SCOTUS: No longer content with stacking, they're now dealing from the bottom of the deck

[China]

Florida appeals to Supreme Court over controversial social media law

 

The question of whether states can regulate what social media companies allow on their platforms is on its way to the Supreme Court.

 

Driving the news: Florida filed a brief Wednesday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a decision against its controversial social media law after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck it down in May, deeming it unconstitutional.

 

Florida’s law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May 2021, could prevent platforms from removing content from news outlets, allow individuals to sue platforms if they believe content rules aren’t consistently applied and could fine social media services that ban political candidates in the state.

The 11th Circuit ruled 3-0 that it violated the First Amendment.

The big picture: States have increasingly been trying their luck at passing social media content laws that control how platforms can moderate content, and the Supreme Court weighing in could put an end to that—or unleash more efforts.

 

Laws in Texas and Florida, two states that have been the flashpoint of this debate, vary in language, but broadly compel platforms to carry speech deemed as "political" or having a "viewpoint." Both states allege unfair censorship of right-leaning content.

What they're saying: "Although we oppose legislation like Florida’s social media law, which threatens the First Amendment and democratic principles, [we agree] that the Supreme Court should resolve issues in this case," Matt Schruers, president of the Communications and Computer Industry Association, one of the groups that's been fighting the law in court, said in a statement.

 

"With state legislatures considering a greater role for governments in online speech, the question of whether a government can compel social media services to disseminate content violating their policies is destined for the Supreme Court.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Oh Look! Another Clarence Thomas Ethics Scandal!

 

Clarence and Ginni Thomas are a veritable conservative power couple. He’s a Supreme Court justice boldly re-writing established precedent to shape the country to his proclivities. She’s a far-right operative that has her hands in the pots of all the hot-button issues. And that’s caused some problems for Clarence, what with justices and the appearance of impropriety and all that.

 

Like we know Ginni was working harder than Kris Jenner after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election — the January 6th committee even wants to talk to her about it. But despite her involvement, Clarence Thomas went on to hear a case about the January 6th committee — and shockingly! — he was the lone dissent when the Court rejected Trump’s efforts to block the release of presidential records to the committee. Hmmm… sus.

 

But despite the repeated calls for recusals or resignation, well, the Supreme Court doesn’t actually *have* an ethical code they’re bound to, so… shrug emoji.

 

Don’t worry, there’s another ethical lapse making news.

 

As reported by the Los Angeles Times:

 

Quote

Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records. Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years, instead checking a box labeled “none” where “spousal noninvestment income” would be disclosed.

 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

The Supreme Court Is On The Verge Of Killing The Voting Rights Act

 

The beginning of the end for the Voting Rights Act started more than 30 years ago. On Oct. 4, the end of the end is likely to begin.

 

This term, the Supreme Court is hearing a case about whether Alabama’s newly drawn congressional maps violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race. In a seven-district state, the new maps included only one majority-Black district even though the state has a population that is more than one-quarter Black. The groups challenging the maps say that because it would be relatively easy to draw a map with two majority-Black districts, the state is legally obligated to do so. But Alabama Republicans countered by arguing they don’t have a requirement to use the plaintiffs’ maps, because creating a second majority-Black district would violate other race-neutral criteria used in redistricting.

 

The justices’ ruling could have implications that go far beyond Alabama, potentially neutering what remains of the Voting Rights Act — a seminal piece of legislation that is ostensibly permanent yet constantly imperiled. 

 

The current Supreme Court justices, under Chief Justice John Roberts, might strike the final blow against the Voting Rights Act, whether it’s in this case or a future one. But they didn’t strike the first blow. According to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of Supreme Court cases involving the Voting Rights Act, most of the first 20 years of decisions interpreting the law went in a liberal direction.1 That changed in the late 1980s, when more right-leaning justices joined the bench and, not coincidentally, more and more of decisions overall started to go in a conservative direction. Of the seven Voting Rights Act cases that the court has heard in the Roberts era, only one had a liberal outcome. “Starting in the 1990s as the court’s composition changed, the court has been cutting back or refusing to expand Section 2 in virtually every case it’s had,” said Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University.

 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Larry]

Just based on this quote:  

 

Quote

In a seven-district state, the new maps included only one majority-Black district even though the state has a population that is more than one-quarter Black. The groups challenging the maps say that because it would be relatively easy to draw a map with two majority-Black districts, the state is legally obligated to do so. 

 

... I think I rule with the state, here. 
 

Just because 1/4 of a state is black does not mandate that 1/4 of districts must be majority black. 
 

The law prohibits districts being drawn as racially discriminatory. 
 

Show me an area that's 60% black, and the GOP divided it into three Republican districts, and then you've shown discrimination. 
 

Show me a district where they crammed all the black voters into one district that's 92% black?  You've got a complaint. 
 

But if the plaintiff's case (as opposed to just the article's summary) is "we want them to carve out two majority black districts?  Sorry. You're not entitled to that. 

[Califan007 The Constipated]

20 minutes ago, Larry said:

Just based on this quote:  

 

 

... I think I rule with the state, here. 
 

Just because 1/4 of a state is black does not mandate that 1/4 of districts must be majority black. 
 

The law prohibits districts being drawn as racially discriminatory. 
 

Show me an area that's 60% black, and the GOP divided it into three Republican districts, and then you've shown discrimination. 
 

Show me a district where they crammed all the black voters into one district that's 92% black?  You've got a complaint. 
 

But if the plaintiff's case (as opposed to just the article's summary) is "we want them to carve out two majority black districts?  Sorry. You're not entitled to that. 

I could be wrong, but I think the issue is that Alabama has no problem redrawing the district lines for majority white districts and even breaking them up but won’t do so for the majority black district even though it would be rather easy to do so. The argument seems to be that by not doing so, Alabama is diluting the voting power of black voters in the state. From what I gathered the Supreme Court (maybe? lol) said Alabama didn’t have to redraw the districts because it was too close to the midterm election, not because the case had no merit. Or at least some of the justices did.

[Larry]

Yahoo: The Onion Filed a Brief With the Supreme Court. It's Not a Joke

 

Quote

 

The brief is laced with dramatic hyperbole, jabs at the self-seriousness of the legal profession, and outlandish, obviously false declarations of fact. Filing a parody brief was of course the point, the site’s lawyers explained, as they threw their support behind an Ohio man arrested for publishing a Facebook page making fun of his local police department.  

 

“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks,” the site’s lawyer Stephen van Stempvoort wrote.  

 

The case involves petitioner Anthony Novak, who faced criminal charges linked to the police department parody page he made on Facebook. He was briefly jailed after his arrest and went to trial, where he was acquitted.

 

 

[China]

Ketanji Brown Jackson takes the Supreme Court's conservative majority to school

 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has made it clear in her first two days on the Supreme Court that she is not just any new justice. She is a justice who is ready to do what needs to be done.

 

Most new justices take a bit of time before they start to really get up to speed. Even if their votes matter, new justices generally take a while before their presences are really felt on the court. As I wrote Monday, though, the court’s current makeup — and the cases the justices are scheduled to hear — could lead Jackson on a different path.

 

Thus far, she has taken that different path.

 

From the first oral argument Monday, in a Clean Water Act case, Jackson was participating fully — raising significant questions about the meaning of “adjacency” and engaging in back-and-forth discussions with the lawyers appearing before the court.

 

It was on Tuesday, though, in a Voting Rights Act challenge to Alabama’s proposed redistricting maps, which a lower federal court found violated Section 2 of the law by diluting Black voters’ influence, that Jackson left her first real mark on the court.

 

“I don't think we can assume that just because race is taken into account that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem,” Jackson told Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour Jr. — and, just as likely, the justices alongside her.

 

This was not a standalone point. It was a windup to a dismissal of an entire motivating principle of the conservative legal (and, at times, political) movement. It was what I imagine is just the beginning of Jackson’s argument — on conservatives’ own ground of “history and traditions” — against “race-neutral” constitutional standards in a nation (and world) of regular, systemic and extreme examples of racism.

 

Referring to the “history and traditions” standard — so often invoked by Thomas and others using some version of originalism or “original intent” as their means of constitutional interpretation — Jackson said, “[W]hen I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, in a race-conscious way.”

 

The amendments and legislation at the time, she explained, were devised to help ensure that recently freed slaves were “actually brought equal to everyone else in the society.” She buttressed this by citing and quoting from “the report that was submitted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment.”

 

Then Jackson, the first Black female justice, quoted the lawmaker who introduced the Fourteenth Amendment as saying of its purpose: "[U]nless the Constitution should restrain them, those states will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated freedmen."

 

Jackson then concisely brought us to her point. “That's not a race-neutral or race-blind idea,” she told LaCour, her colleagues, the room and the country of this original purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. The justice’s evidence was not news to historians or others who study the Civil War era and the post-Civil War amendments. It was fact. But this line of argument has been all but cut out of legal debate in recent decades.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

A Supreme Court Case Could Decide the Fate of the Modern Internet

 

In October 1959, the Supreme Court heard the story of Eleazer Smith, a Los Angeles bookstore owner. Smith was convicted and given a 30-day jail term for the possession in his bookstore of a hardcover book, Sweeter Than Life. It was an erotic novel—which was illegal. Smith was convicted under a Los Angeles ordinance that says if you merely sell obscene materials, even if you haven’t read them and you don’t know about them, you can go to jail. Fortunately for him, a civil liberties attorney took his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, which held that the Los Angeles ordinance violated the First Amendment.

 

That ruling set the stage for the creation of a law, Section 230, that has shielded internet giants and social media companies from legal liability for what users say on their platforms, in the same way that Eleazer Smith wasn’t liable for what was inside a book in his store. But now, the Supreme Court is set to hear a case on Section 230, one that could fundamentally alter big tech’s business model.

 

On Friday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Jeff Kosseff, a law professor who wrote the book on the most important law underpinning the modern internet: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

 

Lizzie O’Leary: You are probably sick of this, but you did write a book with the title The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. Can you read them for me?

Jeff Kosseff: Sure. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

 

How would you characterize the role that those 26 words had in setting the stage for the modern internet?

They’ve allowed companies of all sizes to build internet businesses around content that users create rather than content that the companies create. It’s really a risk-shifting strategy. It’s saying any legal risk of defamation or anything else is going to be put on the people who post the content, and it won’t be placed on the platform that hosts it.

 

To understand the landscape in which Section 230 was written, you have to remember the internet of the early 1990s. Back then, services like CompuServe or Prodigy hosted forums and message boards where people posted all sorts of things. But the companies took very different approaches to what users said on their sites. CompuServe didn’t do much moderation of the content on its service, while Prodigy did. This being the internet, users invariably said some offensive things, and both companies got sued, but it was CompuServe’s hands-off approach that was the more successful legal strategy. Why?

They’re able to get the case dismissed. The judge says, “You are just like Eleazer Smith’s bookstore. You didn’t know about this content, you had no reason to know, so we’re not going to hold you liable for defamation.” Now, a few years later, Prodigy tries the same thing, and its efforts are rejected. The judge says, “You’re different than CompuServe. Because you do all of this [moderation], you’re more like a newspaper than a newsstand, and just like a newspaper, you are liable for every single thing in your pages.” This is in 1995. It starts to get a lot of attention from Congress and in the media because it stands for the proposition that, if you moderate content, you actually can increase your liability.

 

In 1995, Congress rewrote the telecommunications law for the first time in 60 years. A lot of people, including lawmakers, thought the internet was a terrifying place full of weirdos and pornography. The older, less tech-savvy Senate attached the Communications Decency Act to their version of the telecom bill. The CDA made it illegal to knowingly send or show minors indecent content online, but over in the House, members were taking a very different approach.

You have a Republican, Chris Cox, and a Democrat, Ron Wyden, and they want to come up with an alternative. That’s Section 230. What Section 230 does is it solves this Prodigy problem by saying that if you’re an interactive computer service provider, you won’t be treated as the publisher of content that someone else provides. Rather than have the government criminalize certain types of constitutionally protected speech, we’re going to put it in the hands of these online services and also of the user.

 

In some sort of congressional magic, both the Communications Decency Act and Section 230 get put in the same part of the telecom bill, even though they conflict with one another. But the day that President Clinton signs it into law, you have civil liberties groups challenge the constitutionality of the Senate’s bill. That goes, within a year and a half, up to the Supreme Court, and they strike the CDA down. So basically all that’s left of this internet part of the telecom law is Section 230.

 

As tech platforms have grown in their influence in power, Section 230 has become a pretty popular target for politicians on both the left and the right. But the courts have pretty vigorously upheld the law and ruled that it gives companies a broad liability shield, which is why the Supreme Court’s recent decision to even hear a 230 case is so significant.

This case, Gonzalez v. Google, centers on a young American law student, Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris. Her family sued Google, claiming that YouTube, which is owned by Google, violated the Anti-Terrorism Act when its algorithm recommended ISIS videos to other users.

Now, the plaintiffs in the Gonzalez case said, “We’re not just seeking to treat YouTube as a publisher. What we’re going after YouTube for is the targeted promotion of certain content.” If people are searching for things related to ISIS, at least at the time, YouTube will then, at least according to the complaint, recommend similar content. This is part of the radicalization and propaganda process. What the plaintiffs in the Gonzalez case are saying is that it’s that sort of algorithmic promotion of terrorist content that is not within the scope of Section 230.

Now, courts—including the 9th Circuit, where this came from, and the 2nd Circuit—have rejected that. They say that’s part of the editorial and curation process that Section 230 protects. There have been some judges who have dissented, including in this case in the 9th Circuit, who have said, “No, this is different, and YouTube and other social media sites really contribute to the harms in how they target the content.”

 

Usually when the Supreme Court takes a case, it’s because you have what’s known as a circuit split. But on this issue, Section 230 really has not been read in different ways by different courts.

 

Click on the link for the rest

[PokerPacker]

12 minutes ago, China said:

A Supreme Court Case Could Decide the Fate of the Modern Internet

 

In October 1959, the Supreme Court heard the story of Eleazer Smith, a Los Angeles bookstore owner. Smith was convicted and given a 30-day jail term for the possession in his bookstore of a hardcover book, Sweeter Than Life. It was an erotic novel—which was illegal. Smith was convicted under a Los Angeles ordinance that says if you merely sell obscene materials, even if you haven’t read them and you don’t know about them, you can go to jail. Fortunately for him, a civil liberties attorney took his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, which held that the Los Angeles ordinance violated the First Amendment.

 

That ruling set the stage for the creation of a law, Section 230, that has shielded internet giants and social media companies from legal liability for what users say on their platforms, in the same way that Eleazer Smith wasn’t liable for what was inside a book in his store. But now, the Supreme Court is set to hear a case on Section 230, one that could fundamentally alter big tech’s business model.

 

On Friday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Jeff Kosseff, a law professor who wrote the book on the most important law underpinning the modern internet: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

 

Lizzie O’Leary: You are probably sick of this, but you did write a book with the title The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. Can you read them for me?

Jeff Kosseff: Sure. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

 

How would you characterize the role that those 26 words had in setting the stage for the modern internet?

They’ve allowed companies of all sizes to build internet businesses around content that users create rather than content that the companies create. It’s really a risk-shifting strategy. It’s saying any legal risk of defamation or anything else is going to be put on the people who post the content, and it won’t be placed on the platform that hosts it.

 

To understand the landscape in which Section 230 was written, you have to remember the internet of the early 1990s. Back then, services like CompuServe or Prodigy hosted forums and message boards where people posted all sorts of things. But the companies took very different approaches to what users said on their sites. CompuServe didn’t do much moderation of the content on its service, while Prodigy did. This being the internet, users invariably said some offensive things, and both companies got sued, but it was CompuServe’s hands-off approach that was the more successful legal strategy. Why?

They’re able to get the case dismissed. The judge says, “You are just like Eleazer Smith’s bookstore. You didn’t know about this content, you had no reason to know, so we’re not going to hold you liable for defamation.” Now, a few years later, Prodigy tries the same thing, and its efforts are rejected. The judge says, “You’re different than CompuServe. Because you do all of this [moderation], you’re more like a newspaper than a newsstand, and just like a newspaper, you are liable for every single thing in your pages.” This is in 1995. It starts to get a lot of attention from Congress and in the media because it stands for the proposition that, if you moderate content, you actually can increase your liability.

 

In 1995, Congress rewrote the telecommunications law for the first time in 60 years. A lot of people, including lawmakers, thought the internet was a terrifying place full of weirdos and pornography. The older, less tech-savvy Senate attached the Communications Decency Act to their version of the telecom bill. The CDA made it illegal to knowingly send or show minors indecent content online, but over in the House, members were taking a very different approach.

You have a Republican, Chris Cox, and a Democrat, Ron Wyden, and they want to come up with an alternative. That’s Section 230. What Section 230 does is it solves this Prodigy problem by saying that if you’re an interactive computer service provider, you won’t be treated as the publisher of content that someone else provides. Rather than have the government criminalize certain types of constitutionally protected speech, we’re going to put it in the hands of these online services and also of the user.

 

In some sort of congressional magic, both the Communications Decency Act and Section 230 get put in the same part of the telecom bill, even though they conflict with one another. But the day that President Clinton signs it into law, you have civil liberties groups challenge the constitutionality of the Senate’s bill. That goes, within a year and a half, up to the Supreme Court, and they strike the CDA down. So basically all that’s left of this internet part of the telecom law is Section 230.

 

As tech platforms have grown in their influence in power, Section 230 has become a pretty popular target for politicians on both the left and the right. But the courts have pretty vigorously upheld the law and ruled that it gives companies a broad liability shield, which is why the Supreme Court’s recent decision to even hear a 230 case is so significant.

This case, Gonzalez v. Google, centers on a young American law student, Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris. Her family sued Google, claiming that YouTube, which is owned by Google, violated the Anti-Terrorism Act when its algorithm recommended ISIS videos to other users.

Now, the plaintiffs in the Gonzalez case said, “We’re not just seeking to treat YouTube as a publisher. What we’re going after YouTube for is the targeted promotion of certain content.” If people are searching for things related to ISIS, at least at the time, YouTube will then, at least according to the complaint, recommend similar content. This is part of the radicalization and propaganda process. What the plaintiffs in the Gonzalez case are saying is that it’s that sort of algorithmic promotion of terrorist content that is not within the scope of Section 230.

Now, courts—including the 9th Circuit, where this came from, and the 2nd Circuit—have rejected that. They say that’s part of the editorial and curation process that Section 230 protects. There have been some judges who have dissented, including in this case in the 9th Circuit, who have said, “No, this is different, and YouTube and other social media sites really contribute to the harms in how they target the content.”

 

Usually when the Supreme Court takes a case, it’s because you have what’s known as a circuit split. But on this issue, Section 230 really has not been read in different ways by different courts.

 

Click on the link for the rest

I've been saying for awhile that these recommendation algorithms make social media a fundamentally different beast from message boards.  They are not simply a place where people post a message and that's it.  They actively promote and curate content with their algorithms, and as such, they should be liable for the content they promote.

Edited October 11, 2022 by PokerPacker

[China]

Supreme Court Hears Warhol Case That Could End Fair Use as We Know It

 

In 1981 the photographer Lynn Goldsmith took a portrait of Prince. He sits alone on a white background, wearing a blank expression with a glint of light in his eyes. In 1984 Andy Warhol used that photo to create art. Warhol altered the image, adjusting the angle of Prince’s face, layering on swaths of color, darkening the edges, and adding hand-drawn outlines and other details in a series of 16 silkscreen prints.

 

40 years later, the artwork is at the center of a Supreme Court case that could change the course of American art, copyright law, and even the state of the internet. The question is whether Warhol’s work was fair use, or if he violated Goldsmith’s copyright. In oral arguments on Wednesday, the Court wrestled with the finer points of the issue, and to put it mildly, it’s pretty complicated.

 

Did Warhol create an entirely new work of art, or was it just a derivative reinterpretation of Goldsmith’s photo? If the art is found to be derivative, the Warhol Foundation will owe Goldsmith millions in fees, royalties, and perhaps additional damages. But the implications of the Supreme Court’s impending decision are a much bigger deal than a few million dollars.

 

Goldsmith argues that siding against her would pave the way for artists to have their work appropriated without compensation, which she says would decimate the field of photography. On the other side, a ruling in favor of Goldsmith, “would make it illegal for artists, museums, galleries, and collectors to display, sell, profit from, maybe even possess a significant quantity of works,” said Roman Martinez, a lawyer for the Warhol Foundation. “It would also chill the creation of new art by established and up-and-coming artists alike.”

 

The aftershocks could spread far beyond the art world, too. The question of fair use is a fundamental issue on the internet, social media platforms in particular. For example, YouTube has copyright algorithms that scan every video. If they detect footage or music that YouTube doesn’t have a license to use, the video gets flagged, suspended, or removed. This kind of algorithm is designed to err on the side of caution, and if the rules about fair use become stricter, platforms could get a lot more heavy-handed in their decisions about removing content. Imagine filters that bring down the banhammer on any video that has a visual similarity to copyrighted material. Sure, that would be an extreme outcome, but this is an extreme case. We’re talking about legally erasing the legacy of the most famous artist of the 20th century.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Supreme Court asked to block Biden student debt relief program

 

The Supreme Court on Wednesday was asked to block the Biden administration’s student loan debt relief program, which is set to take effect this weekend.

 

The Brown County Taxpayers Association, a taxpayers’ group in Wisconsin, directed its request at Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is responsible for such matters in Wisconsin.

 

The emergency filing from the association asks that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers be suspended while its lawsuit unfolds. The Biden administration could start processing borrowers’ requests for student loan forgiveness as soon as this Sunday.

 

The U.S. Department of Education opened its application for student loan forgiveness in a beta test on Friday, and more than 8 million people submitted requests for relief over that weekend. The application officially launched on Monday.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

[Llevron]

5 minutes ago, Cooked Crack said:

 

 

I never knew about the ALDC stuff. The many conversations I had about affirmative action and how it just holds black people back (that was not my argument, you probably guessed) and this never once came up. I am a little embarrassed I never came across this. 

Edited October 31, 2022 by Llevron

[TheGreatBuzz]

So I don't know a good way to ask this so I'm just gonna say it and take my lumps; wouldn't "athletics" favor the black community?

 

 

Also, I highly recommend the Strict Scrutiny podcasts.  Three women do a good dive on upcoming cases.  They did a special Sunday episode yesterday in preperation for today. 

[Fergasun]

Anyone older than 30 should realize it is impossible to police folks biasii. So acting like you can "abolish affirmative action" inherently is stupid.  

 

Thus if SCOTUS outlaws this practice which has been held legal for a long time, I will think that they are both out of touch with society, reality and a bunch of racists.  

 

 

If it is going to happen (HINT it will happen), be open about it.

 

[PokerPacker]

3 hours ago, The Almighty Buzz said:

So I don't know a good way to ask this so I'm just gonna say it and take my lumps; wouldn't "athletics" favor the black community?

Not if they're giving the scholarships out for Hockey and Lacrosse.

[Renegade7]

It's better this way to jus kill Affrimarive Action now then have our society twist itself into a pretzel explaining why white people aren't eligible once they become a minority group themselves. 

 

We seem incapable of having this difficult conversation and best way to go about it, so jus take that bullet out the chamber now.  It's helped enough, current minority groups can make it work from here compared to when Affirmative Action was first implemented. 

 

Call it an L if folks want, it would be worse L in the future at rate we going.

Edited October 31, 2022 by Renegade7

[PeterMP]

4 hours ago, PokerPacker said:

Not if they're giving the scholarships out for Hockey and Lacrosse.

 

@The Almighty Buzz

It isn't just hockey and lacrosse, but things like fencing and squash too.

 

Gymnastics, fencing, hockey, golf, skiing and lacrosse are some of the easiest sports to get scholarships in.

 

https://www.marke****ch.com/story/these-are-the-sports-your-child-should-play-to-get-a-college-scholarship-2017-05-08

 

Those sports are also expensive and so tend to be white.

 

[China]

Justice Jackson Recused Herself From a Supreme Court Case. Your Move, Clarence Thomas!

 

Today, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments that will likely result in its overturning of affirmative action in education. The plaintiffs allege that race-conscious school admissions are a form of discrimination against White and Asian students. It’s bad! But there are actually two separate arguments today about the constitutionality about affirmative action, because Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from one due to a potential conflict of interest. Justice Clarence Thomas is seeing this, right?

 

Conservative activist Ed Blum is challenging the race-conscious admission policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University via his group Students for Fair Admissions. Justice Jackson attended Harvard and served for six years on its board, and she will not participate in the argument about Harvard; the arguments were previously grouped together, but today the court is hearing them separately.

 

Meanwhile, Justice Thomas is married to MAGA nutcase Ginni Thomas—who said under oath to the January 6 Committee that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and badgered former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to overturn the election—and he has not recused himself from any cases about said election or insurrection. As of May 2022, he hasn’t recused from any cases involving his wife’s political activism, including opposition to the Affordable Care Act. But Thomas has recused from cases involving his son’s employer or university.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Federal judge blasts the Supreme Court for its Second Amendment opinion

 

A federal judge based in Mississippi has released a scorching order expressing frustration with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment opinion issued last summer and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

 

The opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations. Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

 

Judge Carlton Reeves – who is considering a case concerning a federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms – said he is not sure how to proceed.

 

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote in an order released last week.

 

“The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

 

“And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

 

The Bruen decision, he said, requires him to “play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

 

Reeves, who sits on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, ordered the parties, including the Justice Department, to brief him on whether he should appoint a historian within 30 days. “Not wanting to itself cherry-pick the history, the Court now asks the parties whether it should appoint a historian to serve as a consulting expert in this matter,” he said.

 

The challenger to the felon possession law, Jesse Bullock, says the regulation cannot withstand the Supreme Court’s latest decision interpreting the Second Amendment.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Larry]

8 hours ago, China said:

The opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations. Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

 

Just pointing out.  "This nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation" was that Wyatt Earp could ban all firearms in town, simply by saying so.  

[China]

The Right-Wing Plan To Bring Down The Regulators Reaches The Supreme Court

 

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a SEC v. Cochran, a case in which the conservative majority could further erode the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate financial markets — and, depending on how the justices decide the case, potentially deal a powerful blow to other agencies’ ability to carry out their regulatory and enforcement mandates as well. 

 

At issue in the case is whether Michelle Cochran, a certified public accountant, can challenge the constitutionality of the administrative law judge who presided over a proceeding the SEC brought against her for allegedly violating accounting standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Congress created the PCAOB in a 2002 law to protect investors by ensuring accurate audits of publicly traded companies. 

 

That may sound like an in-the-weeds dispute of interest only to financial services professionals and the federal officials Congress has tasked with regulating them. But far from being an exercise in legal minutiae, the case exemplifies a right-wing push to destroy what conservatives derisively call “the administrative state,” or the federal government agencies that protect the environment, food safety, financial markets, public health, and much more.

 

A deeper look inside the Cochran litigation shows how right-wing ideologues are succeeding in shaping negative judicial — and, along the way, public — assessments of federal government agencies as unconstitutional perpetrators of infringements on civil liberties. They do this not only by bringing cases that challenge the agencies’ constitutionality, but by injecting those cases with extra-legal arguments intended to portray the federal bureaucracy in the worst possible light, as an anti-democratic, tyrannical behemoth bent on stripping Americans of their freedom. These arguments are getting a more receptive hearing as the federal bench is increasingly stacked with judges hand-picked by conservative activists during the Trump era, who are similarly steeped in this ideology. 

 

The Cochran case represents just one line of attack on federal agencies, in particular the SEC’s authority to regulate financial services professionals. “Professionals getting in trouble with their licensing regulators for violating professional conduct rules — and then complaining about having professional licensing consequences for those violations — is what we’re talking about,” said James Tierney, a professor at the Nebraska College of Law who previously worked at the SEC. “That’s the consequence of being in a licensed profession,” Tierney said. But, he added, “There are judges and litigants who think professional occupational licensing is the most foul intervention into civil liberties that we’ve ever seen.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

[The Evil Genius]