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This is killer Gavin Long a/k/a Cosmo Setepenra's list of books. http://convoswithcosmo.com/man-datory-reading-list/ Note this one - the only one listed related to American race issues: "The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander This is the title I immediately and robotically recite anytime someone is looking for a book recommendation. By far the most infuriating book I’ve read, but vital for anyone that’s looking to understand why the #BlackLivesMatter movement exists. Why Black people are angry. And why the black father is absent in most Black homes (done so intentionally via the system of White Supremacy). It’s an unrelenting and exhaustively...

As the moon floated free of the earth, at 12:30 a.m., on Monday, September 28, a magnificent emanating penumbra encircled the reflected light that gives human life its subjective zen. The quiet reflection of this huge blood moon, however, showed no banner across its face declaring, “America, it’s OK to kill your innocent babies. Do you care about their blood?” The emanating penumbra that Justice Harry Blackmun saw back in 1973, a penumbra that he himself created out of whole cloth, was a false, cruel, baby killing penumbra. This week’s blood moon was clear, bright, beautiful, but stained with the...

The late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun ceded so much of his authority to his law clerks during his 24-year tenure that it amounts to "a scandalous abdication of judicial responsibility," Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow asserts in a magazine article out today. “Will we find someday that Justice Scalia's file on Bush v. Gore reflects the same partisanship among the clerks that we see in Blackmun's files in Planned Parenthood v. Casey?" Garrow asked. "I hope we don't." It was in the (Casey v Planned Parenthood) file that some of the most stinging remarks are made by Blackmun's clerks....

INDULGE me in a momentary historical fantasy. Suppose that Roger Brooke Taney had not gone down in American history as the principal author of what is now almost universally acknowledged as the worst decision in the history of American jurisprudence, Dred Scott vs. Sandford in 1857. Suppose the country had been shaped in the image of Chief Justice Taney's decision, which decreed that slaves could be carried anywhere in the union, and that Negroes could not be citizens under the Constitution, for they were ""regarded as being of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race...

The late Harry Blackmun's papers show how he's still shaping the Supreme Court today on issues like abortion. But the cases he thought he'd closed aren't closed after all. When the Library of Congress opened the late Justice Harry Blackmun's massive collection of papers for public inspection on March 4, two journalists already had been looking through the 1,600 cardboard boxes of documents for two months. Both are ardent fans of Blackmun and his most famous ruling—Roe v. Wade—and had been granted exclusive access at the Blackmun family's request. The reporters—The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse and National Public Radio's...

Same-Sex Marriage and the Living Document March 4, 2004 “According to definition,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “the ideal citizen of this Modern State must be free to act on his individual judgment of morals, must reach conclusions on all matters by private judgment, but must accept the coercion of any law whatsoever when it has been decided by a majority of such individual citizens so concluding.” That about sums it up. The Modern State, now called Democracy, has no moral principles, but we have a duty to obey it anyway. Why? Majority rule, you know. But sometimes the courts overrule the...

<p>O Tannenbaum, where art thou?</p> <p>Tuesday, December 9, 2003 12:01 a.m.</p> <p>NEW YORK--Ground Zero is a massive stretch of sacred ground. Covering more than 14 acres and reaching several stories deep, the site once housed a complex of two massive towers and five other office buildings as well as train stations and dozens of stores. So why is there no room for a Christmas tree?</p>