They Both Stink.

TSA 2!

TSA.

Well ... !

The Justice Clarence Thomas Dissent That Broke My Heart.

Solo dissent in case striking black jurors unconvincing

As law professors go, I’m pretty sympathetic to Clarence Thomas’s constitutional jurisprudence. It’s not that I agree with him, which I almost never do. But I think he genuinely tries to apply originalism using historical methods.

And when it comes to the law of race, where again I disagree with Thomas, I respect his effort to give voice to a distinctive form of conservative black nationalism that insists on color blindness because it’s better for blacks.

What’s more, I respect what I’ve seen of Thomas personally. I’ve never forgotten seeing him greet by name the members of the maintenance staff at the Supreme Court who polish the miles of brass on the court’s many staircases. Once I asked him about it, and he said he sometimes felt he had more in common with them than with the other justices. I didn’t think it was a line then, and I don’t think so now.

But now I confess to feeling a bit upset about Thomas’ solo dissent in Foster v. Chatman on Monday, a decision that reversed the capital conviction of a black man from Georgia because the prosecution used its peremptory challenges to strike all the black members of the jury pool.

Thomas is from Georgia. The facts of the case, going back almost 30 years, demonstrate egregious racial stereotyping by the prosecution. Yet Thomas was unwilling to join his seven colleagues, among them some serious conservatives, in striking down the conviction.

Why, exactly, did Thomas bend over so far backward to argue for sending inmate Timothy Foster to his death? And is there something — anything — admirable that can be gleaned from his dissenting opinion?

There was a technical issue at stake in the case — namely, whether the state supreme court decision denying the prisoner’s claim was based on state or federal law. On this point, Thomas’s view is defensible, if unconvincing.

Foster was convicted for the heinous sexual assault and murder of Queen Madge White in Rome, Ga., in 1986, almost 30 years ago. He appealed through the Georgia courts, relying among other arguments on the claim that the prosecution systematically excluded all the black jurors in violation of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Batson v. Kentucky, a landmark 1986 decision.

The Georgia courts denied Foster’s claim because he couldn’t prove the exclusions were motivated by race. But when Foster re-presented his claim in his post-conviction habeas corpus proceeding, he had more evidence to support it. Foster now had documents showing that the prosecution actively identified and marked the black prospective jurors (with a capital B) and excluded them from the jury based on their race.

A superior court in Georgia rejected Foster’s claim anyway, saying that he hadn’t shown new facts sufficient to overturn the conviction. Foster then went to the state supreme court, which denied his claim in a single sentence.

The Supreme Court won’t review a state court judgment if it rests on what lawyers call “adequate and independent state grounds.” The idea is that the court is the highest authority on federal law and the U.S. Constitution, but state supreme courts are the highest authorities on state law.

But as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his doctrinally subtle opinion for the court, the Georgia Supreme Court never said it relied on state law grounds to deny Foster’s claim. Its silence left Roberts the option of concluding that the state court had rested its judgment on the federal constitutional law issue of whether the Batson precedent had been violated. That allowed the court to hear the case.

Roberts then went on to assess the evidence. He concluded that the prospective jurors were indeed excluded based on race, invalidating the conviction.

Thomas’s dissent started with the technical issue. He said that the “most obvious” reason for the Georgia court dismissing the case was that Foster had already litigated it. Georgia bars successive relitigation of the same issue at the habeas stage. This, said Thomas, meant there was an adequate and independent state ground for the judgment — and the court had no business hearing the case.

Thomas’s argument here was what I would call wrong but reasonable. Probably the Georgia high court did reject the claim as already litigated. But it’s the job of a court to say what it’s doing — particularly when a man’s life is on the line and there has been notable racism in obtaining his conviction. The state court’s silence is and should be sufficient basis for the Supreme Court to hear the case.

Where Thomas really made me sad was in his attitude toward the underlying issue of whether the conviction was tainted. He went through the black potential jurors excluded and systematically accepted the prosecutors’ excuses for challenging them. He urged deference to the trial judge’s judgment, and he discounted the documentary evidence, saying it wasn’t clear who had highlighted or marked the black potential jurors’ names on the list that was in the prosecutors’ files.

To all this I can only say: Really?

I appreciate that Thomas wants to keep his judgment free of any bias that might arise because of his own race. In this he follows the model of Justice Felix Frankfurter, who (echoing St. Paul) said that “as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.”

But race neutrality shouldn’t be race blindness. Thomas’s decision shows he isn’t willing to bend his usual rigor to save a black defendant, which is perhaps worthy of a kind of admiration. But the facts here are so clear that Thomas’s dissent makes it seem like he bent over too far to seem fair — and in the process would have sacrificed the integrity of the judicial system, not to mention a man’s life.

Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/national-opinions/article79918152.html#storylink=cpy

Editor's note: Ever since Anita Hill busted Clarence Thomas before a shocked audience, the man has NEVER been the same. Yep.

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Trump Vs. Clinton Is A Verdict On America

Trump vs. Clinton is a verdict on America.

Hillary Clinton was on a path to become the most widely and deeply disliked major party candidate in recent U.S. history. Then Donald Trump came along and beat her to it.

I'm glad they are unpopular. Their names read together are a verdict on American society. They are a reflection of our self-hatred. The Clinton-Trump election is like history dragging our country across the carpet and putting our nose in our own filth. Breathe deep.

Clinton is a maximally corrupt figure. Her great fortune in this election is that hers is a conventional sort of corruption that does not seem to directly threaten law and order in the United States, or destabilize the world order. She is loose about the security of her private email server on which she conducts the business of state, but just try to get the transcript of the speech she delivered to Goldman Sachs for a hefty fee.

Although she's happy to take six-figure paychecks from American public colleges for her speeches, Clinton's main business has been the globalist do-gooding grifter circuit. The outlines of it are simple enough. Give to the Clinton global outfits and get favorable treatment in return. The Clintons get to travel around the world for more networking and buck-raking opportunities, and keep their staff of flunkeys and friends well-paid. It's a family business. Try to imagine Clinton being tough on financial services, when its firms have paid her husband nearly $20 million to speak to them since his presidency ended.

Clinton is a political coward. See her perfectly calibrated zero-courage shift on same-sex marriage over the last two decades. She embodies the sick American culture of exaggerated victimhood. See her response to every political criticism, or her active imagination about being shot at by snipers in Bosnia.

And she is fantastically incompetent. Obama defeated her by asking, "Who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right, and who got it wrong?" Then he inexplicably made her secretary of state and she made the worst foreign policy decision since Iraq, knocking over Libya's government and making another safe harbor for ISIS.

Trump's corruption is more exotic and destabilizing. His life has been built on breaking his promises to everyone: other property developers, creditors, even his own wives. He brags about this. He makes fun of his own supporters when he says that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still receive their support. He has also used the government to beat up small competitors and bully property owners who stand in his way.

His corruption is worse than Clinton's in that it makes a normal person squeamish. He outwardly relishes the opportunity to command American troops to commit war crimes and to torture our enemies, or suspected enemies. He injects conspiracy theories into our politics — whether they are about Obama's birth certificate, vaccines, or the JFK assassination. He openly admires governments, like those of China and Russia, that crush internal dissent. He praises a fictive story about desecrating Muslim bodies as a foreign policy strategy.

He benefits from corruption. Donald Trump has gotten hundreds of hours of uninterrupted and free media coverage from a ratings-chasing cable news business. He has gotten bathroom-tissue soft coverage from some in the conservative-entertainment complex. The tumor-like growth on the body politic, Sean Hannity, has a deep conflict of interest: He benefits when his audience is handed political defeats and humiliations. Nothing is better for opinion journalism than opposition, and this counts even more for talk radio and prime-time Fox News.

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The case against either candidate becoming president is so strong that it is nearly impossible to blame anyone for voting any which way in this election. More than 100 million Americans will cast a ballot for Clinton or Trump in November.

But these days American self-government is indistinguishable from self-incrimination. Our domestic policy is a nest of rent-seeking corruption, our social insurance system is an act of theft against posterity. And our foreign policy, described fairly, resembles the last weeks of a bloodthirsty crime family, led to its bitter end by demented octogenarians. Clinton or Trump 2016: a just punishment.

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Lest there be any doubt that Donald Trump attracts the most thoughtful people to his cause, his most important endorsement in advance of Tuesday's Indiana primary came from former basketball coach Bobby Knight. When asked by NPR what domestic issues attracted him to Trump, Knight said, "What the hell do I know anything about domestic issues? That's for somebody a lot smarter than I am. And you got to understand that I'm just talking about a guy that I think and all those things that need to be done, like domestic issues and whatever, here's my choice of the guy to do it. It's just that simple." The interviewer followed up by asking whether Knight believed Trump can unify the country. "How the hell would I know that?" Knight responded. It was as inspiring as any halftime pep talk.

But we know the real reason for this most weighty of endorsements: Bobby Knight is a jerk, and he supports Donald Trump because Trump is a jerk, too.

And it isn't just Knight. Among Trump's most prominent endorsers are a convicted rapist, the jerkiest governor in America, the NFL's best-known bully, conservatism's foremost performance artist of hate, and various members of the Ku Klux Klan. If there's a dirtbag or scumbag in America who isn't on Team Trump, it'd be hard to find him.

We all know that Trump has harnessed the disgruntlement and anger of the Republican base and used it to feed his campaign. But it would be a mistake to see it only as a temporary state of mind that Trump has exploited. It is that, but there's also the fact that America's worst people, who were terrible before this election began and will be terrible after it's over, have found their champion.

You can see it in Trump's running critique of "political correctness" and his supporters' insistence that they're attracted to him because unlike other politicians, he "tells it like it is." In truth, Trump doesn't tell it like it is — he spews more inaccuracies, distortions, and outright lies than any other candidate. But there's no doubt that he says things other politicians won't. That's not because they're some kind of deep truth that the powers-that-be find threatening, but because they're vulgar and offensive. When Trump says that Mexicans are criminals and rapists, or invents belittling nicknames for his opponents, or sends all kind of misogyny Hillary Clinton's way, he may be saying things others are unwilling to say, but that's nothing to be proud of.

Nevertheless, it's undeniable that there's something compelling about a candidate who doesn't talk like other politicians, and most politicians try very hard to convince everyone that they're nice. They try to be approachable, likeable, genuine, and authentic. They try to make us feel as though, if we had the chance to get to know them, we'd become great friends. And yes, most of the time it's phony.

But that doesn't make Trump's persona any more real, and it doesn't mean that if you make an effort not to offend people you're just being "politically correct." When someone says that political correctness is being used against them, what they usually mean is that they said something offensive, and somebody else told them not to be such a jerk.

But many people find Trump's jerkiness intoxicating, for the same reason they feel the same way about certain talk radio hosts. Trump can be a jerk on your behalf, saying the things you think but are reluctant to say out loud, because the norms of politeness in a civilized society prevent it. It's fitting that Trump comes to politics from reality TV, a genre which allows us to watch "real" people act like monsters to one another. Trump talks about how bored we'd all be with him if he acted "presidential," and since he seems to think being presidential just means not insulting people, he's probably right. A Donald Trump who treated other human beings with kindness and consideration wouldn't be nearly as interesting to watch, and wouldn't be leading the polls in the Republican primaries.

But imagine if someone you actually knew acted like the Donald Trump we see on television. Let's say you and your spouse invited someone over for dinner, and after the meal he said, "Well that food was crap, and not only that, your outfits are ugly, your taste in decor is abominable, and your kids strike me as uncommonly stupid." You probably wouldn't say, "Wow, how refreshingly honest — he really tells it like it is!" You'd say that guy was a jerk, and never invite him over again.

Trump's success so far is proof that we have more than our share of jerks here in America, and they're coming out for him in force. But do jerks make up more than half of the electorate? It's hard to imagine.

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Prince's Death Illustrates Importance Of Having A Will.

Gail MarksJarvis: Prince's death illustrates importance of having a will

Flowers lay on a T-shirt signed by fans of the musician Prince at a makeshift memorial created outside the Apollo Theatre in New York on Friday, April 22, 2016. The pop star died Thursday at age 57.

Pop music star Prince apparently died without writing a will, and it's likely that his relatives and business contacts will be fighting in a Minnesota court for years over his estate, estimated at $150 million to $300 million.

With no wife or children, first in line, according to estate law, are Prince's five siblings. Under simple court rules governing inheritances when there is no will, each of the siblings will get an equal share. That will apply whether Prince was fond of each of the siblings or not. And with Prince's complex estate, massive business dealings, his practice of secrecy and millions in wealth at stake, attorneys don't expect this case to culminate quickly or simply.

"It's ironic," said Avi Kestenbaum, a New York estate planning attorney with Meltzer Lippe. "Prince, at age 57, spent 37 years making his legacy. He fought the music industry for control, and now he has no control."

It's a lesson for other people, whether rich or poor, famous or regular. When you die without a will, you get no say. If you hated a relative, your children might end up in that person's care. If you divorced and forgot to take a previous spouse's name off an account or insurance policy, your new spouse or children might not benefit. If you have a business, and children with no interest in it and no business savvy get control, the value of your life's work could be destroyed.

After a death, if there's no will, a house with both spouses' names on it will go to the surviving spouse. But in an era of multiple marriages and divorces, inheritances get sloppy. Consider a father with grown children who have sweet memories of the home where they were raised. With no will, a second wife could inherit the house and give it to her own children from her previous marriage, leaving out the children who were raised in that house, notes estate planning attorney Adam Damero, of McGuireWoods.

On the other hand, estate planning attorneys recall instances in which second wives have been left homeless because a husband died without updating an old will to incorporate a second wife. In an old will, he leaves his home and everything else to his children.

"The kids kick the woman out of her own house," said Kestenbaum.

In situations where everyone gets along, the children might ignore the will and let the woman stay in the home. But in some families not everyone gets along, Damero said.

The court can't guess what might have been in a person's head, but certain rules apply when there is no will: If a person has a spouse and children, the estate is divided half to the spouse and half to the children. If there are only children, the estate is divided equally among them. If there are no children, siblings come next and inherit an equal share of the wealth.

Many people don't write wills because they assume they are young and have plenty of time. Yet Prince was only 57 years old. Many people also do not want to think about dying, or worry about giving up control, said Kestenbaum. They say: "I'll be dead anyway. Why should I care?"

But the Prince case illustrates one reason to care: His siblings now could be targets of people trying to exercise business interests that are not favorable to them, and even if the siblings got along well the pressures can divide them.

Estate attorneys say that they often see families torn apart as they deal with the division of property and control after a death. "The most fights occur where there is a business or real estate that is given to children equally," said Kestenbaum. "How do you run a restaurant with four chefs in the kitchen?" he said. "So maybe you leave a business to one child and insurance to another."

Families should revisit the will every few years because as time passes, one asset can gain value a lot while another loses.

Les Kotzer, a Toronto attorney, takes preparations for the family even further in his book: "The Family Fight: Planning to Avoid It."

During years of working with wills, Kotzer noted that many grown children end up in feuds because parents failed to talk with their children about wills while still alive. Conversations can suggest better ways of dividing possessions. One problem Kotzer noted was that one grown child might have memories of playing a piano in the family home, while the child who is to be given the piano in a will might have a spouse that doesn't want the instrument cluttering their house.


Gail MarksJarvis is a personal finance columnist for the Chicago Tribune and author of "Saving for Retirement Without Living Like a Pauper or Winning the Lottery." Readers may send her email at gmarksjarvis@tribune.com.

Editor's comment #1: It's ironic," said Avi Kestenbaum, a New York estate planning attorney with Meltzer Lippe. "Prince, at age 57, spent 37 years making his legacy. He fought the music industry for control, and now he has no control."


Yep. That sums it ALL up. If you die and leave NO will. like #prince supposedly did, then whatever you would have wanted to do with your earthly assets will not matter to anyone -- except to you!

So make a will and AVOID having your "will" thwarted.

Editor's comment #2: Many of you (i'm certain -- wink) are puzzled by the question why #prince never left a will.

Well, puzzle yourself no more. Methinks the answer lies in this lyric from his song, #letsgocrazy:

"IN THIS LIFE, YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN."

yep.

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