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THE CONSERVATIVE PIPELINE TO THE SUPREME COURT
With the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo has reared a generation of originalist élites. The selection of Neil Gorsuch is just his latest achievement.
By Jeffrey Toobin

...The students did start the Federalist Society from scratch, but it is less clear that tremendous courage was required. Within just a few years, the group was embraced and funded by a number of powerful, wealthy conservative organizations, which eventually included foundations associated with John Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Richard Scaife, and the Koch brothers. “The funders all got the idea right away—that you can win elections, you can have mass mobilizations, but unless you can change élites and the institutions that are by and large controlled by the élites, like the courts, there are limits to what you can do,” Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a professor of politics at Pomona College and the author of “Ideas with Consequences,” a study of the Federalist Society, said. “The idea was to train, credential, and socialize a generation of alternative élites.”

General Zaher al-Sakat tells Richard Spencer that he was ordered three times to use chemical weapons against his own people in Syria - but he could not go through with it.

As chief scientific officer in the army's fifth division, he ran chemical weapons operations in the country's southern Deraa province, where the uprising began in March 2011.

Gen Sakat says he was ordered three times to use chemical weapons against his own people, but could not go through with it and replaced chemical canisters with ones containing harmless bleach.

Gen Sakat believes chemical weapons have now been used 34 times, rather than the 14 occasions cited by international intelligence agencies.

He also claims to have his own intelligence that the Syrian president is evading the terms of a Russian-brokered deal to destroy his chemical weapons by transferring some of his stocks to his allies – Hizbollah, in Lebanon, and Iran.

He also insists that all such orders had to come from the top – President Assad himself – despite insistent denials by the regime that it has never used chemical weapons.

Gen Sakat spoke to The Sunday Telegraph last week, his first interview with a western newspaper, as Mr Assad confirmed for the first time what he and much of the rest of the world already knew – that regime possessed a huge arsenal of chemical weapons, and the delivery systems to go along with them.

You've no idea of what a "World War" means.

Not trying to be argumentative...

Well, you're welcome to that view, but world-wide, it's definitely a minority view.

Is is your position that we should have done absolutely nothing, just like Obama did? Or is it that we should have bombed the living hell out of Assad and his entire air force and thereby avoid a "meaningless exercise?"

This is a must read.

It is vitally important to understand how the Federalist Society has weaponized the American judiciary to forward conservative movement ideology.

Quote:

THE CONSERVATIVE PIPELINE TO THE SUPREME COURT
With the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo has reared a generation of originalist élites. The selection of Neil Gorsuch is just his latest achievement.
By Jeffrey Toobin

...The students did start the Federalist Society from scratch, but it is less clear that tremendous courage was required. Within just a few years, the group was embraced and funded by a number of powerful, wealthy conservative organizations, which eventually included foundations associated with John Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Richard Scaife, and the Koch brothers. “The funders all got the idea right away—that you can win elections, you can have mass mobilizations, but unless you can change élites and the institutions that are by and large controlled by the élites, like the courts, there are limits to what you can do,” Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a professor of politics at Pomona College and the author of “Ideas with Consequences,” a study of the Federalist Society, said. “The idea was to train, credential, and socialize a generation of alternative élites.”

NYer

I'm pretty confident that's not in line with your thinking. What would you do?

I'd like to hear what you'd've done.

I think the exercise was a meaningless, incredibly expensive piss in the wind.