Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boiler.

I want to talk this week about Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court Justice per se, and

also about our collective Clarence Thomas problem.

The first part's pretty easy.

Thomas has been in the news a lot lately.

Over the past few weeks, we've learned a lot about how he's benefited in a personal

financial sense from being a Supreme Court justice.

When he's spoken publicly about his private life, he's sort of taken pains to present

himself as the Supreme Court's every man.

He didn't come out of privilege and didn't attend an Ivy League university as an undergraduate,

and all of that is true.

But he also likes to talk about how he cherishes his own humble sensibility.

He doesn't like luxury.

He prefers RVs and sitting around campfires with regular folks.

None of that is true.

For almost as long as he's been a justice, Thomas has been a patron of a right-wing billionaire

named Harlan Crow.

In that capacity, Crow has treated him to lavish vacations, gifts, even money, and Thomas

disclosed none of it.

Or rather, he initially disclosed some of it, but then reporters got wise to the relationship

between the two men, and so he stopped disclosing the gifts.

Meanwhile, Crow has had business before the Supreme Court, and Thomas has heard the cases

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