FINALLY: Justice Clarence Thomas Recognized by Smithsonian African-American History Museum
Posted: September 26, 2017 Filed under: History, Law & Justice, Think Tank | Tags: African American, Black History, Clarence Thomas, Martin Luther King Jr, SCOTUS, Smithsonian African-American History Museum, Thurgood Marshall, U.S. Supreme Court Leave a comment
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty
Justice Thomas appears in an exhibit that was installed Sunday, a Smithsonian spokeswoman said Monday. The display honors both of the black justices who ascended to the pinnacle of the legal profession. The other is Thurgood Marshall.
Justice Thomas’ apparent omission irked conservative observers, who suspected an ideological bias among Smithsonian officials and called for the influential jurist’s inclusion in the museum.
Ronald D. Rotunda, distinguished professor of jurisprudence at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University, said Justice Thomas deserves to be recognized for his contributions to constitutional jurisprudence, his record of public service and his inspirational life story.
“Like Thurgood Marshall, he has been a very influential justice, and like Thurgood Marshall, he has risen from humble beginnings,” Mr. Rotunda said. Read the rest of this entry »
Charles C.W. Cooke on Antonin Scalia: Originalism Was His Judicial Philosophy
Posted: February 20, 2016 Filed under: Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Antonin Scalia, Austin, Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, Colorado, Federalist Society, Funeral, Supreme Court of the United States, Texas, The New York Times, United States Leave a comment
Justice Scalia was referred to as a “conservative” justice, but his judicial philosophy was about ahdering to the Constitution.
Source: National Review
Reality Distortion Field Headline of the Day
Posted: September 10, 2015 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, David Brock, Hillary Clinton, Media Matters For America, Politico, Sidney Blumenthal, Supreme Court of the United States, The New York Times, United States Department of State Leave a commentBrock, the former right-wing journalist-turned-pro-Clinton crusader, takes aim at a top New York Times editor in a soon-to-be released book obtained by POLITICO. In the book, titled “Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary Clinton and Hijack Your Government,” Brock accuses senior politics editor and former Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan of helping to turn the paper into a “megaphone for conservative propaganda” by unfairly targeting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The founder of liberal watchdog groups Media Matters and Correct the Record casts Bill and Hillary Clinton, whom he tormented in the 1990s as a reporter with the American Spectator, as personal and political angels who offered him access to some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors.
But he uses the book as a platform to attack the Times — whose editorial board endorsed Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008 — over its approach towards the Clintons from the Whitewater investigations of the 1990s to the current coverage of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
“As it concerns Clinton coverage, the Times will have a special place in hell,” he writes, claiming that interviews with current Times employees prove his case. Read the rest of this entry »
Tom Nichols: ‘You, Too, Will Love Big Brother’: The New Totalitarians Are Here
Posted: July 6, 2015 Filed under: Censorship, Politics, Religion, Think Tank | Tags: Activism, Al Gore, Alan Chambers (Exodus International), Alliance Defending Freedom, Americans, Authoritarianism, Big Brother, Clarence Thomas, Doublethink, Fascism, George Orwell, Marxism, Progressivism, Socialism, The Federalist, Totalitarianism, United States Leave a comment
Totalitarians want their rule, and their belief system, to be accepted and self-sustaining – even if it takes bludgeoning every last citizen who disagrees
Tom Nichols writes: There’s a basic difference in the traditions of political science between “authoritarians” and “totalitaritarians.” People throw both of these words around, but as is so often the 
case, they’re using words they may not always understand. They have real meaning, however, and the difference between them is important.
Simply put, authoritarians merely want obedience, while totalitarians, whose rule is rooted in an ideology, want obedience and conversion. Authoritarians are a dime a dozen; totalitarians are rare. The authoritarians are the guys in charge who want to stay in charge, and don’t much care about you, or what you’re doing, so long as you stay out of their way. They are the jefe and his thugs in a brutal regime that want you to shut up, go to work, and look the other way when your loudmouthed neighbor gets his lights punched out by goons in black jackets. Live or die. It’s all the same to the regime.
Totalitarians are a different breed. These are the people who have a plan, who think they see the future more clearly than you or who are convinced they grasp reality in a way that you do not. They don’t serve themselves—or, they don’t serve themselves exclusively—they serve History, or The People, or The Idea, or some other ideological totem that justifies their actions.
[Read the full text here, at The Federalist]
They want obedience, of course. But even more, they want their rule, and their belief system, to be accepted and self-sustaining. And the only way to achieve that is to create a new society of people who share those beliefs, even if it means bludgeoning every last citizen into enlightenment. That’s what makes totalitarians different and more dangerous: they are “totalistic” in the sense that they demand a complete reorientation of the individual to the State and its ideological ends. Every person who harbors a secret objection, or even so much as a doubt, is a danger to the future of the whole project, and so the regime compels its subjects not only to obey but to believe.
This is what George Orwell understood so well in his landmark novel “1984.” His dystopian state doesn’t really care about quotidian obedience; it already knows how to get that. What it demands, and will get by any means, is a belief in the Party’s rectitude and in its leader, Big Brother.
If torturing the daylights out of people until they denounce even their loved ones is what it takes, so be it. That’s why the ending of the novel is so terrifying: after the two rebellious lovers of the story are broken and made to turn on each other, the wrecks left by the State are left to sit before the Leader’s face on a screen with only one emotion still alive in the husks of their bodies: they finally, truly love Big Brother.
Justice Thomas: ‘Above George Takei’s Intellectual Pay Grade’
Posted: July 3, 2015 Filed under: Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: African American, Clarence Thomas, Declaration of Independence, Dignity, George Takei, Human, Japanese American internment, Natural and legal rights, Slavery, Supreme Court of the United States Leave a comment
“Thomas’s discussion was clearly above George Tekei’s intellectual pay grade. He owes the quiet justice a big, fat apology.”
Wesley J. Smith writes:
…Tekei claimed falsely that Thomas wrote that slavery was somehow “dignified.” He most certainly did not.
Rather, Thomas argued that human dignity is intrinsic and equal among all human beings, and moreover, that our inherent worth can’t be taken away by government or anyone else.
Wesley J. Smith writes at Human Exceptionalism:
”Slavery did not strip its victims of their inherent dignity. It was evil precisely because they had inherent dignity.”
So does each and every LGBT human being. Read the rest of this entry »
The SCOTUS Marriage Decision, in Haiku
Posted: June 27, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, Humor, Law & Justice | Tags: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Daniela Lapidous, Haiku, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, media, Poetry, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, Twitter Leave a comment
George F. Will: On Obamacare, John Roberts helps Overthrow the Constitution
Posted: June 26, 2015 Filed under: Law & Justice | Tags: Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Chevron U.S.A., Chief Justice, Clarence Thomas, Earl Warren, Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Internal Revenue Service, John Roberts, Majority opinion, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Samuel Alito, Supreme Court of the United States 1 Comment
George F. Will writes: Conservatives are dismayed about the Supreme Court’s complicity in rewriting the Affordable Care Act — its ratification of the IRS’s disregard of the statute’s plain and purposeful language. But they have contributed to this outcome. Their decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches has borne this sour fruit.
“Since the New Deal, courts have permitted almost any legislative infringement of economic liberty that can be said to have a rational basis. Applying this extremely permissive test, courts usually approve any purpose that a legislature asserts. Courts even concoct purposes that legislatures neglect to articulate.”
The court says the ACA’s stipulation that subsidies are to be administered by the IRS using exchanges “established by the State” should not be construed to mean what it says. Otherwise the law will not reach as far as it will if federal exchanges can administer subsidies in states that choose not to establish exchanges. The ACA’s legislative history, however, demonstrates that the subsidies were deliberately restricted to distribution through states’ exchanges in order to pressure the states into establishing their own exchanges.
“The Roberts Doctrine facilitates what has been for a century progressivism’s central objective, the overthrow of the Constitution’s architecture. The separation of powers impedes progressivism by preventing government from wielding uninhibited power. Such power would result if its branches behaved as partners in harness rather than as wary, balancing rivals maintaining constitutional equipoise.”
The most durable damage from Thursday’s decision is not the perpetuation of the ACA, which can be undone by what created it — legislative action. The paramount injury is the court’s embrace of a duty to ratify and even facilitate lawless discretion exercised by administrative agencies and the executive branch generally.
[Read the full text here, at The Washington Post]
The court’s decision flowed from many decisions by which the judiciary has written rules that favor the government in cases of statutory construction. The decision also resulted from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s embrace of the doctrine that courts, owing vast deference to the purposes of the political branches, are obligated to do whatever is required to make a law efficient, regardless of how the law is written. What Roberts does by way of, to be polite, creative construing (Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting, calls it “somersaults of statutory interpretation”) is legislating, not judging.
” The paramount injury is the court’s embrace of a duty to ratify and even facilitate lawless discretion exercised by administrative agencies and the executive branch generally.”
Roberts writes, almost laconically, that the ACA “contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting.” That is his artful way of treating “inartful” as a synonym for “inconvenient” or even “self-defeating.”
Rolling up the sleeves of his black robe and buckling down to the business of redrafting the ACA, Roberts invents a corollary to “Chevron deference.”
Named for a 1984 case, Chevron deference has become central to the way today’s regulatory state functions. It says that agencies charged with administering statutes are entitled to deference when they interpret ambiguous statutory language. Read the rest of this entry »
Scalia: ‘Words No Longer Have Meaning if an Exchange That is Not Established by a State is ‘Established by the State’
Posted: June 25, 2015 Filed under: Breaking News, Law & Justice, Politics, White House | Tags: Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Commerce Clause, Global Panic, John Roberts, Majority opinion, Medicaid, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Social Security Act, Supreme Court of the United States, Taft–Hartley Act, Taxing and Spending Clause 2 Comments
Did the chief justice mean what he said?
James Taranto writes: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices,” Chief Justice John Roberts observed three years ago in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the case that is usually described—with a good deal of imprecision—as having “upheld” ObamaCare.
Did the chief justice mean what he said? Today the court delivered another ObamaCare ruling, this time entirely in the administration’s favor and by a vote of 6-3. Unlike in NFIB, the majority in King v. Burwell spoke with a single voice, Roberts’s. So did the dissenters, that of Justice Antonin Scalia.
As Scalia sums it up: “The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.’ That is of course quite absurd.” The practical consequence is that despite the limiting language, tax subsidies will continue to flow to people who buy medical-insurance policies in the majority of states, which have not established exchanges.
BONUS: GOP Already Fundraising on SCOTUS Defeat
The justices went further in the administration’s favor than the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose judgment they upheld. As Roberts explains (citations omitted here and in subsequent quotes): “The Fourth Circuit viewed the Act as ‘ambiguous and subject to at least two different interpretations.’ The [circuit] court therefore deferred to the IRS’s interpretation”—a doctrine known as Chevron deference.
[Read the full text here, at WSJ]
In a similar case called Halbig v. Burwell, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had ruled that the statute was not ambiguous—that the provision limiting subsidies to policies purchased through “an Exchange established by the State” did in fact limit subsidies to policies purchased through “an Exchange established by the State.” As Scalia observes:
You would think the answer would be obvious—so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it. . . . Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is “established by the State.” Read the rest of this entry »
Supreme Court Resigns Duties, Tortures English Language to Save Obamacare
Posted: June 25, 2015 Filed under: Law & Justice, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Administrative State, Andrew Napolitano, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, George Orwell, Global Panic, Health care reform, Health Insurance, Health law, John Roberts, Obamcare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Socialism, Supreme Court, Supreme Court of the United States 2 Comments
“If only there was some branch of government designed to review legislative actions, thwarting the intentions of Congress if they conflict with the law… oh, wait, that branch does exist…”
Robby Soave writes: In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell observed that “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Today is Orwell’s birthday; it’s also the day the Supreme Court released its 6-3 decision in King v. Burwell, which preserves the Affordable Care Act at the expense of plain English.
“The majority opinion explains away this blatant contradiction by expressing confidence that architects of the law intended something other than what they wrote—the opposite of it, in fact.”
The majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled that the provision of the law mandating an “Exchange established by the State” should be interpreted to include an Exchange not established by any state, but instead by an agency of the federal government, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.
[More – In Upholding Obamacare’s Subsidies, Justice Roberts Rewrites the Law—Again]
In his spot-on dissent, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia explains why this is an “impossible possibility”:
The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says “Exchange established by the State” it means “Exchange established by the State or the Federal
Government.” That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so.…
[Read the full text here, at Reason.com]
Faced with overwhelming confirmation that “Exchange established by the State” means what it looks like it means, the Court comes up with argument after feeble argument to support its contrary interpretation. None of its tries comes close to establishing the implausible conclusion that Congress used “by the State” to mean “by the State or not by the State.”
The majority opinion explains away this blatant contradiction by expressing confidence that architects of the law intended something other than what they wrote—the opposite of it, in fact. Intent should trump plain English—even when the two directly oppose each other—writes Roberts, because the Court’s job is to defer to the will of lawmakers, and even contort logic to assist them, “if at all possible”: Read the rest of this entry »
Justice Thomas Commencement Address
Posted: May 30, 2015 Filed under: Education, Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: American Psychological Association, Clarence Thomas, Cologne, Commencement speech, Country, Cynicism (contemporary), Daily Mail, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social psychology, University of Cologne Leave a comment
“Next, remember that life is not easy for any of us. It will probably not be fair, and it certainly is not all about you. The gray hair and wrinkles you see on older people have been earned the hard way, by living and dealing with the challenges of life. When I was a young adult and labored under the delusion of my own omniscience, I thought I knew more than I actually did. That is a function of youth.
With the wisdom that only comes with the passage of years, the older folks warned me presciently and ominously, “Son, you just live long enough and you’ll see.” They were right; oh, so right. Life is humbling and can be hard, very hard. It is a series of decisions, some harder than others, some good and, unfortunately, too many of them bad. It will be up to each of you to make as many good decisions as possible and to limit the bad ones, then to learn from all of them. But I will urge you to resist when those around you insist on making the bad decisions. Being accepted or popular with those doing wrong is an awful Faustian bargain and, as with all Faustian bargains, not worth it. It is never wrong to do the right thing. It may be hard, but never wrong…
Stay positive. There will be many around you who are cynical and negative. These cause cancers of the spirit and they add nothing worthwhile. Don’t inhale their secondhand cynicism and negativism. Some, even those with the most opportunities in this, the greatest country, will complain and grieve ceaselessly, ad infinitum and ad absurdum. It may be fair to ask them, as they complain about the lack of 
perfection in others and our imperfect institutions, just what they themselves are perfect at.
[Check out the book “Remembering Who We Are: A Treasury of Conservative Commencement Addresses” from Amazon.com
Look, many have been angry at me because I refuse to be angry, bitter, or full of grievances, and some will be angry at you for not becoming agents in their most recent cynical causes. Don’t worry about it. No monuments are ever built to cynics. Associate with people who add to your lives, not subtract; people you are comfortable introducing to the best people in your lives—your parents, your family, your friends, your mentors, your ministers.
Always have good manners. This is a time-honored tradition and trait; it is not old-fashioned.”
[Life Lessons from Justice Thomas – Powerline]
“It makes me wish every precious snowflake could hear this before they enter the real world.”
‘The First Amendment is Not Abridged for the Benefit of the Brotherhood of the Robe’
Posted: April 30, 2015 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Floyd Abrams, Harvard Law School, John Roberts, Judge, Minority religion, Political action committee, Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O'Connor, Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment, Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court of the United States 2 Comments
Symposium: When strict scrutiny ceased to be strict
At SCOTUSblog, Floyd Abrams writes: The result in the Williams-Yulee case was a difficult one to predict except that it was entirely predictable that the result would be by a deeply divided Court. It is no surprise that it was a five-to-four ruling, and no surprise at all that the jurists on both sides appear to have been irritated and frustrated by the views of those on the Court with whom they differed. The same had been true in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White (2002), the Supreme Court’s last trek into the muddy constitutional waters that required an assessment of First Amendment issues in the context of judicial elections. That case was not only decided by a five-to-four vote, but one of the five Justices — Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — repeatedly announced after her retirement that she regretted her vote.
“Critics of Citizens United can take no solace from yesterday’s decision, since it is rooted in all respects in the difference between judicial elections and all others. If anything, the more the Court focuses on the special and distinct role of judges as opposed to other elected officials, the more firmly it reinforces its earlier ruling as to the latter.”
The unavoidable problem in the case stems from the reality that if judges are to be elected, they must be allowed to campaign for election. Yet, what they say in their campaigns about what they will do as judges may lead people to doubt their open-mindedness as judges.
[Also see – Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar: A Disappointing End by Jonathan Keim]
And when they personally raise money, at least from lawyers and potential litigants before them, it may well lead to the perception of indebtedness on their part to their contributors.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia testifies before a House Judiciary Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee hearing. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
“One need not adopt wholesale Justice Scalia’s final thrust at the majority in the case to admire its beauty: ‘The First Amendment is not abridged for the benefit of the Brotherhood of the Robe.’”
The Florida Code of Judicial Conduct sought to strike a compromise, barring judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign funds, while allowing their campaign committees to solicit funds for them and allowing the candidates to write thank-you notes to contributors. On its face, it was a perfectly reasonable, good
faith effort to walk a difficult line. The First Amendment, however, is more demanding than that.
[Check out Floyd Abrams’s book “Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment” at Amazon.com]
The problem with the ruling begins with an ostensible First Amendment victory. Seven of the nine members of the Court (all but Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer) concluded that strict scrutiny should apply, a usual predicate for striking one sort or another of government limitation on speech. Read the rest of this entry »
Jonah Goldberg: ‘The Left’s Anger is Palpable’
Posted: July 4, 2014 Filed under: Politics, Think Tank, U.S. News, White House | Tags: American Enterprise Institute, Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, Hobby Lobby, Jonah Goldberg, MSNBC, Supreme Court, Supreme Court of the United States, Tim Scott, United States 2 Comments
Resenting the Republic
For National Review Online, the frequently-insightful Jonah Goldberg writes:
You wouldn’t think, five years into the Obama presidency, that so many liberal Americans wouldn’t like America.
A new Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans don’t often feel pride in being an American, and only 28 percent said that America is the greatest country in the world. Respondents who “often feel proud to be American” were overwhelmingly conservative (from 72 percent to 81 percent, depending on the kind of conservative). A majority (60 percent) of “solid liberals” said they don’t often feel proud to be an American.
“To listen to some of the hysterical responses to the court’s decision, you’d think the government in Washington is the only thing thwarting the desire of millions of businessmen to drape their female employees in burqas.”
The polling data only prove what has been obvious for a while.
Georgia representative John Lewis recently said that “if the Civil Rights Act was before the Congress today, it would not pass, it would probably never make it to the floor for a vote.”
[Jonah’s book, The Tyranny of Cliches, is available at Amazon]
Lewis is right. If it came before the Congress today, it wouldn’t pass. You know why? Because we passed it 50 years ago. The GI Bill wouldn’t pass today either, because that was enacted in 1944. If, somehow, we had Jim Crow today, the American people — and Congress — would vote to abolish it in a landslide.
In fairness, Lewis was primarily condemning congressional gridlock, not GOP racism.
Primarily. Read the rest of this entry »
Breaking: High Court Upholds Mich Affirmative Action Ban
Posted: April 22, 2014 Filed under: Breaking News, Law & Justice, U.S. News | Tags: Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court, United States Supreme Court 2 Comments
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (AP Photo/Patrick Semanski)
“But without checks, democratically approved legislation can oppress minority groups…”
— Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
WASHINGTON (AP) —Mark Sherman reports: The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld Michigan’s ban on using race as a factor in college admissions despite one justice’s impassioned dissent that accused the court of wanting to wish away racial inequality.
The justices said in a 6-2 ruling that Michigan voters had the right to change their state constitution in 2006 to prohibit public colleges and universities from taking account of race in admissions decisions. The justices said that a lower federal court was wrong to set aside the change as discriminatory.
Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
“This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it.”
— Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
The decision bolstered similar voter-approved initiatives banning affirmative action in education in California and Washington state. A few other states have adopted laws or issued executive orders to bar race-conscious admissions policies. Read the rest of this entry »
What Do Kobe Bryant and Zora Neale Huston Have in Common? (Besides Racial Identity)
Posted: March 27, 2014 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, History, Mediasphere | Tags: African American, Alice Walker, Bryant, Clarence Thomas, Harlem Renaissance, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Shooting of Trayvon Martin 1 Comment
Re: the Trayvon Martin case:
“I won’t react to something just because I’m supposed to, because I’m an African-American”
To which Bryant replied:
“I won’t react to something just because I’m supposed to, because I’m an African-American,” he said. “That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we’ve progressed as a society? Well, we’ve progressed as a society, then don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won’t assert myself.”
For those that remember early 20th Century Harlem Renaissance artist Zora Neale Huston, whose contribution to Ethnography, Anthropology, and Literature made her a rock star in her time (Zora’s popularity reemerged in the 1980s when Alice Walker reintroduced her work) not many remember that Huston’s political views were contrary.
[check out Zora Neale Huston‘s classic book Their Eyes Were Watching God
Neale was a conservative. Unlike many of her literary peers, she rejected notions of group identity, grievance, and identity politics. Though we’re not suggesting Kobe Bryant is a conservative, Neale and Bryant both declined to speak for the “black community”, believing that we should be beyond that. Once asked to comment on a news-making achievement of a fellow African American (just because she, too, is black) her response was not unlike Bryant’s. It was identical. Huston said dismissively (though not an exact quote, this is the gist of her comment):
“When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, do you think white people jumped for joy (that one of their race made this achievement)?’
Which expresses the same common-sense rejection of racial grouping Kobe Bryant expresses here:
“Well, we’ve progressed as a society, then don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right?”
From NRO: Hurston held a fiercely asserted black conservative politics akin to Clarence Thomas’s. Her most famous statement in this vein comes from “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” an essay of 1928:
“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. . . . I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.”
Commentary from Hot Air’s ALLAHPUNDIT, and a Video after the jump
Juan Williams speaks out against the ‘staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals’
Posted: March 8, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: African American, Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, Commencement speech, Johns Hopkins University, Juan Williams, Thomas Sowell, Tim Scott, Walter E. Williams 1 Comment
There’s two things I really admire about Juan Williams.
1. Though I disagree with Juan 85% of the time (his feisty support of Obamacare, his reliable defense of Team Obama’s foreign policy, and his stubborn loyalty to the Administration’s policies in general, can be exasperating to watch) to his credit, Juan Williams does not have a double standard when it comes to intolerance, and doesn’t hesitate to call it out. Unlike a lot of news talk show hosts, and guests, he doesn’t indulge in fake outrage.
2. Juan Williams has unusually good taste in neckties. Contrary to Blake Gopnik’s complaint about the sorry state of neckwear among political commentators these days, I believe Williams is the 
under-appreciated winner here. True, most of the time Juan’s ties are not noteworthy. But every once in a while, he’ll appear on a talk show with a necktie so unique, so well-coordinated , so exquisite, I’ll find myself thinking, “man, that’s a nice necktie”. I’ve even tweeted Juan to say so. Sure, it may seem trivial. But man with wrong opinions, but good taste in neckwear, is hard to hold a grudge against.
This is from Hot Air. I’ll leave the commentary to Ed Morrissey, you can see it in the original post, here’s Juan’s main message:
“There is a disgraceful double standard amongst liberals, particularly those in academia, in the hatred they direct at black conservatives.
We saw this last April when the conservative neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson was forced to step down as a Commencement Speaker for Johns Hopkins University (where he ably served as the head of pediatric neurosurgery).
Liberals on the Hopkins campus mobilized against Carson because he criticized President Obama’s health care reform law and said that he opposed gay marriage.
I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals.
Justice Thomas Is Right About America’s Obsession With Race
Posted: February 22, 2014 Filed under: Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Civil War, Clarence Thomas, Jim Crow laws, MSNBC, Savannah Georgia, Supreme Court, Timothy Noah, United Auto Workers, Virginia, Volkswagen Leave a commentPhoto by Alex Wong/Getty
It’s become a compulsion to use the label for any political opponents—and it’s destroying our cohesiveness as a society. Is no one proud of the progress we’ve made?
“The worst I have been treated was by northern liberal elites. The absolute worst I have ever been treated… The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Ga.”
From firsthand experience, I know exactly what Justice Thomas is describing…
Ron Christie writes: Are we obsessed with race and racism in our society? Before you answer the question, consider how issues of race are brought up in the media and discussed around the proverbial water cooler. Do we disc
uss the remarkable progress we’ve made as a country since the dark days of segregation and Jim Crow?
Do we consider how blacks lived in the South in the not too distant past—like my grandparents, who ran the risk of being lynched for looking at someone white? That’s given way to interracial marriage no longer being a taboo. The Supreme Court didn’t repeal the statute banning interracial marriage in Virginia until 1967.
Unfortunately, very little of the dialogue involving race in America today is positive, uplifting, or inspirational. Instead, there is a compulsion by many on the left to brand their political opponents as being racist. Two specific events occurred in the past week that have me firmly convinced that there is an obsession with race in America today that is destructive to our societal cohesiveness.
Tamera Mowry Is Not Alone
Posted: January 15, 2014 Filed under: Entertainment, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Adam Housley, Barbara Reynolds, Clarence Thomas, Fox News Channel, Melissa Harris-Perry, Michelle Malkin, Oprah Winfrey, Tamera Mowry 1 Comment
Mowry’s got the right attitude. She wiped away her tears and told Oprah that haters wouldn’t drag her down
Michelle Malkin writes: This made my heart ache and my blood pressure spike: Actress Tamera Mowry, who is black, wept in an interview with Oprah Winfrey over the vile bigotry she has encountered because of her marriage to Fox News reporter Adam Housley, who is white. Misogynist haters called Mowry a sellout and a “white man’s whore.” International news outlets labeled the Internet epithets she endured “horrific” and “shocking.”
Horrific? Yes. Shocking? Not at all. What Mowry experienced is just a small taste of what the intolerance mob dishes out against people “of color” who love, think and live the “wrong” way. I’ve grown so used to it that I often forget how hurtful it can be. Mowry’s candor was moving and admirable. It’s also a valuable teachable moment about how dehumanizing it can be to work in the public eye. Have we really sunk to this?
Young actresses in the 21st century forced to defend their love lives because their marital choices are politically incorrect? We’re leaning backward in the regressive Age of Hope and Change.
You and What Army? Delusional Lt. Col. Robert Bateman’s Captain Queeg Moment: Insults Supreme Court for Heller Decision; Calls for Massive Gun Bans, Turn-Ins
Posted: December 9, 2013 Filed under: Guns and Gadgets, Law & Justice, Self Defense, War Room | Tags: Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Bateman, Clarence Thomas, District of Columbia v. Heller, Esquire, John Roberts, Second Amendment, Supreme Court 1 Comment
Lt. Tom Keefer: “Captain Queeg has all syndroms of acute paranoia.”
“Ah, but the strawberries! That’s where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt…”
NRA-ILA reports: To say the least, some of the characters who have appeared on the national scene in recent years have demonstrated some enormous egos and used some pretty ill-tempered language in their efforts to turn this nation into something we wouldn’t recognize. But Army Lt. Col. Robert Bateman is challenging them for top dishonors in that regard, with an over-the-top rant in Esquire magazine this month.
[STRAWBERRIES – AUDIO CLIP]
Real warriors don’t brag, of course. They let their actions speak for themselves. And real warriors support the Second Amendment and oppose gun control, as indicated by a letter signed by over 1,100 current and former Army Special Forces soldiers in January.
Bateman’s self-adulation was just the beginning, however.
He next attacked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for “his attempt to rewrite American history and the English language” in his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller. Bateman also extended his attack to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas for concurring with Justice Scalia. “They flunked basic high school history,” Bateman said. Bateman added that Esquire readers could read the Heller decision for themselves, but that it really isn’t necessary, because “I can spell it out for you in ten seconds.”
At this point, we found ourselves asking to be spared additional arrogance and ignorance, but Bateman wasn’t inclined to oblige.
Bateman continued to explain his factually incorrect idea is that the Second Amendment’s reference to the well regulated militia means that no one has the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms. “As of 1903, the ‘militia’ has been known as the National Guard,” Bateman insisted.
Racism, Sexism A-Okay
Posted: December 2, 2013 Filed under: Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Clarence Thomas, Democrat, Democratic, Garcia, John Fund, Miguel Estrada, New Hampshire, Peter Sullivan, Republican, Sullivan 2 CommentsThe War on Conservative Minorities
New Hampshire state representative Marilinda Garcia (Image via Facebook)
Racist and sexist attacks on women and minorities are acceptable, if the targets are conservative.
John Fund writes: Members of both political parties use sharp elbows to rough up and discredit the opposition, but the media are supposed to call “foul” on the worst abuses. But when the media are ideologically opposed to conservatives — especially minority conservatives — the abuses sometimes get lost in the shuffle.
Take what happened last week to New Hampshire state representative Marilinda Garcia, who announced she would challenge incumbent Democratic representative Annie Kuster in a highly competitive district that has switched party control in three of the last four elections.
Democrats were clearly rattled by the 30-year-old Garcia’s entry. Democratic-party communications director Harrell Kirstein said she would inevitably be part of a “reckless race to pander to the same extreme right fringe of the Republican Party that forced the federal government shutdown.” He called her a “loyal rubber-stamp” for the “irresponsible” agenda of former GOP house speaker Bill O’Brien.
Tough but in bounds.
But then prominent Democratic state representative Peter Sullivan, a self-described leader of the legislature’s “progressive” bloc, entered the picture. Using his Twitter account, he compared her unfavorably to O’Brien and conservative state representative Al Baldasaro this way:
She’s Al Baldassaro [Sullivan misspelled his name] in stiletto heels, a lightweight and O’Brien clone.
Bill O’Brien + Kim Kardashian = Marilinda Garcia
She is a right-wing, homophobic, anti-worker shill for the Koch Brothers.
Sullivan’s sexist comments drew fire from some blogs. Twitchy.com noted that describing Garcia as a male lawmaker in “in stiletto heels” suggests she’s merely masquerading as a woman and that Sullivan, with the Kardashian comparison, was “not-so-subtly tying Garcia to a woman who rose to fame as the star of a sex tape.” GOP state representative Jane Cormier said her Democratic colleague “owed all women an apology for bringing sexist and demonizing remarks into the political process here in NH.”
Garcia has a “pretty significant political résumé,” Cormier pointed out. She was elected for the first time in 2006 and currently serves on the House Finance Committee. Previously, she served as co-chair of a House caucus and as a majority whip. In 2010, she received a master’s of public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. As an accomplished harp player, she is an adjunct professor of music at several universities.
BOOK REVIEW: Mike Gallagher’s ‘50 Things Liberals Love to Hate’
Posted: December 1, 2013 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, Reading Room | Tags: ACLU, Ann Coulter, Books, Clarence Thomas, Howard Zinn, Humor, Mike Gallagher, Sarah Palin, Talk radio, United States 1 Comment
Wes Vernon writes: Taken page by page, this book is a fun read. Taken as a whole, it remains entertaining but acquires a deeper meaning. One must add up all “50 Things Liberals Love to Hate” to appreciate fully the huge canyons that have divided us into two nations in terms of worldview.
It is now common-sense Americans (of whatever ethnic, racial or religious background) versus a segment of the population that has bought into a strain of thought that constitutes an intellectual “foreign object” in our midst.
The latter is a disruption to — and arguably, an attempted destruction of — the free exceptional nation we have come to know and love and for which our Founding Fathers sacrificed that we may enjoy prosperity and happiness as rewards for hard work and initiative.
Author Mike Gallagher is a radio talk-show host whose daily routine is such that he can’t avoid stumbling over other-planet ideas promoted by those who, with a straight face, imply, “Doesn’t everybody think so?” If they get the wrong answer to that question, their follow-up will include such epithets as “racist,” “bigot,” “homophobe,” and “Islamophobe,” to cite some of the milder insults.
Mr. Gallagher obviously had fun putting all these leftist pet peeves between two covers. The book is filled with howlers that are at once amusing and threatening.
Take, for example, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, two parts of one of the “50 Things,” and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) acolytes who go to court to force each of those two groups to admit members of the opposite sex into their ranks.
The people pushing that idea are not ignorant of the most basic facts of life and human nature. Most (though not all) know that boys and girls are wired differently. Liberals know it all too well. That’s what they intend to change.
[VIDEO] The November 14th interview with Clarence Thomas
Posted: November 19, 2013 Filed under: Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: Above the Law, Clarence Thomas, Diane Sykes, Federalist Society, Oral argument in the United States, Thomas, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, United States Supreme Court 1 CommentAnn Althouse writes: Discussed previously here, linking to an Above the Law item that is now titled “Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks!” but was previously titled “Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks — And Oh What A Speech!”
I’m going to guess that the “And Oh What A Speech!” part got dropped not because ATL wanted to back away from expressing enthusiasm but because it’s not a speech. It’s an interview. And part of what’s good about it is that the interviewer 7th Circuit Judge Diane S. Sykes is excellent. Read the rest of this entry »
