The NYT goes after Clarence Thomas over "an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship."

It's a long article, and you have to comb through it to try to grasp what we're supposed to think Justice Thomas did wrong. I'd just like to highlight the historical preservation that is at the center of the insinuations. You have to get to the 3rd screen of this 4-screen-long article to read:

At first glance the Pin Point Heritage Museum, scheduled to open this fall, would seem an unlikely catalyst for an ethical quandary. That Pin Point’s history is worthy of preservation is not in dispute.

Part of the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor designated by Congress, it is representative of tight-knit Southern coastal settlements that trace their roots to freed slaves and were often based around fishing. In Pin Point, the Varn crab and oyster cannery, founded in the 1920s, was a primary source of jobs until it closed in 1985....

Justice Thomas, 62, was born and raised near the cannery overlooking the Moon River, where it was not uncommon for babies to rock in bassinets made of crab baskets while their mothers shucked oysters.

Imagine a liberal justice raised under such circumstances. Imagine this historical preservation project without any connection to conservative politics. What article would appear in the New York Times?

But Clarence Thomas is the man that liberals would love to discredit. Here, the idea is that although the judicial code of conduct does not apply to Supreme Court justices, the justices do purport to follow it, and:

The code says judges “should not personally participate” in raising money for charitable endeavors, out of concern that donors might feel pressured to give or entitled to favorable treatment from the judge.

Here's the actual text of the code:

A judge should not solicit funds for any educational, religious, charitable, fraternal, or civic organization, or use or permit the use of the prestige of the judicial office for that purpose, but the judge may be listed as an officer, director, or trustee of such an organization. A judge should not personally participate in membership solicitation if the solicitation might reasonably be perceived as coercive or is essentially a fund-raising mechanism.

Note how the "personally participate" language relates to "membership solicitation" and there's nothing in the article about that. At most, the article has Thomas saying "I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with" to the owner of the cannery. So "a judge should not solicit funds..." — let's use the actual text. How is that soliciting funds? You can see the interest in sliding over to the "personally participate" language that relates to "membership solicitation." Pretty sleazy.

And all in the context of preserving a site in the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor designated by Congress!

The Times notes: "The justices are not bound by the federal judiciary’s conduct code, because it is enforced by a committee of judges who rank below the justices." Right. Of course, that's the way it has to be. Imagine a committee of judges unleashed to have at Clarence Thomas!

The constitutional check on a Supreme Court Justice is impeachment. Picture Congress going after Thomas for playing some background role in preserving a valuable black history site.

ADDED: Instapundit says:

But of course, the New York Times piece isn’t really about ethics. It’s battlespace preparation for the Supreme Court’s healthcare vote. The problem for the Times is that Thomas doesn’t care what the New York Times thinks. Which means this is more about preparing a narrative of failure for ObamaCare — It was struck down by evil corrupt conservative judges. I think they’re going to be kept quite busy constructing failure narratives over the next couple of years.

What Panchito's did to The Fat Black Pussycat.

It's a terrible shame!

Panchito's owner Bob Engelhardt was a regular at the Pussycat which he described as a 'cesspool'. It was situated in a quiet street behind the tourist mecca MacDougal Street.

He said the nostalgia was misplaced, and that the preservation group did not understand the spirit of Greenwich Village.

Engelhardt added:'There are buildings that are worth preserving. Ninety per cent of what's in the Village isn't.

'The Village was freedom. The Village was not rules and regulations set in concrete. It destroys everything the Village was always famous for.'

Consider freedom and historical preservation. What if the history to be preserved was a time of great sleaziness? What if that sleaziness is connected to artists we love?

Pick the choice closest to your beliefs.
	Property owners deserve great freedom in the putting up of signs that represent their business.
	Historical preservation outweighs the interests of the current owner.
	The old sign is cool and the new sign is dull and transitory, so I'm for preservation in this case.
	The old sign is sleazy and I like the new business, so I'm against preservation in this case.
pollcode.com free polls

"Pie is an interloper trading on a false history and a tangle of confusion about its cultural role."

"Its past is unremarkable and un-American. As you may recall from your middle-school history books, many accoutrements of Western life first appeared in Egypt and then spread to the Romans via Greece. Prophylactics are a notable example. Pie is another one. The pies of the ancients, rather than being oozing desserts, were combinations of savory foods baked in a pot made of tough dough. (In our evolutionary tree of Western cooking, pies, tellingly, share a branch with the most hit-or-miss of all edible things, the casserole.) This crust-pot baking method spread through Europe and gained popularity through the Middle Ages, since the dough shell, called a bake-meat (later, just as appetizingly, a coffin), allowed meats to stew without losing moisture. It also helped seal off the meal and slow down spoilage. "For hundreds of years," Janet Clarkson points out in her jaunty account of pie development, Pie: A Global History, "it was the only form of baking container—meaning everything was pie." Pie culture grew with the advent of modern pastry dough during the 16th century, at which point cooks in more ambitious kitchens started to experiment with sweeter fillings. (Queen Elizabeth is said to have eaten some of the first fruit pies.) This is the true origin of our pie tradition. Early apple pies weren't American and sweet at all. They were unsugared, tough, and manufactured by the British."

The anti-pie rantings of  Nathan Heller.

Speaking of pie and tradition: "After I see a movie I like to go get a piece of pie and talk about it. It's sort of a little tradition I have."



"Do you like to get pie after you see a good movie?" "Yeah, I love to get pie after a movie."

"Group keeps weeds, snakes away from 9th U.S. president."

What we read when we scavenge reading material.

"Preservationists say the building... is a classic example of Brutalist architecture that should be maintained for future generations."

It's the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, in Washington, D.C., a couple blocks from the White House.


(Photo by kimberlyfaye.)

Should we preserve historically significant ugliness? Because we need negative examples, to know what to avoid? For contrast? Because history matters? Even the 1970s?

But the church won in the end:

"Historic preservation was never meant to be more important than the very people or purposes that buildings were meant to serve... This 1970s Brutalist-designed building ... would have bankrupted this congregation and forced it out of downtown where it had been for 100 years. That makes no sense."

Sense! Should we make sense? How much more of history, art, and architecture would be lost to us now if we'd been making sense all these millennia?

Are you more convinced by the "make sense" argument — this place is bankrupting them — or by the passionate desire to demolish what is indisputably ugly?

Do you not worry that perhaps it is not ugly, not permanently ugly, and you are blinded by the aesthetics of our time? I remember, after graduating from art school in 1973, feeling quite sure the ornamentation on buildings like this was a hideous mistake and our cities needed to be stripped clean of it. Thank God I was powerless.