Free Republic

In late August, amid a rising outcry over revelations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had received decades of undisclosed gifts and free luxury travel, a lawyer in Chicago fired off an email to her fellow former Thomas clerks. “Many of us have been asked recently about the justice,” wrote the lawyer, Taylor Meehan. “In response, there’s not always the opportunity to tell his story and share what it was like to work for him. And there’s rarely the opportunity for us to do so all together.” Meehan attached a letter in support of Thomas. Minutes later came a reply....

More than 100 former clerks have signed an open letter defending Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s character and integrity. Thomas has been under a withering assault on his character as both he and his wife Ginnie have run afoul of the left’s smear machine. Ginnie is a conservative lobbyist and the left has been trying to portray her influence on her husband as malignant. But it is the attack on Justice Thomas’s character and integrity that has spurred many of his former clerks to come to his defense. Thomas has been under fire for accepting gifts and perks from his...

It was a satisfying video for those who see America sinking into a criminal abyss: a brazen robber was systematically working his way through a Stockton, California convenience store's cigarette shelves, pouring hundreds of packs into a huge garbage can on wheels. Eventually, one clerk grappled with him, and another began whacking his legs with a long stick. The clerks are now being investigated for assault under the theory that you cannot use deadly force to protect commercial property. That's just wrong. ... police are investigating the clerks for criminal assault. These are the same police who never showed up...

Full Title: His first day on the job, Kavanaugh hired as many black law clerks as Ginsburg has in her entire tenure Justice Brett Kavanaugh has hired a black law clerk for his new chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court, matching Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s record of African-American clerkship hiring during her tenure on the nation’s highest judicial tribunal. With his first clerkship hires, Kavanaugh also set a gender composition record, an apparent attempt to buck the high court’s hiring patterns, which tend to favor white, male graduates of elite law schools. Since joining the high court in 1993, Ginsburg...

Brett Kavanaugh hit the ground running this weekend after the Senate finally confirmed him to the Supreme Court. He immediately took the oath of office in a private ceremony to complete the appointment, although the White House will hold a ceremonial swearing-in later this evening as well. Justice Kavanaugh showed up yesterday in chambers, scoring a historic first with his choice of clerks, as the New York Times’ Adam Liptak reported: A day after the bitter fight over his nomination ended in his elevation to the Supreme Court, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh was in his new chambers on Sunday,...

American-Statesman County clerks can refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples based on religious objections to gay marriage, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Sunday. Paxton noted that clerks who refuse to issue licenses can expect to be sued, but added that “numerous lawyers stand ready to assist clerks defending their religious beliefs,” in many cases without charge. Paxton said Friday’s “flawed” opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned bans against same-sex marriage in Texas and other states, placed religious people in conflict between following their faith and the U.S. Constitution

Two robberies and a near-death experience convinced Mark Headstrong that he needed to carry a gun. So he started packing a few months ago – a black revolver with a brown handle, small enough to tuck into his front pants pocket. For the soft-spoken convenience store clerk, the weapon proved its usefulness on the afternoon of Nov. 17, when he was almost robbed a third time. A man walked into the Wrightsville Country Store wearing a dark jacket and a Groucho Marx mask, pointed a loaded single-automatic pistol in Headstrong's face and demanded cash. Rather than obeying the order, the...

Hollywood test audiences are always giving low ratings to movies with depressing endings, sending them back to the editing room for a little “cheering up.” But it’s not just the grainy independent films about forbidden romances and snooty aristocracies that get recalled. Some of Tinseltown’s biggest blockbusters got a heavy dose of Paxil...

The Clueless-like the demons of yore-are legion, and afflict us in myriad ways !

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraqi Shiite residents of Baghdad's Sadr City have expressed anger on over a picture of a grinning Jesus they mistook for a Shiite holy figure that appeared in the area after a joint US-Iraqi operation. Residents found a picture of "Buddy Jesus" from the 1999 film "Dogma" posted in the streets, accompanied by a badly photocopied pamphlet bearing a crude approximation of a US military crest and outlining a US "plan" to subjugate the neighborhood. "That picture abuses our Imam Mahdi and his holy character, and mocks our sacred figures," said resident Abu Riyam Sunday, apparently mistaking...

The big talk in law blogs this week is about the scandalously small number of women among the elitest of the elite, the law clerks to the Supreme Court justices. It isn’t just the number of women sitting on the bench that’s been reduced by 50 percent. This year, only seven of the Supreme Court’s 37 law clerk’s will be women. Shame on them. When I clerked on the Supreme Court nearly 30 years ago, 5 of the clerks were women. From five to seven in 30 years? Why does it matter? Supreme Court clerkships are like the final gold...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — Everyone knows that with the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the number of female Supreme Court justices fell by half. The talk of the court this summer, with the arrival of the new crop of law clerks, is that the number of female clerks has fallen even more sharply. Just under 50 percent of new law school graduates in 2005 were women. Yet women account for only 7 of the 37 law clerkships for the new term, the first time the number has been in the single digits since 1994, when there were 4,000 fewer...

Spurred by new laws restricting the sales of cold remedies such as Sudafed, which contain pseudoephedrine, a necessary component of popular meth-cooking recipes, police and prosecutors across the country have been arresting convenience store clerks -- sometimes on charges that carry substantial prison sentences. In one Georgia case, authorities made mass arrests of immigrant store clerks and owners, but it's starting to look less like a criminal conspiracy and more like culturally naive foreign-born merchants simply trying to sell their merchandise. It's all a big waste of money, says the Drug Policy Alliance, which issued a press release this week...

The recent release of Justice Harry A. Blackmun's private Supreme Court case files has starkly illuminated an embarrassing problem that previously was discussed only in whispers among court insiders and aficionados: the degree to which young law clerks, most of them just two years out of law school, make extensive, highly substantive and arguably inappropriate contributions to the decisions issued in their bosses' names. Even Roe vs. Wade, Blackmun's most famous decision, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, owed lots of its language and much of its breadth to his clerks and the clerks of other justices. A decade later,...

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050106/REVIEWS/501060302 Virgin No MPAA rating *** (3 stars out of 4) BY ROGER EBERT January 7, 2005 Jessie Reynolds is not the kind of girl who gets nice things written under her picture in the high school yearbook. She's probably never going to graduate, for one thing. When we see her for the first time in "Virgin," she's trying to talk a stranger into buying some booze for her, and when he does, he gets a kiss. Jessie is not bad, precisely. It would be more fair to say she is lost, and a little dim. She clearly feels left...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Supermarket checkout clerks are going the way of the bank teller - available if you want one, avoidable if you don't. Self-checkout machines, which let customers scan, bag and pay for their own groceries, offer shoppers a chance to avoid the lines at the checkout stands. "This is like an ATM for them. It's quicker and easier," said Jennifer Panetta, a spokeswoman for the six-state Harris Teeter chain, based in Matthews, N.C. "They are in pretty much all our stores." About one-quarter of grocery chains are trying them now, with some 34,000 machines in use in stores...

Albertson's Johnston Gets a Hefty Pay Package: Graef Crystal May 26 (Bloomberg) -- While he's trying to cut the pay of his supermarket clerks and other workers, Lawrence Johnston, the chief executive officer of Albertson's Inc., the third-biggest U.S. grocer, seems to have forgotten to trim some other costs -- most notably his own bloated pay package and those of his top subordinates. There's some irony here, because the criticism of a number of large institutional investors has been aimed, not at the Boise, Idaho-based Albertson's, but, rather, at Safeway Inc., the second-biggest U.S. food retailer in net sales. Last...

<p>BATON ROUGE - Most Louisiana sheriffs and all clerks of court are in line for pay raises this legislative session even though lawmakers have blocked pay raises for statewide elected officials.</p> <p>The difference is sheriffs and clerks are paid with self-generated local funds, not state money.</p>