,’” said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the discussions. The arms control talks in late July included representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry and a U.S. delegation headed by former Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering.

Uncertainty about what Putin and Trump discussed caused much consternation in Washington after the two leaders and their translators met alone in Helsinki, even inspiring Democratic attempts to subpoena Trump’s Russian interpreter. The document doesn’t fully address critics’ questions about the private meeting, such as what the Russian government meant last month when it said the two leaders had discussed “cooperation in Syria.”

Even Trump’s top U.S. advisers have expressed murkiness about what the two leaders discussed or agreed to. As recently as last week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told reporters he was “not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened in Helsinki."

Still, Putin touched on some of the document’s themes during his joint news conference with Trump in Helsinki, where the Russian leader said that “as major nuclear powers, we bear special responsibility for maintaining international security."

Among other priorities, Putin expressed interest in extending an Obama-era nuclear-reduction treaty and ensuring “non-placement of weapons in space.”

“We submitted [to] our American colleagues a note with a number of specific suggestions,” Putin said at the time.

The White House, which has refused to answer most questions about what Trump and Putin discussed, would neither confirm nor deny the document's veracity.

“During the historic meeting between President Trump and President Putin, the two leaders discussed a range of subjects, including our nuclear arsenals, which when combined account for roughly 90% of all nuclear weapons," National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said.

He added: "There were no commitments to undertake any action, beyond agreement that both sides should continue discussions. The President did not receive any written proposals from President Putin, and the President did not provide any written proposals to President Putin.”

Some conservative defense hawks in the U.S. have warned against trusting Putin's suggestions on arms control. They allege he aims to hamper Trump's priorities of modernizing America's nuclear arsenal and creating a Space Force, a military branch that the president says would ensure "American dominance" beyond the Earth.

But overall, nuclear arms control remains one of the few areas of the U.S.-Russian relationship with bipartisan support in Congress.

For instance, the Russian document proposes a five-year extension for the so-called New START Treaty limiting nuclear arms. That mirrors a nonbinding resolution, S. 3169 (115), that Democrats recently proposed in Congress, where lawmakers have expressed alarm about the dangers of a new arms race as the U.S. and Russia upgrade their nuclear arsenals and Trump seeks to establish his Space Force.

The Russian document outlines a host of areas where the two countries could work together to reduce nuclear dangers and rebuild some of their lost trust.

It begins with extending the New START Treaty, which was signed by Putin and then-President Barack Obama in 2010 and ratified by the Russian Duma and U.S. Senate. The two sides agreed to limit each nation to 1,500 nuclear warheads deployed on land-based and submarine-launched missiles and carried by bomber aircraft, and it permits a vigorous set of regular inspections.

Russia proposes that the two countries “consider the possibility of a five years extension” of the treaty, which expires in early 2021, “upon understanding that existing problems related to the Treaty implementation will be settled,” the document says.

More controversially, the document outlines Moscow's pitch to “reaffirm commitment” to agreements covering “intermediate-range missiles.” That is a reference to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty negotiated by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which prohibited ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

The United States has accused Russia of violating the pact by deploying a cruise missile that can travel more than 500 kilometers. In response, Congress last year provided funding for development of a U.S. version of the missile, and some Republican hawks have urged the Trump administration to pull out of the treaty altogether to avoid giving the Russians any battlefield advantage.

In the July 16 news conference in Helsinki, Putin referred to the New START Treaty, a possible ban on weapons in space and "the implementation issues with the INF treaty."

Trump also highlighted the potential for cooperation.

"We’re getting together and we have a chance to do some great things, whether it’s nuclear proliferation in terms of stopping, we have to do it — ultimately, that’s probably the most important thing that we can be working on," Trump said in the post-summit news conference.

"Our relationship has never been worse than it is now," Trump added. "However, that changed as of about four hours ago. I really believe that."

The Russian document also raises the prospect of a new space treaty that bars both nations from placing weapons in orbit — urging the two countries "to discuss the non-placement of weapons in space."

The U.S. and Russia are both party to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, but that only prohibits placing weapons of mass destruction in space. Both nations, along with China, are believed to be working on anti-satellite weapons and other offensive means to attack space assets.

The Russian appeal also addresses rising tensions in Eastern Europe, proposing that Washington and Moscow "take measures in order to prevent incidents while conducting military activities in Europe, as well as to increase trust and transparency in the military sphere."

It also calls on the two sides to "initiate expert consultations to identify destabilizing kinds of arms, to take them into account in the arms control mechanism."

The Russian document raised a series of possible venues for the talks to place. It proposes "strategic stability" consultations, led by the deputy secretary of state and deputy minister of foreign affairs, which could discuss a host of other thorny issues such as Syria. It also recommends so-called 2+2 dialogue between the U.S. secretaries of State and Defense and their Russian counterparts, as well as meetings between the heads of the U.S. and Russian armed forces.

The Pentagon seems eager to revive the "strategic stability" talks, which were suspended last year.

"We're in the process of trying to arrange a period of time, a date and a place, to meet to have strategic stability talks," John Rood, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said late last month during a discussion hosted by the Aspen Institute. He said those would ideally involve "clear understandings of how we regard nuclear doctrine."

How the Trump administration plans to proceed on the arms control agenda, however, remains uncertain. A State Department spokesman declined to say when or if official talks might begin on extending the New START treaty.

But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has expressed cautious optimism that Russian interest in negotiating new arms control agreements is genuine and that the two countries can make progress.

Trump went to Helsinki "with the objective to create the opportunity for leaders of these two powers that own enormous nuclear capacity to have a channel to communicate," Pompeo said several days after the summit. "There were places they found overlap. We're going to work on counterterrorism together. We're hopeful that on some of these grand arms control issues, that are very important to the world, that there may well be a path forward."

Arms control advocates have generally criticized what they view as Trump's overly aggressive foreign policy, particularly some of his fiery rhetoric about nuclear weapons and his proposal to develop a new, lower-yield nuclear bomb for use short of an all-out atomic conflict.

Yet widespread agreement exists that the U.S. should seize the opportunity to carry on the Cold War legacy of arms treaties with Russia.

"New START extension should be a priority regardless of other problems in the U.S.-Russia relationship," said Alexandra Bell, a former State Department official who is senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Washington think tank. "The predictability and stability the treaty provides should not be a bargaining chip. It also shouldn't be assumed that we can just deal with this later. The Russians have shown an interest in serious conversations about extension. We should pursue the opportunity."

Yet fierce critics remain in the most hawkish foreign policy circles in Washington. For example, the Center for Security Policy — a conservative group headed by Frank Gaffney, an ally of Trump national security adviser John Bolton — called Putin's offer in Helsinki "a trap."

"He said that he wants to re-start bilateral arms control processes with the United States," the think tank said in recent statement. "That proposal, much favored by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, would: preclude the United States from decisively countering Putin’s strategic nuclear modernization; deny America the right to defend itself against ballistic missile attack; and emasculate Trump’s envisioned Space Force military service.

"President Trump must take a businesslike approach to get Putin to pay for his own arms control, while putting American defense interests first," it added.


From whom are unforgiven we bring the mercy of war. 
   
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Chicago

 Wolfblade wrote:
 whembly wrote:
 Wolfblade wrote:
 whembly wrote:

Oh, I know that. I disagree with many points the author has made...

I think after the midterm, Thomas will retire.


What points are there to disagree with? Safer democracy? Yeah, having people argue that we should have second class citizens, or discriminate against a group is good for democracy, right? That kids should not be allowed to take dangerous jobs (i.e. factory jobs)? Yup, safer without those laws!

I'm not sure how you can honestly respect Thomas. He's an idiot, a fool, and has proven this time and again by directly arguing against almost every law that promotes basic human rights or decency.

Thomas follows the textualist/originalist views in determining the constitutionality of such laws. If you understood these principles, then you'd know he's not wanting all those things you've accused him of wanting. Philosophically, his jurisprudence is to call "balls and strikes" of said laws... not to fix it. The legislatures are best equipped to fix flawed laws, not the judiciary. Simply because the legislatures are more susceptible to voters accountability... rather than the life-termed judiciary.

No, he portrays everything as violating the original framework because the original framework doesn't explicitly say X or Y or Z. It's how he tried to justify opposing child labor laws, and supporting segregation for example.


Which is ironic given the fact that he could still be a slave considering that stance he takes

Ustrello paints- 30k, 40k multiple armies
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/614742.page 
   
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Canterbury

thing o also bear in mind is that Trump thinks asbestos would have stopped the WTC from burning down on 9/11

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/258655569458651136?lang=en

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/jm9f46

https://twitter.com/LynnHorsley/status/1027043622682812417


Big problems getting Johnson County results tonight. Estimate is final results won't be posted for at least two more hours. Big computer glitch.


Good thing the man in charge of elections in the state has kept his eye on the ball eh ?

... ohh.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-06/biggest-american-aluminum-maker-seeks-waivers-from-u-s-tariffs


Biggest American Aluminum Maker Seeks Waivers From U.S. Tariffs

Alcoa Corp., the American aluminum maker that supplies metal used in everything from Coca-Cola cans to Boeing Co.’s 747 jetliner, is seeking relief from U.S. tariffs meant to help it.

...



going well .

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/08 07:29:19


The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,
 
   
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 reds8n wrote:
thing o also bear in mind is that Trump thinks asbestos would have stopped the WTC from burning down on 9/11

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/258655569458651136?lang=en

Its one of those pet theories that came from the right wing fringe as an example of the downside of government regulation. The Cato Institute went with that 'theory' that if the government hadn't banned the use during construction it wouldn't have been that bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump got it from them. The only thing more asbestos would have done is create an even bigger cloud once the towers collapsed.

Sorry for my spelling. I'm not a native speaker and a dyslexic.
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Tomb Kings 1500 points Sekhra (RIP) 
   
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Bristol

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
 reds8n wrote:
thing o also bear in mind is that Trump thinks asbestos would have stopped the WTC from burning down on 9/11

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/258655569458651136?lang=en

Its one of those pet theories that came from the right wing fringe as an example of the downside of government regulation. The Cato Institute went with that 'theory' that if the government hadn't banned the use during construction it wouldn't have been that bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump got it from them. The only thing more asbestos would have done is create an even bigger cloud once the towers collapsed.


Yeah, the idea that more asbestos, of any form, would have made 9/11 less of a tragedy is absolutely insane.

https://www.asbestos.com/world-trade-center/

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/08/08 08:07:43


The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.

Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
 
   
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[DCM]
Et In Arcadia Ego





Canterbury

 whembly wrote:
 Xenomancers wrote:
 Formosa wrote:
Wait so advocating for violence is enough to get you thrown off these platforms, and rightly so, I assume this will be applied across the board then?

Otherwise they run the very real risk of appearing biased in favour of one side over another.


I don't think they care too much about that. Nor do I think anyone cares about Alex Jones, that has an IQ over 85.

Meh... he has his own websites.


Spoiler:




http://archive.is/pI1zS


You will not post anything libelous, defamatory, harmful, threatening, harassing, abusive, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable, or otherwise illegal.


err.. are you gonna tell'em or ...

The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,
 
   
Made in nl
Tzeentch Aspiring Sorcerer Riding a Disc





Well it clearly says you, not him, so he's all good.

The part where they casually switch from civilization to tribe like its the same thing hurts my brain.

Sorry for my spelling. I'm not a native speaker and a dyslexic.
1750 pts Blood Specters
2000 pts Imperial Fists
6000 pts Disciples of Fate
3500 pts Peridia Prime
2500 pts Prophets of Fate
Lizardmen 3000 points Tlaxcoatl Temple-City
Tomb Kings 1500 points Sekhra (RIP) 
   
Made in gb
Wolf Guard Bodyguard in Terminator Armor




Yeah, do as I say don't do as I do has been around for a looooooooooooooooooong time.
   
 
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