A good decision -- how do you penalize a company and stockholders today for (lamentably) legal actions taken (often by a predecessor entity) over a century and a half ago?

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected most claims by slave descendants that they deserve reparations from some of the nation's biggest insurers, banks and transportation companies.

The three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling that slave descendants have no standing to sue for reparations based on injustices suffered by ancestors and that the statute of limitations ran out more than a century ago.

But the panel did keep alive a smaller portion of the suit, claiming that major U.S. corporations may be guilty of consumer fraud if they hid past ties to slavery from their customers.

The opinion, written by Judge Richard A. Posner, said that "statutes of limitations would be toothless" if descendants could collect damages for wrongs against their ancestors.

"A person whose ancestor had been wronged a thousand years ago could sue on the ground that it was a continuing wrong and he is one of the victims," the court said. It said statutes of limitations could be extended in some cases but not for acts committed 100 years ago.

The panel also said the descendants lacked standing to sue because their links to the slaves were distant.

Now the court did keep alive a consumer fraud claim, but I doubt it will prevail. After all, does a company have an affirmative obligation to disclose any connection to slavery in its distant past?

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Unfortunately for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his crowd of Holocaust denying anti-Semites, the verdict is in and the evidence indisputable.

Delegates at the meeting earlier on Tuesday agreed to form a "fact-finding" committee to study the Holocaust.

The head of the new committee, identified as Iranian academic Mohammad Ali Ramin, said its members were "not racist or opposed to any particular group".
"Rather they are just seeking the truth to set humanity truly free," the ISNA students news agency quoted him as saying, without naming the committee members.

Robert Faurisson, a French scholar who has described the Holocaust as a "historical lie", said the committee included members from the United States, France, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Iran, Bahrain and Syria, ISNA reported.

But if you want to know what these buffoons are really all about, consider this speech and its reception.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday told delegates at an international conference questioning the Holocaust that Israel's days were numbered.

Ahmadinejad, who has sparked international outcry by referring to the killing of six million Jews in World War Two as a "myth" and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map", launched another verbal attack on the Jewish state.

"Thanks to people's wishes and God's will the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want," he said.

"Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out," he added.

His words received warm applause from delegates at the Holocaust conference, who included ultra-Orthodox anti-Israel Jews and European and American writers who argue the Holocaust was either fabricated or exaggerated.

This is the leader of a nation chasing after nuclear weapons. He is promoting a view of history that is wrong, in order to justify his own planned genocide of the Jews – a genocide envisioned and justified by his holy book. Given the folks that Ahmadinejad has surrounded himself with during this conference, perhaps the now is the time to put an end to him and his plans – and to cleanse the human race of some of its most disgusting specimens.

Posted by: Greg at 01:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Look who turned up at Iran's Holocaust Denial Conference.

Iran held a gathering that included Holocaust deniers, discredited scholars and white supremacists from around the world on Monday under the guise of a conference to “debate” the Nazi annihilation of six million Jews.

Among those representing the United States was the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, whose prepared remarks, issued by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said the gas chambers in which millions perished actually did not exist.

Robert Faurisson, an academic from France, said in his speech that the Holocaust was a myth created to justify the occupation of Palestine, meaning the creation of Israel.

That is what IranÂ’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has frequently claimed, and it was Mr. AhmadinejadÂ’s statements that inspired the Foreign Ministry to hold the conference. The ministry said 67 people from 30 countries were participating in the two days of meetings.

In a welcoming speech, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies, said the session would provide an opportunity to discuss the Holocaust “away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe.” In several European countries, denial of the Holocaust is a crime.

An accompanying exhibition also denied the Holocaust. One poster with three photographs showed dead bodies and described accounts of their gassing as a myth. Signs pointed to smiling prisoners freed at the end of the war with the label “truth.”

New captions in Persian on other pictures of corpses described them as victims of a typhus epidemic in Europe, not of the Nazi death machine.

I bet my recently0-banned troll Ken Hoop is positively orgasmic reading these accounts, having spent months espousing just such lies here.

And I ask the world -- is this a nation that we can allow to get nuclear weapons, especially given the stated objective of its president to complete the task tha he denies hitler began?

Posted by: Greg at 11:47 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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I wish he had gotten life, but 90 years seems acceptable.

A teenager who helped to savagely beat another youth and sodomize him with a plastic pipe, leaving him near death, was ordered Monday to serve 90 years in prison.

In a verdict that his victim called "just," Keith Turner, 17, faces at least 30 years behind bars before he can become eligible for parole. The sentence came less than a month after Turner's friend, David Tuck, 18, received a life prison term for his role in the attack.

"This is just another step," the 18-year-old victim told the Houston Chronicle after Turner was sentenced. He noted that he faces more surgeries and the trial of a lawsuit related to the incident.

His father said he was pleased with the result.

"We did it. We got them both. It's what we wanted. We're happy," said Albert Galvan. "Those two guys are not going to walk around in society for a while."

Turner showed little emotion as state District Judge Michael McSpadden announced the jury's decision. His mother, Janis Turner, sobbed.

She had sought to convince the jury on Friday that her son is a good person who was influenced by bad people. "He's not a bad kid," she told jurors as they began considering punishment. "He's making bad choices."

How many "good kids" do you know who sodomize people with a pipe for kissing a girl of a different race?

Posted by: Greg at 11:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It does not get any clearer than this -- such statutes are under-inclusive in their application.

If their overarching purpose is to affirm the equality of all people, then the law should punish all assaults the same, regardless of the race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or veteran status of the victim. The "protected class" should be human beings.

Cut through all the arguments about freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and "perceived harms" from crimes based upon bias, and this is the heart of it -- no person should be victimized by crime, and differential treatment based upon "protected class" status undermines the very notion of equality that we as a society strive for in our attempts to wipe out racial bias.

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