Discriminations

Isaac J. Bailey, a columnist for the Myrtle Beach (S.C.) Sun News, asks a very good and interesting question:

Has the question ever been asked? And if it ever were, how would John Kerry, John Edwards and the leadership of the Democratic National Committee respond?

The question: Why hasn't the Democratic Party used race-based affirmative action to assure someone other than white men make their way to the White House?

I'm not big on that kind of affirmative action, but it's supposed to be more than a public pronouncement for Democrats. It's supposedly a bedrock principle. If so, then why is it that campaign after campaign, the people they anoint are those who will extend the unbroken line of white commanders in chief?

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In a page one article in today's Washington Post, reporters Dan Balz and Lois Romano write that

in an interview with the Associated Press [Kerry] sounded a tough line on terrorism and said that, if Osama bin Laden is captured, the terrorist leader should be put on trial for murder in U.S. courts, not before an international tribunal.

If that were "a tough line," then Howard Dean was taking a tough line on terrorism last December when he said "he would not state his preference on a punishment for bin Laden before the al Qaeda leader was captured and put before a jury."

"I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found," Dean said in the interview. "I will have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials."

According to long-established rules of war, enemies who do not wear uniforms, hide their weapons from view, and act as saboteurs are considered "illegal combatants." Illegal combatants are not entitled to prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions, are not protected by the law of war, and are subject to summary execution upon detection. When captured, such infiltrators are not entitled to be tried before civilian courts, court-martial panels, or international tribunals based on the Nuremberg model, but must instead face specially organized military commissions.

Yale University law professor Ruth Wedgwood cited another reason for avoiding a public prosecution of Bin Laden: the potential for revealing classified information and compromising U.S. intelligence sources.

One alternative, she said, would be to try Bin Laden in a closed military tribunal, as was done with Nazi saboteurs who infiltrated the U.S. during World War II on a mission to damage war industries. The Supreme Court ruled that the government had the right to try the eight in secret as "unlawful belligerents." All eight were convicted, and six were executed.

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Although the ACLU objects (on principle, of course) to "no fly" lists of people barred from flying, or subject to heightened scrutiny, and filed suit to bar their use, it has promised the government

not to employ people it knew to be on similar terrorism lists so that it could continue participating in a program that allows federal employees to make charitable contributions through payroll deductions.
....
"We oppose 'no fly' lists," said Michael Meyers, a member of the group's executive committee. "Now we have a 'no hire' list that we've signed onto. We're in the midst of an organizational cultural crisis of enormous size."

How, you may ask, is that possible? Easy: Romero never looked at the lists. "I've printed them out," he said, but "I've never consulted them."

Mr. Romero defended his decision to sign the certification but said he was seeking clarification from the government about the obligations it entails. He said that the language of the certification required knowingly employing someone named on the lists, and that he had taken care not to know the listed names....

"On advice of counsel," he said, "we think our interpretation could be reasonable."

Nadine Stroesen, the ACLU's president, asks what I suppose is a rhetorical question:

"Do we do more harm than good by spurning money by certifying something that is plausible but not the only plausible interpretation?" she asked. "It's completely a debate about strategy, not principle."

Mara Patermaster, director of the government's charity program, for some reason took a dim view of this ruse.

"We expect that the charities will take affirmative action to make sure they are not supporting terrorist activities," she said. "That would specifically include inspecting the lists. To just sign a certification without corroboration would be a false certification."

If this new application of affirmative action follows the same developmental trajectory as its predecessor, pretty soon employers will be extending preferences to applicants whose names appear on terrorist watch lists in order to make sure that a critical mass of them are hired.

UPDATE [31 July 10:45PM]

The ACLU has just withdrawn from the charities program and says it will sue the government.

Romero withdrew the ACLU from the program and said the organization plans to sue the government over the policy. The group says the watch list is filled with errors that people listed on them have no way of correcting.
....
The ACLU did not think the policy's language required it to check employees' names against the watch lists, [ACLU spokeswoman Emily] Whitfield said.

The organization withdrew from the program after reading Patermaster's comments in the Times, Romero said. He added that the ACLU would not have participated in the program if it had known about the requirement.

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The popular "school and society" course in the School of Education at the University of Colorado has a section that is limited to minority students or first-generation college students. (Tip thanks to Linda Seebach)

The course — which has a lengthy waiting list — is broken into smaller sections or classes, including one specifically for minority and first-generation students.

[Brad] Jones [head of the CU college Republicans] said some white students "who may need this class to gain entry into the School of Education or to fill a core requirement will find out they would be able to get into the class only if the color of their skin was right, and that's a horrible thought."

UPDATE [3 August 9:45PM]

Reader Linda Seebach sends a press release dated today (not yet available online) from the Campus Accountability Project at the University of Colorado stating that the CU School of Education has abandoned its racial requirement for entry into one of the sections of its popular course, School and Society.

The CAP press release concludes by noting that "[t]he “School and Society” course, ironically, satisfies the University’s graduation requirement imposed on CU students that they take one course in the area of “diversity.”

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You might have missed this, but a few days ago Teresa revealed on National Public Radio that the recipe she submitted to Family Circle magazine for its election year cookie bake-off was not hers.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry had originally submitted a recipe called Yummy Wonders, but, according to Family Circle, its test kitchen said the recipe did not work. When the magazine called her press office and asked if there had been a mistake, the press office sent the pumpkin cookie recipe without consulting her, said her press secretary, Marla Romash.

I'm sure there are those who regard playing fast and loose with cookie recipes as of great/no (take your choice) importance, but what may be of some significance is the hint of an underlying paranoid style that pops up from time to time around Kerry's inner circle. Consider:

In an interview on National Public Radio that was broadcast yesterday, the cookies came up in conversation and in the direct, unvarnished style that people have come to expect, Mrs. Heinz Kerry said: "Somebody at my office gave that recipe out and, in fact, I think somebody really made it on purpose to give a nasty recipe. I never made pumpkin cookies; I don't like pumpkin spice cookies."

This is not pretty, but it's also not unique. Remember Kerry's response after his skiing, er, accident?

When asked a moment later about the incident by a reporter on the ski run, Kerry said sharply, "I don't fall down," the "son of a b*itch knocked me over." [The alleged son of a bitch was the Secret Service agent protecting Kerry at the time.]

There was no "dirty trick" behind the photographs of Sen. John Kerry wearing the blue anti-contamination suit while touring the shuttle Discovery on Monday.

As political pundits and comedians pounced on the pictures of Kerry in what outsiders might deem a goofy-looking costume, the senator's campaign aides alleged the pictures were not supposed to be released publicly.

Not true, said NASA. Government photographers routinely snap pictures of visiting dignitaries.
....

Furthermore, NASA spokesman Bill Johnson said the Kerry campaign asked that the pictures be taken of the senator's unusually up-close tour of the Discovery and that processing be expedited so reporters could have them.

The pictures have prompted chuckles and jokes among political pundits covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston because, to people unfamiliar with shuttle operations, the head-to-toe light-blue suits look goofy.

UPDATE [30 July 4:30PM]

Comments below and other email remind me that I left out a few examples of Kerryian excuse-mongering:

• It was not Kerry but his "overzealous speechwriters" who were responsible for his oft-repeated attacks on "Benedict Arnold CEOs." (Also see Mark Steyn on this.)

• Kerry voted for the Iraq war resolution only because he was "misled." And how was he misled? When Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle asked him that in a meeting with the Chronicle's editorial board,

Kerry's answer was that Washington insiders believed that Bush didn't mean what he said. "I think that you had a hard-line group (then Pentagon adviser) Richard Perle, (Deputy Defense Secretary) Paul Wolfowitz and probably (Vice President Dick) Cheney. But when Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker (former advisers to the first President Bush) weighed in, very publicly in op-eds in the New York Times and the (Washington) Post, the chatter around Washington and (Secretary of State Colin) Powell in particular, who was very much of a different school of thought, was really that the president hadn't made up his mind. He was looking for an out. That's what a lot of people thought."

What about what Bush said to the U.N.? That was "rhetorical," Kerry answered. And "a whole bunch of very smart legitimate people" not running for president thought as he did. "So most people, actually on the inside, really felt that (Bush) himself was looking for the way out to sort of satisfy Cheney, satisfy Wolfowitz, but not get stuck." Kerry continued, "The fact that he jumped and went the other way, I think, shocked them and shocked us."

So Kerry was "misled" because he believed that Bush didn't mean what Bush said.

Talk about your dirty tricks . . .

• When Kerry bounced the ceremonial first pitch of a Yankees - Red Sox game in the dirt, it was only because he "held back" and "tried to lob it gently" out of concern for the National Guard soldier and Iraq veteran who was standing in as catcher.

UPDATE II [1 August 7:30PM]

More on Kerry's being "misled" from Mark Steyn:

Kerry now says that Bush "misled" him on Iraq. But, if he was that easily suckered by a renowned moron, how much more susceptible would he be to such wily operators as Chirac.

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David Broder almost had an interesting column in the Washington Post today. In Broder's view, the "Democrats' Shaky Convergence" (his title) isn't really a convergence at all because the "heart" of the party is at war with its "head."

The Democratic "heart," its activist base, is pretty radical, certainly far to the left of its candidates and the American public at large. When a cross-section of the delegates were asked in a Boston Globe poll what they believe, Broder reports,

80 percent of them say they opposed the decision to start the war in Iraq and 95 percent oppose it now. Unlike Kerry, 62 percent support gay and lesbian marriage. Almost nine out of 10 describe themselves as supporters of gun control.

The head -- the platform and the policy ideas embraced by John Kerry and John Edwards -- belongs to the New Democrats, the group that 20 years ago founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which became the political base for Bill Clinton.

An editorial in today's WaPo, "Mr. Kerry's Task," makes a similar point and stumbles over the same large obstacle. Kerry's "first objective," the edit maintains,

will be to convince voters that he is a credible potential commander in chief. He has the experience and knowledge of the world to do so; his problem is that his words may be undermined by the gap between his posture and the views of most of those who will nominate him. Mr. Kerry has portrayed himself as a leader who would be more competent and cooperative, but no less resolute, than Mr. Bush in the war on terrorism. But as the convention has made clear, many of his backers are far more dubious of Mr. Bush's assertion that a war is taking place at all, and they flatly oppose his strategy of preemption. Where Mr. Kerry criticizes Mr. Bush's prosecution of the Iraq war, most of his party seems to have no doubt that it was a disastrous blunder in the first place -- skating over the fact that their nominee voted to give the president the power to wage it.

Actual voters may be more skeptical.

UPDATE [30 July 8:45AM]

Kerry's speech last night did strike me as one of his best, although skeptics will say that that's not saying much. He pledged to tell the truth to the American people but has not said, at least recently, whether he believes we were wrong to go to war in Iraq. His statement that he would not "mislead us into war" implies as much, but such important matters should not be left to implication and inuendo.

Everyone said his task at the convention was to introduce himself to the American people. In that regard, and with particular attention to the biographical film and performance last night, I was struck by a comparison to Richard Nixon. Nixon presented a tape with an 18 and a half minute gap; Kerry presented a biography with a 19 and a half year gap, his Senate career.

UPDATE II [30 July 12:15PM]

For once the Washington Post agrees. Saying "Mr. Kerry missed an opportunity for straight talk" and calling his acceptance speech "in many respects a disappointment," a WaPo editorial this morning notes that "Mr. Kerry last night elided the charged question of whether, as president, he would have gone to war in Iraq."

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In his acceptance speech last night, John Edwards accused the Republicans of taking this campaign "down the lowest possible road" and of practicing the "hateful, negative politics of the past."

I couldn't tell from the speech what specifically (if anything) he had in mind in making these accusations. But no matter. I'm sure many of the delegates in the audience are convinced that simply being a Republican is hateful.

So, let me paraphrase: "Hey, you hateful lowlifes! Come join us in building One America...."

This from a party that denied a platform to popular, progressive Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania in 1992 because he opposed abortion but honors Al Sharpton with a prime time speaking spot.

UPDATE [3 August 9:05PM]

Anyone interested in more information about how the Clinton Democrats treated Gov. Bob Casey should look at the 12th comment below -- it's a good example of how biased opinions lead to, er, misstated facts -- and the comments quoted from Nat Hentoff that appear in my following reply.

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O.K., my brief detour into being nice to the Democrats (see Whose One America? below) has lasted long enough. Now we will return to your regularly scheduled Discriminations.

Something has been bothering me about what has been emanating from the Democratic Convention -- I mean something other than the Dems' enthusiasm for many people and policies with which I disagree -- and I've had trouble putting my finger on it. Now I think I've got it, or at least part of it, based on a flash produced by this rather inoffensive remark in Sen. Kennedy's address:

"We should have strengthened, not scorned, the alliances that won two world wars and the cold war," Senator Edward M. Kennedy told the convention delegates on Tuesday.

I had a similar feeling listening to Teresa the Terrible's speech. She, too, struck me as dated, as anachronistic, as an aging butterfly stuck in 1960s feminist amber, and anger. She hopes that one day women will find their "voice," where outspoken women will not be regarded as "opinionated" but well-informed? Give me a break. What does she think Hillary Clinton was and is, a potted plant? (Don't answer that.) Or Condi Rice or Sharon Hughes or Janet Reno?

In short, both Kennedy and HeinzKerry struck me as emblematic of a Democratic Party that is not so much out of its mind as out of its time, stuck in a time that no longer exists. That's an odd place for a "progressive" party to be.

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I second JustOneMinute's enthusiasm for Barack Obama's keynote address to the Dems. If more Democrats sounded like this there would be fewer Republicans, and less need of them.

UPDATE

While I'm being nice to Democrats, let me encourage you to visit Dean Esmay and take the pledge he invites and that I endorse. (But Dean, since the issue I care most about is on this side of the water's edge, does that mean I get to indulge in name calling?)

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On Monday the Boston Herald printed some choice quotes from Teresa the Terrible gleaned from a 1975 book by Myra McPherson, formerly a reporter with the Washington Post. Today the WaPo's "Reliable Source" quoted some highlights from the highlights here.

Among the gems:

• She railed against the "putrid politics" of the Democratic Party;
  
• "I know some couples who stay together only for politics," she said. "If Ted Kennedy holds on to that marriage (to ex-wife Joan) just for the Catholic vote, as some people say he does, then I think he's a perfect bastard."
  
• She said she didn't trust Nixon, but added: "Ted Kennedy I don't trust either."
  

Apparently the statute of limitations has run on being an untrustworthy bastard.

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The Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented the winning parties in the Seattle school assignment case discussed immediately below, has just won another big case in San Francisco where a state trial court ruled that the city's public contracting program giving overt preferences to minorities and women violated the state constitution, as amended by Prop. 209.

The latest version of the law that was struck down provided for an automatic 10% reduction of the bids submitted by female or minority firms and required contractors to hire a certain percentage of women or minority subcontractors.

In his ruling yesterday, Superior Court Judge James Warren ruled that the

[California] Supreme Court found that (Prop. 209) prohibited all discriminatory and preferential treatment on the basis of race. It did not permit race-conscious government action even when labeled "affirmative action."

He rejected the city's argument that Prop. 209 includes an exception for cities that are trying to remedy past intentional discrimination....

"The intent of the voters in adopting Prop. 209 was to outlaw race- and sex-based programs irrespective of the goodwill and moral position behind any particular program,'' Warren wrote.

He also dismissed the city's argument that striking down the ordinance would violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, saying that other courts have found Prop. 209 constitutionally sound.

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About six months ago I wrote (here) that the Ninth Circuit was considering a long-running case involving the Seattle school board's use of a "racial tiebreak" in assigning high school students to over- and under-subscribed schools. I wrote then that the city's interest appeared to be nothing more, or less, than "straightforward racial balancing," and now a three judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, in a masterful opinion written by Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain, has agreed, calling the school board's policy "unadulterated pursuit of racial proportionality that cannot possibly be squared with the demands of the Equal Protection Clause." (Hat Tip to Fritz Schrank. The opinion is also discussed here.)

Both the opinion and the dissent, by Judge Susan P. Graber, are long, thorough, and thoughtful. Read them both, since I'm not going to summarize them here (though I may have more to say about them later after more reflection).

The opinion is encouraging to those of us who feared Grutter would open the flood-gates for racial preferences. The dissent, however, is fascinating and perhaps even more useful because it so neatly and cleanly confirms something I've argued here on several occasions, the degree to which the preferentialist argument unwittingly echoes long-discredited racial arguments.

First, as I argued most recently here (with links there to earlier examples), it is difficult if not impossible to reject the idea that the Constitution requires colorblindness without implicitly endorsing the legal argument of the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Plessy held that requiring blacks to ride in separate rail cars imposed no stigma on them. The dissent here argues (I'm quoting the majority)

that the constitutional prohibitions against determinative racial preferences and quotas do not apply within the secondary educational context because secondary schools do not employ race as a proxy for merit, and thus pose little risk of stigmatizing or stereotyping those they putatively benefit.

The Court has long prohibited the use of outright quotas in contexts where merit and qualification are—as the dissent asserts them to be here—completely irrelevant. Thus, Croson rejected Richmond’s racial quota for construction contracts on grounds that the “quota cannot be said to be narrowly tailored to any goal, except perhaps outright racial balancing.” Croson, 488 U.S. at 507. Of course, when dealing with contracting, the only “qualification” or indicum of “merit” is submission of a low bid. Croson’s constitutional objection to the City’s use of a quota was thus not that it threatened to stigmatize minorities: It was that quota-driven racial balancing is flatly at odds with the Fourteenth Amendment’s “ ‘ultimate goal’ of ‘eliminat[ing] entirely from governmental decisionmaking such irrelevant factors as a human being’s race. [citations omitted]

Likewise, courts have rejected the use of race-based quotas in legislative redistricting. As the Fifth Circuit has put the point, “[D]istricters are not bound—or allowed—to sacrifice traditional districting concerns to meeting quotas of diversity, just as they are not allowed to do so in order to meet quotas of racial concentration.” [citations omitted] But surely redistricting involves no “competition” or “consideration of merit,” and of course “no stigma results from any particular [districting] assignment.” Cf. post at 10076. At bottom, the problem with the imposition of a racial quota and the use of inflexibly mechanical racial preferences is not simply that they impermissibly conflate skin color with merit or qualification; it is that, more than any euphemistic “thumb on the scale,” they breed deep-seated cross-racial resentment and do violence to the constitutional principle that “we are just one race here. It is American.” Adarand, 515 U.S. at 239 (Scalia, J., concurring).

is the dissent’s claim that because the District ultimately assigns each student to a “quality” high school offering a “baseline . . . education,” no applicant rejected on the basis of his or her race “suffers a constitutionally significant burden” from the tiebreaker’s operation. Post at 10076-77, 10098-99.

Again, in a familiar pattern, this argument eerily echoes old segregationist positions, a fact noted by the majority.

The dissent’s appeal to the rights/privileges distinction in this context is particularly ironic because it readily parallels arguments long ago repudiated in this context. Indeed, it quite unintentionally evokes the State of Missouri’s argument that because it had no duty to supply legal education, and there was therefore no personal “right” to a legal education, no one could suffer a legally cognizable injury from the University of Missouri Law School’s use of a racial classification in admissions. Yet as the Court explained in rejecting that claim, “The question here is not of a duty of the State to supply legal training, or of the quality of the training which it does supply, but of its duty when it provides such training to furnish it to the residents of the State upon the basis of an equality of right.” Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337, 349-50 (1938).

that, because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race.

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John Kifner's riff in the New York Times on how much Boston has changed since the bad old days when anti-busing whites raged against blacks is encouraging but at the same tme sadly empty.

Even when it is not done so explicitly, busing is usually presented as something of a morality play, with noble, integrationist whites (with a supporting cast of loyal [to the Democrats] blacks) struggling against racist whites to promote integration. The resulting "white flight" -- in Boston "[t]here were 45,000 white students in the public schools in 1974; today the figure is 8,431, or 14 per cent of the total" -- thus is usually seen as whites fleeing not only from blacks but from their own decent but abandoned principles.

Kifner doesn't go into any of that here, which is why his short piece comes across as empty. It is entitled "Before Gay Marriage, There Was Busing," but better, much better, would have been "Before Racial Preferences There Was Busing," for busing, i.e., assigning students to school by race to promote integration, was the first major instance where liberals abandoned color-blindness in favor of "taking race into account." The arguments that were crafted in the busing controversy to justify racial assignments were later used, with little modification beyong chaning "integration" to "diversity," to justify hiring, promoting, and admitting by race.

Busing, like quota, came to be reviled as a code word, but it is difficult to see how anyone who favors racial preferences could have any principled objection to it.

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The Democrats are quite proud of themselves for the "diversity" of their convention delegates.

"We could not be more proud to announce today that the 2004 Democratic National Convention will be the most diverse in our Party's history," said Alice Huffman, DNCC Chairwoman. "Our delegates represent the inclusiveness of the Democratic Party and the diversity of America. We look forward to gathering later this month in Boston to nominate a candidate who embraces this spirit of diversity."

According to statistics compiled by the Democratic National Committee, nearly 40% of the delegates to this month's Convention in Boston are minorities. More African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native-Americans, and Hispanics will attend the Convention than ever before.

In addition, approximately 50% of this year's Democratic Convention delegates are women.

"The breadth and diversity of the delegates to our national Convention proves that Democrats from all walks of life are united in their commitment to elect John Kerry the next President of the United States," said Alice Germond, Secretary of the Democratic National Committee.

In short, the Democrats' "diversity" is based on the same sort of social engineering that they would like to apply to the society as a whole. As an article in the Chicago Tribune pointed out,

The diversity is no accident. While Democratic conventions have long attracted large numbers of African-Americans--the party's most reliable constituents--the representation of other groups has increased, largely due to diversity goals set at the state level, according to Pasquil. Each state is required to have a diverse delegate selection plan that is approved by the Democratic National Committee.

And she was at the top of the list despite the fact that in the 1996 campaign she had come uncomfortably close to the Asian fundraising scandals that marred the Democrats' effort. Maria Hsia, you may recall, was convicted for, among other things, her role in what the Guardian, hardly a Republican paper, called

one of the most embarrassing episodes in Mr Gore's career, his 1996 visit to a Los Angeles Buddhist temple at which dozens of monks and nuns were asked to sign cheques to the Democratic national committee - for which they were later reimbursed -- to disguise the fact that the donations came from the Hsi Lai temple itself, whose charitable status precluded it from making political payments.

Mona Pasquil, DNC Western States political director and former director of Asian- Pacific affairs, testified that she saw no signs of fundraising, such as a table at the door, name tags, checks being exchanged, or solicitations for money.

A vote for Kerry -- and the Pasquils he would bring into the agencies and the judges he would nominate -- would be a vote to make a mockery of Justice O'Connor's prediction (or was it merely a plaintive hope?) that racial preferences would fade away after 25 years.

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The following are excerpts from the Kerry and Bush questionnaires from the NAACP. Note that for the NAACP "equal opportunity" and "affirmative action" have become synonyms.

Q: If elected president, what specific actions will you take regarding equal opportunity (affirmative action) programs?

Bush: I support affirmative access, which aggressively reaches out to minorities, is inclusive of all races, provides equal opportunity, and promotes diversity. My administration has broken down government contracts to allow small businesses, especially minority-owned small businesses, to better compete.  My budgets have supported a 30% increase in funding for minority-serving institutions. I do not support racial quotas, preferences, or set-asides, which perpetuate divisions and can lead people to question the accomplishments of successful minorities.

Kerry: We deserve a president who doesn't call fairness a special preference. I believe in an America where we take common sense steps to ensure that our schools and workplaces reflect the full face of America. The Bush administration is wrong to dismantle important avenues of opportunity for Americans. I have opposed right wing efforts to undermine or eliminate affirmative action programs and have supported programs that seek to enhance diversity, for example, by fostering the growth of minority small businesses. As president, I will be a passionate advocate for affirmative action and equal opportunity programs. I believe these programs will strengthen our nation.

Q: Do you support or oppose reparations (for slavery) legislation, H.R. 40, as introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI)?

Bush:          No response.

Kerry:         Support.

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Jim Russell is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more. Bucking the Republican Party establishment in Westchester and Rockland counties, New York, he has filed petitions to launch a primary challenge against the candidate who had been selected in convention to run against incumbent Rep. Nita Lowey in November.

Russell said he lost his $60,000-a-year job as a computer programmer and network administrator for AT&T after 21 years when the company outsourced his work overseas. While at the company, he said he saw supervisors unfairly promote minority workers to obtain the bonuses they received as a result....

"I worked on an artificial intelligence project and at one point was asked to explain it to a black female employee," Russell said about the experiences at AT&T that helped bring him to the contest to represent the 18th Congressional District. "She then made a presentation to upper management and soon thereafter received a promotion and very graciously didn't thank me for using me to explain how the project worked. Later I confronted upper management at a meeting, asking, 'Do you receive incentives for promoting minorities?' They said, 'Yes, upper management receives salary incentives or bonuses for affirmative-action promotions.' I don't think that was fair."

Tracey Belko, a spokeswoman for AT&T, would not discuss the details of Russell's complaint. She said only, "AT&T is an equal opportunity employer. The company hires and promotes on the basis of merit."

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I've just added an UPDATE to Black Poll below that may be of interest and that I mention here for those of you not in the habit of re-reading all old posts.

UPDATE [7/24/04 10:00PM]

For some reason the UPDATE referred to here didn't post when I thought it did. But it's there now. Really.

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If you're ever elected president and then write your memoirs, you better hope you get a better review than this one. This is the sort of review that makes, or should make, unsold copies of the book crumble to dust on the shelves.

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Indefatigible reader Fred Ray sends word of two articles that don't seem as though they should be about race but are.

The first reports what usually would be good news in liberal circles, that a coalition of slow growth advocates won control of the Chatham County (North Carolina) commission. Instead, the Raleigh News and Observer's article stresses that "All White Men Will Sit On Board."

Although slow-growth advocates won a decisive victory in the Chatham County Commission Democratic primary this week, one casualty is the racial diversity of the board itself.

Regardless of who wins in the general election in November, all five Chatham commissioners will be white men -- for the first time since before the 1980s election of African-American Carl Thompson.

And then, I suppose inevitably, the front page story in today's Washington Post about teenage motocross champion James "Bubba" Stewart, who, by the way, is black, is all about race, little about motocross.

Now, the Tiger Woods of motocross racing is trying to remember when he first met the Tiger Woods of golf, when they hung out on Tiger's practice range and got to be friends, talking about everything except racing and golf and leaping over racial barriers.

So, no. It isn't possible, at least not in today's race-saturated media.

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Speaking to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference in Monterey, California, yesterday, Justice O'Connor said "[a]ffirmative action was never meant to be open-ended and there has to be an end point." And, similarly,

O'Connor wrote in her opinion that she expects racial preferences will no longer be necessary in 25 years. She reiterated Thursday that the high court has always seen affirmative action as having an expiration date, though she did not explain how she arrived at the quarter-century deadline.

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The Los Angeles Times reports today that a proposal to allow non-citizens to vote in San Francisco school board elections is dividing the Chinese-American community there. Chinese-American students make up 31% of the students in the San Francisco Unified School District, making them the largest demographic group.

I mentioned this controversy about a month ago, here, but didn't realize then (Pitfalls of Blogging #206: Bloggers, like journallists, often write about subjects on which they have done little work and know nothing) that just underneath the surface this debate, like so much in San Francisco and elsewhere, actually concerns race.

The Chinese community in San Franciso is, and has been for a while, agitated about something known as the "diversity index," which grew out of a lawsuit the NAACP filed against the city schools in the 1970s claiming racial segregation. As a result of that litigation the city imposed a policy requiring every school to have students representing at least four racial or ethnic groups and limiting each school to no more than 45% of one racial/ethnic group. Then, as a result of that "solution," the Chinese community sued the school district, claming successfully that it was now the victim of hard quota discrimination, and the "diversity index" was born as part of a settlement of that suit.

Foreshadowing a number of later debates about "diversity," the diversity index attempted to duplicate the results of racial assignments without explicitly taking race into account by using various socio-economic indicators. No group has been satisfied, especially the Chinese whose children are often bused over two hours to inferior schools. (This discussion is based on a number of articles that can be found by Googling "San Francisco" and "diversity index." A good, succinct summary can be found here.)

Perhaps nowhere is it clearer than in San Francisco that the Emperor of "Diversity" is wearing no clothes, that race-based, force-fed "diversity" programs predictably produce bitterness and divisiveness. As noted in the San Francisco Examiner article cited above,

Instead of achieving racial harmony, the diversity index sparked tremendous and emotional discord between neighborhoods, ethnic groups, parents and students.

"You are dividing everyone across The City," said Mel Lee, a city resident who said he had an interest in school-district issues and is one of the founders of the Asian Contractors Association.

a real Balkanization, in which group after group struggles for the benefits of special treatment.... The demand for special treatment will lead to animus against other groups that already have it, by those who think they should have it and don't.

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A new BET/CBS News poll of African Americans contains some findings that are entirely unsurprising, some that are depressing, and one or two that I find more interesting.

No one will be surprised that blacks are supporting Kerry over Bush by 8-1 (though some might have expected even higher margins), even though there is not much enthusiasm for Kerry.

When asked whether "the results of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq," 90% said it wasn't worth it. Interestingly, however, this answer apparently does not reflect a principled isolationism, for when asked whether "you think the U.S. should or should not intervene when crises occur in Africa," 67% said we should intervene.

41% of the respondents felt their votes were less likely to be counted than the votes of whites, and only 47% believed their votes were just as likely to be counted.

On same-sex marriage, black voters are a bit more conservative than all voters: 21% think gays should be allowed to marry (vs. 26% of all voters); 22% to form civil unions (vs. 33%); and 53% wanted "no legal recognition" (vs. 39%). (I couldn't tell from the information presented whether the "all" figures included the black numbers; I assume they did, which would tend to minimize the difference in attitudes between blacks and whites).

On "affirmative action" (significantly, not the more descriptive "racial preference"), the poll asked:

What do you think should happen to affirmative action programs -- 1. Should they be ended now, or 2. Should they be phased out over the next few years, or 3. Should affirmative action programs be continued for the foreseeable future?

A more interesting question provided some alternatives to affirmative action, and the pollsters summarized the findings as follows:

Given a set of choices, blacks say some things would work better than quotas to get more African-Americans to attend college. 65% of African- American voters say better college preparation in elementary and high school would be the best way to help more African Americans attend college. 25% think more financial assistance from the federal government would be the best way. Only 4% cite more spaces in college set aside specifically for black students as the best way to help more African Americans go to college.

UPDATE [7/24/04]

MSNBC has also noticed the above anomaly, based I believe on confusion over the meaning of "affirmative action," in the BET/CBS poll results.

Three-quarters of African Americans believe affirmative action should be continued for the foreseeable future, yet only 4 percent said college spaces should be set aside for black students; two-thirds said better preparation in elementary and high school is the best way to get more African Americans into college.

Which of the following do you think best describes the meaning of "affirmative action" in employment and college admissions:

A) Giving preferential treatment to minority applicants;

B) Taking pro-active steps to ensure that all applicants are treated without regard to race, religion, or ethnicity;

C) Implementing policies to ensure that the acceptance rate of minority applicants equals their proportion of the population in the U.S.

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The Chicago Sun Times had an article two days ago asking "who really benefits from colleges' affirmative action." You may want to read it because all I'm going to do here is respond serially to some quotes from and assertions in it.

Here we go:

Thirty-nine years ago, in a landmark speech at Howard University, President Lyndon B. Johnson called on the nation to achieve not just legal equality for all races in America, but "true equality."

Though Johnson never spoke the words "affirmative action" -- the phrase had not yet been coined -- he was signing on to the spirit of the idea. He called on Americans to make a special effort to counter the "devastating heritage of long years of slavery" and "a century of oppression, hatred and injustice."

After a brief discussion of the recently acknowledged but long-known fact that a substantial number of the racially preferred on college campuses are either foreign, the children of foreigners, or of mixed racial background, McNamee quotes Jesse Jackson:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said, "Universities have to give weight to the African-American experience because that is for whom affirmative action was aimed in the first place. That intent must be honored."

This curious makeup of the black student population at top universities has been discussed quietly on campuses for years, but became public only earlier this year when Harvard law professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. raised the issue bluntly at a reunion of Harvard University's black alumni.

Before then, academics tended to skirt the issue, in part because there is no agreement on the proper goals of affirmative action and in part because criticism might be misconstrued as an attack on immigrants.

Jonica Witherspoon, 22, who graduated from Northwestern this past spring, said that, given her test scores, she probably wouldn't have made the cut to attend Northwestern if she were not African American. But, she said, she never resented students from places like Jamaica or Nigeria who may have taken a spot that would have gone to somebody from, say, Chicago's West Side.

Jessica Baker, 20, a junior majoring in communications at Northwestern, said the rich ethnic mix among black students -- with all their differing points of view -- gives her a sense of greater intellectual freedom. When she makes a point in a classroom discussion, she said, she doesn't worry as much that it might be taken by non-black students as "the black ideal or the black statement."

"Like their wealthier white counterparts, many first- and second-generation immigrants of color test well because they retain a national identity free of America's racial caste system and enjoy material and cultural advantages, including professional or well-educated parents," Harvard law professor Lani Guinier recently wrote in the Boston Globe.

"Class is a big explanatory factor in this," said Martha Biondi, associate professor of African American Studies & History at Northwestern. "This does reveal the gap between the haves and the have nots."

Biondi is studying arguments made by protesters in the late 1960s and early 1970s who demanded more black students on campus.

"What struck me is that the students' emphasis was not on actual diversity, but to give opportunities to those students who had been denied opportunity," Biondi said. "That was their goal -- to bring in students who systematically and for generations had been locked out. It wasn't necessarily about past discrimination, but present discrimination. . . .

How's this for a deal: what if we got rid of racial preferences and instead made "present discrimination" a criminal offense?

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Because of his liberal though usually unavailing use of executive privilege arguments to protect his personal wrongdoing, President Clinton was often, with good reason, compared to President Nixon. Recent revelations about his national security advisor, Sandy Berger, playing fast and loose with classified and potentially embarrassing documents re-inforces that comparison by reminding us of a somewhat similar controversy that engulfed Henry Kissinger at the end of his service in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Briefly, Kissinger packed up and took with him (his critics said stole) a large volume of sensitive foreign policy documents. With scholars and journalists in hot pursuit, he delivered them first to a private estate in upstate New York, and then to the Library of Congress under an agreement that limited access until five years after his death. Much of the background can be found in KISSINGER v. REPORTERS COMMITTEE, 445 U.S. 136 (1980) 445 U.S. 136. According to William Burr, author of THE KISSINGER TRANSCRIPTS (1999), these papers "contain the only complete set of the highest-level records of the foreign policies of this country in the Nixon and Ford years."

I found William Burr's comments cited above (which are worth reading) in the process of searching for something else I recalled from this debate, a scathing review of the first volume of Kissinger's memoirs in the early 1980s by the distinguished historian Theordore Draper, which I remembered made reference to a stunning example of official declassification dissembling. I never found it, but fortunately Burr summarizes it succinctly (which is why his comments came up on my search):

Theodore Draper made a similar point when he reviewed the first volume of Dr. Kissinger's memoirs in the spring 1980 issue of Dissent. Mr. Draper observed that Dr. Kissinger's use of classified documents was "nothing less than scandalous" because his book "contains literally scores of direct references to and textual quotations from documents obviously of the highest classification… I wondered how Kissinger could make use of classified documents on such a large scale and of such recent vintage. If they had been declassified for him, could I or any other scholar have access to them? Could one check up on how he used these documentary sources?" Draper found that the answer was no. "In effect, only quotations were declassified, documents were not. By means of this dodge, no one else can gain access to these documents to determine how faithfully Kissinger made use of them."

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Last week Samuel Freedman had an interesing article in the New York Times (yes, that New York Times) arguing that "Latino Parents Decry Bilingual Programs." And he quoted a number of them, and their children, who decried it eloquently:

"I'm very angry," Ms. Salsedo said in Spanish through an interpreter. "The school is supposed to do what's best for the kids. The school puts my kids' education in danger, because everything is in English here."

And the children had no trouble expressing their own frustration lucidly enough in English. "I ask the teacher all the time if I can be in English class," said Alberto, a 9-year-old who will enter sixth grade in the fall. "The teacher just says no." For the time being, Alberto added, he learns English by watching the Cartoon Network.

For years, bilingual education coasted along on its perception as a virtual civil right for Hispanics. Maybe such a reputation was deserved 30 years ago, when the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund sued and won a consent decree requiring that New York City offer bilingual education. But as the innovation hardened into an orthodoxy, and as a sort of employment niche grew for bilingual educators and bureaucrats, the idealistic veneer began to wear away.

The grievances of Bushwick's parents point at an overlooked truth. The foes of bilingual education, at least as practiced in New York, are not Eurocentric nativists but Spanish-speaking immigrants who struggled to reach the United States and struggle still at low-wage jobs to stay here so that their children can acquire and rise with an American education, very much including fluency in English.

What "community control" meant then in Bushwick was a school district dominated by the neighborhood's City Council member, Victor Robles ( now the city clerk). School jobs, including those in bilingual education, were patronage plums.

* * *

Sometmes it appears that New York Times reporters don't read the work of ... other New York Times reporters. Thus, in a generally interesting article about the, for lack of a better term, diversity of Hispanics in New Mexico, reporter Rick Lyman writes:

Issues like immigration or bilingual education, which candidates can use to appeal broadly to Hispanic voters in other states, do not always hit the mark so neatly here. Voters in New Mexico from old-line Hispanic families can share a cultural identification with newcomers, but have very different views on such touchstone issues.

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Occidental College in Los Angeles fired Jason Antebi, the student host of a popular student radio program for, among other transgressions of political correctness, disrespecting diversity. (Hat Tip to Joanne Jacobs)

In response to Antebi's biting on-air satire, three students filed sexual harassment complaints against him in March 2004. Two of his accusers were student government rivals who had unsuccessfully tried to have him recalled from office on different grounds earlier in the year. In their complaints, the offended students claimed that Antebi's show promoted "disrespect and slander" against "women, diversity, and Occidental College" and thus constituted a form of punishable "hostile environment" harassment.

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There are no better examples of Conventional (Liberal/Establishment/Whatever) Wisdom on racial preferences these days than Randy Cohen's Ethicist column in yesterday's New York Times Magazine and an editorial, "Diversity in Montgomery," in today's Washington Post. Since these two items are virtually identical in philosophy, values, sentiment, attitude, and even smugness, I decided to write about them in one post rather than two.

I. Shouting "Fire" In a Crowded, Multicult County

The WaPo's edit is about the woeful lack of "diversity" in the Montgomery County (Maryland) fire department that has "raised so many eyebrows" and led the eyebrow monitors at the Post to demand "a closer look" at the department's hiring procedures.

What is it about fire departments? Not long ago I discussed a similar controversy in Baltimore, where the fire chief declared the hiring process was "absolutely fair" and, confirming the topsy turvy logic of racial preference, that "the process will be changed immediately."

Since 1990 Montgomery County has dropped from 77% white to 60% white, but 43 of the current crop of 46 fire dept. recruits are white. The question I believe this fact raises is, What is the problem here? Discrimination would certainly be a problem, and so I have no issue with the edit's call for "a closer look." Since apparently there is no discrimination, I would be inclined to declare this "underrepresentation" a non-problem and, as they used to say, move on.

Not so the Post. "Fire and rescue workers," it writes, "as much as police, are the ubiquitous public face of any jurisdiction; they should bear some resemblance to the citizens they serve." But only some resemblance: not tall/short, blond/redhead, old/young; only black/white/yellow/brown/red resemblance matters.

The WaPo and its preferentialist defenders would no doubt reply something like, "Ah, but your alternatives are only, as it were, skin deep. Our resemblance, by contrast, reflects deep cultural identity." And thus do they reveal their assumption, first, that racial essentialism is real, i.e., that races really are different, and second, that race is the only thing that matters these days. There is no concern about under-or over-representation of Jewish firefighters, of born-again firefighters, of socialist or fascist firefighters, of gay (or straight) firefighters, of vegetarian firefighters. (There was a momentary but quickly forgotten concern that "just two women" were among the 46.)

The WaPo laments that the department was forced by its meanie lawyers to abandon its practice of "dividing applicants into 'pools' designated by race to give minority candidates an explicit edge in hiring." (Presumably these "pools" are somehow not real pools; hence the quotes. And I assume we can assume that in the absence of "an explicit edge" in hiring minorities an implicit edge would do.)

It also laments that "[t]he department further undercut its own efforts to promote diversity by eliminating the lone recruiter from the payroll to save money." The question of a recruiter may well be the nitty gritty where the rubber of racial preferences meets the road. The fire department obviously does not have a shortage of qualified applicants. Yet the WaPo demands that taxpayers support the considerable expense (salary, benefits, retirement, opportunity costs, etc.) of one (or more) recruiters in order to drum up applications from under-resembled groups. I believe that money could be spent better fighting discrimination, or even fires, than on social engineering to promote a more pleasing pigmentary diversity.

The WaPo is pleased, however, that the county has backed down and restored a full-time recruiter to the payroll, "an African American paramedic...." But wait a minute. Are all minorities fungible even though they don't "resemble" each other? Why is this not a slap in the face of the Hispanic and Asian non-applicants?

It is also pleased that the county is re-evaluating its requirement that candidates have "experience as paramedics, as emergency medical technicians or in emergency communications" and that it also "is reevaluating the written test for recruits, with an eye to increasing the emphasis on non-cognitive factors such as common sense, judgment and conflict management abilities." I'm sure Montgomery County residents will be as pleased as I would be to know that the people coming to rescue residents from burning houses are skilled in conflict management.

II. The Ethical Discriminator

Randy Cohen, the NYT resident ethicist, received the following query from a discriminator who wants to be ethical:

I work for an executive search firm whose clients increasingly request diverse slates of candidates in regard to sex and ethnicity, something our company supports. Our lawyers say it would be illegal for our company database to identify candidates' ethnicity or sex. However, nobody would know if I kept my own list of outstanding diversity candidates. Would it be ethical to do so if my intent were to make sure that we do not omit diverse qualified candidates for a job search? Anonymous

The search firm's efforts to assemble a diverse database of candidates to meet its clients' wishes for a heterogeneous pool of applicants are both laudable and legal. However, to segregate or classify candidates by virtue of their membership in a particular protected class, by race or sex, for instance, is another matter entirely.

It would be abhorrent to use such a list to exclude qualified candidates, but to use it to promote an egalitarian society is not just ethical but admirable: in ethics, intent counts.

Cohen generously recognizes that " [t]here are certainly arguments against affirmative action programs, among them that categorizing people by race or sex reproduces the very discrimination such programs seek to counter," but, he continues, "until more effective programs are put in place, affirmative action is the best -- and most ethical -- game in town."

More "effective" at what? Certainly not at bringing about an end to racial discrimination. I guess I'm just not cut out to be an ethicist.

* * *

Both Ethical Cohen and the WaPedit remind me of a story I heard in college from a religion professor who had taught formerly at a prominent seminary. He told of a request that came in from a small Southern congregation seeking a new minister, preferably one who was not an integrationist. As the person in charge of placement, my professor friend wrote back that there were so few segregationists among his recent graduates that they were very much in demand and so commanded much higher salaries than their peers. The congregation, he reported, wrote back and said in that case they'd settle for a moderate.

So far major corporations, elite academic institutions, and the establishment media have not demonstrated the common sense of that small congregation. They are content to pay premium prices to continue discrimination.

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The Ombudsgod called this issue to my attention recently, and I put some material aside to write about it. Now that he has done so himself, however, mainly what I need to do is call your attention to his post.

In a nutshell (actually, there is more than one nut involved), a defense lawyer in Oregon argued, with the help of an "expert" witness, that his client should not be held responsible for killing his two-year old son because blacks have not fully recovered from the trauma of slavery and discrimination. (See here, here, here, and here for additional discussion of this controversy.)

As I mentioned to The OBG when he first alerted me to this peculiar argument, it reminded me of two old but still classic books: SLAVERY (1959), by historian Stanley Elkins, and THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR (1961), by novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren.

SLAVERY, likening the insitution of slavery to the Nazi concentration camps, argued that the peculiar institution was so brutal, and so total, that it transformed its subjects into the docile, childlike figures of Southern mythology, creating something he called a "Sambo personality." Much of the historiography of slavery over the past generation has been an extended effort, largely successful, to refute Elkins by stressing the success of slaves in creating their own culture, etc. In many respects the debate over Elkins' book foreshadowed the debate over Moynihan's famous report on the problems of the black family, which he traced back to slavery. To a surprising and unfortunate degree, the "post traumatic slave syndrome" sounds like a farcical reprise of a parody of the Elkins argument.

In THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, Warren argued (among other things) that "The War" bestowed two lasting legacies: it gave the North what he called "a treasury of virtue" -- no matter what the U.S. did subsequently, the act of freeing the slaves (even if done as a by-product rather than a purpose of the war) provided such stockpiles of moral virtue that it could never be depleted.

The South, by contrast, was provided with "the Great Alibi." All subsequent problems could be blamed on The War and the Yankees. Nothing was ever the South's own fault.

If Warren were still alive and revising his small classic, he might be tempted to add some version of the "post-traumatic slave syndrome" to his list of legacies, if, that is, he took it seriously.

UPDATE [7/18/04]

In his comment below Andy Lazarus makes the very good point that I should have made clear in my post that the attempted post-traumatic slave syndrome defense was not successful. I think I was too traumatized by the argument to note its failure.

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I know, I know. It's not a word. But it seems apt, given this assertion by WaPo reporter Dan Balz in his article today that could have been (but wasn't) entitled "Bush Panders To Cubans."

Bush has been working to elevate social issues in the presidential race, focusing attention on a more hospitable subject than the economy and the Iraq war, two favorite themes of Democratic opponent John F. Kerry.

More important, however, there's a serious substantive problem with this at best awkward construction. Who says the economy and the Iraq war are not "hospitable subjects" for the Bush campaign? Certainly not the Bush campaign, which has shown no unease or discomfort in claiming credit for recent but dramatic economic growth. Nor has Bush acted as though he regards his record regarding Iraq as something to be avoided in the campaign.

And as for Kerry, does Balz really maintain that Iraq and the economy are "two favorite themes" of Kerry's? What, in fact, does "theme" mean here?

Presumably Balz's piece was read by a different editor from the editor who read Amy Goldstein's article, also in today's paper. In Ms. Goldestein's version of hospitable and inhospitable themes, the war against terrorism, presumably including Iraq, is "one of the central selling points of the Bush campaign." Indeed, in describing a Michigan campaign rally attended by Sen. McCain and Vice President Cheney, Ms. Goldstein writes that "Cheney's remarks before cheering crowds in Lansing and, later in Waterloo, Iowa, touched on the campaign's themes, national security and the economy."

When can we expect the Post's political writers to get their themes straight?

ADDENDUM [7/17/04 10:20PM]

Although Ms. Goldstein was better on the themes than Dan Balz, she too appears to have let her predilections distort her analysis. Consider her description of Sen.McCain's position on gay marriage:

This week, McCain broke with the administration again on an issue of great symbolic importance to Bush's conservative base: whether same-sex marriages should be legal. The Arizonan was one of six GOP senators who voted against a proposed constitutional amendment aggressively supported by Bush that would have prohibited such marriages. McCain called the measure "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans" because it interfered with states' rights.

"While Senator McCain believes marriage should be limited to a man and a woman, he opposes tampering with the Constitution and wants this issue to be resolved by the states," spokesman Marshall Wittman said from Washington.

While gay-rights activists welcomed McCain's stance on the vote, they said they wished he supported same-sex marriages.

"As long as he votes no, I don't really care why at the moment," said Kathie Gummere, a gay-rights activist who lobbies the Arizona Legislature. "Of course our long-term goal is full equality."

A prominent social conservative expressed disappointment.

"You'd think he'd be somewhat concerned about what people in Arizona think on an issue like this. It doesn't seem like he is," said Len Munsil, president of the Center for Arizona Policy.

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Rick Palmer reminds us that in his three years as president JFK

Cut taxes
Intervened in Vietnam
Attacked Cuba
Was a fervent anti-Communist
Believed in a color-blind society

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Admissions standards for the University of California are designed to accept the top 12.5% of high school graduates in the state. In response to a recent report revealing that in fact 14.4% of the graduates now meet those requirements, the Board of Regents has been considering raising the minimum GPA required from 2.8 to 3.1. That decision has now been delayed.

The shift would lower eligibility rates for all ethnic groups. However, critics have been particularly concerned about the affect on black and Hispanic students, since those groups already are underrepresented at UC.
....
UC officials calculate that raising the GPA, along with other proposed procedural changes, would mean that the rate of black high school graduates eligible for UC would drop from 6.3 percent to 4.7 percent. Hispanic eligibility rates would drop from 6.5 percent to 5.5 percent. The percentage of white students qualifying for UC would drop from 16.1 percent to 14.2 percent; for Asians the rate would drop from 31.4 percent to 27.8 percent.

The changes won't affect most students who try to get into UC; 75 percent of applicants have GPAs of 3.5 or higher.

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Walter Olson of Overlawyered has emailed with a clue he found on the Kerry web site of how affirmative action might fare if the Democrats win in November:

Sarah von der Lippe will manage justice policy. She has been a civil rights lawyer in private practice for the past eight years, specializing in defending Affirmative Action rights. Previously, she worked for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) as Legislative Assistant for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

• In 1997, she co-authored a report for the Urban Institute that concluded that minority firms do not get "a fair share" of government contracts.

The study reveals substantial disparities between the share of contract dollars received by minority-owned firms and the share of all firms that they represent.

Did you know that there are nine Justices who sit on the Supreme Court? [D]o you know that these justices are appointed for life? Did you know that the next president might have the opportunity to appoint up to three Supreme Court Justices? And did you know that just one more right-wing Justice could tip the balance on the number of the rights and freedoms we take for granted?

Please join People for the American Way Foundation and allies as we explore the Supreme Court and related issues....

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"Dear Ella," writes a stigmatized promotee,

I have long been an advocate of affirmative action, but when I was recently promoted, the whispers (which I heard loudly) were that I was not promoted due to my hard work but due to the fact that I am black.
....
How do I better understand and explain my pro-affirmative action stance to those opposed to my promotion and to those who I promote in the future?

She began by referring to a bit of the history of one of the presidential executive orders mentioning affirmative action, but like so many others she neglected to mention the central fact (analyzed with citations here and here) that the orders signed by both presidents Kennedy (10925, signed March 6, 1961) and Johnson (11246, signed Sept. 28, 1965) emphasized that government contractors were obligated to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." [Emphasis added] That's a pretty big omission.

Then, amazingly, Ella proceeds to blame the stigmatized promotee for the stigma!

If you were promoted because you worked hard, paid your dues and preformed well, why would you feel the need to highlight affirmative action to substantiate your rise?

I suspect that you may be the one who has more doubt about the reasons behind your promotion than your co-workers and that in someway [sic] you feel this promotion is undeserved. You need to rethink how you think about yourself and about the people and teams you worked with that helped to make you shine.

A leader leads without focus on race, creed, religion or national origin -- why should you be any different?

Until, presumably, that promotee must make some hiring or promotion decisions him- or herself, at which time, of course, race must be taken into account.

I couldn't begin to make this stuff up.

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Not long ago I commended the blog of a frequent commenter here, LaShawn Barber. Here is an interesting interview with her.

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In his Washington Post column yesterday, David Ignatius quoted a perceptive observation by new Iraqi president Ghazi Yawar.

In their interview, Yawar was "wearing the traditional costume of flowing white robe and a gold-edged black cape." Nevertheless, Ignatius wrote,

Yawar speaks in a distinctly modern voice. Though his own tribe is a potent force, with about 3 million Iraqi members split about evenly between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, he argues that these ancient tribes must be harnessed to make Iraq a truly modern state. "Our tribe is Iraq," Yawar says. "What makes the U.S. a superpower is that all the ethnicities melt together."

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Historical guilt is an interesting phenomenon, as is the related question of how long -- and how much and what kinds of penance -- it takes for it to wear off. This reflection on historical guilt is induced by a long series of increasingly vituperative comments on an interesting post by Joanne Jacobs, many of which debate the degree of Republican guilt, and subsequent hypocrisy, for creating majority/minority voting districts, i.e., racial gerrymandering.

I believe that it is right to point a finger of blame at the Republicans for their leading role in creating majority/minority districts, but it is wrong to imply that critics of racial gerrymandering and racial preferences in general have given them a pass for their atrocious behavior. I've written about his a number of times, most recently here, which cites earlier posts as well. But, as that post demonstrates, Roger Sweeney and others are also right to emphasize that the Democrats are more than complicit in this travesty of principle (although one could certainly argue that the Democrats, having abandoned the principle of treating individuals without regard to race, were not behaving in an unprincipled manner, which the Republicans certainly were).

But it ill behooves a controversialist to point fingers and shout "You started it!" when the party he defends not only went along with the "it" in the first place but still endorses it while the responsible party has (for the most part, but not completely) abandoned the practice and its defense.

Why not, for that matter, blame the Republicans today for starting racial preferences? It is perfectly clear that the first major federal support of race-based hiring was President Nixon's "Philadelphia Plan," (implemented by Secretary of Labor George Shultz) just as it is perfectly clear that one of Nixon's overriding motives was the partisan goal of driving a wedge between blacks and unions. Liberal Democrats such as Rep. Edith Green of Oregon, one of the staunchest civil rights supporters in Congress, were aghast at this program and a vociferous and perceptive critics of it.

I regard the "Philadelphia Plan," and especially the defense of race-based action that it engendered, a tragedy, but equally if not more tragic was the Democratic Party's quick abandonment of the colorblind principle articulated in that debate by its own liberals like Edith Green.

History certainly deserves its due, but after a certain point it also deserves to be regarded as, well, history. Otherwise we would still be denouncing the Democrats as the party that gave us slavery, secession, segregation, lynching, and the poll tax and praising the Republicans for freeing the slaves.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In Opinion Journal today Brendan Minter writes that "Reporters analyzing the election sound more like Kerry cheerleaders."

A case, or cheer, in point is Amy Goldstein's article on the first page of the Washington Post today. First, note the title:

'We Were Right to Go Into Iraq,' Bush Says:
President Seeks to Offset Senate Panel's Findings

Further, Goldstein writes:

Confronted with unanimous findings by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the administration had relied on unfounded intelligence in going to war, the president essentially sought to reframe the debate. Hussein's removal, he said, was part of a three-prong strategy for peace.

And immediately following:

"We are defending the peace by taking the fight to the enemy," Bush said in a subtle reformulation of the idea of "preemption" that has been a centerpiece of his foreign policy since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "We have followed this strategy -- defending the peace, protecting the peace and extending the peace -- for nearly three years. We have been focused and patient, firm and consistent."

Regarding the turnaround in Libya, Goldstein writes that

The Kerry campaign accused Bush of traveling [to Oak Ridge, Tenn.] to create an erroneous impression that Libya's decision resulted from the Iraq war.

Kerry issued a statement saying Bush had not decreased the global nuclear threat, contrasting current administration policies with his own proposal "for dramatically reducing the threats from nuclear terrorism."

are substantial differences of opinion over what motivated Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to decide eight months ago to stop trying to develop nuclear weapons, allowing Western inspectors to verify its actions and agreeing to destroy some materials and ship others here to Oak Ridge....

Many specialists say the decision grew out of diplomacy with the United States and Britain that began during the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president. Bush did not acknowledge that history on Monday, saying instead that the decision was the result of a determination of the United States, Britain and other allies to "expose the threats of terrorism and proliferation -- and oppose those threats with all our power."

[Cross-Posted On Oh, That Liberal Media!]

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's the dilemma at the core of affirmative action in a nutshell. In recent remarks to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition, remarks that were largely overlooked by the press since they did not concern race, John Kerry lamented the fact that girls in large numbers lose interest in math and science between fourth and eigthth grades and came out in favor of "all-girls' schools designed specifically to prepare girls for careers in science and math."

Since my daughter, Jessie, just graduated from an all-girls college (Bryn Mawr) in physics, I'd be interested to hear whether she, and others, think baby Bryn Mawrs for elementary and middle school girls in the sciences is a good idea.

But the above is only the setting. What I found really interesting, and revealing, was Kerry's comment in connection with this proposal:

As president, I will give all Americans, especially women and minorities, the same encouragement, and we have to give it early on. 

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Say What? (8) | TrackBacks (0)

A number of commentators (including yours truly) have been known to assert that affirmative action often stigmatizes its ostensible beneficiaries. Anyone doubting this assertion may want to take a look at this article in Middletown (Conn.) Press, starting with its title, "Six Officers Promoted; Affirmative Action Cited."

Close readers will note that the article says nothing about stigma. Why, then, do I mention it so prominently here? See if you can imagine the promotees not feeling stigmatized by, among other things, the remarks of Mayor Domenique Thornton:

Mayor Domenique Thornton addressed the officers and those in attendance at the beginning of the ceremony, saying how proud she was to see such a diverse crowd being recognized.

"I personally am very excited to promote so many Affirmative Action candidates. Five out of the six candidates meet Affirmative Action guidelines," said Thornton. "I’m very delighted to see it happen under my administration."

UPDATE

For a contrary view, see the Vision Circle post linked in the Trackback below. Its author believes that the notion that affirmative action preferences ever stigmatize their beneficiaries is "social science fiction ... worthy of Bullfinch."

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Say What? (7) | TrackBacks (1)

... to win the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, that is.

Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, said he would eliminate affirmative action programs. The black businessman said it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent Voting Rights Act -- not racial quotas -- that contributed to his success.

"All the people who've succeeded since 1964, they didn't do it because of a quota," he said. "They've done it the old-fashioned way; they worked for it."

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The two Johns, Kerry and Edwards, "with their ties loosened and shoes kicked off" in an interview with Washington Post editors, "vowed to forgo negative advertising in this presidential campaign." That was the same interview in which they asserted that "President Bush has governed in a dishonest fashion" and stated that "[t]he value of truth is one of the most central values in America, and this administration has violated" it. "We have not stood up and attacked our opponents in personal ways," Kerry said. (Of course, Kerry and Edwards were sitting during the course of this interview.) Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz, the WaPo reporters, then drily observed:

This week alone, Kerry has criticized Bush personally in speeches for lying, professional laziness, waiting until right before the election to indict Enron Corp.'s former chief executive, Kenneth L. Lay, lacking values and even having worse hair than the two Democrats. Some advisers are privately counseling Kerry to tone down his attacks on Bush.

Those comments echo a constant refrain. As Mark Steyn reminds us, about a year ago the Democratic National Committee put out a press release claiming that "President Bush Deceives The American People." The DNC was referring to the following 16 words in the president's 2003 State of the Union Address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Truthful John Kerry knew this was a lie because Truthful Joe Wilson had revealed that in his fact-finding trip to Niger for the CIA he had spent "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people" and had not found one single receipt showing nuclear goods sent to Saddam.

Now, however, the British government is about to release a report confirming that its original intelligence about Niger and Iraq was well-documented and accurate.

Since Truthful John believes that the "value of truth is one of the most central values in America," I am sure we can expect an apology to the president from him.

Sure.

ADDENDUM: The First Amendment Dodge

Note the recurrence of this tactic: whenever the Democratic nominees are asked whether they agree with some outrageous comments of their supporters, i.e., whether they think such comments are, you know, true, they dodge the question by asserting the "right" of people to say what they think. In this interview, for example, the two Johns said it was anger at Bush's lies

that prompted entertainers at Thursday's Democratic fundraising concert in New York to attack Bush as a "cheap thug" and a killer. "Obviously some performers, in my judgment and John's, stepped over a line neither of us believes appropriate, but we can't control that," Kerry said. "On the other hand, we understand the anger, we understand the frustration."

Edwards said scathing anti-Bush attacks such as the concert and Michael Moore's new film "Fahrenheit 9/11" reflect an "expression by folks with genuine feelings," adding, "Thank goodness in our country they have a right to express those feelings."

Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and John Wilkes Booth were also "folks" with "genuine feelings." So what? But is defending the right of the filth purveyors to purvey filth, especially in the absence of any attack on that right, the best that the two Truthful Johns can say? What happened to the "central value" of truth?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the Left's perennial disappointments in America's downtrodden masses is that the latter don't think of themselves, and hence don't act or vote, as though they were downtrodden masses. That's why campaigns based on supposed economic resentments of the oppressed usually fail. (Except, you could argue, campaigns to lower taxes, but that's another story.)

With that history in mind, George Will writes today that

[p]erhaps the selection of Edwards expresses Kerry's desire to outsource, as it were, the nonsense part of his campaign. Edwards can talk economic foolishness for the constituency hungry for that -- the Democratic base -- while Kerry talks sense, as he understands it, about other matters.

Note, however, that implicit in Will's criticism is the recognition that Edwards may well be correct. Many millions of voters may indeed vote on the basis of economic resentments -- not the downtrodden masses, of course; they have been hegemonized by our crass materialistic culture into a political torpor of false consciousness, but the compassionate vanguard of the "Democratic base," who from the comfort of their suburban and academic villages are expressing by proxy the resentment the masses should feel, but don't.

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At least that's what I think it is. I'd never thought of Barbara Ehrenreich as a comic, but her OpEd today is almost, well, funny. (What? You don't think she was trying to be funny? Well, in that case it's really funny.)

At any rate her piece is a blast ... against that well-known right wing meanie, Bill Cosby. Cosby, as everyone knows by now, has had some harsh things to say lately about how the black community is raising its young, among other things.

As a refresher, here's one summary of Cosby's comments from a couple of weeks ago:

In the presence of NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and other African-American leaders, comedian Bill Cosby took aim at blacks who don't take responsibility for their economic status, blame police for incarcerations and teach their kids poor speaking habits.
....
Cosby said ... : "Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.'

He added: "They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. ... You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"
....
"[Imprisoned blacks] are not political criminals," he said. "These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?"

Cosby made headlines in May when he upbraided some poor blacks for their grammar and accused them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them.

He shot back Thursday, saying his detractors were trying in vain to hide the black community's "dirty laundry."

"Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other n------ as they're walking up and down the street," Cosby said during an appearance at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund's annual conference.

"They think they're hip," the entertainer said. "They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere."
....
"I can't even talk the way these people talk, 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk," Cosby said then. "And then I heard the father talk ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."

Cosby elaborated Thursday on his previous comments in a talk interrupted several times by applause. He castigated some blacks, saying that they cannot simply blame whites for problems such as teen pregnancy and high school dropout rates.

"For me there is a time ... when we have to turn the mirror around," he said. "Because for me it is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us. And it keeps a person frozen in their seat, it keeps you frozen in your hole you're sitting in."

Cosby lamented that the racial slurs once used by those who lynched blacks are now a favorite expression of black children. And he blamed parents.

"When you put on a record and that record is yelling 'n----- this and n----- that' and you've got your little 6-year-old, 7-year-old sitting in the back seat of the car, those children hear that," he said.

He also condemned black men who missed out on opportunities and are now angry about their lives.

Bill Cosby has been attacking the poor of his race, and especially the youthful poor, for a range of sins, including using bad words, "stealing poundcake," "giggling" and failing to give their children normal names like "Bill." "The lower-economic people," Cosby announced, "are not holding up their end in this deal."

I would be tempted to say that Ms. Ehrenreich has a future in the entertainment business, except she's already in the NYT.

UPDATE (13 July)

See Thomas Sowell's comments on the NYT comic, here.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Say What? (16) | TrackBacks (0)

The University of Virginia Cavalier Daily reports today that next fall's entering freshman class is "more diverse" than last year. By that it means next fall's freshman class is 10% black, compared to 9% last fall. (Similarly, Hispanics increased from 3% to 5% and "Asian and Asian Americans" increased from 13% to 14%. A chart in the print edition showing last year's numbers does not appear in the online version.)

The increase in minority acceptances at the University is contrary to results seen at peer institutions such as the University of Michigan and University of California at Berkeley, both of which experienced decreases in minority acceptances.
....

"This year there was more money available to do more traveling and reach out a little more," [director of the Minority Outreach Office Valerie] Gregory said. "We made more high school visits and the money allowed us to visit New York, Philadelphia and some other areas that typically have high minority populations."

But even without any concern for religious diversity, all is not well at Mr. Jefferson's university: "Women comprise 54 percent of the class for the second year in a row...." Still, I doubt whether there are any plans to institute admissions preferences for the underrepresented males, to visit areas or schools that typically have high male populations, or to interview a disproportionate number of males in hopes of attracting more of them. I'm sure such behavior would be regarded as discriminatory.

Meanwhile, across the commonwealth in Fairfax County, the highly selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology continues to be the subject of intense debate over its unrepresentative student body. (See here and here for some background on this debate.)

TJ attracts around 3,000 applicants a year from Fairfax and surrounding counties. That number is winnowed down to 800 semi-finalists, from which a class of 400 or so is ultimately selected. The school used to "consider" race until lawyers told them to stop several years ago. As a result, the Washington Post reports today, "[l]ast year, the student body was about 1 percent black and 2 percent Hispanic." You can predict the response:

A proposal to diversify the student body at the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology by giving less weight to applicants' test scores is on the Fairfax County School Board agenda for the first time tonight...

I wonder if the quaint old principle that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong still lives on, even among some educators.

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The leaders of eleven women's organizations in Michigan issued a statement yesterday opposing equal treatment of men and women, blacks and whites -- opposing, that is, what they termed " "the deceptively titled" Michigan Civil Rights Initiative -- and supporting preferences for themselves and their members.

"Oftentimes, affirmative action is viewed as a tool that solely benefits people of color. However, it is important to remember that affirmative action benefits women as well -- regardless of race or color," concluded Anita Bowden of the Michigan Council of the YWCA. "In fact, women are the most frequent beneficiaries of and will lose most if affirmative action is lost."

"We stand in opposition to Ward Connerly's deceptively titled "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative," said Diane Neth Covel, Director of Public Policy, Michigan AAUW. "We will continue to support policies that increase the diversity of Michigan's educational institutions and workplaces."

Fern Ettinger of the National Council of Jewish Women emphasized the importance of diversity, stating, "The case for diversity in higher education is indeed compelling. Our country cannot afford to ignore equal opportunity and access for women in education. Our future leaders must be educated in a classroom as diverse as the challenges we face."

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Last week Peggy Noonan's typically perceptive column in Opinion Journal (referred to by Mickey Kaus here) discussed her troubling but fascinating thoughts about the current mood of the American electorate. Because many of you may not have subscriptions, I'm going to quote the core of her concern at some length. Her column was titled "Warren G. Kerry."

History has been too dramatic the past 3 1/2 years. It has been too exciting. Economic recession, 9/11, war, Afghanistan, Iraq, fighting with Europe. fighting with the U.N., boys going off to fight, Pat Tillman, beheadings. It has been so exciting. And my general sense of Americans is that we like things to be boring. Or rather we like history to be boring; we like our lives to be exciting. We like history to be like something Calvin Coolidge dreamed: dull, dull. dull. And then we complain about the dullness, and invent excitements that are the kind we really like: moon shots, spaceships, curing diseases. Big tax cuts that encourage big growth that creates lots of jobs for young people just out of school.

No, I am not suggesting all our recent excitement is Mr. Bush's fault. History handed him what it handed him. And no, I am not saying the decisions he took were wrong or right or some degree of either. I'm saying it's all for whatever reasons been more dramatic than Americans in general like history to be.

Here is my fear: that the American people, liking and respecting President Bush, and knowing he's a straight shooter with guts, will still feel a great temptation to turn to the boring and disingenuous John Kerry. He'll never do anything exciting. He doesn't have the guts to be exciting. And as he doesn't stand for anything, he won't have to take hard stands. He'll do things like go to France and talk French and they'll love it. He'll say he's the man who accompanied Teresa Heinz to Paris, only this time he'll say it in French and perfectly accented and they'll all go "ooh la la!"

The American people may come to feel that George W. Bush did the job history sent him to do. He handled 9/11, turned the economy around, went into Afghanistan, captured and removed Saddam Hussein. And now let's hire someone who'll just by his presence function as an emollient. A big greasy one but an emollient nonetheless.

I just have a feeling this sort of thing may have some impact this year. "A return to normalcy," with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

First, as I've stated, I think this is a deeply perceptive insight. Thus I'm not saying she's wrong about what many voters may feel or how they may vote. I do believe, however, those voters would be wrong to vote for a "return to normalcy" (Harding's campaign slogan for those of you who don't recall), and the Bush campaign should be able to make the case that such a vote would be wrong. Here are some reasons.

1. The original "return to normalcy" of the 1920s led, either directly or indirectly, to depression and war.

2. Returning to "normalcy" in 1920 seemed both plausible and possible after the turmoil of World War I. The Germans and their allies were thoroughly defeated. Today, such a return to pre-9/11 "normalcy" is neither plausible nor possible. We have real enemies who are determined to kill as many of us as possible. Turning our back on them and being nice to the French, even in perfectly accented French, will not make them go away.

3. There is every indication that Kerry/Edwards and the Democrats will campaign on the opposite of a "return to normalcy." As Mickey Kaus observed (linked above),

Doctrinaire Shrumian populism is back. Those powerful interests are standing in your way again in the first Kerry-Edwards ads.

4. For better of worse, in short, "normalcy," in the sense of a reduction of strife, tension, and conflict (both domestic and foreign) is simply not possible now, and to attempt it is to put one's head in the sand -- or throw sand in the eyes of voters.

Those are my four reasons, but I think it worth noting that Noonan's insight fits someone else far better than John Kerry: none other than William Jefferson Harding. Their hail-fellow[gal]-well-met gladhanding personalities were similar. The presence of scandals (including both pardon-fixing and sexual affairs in the Oval Office) in both their administrations was similar. The original Harding followed the exertions of our victory in World War I; the second Harding (in this telling) came hard on the heels of our victory in the cold war. Clinton, both personally and in his time, was a plausible Harding. Kerry is not, even if he wanted to be.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Say What? (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I have already said quite a bit (see here and here) about the tension -- and I believe ultimate incoherence -- of liberal Catholics' attempt to have their cake and eat it too on the abortion question, an attempt that rests on the device of stressing their "personal" opposition but their refusal, ostensibly because of their respect for the wall of separation between church and state, to impose their personal religious belief on others. Now Kerry, speaking last weekend to editors in Dubuque, joins Cuomo and Califano with, characteristically, a rather blunt, unsubtle version of that argument that goes farther than they did, affirming that he believes life begins at conception.

I oppose abortion, personally. I don't like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception. But I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist . . . who doesn't share it. We have separation of church and state in the United States of America

But what of the "wall of separation"? Let us imagine two scenarios.

Scenario One: imagine that C/C/K as governor of a state in a world without Roe v. Wade is presented with a bill passed overwhelmingly by the legislature severely restricting abortion for purely secular reasons (killing innocent life is wrong, etc.). Does "he" (my composite Cuomo/Califano/Kerry) seriously believe that the principle of separation of church and state would bar him from signing such a bill? Indeed, if he didn't sign it wouldn't he then be imposing his own personal opinion -- that the state should not impose its views on pregnant women -- on the majority of people as represented by their legislators?

Scenario Two: Imagine that C/C/K as governor of a state with severe restrictions on abortion (passed for purely secular reasons and still in our world without Roe) is presented with a bill legalizing abortion by overturning those restrictions. Imagine further that the record reveals that the assumption underlying and sentiment fueling this reform can be fairly described as heavily religious and even vaguely protestant -- a belief that in contested matters of morality the individual conscience is sovereign and that the state has no business trespassing on the deeply personal and private (and hence protected) territory where individuals, with guidance only from God, decide moral questions. To be consistent with recent comments in this world, wouldn't Gov. C/C/K have to veto such legislation as breaching the wall of separation between church and state? Does anyone seriously believe Gov. C/C/K would veto such pro-choice legislation?

I believe in the separation of church and state, and independent of that belief I'm confident that the Constitution commands it (although the contours of that "it" are not self-evidently clear). But I do not believe that principle precludes either pro-life or pro-choice legislation in most instances. [ADDENDUM 7/7: As I pointed out in a comment to this post, the pro-life position has many sources other than Catholic or even religious doctrine, just as the pro-choice position is not exclusively secular. It makes no more sense to say that the "wall of separation" prevents Catholic politicians from supporting pro-life policies than it does to say that it prevents protestants from supporting pro-choice policies.]

Finally, I would have no quarrel with C/C/K if they said something like, "This is a difficult issue. I don't like abortion. But I also abhor interfering with a woman's right to choose. On balance, if forced to choose, I believe the woman's right is more fundamental than the right of the unborn child to be born alive." My complaint is that they try to hide behind a "wall of separation" to avoid making a hard choice, and that the wall (whatever its exact dimensions) does not offer them such protection.

UPDATE

See Captain Ed's impressive post, "Kerry Flip-Flops On Life." (Link via Susanna Cornett)

UPDATE II (July 8)

See similar comments in The American Spectator, pointed out to me by Lane Core's, whose own generous comments are here.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:35 PM | Permalink | Say What? (13) | TrackBacks (2)

... the line, that is, separating Red from Blue America. Ilya Shapiro, a law clerk on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals living in Jackson, Miss., whose politics and values are Red but whose cultural tastes are Blue, eloquently reminds us via an OpEd in today's Los Angeles Times that "It's Never Black and White Inside Purple America." (Tip thanks to reader who calls himself "Bonehead.")

"You see," he writes,

I reside in that quixotic region, Purple America, where the cosmopolitan meets the conservative. Purple America is not so much a place as an idea, or a confluence of values from Red America with tastes from Blue America. It combines a strong belief in personal responsibility, ordered liberty and civil society with a passion for independent film, Belgian ale and salsa dancing. It also could go with a good ballgame, preferably on grass and without the designated hitter.
....
Purple America demands independent creativity grounded in a solid moral core, as well as an inevitably thick skin; its inhabitants are attacked for godless "hedonism" on one side and politically incorrect "insensitivity" on the other. If I had a nickel for every time an urbane acquaintance marveled at how someone so "nice" could sympathize with those ghastly Republicans, I'd be able to build that bridge to the 21st century. Conversely, a cobblestone for every time a good ol' boy sneered at my choice of drink (wine or imported beer), car (Japanese sedan or German sports car) or clothing (mostly Italian, except my seersuckers) would lead me to that shining city on a hill. Purple America gets a tear in its eye during the Fourth of July parades of patriotism, but it relishes even more the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" on the Champs-Elysees after Lance Armstrong wins another Tour de France.

It welcomes diversity, but not the false diversity that considers a black lawyer's kid from Brentwood more worthy than the son of a West Virginia coal miner or of a Vietnamese fisherman.

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From time to time it is necessary to criticize the arguments of our allies in the affirmative action fight as well as our opponents. With that in mind, let's look at the argument against affirmative action by Andrew Coulson of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan.

So before we get completely lost in the fog of affirmative action warfare, we should ask ourselves: is this even the right fight? What is the fundamental problem we are trying to solve, and is affirmative action really the right solution at the right time?

The problem, clearly, is that too many minority students leave high-school unprepared for college or the modern labor market. Affirmative action’s solution is to gloss over these students’ educational shortcomings and usher them along as if they were adequately prepared.

Is that really the best we can do? Aren’t we just acquiescing to our own failure to teach these kids elementary- and high-school subjects when they are actually in elementary- and high-school? Wouldn’t it be better to fix our K-12 education system so that it doesn’t fail so many students in the first place?

In those cases the problem is not that the minorities are unqualified; it is that they are less qualified. The problem, in short, is one of double standards, which are doubly unfair. They are unfair to the non-minority applicants who would have been selected but for the racial preferences, but they are arguably even more unfair to minorities, from whom less is expected and whose real accomplishments are tainted by the suspicion that they were not fairly earned. Not to mention -- scratch that, since I always do mention it -- the enormous social cost of undermining the core value that every person has a right to be judged without regard to race, creed, or national origin.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (1)

At the end of his recent column in the Washington Times criticizing Justice O'Connor's jurisprudence, or lack of it, especially in Grutter, Robert Zelnick has an interesting proposal:

But what if Barbra Grutter didn't have to give up her place to a less qualified minority? What if both could be admitted? Suppose Michigan, under the lash of legislation, executive order or ballot initiative was compelled to enroll one non-minority student for each affirmative action beneficiary? Justice O'Connor's constitutional mischief would not be wholly erased. But the human damage would be repaired. And in the legal muddle her opinions have produced, that is not a bad result.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Say What? (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of you may have followed the brouhaha down below occasioned by my post poking fun at Kerry's over-the-top shotgun grip. Now on a "regular guy" swing throught the midwest, this photo shows that Kerry usually and normally grips his gun with his left thumb on top of the barrel. If he actually shot with it there, maybe that's why he missed the clay target just before this photo was taken. (Also note the repeated absence of eye and ear protection.)

Stay tuned. I may have more to say about this odd thumb placement if I receive permission to reprint some emails that were sent to me on this crucial issue. (Actually, I don't really care where Kerry puts his thumb, but I do care when I'm accused of spreading lies for finding his placement odd.)

UPDATE

I suspect that most of you are not as interested as I am in proper, or improper, ways to hold a shotgun, but it's my blog so you'll just have to indulge me.

My suggestion a few posts below that photos of Kerry pheasant hunting that showed him gripping his gun with his left thumb curled over the top of the barrels may be his "Dukakis-in-a-tank" moment elicited a number of responses, a few from Kerry supporters who accused me of everything between "spreading lies" and posting "inaccurate, incorrect information." Fuel was added to their fire when Steve Smith, the editor of Pointing Dog Journal and The Retriever Journal and several books on wingshooting, and no Kerry supporter ("I'd walk across hot rocks to vote against Kerry," he wrote) posted a comment that appeared to defend Kerry's unorthodox grip. "Instinctive shooters (those who don't "aim" but instead "point" in the English manner)," Smith wrote, "grip the barrels with the left hand as Kerry is."

Boy was I surprised. I was so surprised I sent Steve an email that included the following:

I appreciate your comment on my post. If we could step outside the partisan invective for a moment, I really am curious about your seeming defense of what one commenter called the "bayonet grip" (thumb over the barrels).

I really do defer to your knowledge in this area. I have probably a
normal or average amount of hunting/shooting experience, more when
I was kid than recently: quail, doves, skeet, etc. I'm no expert, but I
really never have seen anyone shoot a shotgun with that grip, at least
on purpose. Do some hunters really do that?

John,

Thanks for the e-mail....

The Brits teach that the forend is to hold the barrels onto the action, not to be used as a gripping point (even though it's checkered). The hand is not wrapped completely around the barrels; instead, the fingers of the left (assuming RH shooter) hand wrap up and around the edge of the right barrel, and the thumb lies on the side of the left barrel, parallel with it and pointing forward. You can then look down the rib between your fingers and thumb at the bird. (Emphasis added)

This makes perfect sense to me ... , but that's not what Kerry was doing in that one photo I linked. There, his thumb is wrapped around the top of the barrel, almost touching his index finger on the other side. I'm not saying he can't/doesn't shoot (as some of my commenters thought I was saying), only that that photo doesn't provide good evidence of it.

Actually, I shot against a guy in a sporting clays tournament (he whipped my butt) who shot that way. He held his head up, wrapped his hand around the barrels like he was going to squeeze a lemon, and used his instincts -- it was almost shooting from the hip.

Having said that, if Kerry is shooting that way, he's only the second guy
I've ever seen that could do it -- I sure can't.

Steve Smith is a scholar and a gentleman, and I appreciate his letting me quote his emails.

UPDATE II (8 July)

Believe it or not, here's yet another picture of Shooter Kerry with his thumb over the top of his barrels (and, again, with no eye protection), also commented upon here.

UPDATE III (9 July)

From Victor Davis Hanson (via InstaPundit):

Only belatedly has John Kerry grasped that his shrill supporters are often not just trivial but stark-raving mad. If he doesn't quickly jump into some Levis, shoot off a shotgun, and start hanging out in Ohio, he will lose this election and do so badly. . . .

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Say What? (11) | TrackBacks (0)

That New York Times article (which I discussed here) continues too have legs. It described the concern of Lani Guinier and like-minded preferentialists that Harvard and other elite schools were filling too many of their "diversity" quota spots (they, of course, don't admit to any quotas) with foreign-born dark-skinned people, thus avoiding the true purpose of affirmative action, correcting past injustices. So much for the "diversity" rationale, but never mind; everyone except a majority of the Supreme Court has long known that rationale was mainly window dressing.

Roger Clegg sent an excellent letter to the NYT, which it predictably chose not to publish. But, thanks to the miracle of the blogosphere, you can, and should, read it here. Now comes Ruben Navarrette Jr., a syndicated columnist, to give it a few more shots. (Thanks to Dave Huber for the tip.)

"Some observers," Navarrette observes, "of higher education think that Harvard and other elite schools may be trying to pull a fast one, admitting high-achieving foreign students as an easy way to meet diversity goals."

Could be. When I was a Harvard undergraduate in the late 1980s, I could never shake the feeling that the institution was forever pretending to be more inclusive than it really was. It would carefully admit a sprinkling of African-American and Hispanic students.

Working in the admissions office — first as a file clerk and later as a recruiter — I could see that those admitted were often the cream of the crop. They may have had 1,400 SAT scores, or been high school valedictorians or student body presidents. This wasn't affirmative action. It was just the latest example of what Harvard has long done: acknowledge excellence.

There was precious little risk-taking. Few of my classmates came from small farm towns or barrio high schools. The idea back then seemed to be to achieve diversity while still playing it safe. These days, it could be that the safe route is to admit high-performing foreign students.

don't know about you, but — even as someone who can be persuaded into supporting some of the more benign forms of affirmative action, such as outreach efforts — I never bought that line. In fact, of all the justifications for race-conscious admissions policies, the "past injustice" argument is about the silliest and most problematic.

For one thing, it's not like any society could ever fully compensate for the horrors of slavery or the injustice of land-grabs that stripped Native Americans and Mexican-Americans of their rightful holdings. Besides, even if it could make up for something like that, how do you get there by admitting a bunch of high-achievers into elite colleges and universities?

We either need to get rid of affirmative action or come up with a better rationale for keeping it.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The following comment just appeared on an old post of mine. Since it expresses an interesting and very common point of view, I thought it worth posting here:

I'm so glad I attended a historically black university. It kept me from having to study with people with the same opinions as those I'm seeing on this board.I can't believe how widespread the feeling that blacks are "getting it easy" is in the white community. The black kids you are so jealous of are only separated by one generation from their grand-parents who, had to endure a life time of racism. You all love to use even playing field argument. But if you really want to make the playing field even, strip every white person of their personal wealth and place all their children in second rate schools, and do this for about 200 hundred years. Then the playing field will be even! I'm sorry if a good white student doesn't get into the school they desire, but affirmative action was created for a reason. To offset the affect of racism on the black community. But I guess everyone forgot about that. I mean it was 30 something years ago, and that has to be enough time to make up for the 200 and something years prior.

The post from last spring to which the commenter objects cited then-fresh statistics about applications to next fall's freshman class at UVa.

UVa received 15,094 freshman applications this year, including 1,018 from black students. UVa accepted 4,724 students in March; 582 are black. They must accept or decline the invitation by the beginning of May.

• 7% of the applicants were black;
  
• 12.3% of the admittees were black;
  
• 29.4% of the non-black applicants were admitted;
  
• 57.1% of the black applicants were admitted.
  

True. But I emphasized that

critics of racial preference do not maintain that minority admittees are not “qualified.” The complaint is that they are held to a different, and lower, standard than other applicants.

One thing our commenter has in common with Lani Guinier et. al. is a belief that the justification for racial preferences has nothing, or little, to do with "diversity." Preferences are required, in this view, for purely compensatory purposes. Our commenter, in fact, disdains diversity in practice as much as he does in principle. He's glad he attended a predominantly black school since that kept him "from having to study with people with the same opinions as those I'm seeing on this board."

On a number of occasions (an example is here) I have criticized preferentialists who argue that "diversity" is so important that institutions should be forced to offer preferences in order to achieve it -- indeed, who argue, incorrectly, that in Grutter the Supremes made preferences mandatory. By this logic, of course, they should be filing lawsuits against historically black colleges to force them to offer preferences and other inducements to whites, an argument that would seem to be reinforced by our commenter's implicit argument that all blacks think alike and all whites think alike. And while they're at it they should also be filing suits to prevent racially exclusive organizations, dorms, events, ceremonies, etc., at all institutions, even where the racial exclusivity results from voluntary choice and not official exclusion since "free choice" is impossible in a racist society.

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David Maraniss of the Washington Post is perhaps the most astute of all Clinton's biographers, and he has an excellent article in the Post's Sunday Outlook section showing off his talents. I say this even though his assessment of Clinton is more generous than I am inclined to be, a judgement both reflected and no doubt influenced by his conclusion:

During the 1992 campaign, and occasionally during Clinton's White House years, I wondered why he argued so insistently that the media were mistakenly obsessed with his personal attributes and should instead be focused on his public actions, when it seemed so apparent that his personal actions were affecting his ability to govern. It made me think that he was a careless optimist trying to rush past his own problems and avoid responsibility. Now, as the whole melodrama of Clinton, Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr recedes and seems less comprehensible year by year, I think he was atrocious in his behavior but essentially right in arguing that he should be judged by how he governed the country, not how he governed himself.

But for an eloquent statement of a kinder, gentler view, see the article by Maraniss.

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La Shawn Barber, who could be described as a "conservative Christian of color," has a cool blog. I don't know her, but I'm pretty sure she would describe herself this way only while raising an eyebrow and putting quote marks around the description, as she does in asking "Am I the only 'person of color' who...?" (I'm just imagining the eyebrow raising; it's not in the text) in this post on "Firehouse Diversity."

In that post she is incensed by a Washington Post article describing plans "to dumb down the test" for Montgomery County, Maryland, firefighters to correct the problem of whites being "disproportionately represented in the county's fire department."

Why don't we just do away with performance standards altogether? Get rid of the MCAT, LSAT, GRE, SAT, and all admissions and employment tests so that everybody will be equal. Am I the only "person of color" around here who's insulted by paternalistic and condescending junk like this?
....
They plan to dumb down the test. Anything they do to make this test easier to pass will entail lowering the standards. Let's see, what sort of aptitude test will afford "greater opportunity" to blacks? A test given in ebonics? Hip-hop slang? Lots of pictures? If rewriting a test so that blacks can pass it isn't outrageous to blacks, nothing is.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

No, not on his wife, or even on his girlfriends. His new autobiography raises a question of whether he cheated when he was teaching in the law school at the University of Arkansas in the early 1970s.

Consider the following passage from pages 204-205 of My Life:

I'll never forget reading one black student's exam paper with a mixture of disbelief and anger. I knew he had studied like a demon and understood the material, but his exam didn't show it. The right answers were in there, but finding them required digging through piles of misspelled words, bad grammar, and poor sentence construction. An A's worth of knowledge was hidden in the bushes of an F presentation, flawed by things he hadn't learned going all the way back to elementary school. I gave him a B-, corrected the grammar and spelling, and decided to set up tutoring sessions to help transform the black students' hard work and native intelligence into better results. I think they helped, both substantively and psychologically, though several of the students continued to struggle with their writing skills and the emotional burden of having one foot through the door of opportunity and the other held back by the heavy weight of past segregation.
....
When the Supreme Court upheld the principle of affirmative action in 2003, I thought of my black students, of how hard they worked and all they had to overcome. They gave me all the evidence I'd ever need to support the Court's ruling.

But that is for another day. The question that's interesting for purposes of this post is, How did Professor Clinton know whose exam he was reading?

The University of Arkansas law school, like most law schools, has long employed "blind grading" of exams, where students are assigned numbers and do not sign their names. Thus the professor, in theory, does not know the identity of students while grading exams. (I have commented earlier -- here, here, and here -- on the oddity of so many professors who so avidly oppose colorblindness for everyone else practicing it themselves at the heart of their profession, but that's also another story.)

It is clear that blind grading is and was the common practice at Arkansas. A web site offering advice to law students provides sample exam questions from a number of law schools, including sixteen professors from the University of Arkansas. All of them say something similar to Prof. Richard Richards' instructions regarding his Civil Procedure exam: "Do not put your name anywhere on your bluebooks; use only your exam number."

Since the earliest example provided here was from 1982, I emailed a query about practices at Arkansas in the early 1970s to a law professor who taught there then. He replied:

Blind grading was then and remains the custom in law schools, including the University of Arkansas. Exceptions commonly apply, of course, for research papers, skills presentations, and the like. But in ordinary courses with ordinary end-of-the-semester final exams, blind grading has long been standard.

In that other post, the one I'm not writing today, I wouldn't be able to avoid pointing out that the race-exclusive tutoring program that Clinton implemented would be presumptively illegal today, even after the 2003 ruling.

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John Kerry's new ad, "Pilot," is another of his ongoing efforts to make himself appear, as the New York Times put it, an "all around" guy.

Let's roll the tape. "As the ad opens," writes the Los Angeles Times

Kerry sits with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and laughs. Home movie footage is shown of him as a young father playing ball with his daughters, Vanessa and Alexandra. Then come pictures of Kerry shooting a rifle...."

The spot shows a series of photographs— Kerry with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry; Kerry playing soccer with his kids; Kerry flying an airplane; Kerry hunting with a rifle....

There are actually several problems here, but the first is that the picture in the ad does not show Kerry with a rifle. Here is a larger version of that picture, taken from the Firefighters For Kerry web site. Kerry, as you can see, is holding a double barrel shotgun (the picture was taken during his photo op pheasant hunting trip in Iowa last fall). This is not a minor error, and I'll come back to it in a moment. Meanwhile, Wait! There's more.

Kerry may or may not be the avid hunter he and his ad proclaim, but this picture of him with the thumb of his left hand wrapped across the top of the barrels suggests that he hunts for photo ops rather than game. Trying to shoot with this grip is roughly akin to trying to write by gripping a pencil in your fist the same way you would grab a knife as though you were going to stab someone with an overhand blow.

Hold on; I'm not through. If you can view the ad itself (cited above), do so, and hit the stop button when Hunter Kerry appears. Those guys standing around off to the left but in front of him probably aren't in the line of fire (if any firing were to happen), but I wouldn't want to be standing there, especially not when the man with the gun is holding it with such an odd grip.

Now here's the funniest part. I would have said that no hunting was actually going on here -- just a photo shoot -- but take a closer look at the still picture from the firefighters' site. Doesn't that look like a dog behind Kerry, pointing in the opposite direction from where he's poised to shoot? Come to think of it, maybe this scene is deeply symbolic. Kerry is being provided with information (in the form of the point) on the location of sought after targets from a highly trained professional field operative (the dog), and he turns his back and looks resolutely in the wrong direction, under the watchful eye of his advisers off to the left. Think what Michael Moore could do with this if only Kerry were a Republican!

Now, as long as I'm being snide, there's one thing I would like to know. Is the gun in Kerry's hands a stage prop or, as he's claimed, something that's been in his family for years? If the latter, what exactly is it? If it's a fine English double of the sort one might expect to find in any one of Kerry's several multimillion dollar mansions, it might well be worth more than the annual salaries of many people "all around" motorcycling, hockeying, piloting, hunting guy Kerry would like to vote for him. Inquiring minds want to know.

So much for the fun. Here's the serious part. I assume the reporters writing about this ad were writing not only from viewing it but also from material provided by Shrum and Donilon, who produced it for Kerry. I think this because most of the articles were written in similar if not identical ways using similar if not identical organization and phrasing. If so, it means that Kerry's advisers (and even Kerry himself, since he announces, as required, that he approved the ad, though not necessarily the descriptive materials that must have accompanied it) don't know the difference between a rifle and a shotgun or that rifles are not used in pheasant hunting. The fact that such a blunder occurs as a central part of an ad whose purpose is to make Kerry look like a regular guy whom hunters and sportsmen can trust to protect their interests is quite telling.

UPDATE

This post stirred up quite a ruckus, but I was prepared to let the comments speak for themselves and just let sleeping, or pointing, dogs lie (or not). But now Instapundit has added an update to his post linking mine to note that "a commenter at Pejman's says that the story linked above [that is, mine] is wrong."

Actually, what Oliver Willis said is that it is a "lie." I -- along with Pejman, Susanna Cornett, and several others who linked to my post -- are "Spreaders of the lie." And, alas, that deserves a reply.

Mr. Willis, like so many of his ideological colleagues, seems to have a habit of accusing those who disagree with him of lying, and in my case I'm still not sure what he thinks I lied about. My post pointed out some problems I found with Kerry's recent ad portraying him as an avid hunter. As should have been clear (but if it wasn't, I should have been clearer), that doesn't mean I claimed Kerry had never been hunting. Indeed, I even said "Kerry may or may not be the avid hunter he and his ad proclaim," although I followed that by saying, and still believe, that "this picture of him with the thumb of his left hand wrapped across the top of the barrels suggests that he hunts for photo ops rather than game." (One commenter pointed out that this is the way you would hold the gun if you were going to bayonet the pheasant.) In other words, the picture looks transparently posed, and not posed very authentically, even if before or after it was shot he proceded to blast every pheasant in Iowa.

I also continue to find it amusing that Kerry's ad people and virtually all the journalists who wrote about this ad, and the editors who reviewed what was written, apparently don't know the difference between a rifle and a shotgun.

UPDATE II

Lane Core just sent this humorous link with more pictures.

The picture in the upper right is a clearer copy (on my monitor) of the one I cited. You can clearly see the left thumb over the top of the barrel, bayonet style, almost touching his index finger on the other side. Very odd. In the picture on the left, by contrast, Kerry is holding his gun in a way that raises none of these questions.

UPDATE III

See this post, and especially the UPDATE at the end of it.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Say What? (61) | TrackBacks (11)