Discriminations

The Chronicle of Higher Education, and presumably its academic readership, thinks it newsworthy that a professor of environmental studies at Amherst College, Jan Dizard, is also a hunter.

Mr. Dizard, who was instrumental in creating the environmental-studies major at Amherst, says he is the only professor at the college who hunts. That he is an environmentalist might seem even more incongruous. Not so, he says.

“Before there was a cultural shift from sustainability to conservation, hunters were more accepted as part of the environmental movement,” Mr. Dizard says....

Hunting has an enormous positive effect on the environment, he notes, both in terms of wildlife management and from the license and equipment-tax revenue that supports various conservation efforts.

I assume those aghast colleagues — every last man, woman, and child of them, if they resemble most college faculties — think of themselves as committed devotees of “diversity.” Incongruous as that might seem.

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Don’t you wish someone would tell the Democratic office holders in East St. Louis, Missouri? (HatTip: Drudge)

EAST ST. LOUIS — City officials seeking a new police chief passed up the former director of the Florida Highway Patrol, who formerly was a top commander of the Illinois State Police, because he is white, two former members of a city board claim.

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Hair Trigger Hat Trick, my post from a few days ago on Sen. Snowe’s “trigger” (hair trigger? tripwire?), has been UPDATED.

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Recently we have seen the fabrication of false quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh, and swallowed hook, line, and sinker by those in the media who are predisposed to believe him a raving racist. That sort of thing has, unfortunately, become not quite common but also far from rare, as the line between incompetence and partisan maliciousness has become almost indistinguishable across the media landscape.

Today Hans Bader provided another dramatic example.

Liberals are busy Twittering each other with the false claim that Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, said that he would have voted to uphold school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

There’s just one problem: he never said any such thing. He said the very opposite! (Scalia has long agreed with the Supreme Court ruling banning segregation).

A liberal reporter for Capitol Media Services, Howard Fischer, made the claim that Scalia said he would have voted to uphold segregation, in a story carried in the East Valley Tribune. But as even liberal law professor Jack Balkin, who was initially fooled by the story, now admits, it’s pure bunk: a video recording of the event shows that Scalia actually said he would have voted to strike down segregation.

Before the error was uncovered, the story circulated all around the internet, including at CQ Politics’ Political Wire, and as a result, we can expect to see the false claim repeated for weeks in the press. (Political Wire, for example, contains a commentary by Taegan Doddard entitled, “Scalia Would Have Voted to Keep School Segregation“).

UPDATE, Oct. 27, 4:12 p.m.: the reporter who made the false claim about Scalia (Howard Fischer) has now deleted his claim that Scalia would uphold segregation from the online version of his story, tacitly admitting that he was wrong. But he did not disclose the error in his original story for readers.

SECOND UPDATE, Oct. 27, 6:22 p.m.: The erroneous story's internet version has now been revised to contain a vague reference to its error, in a passage that reads:

“Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a story that was originally posted Oct. 26. It removes an incorrect reference to Brown v. Board of Education in the initial version.”

Read Bader’s whole piece, since it provides a number of other examples “of reporting [that] is typical for liberal court reporters, who routinely make false claims that make conservatives or businesses look bad or politically-correct constituencies look good.”

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Michael Shear is identified as a “Washington Post Staff Writer,” but as we last saw here, his news articles are often indistinguishable from Washington Post editorials. A few days ago Shear wrote that

The White House is moving aggressively to remove the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from its traditional Washington role as the chief representative for big business, the latest sign of a public feud ignited by disagreement over the administration's effort to overhaul the health-care system.

... President Obama, his Energy secretary and one of his other most senior advisors have begun criticizing the chamber publicly, casting it as a profligate lobbying organization at odds with its members in opposing the administration on such issues as consumer protection and climate change.

Shear returned to this controversy today, but his article could have been written from a White House memo. Although he quotes the Chamber’s chief lobbyist complaining of White House “invectives” and “name-calling,” Shear gives no examples of any White House criticism. Instead, he reports only that “White House officials contend they are not waging a campaign against the Chamber and they say top officials remain open to discussions with the group's leadership.”

What then, according to Shear, is this conflict all about? Easy: it’s the people against the special interests. Do I exaggerate? You be the judge. “[T]he clash between the Chamber and the White House,” he writes, “is a clear indication that Obama intends to challenge the power of lobbyists.”

During his presidential campaign, Obama vowed to “tell Washington, and their lobbyists, that their days of setting the agenda are over.” And just a month into office, he said in a radio address that “the system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long, but I don’t. I work for the American people.”

That sentiment has run into a massive lobbying presence in Washington which is fighting back against the president’s push for health-care reform, his climate change legislation and his plans to regulate the financial sector.

But Obama is fighting back....

Shear’s article, of course, is not the only editorializing in the news pages of today’s WaPo. In a front-page article, Alec MacGillis asks, If you build a coverage mandate, will they come? His answer, you will not be surprised to hear, is yes, because “many economists say” that “the lesson of behavioral economics” is

that people do not necessarily make decisions out of well-reasoned self-interest. It is an approach that has gained a powerful foothold in the Obama White House.

The best case study is Massachusetts, which instituted a health insurance mandate three years ago that has succeeded in bringing coverage levels from 91 percent of state residents to more than 97 percent. The state made it easy to sign up — people who qualified for subsidized coverage got help filling out forms at safety-net hospitals and clinics, while others could use a Web site to determine whether they qualified for subsidies or call a new agency, the Health Connector, for assistance.

The mandate had bipartisan backing, and residents were deluged with publicity. The Boston Red Sox promoted the mandate, pharmacy loudspeakers intoned it, grocery store receipts carried reminders and churches coaxed congregants. The Health Connector held 200 meetings with employers and two dozen outreach sessions, community groups received funding to help people sign up, and residents got red-lettered postcards in the mail.

And it worked: A Health Connector board member told Glied that a typical comment from young adults coming to sign up for coverage was: “My mom said I had to sign up for health insurance or I would get into trouble.”

As the New York Times reported last March, Massachusetts “government and industry officials agree that the plan will not be sustainable over the next 5 to 10 years if they do not take significant steps to arrest the growth of health spending.”

Massachusetts is a model, for better or worse, that we may be about to emulate nationally, starting with the disingenuousness needed to pass it.

Those who led the 2006 effort said it would not have been feasible to enact universal coverage if the legislation had required heavy cost controls. The very stakeholders who were coaxed into the tent — doctors, hospitals, insurers and consumer groups — would probably have been driven into opposition by efforts to reduce their revenues and constrain their medical practices, they said.

Alan Sager, a professor of health policy at Boston University, has calculated that health spending per person in Massachusetts increased faster than the national average in seven of the last eight years. Furthermore, he said, the gap has grown exponentially, with Massachusetts now spending about a third more per person, up from 23 percent in 1980....

The state expects to spend $595 million more on its health insurance programs this year than in 2006, a 42 percent increase. But about 432,000 people have gained coverage, leaving only 2.6 percent of the population without insurance, according to a recent state survey. At only one-sixth the national average, that is by far the lowest rate in any state.

Some health policy experts argue that changes in payment practices will not be enough to slow the growth in spending, even when combined with other cost-cutting strategies. To truly change course, they say, the state and federal governments may need to place actual limits on health spending, which could lead to rationing of care.

“Really controlling costs requires just stopping spending,” said Stuart H. Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University.

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First, let me introduce you (if you don’t already know him) to a friend, Joseph C. Phillips. You’ve probably seen him many times, even if you don’t remember: he played the role of, Lt. Martin Kendall, Bill Cosby’s son-in-law, on “The Cosby Show.” More recently, and more relevant to our current concerns, he has become a prolific commentator and author (I recommend his book), and now a regular on Townhall.com.

Which brings me, as I hope to bring you, to his piece today at Townhall, Playing For Keeps. But be careful: as he points out, if you are a friend of Joseph Phillips, you are regarded as an evil enemy of America — and not only by thuggish leftists in the White House or SEIU or ACORN but also by elites with more respectable addresses. He points, for example, to esteemed Harvard Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. Her strategic and practical insights have guided leaders of large and small organizations worldwide for over 25 years, through teaching, writing, and direct consultation to major corporations and governments. The former Editor of Harvard Business Review (1989-1992), Professor Kanter has been named to lists of the “50 most powerful women in the world” (Times of London), and the “50 most influential business thinkers in the world” (Accenture and Thinkers 50 research). In 2001, she received the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Career Award for her scholarly contributions to management knowledge, and in 2002 was named “Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year” by the World Teleport Association....

She has received 23 honorary doctoral degrees, as well as numerous leadership awards and prizes for her books and articles; for example, her book The Change Masters was named one of the most influential business books of the 20th century (Financial Times)....

She is Chair and Director of the Advanced Leadership Initiative of Harvard University, an effort across the professional schools to help successful leaders at the top of their professions apply their skills to addressing challenging national and global problems.

President [Barack] Obama is marginalizing not just his enemies but those of the American people. He is attacking organizations standing in the way of progress toward reforming health care or cleaning up the conditions that led to the financial crisis. He is putting on notice advocates of greed — instead of the greater good — that they no longer have public legitimacy.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Ostensibly Republican Senator Olympia Snowe has taken her stand, such as it is, objecting to the “public option” but offering what is billed as a compromise: a “trigger” provision that will allow the creation of some sort (what sort?) of public option in the future if insurance premiums remain too (how?) high.

But, according to Ronald Brownstein’s description in today’s National Journal, she has co-sponsored a successful amendment to the Senate Finance Committee bill that would exempt many people from the individual mandate and lower fines on those who did not comply, thus guaranteeing that insurance premiums would go up, not down.

Because the insurance industry raised this alarm in its much-criticized report on the Finance bill, reform supporters are inclined to dismiss it. But many prominent health care thinkers share this concern. (In Democratic circles, that might amount to sympathy for the devil.) One worried expert is Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist frequently consulted by Democrats. Gruber has calculated that the Schumer-Snowe approach will reduce the number of uninsured people the bill covers by about 3 million -- and raise premiums for those it does cover by 10 percent. “You’ll lose the 35-year-old who doesn’t go to the doctor,” Gruber frets.

Equally concerned is Sarah Bianchi, the chief domestic policy adviser for both the 2004 John Kerry and the 2000 Al Gore presidential campaigns. “Insurance works only when the healthy and the sick pay premiums,” Bianchi sensibly reminded in a recent Democratic Leadership Council paper. Rather than excusing more people from the mandate, she says, Congress should spend more on subsidies to help uninsured families buy the coverage they would be required to purchase. “Because they have an affordability problem, they let more people out of the mandate,” she says. “But because they let more people out, they will make premiums go up.”

With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

UPDATE [28 October]

Further thought, or something, has convinced me that Sen. Snowe’s “trigger” is not really a trigger at all. It is actually a tripwire (“A tripwire is a passive triggering mechanism, usually/originally employed for military purposes, although its principle has been used since prehistory for methods of trapping game”)?

In this case, the “game” are all the gullible observers who regard the “trigger” as anything other than a slightly delayed but still guaranteed path to the public option.

Soldiers sometimes detect the presence of tripwires by spraying the area with Silly String. If the string falls to the ground there are no tripwires. If there is a tripwire, the string will be suspended in the air without pulling the wire.

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Peggy Noonan gets most things right, with verve and wit, and even when she’s wrong her writing is often impressive enough to pull along even disagreeing readers. She usually hits the slow pitches of idiocy and offensiveness thrown by our politics out of the park, but today she strikes out on Obama’s Fox war.

The president doesn’t seem to like this moment. Who would? He and his men and women have returned to referring to what they “inherited.” And what they inherited was, truly, terrible: again, a severe economic crisis and two wars. But their recent return to this theme is unbecoming. Worse, it is politically unpersuasive. It sounds defensive, like a dodge.

The president said last week, at a San Francisco fund-raiser, that he’s busy with a “mop,” “cleaning up somebody else’s mess,” and he doesn’t enjoy “somebody sitting back and saying, ‘You’re not holding the mop the right way.’” Later, in New Orleans, he groused that reporters are always asking “Why haven’t you solved world hunger yet?” His surrogates and aides, in appearances and talk shows, have taken to remembering, sometimes at great length, the dire straits we were in when the presidency began.

This is not a sign of confidence. Nor were the president’s comments to a New York fund-raiser this week. Democrats, he said to the Democratic audience, are “an opinionated bunch.” They always have a lot of thoughts and views. Republicans, on the other hand—”the other side” — aren’t really big on independent thinking. “They just kinda sometimes do what they’re told. Democrats, ya’ll thinkin’ for yourselves.” It is never a good sign when the president gets folksy, dropping his g’s, because he is by nature not a folksy g-dropper but a coolly calibrating intellectual who is always trying to guess, as most politicians do, what normal people think. When Mr. Obama gets folksy he isn’t narrowing his distance from his audience but underlining it. He shouldn’t do this.

But the statement that Republicans just do what they’re told was like his famous explanation of unhappy voters are people who “cling to guns or religion.” (What comes over him at fund-raisers?) Both statements speaks of a political misjudgment of his opponents and his situation. They show a misdiagnosis of the opposition that is politically tin-eared. Politicians looking to win don’t patronize those they’re trying to win over.

To understand Obama’s war on Fox and friends, don’t look only to Nixon and his enemies liest but also, even especially, to Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. What Obama is trying to do to the Chamber of Commerce, the Insurance Industry, Fox News, and talk radio is exactly what McCarthy and HUAC did — not to communists but to their “fellow travelers” and those like, say, subscribers to The New Republic or The Nation, who were in “sympathetic association” with them: intimidate them, ostracize them, shut them up.

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News we hope we can use from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Observing that athletes who wore red uniforms in the 2004 Olympics were more likely to win when competing against athletes wearing blue uniforms, researchers at the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, in Romania, decided to pit the two colors against each other. They compared the performances of red and blue teams in virtual multiplayer shooting games and found that red won nearly 55 percent of the matches.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Last month I asked whether the Chicago Tribune was purposefully misleading or merely incompetent for running an article under this headline: New U. of I. board eliminates preferential admissions. “The assertion in the headline is, of course, not true,” I noted.

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).

Now another Illinois head has fallen.

Beleaguered University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman announced his resignation Tuesday, marking a near-wholesale turnover of the university's most senior leadership. University and state leaders lauded Herman's departure as a significant decision that will allow the university to move beyond an admissions scandal that rattled the Urbana-Champaign campus....

Herman's resignation follows that of President B. Joseph White, who will step down at the end of the year. Six university trustees also have been replaced after revelations by the Chicago Tribune of preferential admissions practices that let applicants connected to trustees, lawmakers and other powerful people get admitted over more qualified students.

But friends and defenders of preferential admissions need not fear. Preferential treatment remains alive and well in Illinois.

Query: Has any intrepid investigative reporter compared the qualifications of those admitted under the scandalous political preference program with the qualifications of those admitted under the unscandalous racial preference program? Has anyone in Illinois demanded (now this would be a scandal!) that all applicants to the University be treated, you know, equally, and judged by the same standards?

UPDATE [22 October]

Now, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune today (pointed to by Inside Higher Ed), a rejected applicant to the University of Illinois has filed what he and his lawyer hope will be a class action suit “on behalf of all ‘non-clout’ applicants who had been denied admission from 1999 to 2009. The suit seeks more than $5 million in damages.”

[Jonathan] Yard was ranked in the top 15 percent of his high school class, scored a 29 on the ACT and was a varsity athlete, said the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago.

After applying for admission in 2008, he was wait-listed, then rejected. The lawsuit notes that the university catalog cited academic record, ACT scores, leadership and communication skills among its admissions criteria. “Notably absent from this list of admission criterion is any mention of one’s political clout,” the suit states.

An ongoing Tribune investigation found that subpar candidates were admitted to the university based on political influence. The university president and chancellor have resigned because of the scandal.

Because the University of Illinois also has affirmative action admissions, some “subpar” students were admitted because of their race or ethnicity, something that has somehow escaped the notice of the Chicago Tribune and all those legislators and others scandalized by this one rather narrow category of preferential treatment.

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InstaPundit points this morning to an article in the Washington Times about a truly mind-boggling new race-based decision out of the Department of Justice.

KINSTON, N.C. | Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” — identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

But in fact the requirement may be even screwier than that.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters' right to elect the candidates they want.

If blacks as a group (not as individuals) have a right to elect “candidates of their choice,” and if that choice can be achieved only by electing Democrats, why not simply outlaw the Republican Party as a criminal conspiracy to deprive blacks of their rights?

Wait, you say, that’s going too far. Really? Is it really suggesting anything much more extreme than the Department dropping an all but successful voter intimidation complaint against weapon-wielding members of the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia? (Note that the recent Kinston partisan requirement decision was “made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia.”)

Or, for that matter, is it really going beyond the recent concerted White House attempt to brand a news organization as not a news organization because it doesn’t like that news organization’s “perspective”?

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Patrick Welsh, who has been teaching English at Alexandria, Virginia’s, T.C. Williams High School (the school featured in Remember the Titans) since right after the earth cooled, has another of his periodic Washington Post columns today reporting from the school front lines.

Making the Grade Isn’t About Race. It’s About Parents argues, as you will have guessed, that the poor performance of so many of his (and other) black students has “nothing to do with race.” He begins:

In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class — and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: “It’s because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study.”

Another student angrily challenged me: “You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us.” When I did, not one hand went up.

I was stunned. These were good kids; I had grown attached to them over the school year. It hit me that these students, at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, understood what I knew too well: The lack of a father in their lives had undermined their education. The young man who spoke up knew that with a father in his house he probably wouldn’t be ending 12 years of school in the bottom 10 percent of his class with a D average. His classmate, normally a sweet young woman with a great sense of humor, must have long harbored resentment at her father’s absence to speak out as she did. Both had hit upon an essential difference between the kids who make it in school and those who don’t: parents.

My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn’t because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn’t wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren’t there for them — at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.

Welsh goes on to paint a devastating and depressing picture of the “fixation on race” at T.C. Williams.

In an example of how bad the fixation on race here has become, last year Morton Sherman, the new superintendent, ordered principals throughout the city to post huge charts in their hallways so everyone — including 10-year-old kids — could see differences in test scores between white, black and Hispanic students. One mother told me that a black fifth-grader at Cora Kelly Magnet School said that “whoever sees that sign will think I am stupid.” A fourth-grade African American girl there looked at the sign and said to a friend: “That’s not me.” When black and white parents protested that impressionable young children don’t need such information, administrators accused them of not facing up to the problem. Only when the local NAACP complained did Sherman have the charts removed....

But focusing on a “racial achievement gap” is too simple; it’s a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.

Last year, two of the finest and most dedicated teachers at my school — one in science and one in math — tried to move students who were failing their classes into more appropriate prerequisite courses, because the kids had none of the background knowledge essential to mastering more advanced material. Both teachers were told by a T.C. Williams administrator that the problem was not with the students but with their own low expectations.

Just ask the liberals. They’ll tell you (as they’ve no doubt told Welsh) that attributing educational difficulty to single-parent families is just as racist as blaming their race, just another example of “blaming the victim.”

Liberals can’t afford to let go of their victims. (If they weren’t victims, who would need liberals?)

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Shepard Fairey, creator of the iconic “Hope” poster of candidate Obama (a revealing variant of which is discussed here), has admitted in court that

he knowingly submitted false images and deleted others in the legal proceedings, in an attempt to conceal the fact that the AP had correctly identified the photo that Fairey had used as a reference for his “Hope” poster of then-Sen. Barack Obama.

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David M. Herszenhorn and Robert Pear, writing of course in the New York Times, seem to think so. My favorite sentence from their Thursday, Oct. 15, article, discussing the Dems recent proposal to spend an additional $240 billion to shield doctors from cuts in Medicare that, er, the same Dems are proposing elsewhere.You can relish this contradiction on your own time, since it’s not my concern here. The following peach of a sentence by Pear and Herszenhorn is. [Emphasis added]

The Medicare bill has support from doctors, who are potentially crucial allies in the Democrats’ effort to overhaul the health care system. But the bill could shatter the aura of fiscal responsibility that Senate Democrats have worked to create in writing their broader health care legislation.

aura
noun. the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place....

• a supposed emanation surrounding the body of a living creature, viewed by mystics, spiritualists, and some practitioners of complementary medicine as the essence of the individual, and allegedly discernible by people with special sensibilities.

• any invisible emanation, esp. a scent or odor....

• Medicine ( pl. also aurae |ˈôrē|) a warning sensation experienced before an attack of epilepsy or migraine
  

I’d say that sums up the fiscal responsibility of the Democrats, and those who claim to see it, pretty well.

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From Zogby:

UTICA, New York – U.S. adults of different political ideologies have extremely different views about the nation's healthcare system, according to a new Zogby International interactive poll. Overall 63% rate the U.S. healthcare system as excellent or good, but only 43% give those combined high marks to the system's value. Forty-seven percent believe that affordable healthcare is a right, and 30% say it is a privilege. Another 20% believe it is neither....

The differences based on party affiliation are so sharp that Democrats are 10 times more likely to rate the nation's healthcare system as poor than are Republicans, and eight times more likely to say healthcare is a right.

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[NOTE: Formerly bad link now fixed.]

Today's Washington Post (!) has an editorial that provides a sympathetic platform for a devastating critique of Obama by an Iranian Nobel Prize winner.

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Is the health care reform that is likely to come out of the ongoing Congressional deliberations involve a conspiracy to force a “public option” on an unwilling public? Normally conspiracies are hidden, carried out in secrecy, but the Democrats pathway to a public option is so well-lighted and well marked that it’s hard to call it a conspiracy, even though many participants in the process appear to be blind to it. Consider:

Senators Baucus, Conrad and other poobahs have recognized that a public option would never pass the Senate. Indeed, it wouldn’t even get the vote of Senator Snowe. Thus in the coming weeks they appear poised to insert something like Senator Snowe’s proposed “trigger.”

Snowe supports a so-called “trigger” as a fall back plan where some form of a public option kicks in, perhaps temporarily, if reforms do not bring health care costs down.... [L]eadership aides say that it is increasingly likely that the “trigger” gets into the base bill that Reid is now crafting.

As it now stands, the plan proposed by Democrats and the Obama administration would not only fail to reduce the cost burden on middle-class families, it would make that burden significantly worse.

Insurance death spirals occur when regulators force insurers to offer coverage (“guaranteed issue”) at premiums below the known risk of those they are insuring, without any assurance that the shortfall can be made up elsewhere. When insurers comply with these rules and offer relatively low cost health insurance policies to all comers, quite predictably, many sick people step forward to sign up. When the insurers then try to turn around and charge higher premiums to the relatively healthy to cover their costs, the healthy, also quite predictably, are more reluctant to enroll because they can see the premiums they would have to pay would very likely exceed their health-care costs. So they often say “no thanks” to the insurance and decide to take their chances by going without coverage instead. As more and more healthy people exit the marketplace, insurers are then forced to raise premiums for everyone who remains, which only further encourages the lower risks to opt out. This vicious cycle of rising premiums and an increasingly unhealthy risk pool is called a ‘death spiral’ because it eventually forces the insurer to terminate the plan.

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From the Urban Dictionary:

uncentered isn't defined yet, but these are close:

kittywampus
crazy word from south-western wisconsin meaning-off-balanced, uncentered, or a general state of confusion.

cokee
Trinidadian term meaning messed up or uncentered.

Although this description is no doubt true, at least up to a point, I believe it obscures more than it illuminates. The trouble with “the center” is the same trouble Gertrude Stein famously found with her hometown, Oakland: “Oakland? There’s no there there.” The “center,” in short, has no core, no center; it is defined entirely by its equi-distance between two things it’s not. And since left and right are not fixed, static identities but are always pulling against each other in a never-ending tug of war, with first one side and then the other getting the upper, stronger hand, the center moves left and right depending on the strength of those on either end of its rope.

Thus those “moderate” politicians always in search of the center are always searching for a moving target. Take Maine’s ostensibly Republican Senator, Olympia Snowe (please, take her). As Jay Cost wrote yesterday on RealClearPolitics,

Snowe is one of those senators who can almost always be counted on to find the political center in the Senate, wherever it may be in real terms, because that is where the action is.

The substantive emptiness of the center is bad enough, but the real problem we have now is far worse than that. The real problem is that the great preponderance of elected Democrats have decided to follow Obama out to the left flank of American politics, with not a few of them even trying to push him farther left. As a result, a great gulf has opened up between the center of the Congress and the center of the country as a whole. Washington’s center is not the country’s center. Far from it.

60% or more of the members of Congress (both houses) support the sort of health care reform proposed by Obama and supported by nearly all Congressional Democrats, but Rasmussen finds that only 44% of the public does (and “[j]ust 30% of U.S. voters now think President Obama is governing in a bipartisan fashion”). Moreover, the intensity of those views is even more skewed: “Currently, 23% Strongly Favor the legislative effort and 39% are Strongly Opposed.”

I don’t fault Sen. Snowe for searching for the center, but since she’s looking for it in the wrong place what she’s finding is not in the real center at all.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Diversity” in college admissions, and the racial preference necessary to produce it, is defended because ... because ... well, because everybody whose opinion counts knows that “diversity” is a Good Thing. Something about whites and Asians learning from others who are “different.”

But what is the value of “diversity” on the federal bench? Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, writes that President Obama “deserves substantial credit” for nominating “large numbers and percentages” of minority judges.

Yes, but why? (Not why did He do it; why does He deserve so much credit for doing so?) According to Tobias,

Expanding ethnic and gender diversity in the federal courts will afford numerous benefits. Many minority and female judges can assist their colleagues in understanding and resolving complicated issues that relate to discrimination and abortion, which the bench confronts while helping restrict prejudice in the federal justice process. Citizens also have more confidence in a federal judiciary that reflects the nation's diverse population.

If so, if it really takes a member of a group that has experienced discrimination to understand and resolve all those “complicated issues,” do we then have to take care that no white or Asian plaintiff complaining of affirmative action discrimination ever has to go before a black or Hispanic judge, who simply couldn’t understand? Appellate courts would also have to implement rules to ensure that no three judge panel was ever made up entirely of minorities or non-minorities, since no racially or ethnically homogenous group of three judges could be expected to understand and resolve those “complicated issues” produced by discrimination.

And as for the swelling national confidence in a judiciary that “reflects the nation’s diverse population,” let us finally, after all these years, implement “diversity” appointment policies to reflect the wisdom of Sen. Roman Hruska’s 1970 defense of the failed Supreme Court nomination of Harold Carswell:

Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

But the debate over the quota system — racial quotas in particular — continues to inflame passions in a country that has long considered itself a racial democracy.

Since 2003 more than 1,300 institutions of higher education have adopted quotas for Afro-Brazilians and graduates of public high schools. The government has also created 10 public universities and dozens of new campuses in poor areas in an effort to expand access to higher education for the underprivileged.

Quotas, however, are not so easy to implement, in part because

centuries of racial intermixing, which was initially encouraged by Portuguese colonizers seeking to whiten the population, have made it famously hard to classify Brazilians by race.

Take the case of Alan and Alex Texeira, identical male twins who applied for admission to the federal University of Brasilia in 2007 under the racial quotas. After analyzing photos of the brothers — a required step for accessing the university's quota system—separate “race boards” determined that one was black and one was white.

“You’re not discriminated against because you’re black, but because you’re poor,” argues Flávio Bolsonaro, a state legislator in Rio de Janeiro. He filed a legal challenge after the State University of Rio de Janeiro adopted the country’s first quota for higher education, in 2003. In June a state tribunal upheld Mr. Bolsonaro’s claim that the measures violated Brazil’s Constitution, which outlaws all forms of discrimination, and ordered the university to halt its affirmative-action measures.

State officials have vowed to appeal the court ruling. “The quota program values the public-school education and makes reparations from a racial point of view,” Sérgio Cabral Filho, governor of Rio de Janeiro state, told reporters recently. “Contrary to what some say, it is not a racist program. Brazil has a duty to the blacks, and it’s about making reparations.”

The United States, the South Africa of the New World. Thank you, Democrats (and timid Republicans).

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

By now most of you know that a new report by the insurance industry claiming the Baucus “Bill” could raise a typical middle class family’s insurance premium by $4000 has the Democrats furious and scrambling to reply.

In fact, the Baucus backers seem to be in such a tizzy that some of them are unwittingly undermining their previous, well-scripted arguments. Consider, for example, the following (from the Associated Press article linked above):

The PricewaterhouseCoopers study also assumes that proposed taxes on high-cost insurance, new levies on insurers and other health industry firms, and Medicare cuts will be directly passed on to privately insured policyholders.

Critics of the study said it tilted those assumptions too far toward a worst case, ignoring the bill's potential to curb costs.

For example, the tax on high-cost health insurance that Baucus is proposing could lead employers and individuals to switch to lower-cost plans and avoid the levy. If that happens, there would be no additional costs to pass on to consumers.

The study “assumed the tax would have no behavioral effect, contrary to every other tax in the history of civilization,” said economist Len Nichols of the nonpartisan New America Foundation.

Apparently in the president’s mind “everyone” does not include all those people who have good employer-provided plans, since it is those good plans that will be dropped to avoid the “Cadillac” tax.

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

Because (along with New Jersey) Virginia is one of only two states electing a governor next month, the election here is garnering a great deal of attention, as it should. But there is more than the governor’s office at stake, and some of the other races are also fascinating, one of which is the election for attorney general. Ken Cuccinelli, a very conservative Republican state senator, is running against Steve Shannon, a very liberal state delegate.

Those of you interested in Virginia politics (and this year, everyone should be) may find the following excerpt from The Cuccinelli Compass, the candidate’s Oct. 10 newsletter, of interest. After mentioning “the Nobel hilarity” and quoting John Podhoretz’s comments about it, Cuccinelli described recent events on the campaign trail:

Last Friday, October 2nd, I debated my opponent on WTOP (available at WTOP.com). In that debate, we each had the chance to ask the other a single question. What was his question to me about? Crime? The economy? Nope. Global warming. Well, at least you know his priorities.

On the other hand, I asked him when he read the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Melendez-Diaz case from this summer, as he began to repeatedly get the law wrong under Melendez... even on one of his own bills!

Then, this past Wednesday, we had our second debate within five days. Several interesting things occurred at this debate.

First, my opponent walked in with 20 or so orange-clad Liuna union members (http://liuna.org/). Not a common occurrence in a right to work state. [Sidenote: I didn’t know what “Liuna” was until I got home and looked it up...]. They left toward the end of the debate, which seemed very strange at the time (see below).

I’m not aware of such a presence at ANY general election joint appearance by Virginia candidates EVER. Though it should not be surprising when of the 11 donors over $10K my opponent reported for July and August, 7 of them were unions, including the NY/NJ local of the SEIU. Just so you know where his money is coming from.

As another note here, one of the attendees at the debate had this interesting report on his interaction with the Liuna folks:

“During a brief ‘technical break’ the orange clad union supporters of Steve Shannon departed, when I asked someone why they were leaving they explained they were only being paid until 8:30 so the bus was leaving.” (Original comment at: http://dungareeliberty.wordpress.com/)

Second, we got to ask each other one more question. I went first and asked my opponent to identify the divisions in the Attorney General’s office and what each one does. The non-response was deafening. A Youtube clip of the exchange was put up by one of the bloggers in attendance here. Please go take a look at the embarrassing Youtube link.

Here’s what Amy Gardner of the Washington Post said about this exchange in her blog post :

“The best moment was probably when Cuccinelli asked Shannon to name all the divisions in the attorney general’s office. Shannon said he’d get to that in a second but first wanted to address Cuccinelli’s previous remarks about a state tax increase in 2004.

Cuccinelli leaped to his feet, turned to moderator Scott Thuman of WJLA-TV, and said:

“Mr. Moderator, in court I’d object to a witness not answering the question.”

Oh well, it wasn’t court. Shannon didn’t answer the question.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Much derisive humor and sarcasm has, justifiably, been directed toward I, Barack’s Nobel (such as here, here, and here). But the more I think about it, there’s something seriously unfunny about this award. Most of the humor has pointed to the Prize Winner’s lack of accomplishments to date, but the fact is that He has done many things already. That’s the problem.

With Chinese pro-democracy dissidents being jailed while the Prize Winner turns his back on the Dalai Lama to please their jailers; with Iranian pro-democracy demonstrators shot down in the streets and others sentenced to death after revolutionary “trials” while the Prize Winner looks the other way and continues to make nice with the executioners; with a legitimate, democratic government in Honduras, protected by the army at the behest of the nation’s Supreme Court enforcing the Constitutional prohibition against the former president staying in office beyond his term while the Prize Winner and his (our) government punishes the legitimate government and supports the return of the deposed Hugh Chavez friend and wannabe, there is something not funny but downright offensive about this prize.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

Obama remains a powerful voice of hope and change for many Europeans, not only because of his eloquence and his reassertion of America's role as a leader of international diplomacy, but also because he physically embodies change as progress. In this country, most people have taken their cue from a president determined to govern as chief executive of a post-racial society.

Obama would not have been in position to receive the Nobel Peace Prize had not Americans at a critical level made peace — or called an unprecedented truce — with its racist past. Our history is rooted so deep in slavery and segregation that terrible vestiges among the masses are still with us today in poor public schooling and disproportionate unemployment of black men....

[The Prize committee] would have been better off proclaiming, “The Norwegian Nobel Committee awards its 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the United States of America for having the courage to come full circle 233 years after a slave-owning nation declared independence by saying all men are created equal.’’

I wish they weren’t so funny, whether their humor is intentional or not. But then, I also wish we actually had a post-racial president. Instead, what we have is a very, very liberal president, and post-racial is to liberal as oil is to water.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No, “I, Barack” is not a quote from taking the oath of office, or from anything else. To see what it, you’ll have to read this, my take on the Nobel news.

In Rose Garden remarks accepting the Prize on Friday Obama said he was “deeply humbled.” But, he continued:

Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.

Mr. Obama spent more than 21 months with that message, insisting in a booming voice from Seattle to St. Petersburg that the election was not about him: “It’s not about me; it’s about you.”

• February 2008: “This isn't about me and it's not about Senator Clinton.”

• After his European appearances before adoring crowds, July 2008: “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol....

• In his appearance with Pastor Rich Warren at Saddleback, August 2008: “And you know, I think the process for me of growing up was to recognize that it's not about me. It’s about...

  REV. WARREN: I like that. (Laughter and applause.) I like that.

• Interview with Time, August 2008, when asked about Dems who don’t think he’s tough enough: “I don't think tha's just about me. I think they are....”

• January 2009: “This election is not about me. It's about....”

• Meeting with doctors, nurses, health care workers, July 21, 2009: “‘This isn’t about me,’ Obama said. ‘This isn’t about politics. This is about....’”

• To Glenn Beck, July 23, 2009: “I have the best health care in the world, which is why I say this is not about me.”

• Speech to United Nations, September 2009: “I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are....”

• George Will on the Obamas’ speeches to the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen: “She, Mrs. Obama, used the first-person singular pronoun in some form or another, “I” or “me” 34 times in sixteen paragraphs. He used it 23 times in thirteen paragraphs. It was all about them.”
  

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.

I’ve written about our Narcissist In Chief before (“He increasingly reminds me of the author who, after talking throughout lunch about his own work, turns to his companion over coffee and says, ‘I’ve been talking long enough about myself. Tell me, what do you think of my latest book?’”). But now, even though I like to think of myself as devoted to politeness and civility, I’m so sick of hearing “it’s not about me” ad nauseam that I find myself hoping that at its inexorable next repetition some courageous, truth-telling Joe Wilson will stand up and shout, “Liar!”

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I have not blogged much on the details of the various health care bills, the CBO scoring, etc., because so many people have followed that issue much closer than I have. One of those people is Keith Hennessey, and from what I have read it seems to me that it would be difficult for anyone to be deeply informed of where the health debate is now without reading this post of his today. If I had the power to assign homework, Hennessey’s post would be at the top of my required reading list.

There is too much in it that deserves quoting for me to quote any of it. Just read the whole thing. Oh, wait. There is one thing I’ll quote, not because it’s the most important but because I don’t recall seeing the point — that all the current bills would bend the “cost curve” upward, not downward — made so well elsewhere:

... these bills would increase total health insurance spending relative to current law. I therefore believe the bills fail in the core objective defined by the President.

In addition to the above economic point, there’s a simple Washington-based argument that reinforces my conclusion: the industries that generate income from health spending generally support these bills. They know that the government mandates will, on net, increase total spending on health care and health insurance, the opposite of the President’s correctly stated policy goal. If these bills actually reduced health spending relative to current law, the insurers, doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers would oppose them. Remember that the insurance industry champions the individual mandate. How many other industries would like the U.S. government to force you to buy their product, and then prohibit you from buying inexpensive versions of it?

In the past proposed legislation was scored by the CBO and thoroughly analyzed by smart, informed lobbyists, providing legislators (if they chose to avail themselves of it) of both general and detailed arguments for and against whatever was being considered. Legislators were very much aware that these lobbyists, moreover, represented influential organizations and constituencies, and votes were rarely if ever cast without awareness of who cared deeply and who was watching. Those organizations and constituencies and their lobbyists are of course still with us, but now they have been joined by thousands — indeed, tens or even hundreds of thousands — of ordinary people, i.e., voters, who have ready access to the sort of analyses available in the past only to those who employed high-paid lobbyists ... and the legislators those lobbyists were hired to influence. Thus the audience of very, very well informed and highly concerned constituents is probably larger now than it has ever been on any legislation.

In this regard, this August 25 Rasmussen poll may be the one that should concern Congress more than anything else:

Most voters think they understand the health care reform legislation proposed by President Obama better than Congress does — and about as well as the president himself.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% of voters rate their understanding of the health care plan as good or excellent. Only 21% say their understanding of it is poor.

By contrast, just 22% say Congress has a good or excellent understanding of the plan. Thirty-five percent (35%) say Congress’ knowledge of the proposal is poor.

ADDENDUM

With regard to the Senate Finance Committee “concepts” just scored by the CBO, it is impossible for either the Senators or their constituents to be better informed about the bill because, as law professors William Jacobson and Jonathan Adler have reminded us, THERE IS NO BAUCUS BILL. Jacobson:

THERE IS NO BAUCUS BILL.

The CBO scored the concepts described by the Baucus Committee. There is no legislative text. None. Baucus and his Democratic colleagues refused to reduce their concepts to actual legislation prior to a vote....

Your esteemed Senators have so little respect for you that some of them are willing to vote in favor of legislation which does not exist because THERE IS NO BAUCUS BILL.

The actual legislation will be drafted in secret by Harry Reid and a few other people, including staffers whose names and political connections you never will know, and the resulting legislation will be rammed through the Senate and House before anyone gets to read and analyze it.

Months of debate mean nothing. It's all smoke and mirrors by people who think you are too stupid to realize what is going on.

Have I made myself clear on this? THERE IS NO BAUCUS BILL.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I can almost sympathize with the co-chairs of the Minority Rights Coalition at the University of Virginia as they strive, mightily but with absolutely no success, to define “minority” in a long, painful column in the Cavalier Daily today.

“Here are two questions to chew on,” they write.

(1) What is the Minority Rights Coalition? and (2) What is a minority? We can answer the first question in two sentences, but the second, we could work on for years and not develop a solid answer. Sometimes we feel like a broken record:

“The Minority Rights Coalition is the umbrella organization which advocates on behalf of its constituent organizations and seeks to draw strength from the connections and common struggles of its members. It is composed of the Black Student Alliance (BSA), the Asian Student Union (ASU), the Latino Student Alliance (LSA), the Middle Eastern Leadership Council (MELC), the Queer Student Union (QSU), and Feminism is for Everyone (FIFE).”

• “The definition of ‘minority’ is not an altogether unanswerable question....”

• “The word ‘minority’ can obviously mean a group with fewer members than the majority....”

• “... if we choose to define ‘minority’ as “a group with fewer members than the majority,” then it seems strange that the MRC, together, makes up a large majority of the student population at the University. Even FIFE alone, about whose membership we are frequently asked, would stand to claim to represent the interests of a majority of the student population here, since women compose more than half of the school’s student body.”

• “Minority” does not necessarily mean “a group with fewer members than the majority,” but “[a]n alternative is elusive and nebulous....”

• “There are too many ways to define minority to touch on them all.”
  

In desperation or resignation, the co-chairs of the Minority Rights Coalition offer the following definition:

groups of individuals targeted in bias incidents (e.g. keying a woman’s car with derogatory slurs like “bitch” or “whore”), groups that struggle against institutional discrimination (e.g. refusing to provide a minimum amount of unpaid leave for care for a newborn child), or groups that cannot effectively voice their concerns for a variety of reasons (e.g. population size, educational limitations, language capabilities).

.... There are so many individuals and so many groups who are marginalized in so many ways....

Moreover, defending and advocating for the rights of minority student populations is a multifaceted purpose. It is not simply pushing for a new major, for a more diverse incoming class, or for more money. It is standing firm as a voice for any underserved or targeted population.

There is something else noteworthy about the MRC’s membership: despite the patently ideological litmus test its members must pass, the interests of these member “populations” often conflict. As it happens, just yesterday U.S. News and World Report published an article, “Do Elite Private Colleges Discriminate Against Asian Students?,” highlighting research revealing that

A recent study of the applicants to seven elite colleges in 1997 found that Asian students were much more likely to be rejected than seemingly similar students of other races. Also, athletes and students from top high schools had admissions edges, as did low-income African-Americans and Hispanics.

Translating the advantages into SAT scores, study author Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist, calculated that African-Americans who achieved 1150 scores on the two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges in 1997 as whites who scored 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s.....

Espenshade found that when comparing applicants with similar grades, scores, athletic qualifications, and family history for seven elite private colleges and universities:

• Whites were three times as likely to get fat envelopes as Asians.

• Hispanics were twice as likely to win admission as whites.

• African-Americans were at least five times as likely to be accepted as whites....

Alas, Espenshade himself exhibits the pitfalls of the group think that his research otherwise exposes. For example,

Espenshade warned against concluding that his study proved that colleges improperly discriminated. For one thing, Asians, who make up less than 5 percent of the U.S. population, often make up nearly a third of the applicant pools to elite colleges. And they generally account for at least 10 percent of the student body.

This argument, a foundation of the preference principle, has far more radical implications than is generally recognized, for it in effect redefines discrimination as something that applies only to groups. To say that preferences cannot be discriminatory because the University of Michigan is still 80% white is to say that discrimination against individuals doesn’t count, until and unless it is massive enough to affect the statistical representation of the racial or ethnic group to which they are said to belong. Do “civil rights” groups really want to go there?

In that post I quoted a Daily Princetonian article that (incorrectly) found Li’s complaint “adds a new twist” to anti-discrimination arguments “since previous complaints about universities' racial preference policies have been filed by white students alleging bias.” (Actually, as I pointed out, Li’s twist was not as new as the Daily Princetonian thought, but let’s return to the article.)

In Li’s case, however, “you have a minority candidate, but a minority candidate from a category that is not regarded by the [court] as an underrepresented category,” University politics professor and noted constitutional scholar Robert George said. “This is a minority candidate who is saying, ‘I don’t want my race to be counted for me or against me, but for my race not to be counted against me, it is important that no race be counted in any way that reduces my chances of admission.’”

“So you have two different categories of minority whose interests are allegedly in conflict.”

Here’s a thought: following the example of corporations who issue preferred stock and common stock, perhaps students should consider organizing two categories of minority rights groups. One would contain the minority groups whose “populations” receives preferred treatment at their institution (Hispanics, blacks, Native Americans, “Middle Easterners,” women feminists, etc.); the other all the common, un-preferred minority groups (Asians, Jews, evangelical Christians, conservatives, libertarians, ROTC cadets, etc.)

Posted by John Rosenberg at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Say What? (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In this post yesterday on a tenure controversy I mentioned that I’ve never been impressed with the “role model” justification for affirmative action (and gave one reason why not). In an Addendum I noted that Roger Clegg reminded me that the Supreme Court had also rejected that justification in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, 476 U.S. 267 (1986).

Re-reading that case (one of my Stanford professors used to say that scholars never read anything; we always re-read), I’m reminded that I also have problems with a justification for “racial classification” that the Supremes do accept. From Justice Powell’s majority opinion in Wygant:

The Court of Appeals, relying on the reasoning and language of the District Court’s opinion, held that the Board’s interest in providing minority role models for its minority students, as an attempt to alleviate the effects of societal discrimination, was sufficiently important to justify the racial classification embodied in the layoff provision.... The court discerned a need for more minority faculty role models by finding that the percentage of minority teachers was less than the percentage of minority students....

This Court never has held that societal discrimination alone is sufficient to justify a racial classification. Rather, the Court has insisted upon some showing of prior discrimination by the governmental unit involved before allowing limited use of racial classifications in order to remedy such discrimination....

the role model theory employed by the District Court has no logical stopping point. The role model theory allows the Board to engage in discriminatory hiring and layoff practices long past the point required by any legitimate remedial purpose. Indeed, by tying the required percentage of minority teachers to the percentage of minority students, it requires just the sort of year-to-year calibration the Court stated was unnecessary in [Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 431 U.S. 324 (1977)]....

Moreover, because the role model theory does not necessarily bear a relationship to the harm caused by prior discriminatory hiring practices, it actually could be used to escape the obligation to remedy such practices by justifying the small percentage of black teachers by reference to the small percentage of black students.... Carried to its logical extreme, the idea that black students are better off with black teachers could lead to the very system the Court rejected in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (Brown I).

It’s too bad, in my view, that the Court did not clearly and plainly hold that the right to be free from racial discrimination inheres in individuals, not groups, and thus that discriminating against non-discriminators in the present can never be a legitimate remedy awarded to anyone who was not a victim the employer’s discrimination in the past.

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President Obama habitually accuses critics of his various health reform “plans” of myth-mongering. Examples:

• Portsmouth Town Hall: “... nother myth that we've been hearing about is this notion that somehow we're going to be cutting your Medicare benefits. We are not.”

• On 60 Minutes: When asked the purpose of his speech to the Joint Session, he replied “Well, I think the most important thing was to make sure that American people understood the nature of the problem, what exactly I was proposing, to debunk some of the myths that had been floating around out there...”

• Minnesota Town Hall : “... And contrary to some of the myths out there...”
  

For example, Obama frequently argues that a public option is necessary to counterbalance and restrain obscene industry profits. Thus in a July 22 news conference he asserted that

having a public plan out there that also shows that maybe if you take some of the profit motive out, maybe if you are reducing some of the administrative costs, that you can get an even better deal, that’s going to incentivize the private sector to do even better. And that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing.

Now, you know, there had been reports just over the last couple of days of insurance companies making record profits. Right now, at the time when everybody’s getting hammered, they’re making record profits and premiums are going up.

Consider WellPoint, the biggest private health insurer on Wall Street, which has about 35 million customers nationwide. Last year, it paid out 83.6% of revenues in expenses. Net, after-tax income as a percentage of total revenue came to a princely 4.1%.

Profits are thin at WellPoint, Inc.’s Indianapolis headquarters.
In other words, simply eliminating profits would only allow the public option to undercut the private sector by 4% or so.

Returns on assets, a key measure of profitability, are typically pretty modest too. According to analysis by FactSet, WellPoint’s ROA has averaged 5.8% over the past five years, Aetna’s, 4.2%. Those were, remember, supposedly boom years. UnitedHealth was higher, at 9.6%, but fell to 6.4% in 2008. These are reasonable, but hardly spectacular, results. By comparison, Wal-Mart averaged a 9.2% return on its assets and Dell, Inc. 12.4%.

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Does the justification for the proposed “individual mandate” on every American adult to buy health insurance, or pay an “excise tax” for failing to do so, create a slope so slippery that’s it’s not even a slope but a virtually vertical incline? Could it pave the way for another mandate that would leave today’s health reformers gagging on their current arguments?

I think a pretty good argument can be made that it does.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Boston’s Emerson College has come under fire for is lack of faculty “diversity.” As reported in the Boston Globe article,

[i]n its 129-year history, Emerson College has granted tenure to just three black professors. Two of them had to sue for the distinction. Last year, when two more black scholars were up for tenure, school administrators denied them both, despite approval from colleagues in their departments.

The result has been a flurry of accusations and investigations that have swept across the downtown campus and into the academic world around it. The local chapter of the NAACP has cried foul. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination has launched an inquiry.

“Students and parents are selecting schools where there are role models of the professionals whom the students aspire to be,’’ said Theodore Landsmark, president of the Boston Architectural College and a civil rights leader who is serving on [an outside] panel [reviewing the cases] along with Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds. “Schools that lack diversity are finding that they are less competitive in a global marketplace,’’ Landsmark said.

Be that as it may, if un-diverse institutions will fail because they “are less competitive in the global marketplace,” then no civil rights laws and enforcement mechanisms are needed (EEOC, go home!) because the market will do in the un-diverse.

Finally, note the comment of Prof. Roger House, one of the professors denied tenure this year (but allowed to reply in 2011 in return for dropping his complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination).

House declined recent requests for comment, but previously questioned the fairness of the college’s tenure process. “It seems they have different tenure standards for different people based on race,’’ he told the student newspaper in February.

ADDENDUM

Roger Clegg reminds me (or, if you’re a skeptic, informs me) that “role models” were rejected by the Supreme Court as a justification for racial preferences in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, 476 U.S. 267 (1986). Indeed, Justice Powell, who blessed affirmative action in Bakke, wrote the majority opinion, and Justice O’Connor, who sanctified it in Grutter, concurred.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education today discusses a report arguing that colleges charging more for tickets to men’s basketball games than do for women’s games reflects pervasive, deep-seated sex discrimination.

The report, "Ticket Office Sexism: The Gender Gap in Pricing for NCAA Division I Basketball," was published by the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. It presents data that rebut a “popular but faulty” argument that colleges charge less for women's games than for men's because those events fail to draw comparable crowds—or because the women's teams rank lower than the men's teams.

Among the top 25 men's and women's teams, the report says, colleges charged nearly three times as much, on average, for single-game seats for men's games. The disparity was even greater for season tickets, with the average highest-priced package at $233 for women and $2,500 for men.

I have not read the Wellesley Centers for Women report (available for purchase on its web site), but if anyone has I’d like to know how these attendance figures were regarded as “comparable.” Or perhaps its just that the Wellesley Centers for Women authors do not believe there should be any connection between demand and price. In any event, the demand that that the price difference is both evidence and proof of sex discrimination seems to be a classic example of “comparable worth,” as defined succinctly by labor economist June O’Neill:

Should a truck driver earn more than a telephone operator, or an engineer more than a librarian? Questions like these are largely resolved in the labor market by the forces of supply and demand. Proponents of comparable worth, however, challenge the resulting pattern of wages by arguing that occupations dominated by female workers are paid less than comparable male-dominated jobs because of systematic discrimination against women. Under comparable worth, employers would be required to set wages to reflect differences in the "worth" of jobs, with worth largely determined by job evaluation studies, not by market forces.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Leading liberals like Tom Friedman in the New York Times, Nancy Pelosi in Congress and Jimmy Carter, wherever he is, and uncountable (and unaccountable) academics seem to have become virtually unhinged by the vociferous criticism of President Obama.

Since most of these hand-wringers are not on record being bothered by the even harsher personal invective routinely heaped on President Bush, however, they seem to view civility as a one way street: everything is fine so long as everyone is walking and talking in the direction they want to go.

For example, Politico sponsored a “conversation” the other day on “Deligitimizing [sic] Presidents,” and only the moderator, Fred Barbash, noticed the harsh “delegitimizing” (correctly spelled here) of the opposition coming directly from the White House, a “Reality Check” devoted to denouncing Glenn Beck and “even more Fox lies.”

This double-standard, however, is typical. Thus in the press conference at which Nancy Pelosi “got choked up” by all the horrible political rhetoric coming from Obama’s critics, what she then said was,

And so I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, understanding that — that some of the people — the ears it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume.

Or take Prof. Mary Frances Berry, who had to be pried from her chair on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, one of those taking part in Politico’s “conversation,” where she said that

[t]he slurs and attacks on [Obama] lack a factual basis and, until the next election, there is no way to reconcile the perpetrators in the Constitutional process. The attackers’ very irrationality heightens the danger of an assault.

But this view, as well, merely reflects the rhetoric coming out of the White House, as when President Obama recently told critics to shut up and get out of the way. “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,” he said. “I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess.”

Civility, White House style.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

One of his many promises about which Obama has repeatedly gone out of his way to be “perfectly clear,” as he emphasized in his State of the Union Address, is that

if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.

The proposal, added as part of a last-minute package of modifications to Chairman Max Baucus' bill, would increase the threshold for deducting medical expenses from today's level of 7.5 percent of income to 10 percent. This seemingly small change is projected by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation to cost taxpayers over $4 billion per year....

Of the almost 15 million families affected by this change, only 78,000 have incomes of more than $200,000. The other 99.5 percent of the victims of this tax hit would be below that figure, with many of them being far from wealthy. In fact, more than 62 percent of the taxpayers affected by this change make less than $75,000 per year.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)