Horn News – Students at one of the most liberal universities in the D.C. area tried to “cancel” Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas from his side gig as a lecturer in constitutional law.
But the political attack backfired.
Officials at George Washington University stepped in to defend Thomas from the woke mob – and ensured the community that free speech was alive and well. Continue reading
Jonathan Turley – Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on why the most creative and productive individuals are often disfavored in our modern confirmation system. With the announcement of the new nominee this evening by President Donald Trump, we will have the state of a counter-intuitive process that favors those who are the least forthcoming or open about their views.
Here is the column:
In his influential book, “Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare,” ecologist Paul Colinvaux explained that big animals are top predators but require more food and energy to survive. Smaller animals require less of both, and present less of a target to predators, and therefore tend to survive.
The same is true for Supreme Court nominees. Most are not especially remarkable in their prior rulings or writings. They are selected largely for their ease of confirmation and other political criteria. Big fierce minds take too much time and energy to confirm, so White House teams look for jurists who ideally have never had an interesting thought or written an interesting thing in their increasingly short careers. Continue reading
Since before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 50 years ago, scientists have known that certain synthetic chemicals can interfere with the hormones that regulate the body’s most vital systems. Evidence of the health impacts of so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals grew from the 1960s to the 1990s. With the 1996 publication of Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and J. Peterson Myers, many people heard for the first time how such exposures – from industrial pollution, pesticides, and contact with finished consumer products, such as plastics – were affecting people and wildlife. Since then public concern about these impacts has grown.
In 2009, the American Medical Association called for reduced exposure to endocrine- disrupting chemicals. Last year, eight scientific societies, representing some 40,000 researchers, urged federal regulators to incorporate the latest research on endocrine-disrupters into chemical safety testing. Continue reading