Discriminations

I must be missing something (and that chorus in the background shouting “Not for the first time!” can pipe down now). It is not unusual for me to disagree with the Washington Post’s editorializing (both on its editorial pages and, not infrequently, in news articles), but I rarely find its coverage incoherent. But that is the only way I can describe its recent coverage of our response to the new “disclosure” and “revelations” of a second uranium enrichment plant in Iran (unless, as I said, I’m missing something, in which case someone should fill me in).

Here’s the beginning of yesterday’s front page story by Glenn Kessler, “For Obama, Focus Shifts From Engagement To Pursuit of Concerted, Tough Measures”:

The disclosure of a second uranium enrichment site in Iran has led the Obama administration to shift the emphasis in its dealings with the Islamic republic -- away from engagement and toward building an international consensus for sterner action against Tehran. [Emphasis added for reasons that will become clear below.]

The effort to directly engage Iran was a hallmark of the early months of the administration.... Now, while not shutting the door on engagement entirely, the United States and its allies plan to forcefully press the case that Tehran has been caught, red-handed, in yet another violation of international rules.

Let’s leave all this “petty bickering,” as the president would no doubt call it, aside. My more serious problem with the analysis here (or confusion, if I really am missing something) comes from revelations about the new “revelations” in a second article, this one by Karen DeYoung and Michael D. Shear, that also appeared on the Post’s front page yesterday. Let’s pick it up in the second graph:

“Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow,” Obama said, condemning what he described as a “covert uranium enrichment facility” that Western intelligence discovered years ago and has since been covertly monitoring....

In a hastily arranged appearance outside the Group of 20 conference in Pittsburgh, Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy outlined intelligence that Brown said would “shock and anger the whole international community, and it will harden our resolve” to force Iran to change its path.....

Friday’s announcement capped a week of behind-the-scenes action in which Iran and the United States each maneuvered to reveal the information on its own terms. U.S. intelligence officials briefing reporters in Washington declined to be precise, but they said they had learned about the facility by early 2007. They said it is not yet operational but may be capable in 2010 of producing enough material for at least one bomb per year.

The CIA, along with its British and French counterparts, spent the summer compiling a dossier of information that administration officials said they had not yet decided how and when to reveal. Their hand was forced, they said, by a letter the Iranian government sent to the IAEA in Vienna on Monday.

The New York Times has also revealed that we have known of Iran’s second plant for a long time. As John Hinderaker writes on Power Line:

The Times reports that President Obama has known about the secret Iranian site since the Presidential campaign, when he received a briefing from then-director of national intelligence Mike McConnell. This puts his various pronouncements about Iran in an even stranger light than we had realized.

The Post’s fawning over Obama, of course, was not limited to Kessler’s headline. Here is how DeYoung and Shear present our fearless leader’s response to the “disclosure” and “revelations”:

.... “We have offered Iran a clear path toward greater international integration if it lives up to its obligations, and that offer stands,” the U.S. president said, “but the Iranian government must now demonstrate through deeds its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international law.”

But Obama was stern-faced and grim, and the rapidly escalating confrontation provided him with a fresh opportunity to project toughness and success on the world stage.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 3:34 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Those of you interested in Virginia's gubernatorial race, and the level of the Washington Post's coverage of it, may find this letter in today's Post of interest.

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Those of you who remember this may find this vaguely familiar, but I hope you will still find it interesting.

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You will have gathered from this post’s titile, I hope, that minority math is indistinguishable from non-minority math, a point that is strangely absent from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article this morning, “Minority Students Needed in Math and Science to Combat 'Brain Drain,' Professors Say,” and the professors quoted there.

The article begins:

Mathematics-education experts on Tuesday urged the federal government to get more involved in recruiting underrepresented minority students to science, math, and engineering majors, saying such efforts are key to increasing the number of Americans working in those fields....

“For the first time in history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries have experienced,” said Carlos Castillo-Chavez, a professor of mathematical biology at Arizona State University. “Reverse immigration” of Chinese and Indian scientists and mathematicians who studied and worked in the United States but are now returning to their home countries will heighten the need for developing talent among U.S. citizens, he said.

Because they are “underrepresented,” it might be argued, they represent the largest pool from which to gather new recruits. That might be true, but it also might not. Perhaps attracting more students like those already attracted would yield greater numbers. And then there’s a question about the number who graduate as opposed to the number who enter. If a much higher proportion of non-minority students actually complete math and science degrees, it may be more productive to recruit more of them than to seek more entering students from groups whose graduation rate is lower. Of course, these concerns are relevant only if the need for more math science students is based on the national interest rather than on the interest (or lack of it) of the students being recruited.

Here’s a thought: if we need more math and science and students, why not simply take steps to make that career choice more appealing and affordable for all students, without regard to their race or ethnicity?

I was never very good at math (a considerable understatement), but it seems to me that a need for more mathematicians and scientists ≠ more minority mathematicians and scientists.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Take a look at the masterful job Scott Johnson of Power Line has done in exposing the “disgusting” performance of the Washington Post and its reporters, Darryl Fears and Carol Leonnig, in “sliming” James O’Keefe, the ACORN slayer.

I especially appreciate his generous acknowledgment of my various Fears pieces in the second of those posts.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that the Department of Education “has made little progress in monitoring,” i.e., knows little or nothing about, “what happens to the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants given to minority-serving institutions and colleges that enroll a large proportion of low-income students.”

A Government Accountability Office report issued Monday urged more-comprehensive oversight of how grant money is used, a recommendation the office had previously made in separate reports in 2004 and 2007. The programs the accountability office had suggested have not yet been put in place....

In the 2008 fiscal year, the federal government gave out $667-million in grants to institutions eligible for money under Titles III and V of the Higher Education Act. Those institutions include historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges and universities, institutions serving Alaskan natives and native Hawaiians, and those enrolling a high proportion of low-income students.

Wait, we’ve heard that before somewhere....

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The Cavalier Daily sported an entire newspaper page today of “Students and administrators reflect[ing] on the Office of Diversity and Equity’s efforts to create a more welcoming, inclusive University community.”

It’s a pretty weak reflection; nothing much shows up. The Office was created in 2003 as part of the University’s frenetic, self-flagellating response to what today’s article carefully calls the alleged racially motivated assault on Daisy Lundy, then a candidate for student body president. She was elected after her opponent withdrew from the race. (In addition, see discussion of this “alleged” assault here, here, here, here, here, here, here, for starters.)

So, what is the Office of Diversity and Equity’s mission, and what has it accomplished? ““The Office provides “consultation, coordination, and assistance to various organizations and University constituents,” explained Marcus Martin, Interim Vice President of the Office for Diversity and Equity who has replaced, at least temporarily, the first Diversity Vice President, William Harvey, who resigned last summer.

Lest those goals seem too narrow, Martin continued:

How the Office’s policies are intended to affect the different aspects of diversity can be seen in some of the office’s broader goals, including “promoting an inclusive, welcoming, respectful environment, and embracing diversity and equity as core values tied to the University’s priorities,” as well as “encouraging commitment to academic diversity,” Martin said.

To accomplish these broad goals, the Office has five committees that each have a unique focus to promote different aspects of diversity. One of those committees, Martin said, is the Diversity Council, which was created “to provide a forum where representatives from the community could come together to discuss strategies to make the community more welcoming.”

Martin cited the many community events sponsored by his office, collaborations with student groups, various community outreach efforts and his office’s input in developing “a global curriculum” at the University.
Black Student Alliance President Lauren Boswell agreed that the University has successfully promoted diversity on Grounds, noting that the Office of Diversity and Equity has been one of her group’s biggest supporters.
Indian Student Association President Mitika Garg said the University “does a great job of empowering us to address diversity issues.”

The administration, however, strongly emphasizes student self-governance, and as a result “there’s only so much the administration can do,” Garg said.

Asian Student Union President Jigar Patel said although the Office of Diversity and Equity is very helpful, his group mostly interacts with the Dean of Students.

Overall, Patel said that from his perspective, “the University is doing its part.” He said, though, there is still room for improvement.

“For us to grow as an institution we’re going to have to focus more of our efforts on diversity,” Patel said.

Seth Kaye, president of Queer and Allied Activism, added that the University could potentially do a better job of preventing problems, instead of just solving them as they arise. For example, he noted that his group was frustrated with the University police for not immediately sending out an e-mail after two gay students had been the victims of a hate crime last April.
“They were helpful after we went to them,” Kaye said.

Although he acknowledges that there exists room to improve, Martin said the University’s creation of his position almost four years ago shows that it has taken a much more proactive role to foster diversity than in the past. He hopes its actions will make the University a much more inclusive and open institution.

All this singing of the praises of “diversity,” etc., however, doesn’t come cheap. Over two years ago, as discussed here, the salary of William Harvey, the University’s first Vice President for Diversity and Equity, was $315,000, making him one of the University’s highest paid officers. Ms. Daisy Lundy, who became Daisy Lundy Lovelace, also did quite well as a result of the “alleged” assault on her. As Mr. Harvey’s assistant, she held faculty rank with a salary of $54,500. Harvey’s gone, but Ms. Lundy Lovelace is still here, with a reported salary in 2009 of $56,700.

Who says “diversity” doesn’t pay?

ADDENDUM

As of 9:45 tonight (9/21), there is one Comment on this article, and it’s a doozy. “Person 23,” a member of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Class of 2008, writes:

UVa is a shining example of the complete failure of affirmative action. There is still a black part of campus, a black part of the cafeteria, a place in [T]uttle where all the asians hang out, and of course the frat area where all the white people (and non-white ppl who conform to white, southern culture) hang out.

The University needs to re-evaluate how it assesses diversity. Can we please acknowledge that just because a person is black doesn’t make them diverse, and just because someone is white doesn’t mean they lack diversity?
....
THE UNIVERSITY WILL NEVER BE DIVERSE so long as group think, tradition, conformity, elitism, and collectivism are the norm.

The University doesn’t need more black people, asian people, etc. It needs more individuals who are willing to keep their individualism is the face of group context and group think. At the same time, it needs less individuals who dress, act, and think in the same manner as the person next to them.....

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s an idea that would go a long way toward reducing the federal deficit: A presidential fib tax on Obama every time he says something that’s not true.

Over this just past media-blitz weekend, for example, Obama said that fining people who do not buy health insurance is not a tax. “I absolutely reject that notion,” he said. “No, that’s not true, George,” he insisted to ABC’s George Stephanapolous.

The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore....

President Obama might be interested to read the Chairman’s mark of the Finance Committee bill, which says that, “The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax.” The mark further says that, “The excise tax would be assessed through the tax code and applied as an additional amount of Federal tax owed.” CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation estimate that the government will collect $20 billion from taxing the uninsured. CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation estimate that the government will collect $20 billion from taxing the uninsured.
[Emphasis in original]

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The silliest thing (although it is a close call) in John L. Jackson Jr.’s “Brainstorm” entry titled “Racial Apologetics” on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog is that it was organized around the incident of Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “You lie!” at President Obama in frustrated response to Obama’s now well-documented (even by MSNBC!), well, misrepresentation of the facts about health care coverage of illegal immigrants.

For many (most?) of Wilson’s critics on the left, he deserved censure not so much for what he said or even for how he said it. As Jackson reports, without any apparent “apologetics,”

the Congressional Black Caucus has been particularly committed to the idea of sanctioning Wilson, and many critics chalk that fact up to the racial imagery of the entire thing: a lone White representative from the South heckling America’s first black President.

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As I write (about 8:40AM Monday morning) MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” is playing in the background. A moment ago Helene (the Discriminating Wife) just screamed, and when I ran in to see what had provoked it (a mouse? the cat throwing up on the bed?) it turned out to be Andrea Mitchell saying in response to a question that she didn’t know ACORN had been accused of (and often indicted for) extensive voter fraud.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, almost. When ABC’s George Stephanopolous asked Obama, “How about funding ACORN?” Obama replied:

You know, if — frankly, it's not really something I've followed closely. I didn't even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.

Obama, moreover, has just described himself as a “big newspaper junkie.” That no doubt means he reads the New York Times and the Washington Post. So, it’s quite understandable that he would know nothing or any scandals involving ACORN.

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Maybe we need to coin a new word to cover the chutzpah of our chief executive: megalObamaniac.

How else would you describe his remark to students at the University of Maryland that the effort to pass his health care reform “will be remembered as one of the defining moments in the nation’s history”?

Obama’s still non-existent “plan” (or maybe one of the House’s 1000 page plans) is thus presumably right up there with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses and his Gettysburg Address.

I’m sure it has not escaped Obama’s steel-trap mind (whether rusted shut or not) that if his health care reform will be remembered as a “defining moment” in the nation’s history, then he will be remembered as the Great Definer.

Others, of course, may remember him later as many think of him now, as the Great Defiler.

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The Associated Press is running a story on the first spate of President Obama’s weekend flurry of appearances under the headline, “Obama: Health care anger not motivated by his race,” but is that really what he said?

Here’s what, according to the AP article, he told CNN:

“Are there people out there who don’t like me because of race? I’m sure there are,” Obama told CNN. “That’s not the overriding issue here.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michelle Obama told a gathering of women’s groups today that the treatment of women under our current health care system is “unacceptable.”

Michelle Obama said women are being “crushed by the current structure of our health care” because they often are responsible for taking care of family illnesses, arranging checkups and monitoring follow-up care.

“Women are the ones to do it,” she said to an audience of 140 people, including representatives from groups such as the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the National Council of Negro Women. “Mothers are the ones that do it. And many women find themselves doing the same thing for their spouses.”

Perhaps I missed it. Does the President’s “plan” require a politically acceptable gender mix of those seeking newly subsidized and regulated medical services? (Of course, as explained here, not “requiring” it may lead to exactly the same result.) If not, what was the point of Ms. Obama’s remarks — beyond, of course, the purely partisan pandering.

ADDENDUM

I’ve just noticed that John Hindraker has said much the same thing.

Under Obamacare, will someone other than mothers (or fathers) arrange checkups for their kids? Take care of family illnesses? Make sure the kids are taking their medicine and get follow-up care if they need it? Is there really anything like this in any of the Democrats’ proposals? If mothers (and fathers) don’t arrange their kids’ checkups, who will? Someone else’s mother or father, apparently. No doubt they’ll care more and do a better job.

The Obama administration seems to be bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase “nanny state.”

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Well, now we can rest easy (or maybe just easier). David Brooks, the house conservative at the New York Times, has just absolved us of racism. But this absolution didn’t come cheap, since he does convict our “populist backlash” against Obama of being “ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top....”

Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector....

What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”

Perhaps one day he will favor us with publication of the finely tuned scale with which he calibrates the exact importance that should be attributed to “the Van Jones and Acorn stories.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[NOTE: This post has been updated, twice]

In the past few days besieged Obamanauts have been hurling charges of racism against Obamacare critics with increasing ferocity and, yes, unwitting, unintentionally self-indicting humor, such as Maureen Dowd’s unembarrassed admission that when she heard Rep. Joe Wilson shout “You lie!” at the president “fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!” And then there was the ineffable, Dowd-like Jimmy Carter’s entirely predictable rant “that an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American.”

We’ve heard this all before ... and before .... The Tea Parties? Racist! The Town Hall critics of Obamacare? Racist rowdies! Opposition to providing subsidized medicare to illegal immigrants? “[A] political bullet aimed at immigrants south of our borders, who mostly happen to be brown.”

Predictably, all these frenzied accusations of racism are having one effect that the accusers, if only they were rational, would lament: they are inexorably, for both better and worse, taking the sting out of that formerly wounding epithet. Since millions of people who are not racist, and who know perfectly well they are not racist, are being accused of it by people in positions of authority and, in the old days, respect, no doubt many of them will conclude that the charge has become nothing more than a partisan club with which to whack conservatives. This development is, on the whole, good, since that is in fact what the charge has become, but it is also unfortunate, since a few actual racists as well may now be immune to its censure. Liberals, ever heard of “crying wolf,” and its effect?

Unfortunately, the view that most Obama critics are racist is not limited to the fevered swamp inhabited by Maureen Down, Jimmy Carter, and the professional race baiters in an around the far left. Rasmussen’s poll this morning reveals that the Democratic party as a whole has been infected by this mania.

Twelve percent (12%) of voters nationwide believe that most opponents of President Obama’s health care reform plan are racist. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of voters disagree, and 21% are not sure.

Eighty-eight percent (88%) of Republicans reject the notion that most of the opponents are racist. So do 78% of voters not affiliated with either major party. However, just 39% of Democrats share that view. Twenty-two percent (22%) of those in the president’s party say that most of the opposition to his plan comes from racists, and another 39% are not sure.

That is truly pathetic.

But look on the bright side: think how much worse things would be if we hadn’t elected a post-racial president dedicated and able to bring us all together.

ADDENDUM

I probably don’t need to add, but will anyway, that of course many Democrats are also deranged on issues other than race. As Iain Murray has just pointed out on NRO’s The Corner, citing this poll on “Extremism in New Jersey,” 32% of the Democrats in New Jersey “think that George W. Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11.”

ADDENDUM II

Roger Kimball, quoting the philosopher Sidney Hook, makes my point far better than I did:

... Obama’s election has heralded a marked upswing in racialism. Now, more than ever, if you criticize the ideas or behavior of someone who happens to be black, you run the risk of being called racist.

It is an epithet that overuse has more or less emptied of intellectual content. But it still carries a toxic political payload. The problem, as the philosopher Sidney Hook observed some years ago ... , that spurious charges of racism, far from making us more sensitive to the real thing, have the effect of dulling us to genuine instances of racism. “As morally offensive as is the expression of racism wherever it is found,” Hook wrote,

a false charge of racism is equally offensive, perhaps even more so, because the consequences of a false charge of racism enable an authentic racist to conceal his racism by exploiting the loose way the term is used to cover up his actions. The same is true of a false charge of sexism or anti-Semitism. This is the lesson we should all have learned from the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Because of his false and irresponsible charges of communism against liberals, socialists, and others among his critics, many communists and agents of communist influence sought to pass themselves off as Jeffersonian democrats or merely idealistic reformers. They would all complain they were victims of red-baiting to prevent criticism and exposure.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Jennifer Rubin has a very disturbing report arguing that the Obama Justice Department has, from the Attorney General on down through the career lawyers working in civil rights, rejected the view that civil rights laws protect everyone equally.

The notion that civil rights laws apply to all citizens, and are not on the books merely to protect minority groups or to pursue white racists, is an anathema to the liberal civil rights establishment and their sympathetic partners in the Justice Department.

[An] attorney familiar with the inner workings of the Civil Rights Division agrees with this take. He observes that Department staff “openly and proudly advocate for a different standard” depending on the race of the alleged civil rights violator. He contends that this view extends now up to the attorney general and to staff attorneys who “say it openly at the Justice Department when the topic of ‘reverse’ discrimination comes up.”

some speculate that there was an effort to conceal more widespread voter intimidation or fraud which inured to the benefit of the Obama campaign. But there is perhaps something more basic and more far-reaching than that at work....

The dismissal of the New Black Panther case can then be seen in a larger and more ominous context. It was quite likely a message to the liberal civil rights establishment: there is a new Justice Department and the days of enforcing civil rights laws against any defendant — regardless of his race — are over. One can imagine then that there might be those in Justice surprised by the firestorm created by the New Black Panther case’s dismisal who may now regret having opened the Department and its civil rights perspective up to further scrutiny. The Holder Justice Department may be chagrined to learn that most Americans take exception, strongly so, to the idea that the civil rights laws are there only to protect historically discriminated minorities. But we are certainly going to have that national conversation about race which Holder has been pining for.

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According to today’s column by the always entertaining Derrick Z. Jackson, Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You Lie!” outburst

was a double-barreled blast. One was a shout out for white Americans who somewhere in their psyche cannot respect a black president. The other, since it came as Obama said undocumented people would not be covered under his health care proposals, was a political bullet aimed at immigrants south of our borders, who mostly happen to be brown.

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

The White House has been changing its tune with increasing frequency on some matters related to health care reform. One, which I discussed several days ago, concerned whether or not the House legislation contained truck-wide loopholes that would have allowed coverage of illegal immigrants. George Will describes another new (but still discordant) tune:

He says America’s health-care system is going to wrack and ruin and requires root-and-branch reform — but that if you like your health care (as a large majority of Americans do), nothing will change for you. His slippery new formulation is that nothing in his plan will “require” anyone to change coverage. He used to say, “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” He had to stop saying that because various disinterested analysts agree that his plan will give many employers incentives to stop providing coverage for employees.

The most notorious example I can think of where something that was not “required” (indeed, it was argued vigorously that it was not even permitted) came quickly to be de facto required across the land concerns Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and how the Supreme Court made a travesty of it in, among other cases, United Steel Workers v. Weber (1979), 443 U.S. 193, which involved a training program at a Kaiser aluminum plant for craft jobs that reserved 50% of the positions for blacks and provided that blacks and whites would be selected on the basis of seniority within their racial group. Brian Weber, a white who was not selected, had more seniority than two of the successful black applicants. He sued, and lost because the Supremes reached a result that, according Chief Justice Burger in dissent, was “contrary to the explicit language of the statute.”

Under the guise of statutory “construction,” the Court effectively rewrites Title VII to achieve what it regards as a desirable result. It “amends” the statute to do precisely what both its sponsors and its opponents agreed the statute was not intended to do.

When Congress enacted Title VII after long study and searching debate, it produced a statute of extraordinary clarity, which speaks directly to the issue we consider in this case. In 703 (d) Congress provided:

“It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee controlling apprenticeship or other training or retraining, including on-the-job training programs to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.” 42 U.S.C. 2000e-2 (d).

Often we have difficulty interpreting statutes either because of imprecise drafting or because legislative compromises have produced genuine ambiguities. But here there is no lack of clarity, no ambiguity. The quota embodied in the collective-bargaining agreement between Kaiser and the Steelworkers unquestionably discriminates on the basis of race against individual employees seeking admission to on-the-job training programs. And, under the plain language of 703 (d), that is “an unlawful employment practice.”

Were Congress to act today specifically to prohibit the type of racial discrimination suffered by Weber, it would be hard pressed to draft language better tailored to the task than that found in § 703 (d) of Title VII....

Equally suited to the task would be § 703 (a) (2), which makes it unlawful for an employer to classify his employees “in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” 78 Stat. 255, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2 (a) (2).

Entirely consistent with these two express prohibitions is the language of § 703 (j) of Title VII, which provides that the Act is not to be interpreted “to require any employer . . . to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race . . . of such individual or group” to correct a racial imbalance in the employer’s work force. 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2 (j). Seizing on the word “require,” the Court infers that Congress must have intended to “permit” this type of racial discrimination....

In an interpretative memorandum submitted jointly to the Senate, Senators Clark and Case took pains to refute the opposition’s charge that Title VII would result in preferential treatment of minorities. Their words were clear and unequivocal:

There is no requirement in title VII that an employer maintain a racial balance in his work force. On the contrary, any deliberate attempt to maintain a racial balance, whatever such a balance may be, would involve a violation of title VII because maintaining such a balance would require an employer to hire or to refuse to hire on the basis of race. It must be emphasized that discrimination is prohibited as to any individual.

Of particular relevance to the instant litigation were their observations regarding seniority rights. As if directing their comments at Brian Weber, the Senators said:

Title VII would have no effect on established seniority rights. Its effect is prospective and not retrospective. Thus, for example, if a business has been discriminating in the past and as a result has an all-white working force, when the title comes into effect the employer’s obligation would be simply to fill future vacancies on a nondiscriminatory basis. He would not be obliged — or indeed permitted — to fire whites in order to hire Negroes, or to prefer Negroes for future vacancies, or, once Negroes are hired, to give them special seniority rights at the expense of the white workers hired earlier. [Emphasis added by Rehnquist]

Thus, with virtual clairvoyance the Senate's leading supporters of Title VII anticipated precisely the circumstances of this case and advised their colleagues that the type of minority preference employed by Kaiser would violate Title VII's ban on racial discrimination.

Those opposed to H. R. 7152 should realize that to hire a Negro solely because he is a Negro is racial discrimination, just as much as a ‘white only’ employment policy. Both forms of discrimination are prohibited by title VII of this bill. The language of that title simply states that race is not a qualification for employment. . . . Some people charge that H. R. 7152 favors the Negro, at the expense of the white majority. But how can the language of equality favor one race or one religion over another? Equality can have only one meaning, and that meaning is self-evident to reasonable men. Those who say that equality means favoritism do violence to common sense.

Recall (or re-read) the language of Section 703 (j) that I quoted above from Justice Rehnquist's dissent. As Rehnquist noted, that provision

was specifically directed at the opposition’s concerns regarding racial balancing and preferential treatment of minorities, providing in pertinent part: “Nothing contained in [Title VII] shall be interpreted to require any employer . . . to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race . . . of such individual or group on account of” a racial imbalance in the employer’s work force.

The Court draws from the language of § 703 (j) primary support for its conclusion that Title VII’s blanket prohibition on racial discrimination in employment does not prohibit preferential treatment of blacks to correct racial imbalance. Alleging that opponents of Title VII had argued (1) that the Act would be interpreted to require employers with racially imbalanced work forces to grant preferential treatment to minorities and (2) that “employers with racially imbalanced work forces would grant preferential treatment to racial minorities, even if not required to do so by the Act,” ante, at 205, the Court concludes that § 703 (j) is responsive only to the opponents’ first objection and that Congress therefore must have intended to permit voluntary, private discrimination against whites in order to correct racial imbalance.

Contrary to the Court’s analysis, the language of § 703 (j) is precisely tailored to the objection voiced time and again by Title VII’s opponents. Not once during the 83 days of debate in the Senate did a speaker, proponent or opponent, suggest that the bill would allow employers voluntarily to prefer racial minorities over white persons.23 In light of Title VII’s [245] prohibition on discrimination “against any individual . . . because of such individual’s race,” § 703 (a), 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2 (a), such a contention would have been, in any event, too preposterous to warrant response...,

Remember this history of what is “required” every time you hear the president say, as he did in his speech to Congress last week, that

nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. (Applause) Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From “Fox News Sunday”:

CHRIS WALLACE (host): Senator McCaskill, do you really believe that that’s possible, that you can take hundreds of billions of dollars out of Medicare without cutting services to seniors?

SEN. CLAIRE MCCASKILL (D-MO.): Well, I don’t know how many ads you’ve seen for scooters on cable TV, but I see a lot of them. Those are scooters paid for by the American people, and a lot of them are going to folks who don’t need scooters.

As I wrote last week:

Here’s a thought. Following the common-sense logic (as well as political wisdom) of controlling our borders before launching current illegals on a path to citizenship, why not start right now imposing all that efficiency and cost-saving on Medicare and Medicaid? All that saved money could then, well, be put in a “lockbox” like the Social Security funds and, once it has grown to a trillion dollars or so it could then be spent on Obama’s ambitious shiny new plan!

Oh, wait....

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Ralph Ellison would be amazed at the new color of invisibility.

In “Diversity Increases at Public Historically Black Colleges,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning:

Public historically black colleges and universities have become increasingly diverse over a 20-year period, according to a new report by the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.

The proportion of Hispanic, Asian, and multi-ethnic students enrolled in the organization’s member institutions jumped from 6 percent of the student population in 1986 to 8 percent in 2006. The total number of nonblack students of color increased by 64 percent. The organization represents 47 public historically black colleges and universities, or HBCU’s.

Also of great interest is how this upsurge of new “diversity” was achieved.

The increase isn’t a result of any specific initiatives to diversify the colleges, said Dwayne Ashley, president and chief executive of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. “Our goal is to enroll students who want to get a great education.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Something remarkable almost happened yesterday: I found myself agreeing, at least for a moment, both with the underlying vision and actual policy proposed in a speech by President Obama.

I happened to be walking by a TV report of his speech and thought I heard him say

We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis ... cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences....

We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses. Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences, and expect that next time, American taxpayers will be there to break their fall.

So much for the policy. But there was also an underlying regulatory vision. The president stated that he would be calling on Congress to implement “the most ambitious overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the Great Depression.”

As it happens, I agree with much of this vision. I think the only thing wrong with its aim is the target. What we need is for the Congress to step up and regulate its own and the administration’s “reckless behavior and unchecked excess.”

And to get that we’ll need a new Congress.

ADDENDUM

It may be worth noting that perhaps Obama’s teleprompter was malfunctioning on Wall Street, since he stated that his White House has

worked closely with leaders in the Senate and the House, including not only Barney [Frank], but also Senators Chris Dodd and Richard Shelby, and Barney is already working with his counterpart, Sheldon [sic] Bachus. And we intend to pass regulatory reform through Congress.

We’re in good hands....

ADDENDUM II

On the other hand, maybe the president’s teleprompter misspoke the first name of Rep. Spencer Bachus (R, Ala), the Ranking Member on the House Financial Services Committee, relieving the transcriber/web site poster of any responsibility for the gaffe.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

About a week ago I posted a link to Roger Clegg’s Excellent Letter .... Now he’s gone and written another one,
and once again some “obviously sleeping” mainstream media editor let it slip by.

Don’t let it go to waste; read it.

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In an Associated Press article worrying over “Election trouble brewing for House Dems in 2010,” reporter Beth Fouhy points to

the likelihood of a highly motivated GOP base confused by the president's proposed health care plan and angry at what they consider reckless spending and high debt.

Does anyone, of whatever partisan persuasion, not think the debt is high and getting higher? No? Then her “what they consider” (emphasis added) high debt is a purely partisan put-down.

But Fouhy’s most extreme partisan bias is revealed by her charge that the “highly motivated GOP base” is “confused by the president’s proposed health care plan.” (Emphasis added)

First, what plan? I thought the details were still being worked out. But the real offense here is the charge, with no evidence provided, that the GOP base is “confused” about Obamacare. That is a defensible statement only if one is willing to assert openly what is assumed here: that the “facts” of the plan (again, what plan?) are as described by the president, so that anyone who disagrees with his various descriptions — that the plan will be deficit neutral; that everyone who wants to will be able to keep their current insurance; that there will no service cuts to Medicare; that there will be no rationing of services; that no illegal immigrants will be served — is “confused,” because the presidents assertions are all factually accurate.

If AP reporters and editors really believe that, why “report” at all? Why not just regurgitate Democratic talking points?

Oh, wait....

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HAMMOND [Indiana]| The leader of the Washington, D.C.-based National Black Chamber of Commerce on Friday issued a rallying cry for minority-owned business to take to the streets and shut down big cities if necessary to get their slice of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus funds.

Harry Alford was keynote speaker at the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus symposium at Purdue University Calumet....

Alford said American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus funds should be administered according to Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which established affirmative action for minorities. Federal agencies, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, also are mandated by law to give 30 percent of all jobs available to those in poverty.

Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., was enacted as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. As President John F. Kennedy said in 1963:

Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races [colors, and national origins] contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial [color or national origin] discrimination.

No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

This is something to fight for. We have to go to war, train soldiers. We’ll do the ugly stuff in the streets. We need our legislators to do their work in the Legislature.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

... Why is the White House providing what MSNBC cutely calls “clarification” of its position on health care for illegal immigrants? (“Clarification,” for those of you whose Washington-speak vocabulary is weak, means abandoning one’s previous position.)

As reported by MSNBC last night, here are the points of the White House’s new “clarification”:

•Undocumented immigrants would not be able to buy private insurance on the exchange. Those who are lawfully present in this country would be able to participate.

•Undocumented immigrants would be able to buy insurance in the non-exchange private market, just as they do today. That market will shrink as the exchange takes hold, but it will still exist and will be subject to reforms such as the bans on pre-existing conditions and caps.

•Verification will be required when purchasing health insurance on the exchange. One option is the SAVE program (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) which states currently use to make sure that undocumented immigrants don't participate in safety-net programs for which they are ineligible.

•There would be no change in the law that requires emergency rooms to treat people who need emergency care, including undocumented immigrants. There is already a federal grant program that compensates states for emergency room costs associated with treatment of undocumented immigrants, a provision sponsored by a Republican lawmaker.

Finally, you’d think that even MSNBC might think it relevant to mention that Democratic majorities on two House committees voted down amendments to require just this sort of SAVE program verification.

On second thought, no, you wouldn’t.

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Yesterday the Chicago Tribune ran an article under this headline: New U. of I. board eliminates preferential admissions.

The assertion in the headline is, of course, not true. What the new board eliminated was only the preferential admission of friends of politicians and other well-connected people, as discussed here and here.

Preferential admissions of favored racial and ethnic groups remains alive and thriving at the University of Illinois (“College admissions should be race-conscious,” said then University Chancellor Nancy Cantor).

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Those of you who follow these things (and most of you must, or you wouldn’t be here) will have noticed the appearance of a new book by former Princeton president William Bowen, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities ... and that, despite the attention it’s been receiving, I haven’t discussed it.

I’m still not going to discuss it here in any depth, but I will point to some who have. See here and here in the New York Times for the predictable celebration; here and here in the higher education press; here for some criticism, as well as the comments by Roger Clegg and Jane Yakowitz (and several others) to the Inside Higher Ed article linked above.

The book tracks graduation rates from 21 public “flagship” universities, though of three different levels of selectivity. Some of its evidence is quite interesting — for example, that students with the highest probability by far of graduating were those who had the foresight to be born as girls with Asian parents (my, not Bowen’s, characterization).

Perhaps the most controversial argument of the book is its determined effort to refute Richard Sander’s “mismatch” theory, as summarized by Inside Higher Ed:

The large gaps in graduation rates, especially for black men, are an issue of great concern to the authors. And they note that some might look at these figures and see evidence for the “mismatch” theory that is popular with many critics of affirmative action. That theory holds that students from various minority groups are not well served by being admitted to highly competitive colleges with grades and test scores that are lower than those of other admitted applicants. These students -- as evidenced by lower graduation rates -- don’t experience academic success as they might at less competitive institutions, the theory holds.

The new book argues that it has conclusive evidence to debunk mismatch theory. The authors used data from their database to compare black men with high school grade-point averages below 3.0 who enrolled in the most selective flagships and those who enrolled in less selective flagships and the least selective flagships. What the authors found was that these students -- who mismatch theory would suggest would do better at less competitive institutions -- actually are most likely to graduate at more competitive flagships. The graduation rate for this cohort of black males at the three selectivity levels of flagships is (starting from the most selective), 46 percent, 40 percent, and 38 percent. So these black males benefit significantly from being at the more competitive institutions.

the book treats “black men with high school grade-point averages below 3.0” as fungible — that is, that the students meeting this description who go to the more selective schools are no more academically promising than those who go to the less and least selective schools. That’s very dubious: I would think that, ceteris paribus, the students who got into and chose to go to the more selective schools had something to suggest that they were more likely to succeed academically than those who did not go there.

There is, however, an even more fundamental problem with Bowen’s data, and that is that the Mellon Foundation, which controls the database on which Bowen’s conclusions are based, will not allow access to other scholars to see if they can replicate his analysis. Similarly, with his controversial book on affirmative action, The Shape of The River (subjected to a devastating review by Stephan Thernstrom that can be found here, discussed in part here), only scholars trusted by Bowen were allowed access to the underlying data.

I doubt that Richard Sander will be allowed to examine the data, but I am confident that he will have something to say about Crossing the Finish Line anyway. Look for it.

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Jonah Goldberg calls attention to new Rasmussen findings on the declining popularity of the terms “liberal” and “progressive” with American voters:

“Progressive” is becoming more of a dirty word, but all political labels – except “being like Ronald Reagan” - are falling into disfavor with many U.S. voters, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
“Liberal” is still the worst and remains the only political description that is viewed more negatively than positively. Being like Reagan is still the most positive thing you can say about a candidate.

Just 15% of voters say they view the description of a candidate as politically liberal as positive, down four points from last November. Forty-one percent (41%) see it as a negative description, up five points form the earlier survey, while 42% say it’s somewhere in between.

Aware of their low ideological ratings, political liberals have shifted in recent times to calling themselves progressives, but that name, too, has begun to lose its luster. Thirty-two percent (32%) now consider it a positive to describe a candidate as politically progressive, but that’s down from 40% just after the last election. Twenty-seven percent (27%) see it as negative label, up from 16%, and 36% put it somewhere in between the two.

I have a bit of personal experience in these ongoing word wars. I once had an odd job (in several respects) working on a revision of the Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors, a companion to the Education Resources Information Center (a part of the National Institute of Education) database of educational literature. This was back when political correctness was just getting launched in a big way, and indeed one of the reasons for that particular revision of the Thesaurus was to dump newly politically incorrect terms such as “handicapped” for their politically correct replacements, such as “disabled.”

I had, and still have, serious problems with this effort to police the language, and, in fact, the transition from “handicapped” to “disabled” nicely reveals one of them, the ignoring of plain meaning.

If you were lost, driving alone in an old car on an isolated mountain road late at night, would you rather be in a car that was handicapped or disabled? (The Oxford American Dictionary that’s built into my Powerbook’s operating system says of handicapped that it means “having a condition that markedly restricts one's ability to function.” The verb “disable,” by contrast, means “put out of action,” and its thesaurus entry refers to “incapacitated,” “paralyzed,” “immobilized,” etc.)

What is producing all of these verbal transitions, I think, is that the group to whom the term refers is “disadvantaged” in some way (whether actually in bad shape or only perceived that way doesn’t matter here), so that the term that applies to it takes on the same negative connotations. The new, substitute term reflects a determination to improve the image of the group, but over time it, too, comes to reflect the little-changed reputation of its referent. So it must be changed again ... and again....

Liberals, even by another name, are, alas, still liberals.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:11 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The last two Democratic administrations, Obama’s and Clinton’s, have a similar interesting embarrassment in common: both appointed or attempted to appoint intelligent, articulate, very highly regarded black graduates of an elite Ivy League law school, Yale, and both had to be thrown under the bus after their radical views came under scrutiny.

Actually, Lani Guinier’s views were well inside the mainstream of elite legal academia, as Bill and Hillary Clinton clearly knew when they nominated her, just as Van Jones’s views are so commonplace on the left that he is still being defended by influential Democrats like Howard Dean, and he is now sitting in an office at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank run by Obama transition chief John Podesta. But this post is not about Democrats abandoning their good friends when the heat’s turned up, even though Obama, as a serial thrower of old friends and grandmothers under the bus, makes that tempting.

What I want to do instead is suggest that you pause to consider the counterfactual possibility that if he had not run for president Barack Obama himself, whose own record and identity so closely fits the profile of both Lani Guinier and Van Jones, might not have survived appointment in a more traditional Democratic administration. (For my hypothetical I might even allow him to have been elected to the Senate, since all he did in his two years there was plot his presidential run and write the second volume of his pre-presidential autobiography.)

What if, for example, a President Biden (remember, this is a counterfactual hypothetical, after all) had nominated the young Senator (or perhaps still Illinois state senator) to be the new, say, Secretary of Education or, shades of Guinier, head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department (even Biden would not have regarded Obama as qualified to be Attorney General).

At some point, either before or after Obama assumed his new position, someone in the mainstream media would have noticed all the unfettered radicalism of Obama’s career to date — his twenty-year association with the racist, America-bashing Rev. Wright, his years of work with Weatherman Bill Ayers radicalizing the Chicago schools and funneling money, through his work on the Woods Foundation, to ACORN and other radical groups, his work favoring extreme version of race preferences while a state senator and his successful efforts to block protection for young (very young) survivors of botched abortions, even though an identical federal law had passed the Senate unanimously. Indeed, the charge that he enabled infanticide was probably less hyperbolic than the current “death panel” accusations.

I’m assuming here that his attempt to lie his way out of that vote would have have been less successful than it was during his actual presidential campaign.

In short, if anyone in the mainstream media had bothered to read the revelations about the young man named to be the new Sec. of Education or head of the Civil Rights Division aired by Sean Hannity or compiled, chapter and verse, by the diligent research of Stanley Kurtz, the fate of this radical, mysterious, bright, articulate (even “articulate and bright and clean and ... nice-looking”) black Ivy League law school graduate might well have met the same fate as the eerily similar Guinier and Jones.

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I have no reason to suspect that Rep. Joe Wilson, the loudmouthed heckler from South Carolina, is on the payroll of the Democrats, but if he is he’d have done just what he did last night.

The Dems and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) are already milking Wilson for all he’s worth to confirm what I’ve described, here and here, as the new Conventional Wisdom that Obama critics are all so rabidly unreasonable that none of us need be listened to, justifying Obama in moving ahead with a health care reform based only on Democratic votes. As Michael Scherer has just written in Time,

At the moment Wilson exploded, the outburst seemed like an assault on the President. Soon afterwards, it was clear that it had been a gift. Wilson had, in an emotional expression, proven Obama's point: the summer of town halls had been less a discussion than a circus, a forum where misinformation was vindicated by passion, where disrespect was elevated as a virtue. Now the circus had come inside Congress.

I would have noted that Googling “Bush lied” today yielded 214,000 hits earlier this morning, but it would probably be more now. True, many of these were objecting to the characterization, but even they prove my point. Take, for example, Fred Hiatt’s argument in the Washington Post in June 2008:

Search the Internet for “Bush Lied” products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic “Bush Lied, People Died” bumper sticker is only the beginning.

I would have said all that, and more, if I had followed my original plan, but I don’t need to do that since others have already done it so well (brief roundup here).

The lack of civility is a two-way street, but, as usual, the purveyors of Conventional Wisdom look only one way before attempting to cross. That’s why they routinely get run over.

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There is a new Conventional Wisdom hardening the already hard intellectual arteries of the mainstream media, and it is revealed, nicely if unwittingly, by the John F. Harris & Jonathan Martin Politico article today.

They begin:

This summer marked the fifth anniversary of the Democratic Party’s swoon for Barack Obama, who thrilled millions of people hearing the young state senator for the first time with words that set his image as a dazzling unifier in an age of mean and divisive politics:

“Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. “Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America.”

Five years later — amid declining approval ratings and an increasingly polarized debate over health care — President Obama is losing his argument. Far from taming the forces of accusation, personal malice and ideological fervor, Obama and his signature health care agenda this summer became their target — and at least partly their victim.

What’s more, as he prepares to address Congress in a nationally televised speech Wednesday, one of the main pillars of Obama’s reputation — that his gift for healing words would combine with the power of his biography to transcend the rancor of modern politics — has never looked more wobbly.

Harris and Martin begin their explanation by pointing to the clever use by the “right wing” of new Internet-based communication technologies, quoting “longtime Democratic pollster Paul Maslin.”

Maslin, who resides in Madison, Wis., said he’s seen the power of the right wing even in his liberal college town, where there have been conservative tea parties to rail against Obama’s plans to increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for his expansive agenda.

“They’re not the majority, but they’re vocal,” Maslin said. “And they’ve used guerrilla tactics to dominate the debate.”

what’s been lost in the furor — perhaps irretrievably — is the idea that Obama might represent a transformational brand of politics of the sort he envisioned five years ago in Boston.

... Obama is learning that its most ardent foes are in some ways impervious to the usual tools at a president’s disposal — not susceptible to persuasion or reasoned argument and only too happy for the attention that comes from being attacked head-on.

an August Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that showed half or more of those surveyed believed health care reform would offer benefits for illegal immigrants and use taxpayer dollars for abortions, and even 45 percent thought the government would make decisions about when to stop paying for care for the elderly.

In short, the message of this article is that Obama no longer “represent[s] a transformational brand of politics” not because of anything he’s done in office but because he’s been attacked by radical, irrational, right-wingers impervious to reasoned argument, presumably the sort of argument that’s been offered by Obama and the Democrats. What they’re saying, in effect, is that the Obamacare critics, i.e., the Town-Hallers, the Tea Partyers, and the Republican Party, have not been engaging in debate but have in fact exercised a heckler’s veto against reasoned free speech.

Even when something like the above is pointed out, they still don’t get it. Thus they quote the ever perceptive Mary Matalin — “Obama ... is “getting through loud and clear, it’s just that the dogs won’t eat the dog food” — but then respond: “But it also may be that a potent opposition is getting through louder and more clearly.” They thus lay full responsibility for the rancor and divisiveness of our current overheated partisan politics exclusively at the feet (or in the mouths) of Obama’s critics.

Earlier I argued in passing that our current bitter divisiveness is probably greater than at any time since our actual shooting civil war of 1861 –1865. And in fact the emerging Conventional Wisdom on who is responsible for our current unpleasantness is strikingly reminiscent of the historiographical debate on the causes of the Civil War. Consider: it was established wisdom in the historical profession for a generation or so that the abolitionists bore primary responsibility for the coming of war because of their extreme, sometimes fanatical (think John Brown) opposition to slavery, preventing cooler and more rational moderates from avoiding war through compromise, etc.

Those historians were displaced in the 1960s and beyond by a new generation of historians who turned that argument on its head, arguing instead that the institution of slavery itself was the primary cause of the war, in large part because heated and even violent opposition to it was reasonable, moral, and in fact inevitable. Or take an analogous question: was The War caused by the South’s secession or by the North’s refusal to allow a peaceful secession?

“What caused the Civil War?” thus turns out to be not really a question of fact at all. It requires a judgment over how people should have reacted to the conditions and circumstances they faced. To argue that the abolitionists bear heavy responsibility is to assume that their response to slavery was somehow “over the top,” in today’s language, that they should have stayed away from their equivalents of our town halls.

You will have guessed by now where I’m (or where I’ve already arrived) with my Civil War analogy. We’re facing something like a civil war now — although for the moment it’s only political and ideological — and when journalists, talking heads, and pontificators at large place all the blame on the unreasonable mobs reacting to Obamacare, Obama debt, Obama deficits, etc., all they are doing is revealing their own Obamian sympathies. Whether they admit it or not, what they’re really saying is that the policies and programs Obama has introduced bear none of the responsibility for the nature of the opposition they’ve provoked, that if Obama’s critics were “susceptible to persuasion or reasoned argument” they wouldn’t be so critical.

As it happens, there are a lot of us dogs who won’t eat that dog food.

Now, lest you think the above is simply an exercise in historical analogizing for fun, let me close by noting that my analysis here is grounded — indeed, provoked — by my view of what Obama was up to in his Joint Session Health Care speech. As I argued here, I think Obama intendes to ride to a version of the Harris & Martin Conventional Wisdom for all its worth, insisting that his critics can’t be reasoned with and so he must ram through a purely Democratic bill. Others seem to have the same (Karl Rove: “[Obama’s] false charges do not reveal a spirit of bipartisanship nor do they create a foundation for dialogue. It is more like what you’d say if you are planning to jam through a bill without compromise. Which is exactly what Mr. Obama is about to attempt idea (Fred Barnes: “he's decided to push a partisan bill through Congress with Democratic votes alone”).

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:48 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of excerpts from The Speech

... we’ve estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system – a system that is currently full of waste and abuse....

Now, because Medicare is such a big part of the health care system, making the program more efficient can help usher in changes in the way we deliver health care that can reduce costs for everybody....

Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan....

Oh, wait....

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Since I don’t know what Obama was trying to do in his speech tonight (rally his base? persuade the unpersuaded?), I obviously have no idea whether or not it will succeed. But I do nevertheless have one observation:

If he did intend to give a partisan speech that was sure to insult, anger, and energize those who oppose his approach, so that he could then point to us and say, “See, these right wingers are so negative you can’t reason with them and so we’ll just have to pass a bill with only Democratic support,” he would have given exactly the speech he did.

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I haven’t said anything about Obama’s controversial talk to school kids today because of a bad case of one-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handism — on the one hand, I’ve been less bothered by it than most of those who are bothered, but on the other I was more bothered by his invitation to the students to write letters describing how they could help him — him! — in his mighty tasks (an invitation subsequently withdrawn) than were those people who were not bothered.

But the president’s disappointing failure to follow Mickey Kaus’s sage advice put an end to my handy silence. Yesterday Mickey quoted a paragraph from what was then a draft of the upcoming speech on which he gagged, with the gag-inducing phrases in bold:

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it. [Gag-phrases boldfaced.]

Those are all the people who are trying to help — families, teachers, and Barack Hussein Obama? He’s “working hard to fix up” classrooms? I hope not! He has two wars and a health care bill to worry about, and a whole lot of other politicians and bureaucrats whose job it is to refurbish up school facilities. Is he Superman? Obama’s willingness to cut out all the other players does suggest an unnattractive solipsism and egotism at best and ... a troublesome cult-building instinct well, let’s just leave it at that.

Here’s the thing. It’s not too late to fix this graf! Obama hasn’t actually delivered the speech yet. A little last-minute pencil editing and his critics won’t have a whole lot to work with. Start by replacing every use of the word “I”

.... So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do.

I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down — don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

On the other hand, Obama couldn’t possibly have followed Mickey’s advice to replace “every use of the word ‘I.’” If he had, as you can easily see from the passage quoted above, the printed version would have looked like swiss cheese, i.e., like all those documents the government used to release under FOIA with the juicy parts “redacted,” leaving gaps of white space. In the speech’s 43 short paragraphs the word “I” occurs, by my (and my word processor’s) count, 68 times. (Well, 69, but one time the president was quoting Michael Jordan.)

This may have ostensibly been a speech to students, but, like all Obama’s speeches, it was really a speech about the one transcendent subject Obama cares about above all others: I, Obama.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

... slipped by obviously sleeping New York Times editors and (and this vacationing blogger, until today) and appeared on Sept. 4. If it slipped by you, too, you should read it now.

For background and more depth, see this post of his on NRO last week (and for another bite of the same apple, this one from a less distinguished source).

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:59 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Diversity Calendar: Sept. 7

The Rhode Island Affirmative Action Professionals is looking for people to join in a meeting to talk about creative ways to recruit people of color for jobs in the public and private sectors.

The meeting is at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 10, at East Providence City Hall, 145 Taunton Ave.

1. Is it legal for a city government to allow its facilities to be used by an organization whose purpose is to promote race-based hiring?

2. RIAAP says that its membership

is open to all persons interested in affirmative action, equal employment opportunity and related professions, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

How odd.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:50 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s been so much written about the past, present, and passing of Van Jones that I hesitate to add to it, but I think this is, as someone else said recently in a different context, a “teachable moment,” and the lesson needs to be drummed home. That lesson is what today’s left looks like, and it’s not a pretty picture.

First, in their own words:

• Here is Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.

  Now [Van Jones has] been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35% of all Democrats believed as of 2007 — that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11. Well, that and calling Republicans “assholes.” I’m pretty sure that if you search through the histories of every single liberal leader at the CAF dinner that night, they have publicly said that and worse.

  Perhaps even Hamsher is too timid to describe the truther petition accurately, for, as Mickey Kaus points out, what it actually suggested is not simply that Bush knew in advance but that Bush “"may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” From the sound of them at the time and later, you’d think that more than 35% of the Democrats thought that.

• And here is the always entertaining David Sirota, writing on Huffington Post, complaining about the “White House’s pathetic behavior” in forcing the saintly Jones out.
  

  First and foremost, Jones was one of the only movement progressives in a policymaking position in the Obama White House. By that I mean, he was one of the only people in the White House who came out of grassroots movement work and not just political/partisan hack work, and one of the only movement progressives put in a policymaking job, and not ghettoized into a political/tactical job....

  Second, Jones being forced out will not mollify the racists, crazies, tea baggers, Republican congresspeople and other assorted conservative freakshows - it will only embolden them. When lynch mobs in the Old South lynched someone, when a witchhunting band caught a target in Salem, when HUAC “proved” the supposed communism of its victims, that didn’t calm them down - it only intensified their bloodlust because it made them believe they could be even more successful in the future. So if the White House’s political “gurus” believe booting Jones was the safe and prudent way to mitigate right-wing hatred, then they are as short-sighted and stupid as they’ve proven themselves to be in mismanaging the summer’s health care debate. Seriously, folks - if you think you can appease or mollify someone who takes to the public airwaves and does this [linking a YouTube of Glenn Beck], then you are as crazy as that screaming lunatic is.

  Finally, the Jones announcement will inevitably create a chilling effect on the aspirations of other movement progressives. Van is a fantastic person who has done fantastic work. He’s kept his advocacy real and didn’t compromise his principles....
  

  So, Van Jones is a good “movement progressive” who has been sacrificed by a craven White House to the screaming lunatics, crazies, and racists on the right. Wait, did I just say he said racists? Yes, I did:
  

  By the way, that message is especially true for African American movement activists, because let’s just be honest - the fact that the right chose to mount a hysteria campaign specifically around an African American, Jones, was no coincidence. The right didn’t just randomly pick some mid-level guy working on noncontroversial issues (green jobs) - they were specifically looking for a black guy with movement politics in his background....
  

“As we’ve seen before, succumbing to these types of propaganda attacks from the right wing only emboldens the aggressors. This controversy will go away and they will trump up another one tomorrow,” said David Brock, founder and chairman of Media Matters for America, a group that has taken on conservative commentators. “No good comes from appeasing a lunatic bully like Glenn Beck.”

“If Jones left under pressure from the Obama administration then we are in for a very long and painful four years,” said Melissa Harris Lacewell, a political science professor at Princeton University. “I would hate to think that Glenn Beck can simply shout down any member of the administration he chooses to target.”

he signed a 2004 petition supporting the so-called “9/11 truther” movement; that he was a self-professed communist during much of the 1990s; that he supported the cop-killer Mumia abu-Jamal; that in 2008 he accused “white polluters” of “steering poison into the people of color communities”; and that earlier this year, speaking to a friendly crowd in Berkeley, Calif., he called Republicans “a--holes.”

There is no more mystery about Van Jones. He was a passionate defender of cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, a self-satisfied and described “Communist,” a supporter of the destruction of the Jewish state, and a promoter of the theory that the Katrina tragedy was a white racist plot, and so forth. That’s okay with Democratic chairman Howard Dean, and Obama’s Environmental Quality Council head Nancy Sutley. (See Ron Radosh’s current blog for chapter and verse, and also the many blogs on Jones at our own www.newsrealblog.com.) This should surprise no one. The recent heads of the black caucus in the House — part of the 120 member “progressive caucus” — have all been Castro-loving racists — Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee to name two off the top of my head. Diane Watson is probably next. The Democratic Party today is a “popular front” organization (to pluck an appropriate term from the 1930s when liberals and Stalinists lined up together as well). There are no scoundrels, America haters, racists — that Democrats won’t assimlate. One of the more obnoxious racists and crooks in public life — Charlie Rangel — is still chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee because Nancy Pelosi can’t remove him so strong is his support in her party.

And if you don’t believe how far left the Democrats have lurched when I say it, here’s authentification from Alan Colmes who, after ignoring all the evidence about who Van Jones actually is and what he believes, and pretending that it’s all a Glenn Beck-World Net Daily-Horowitz plot, concludes “Van Jones is a mainstream liberal.” That’s exactly right Alan. And that’s exactly the problem.

The Wall Street Journal has just said pretty much the same thing. After describing Jones’s closeness with a number of Democratic luminaries (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., John Podesta, Valerie Jarrett), the Journal editorial argues, persuasively that

[t]he ascent of Mr. Jones within the liberal intelligentsia shows how much the Democratic Party has moved left since its “New Democrat” triangulation of the Clinton years....

Our guess is that Mr. Jones landed in the White House precisely because his job didn’t require Senate confirmation, which would have subjected him to more scrutiny. This is also no doubt a reason that Mr. Obama has consolidated so much of his Administration’s governing authority inside the White House under various “czars.” Mr. Jones was poised to play a prominent role in disbursing tens of billions of dollars of stimulus money. It was the ideal perch from which he could keep funding the left-wing networks from which he sprang, this time with taxpayer money.

This helps explain why the political left is so upset about Mr. Jones’s resignation....

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

According to this long research-reporting article in Newsweek, even babies discriminate (HatTip to reader Hube).

I don’t have a strong enough grounding in psychological social science research to have anything worthwhile to say about the research fondly reported here, which for all I know may be penetrating and profound — but if it is it will be in spite of the pervasive politically correct contemporary liberal bias that drips from the Newsweek article.

A few (but only a few) examples:

• “[S]omething interesting happened” — at least it shocked the researcher — when liberal parents in liberal, diverse, multicultural Austin, Tex., were asked as part of one project to discuss race with their 5 –7 year old children.
  

  Five families in the last group abruptly quit the study. Two directly told Vittrup, “We don’t want to have these conversations with our child. We don’t want to point out skin color.”

  [Birgitte] Vittrup [the researcher] was taken aback — these families volunteered knowing full well it was a study of children’s racial attitudes. Yet once they were aware that the study required talking openly about race, they started dropping out.

  It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to Vittrup’s entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles — like “Everybody’s equal” or “God made all of us” or “Under the skin, we’re all the same” — but they’d almost never called attention to racial differences....

  They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup’s first test of the kids revealed they weren’t colorblind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered, “Almost none.” Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered, “Some,” or “A lot.” Even kids who attended diverse schools answered the questions this way.
  

  Imagine that! Liberal parents being reluctant to discuss racial differences with young children because they wanted the kids to grow up colorblind! Could it be that that these young kids didn’t know many blacks; that in fact most of the whites they did know were nice; and that “some” or “a lot” of the black kids they had met in their “diverse schools” weren’t?

• Then there was something Vittrup found even “more disturbing”:
  

  Vittrup also asked all the kids a very blunt question: “Do your parents like black people?” Fourteen percent said outright, “No, my parents don’t like black people”; 38 percent of the kids answered, “I don’t know.” In this supposed race-free vacuum being created by parents, kids were left to improvise their own conclusions — many of which would be abhorrent to their parents.
  

  Now wait a minute. Why should anyone, even a social science researcher, find it especially “disturbing” that children raised by parents who try hard to raise colorblind children, who go out of their way to avoid talking about racial identity, not know whether their parents “like black people”? They might not even know whether their parents know any black people, or which of the people their parents do know are black.

• Vittrup’s mentor at the University of Texas, Rebecca Bigler, “think[s] it's important to talk to children about race as early as the age of 3.”
  

  Her reasoning is that kids are developmentally prone to in-group favoritism; they’re going to form these preferences on their own. Children naturally try to categorize everything, and the attribute they rely on is that which is the most clearly visible.

  We might imagine we’re creating color-blind environments for children, but differences in skin color or hair or weight are like differences in gender—they’re plainly visible. Even if no teacher or parent mentions race, kids will use skin color on their own, the same way they use T-shirt colors. Bigler contends that children extend their shared appearances much further — believing that those who look similar to them enjoy the same things they do. Anything a child doesn’t like thus belongs to those who look the least similar to him.
  

[o]f all those [she] told to talk openly about interracial friendship, only six families managed to actually do so. And, for all six, their children dramatically improved their racial attitudes in a single week. Talking about race was clearly key.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Say What? (5) | TrackBacks (0)

The doubt I have about whether Congressmen are even capable of having conflicts of interest was reinforced by Instapundit’s link today to this New York Post editorial about Rep. Charlie Rangel’s gifts to three members of the House Ethics Committee, which will eventually judge his tax and reporting evasions.

One member of the panel, Peter Welch of Vermont, wisely decided to return his $20,000 gift from Rangel, citing the need for “an abundance of caution.”

But the other two — Ben Chandler of Kentucky and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina — are holding on to Rangel’s largesse, claiming it in no way interferes with their ability to sit in judgment on their benefactor.

Because to be a conflict of interest there have to be two (or more) actual interests in conflict, and Congressmen for the most part have only one interest: getting re-elected.

That said, these two guys — one (Chandler) a Blue Dog and one (Butterfield) a member of the Congressional Black Caucus — are real pieces of work. Chandler, for example, laments the influence of money in politics and supports campaign finance reform because

Americans have lost confidence in their political system.... They believe that our current system for financing campaigns gives disproportionate power to wealthy individuals and groups and exerts too much influence over legislative and regulatory outcomes.

Even more striking is the case of Rep. Butterfield, a former North Carolina Superior Court and Supreme Court judge. He once voted, for example, for a measure that

[p]rohibits members of the House from participating in events that honor them at the presidential nominating convention for the party in which they belong if the event is directly paid for by a registered lobbyist....

When Butterfield was appointed to the ethics committee, the News and Observer interviewed him and reported:

“I know that an investigation can destroy someone’s career, so I know how to handle myself,” he said.

The committee, made up of five Democrats and five Republicans, looks into allegations of violations of the House’s ethics rules, such as accepting improper gifts or failing to disclose a conflict of interest.

Unlike his time in Superior Court, Butterfield will act a both judge and juror on the committee, helping investigate and making a decision. The process is also more confidential than a regular trial.

Butterfield said that the position means he’ll have to be circumspect with his colleagues.

“It’s a solemn responsibility,” he said. “My interaction with other members has got to be appropriate.”

But let’s give the final word to Butterfield’s spokesman, who insisted a bit too loudly but still ambiguously, I think, that “[h]is integrity is not for sale, and certainly not [for] $5,000.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

... that the mainstream media will never ask:

1. Mr. Gibbs, is Van Jones the only communist the president has appointed to an influential position, or are there others?

2. Mr. Gibbs, was the president familiar with Van Jones’s racist, radical past when he appointed him green jobs czar? If not, has he appointed any other czars with whose record he is equally unfamiliar?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Helene and I went to San Francisco’s de Young Museum today for the the King Tut exhibit, and while there we picked up this San Francisco Examiner supplement about the exhibit. Imagine my surprise when, browsing through it, I saw this ad for the San Francisco Housing Development Authority’s effort to recruit blacks for assisted housing. (Click on the link, go the last page, hit “previous page until you get to p. 22, then click on the page to zoom in to the ad in the upper right corner.)

As you’ll see, the ad states that in 1979 blacks were 12.4% of San Francisco’s population but by 2005 their percentage had dropped to 6.5%. And in 2010: “?” Urging “RETURN,” the ad invites readers (or at least black readers) to:

Find out how you can reverse the migration of Blacks from San Francisco. Enjoy the city all the time call our Housing Counseling Team 415.822.1022.

SFHDC goal is to target the “Cert Holders” and educate them about their housing benefits, and help them become mortgage and credit ready so they may take advantage of new affordable housing and rental opportunities currently down the pipeline in Bayview Hunters Point and throughout San Francisco....

Preventing the out-migration of African Americans and other minorities from the city of San Francisco is an important priority for SFHDC. We believe by identifying and counseling Certificate of Preference holders, SFHDC can help hundreds of homebuyers maintain their residency in the city or migrate back to the area. SFHDC views the Certificate of Preference as an invitation for African Americans to move back to the city, and a strategy to slow down the city’s gentrification process.

The City has a growing concern about the out-migration of African Americans from San Francisco. Prior to the Redevelopment of the Fillmore district of the 1960’s, San Francisco once had a population of 100,000 Blacks primarily living in the Fillmore and Bayview Hunters Point. The Fillmore was a thriving Mecca of Black culture and life-style, and minority business-owners, artists, and homeowners. Today, the African American population has been nearly whipped out in San Francisco. Sixty percent of the total Black population has migrated to Oakland, Contra Costa County or out of state, with 40,000 remaining in the city.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Black Caucus has warned President Obama that he better express his “unwavering support” for progressive health care reform in his upcoming speech. According to Politico’s report, the letter from CBC chair Barbara Lee stated

[W]e are deeply concerned about the current discussions surrounding health care reform and the possibility that current components of the bill – such as a robust public option and myriad health disparity elimination provisions – may be stricken in order to lower its cost to about $500 billion.

Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
Although health disparities have been documented in many populations and communities (i.e., gender, age, ethnicity and race, education, income, social class, disability, geographic location, or sexual orientation), The Health Trust has chosen to focus particularly on reducing racial and ethnic health disparities. Without dismissing the importance of addressing the social, economic and institutional factors that trigger health disparities in all population groups, The Health Trust recognizes that because of the intersection of race and class in the US, people of color are disproportionately impacted by the multiple root causes of health disparities....

Root Causes of Health Disparities
An important feature of health disparities as it is defined in the context of health equity and social justice is that these differences in health that certain populations experience are due to factors beyond individual control. The root causes of health disparities are systemic, institutionalized, and many decades or even centuries in the making. The relationships among the root causes of health disparities are multi-directional and cyclical, exacerbating one another and calling for intervention at every level.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

As I’ve mentioned, my wife, Helene, and I are house-sitting in San Francisco, a wonderful, quirky city but also home pond to Nancy Pelosi and other odd ducks. Following are a few random sightings and quotes that provide a small whiff of the atmosphere here, such as the fact that there are so many Priuses here with Obama bumper stickers that I now suspect that all the cars Toyota shipped to San Francisco last year came with the Obama stickers built into the bumpers at the factory.

When we first saw the following poster in a window we thought it must have been home-made, but subsequent sightings, and this site, reveal that it is in fact mass-produced, presumably with an audience of purchasers. [UPDATE: This link has been corrected. It should have pointed, as it does now, to a site with many Obey Obama posters.]

I think this poster speaks for itself, and it says volumes about the mentality of many of the most fervent Obamaphiles.

Riding on a MUNI bus one day (Helene likes to ride the buses so she can tune up her Spanish) we picked up a copy of the San Francisco Bay Guardian someone had left behind, perhaps the only paper in the land that can make the San Francisco Chronicle seem almost sane. On page 13 of the Sept. 2 – 8, 2009, issue there is a large announcement of High Holiday Services at the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls featuring Rabbi Michael Lerner and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker. (This announcement is not available in the Guardian online, but almost the same thing is online here.) I was struck by the caption under Alice Walker’s picture in the Guardian, which stated that she would speak “about how Oppressed People can Become Oppressors.” I didn’t realize, I thought at first to myself, that Alice Walker had become a critic of racial quotas, etc., but then, after reading the announcement, realized she was talking about the Jews. Silly me.

And, moving on, there’s this treat, which may be especially useful for those of you who’ve wondered why it is that Nancy Pelosi so often seems to be stumbling around in the dark:

Opaque – dining in the dark
A Journey for the Senses
689 McAllister St., San Francisco CA 94102

Tel.1.888.310.8321

Imagine a San Francisco dining experience like no other. In a pitch-black dining room, each flavor and texture greets enthusiastic senses hungry for an awareness once brought by sight. This is Opaque, San Francisco’s first dark dining restaurant.

A brilliant experimental dining concept that originated in Europe, dark dining allows food to stir the senses in the most unique way. Each burst of spice, each hint of sweetness, each touch of tang stands out, yielding an entirely new appreciation of fine cuisine. Under the expert guidance of Chef de Cuisine Mike Whang (of the popular Indigo Restaurant), the menu at Opaque in San Francisco cultivates a multi-sensory adventure with an array of options woven into a three-course prix fixe meal.

Dining in the Dark in San Francisco

Upon arrival at their allotted reservation time, guests will begin their journey into depravation by turning off all cell phones and checking any purses or bags with the hostess in the lounge, since they’ll not be needed in the dark dining room. Guests are welcomed to relax in the lighted lounge, order a round of specialty cocktails and select the three courses that will make up their prix fixe menu. Once they have ordered, they’ll be guided into the darkened dining room for a dining experience unlike any other. While not all patrons dine at the same time, great care is taken to make sure that the seating of other tables does not disrupt the experience for those who are already seated. Guests will be guided and served by visually impaired individuals that have been specially trained to serve in the dark and tend to the varying needs of each patron in a comfortable and reassuring way.

For San Francisco’s only dining journey, the seasonally changing menu maps out a unique course of both soft and potent flavors designed to complement each other while stimulating the taste buds. With flavor-melding options like Point Reyes blue cheese and Asian pears, hamachi tuna tartare with mango and ginger, seared sea bass with orange-shallot butter, and grilled filet mignon with roasted garlic mashed potatoes and a green peppercorn sauce, diners are the guides as they select from one of two appetizers, three entrees and two deserts to indulge their senses.

A highly sensual experience, dining at Opaque challenges the way patrons perceive their surroundings and cuisine. Feeling for a fork, running fingers along inviting tabletops, recognizing only the voices of companions, drawing in sweet and savory aromas, identifying each ingredient and spice as they eclipse the palate. Opaque is the venue to learn an entirely new way to interact with the world we live in and to appreciate the flavors that pervade culinary styles from around the globe.
Opaque is open for dinner Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Individual seating times are offered.

“In San Francisco the audience is easy. You put tripe in a bowl and tell them it’s from a humanely raised cow and they’re going to eat it,” Mr. Appleman said. “New York is totally different. In fact, I’m not sure what you have to do in New York.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Say What? (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember that movie from a few years back, A Day Without A Mexican?

People fight in grocery stores as local vegetables become a hot commodity. Affluent families have to — gasp — actually mow their own lawns and take care of their own children. Hollywood has to resort to using latino-looking actors to play the role of “Hood No. 3” on NYPD Blue.

You really needn’t read the article to know what’s in it (but do read the comments, especially the ones by Carlos, Mavprof, and Roger Clegg, who says “Oh, Cheer Up”). There is the usual litany of “disparities” — college enrollment and graduation rates; fields of study; “perceptions of campus climate”; hiring, tenure, and compensation; etc.

Post graduation, racial/ethnic minorities earn less, with the same credentials, as [sic] their White counterparts. Even within the ranks of our liberal-minded institutions, Blacks and Hispanics are grossly underrepresented in our faculties. And where people of color do find positions within our institutions, it is too often in adjunct faculty positions, bereft of the pay and benefits appreciated by regular faculty, and in our service departments, perpetuating the inequalities that we so often condemn in society in general.

There is, of course, the also required ubiquitous liberal trope, persistent and pervasive structural inequality.

Certainly, there are those who firmly embrace the belief in the achievement ideology, which considers American society to be fair and meritocratic. For them, success and failure are based on individual differences in ability and motivation, and not societal or economic barriers. And while they strongly hold to their beliefs, there is a mountain of evidence to show that our society — including some of our campuses — is filled with longstanding, persistent barriers that fall along a color line.

Every time you hear anyone, from the president on down, talk about discriminatory “barriers,” insist that the “barriers” be specifically identified.

If you do that I think you’ll find, as you certainly will with this “race still matters” article, that the “barriers” turn out to be nothing other than the “disparities.” Since there are no actual barriers, the only way to remove the “barriers” always pointed to by the race mavens is to “level the playing field” by “voluntary” race preferences and, when not voluntary, impose them through regulations or disparate impact lawsuits.

Welcome to post-racial America, Obama-style.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Inside Higher Ed reports today that Oxford, “Citing Racism, Won't Let Tories Use University Name.”

The University of Oxford is barring the student affiliate of the Conservative Party from using “Oxford” in its name, following an incident in which racist jokes were told at an event for would-be officers of the organization, who were asked to tell “the most inappropriate joke you have ever told....”

But wait. Isn’t this the same University of Oxford whose famous Oxford Union debated not so long ago whether Israel has “a right to exist.” By a slim majority that right was affirmed, but if the vote had gone the other way does anyone think Oxford would have denied the Oxford Union the right to use its name, even though many would regard it as “inappropriate” to recognize the legitimacy of terrorists annihilating a state?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[Bad link now fixed]

A minority candidate has a real shot at being elected the next mayor of Atlanta, and the prospect has the majority so worried that it is resorting to the old tactic of calling for racial bloc voting.

As someone who grew up in the segregated South, I find this new/old call for racial solidarity both familiar and depressing.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:55 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Fulfilling the wet dreams of liberals and the worst fears of conservatives, the Obama Justice Department is hiring 50 additional lawyers in the Civil Rights Division while shifting its focus to disparate impact enforcement. “As part of this shift,” the New York Times reports,

the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly. President George W. Bush’s appointees had discouraged such tactics, preferring to focus on individual cases in which there is evidence of intentional discrimination.

As I discussed here and here, Obama believes the United States is afflicted with pervasive “structural inequality,” a disease for which aggressive “disparate impact” enforcement leading to racial proportionality is the cure.

As I argued here, the liberal solution to “structural inequality” is to regard “all employment policies or practices ... that have a disparate impact as by definition discriminatory by virtue of their disparate impact alone,” and now the Civil Rights Division is gearing up to impose that solution. In July, the Times reports,

the division’s acting head, Loretta King, sent a memorandum to every federal agency urging more aggressive enforcement of regulations that forbid recipients of taxpayer money from policies that have a disparate impact on minorities.

UPDATE [9:15 A.M.]

Roger Clegg, as usual, puts it better. After noting that the turn to disparate impact is “disturbing ... but not surprising,” he writes:

Disparate-impact lawsuits challenge practices that lead to statistically worse results for a particular minority group (or women) relative to other racial groups (or men), without alleging that the practice is actually discriminatory in its terms, design, or application — that is, is actually “discrimination” at all, by any reasonable definition of the term. Such lawsuits result in (a) the abandonment or watering down of perfectly legitimate selection devices (like tests), or (b) the adoption of surreptitious quotas (to avoid the disparate impact in the first place), or (c) both. So Democratic administrations, which tend to like quotas more than productivity, have always had a penchant for using this approach that Republican administrations have generally lacked. See my testimony before the Senate and House a couple of years ago at their respective oversight hearings for the Division.

So the issues raised by the Obama administration’s civil-rights policies will be important, but they will not be surprising or even new. Here, as elsewhere, it’s just the usual liberal nonsense, warmed over and worse.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:21 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)