JUAN WILLIAMS: America’s Most Influential Thinker on Race: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s insights are reshaping law and policy for the better.

Justice Thomas, who has been on the court nearly a quarter-century, remains a polarizing figure—loved by conservatives and loathed by liberals. But his “free”-thinking legal opinions are opening new roads for the American political debate on racial justice.

His opinions are rooted in the premise that the 14th Amendment—guaranteeing equal rights for all—cannot mean different things for different people. As he wrote in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), he is opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering” by judges to fix racial imbalance and inequality at schools and the workplace. Yet he never contends racism has gone away. The fact that a 2001 article in Time magazine about him was headlined “Uncle Tom Justice” reminds us that racism stubbornly persists.

His only current rival in the race debate is President Obama. At moments of racial controversy the nation’s first black president has used his national pulpit to give voice to black fear that racial stereotyping led to tragedy. But that is as far as he is willing to go. His attorney general, Eric Holder , has gone further by calling Americans “cowards” when it comes to discussing race. And some critics have chastised him even for that.

Justice Thomas, meanwhile, is reshaping the law and government policy on race by virtue of the power of his opinions from the bench. Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on the Supreme Court, stood up as a voice insisting on rights for black people. Justice Thomas, the second black man on the court, takes a different tack. He stands up for individual rights as a sure blanket of legal protection for everyone, including minorities.

An idea so crazy it just might work!

REMAIN CALM. ALL IS WELL! Top-secret military warning on Ebola biological weapon terror threat.

Scientists at the top-secret military research unit at Porton Down, Wiltshire, have been assessing the potential use of Ebola as a bioterrorism weapon, according to confidential documents.

A three-page memo, marked ‘UK secret UK eyes only’, reveals that the unit, where chemical, radiological and biological threats are analysed, was tasked with evaluating whether terrorist organisations such as al-Qaida and Islamic State (Isis) could use the deadly virus to attack western targets.

The heavily redacted document, which has been released under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals that the unit was asked last October to provide “guidance on the feasibility and potential impact of a non-state actor exploiting the Ebola outbreak in west Africa for bioterrorism”.

It goes on to explain that non-state actor threat assessments are “provided by the joint terrorism analysis centre”, while threats to “UK deployed forces are provided by defence intelligence”. The memo outlines three possible scenarios under which terrorists might seek to exploit the Ebola outbreak, which so far has killed more than 9,000 people in the three most affected countries, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The first scenario outlined is completely redacted, illustrating the acute sensitivity about the issue.

But bloggers, etc., who worried about this last fall were paranoid wackos.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Elder Care Doesn’t Have to Resemble Prison: Regulations, fear of lawsuits prevent nursing homes from allowing patients basic autonomy.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Americans are having more trouble paying off their student debt than their houses.

WHY THEY HATE US: “We don’t need Western ideology and gay parades.”

REPORTED BY JAKE TAPPER, NO LESS: Hillary Clinton Says Obama Muslim Rumor Not True “As Far As I Know.”

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IT’S FUN ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW, watching journos who’ve been pushing negative spin on the Rudy Giuliani and Scott Walker stories trying to grasp why they’re being so roundly mocked — including by many right-leaning journos who ordinarily would extend professional courtesy.

UPDATE: Lots of interesting stuff in the comments, including this:

This election cycle, we’re taking the fight directly to the Leftist media machine. Making it personal. No more ‘reasonable proportionate escalation’…we’re going directly to ’11’. Punch them straight in the nose, folks. Their weaknesses are clear: (a) they know they sold themselves out over DreamBoy BO, (b) they are cowards and lazy. Prepare for the fight, my friends…this is the big one.

Yeah, that’s kind of the spirit I’m seeing. After her performance in the 2012 debates, Candy Crowley should have been rendered radioactive and unemployable even at CNN; certainly a reporter who treated a Dem similarly would have been in big career trouble. I think a lot of people learned from that, and are angry.

NOW THAT’S JUST SAD: You Had One Job, Lenovo: And it didn’t involve sneaking malicious adware onto your customers’ computers. “When Lenovo preinstalled Superfish adware on its laptops, it betrayed its customers and sold out their security. It did it for no good reason, and it may not even have known what it was doing. I’m not sure which is scarier. The various news reports of this catastrophe don’t quite convey the sheer horror and disbelief with which any technically minded person is now reacting to Lenovo’s screw-up. Security researcher Marc Rogers wrote that it’s ‘quite possibly the single worst thing I have seen a manufacturer do to its customer base. … I cannot overstate how evil this is.’ He’s right. The Lenovo Superfish security hole is really, really bad.”

Silly Lenovo. They’re not supposed to put annoying commercial adware on their computers. They’re supposed to install undetectable Chinese government spyware on their computers.

MARK STEYN ON OBAMA: “If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?”

Plus: “I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security on the basic Thatcherite principle that if you create a government bureaucracy in order to deal with a problem you’ll never be rid of the problem. But I underestimated the creativity of our rulers: The DHS was set up because 19 Muslims flew planes into skyscrapers and killed thousands of people. Thirteen years later, the head of the DHS thinks his department’s priority should be to ‘give voice to the plight of Muslims’ who have the misfortune to live in America.”

At the very least, it’s the pure instantiation of Conquest’s Third Law: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”

SO LEFTY SOCIAL-JUSTICE WARRIOR TYPES WILL BE BOYCOTTING SUPANOVA BECAUSE ADAM BALDWIN WILL BE THERE. Sounds like a win-win.

THAT’S BECAUSE CREATING IT WAS AN IDIOTIC IDEA, AND IT SHOULD BE ABOLISHED: DHS tackles endless morale problems with seemingly endless studies. “Many DHS employees have said in the annual government ‘viewpoint’ survey of federal employees that their senior leaders are ineffective; that the department discourages innovation, and that promotions and raises are not based on merit. Others have described in interviews how a stifling bureaucracy and relentless congressional criticism makes DHS an exhausting, even infuriating, place to work.”

Well, here’s what I wrote when Pres. Bush proposed creating the DHS. I was right, and that’s no surprise.

WHEN, AS A CHILD, I IMAGINED THE 21ST CENTURY, I DIDN’T IMAGINE BLASPHEMY TRIALS: French Icon Brigitte Bardot on Trial Again for Blasphemy Against Muslims.

MOE LANE: How Debbie Wasserman Schultz Taught the Left To Be Utter Cynics. “Apparently DWS was preparing to accuse Obama of being antiSemitic if he replaced her as DNC chair.”

OBAMA IS THE PATRON SAINT OF THE NEW CLASS, SO WHEN YOU ATTACK HIM, YOU’RE ATTACKING THEM: Rudy Giuliani Causes Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin to Spontaneously Combust. “After watching the brain of Dana Milbank of the Washington Post similarly explode like a character in Scanners, Jazz Shaw of Hot Air writes, ‘Milbank should at least be honest enough to wear a ‘Ready for Hillary’ t-shirt when he goes to work every day if this is how the upcoming election analysis is going to be handled.'”

HEH: The Week in Pictures: Harfing Biden Edition.

SOCIAL SANCTIONS, RANGING FROM SHUNNING TO TAR-AND-FEATHERS, ARE AN APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO THIS SORT OF BEHAVIOR: All over America, people have put small “give one, take one” book exchanges in front of their homes. Then they were told to tear them down. “Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things.”

If doing so becomes painful and unrewarding, they will stop.

I PREDICT THE FIRST MONEY-MAKING APPLICATIONS WILL INVOLVE PORN: Gadgets Are Getting Better at Fooling Your Sense of Touch.

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TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): N.J. teacher had sex with 6 students ages 14, 15: prosecutor. “A New Jersey teacher took advantage of six different students ages 14 and 15, having sex with them at school and in her car, for more than a year, prosecutors say. Among the damning evidence is video of 35-year-old Nicole DuFault – the single mother of two young children – performing oral sex on one of the boys while another victim was nearby, according to prosecutors, who levied 40 counts of aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child against the former Columbia High School teacher.”

I blame America’s pervasive culture of female sexual entitlement.

YOU’RE NOT REALLY EXTINCT IF YOU STILL HAVE DESCENDANTS: A New Theory on How Neanderthal DNA Spread in Asia.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Newsweek: With demand slumping and costs soaring, is legal education heading for disaster? Well, the folks at Newsweek know something about collapsing business models. . . .

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: British Prostitutes Are Helping Disabled People Have Sex. “Sometimes I have to lift people out of a wheelchair, undress them before we can do anything, and then dress them and put them back in the wheelchair once we’re done. It can be pretty difficult and tiring.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 653.