Discriminations

Riding around Virginia’s 5th District with my Congressman, embattled first-term Democrat Tom Perriello (who won by 727 votes in 2008 riding on Obama’s now tattered coattails), David Corn of Mother Jones writes:

... Perriello explains why he thinks his brand of “conviction politics” can win over voters ... : “I don’t see the dividing line as liberal versus conservative. It’s populist versus corporatist. If we’re not standing up to the most powerful interests, where is the Democratic Party?” Perriello acknowledges that some in the conservative district may judge him harshly based on his votes for health care, cap and trade, and the stimulus.

Presumably as an example of his own standing up to powerful interests,

Perriello notes, “I’ve been incredibly critical of [White House economic adviser] Lawrence Summers as someone who wouldn’t know anyone making less than six figures, unless that person was driving him around.”

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I always thought Stanley Crouch was a perceptive, interesting writer. Either he’s recently become unhinged, as this piece clearly suggests, or I was wrong all along.

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By the ineffable logic of “disparate impact” discrimination, Title IX discriminates against ... black girls and women.

Don’t believe me? Then read this.

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Walter E. Fauntroy , pastor emeritus of Washington’s New Bethel Baptist Church, was Washington, D.C.’s, first non-voting delegate to Congress (1971-1991), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, one of the organizers of the March on Washington in 1963 that featured Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, one of the organizers of the Selma to Montgomery march, and many other activities related to civil rights. He is also known as someone who would “regularly burst into song” if given half an opportunity (or not), such as “at the end of an address.”

The song he is singing now, however, makes him the latest and perhaps the saddest exhibit of how far the remnants of the old civil rights movement have fallen from the values that animated that movement and led it to success. Speaking at the National Press Club yesterday promoting a “new coalition of conscience” to oppose Glen Beck’s gathering at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow (the anniversary of King’s famous speech), Fauntroy said

“We are going to take on the barbarism of war, the decadence of racism, and the scourge of poverty, that the Ku Klux — I meant to say the Tea Party.... You all forgive me, but I — you have to use them interchangeably....”

Fauntroy said right-wing conservatives have “declared war on the civil rights movement of the 1960s....”

“I don’t want you to think I’m angry,” Fauntroy said. “[But] when this right-wing conservative exclusionary group comes to highjack our movement, we have got to respond. And I’m looking forward to that Coalition of Conscience, in defense of jobs and freedom for women.”

Do you believe the federal and state government should treat all Americans without regard to race?

For respondents who appear puzzled by the “without regard” concept, the following explication should be offered: it means no agency of government can discriminate against or give preferential treatment to any American based on race.

How do you think the answers of the Tea Party followers of Glenn Beck and the “Coalition of Conscience” followers of Walter Fauntroy would compare? Which would be closer to Martin Luther King’s dream?

If the Glenn Becks have “highjacked” that dream, it’s only because the Walter Fauntroys have abandoned it. [Query: can all the people like me, who agreed with King's dream then and agree with it now, be said to have “highjacked” it?]

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Let us all hope the Obamas enjoy their Martha’s Vineyard vacation. What’s not to enjoy, a cynic might add, about a 10 day hideaway in a private estate said to rent to most mortals for around $50,000 a week? But since I’m not a cynic, I won’t ask.

But I do have one request. Can the president (or his speechwriters) at least now put to rest one of his most cloying verbal tics (much more grating, because more self-congratulatory, than “make no mistake” or “let me be clear...”).

I am referring to his incessantly repeated “I will not rest until....”

• businesses are investing and hiring:

• everyone has a job, a good wage, & benefits;

• YouTube compilation of 8 Obamian “I will not rest[s]...”

• 11 “I will not rest[s]” noted by CBS News

Now let me be clear: Mr. President, go ahead, rest, please! But make no mistake, change will not be easy, but yes [you] can change this irritating rhetorical habit even though

[t]here will be setbacks, and false starts, and sometimes we will make mistakes. But as hard as it may seem, we cannot lose hope.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED twice]

For the past day or so the mainstream press has been all a-twitter (as have Twitter, the blogs, and the talk shows) with recent polls indicating a rising number of Americans think Obama is a Muslim and a falling number believe he is a Christian.

On August 18 The Pew Forum on Religion and Public life started the recent buzz by reporting that Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim.

A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is. The survey was completed in early August, before Obama’s recent comments about the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Center.

In all, just 47% of respondents believe Obama is a Christian; 24% declined to respond to the question or said they were unsure, and 5% believe he is neither Christian nor Muslim.

Since October 2008, the percentage of Americans who say the president is a Muslim has risen from 12 percent to 18 percent. The percentage of people who think he is a Christian has fallen from 51 percent to 34 percent.

A good argument can be made, however, that a wide swath of the public’s “perception of ‘otherness’” is not a “misperception” at all. Indeed, Dorothy Rabinowitz made not a good but a great, immensely powerful argument on this very point back in June, well before the current Muslim controversies. In The Alien in the White House, in the Wall Street Journal she argued that “[t]he distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed,” that

it was clear from the first that this president — single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival — was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans’ leader, a man of them, for them, the nation’s voice and champion.

They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe....

.... The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere — in the salons of the left the world over — and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures — her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands — something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

Let’s start with Islam. Obama has made no secret — indeed, he has proudly proclaimed in his autobiographies and various speeches — that he chose his Muslim father’s name and race when he could have as easily chosen his mother’s and her parents’. He attended a Muslim school as a child in Indonesia, which he spoke of fondly in a 2007 interview with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Indeed, in a 2008 column Kristof took some of the blame for what he regarded as the successful attempt to “otherize” Obama:

Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim — as if that in itself were wrong — regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia.

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s own grandfather in Kenya was a Muslim. Mr. Obama never met his grandfather and says he isn’t sure if his grandfather’s two wives were simultaneous or consecutive, or even if he was Sunni or Shiite. (O.K., maybe Mr. Obama should just give up on Alabama.)

More recently, during his campaign and as president Obama has devoted not inconsiderable efforts to “reaching out” to Muslims, even to the point of making improved relations with the Muslim world the “foremost mission” of NASA, the space (spaced out?) agency. According to NASA administrator Gen. Charles Bolden, the president “charged me with three things.”

One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering.

In June 2007, for example, Senator Obama told the national meeting of the United Church of Christ, that “some right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.”

“But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before a national meeting of the United Church of Christ.

“At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design,” he said.

“There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its No. 1 legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich,” Obama said. “I don't know what Bible they're reading, but it doesn't jibe with my version.”

Let us also not forget Candidate Obama’s famous slur on rural rubes, that

they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

In short, the combination of Obama’s cultural distance from mainstream American, his special “sensitivity” to Muslims and the Muslim world, and his disparaging remarks about evangelicals along with his long sympathetic association with Rev. Wright could easily lead many quite reasonable Americans to be unsure about his religious identity. This is true, I think, especially because most suspicions that Obama is Muslim or is not Christian are not based on theological speculation. They are much more a comment about his cultural distance from themselves than a firm conviction that he worships Allah, that he bows down to Mecca every day, etc.

Obama, they believe, as Rush Limbaugh has suggested, may be our first Muslim president in the same way that Bill Clinton was regarded by many as our first black president.

Finally, there is an additional, unnoted (so far as I know) reason why so many Americans are skeptical of announcements such as this recent one from the White House:

White House says Obama is Christian, prays daily

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is a Christian who prays daily, a White House official said Thursday, trying to tamp down growing doubts about the president's religion.

no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

UPDATE

Byron York has more to say (and he says it well) about why the public can reasonably be confused about Obama’s religious identity.

UPDATE II

James Taranto disagrees with James Carville’s explanation of why so many people believe Obama is a Muslim — “there are a lot of stupid people out there” — and as evidence asks “What right-wing rag published” the following during the 2008 campaign:

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother's Christian background is irrelevant....

The article, by Edward Luttwak, stated that “[i]n Islam . . . there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.” It also noted that

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings....

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House....

That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be. But of all the well-meaning desires projected on Senator Obama, the hope that he would decisively improve relations with the world’s Muslims is the least realistic.

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My Congressman (Fifth District of Virginia), Tom Perriello, a first-termer who won by 700 votes holding on to a thread of Obama’s coattails and who is known not so affectionately by those who hope his first will also be his last term as Tom Pelosiello, was hammered during the tumultuous town hall meetings of last August.

On August 10 I discussed a misleading article about his campaign for re-election here. The next day the Charlotte Daily Progress reported that the embattled incumbent had banned political signs from his meetings.

Prior to the [Scottsville] town hall meeting, Steve Peters, a member of the Jefferson Area Tea Party, complained that Perriello’s office decided to prohibit political signs inside this year’s town halls.

“Last year we were allowed to have our signs,” said Peters, standing outside and holding an anti-Perriello sign. “We didn’t have to sit like little kids in a classroom where you have to raise your hand to ask a question.”
….
Perriello’s district director, Ridge Schuyler, said he chose to ban signs to ensure that the town halls are an opportunity for constituents to interact with their congressman without partisan politics getting in the way.

By John S. Rosenberg | Albemarle County
Published: August 19, 2010

The Daily Progress reports (“Praise, complaints and hard questions for Perriello in Scottsville,” Aug. 11) that Tom Perriello has prohibited political signs at his meetings with voters.

His district director explains that “he chose to ban signs to ensure that the town halls are an opportunity for constituents to interact with their congressman without partisan politics getting in the way.”

“Partisan politics” at campaign events? Who’d a thought?

Perriello has almost always voted down the line with Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in his first term, a record that no doubt explains why, according to the campaign finance monitors at opensecrets.org, he has received well over twice as much money from Democratic campaign committees as the average House member. (See http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cidN00029339).

Heaven forbid that the congressman should have to deal with “partisan politics” when he attempts to explain and justify these votes to his constituents.

After facing criticism that he was stifling free speech, U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello will now allow political signs at his 10 remaining town hall meetings across the district.

Perriello’s office had banned signs at his 20 scheduled town hall forums during Congress’ recess after a number of constituents told them that the abundance of signs at last year’s town hall forums contributed to an overly charged and politicized atmosphere.

The Rutherford Institute, an Albemarle County-based civil liberties organization, chastised the freshman Democrat over the sign ban policy Wednesday.

“Your sign ban amounts to an act of outright censorship that raises grave Constitutional concerns,” wrote Rutherford Institute founder and President John W. Whitehead in a letter to Perriello.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a new post on Minding The Campus, Big Gap In Two Big Gap Studies, that discusses, as you might expect, what I could have called (but didn’t, since Minding The Campus is a respectable site) a gaping gap in two big studies of graduation gaps.

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Back in 2003 I wrote a longish post on The Inscrutable Randall Kennedy. Kennedy, I began that post (noting that I had met him several times and that we share a good mutual friend),

is both a prominent and an impressive law professor at Harvard who has written both widely and deeply about race and the law. He is perhaps best known for his general support of color blindness in such areas as jury selection, where he has argued against insuring racial balance, and adoption, where he defends cross-racial adoption. These views are not common among tenured black law professors at leading law schools, and Kennedy has been roundly denounced by Derrick Bell, among others, who calls him “a critic of blacks,” and worse.

In addition to a big book arguing these themes, Race, Crime, and the Law (Pantheon, 1997), Kennedy has also written a number of controversial articles, such as “My Race Problem — And Ours” (Atlantic Monthly, May 1997), in which he argues against racial pride, racial loyalty, racial kinship, and even racial identity, celebrating instead what the philosopher Michael Sandel criticizes as “the unencumbered self.” Kennedy thus embraces what Sandel rejects as “shallow liberalism.”

Freed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status [Kennedy is quoting Sandel here], unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice, the self is installed as sovereign, cast as the author of the only obligations that constrain.

Examples from some of those writings:

• I disapprove of most forms of public affirmative action myself, on the premise that public authorities shouldn't be permitted to allocate burdens and benefits on racial grounds in the absence of an absolute emergency. (Reviewing Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, America in Black and White in SLATE, 10/14/1997).

• Opposing restrictions on cross-racial adoptions
  ... under our law, the drawing of racial distinctions, particularly by government officials, is and should be presumptively illegitimate.... Typically ... , our legal system rightly prohibits authorities from making decisions on the basis of racial generalizations, even if the generalizations are accurate. [Opposing the Metzenbaum bill, which expressly permitted adoption agencies to use race in placing children, “Orphans of Separatism, The American Prospect, Spring 1994).

• Opposing required racial balance on juries
  I’m against the deployment of racial distinctions in the law to create racially mixed juries. I’m for a strong and vigorously enforced anti-discrimination norm so that nobody is excluded on a racial basis. After that, I say, that’s enough. (Interview with Mother Jones, July 1997

• Opposing racial profiling by police
  Taking race into account at all means engaging in racial discrimination. [This follows several paragraphs where Kennedy takes issue with those who argue that lack of a bad intent, or the presence of non-discriminatory motives, or even the reasonableness of the action can justify taking race into account.]
  

  A disturbing feature of the debate over racial profiling is that many people, including judges, are suggesting that decisions distinguishing between persons on a racial basis do not constitute unlawful racial discrimination when race is not the sole consideration prompting the disparate treatment.... This dilution of the meaning of discrimination is troubling not only because it permits racial profiling to continue.... Even worse, this concession will likely seep into other areas of racial controversy, causing mischief along the way. [“Will likely seep???? Hellloooo. Looked at admission policy lately? — jsr] ... individuals should be judged by public authority on the basis of their own conduct and not on the basis —not even partly on the basis — of racial generalization.

  [Politicians must do more than end bigotry.] They must be willing to demand equal treatment before the law even under circumstances in which unequal treatment is plausibly defensible in the name of nonracist goals. (“Suspect Policy,” The New Republic, Sept. 20, 1999).
  

• Ubiquitous inconsistency
  

  Vocal supporters of racial profiling who trumpet the urgency of communal needs when discussing law enforcement all of a sudden become fanatical individualists when condemning affirmative action in college admissions and the labor market. Supporters of profiling, who are willing to impose what amounts to a racial tax on profiled groups, denounce as betrayals of “color blindness” programs that require racial diversity. A similar turnabout can be seen on the part of many of those who support affirmative action. Impatient with talk of communal needs in assessing racial profiling, they very often have no difficulty with subordinating the interests of individual white candidates to the purported good of the whole. Opposed to race consciousness in policing, they demand race consciousness in deciding whom to admit to college or select for a job. [“Racial Profiling,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2002]
  

an important, albeit merely partial, way in which our society is attempting to repair the gaping wounds caused by innumerable racist actions and inactions that have fundamentally betrayed America's most noble aspirations. Hopefully the policy will survive the right's grotesque attempt to strangle it judicially in the name of equality.

I still wonder because Kennedy is still inscrutable. So far as I know he has never rejected his eloquent objections to many racial preference policies while continuing strenuously to defend others, such as in his article a week ago in The American Prospect, “The Enduring Relevance of Affirmative Action,” where he argues that affirmative action was on the ropes until it was rescued by the brilliant “diversity rationale.”

The rise of the diversity rationale for affirmative action has not been costless, but it has ensured that appreciable numbers of racial minorities are in strategic positions, while dampening certain side effects that attend any regime of racial selectivity. Unlike affirmative action based on grounds of compensatory justice, the diversity rationale is non-accusatory. It doesn’t depend on an assumption of culpability for some past or present wrong, and it minimizes the anger ignited when whites are accused of being beneficiaries of racial privilege. Everyone can be a part of diversity.

Many are drawn to the diversity rationale because it frames affirmative action not as special aid for designated groups but as a way of producing better services and products....

The diversity rationale also facilitates the evasion of prickly subjects — for instance, the fact that racial minorities selected for valued positions sometimes have records that, according to certain criteria such as standardized tests, are inferior to those of white competitors.

Next, note that Kennedy actually acknowledges that the diversity rationale doesn’t respond to the objections to affirmative action, which he helpfully summarized earlier in his article:

Conservatives charged that affirmative action amounts to “reverse racism”; discriminates against “innocent whites”; stigmatizes its putative beneficiaries; erodes the incentives that prompt individuals to put forth their best efforts; lowers standards; produces inefficiencies; goes to those racial minorities who need it least; and generates racial resentments.

Kennedy does attempt, lamely I think, to look on the bright side of “diversity,” but I believe it falls flat.

The diversity rationale moves the spotlight from the perceived deficiencies of racial minorities to their perceived strengths. Unlike other justifications for affirmative action that seek to make exceptions to meritocracy, the diversity rationale is consistent with meritocratic premises. This is the most striking and historically significant aspect of affirmative action: It enables racial-minority status for the first time in American history to be seen as a valuable credential. Instead of the presence of blacks and other racial minorities constituting an expiation of past sins, the diversity rationale makes their presence a welcome and positive good.

The best thing that I can think of to say about Kennedy’s argument here is that most of Kennedy’s other writings demolish it and the principle-less puff it rides on. About Kennedy himself something better can be said: the slippery way the argument is stated suggests the possibility that even he doesn’t believe it. First, his defense is always of “the diversity rationale,” not diversity itself, which might require a substantive definition and argument. Next, it “moves the spotlight” to perceived strengths, not actual strengths that again would have to be identified. Finally — and this is its “most striking and historically significant aspect” — the diversity rationale enables minority status to be seen as a “meritocratic” credential.

The fact that the intellectual core of American liberalism has become so degraded that its leading lights can with a straight face point to "minority status," i.e., pigmentation and nothing more, as a "meritocratic" credential is depressing enough, but that Kennedy himself, who has so powerfully criticized the racializing of merit and even of identity itself, can do so is truly astounding.

This whole argument, in short, is devoid not only of principle — why is this racial profiling just but other racial profiling not? — but even of any actual substance. Forget about “the diversity rationale” frame; what about diversity itself? What is it that justifies the racial discrimination done in its name? What exactly are the “strengths” that it allows to be perceived, the meritocratic credentials that it allows to be seen?

Not only do I still find Kennedy inscrutable, but this tepid defense of “the diversity rationale” makes him even more inscrutable than he was before. That’s because, as I read his long list of trenchant, perceptive criticisms of taking race into account in criminal law, in juries, in adoptions, on the highways and in airports, and especially, in “My Race Problem — And Ours” (linked above), I think both “diversity” and its “rationale” not only contradict but actually violate the deepest concerns that I saw in those critiques.

Consider the Kennedy who shines forth from that noteworthy article:

Neither racial pride nor racial kinship offers guidance that is intellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory....

I ESCHEW racial pride because of my conception of what should properly be the object of pride for an individual: something that he or she has accomplished. I can feel pride in a good deed I have done or a good effort I have made. I cannot feel pride in some state of affairs that is independent of my contribution to it. The color of my skin, the width of my nose, the texture of my hair, and the various other signs that prompt people to label me black constitute such a state of affairs. I did not achieve my racial designation. It was something I inherited — like my nationality and socio-economic starting place and sex — and therefore something I should not feel proud of or be credited with....

I REJECT the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels “the unencumbered self.” The unencumbered self is free and independent, “unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself,” Sandel writes.... [Kennedy embraces what Sandel rejects.]

One defense of racial kinship takes the shape of an analogy between race and family....

.... I want to accept the race-family analogy in order to strengthen my attack on assumptions that privilege status-driven loyalties (the loyalties of blood) over chosen loyalties (the loyalties of will)....

Am I saying that, morally, blood ties are an insufficient, indeed bad, basis for preferring one's genetic relatives to others? Yes....

SOME contend ... that the reason one should feel morally compelled by virtue of one's blackness to have and show racial solidarity toward other blacks is that preceding generations of black people did things animated by racial loyalty which now benefit all black people.... I agree that one should be grateful to those who have waged struggles for racial justice, sometimes at tremendous sacrifice. But why should my gratitude be racially bounded?

THUS far I have mainly argued that a black person should not feel morally bound to experience and show racial kinship with other blacks. But what do I say to a person who is considering whether to choose to embrace racial kinship . . . ?

I contend that in the mind, heart, and soul of a teacher there should be no stratification of students such that a teacher feels closer to certain pupils than to others on grounds of racial kinship. No teacher should view certain students as his racial "brothers and sisters" while viewing others as, well, mere students. Every student should be free of the worry that because of race, he or she will have less opportunity to benefit from what a teacher has to offer. [Query: Shouldn’t all applicants also be free of this worry? — jsr]....

.... [I]t is said with increasing urgency by increasing numbers of people that the various social difficulties confronting black Americans are, for reasons of racial kinship, the moral responsibility of blacks, particularly those who have obtained some degree of affluence. This view should be rejected. The difficulties that disproportionately afflict black Americans are not "black problems" whose solutions are the special responsibility of black people. They are our problems....

A second reason why the justification for outreach matters is that unlike an appeal to racial kinship, an appeal to an ideal untrammeled by race enables any person or group to be the object of solicitude....

.... I evaluate arguments in favor of exempting blacks from the same standards imposed upon whites and conclude that typically, though perhaps not always, such arguments amount to little more than an elaborate camouflage for self-promotion or group promotion.....

A second reason I resist arguments in favor of asymmetrical standards of judgment has to do with my sense of the requirements of reciprocity. I find it difficult to accept that it is wrong for whites to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of white advancement but morally permissible for blacks to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of black advancement....

.... [I]f one looks at the most admirable efforts by activists to overcome racial oppression in the United States, one finds people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular racial group....

is justified by the benefits it allegedly provides to those non-minoritiy students who are exposed to the “diverse” minorities who are preferentially admitted (those minorities, after all, would receive whatever benefits “diversity” has to offer even if they attended less competitive schools), there is an ugly, unstated element of exploitation associated with it.

I’m afraid “inscrutable” may be too weak a description of Randall Kennedy’s inconsistencies. Even more than racial profiling by law enforcement, racial balancing of juries, or racial restrictions in abortion, “the diversity rationale” rationalizes everything he otherwise eloquently claims to oppose.

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President Obama ...

Boasts of Most ‘Progressive’ Political Triumphs in Decades

while Gallup reports

New Lows in Job Approval.

I wonder if there’s a connection.

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On Big Journalism today I discuss a travesty that I’m sure has consumed many of you sports fans, the shocking lack of “diversity” among third base coaches in major league baseball.

I also test your source-spotting skills by asking you to guess whether an article about that issue that I quote was news in the New York Times or a parody in The Onion.

Finally, I just noticed that Thomas Sowell discussed the same issue somewhat more soberly in Bean-Counters and Baloney.

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Prefacing his comment supporting the Ground Zero mosque with one of his signature verbal tics indicating that he really, really means what he was about to to say (“But let me be clear”), President Obama recently announced:

But let me be clear. As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.

What is interesting here is not this nod to originalism — a nod that is sure to be as temporary as it is insincere — but rather how the president chooses to defend the principle of religious liberty. “[O]ver the course of our history, he explains,

religion has flourished within our borders precisely because Americans have had the right to worship as they choose — including the right to believe in no religion at all. And it is a testament to the wisdom of our Founders that America remains deeply religious — a nation where the ability of peoples of different faiths to coexist peacefully and with mutual respect for one another stands in stark contrast to the religious conflict that persists elsewhere around the globe.

Never mind that few critics of that decision deny the right. What is fascinating here is how Obama defines the right that he defends: “In this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion.” [Emphasis mine]

Let’s ignore for now both the fact that this assertion is clearly not true — it is official government policy in this country to treat some people better and others worse because of their race — and even the fact that Obama himself supports preferential treatment based on race and opposes all efforts to prohibit it. What is noteworthy is that he is now on record as recognizing that both religious freedom and racial equality require governmental neutrality, a principle embedded in the Constitution by the “writ of the Founders” whose wisdom has been confirmed over “the course of our history.”

As it happens, I’ve written about the relationship between religious liberty and racial equality before, and I hope you will indulge me in quoting a long excerpt from this 2002 post (occasioned by the then-recent Cleveland school voucher case) where I argued that “the principle of neutrality ... derives not so much from the text of the Constitution as from something deeper in the very structure of our society,” the very thing identified by Obama in his recent comment:

That something is the overriding fact of religious pluralism, a pluralism that in the absence of official neutrality would lead to constant strife and conflict. The dissenters, in short, recognize that the small “c” constitution of American society of necessity dictates the meaning of the large “C” Constitution.

Race and Sects in American History

.... One of the most cherished myths of American history is that our foremothers and forefathers fled the Old World for the New to escape religious bigotry and build a new society based on religious freedom. In fact, the Puritans’ strongest complaint against the Old World was that it was too tolerant, that it was swimming in a sea of such moral sloth and corruption that it had lost all interest in purifying the church. The New World appealed to them because it was empty (except for the “heathens” ripe for conversion), and they could establish Godly communities the way they were quite certain God intended.

And yet within several generations religious toleration had broken out all over. Despite the best efforts of the Puritan divines, diversity could not be denied. The Baptists and Quakers proved irrepressible. Mennonites appeared, and Methodists sprouted like weeds in the wake of itinerant ministers. Even many Congregational churches split asunder as revivalist “New Lights” walked out and founded competing congregations.

What happened? Unintended and unplanned, America began to happen. What Voltaire said cynically about England came to be celebrated here: “If there were one religion . . . , its despotism would be terrible; if there were only two, they would destroy each other; but there are 30, and therefore they live in peace and happiness.”

Toleration developed not because it was valued but because it was necessary. “Freedom came to the Western world,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, one of our greatest theologians, “by the inadvertence of history. Toleration was an absolute necessity for a community which had lost its religio-cultural unity and could find peace only if toleration and freedom were accepted.”

America discovered, however, that toleration alone was not sufficient. Strict neutrality was also required, a prohibition against the state favoring any of the contending sects. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in Zorach v. Clauson (1952), “it is only by isolating the state from the religious sphere and compelling it to be completely neutral that the freedom of each and every denomination and of all nonbelievers can be maintained.” Or as the Court held in Abingdon School District v. Schempp (1963), “the government is neutral, and, while protecting all, it prefers none.”

But if the very structure of American society requires a principle of neutrality that in turn requires a separation of church and state (as the dissenters and I believe it does), should it not also compel a separation of race and state? After all, as the eminent Berkeley historian David Hollinger has written, in our time “ethno-racial affiliations have come to play a role similar to that played by religious affiliations at the time of the founding of the republic and throughout most of American history.” (POST-ETHNIC AMERICA, Basic Books, 1995, p. 123). Surely racial and ethnic preferences are at least as “divisive” today as debates over school vouchers, which seem to have bothered a few litigants and the courts much more than the society as a whole.

As a perceptive if fickle critic of affirmative action has written, racial and ethnic preferences predictably lead (and in fact have led) to

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

The rising emphasis on group difference which government is called upon to correct might mean the destruction of any hope for the larger fraternity of all Americans.

That was Nathan Glazer, in AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION (Basic Books, 1975), and if anything he underestimated the divisiveness of bestowing governmental favors on the basis of race and ethnicity. Now that liberals have abandoned the formerly core value holding that every individual is entitled to be treated without regard to race, creed, or color in favor of multiculturalism and group rights, the very idea of “the larger fraternity of all Americans” is regarded by many as nothing more than right-wing cant.

Or consider the current mantra of “diversity.” Harvard law professor Christopher Edley — former White House aide, co-author of President Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” review of affirmative action policies, advisor to Clinton’s race commission, fervent advocate of racial preferences (he described Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE as “a crime against humanity”), and advisor to the 2000 Gore campaign — has written that “our rich religious diversity” provides a model for racial diversity. “We are fairly united as one of the most religious nations on earth,” Edley wrote, “but we worship differently, celebrate that fact, and recognize that religious differences should play only a limited role in our social and economic lives. Perhaps a model along these lines is what is needed in race.” (Edley, “Why Talk About Race?” Washington Post OpEd, 7 December 1997, p. C1.)

Indeed it is, but this “model” suggests a conclusion that Edley and other preferentialists will not like. If ethnic and racial groups are now analogous to religious sects, why should it be permissible for the state to grant preferences to the former when it is clearly prohibited from doing so to the latter?

Perhaps Justice Breyer and his like-minded brethren, on and off the Court, can be called on to explain why they fear “the risk” of “potential” divisiveness in what they see as religious preferences but not the clear and present divisiveness of racial and ethnic preferences. Or, in the alternative, they could explain why a principle that they believe justifies racial preferences does not also justify religious preference, for certainly they recognize that religion provides as good or better basis for “diversity” as race. Would they look on religious preferences in admissions and hiring with the same favor they bestow on racial and ethnic preferences? What is it precisely that would make a preference for Arabs acceptable but for Muslims unacceptable? Are not evangelical Christians “underrepresented” among the students and on the faculties of our elite, selective universities? Why must the Michigan law school have a “critical mass” of blacks and Hispanics but not of Missouri Synod Lutherans? Why was the old quota system that restricted the number of Jews in the Ivy League (presumably) wrong, but the de facto quota system that restricted the number of Asians admitted to Berkeley and UCLA under the reign of preferences not wrong?

In short, perhaps it is time to insist on a separation of race and state, to insist in the ethnic and racial sphere, as well as the religious, that government must be neutral, that it protect all of its constituent groups but prefer none — not because the First Amendment compels neutrality in this sphere, but because of the same social reality that led to the First Amendment in the first place.

President Obama seems, at least on this occasion, to understand the principle. Now let him practice it.

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The real Maxine Waters scandal is that what she admits is worse than what she denies, but no one regards it as scandalous.

What she denies is that she “violated anything” in arranging government assistance to a bank in which her husband had a substantial financial interest.

In effect, Waters admits to the facts at the center of the House ethics committee report, which said that

Waters’s office improperly worked in September 2008 to press for aid to prevent the failure of Boston-based OneUnited Bank, which eventually stayed afloat with the help of money from the Troubled Assets Relief Program.

Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board. He owned stock in OneUnited that had declined in value from $350,000 in June 2008 to $175,000 two months later and would have been “worthless” without the bailout funds, according to the ethics committee.

attacked the media for covering her ethics scandals but not her longtime work in pressing for minorities to get more government contracts and other federal aid, which she says was the reason she aided black-owned banks during the financial crisis.

did not seek special treatment for OneUnited but rather tried to gain access to treasury for an association of minority-owned banks that otherwise couldn’t have gotten a meeting.

Indeed, as the Washington Post reports,

[e]ventually, the language in the TARP bill, which Congress passed in October 2008, included a provision that would aid small, minority-owned banks such as OneUnited, and the bank received $12 million two months later.

was written into the federal bailout legislation by [Rep. Barney] Frank, who is chairman of the financial-services panel. Mr. Frank has said he inserted the provision to help the only African-American owned bank in his home state.

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Some of you may have seen what you thought was President Obama’s recent YouTube video taking us on a tour of his new Healthcare.gov website.

Actually, that may have been a parody. A much better, and more entertaining, guide can be found here.

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Harry Reid has been getting a lot of flack for saying on Tuesday that he doesn’t know “how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”

Now, in one sense it’s not clear why Harry Reid admitting that he doesn’t know something everyone else knows should be news, since it’s been clear for a long time that there are many well-known things Harry Reid doesn’t know. Mary Katherine Ham pointed out one of them in the Weekly Standard:

Maybe if Rory Reid weren’t having to distance himself from his father to the point of forgoing his last name, Harry Reid would be more familiar with the idea of a Nevadan, Hispanic Republican. In his quest for the Nevada governorship, Rory Reid is getting trounced in polls at the moment by Brian Sandoval, a former federal judge, Attorney General, and ... Hispanic Republican.

Would Senator Reid say the same thing about blacks? After all, a sizable cohort of his fellow liberals insist that all “authentic” blacks must be Democrats, their opinions assigned to them by the grievance elite.

Are the interests of Mexican-Americans indistinguishable from those of Cuban Americans? Are all Hispanics identical regardless of national origin? Are Hispanics nothing more than a fungible political commodity?

One of the things everyone knows about Harry Reid is what he thinks of Republicans: not much, to say the least. Hispanics he expects to know better than to associate with such low life (sort of like “Hispanics don’t let Hispanics vote Republican”), but he has no similar expectation of Jews and blacks.

Harry Reid would no doubt say in his defense, “No, no! You’ve got it all wrong. I don’t discriminate in what I don’t know! I don’t understand how any decent person, of whatever race or color, could be a Republican!”

As I said, the world is full of things Harry Reid doesn’t know.

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Tumultuous

adj.

...

2. Greatly agitated, confused, or disturbed

I heartily recommend this critical discussion of Tumultuous reporting by the Washington Post.

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John McWhorter has written a depressing review of what sounds like an enormously impressive book by Amy Wax, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century, in The New Republic.

“This book is depressing,” McWhorter begins his review, “because it is so persuasive.”

His review is worth reading, and I’m afraid it sounds like the book is too.

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Recently I’ve criticized several leading major media columnists, twice on Big Journalism — Eugene Robinson and David Broder — and once here, Charles Blow. I will now convert this trilogy into a quartet by taking a look at the August 1 column by Doyle McManus, the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau Chief from 1996 to 2008 and now that paper’s Washington columnist.

Let me say at the outset that McManus’s views, like the views of Robinson, Blow, and Broder, are worth discussing not because they’re distinctive but precisely because they’re not. They all express and represent the liberal, Democratic Conventional Wisdom of the nation’s elite political class. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to say that it’s no accident all have found a happy home as columnists at the pinnacles of mainstream mediadom.

McManus wants all of us, but especially the president, to talk more about race. He’s disappointed that “Barack Obama, our first black president, doesn’t like talking about race,” he notes in the first paragraph of his column. “He wants his presidency to be remembered for fixing the economy, installing a national healthcare plan and building a new foreign policy, not the color of his skin.”

Well, one can want whatever one wants. I’m sure James Buchanan wanted to be remembered as the president who avoided civil war and Jimmy Carter wanted to go down in history as the rescuer of American hostages in Iran. I want a brand new Porsche, and am about as likely to get it as Obama is to select what he will be remembered by.

“But the original sin of racial discrimination never stays out of our national conversation for long, and last week even Obama couldn't duck the subject,” McManus continued, arguing that Obama not only can’t but shouldn’t avoid the subject. [And speaking of “the original sin of racial discrimination,” as all the conventionally wise authoritative OpEd liberals do, I analyzed Frank Rich’s version of that trope in “The Original Sin of Frank Rich” on Pajamas Media, here.]

Like many Americans, McManus obviously believed that Obama’s candidacy embodied the promise of a post-racial America. Unlike many more Americans, he apparently still believes.

Obama’s allergy to talking about race relations is understandable.

He won the presidency, in part, by not talking about race. Most of the time, he didn’t have to. Part of his appeal was his gift of being not only African American but biracial and even post-racial. He embodied the promise of racial healing. Vote for Obama, the not very subliminal message went, and we will be a better country by the close of election day. His biography and his appearance made the point better than words.

But that was all about the Obama of the campaign. What about now?

Some of the president’s right-wing critics appear desperate to change the subject to race. Their argument, in the words of Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck, is that Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.... This guy is, I believe, a racist.” Don’t look for evidence to back up that poisonous charge; there isn’t any. But Beck and others seem to think that by repeating it, they can not only erode Obama’s legitimacy as a racial healer but convince white voters that he’s anti-them. And anti-majority politicians don’t win many elections.

Has Obama appointed any Justice, judge, or federal official in any office who does not believe blacks and Hispanics should receive preferential treatment at the expense of whites and Asians? Does Obama not oppose state constitutional amendments to prohibit racial and ethnic favoritism by state agencies? Has his administration not filed a brief supporting racial preferences in college admissions? Was Obama referring to blacks and Hispanics when he talked about small town rubes clinging to their guns and religion? Did he ever object to Wright’s racist rants until those rants became known and embarrassed him? Has his Justice Department not dismissed an already won case against the racist thugs of the New Black Panther Party? More significantly, is his Justice Department not still refusing to honor subpoenas to Civil Rights Division officials even in the face of sworn testimony that as a matter of policy that division refuses to pursue voting discrimination charges against minority defendants? McManus may believe these policies should enhance the legitimacy of Obama’s legacy as “a racial healer,” but not everyone agrees.

If there were any doubt about McManus’s own biases, they are erased by the following paragraph:

Obama has every reason to keep himself offstage when the issue is race. Being a “normal” president — by focusing on policy and legislation rather than race relations — has been one of his signal achievements. To most of white America, he’s just the president, not the black president. In most of the country, the conversation isn’t about whether Obama is favoring blacks or whites or anyone else; it’s about whether his stimulus plan can work and whether he’s running too big a deficit.

I’m sure that most white Americans would dearly love for President Obama to be “just the president, not the black president,” but I’m considerably less sure that most do believe that to be the case, and there are fewer of them every day, with good reason. Moreover, it may well be true that in most of the country “the conversation isn’t about whether Obama is favoring blacks or whites,” but that doesn’t mean the favoring isn’t happening.

The fact that McManus is clearly still a Believer in Obama’s campaign promise of post-racialism, that he continues to believe Obama is a “racial healer” who favors neither blacks nor whites, is touching. But it is simply further evidence (as if further evidence were needed) of how far removed the esteemed elite commentators of the political class who inhabit positions of power in the mainstream media are from average Americans, whose views of the political landscape they inhabit are far more accurate.

The fact that McManus is clearly still a Believer in Obama’s campaign promise of post-racialism, that he continues to believe Obama is a “racial healer” who favors neither blacks nor whites, is touching. But it is simply further evidence (as if further evidence were needed) of how far removed the esteemed elite commentators of the political class who inhabit positions of power in the mainstream media are from average Americans, whose views of their political leaders and the political landscape they inhabit are far more accurate.

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I am accustomed to disagreeing with the designated race writers in the mainstream media — the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson [also here, citing several others], the Boston Globe’s Derrick Z. Jackson, the Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page, the New York Times’s Charles Blow come quickly to mind — but I do not usually find their columns sputteringly incoherent. That, however, is the only way I know how to describe Charles Blow’s Obama’s ‘Race’ War in the New York Times on July 31.

I’m sure I would disagree with it, too, if I knew what Blow was trying to say, but I don’t. I don’t even know why “Race” is in quotes in his title.

As I read it (help me on this in the comments; I’m open to correction), I think he begins by trying to place his all-wise, all-knowing (rather like he’s trying to emulate Obama) self above the fray, looking down at how the muddled masses on both left and right are mangling the wise and “noble” conversation we should be having about race (or “race”).

In any event, here’s how it begins:

Americans are engaged in a war over a word: racism.

Mature commentary on the subject has descended into tribal tirades, hypersensitive defenses and rapid-fire finger-pointing. The very definition of the word seems under assault, being bent and twisted back on itself and stretched and pulled beyond recognition.

Many on the left have taken an absolutist stance, that the anti-Obama sentiment reeks of racism and denial only served to confirm guilt. Many on the right feel as though they have been convicted without proof — that tossing “racism” their way is itself racist.

He does, to be sure, give predictable obeisance to the current litany of liberal talking points — the right’s failed “witch hunt” for racists in the NAACP or on the left, leading to Breitbart’s “Sherrod Charade”; dismissing the brouhaha over Journolist, “a now defunct listserv” with only “a handful of people” that “was hardly a vast left wing conspiracy”; asserting that the dismissal of the New Black Panther case is a “nonstory”; “And then there’s Glenn Beck ....” He’d have to provide his normal Blow by blow account of the sins of the right — otherwise, how would we know we’re reading Charles Blow? — but by coming down from his faux above-the-fray stance whatever point he was trying to make simply disappears into the mundane miasma of left-wing cant.

Whatever he’s been trying to say, everything in his piece is preface to the following conclusion, which Blow and his editors obviously must believe says something worth saying (or at least something):

Blacks, stunned by this new topsy-turvy world of racial politics, continue to rally around Obama. In opinion polls, they consistently rate Obama’s performance and policies highly, I suspect as much out of solidarity as conviction.

Whether the president likes it or not, he’s the nexus of this debate. I, for one, think that he should stand up and redirect it from the negative to the noble. There will be some grumbling to be sure, but there already is.

It’s your choice, Mr. President. I say stand up — for America, for common humanity, for civil discourse. To paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.

Blow never says, and thus blows it.

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... You can find some very DISCRIMINATION-like observations here and here.

The first is another look at the recent work of Prof. Thomas Espenshade of Princeton, which I’ve discussed here a number of times. He finds what looks to the naked eye to be massive discrimination in admissions against Asians, and only a little less against white, but he and his co-conspirator, Alexandria Walton Radford, seem incapable of seeing it.

The second, “Ask Not What Obama Can Do For the Country, but ‘What The GOP Can Do For Obama,’” suggests that the clothes of the emperor of Washington columnists, David Broder, are, if not non-existent, at least a little threadbare.

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The New York Times reports today on the ethics charges facing Charlie Rangel and Mad Maxine Waters (my characterization, not the NYT’s), emphasizing the effect of the corruption charges on the Dems. (“In Ethics Battles, a Partywide Threat,” by David Herszenhorn and Carl Hulse)

Here is the saddest and, I think, most significant and revealing paragraph in the piece:

Neither lawmaker, both Democrats, faces electoral jeopardy. Mr. Rangel, who was charged on Thursday by the House ethics committee with 13 violations, including failing to pay taxes on rental income from his Dominican villa, represents a safe district in Harlem. Ms. Waters, who is accused of using her office to help a bank in which her husband owned stock request bailout money, has a similarly secure seat in Los Angeles.

Has anyone considered the possibility — no, let’s make that a probability — that the more secure the seat, the less incumbents fear retribution from their constituents, the more likely they are to engage in reckless and unethical behavior?

And let us not forget another safe seat incumbent leader of the Black Caucus, House Whip James Clyburn from South Carolina. He is quoted predictably predicting that those right wingers will try to make corruption a racial issue, saying

it was inevitable that some political opponents would try to turn the ethics questions into a race issue. “Those Tea Party people that showed up at the health care debate, they will not hesitate for one moment to racialize something,” said Mr. Clyburn, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “They did, and they will.”

The controversy over the cases and the prospect of the first simultaneous ethics trials for multiple members in more than 30 years mark the biggest challenge for the ethics committee’s and the House’s ability to police its own members since the mid-1990s, when then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and other leaders from both parties found themselves hauled before the secretive panel.

The question of whether black lawmakers are now being singled out for scrutiny has been simmering throughout the 111th Congress, with the Office of Congressional Ethics a focal point of the concerns. At one point earlier this year, all eight lawmakers under formal investigation by the House ethics committee, including Rangel and Waters, were black Democrats. All those investigations originated with the OCE, which can make recommendations — but take no final actions — on such cases.

There’s a “dual standard, one for most members and one for African-Americans,” said one member of the Congressional Black Caucus, speaking on condition of anonymity....

“This is stacked against you once an accusation is made,” the lawmaker added. “You’re guilty until proven otherwise.”

And, after all, it’s not as though Democrats these days can make a principled argument (at least not with a straight face) against special treatment based on race.

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As I wrote here,

Long time, or even short time, readers will know that I often have some fun at the expense of Washington Post affirmative action columnist, and one of MSNBC’s talking head Obamanauts, Eugene Robinson.

Now comes a writer of whom we here at DISCRIMINATIONS are quite fond who does another much-deserved number on Robinson’s Post-partisanship, on Big Journalism yesterday. You should read it.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[NOTE: Please see the important UPDATE to this post]

Some of you are old enough to remember — or not so old that you can’t remember (me? my memory’s still so good I can’t recall the last time I forgot anything) — that just a few short years ago the left was giving President Bush holy hell (actually, unholy hell) over his use of “signing statements” to specify parts of laws he thought unconstitutional and hence would not enforce.

Examples abound (Googling “Bush” and “signing statement” just returned about 33,700 hits), but here are excerpts from one of the more moderate criticisms, this from James Bovard, author of several anti-Bush books:

President Bush has once again decreed that his personal pen is the highest law of the land. In a statement issued on October 4, 2006, he announced that he would ignore many provisions of the Homeland Security appropriations act he signed earlier in the day. His action vivifies that the rule of law now means little more than the enforcement of the secret thoughts of the commander in chief....

Bush pulled the same trick in March after he inked a renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act, announcing that he would scorn notifying Congress on how the feds are using PATRIOT Act powers. Bush declared that he would interpret the law “in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to ... withhold information.” Bush is apparently convinced that he is entitled to govern in secrecy, and any provision of a law to the contrary violates his imperial prerogatives....

Apparently, the government is no longer obliged to obey any law that Bush does not personally approve....

So what is the meaning of “limited government” in the Bush era? Merely that the courts and Congress must be prohibited from limiting the president’s power. Bush’s signing statements are building blocks for dictatorship. The longer he builds, the darker America becomes.

Calling into question the legitimacy of all the signing statements that former President George W. Bush used to challenge new laws, President Obama ordered executive officials on Monday to consult with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. before relying on any of them to bypass a statute.

Calling into question the legitimacy of all the signing statements that former President George W. Bush used to challenge new laws, President Obama ordered executive officials on Monday to consult with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. before relying on any of them to bypass a statute.

Heather Mac Donald nails the administration’s non-verbal immigration signing statement perfectly this morning on NRO’s The Corner:

In enjoining Arizona’s landmark immigration law, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton maintains the Obama administration’s carefully cultivated fiction: that what concerns the White House regarding S.B. 1070 is its effect on legal, rather than illegal, aliens. Almost nowhere in the government’s briefs or the judge’s ruling is the arrest and detention of illegal aliens addressed. This fiction is transparent, however. The real threat posed by S.B. 1070 was that it would disrupt the de facto amnesty that the executive branch has accorded to the vast majority of illegal aliens. It would start to implement congressional mandates and the public will that the immigration laws be enforced. For that reason, it had to be stopped.

Republican Sen. Jon Kyl said at a town hall in Tempe, Ariz. that during a recent private meeting in the Oval Office the president said: “The problem is, if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’” In other words, Kyl said, the president is holding border security hostage to comprehensive reform.

I asked Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton (subbing for Robert Gibbs) about it today at the briefing. "Kyl knows the president didn't say that," Burton said. He would not say exactly what it was the president DID say (Burton said he was not present at the meeting), and he deflected a question about whether Kyl lied.

Afterward Kyl's office said the senator is sticking to his guns.

Feel free to send me the links when you run across examples of anyone who denounced Bush’s signing statements also criticizing Obama’s much more massive refusal to enforce federal law. Somehow I’m not worried about my inbox overflowing.

UPDATE [11:30PM]

The lawlessness of the Obama administration is possibly much more extensive than I suggest above. On National Review Online late this afternoon Robert VerBruggen discussed, and provided a copy of, an internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services memo circulating on Capitol Hill that contemplates undermining and even flaunting current immigration law on a scale far grander than the mere non-enforcement we’ve seen so far.

If Congress won’t pass “comprehensive immigration reform,” the memo considers the following possibilities (among others) to be done by executive fiat:

• “administrative relief options to . . . reduce the threat of removal for certain individuals present in the United States without authorization”;

• “USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations, exercising discretion with regard to parole-in-place, deferred action and the issuance of Notices to Appear (NTA), and adopting significant process improvements”;

• “Increase the Use of Deferred Action ...,” which is defined in the memo as “an exercise of prosecutorial discretion not to pursue removal from the U.S. of a particular individual for a specific period of time.”
  

Sen. Chuck Grassley and others in Congress have been pressing the administration to disavow rumors that a de facto amnesty is in the works, including in a letter to Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano. “Since the senators first wrote to the president more than a month ago, we have not been reassured that the plans are just rumors, and we have every reason to believe that the memo is legitimate,” a Grassley spokesman tells NR. (NR contacted DHS, but a spokesman did not have a comment on the record.)

To be clear, DHS will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.

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There’s so much race stuff to discuss right now that missing a day or three creates an enormous backlog, which I now have since Helene (the Discriminating wife) and I are in White Plains visiting Jessie (the Discriminating daughter) for a week. (Don’t worry; Mosby the Discriminating Dog is being well cared for at home).

I’ve gotten behind because this past weekend we attended the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, “a three-day community of folk music and dance at the foot of the Berkshires in east-central New York State.” I thought Alabama was hot in the summer, but it was never this hot (at least not in memory, which may not be saying much). It was a blast (or a hoot), although I don’t think I’ve every seen so many old people in tie-died shirts.

On the way back to White Plains we decided to stop by the Blueberry Festival in Austerlitz, NY, in hopes of finding not only some blueberries but also blueberry pie and even blueberry ice cream, hopes that seemed quite reasonable given stalls bedecked like this:

Alas, like my race posting over the weekend, it was not to be. By the time we arrived, about 2:45 PM (well before the advertised closing at 4:00) all the blueberries were gone, as was the blueberry pie and the blueberry ice cream.

A blueberry festival that has run out of blueberries is rather like the dream of a post-racial America with Obama still president and Holder still attorney general. Hope, in short, is having a hard time in America these days.

Still, I don’t want to leave you with that empty feeling we experienced yesterday, and so below I want to share with you a moving (I will not say in what direction) Ode to the Blueberry that I had found the night before, in the form of an August 24, 2008, letter to the readers of Chronogram Magazine (“Arts. Culture. Spirit” in the Hudson Valley) from its then publisher and editor, Jason Stern, with comments by himself. Here’s the whole thing;

Esteemed Reader

by Jason Stern, August 24, 2008

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:

There has been a bumper crop of blueberries this year. Each time I walk along the Shawangunk ridge I am astounded that their numbers don’t seem to diminish. Alone, or with friends, I pause my hike often to pick them, collecting a handful with each reach into a bush. In some places an entire hillside is suffused with a purple hue.

Such abundance is rare. It is not often that I get the feeling that there is more of something than I could ever need. And though the blueberries are completely available to me, they are not mine. They are equally available to anyone that would venture onto the ridge.

Faced with so many berries, my reactions occurred in series. First there was the bacchanal, as I ate the berries by the mouthful, even forgetting to taste their bright tartness. There was furtive harvesting and the instinctive gratification of being fed. But gradually, as satiation and the security that the berries would not run out set in, I slowed down and become present to the pop of each berry I plucked from a branch. I began to notice the dramatic and subtle difference in color, flavor, texture, and juiciness of berries from different bushes and locations.

I felt like the berry bushes, and even the whole mountain was offering itself to me, personally. On reflection I considered that this is true. The berries are for me. And the offering is also completely impersonal, like the radiance of the sun, which shines equally on all, and yet every one receives the off ering of its warmth and light. The blueberry bushes, like the sun, have their own imperatives and concerns that correspond to their nature. They are pursuing success in the world of blueberry bushes, seeking spots with more light and the right amount of water. The conditions this year, or perhaps a cosmic need for more blueberries, have invited them into an astonishing level of wellness. They have been lucky, and each individual blueberry bush ego (meaning it possesses a feeling of “I”) is glad for it. One might say they are full of themselves.

As if to prove capitalist economic theory, the success of the blueberry bushes has a trickle-down effect. It has trickled down to you and me, who enjoy reaching in and pulling out berries by the handful. Their success has trickled down to the bears, whose enthusiasm is evidenced by impressive mounds of bright purple shit on the trail. The success of the blueberry bushes is the success of all.

Q&A
What have the blueberries done to be so successful?
They have been themselves, just as the sun (most certainly an ego of the highest order) is busy being itself. In the process of being itself the sun sheds light and life into the whole solar system and beyond. And in the process of being themselves, the blueberry bushes manifest abundant fruitfulness.

What do you make of that?
I feel grateful to blueberry bushes.

For what?
For being themselves so fully, and making the fruits of that fulfillment available to all, unconditionally.

What else?
For demonstrating that being fully oneself, and using all available conditions to produce health, wellness, and abundant openness is not self-serving. In fact it is a gift to all and everything.

A&Q
This is the meaning of the saying “in order to be, in reality, a just and good altruist, it is inevitably required first of all to be an out-and-out egoist.”

Are you suggesting a disposition of self-centeredness?
Of course, you idiot! But not the upside-down, backwards notion of “self ” you are always entertaining. I mean the self that doesn’t need to go around calling itself “I”. I mean the self that simply, tacitly, is.

How do I get to that?
You already are that. You are the one that is present when you have a feeling of abundance; when you are full to overflowing with your own presence and there is no sense of lack or want. You and the world are both present, and connected, by your attention, which flows and overflows willingly.

What do the blueberry bushes know that I don’t?
Are you nuts? Blueberries don’t know anything. They just are, according to their nature. Your problem is that you have departed from yours. You look to things out there to complete yourself. You think you need to eat blueberries to be happy. You’re mistaken.

What happens when I am myself?
Get here, we’ll do the rest.

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According to Inside Higher Ed this morning,

The University of California at San Diego has announced that it has authorized 33 new faculty searches for 2010-11 — and that 12 of the searches will be focused on hires who will “contribute to diversity, equity and climate of inclusion at UC San Diego.”

1. How should a candidate go about demonstrating how he or she would “contribute to diversity, equity and climate of inclusion”?

2. Is it enough simply to be “diverse,” by virtue of skin color, ethnicity, or sex, or must one promise to engage in diverse, equitable, and [or?] climatologically inclusive scholarship or other activities?

a) If the former, is a black black person more diverse than a brown black person? Are, say, Cuban-American or Puerto Rican-Americans considered more diverse, and hence presumably more equitable and includable, at UCSD than Mexican-Americans, because there are fewer of them? If so, would Mexican-American applicants have a cause of action?

b) If the latter, how will UCSD determine what sorts of scholarship or other activities contribute the most to “diversity,” “equity,” and an inclusionary “climate”?

3. What about the 21 non-non-quota searches that have been authorized? Will they be diversity-, equity-, and inclusionary climate-neutral, or will those searches “focus” on applicants who have nothing to contribute on those scores?

Discriminating minds want to know....

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Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia, has done what too many Republicans are too afraid to do — call for an outright end to the “plethora of government-enforced diversity policies.”

In a truly remarkable OpEd in the Wall Street Journal, Webb writes that “present-day diversity programs ... [have] expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.” In promoting “diversity,” Webb observes, policy makers have “ignored ... disparities within America’s white cultures” and “treated whites as a fungible monolith.”

“Where should we go from here?” he asks. And answers:

Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Read his entire piece. If you can’t get to it online, go find and get yesterday’s Journal. It’s that good.

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The always optimistic Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, sends the following thoughts re Shirley Sherrod et al., which I quote with permission:

A Happy Thought re Tea Parties, New Black Panthers, the NAACP, et al.

It is heartening that everyone involved in these controversies — the Obama administration, the Tea Party movement, the NAACP, Shirley Sherrod — has acknowledged that no one should be discriminated against on account of race and that justice should be colorblind.

There is, of course, heated disagreement about the extent to which the various groups are fully committed to this principle and the number of folks in each who ignore it. Those disagreements are worth sorting out — it's how I make my living — but it is happy news that no one in charge is saying, “Sure, we reject the notion of equal treatment — what of it?”

And the fact that there is this basic consensus — not only among those currently in the news, but more importantly among the overwhelming majority of Americans — means that (listen up, race-card players) race relations are better than ever, are good, and will continue to be so. That's worth keeping in mind.

In reply, Roger pointed to Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler as one example, who said in response to whistleblower J. Christian Adams’ charges of racial favoritism that the department “makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved.” His larger point, he continued, is that he meant people “in charge,”

which is intended to remove the New Black Panther Party and the DOJ bureaucrats, who are the obvious candidates for examples of those who indeed reject equal treatment.

But it is quite encouraging that the NAACP and the Obama adminstration were willing to condemn Sherrod when they thought she was discriminating against whites; that USCCR commissioner Yaki was willing to say that the Obama bureaucrat should be fired if indeed she said blacks shouldn’t be prosecuted; that Perez said, sure, he favored colorblind justice (the exact quote eludes me, but something quite good, as I recall); and then of course there is what Sherrod herself said she ended up believing.

It’s like “judicial activism”: The conservatives have won the debate, without much of a contest, so that we all agree that, yes, judicial activism is a bad thing and judges should be bound by the words of the Constitution. Likewise, the left has quickly conceded that of course discrimination against anyone is wrong and that all are entitled to the full protection of the civil-rights laws.

Now, in both instances there is still much to dispute, because the left doesn’t really define “judicial activism” or “equal justice” in an honest way. But, if hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, it is important that our side has at least won the basic fight over what is virtue and what is vice. Now we just have to show the other side to be hypocrites.

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I know this sounds quaint, but I remain convinced that our political discourse would be improved if reporters stuck to reporting ... and pollsters stuck to presenting the results of their polls and surveys, keeping their opinions to themselves unless we ask for them. It’s not as though we have a shortage of opinion or sources to find it without having it shoved at us in pieces that aren’t supposed to be platforms for their authors’ points of view.

To pick one of the less offending examples, Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, reports the results today in the Wall Street Journal of a new Quinnipiac poll that demonstrates Obama’s rapidly declining popularity, especially among men, whites, and independents.

Those are encouraging results to folks of my persuasion (it’s always encouraging when the public agrees with us), and I appreciate the poll and Brown’s presentation of its findings. But I don’t appreciate his overreaching editorializing (and not for the first time), such as the following:

A comparison of the public’s views of him then [a year ago] and now tells us a great deal about the shape of American politics and how difficult it is for any president, even one as politically gifted as Barack Obama, to surmount the nation’s deep political and ideological divisions.

What I believe Obama’s presidency to date shows us is what happens when a determined left-wing president, elected in large part because of rejection of his predecessor rather than an embrace of his own predilections, tries to impose a plethora left policies on a center-right nation.

Of course we have “deep political and ideological divisions,” but the failure of a committed left-wing ideologue to “surmount” them does not mean they are insurmountable, does not demonstrate that those divisions could not be surmounted by someone from either party truly determined to govern from closer to the center.

The divisions we face now are far wider than when Obama came into office, because of Obama’s own actions and rhetoric. To lament the difficulty of transcending them now is rather like lamenting the fact (as though it were fate) that someone who continues to dig furiously is standing in a deepening hole.

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Wanna hear a good one? On Sunday the Washington Post ombudsman apologized for his paper’s lack of coverage of the Justice Dept.’s dropping the New Black Panther Party case.

Among other things, he said,

[i]f Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and his department are not colorblind in enforcing civil rights laws, they should be nailed.

if the Washington Post has ever “nailed” the Obama administration in general or its Department of Justice in particular for their flagrant flouting of colorblindness, it must have used a super-quiet hammer and an invisible nail.

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Someone I’ve been linking with increasing frequency lately has another disturbing post on Minding The Campus today, this one on an announced attempt by the White House to make sure that state education spending is “fair” and “equitable” and has no “disparities.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Those of you who read The Coming Quota Tsunami will not be surprised by very much that appears in MSM Ignored Racial, Gender Quotas in Financial Reform Bill, which appeared yesterday on Big Journalism, but I encourage you to take a look at it anyway.

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I know, I know. Obama’s not gone yet, and predictions of his political demise are premature. Thus I may be among the first to discuss his legacy, but I believe the outlines of that legacy are beginning to emerge.

“By now,” the Washington Times editorialized yesterday,

the default judgment about the Barack Obama-Eric H. Holder Jr. Justice Department is that it discriminates intentionally on the basis of race. By the precise definition used in the American Heritage dictionary, the department is racialist.

The Justice Department hasn’t seriously contested the accusation of racialism. Recently resigned whistleblowing attorney J. Christian Adams has made credible charges, backed by at least five former colleagues, that the department’s Civil Rights Division has adopted a policy of refusing to enforce civil rights laws on behalf of whites victimized by minority perpetrators. [See here and here for reports of that support for Adams.]

[t]he Justice Department’s behavior here runs the risk of delegitimizing the entire civil rights and voting apparatus, which would be a disaster. But if “civil rights” becomes a synonym for “helping Democratic constituencies only” then disaster is what it will be.

I am tempted to say that the rapidly increasing evidence under Obama’s leadership that “civil rights” has sunk to mean only whatever is good for blacks and Democrats stains the very idea of civil rights, but the fact is that the “civil rights” organizations began to foul themselves long before Obama, when they abandoned the “without regard” principle of colorblind equality to which they owed both their success and reputation in favor of demanding preferential treatment based on race. They turned themselves into a special interest group based on a racialist principle that most Americans find repugnant. (For latest evidence of public opinion on racial preference, go here.)

With the widespread realization that the promise of Obama’s post-racialism has been replaced by what David Limbaugh calls (citing chapter and verse) our “‘Most’ Racial President,” I suspect that Obama’s saddest, most depressing legacy will turn out to be the opposite of what nearly all regarded as his most magnificent triumph: breaking at long last the color barrier to the highest office. After Obama’s unabashed racialism in office, who will believe the next black politician who proclaims that he will take us beyond race, that, as Obama said in presenting himself to the nation in his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention,

there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

How sad that Obama, whom so many congratulated (and congratulated themselves for voting for him) for moving us beyond race now seems certain to have sunk us even further into it, widening rather than narrowing the racial divide.

But lest you despair, there is one silver lining to this generally gloomy cloud, and that is what Obama’s experiment in unrestrained liberal government — huge increases in government regulation, in spending and hence in debt and deficit, favoritism to unions, bows to our antagonists overseas and cold shoulders to our allies — has done to the reputation of liberalism as a governing philosophy and the Democrats as a party ready and able to govern.

As a result of Obama, I suspect it will take longer to clean up the reputation of liberalism and the Democrats than it will to clean up the Gulf and its beaches.

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From Rasmussen today:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 26% of voters are embarrassed by Arizona and its behavior. Sixty-two percent (62%) are not.

However, 59% are embarrassed by the nation’s Political Class and its behavior. Twenty-three percent (23%) are not.

Seventy-eight percent (78%) of Republicans are embarrassed by the Political Class, along with 63% of unaffiliated voters. Democrats are closely divided on the question.

Overall, by a three-to-one margin, voters see the Political Class as a greater threat to the nation than laws like the one passed recently in Arizona. Sixty-four percent (64%) see the Political Class as the bigger threat, while 20% say the opposite.

Forty-three percent (43%) of Democrats see the Political Class as a bigger threat, while 36% of those in the president’s party point to Arizona. Republicans and unaffiliated voters overwhelmingly see the Political Class as the bigger threat.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Insofar as administrators at the University of California think UC should be a mirror of the state’s demographics, they are failing miserably.

As of 2008, non-Hispanic whites were 42.3% of California’s population, but they will be only 26.2% of the incoming freshman class. Asians, by contrast, are 12.5% of the population but 40.7% of the freshman class.

The trouble, as UC administrators are quick to tell you, is that if you have to treat applicants without regard to their race you get too many smart kids from certain groups (or in this case, group) and not enough from others.

UPDATE [15 July]

Regarding other “underrepresented minorities” in the University of California system, Joe Hicks and David Lehrer report in the Los Angeles Times that their numbers have increased since Prop. 209 went into effect.

The number of minority admissions to the University of California for this fall — without the benefit of preferences — exceeds that of 1996, in absolute numbers and, more important, as a percentage of all "admits." The numbers are, in almost every category, quite staggering.

Latino students have gone from 15.4% (5,744 students) of freshman undergraduate admissions in 1996 to 23% (14,081) in 2010 (a 145% increase). Asian students have gone from 29.8% (11,085) of the freshman admits to 37.47% (22,877). Native American admits have declined slightly, from 0.9% to 0.8%, but their absolute number increased, from 360 to 531. African American admits have gone from 4% (1,628) to 4.2% (2,624), a modest gain in percentage but a 61% increase in numbers of freshmen admitted.

The only major category that declined in percentage terms was whites, who went from 44% (16,465) of the freshmen admits to 34% (20,807).

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Speaking to the NAACP convention last Monday, Michelle Obama said:

I know that I stand here today, and I know that my husband stands where he is today, because of this organization — and because of the struggles and the sacrifices of all those who came before us. But I also know that their legacy isn’t an entitlement to be taken for granted. And I know it is not simply a gift to be enjoyed. Instead, it is an obligation to be fulfilled.

It would be nice to know what Michelle Obama thinks that entitlement is. For starters, does fulfilling the obligation imposed by the “gift” from the NAACP’s struggles (something that is “not simply a gift” is still a gift) entitle blacks to equal treatment or to preferential treatment?

Since no one has asked Michelle Obama, we don’t know what she thinks she is entitled to.

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One thing you can’t say about the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress: that they govern by the polls. They pushed through Obamacare, even though a substantial majority opposed it. They are suing Arizona over its attempt to protect itself from illegal immigrants, even though a substantial majority supports the Arizona law. And they are about to pass and sign the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which as I discussed last week (The Coming Quota Tsunami) will create a massive new federal bureaucracy to impose “diversity” on the financial sector of our economy even though a substantial majority opposes affirmative action.

Yes, “affirmative action.” In the past most surveys found that pluralities approved of “affirmative action” but opposed virtually all affirmative action policies when those policies were described. In a dramatic new survey, however, pollster Scott Rasmussen finds strong popular opposition even to “affirmative action,” not simply to preferential treatment.

Here are his two main toplines:

1. Do you favor or oppose Affirmative Action programs?

32% Favor
46% Oppose
22% Not sure

2. Okay, do you favor or oppose government programs that give special treatment when hiring to women and minorities?

29% Favor
55% Oppose
15% Not sure

On affirmative action, the Democrats and their enablers in the NAACP are definitely not in the mainstream.

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Good question, if I do say so myself. Asked and answered here.

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A day or two before Sen. Scott Brown’s announcement that he would support FinReg, I sent him this letter:

July 8, 2010

Dear Senator Brown:

Although I live in Virginia, not Massachusetts, I contributed to your Senate campaign (several times) before it was the popular thing to do among conservatives. That secured me a place on your mailing list, so that you can continue to solicit contributions from me [copy of recent letter appended]. That's fine. I continue to support you. But now I am going to ask you for something.

I see in the press that you remain undecided about FinReg. Let me call your attention to one under-noticed component of the pending legislation that, standing alone, should be enough to convince all conservatives to oppose it. I refer to the fact that it will unleash a Tsunami of racial quotas, as pointed out in my blog post:

http://www.discriminations.us/2010/07/the_coming_quota_tsunami.html

[Text of blog post went here]

Thanks for your consideration. And if you should decide to support this bill despite its Maxine Waters-inspired crippling of the financial industry with more and more racial quotas, please take my name off your mailing list.

Regards,

John Rosenberg

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Almost lost in the uproar over Arizona’s controversial new immigration law is another controversial Arizona law, House Bill 2281 passed a month later, that prohibits school districts or charter schools from offering classes that

1. Promote the overthrow of the united states government;

2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people;

3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group;

4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.
   

Here’s a discussion of the Arizona law and Prof. Monteiro’s response that appeared today and that you might find of interest. I certainly did.

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From the Montpelier Times Argus:

Middlebury Police Chief Tom Hanley believes that when someone is a member of his community, it doesn't matter how the person got there....

“We are a public peace agency,” Hanley said late last week. “My agency focuses on enforcing criminal statutes and state laws.”
....
“My job is to keep the community safe, and that means everyone in the community,” Hanley said. “Seeking out people who are not here legally is a distraction from our mission. I don’t have the staff or the resources. It’s just not good police work.”

Just asking.

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On Thursday the Washington Post reported on a controversy over the 10% tax on tanning salons included in Obamacare. (According to CNN, that tax is expected to raise $2.7 billion over 10 years.) “Since patrons of tanning salons are almost exclusively white,” the critics claim, “the tax will be almost entirely paid by white people and, therefore, violates their constitutional right to equal protection under the law.”

Acting like sunscreen, Washington Post staff writer N.C. Aizenman tries to shield the tax from that argument, and brings in a Harvard law professor to apply the screen.

But does the argument have any merit? Not remotely said Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School specializing in racial conflict and law.

“There is no constitutional problem at all, because a plaintiff would have to show that the government intended to disadvantage a particular group, not simply that the group is disadvantaged in effect,” he said.

Kennedy said that this is why courts have upheld a raft of other laws that also happen to have a disproportionate impact on particular groups. For example, laws that impose higher penalties for possession or trafficking of crack cocaine as opposed to powder cocaine resulted in far harsher sentences for African Americans compared to whites. And laws that offer preferential treatment for veterans are much more likely to benefit men than women. But in both cases judges ruled that, because lawmakers did not intend to disadvantage black people or women when drafting those laws, they are legal.

I have commented before on some of Randall Kennedy’s confusing and even “inscrutable” views about discrimination (see here and here), and his rather extreme defense of the tanning tax seems to be another example. Would he offer the same defense, I wonder, for taxes on, say, on kosher food or black hair care products?

I wish he were right about the necessity of always proving intent, but I’m afraid he isn’t.

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Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has a brilliant article on the NAS site demonstrating that the line connecting the Dept. of Justice’s dropping of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case and the Association of American Law Schools is shorter than you might think. Everyone should read it.

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[NOTE: There are two new ADDENDA]

[UPDATED July 13]

We are told by our betters that the financial regulation bill making its way through Congress is necessary in order to prevent another financial meltdown. In fact, insofar as that meltdown was precipitated by a burst housing bubble produced at least in part by the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie, et al. forcing lenders to offer mortgages to borrowers who couldn’t afford them, the new legislation threatens to magnify those misguided policies a thousand fold. Think CRA, Fannie, and Freddie on steroids.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth explains, today (here) and tomorrow (here, from which the following is quoted) that “the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, scheduled for a vote in the Senate when it returns from recess, imposes race and gender employment quotas on the financial industry.”

Dodd-Frank's Section 342 states that race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.

In addition to the bill's well-publicized plans to establish over a dozen new financial regulatory offices, Section 342 sets up at least 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion in:

• The 10 Departmental Offices of the Department of the Treasury;

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.;

• The Federal Housing Finance Agency;

• The 12 Federal Reserve regional banks;

• The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve;

• The National Credit Union Administration;

• The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency;

• The Securities and Exchange Commission; and

• The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  

The director and staff of each office are tasked with promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity not just in the agency's work force, but also the work forces of its contractors and subcontractors.

The mission of these federal monitors it is to assure “to the maximum extent possible the fair inclusion” of women and minorities, individually and through businesses they own, in the activities of the agencies, including contracting.

Each of the 20 offices, Furchtgott-Roth explains,

would have its own director and staff to develop policies promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of not just the agency's workforce, but also the workforces of its contractors and sub-contractors.

And whose brainchild was this coming quota tsunami? None other than everyone’s favorite “diverse” Congressperson, Maxine Waters. As she proudly proclaims in a July 1 press release,

“I wrote this legislation to make sure that federal financial regulatory agencies ensure diversity in their hiring and promotion, as well as in their contracting, so that competent and qualified minorities and women and minority-, women- and small-businesses have a seat at the table.”
....
Congresswoman Waters authored an amendment, adopted by the House-Senate conference, to create Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion at each of the federal regulatory agencies – including the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Depository Insurance Company, among others – in order to ensure the racial, ethnic and gender diversity of the work force and senior management. The offices would also increase the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts of each agency.

ADDENDUM

I might have missed it (or them, if I’ve missed it), but I haven’t seen any discussion of this dramatic attempt to racialize major financial transactions in what passes for the mainstream press. Investors Business Daily came out with another piece by Ms. Furchtgott-Roth, a one-woman truth squad, several hours before my post went up. A Greensboro New-Record blog mentioned Furchtgott-Roth’s discovery several hours before that.

Andy McCarthy is on top of this story on National Review Online, and the blogs, as usual, have quickly linked to Furchtgott-Roth: See InstaPundit, HotAir, ProfessorBainbridge.

Either the watchdogs in the mainstream press haven’t read the bill, or they don’t think the creation of a massive new government bureaucracy to impose “diversity” (but only to the extent “fair”) on financial institutions and transactions is newsworthy. Perhaps that’s because they think imposed “diversity” has worked so well everywhere else.

ADDENDUM II [9 July]

Roger Clegg, who reads everything and even remembers it, informs me that comment about Dodd-Frank’s racializing of financial institutions has not been quite as ignored as I implied. There was, for example, an excellent editorial about it in the Wall Street Journal on June 14. Noting that the “diversity” provisions inserted into the bill by Rep. Maxine Waters requires “requires each federal financial agency, the Fed Board of Governors and the 12 regional Fed banks to "establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion,” the editorial commented:

The law says this diversity czar will “ensure equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic and gender diversity” of the work force and senior management of these institutions. More ominously, this creature of Congress and the White House will also be charged with “increas[ing] the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts” of each agency and conducting “an assessment” of stated inclusion goals.

Mull over that one for a minute. Having recently lived through a financial mania and panic caused in part by political pressure for “affordable housing,” Congress will now order regulators to allocate credit by race and gender. Isn’t the point of this financial reform supposed to be to make regulators better judges of systemic risks, which means focusing on financial safety and soundness? If the Waters provision passes, federal regulators will have to put racial and gender lending at the top of their watch list when they do their checks on the banks and hedge funds they are regulating.

To me, the most interesting and revealing thing she said in her letter was a conjunction in what she no doubt thought was a harmless statement of fact:

The legislation establishes an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion at each government financial services agency in order to “ensure equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic and gender diversity” of the workforce and senior management and also to increase “the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts” of each agency. [Emphasis added]

ADDENDUM III [9 July]

In case the above quote is not clear, let me emphasize that unfortunately the view that equal opportunity is not enough, that it must be supplemented (in practice, replaced) by engineering “diversity” is not limited to the racial hothouse occupied by Rep. Waters and friends. It is in the language of the bill as passed.

UPDATE [July 13]

Carl Horowitz provides useful additional information about the race contributions of Rep. Waters, who “used her clout to ensure that the final package delivers a cartload of favors to black and Hispanic mortgage borrowers, not to mention lending institutions that cater to them.” An example:

The measure ... all but exempts lenders from shutdown if black and other minority borrowers account for high portions of their loan portfolios, especially in minority neighborhoods. The bill states: “The orderly liquidation plan shall take into account actions to avoid or mitigate potential adverse effects on low-income, minority or underserved communities affected by the failure of the covered financial company.” In other words, federal bank examiners should make every effort to keep a failing institution open so long as it underwrites lots of mortgages to the kinds of borrowers instrumental to the disaster in the first place!

There is more. The amended bill would create a Financial Stability Oversight Council headed by the Secretary of the Treasury to consider a struggling financial institution’s “importance as a source of credit for low-income, minority or underserved communities” before any takeover. The measure also would establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion within each of the Treasury Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve System. Rep. Waters’ amendment is explicit: “Each agency shall take affirmative steps to seek diversity in the workplace of the agency, at all levels of the agency.”

All of this looks like quota legislation, even if Rep. Waters can’t quite bring herself to admit as much. And although these diversity-or-else offices wouldn’t be vested with formal enforcement powers, one can be sure that the Justice Department, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies with a civil rights mandate will find every pretext possible, however flimsy, to crack down on lenders whose practices create disparate impacts by race.

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From Jonah Goldberg yesterday:

In 2005, volunteer firefighters from all over the country offered to help with Katrina’s aftermath. But FEMA sent many of them to Atlanta first to undergo diversity and sexual-harassment training (which most already had).

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If you’re interested in the arguably controversial way controversies in higher education over race are treated in the media, take a look at The Uses of the Word “Controversial” on Minding The Campus.

It’s another of those pieces that could have appeared here, by an author who occasionally has things to say that interest at least him.

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... is discussed by one of DISCRIMINATION’s (very) small stable of regular writers on Pajamas Media today, here. It may be worth a read.

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Julia Gillard has become the first female prime minister, pleasing those on the left in the United States like Huffington Post since, it declared, “[s]he is from a left-wing faction of Labor....”

So, perhaps the left here should take notice of one of her first policy initiatives, breaking from the policy of her Labor predecessor, former prime minister Kevin Rudd. “Here is a politician” reports The Australian, “with a solid pedigree on the ‘anti-racist Left rejecting former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s call for a ‘Big Australia’ formed by continuing large-scale immigration.”

Instead, Gillard has said she understands the anxieties of folk in western Sydney, western Melbourne or the Gold Coast growth corridor in Queensland.

As for the boats of asylum-seekers, Gillard has made clear she wants to be even more effective in stopping them in order to protect “our sanctuary” and “the Australian way”.

In other words, Gillard is signalling that she sympathises with the concern that large-scale immigration and multiculturalism are threatening Australia’s core values and identity, a position the Left denounces as bigotry.

Consequently, Gillard’s remarks have produced predictable cries of “racism” .... So why has the new Labor leader ventured into this particular cultural minefield? The explanation is that something tumultuous is happening, not just in Australia but in Britain too, something so unusual that people are stumbling around in a state of stunned disorientation.

It is that politicians are at last actually taking seriously what their electorates are saying to them about immigration and multiculturalism. This is that they will no longer put up with a policy which threatens to destroy their country’s values and way of life, and will vote accordingly.

ADDENDUM

I wonder if the fact that, according to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald [HatTip to reader Jian Li], “Migrant pupils top the entry tests for selective schools" explains some of the opposition to immigration.

CHILDREN of recent Asian migrants are dramatically outperforming students from English-speaking households to dominate the ranks of the top selective high schools.

A Herald analysis shows 42 per cent of children from non-English speaking backgrounds who sat the annual selective high school entrance test last year won a place in the elite system.

Fewer than 23 per cent of students whose families speak English at home were successful....

The percentage of students from migrant families entering the selective system has risen dramatically from 29 per cent in 1995 to as high as 62 per cent in 2008. The component is sharply skewed towards children from Asian-origin families.

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It hasn’t been so long since our American elites thought we should be more sensitive to the opinions of our cultural betters in Europe, especially the French. Now the French are beginning to address a problem with which we have a lot of experience, and it’s interesting to see what they think of what we’ve done.

As the New York Times reported a week or so ago (HatTip to reader Jian Li), “France is embarking on a grand experiment — how to diversify the overwhelmingly white “grandes écoles,” the elite universities that have produced French leaders in every walk of life....”

Because entrance to the best grandes écoles effectively guarantees top jobs for life, the government is prodding the schools to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent — more than three times the current ratio at the most selective schools. But the effort is being met with concerns from the grandes écoles, who fear it could dilute standards, and is stirring anger among the French at large, who fear it runs counter to a French ideal of a meritocracy blind to race, religion and ethnicity.

In France, “the schools fear that the government will undermine excellence in the name of social engineering,” as well they should.

[They] say the process has to begin further down the educational ladder. The state, they say, should seek out poor students with potential and help them to enter preparatory schools.

“The fundamental principle for us is that students have the capability to do the work here, which is very difficult,” with a lot of math, physics and science, very little of it based on cultural knowledge, General [Xavier] Michel [head of “École Polytechnique, one of the world’s finest engineering schools”] said. “We don’t want to bring students into school who risk failing,” he said. “You can get lost very quickly.”

There is a serious question about how to measure diversity in a country where every citizen is presumed equal and there are no official statistics based on race, religion or ethnicity. A goal cannot be called a “quota,” which has an odor of the United States and affirmative action....

We gave the world a ringing Declaration that “all men are created equal,” and now we give it the odor of quotas.

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... as special favorites of the Obama/Holder Justice Dept. J. Christian Adams, the DOJ attorney who recently resigned over DOJ’s handling of the Black Panther case, has a long and frightening expose of other examples of the Obama administration refusing to investigate or prosecute racial irregularities and intimidation conducted by black politicians.

Why such behavior? In Adams’ view,

the best explanation for the corrupt dismissal of the case is the profound hostility by the Obama Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department towards a race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws.

This hostility was — and is — on open display within the Department of Justice.

Brown ran a Tammany Hall-style political operation. During one election, he literally stuffed illegal ballots he knew were marked for black candidates through an optical scanner in front of a crowd of angry citizens shouting provisions of Mississippi law at him.

“You ain’t dealing with Mississippi law, this is Ike Brown’s law,” he replied.

Brown organized teams of notary publics to roam the county collecting absentee ballots. In many cases, the notaries cast the ballots themselves instead of the voters.

Brown took absentee ballots to his home the night before the election, and put yellow sticky notes on them instructing compliant poll workers — whom he chose — why the ballots of white voters should be rejected. The poll workers complied, and canceled their votes.

Brown imported ineligible black candidates from outside the county to run against white incumbents.

He allowed squads of “assistors” to pollute the voting sites and impose “assistance,” telling black voters how to vote inside the booth — in many cases marking the ballots for the voters. During one election, teams of federal observers counted hundreds of verified examples of illegal assistance. Brown lawlessly disqualified white candidates from running for office. He published the names of 174 white citizens in the newspaper, and said they would be subject to challenge if they tried to vote.

about investigating the discrimination. Superiors were reluctant to recommend to political appointees approval of a lawsuit. After the case was filed, the hostility continued. Most attorneys — except one brave woman — refused to work on the matter with Coates. Hostility pervaded the Voting Section, directed at Coates personally and also towards the theory of the case.

had many discussions concerning these cases. In one of my discussions concerning the Ike Brown case, I had a lawyer say he was opposed to our filing such suits. When I asked why, he said that only when he could go to Mississippi and find no disparities between the socioeconomic levels of black and white residents, might he support such a suit. But until that day, he did not think that we should be filing voting rights cases against blacks or on behalf of white voters.

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Once again the invaluable Pacific Legal Foundation has won an important victory for civil rights.

In 1996 the voters of California passed Prop. 209, which amended the state constitution to prohibit the state or any of its agencies from discriminating against or giving preferential treatment to any individual on the base of race, ethnicity, or gender in public contracting, education, or employment.

The state, and many of its municipalities, attempted to ignore the new prohibition against preferential treatment, and left to their own devices would have ignored it forever. The Pacific Legal Foundation and plaintiffs such as Ward Connerly, however, did not leave the state to its own devices. In Connerly v. State Personnel Board, 92 Cal. App. 4th 16 (2001), the appellate court invalidated race and sex quotas that had been inserted in the state public contracting code.

In a dramatic demonstration of bipartisan irresponsibility, in July 2009 the legislature passed and Gov. Schwarzenegger signed new legislation, Assembly Bill 21, re-instituting the invalidated quotas.
Thus Connerly and the American Civil Rights Foundation, again ably represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, sued again, in Connerly v. Schwarzenegger.

The state agreed, amazingly enough, that, yes, the challenged statutes were indeed unconstitutional, but that nevertheless the court should not issue a writ requiring adherence to Prop. 209 because the offending provisions were not being enforced.

That argument passed neither the laugh test nor judicial approval, and on July 2 the appellate court issued a tentative ruling awarding Connerly and the PLF (and the people of California) a %100 victory.

Thanks to Connerly and the Pacific Legal Foundation, now we have something else to celebrate this July 4.

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On three separate occasions over the blog years — 2002, 2006, and 2008 — I recycled a short piece I wrote for a special July 4th issue of The Nation . As I explained in the first of those posts, I was “in sympathetic and close association with The Nation for a number of years, even working there in a couple of different capacities for a while.”

The remainder of that first post follows, making this the fourth recycling of that July 4th piece. Sadly, it’s still relevant.

I continued to publish there a bit after I left, but with decreasing frequency as my views and the magazine’s began to diverge even more. On one occasion the editor, Victor Navasky ... , rejected something I had submitted as too far beyond the pale, but, perhaps for old times’s sake or maybe simply a commendable bid for a bit of diversity, he asked me contribute to a special July 4 issue on “Patriotism” that, as it turned out, contained a large number of short statements by various writers in The Nation’s orbit.

I would say, given the company I was it, my piece was way out in right field. But, given that company, it was so far out that it’s a mistake to regard me as having any company there at all. I can’t link it because that was back in the days before the Internet, even before computers. You can find it in Nexis or the library in the July 15, 1991, issue, but you needn’t. I still like it, and so I’m recycling, I mean reprinting, it in its entirety here:

FOR TOO LONG THE LEFT HAS TOO EASILY REGARDED patriotism as the first refuge of scoundrels. Perhaps the main source of this longstanding discomfort with patriotic sentiment is that patriotism celebrates, at least in theory, the national community as a whole while the left, especially in theory, is oppositional, outside, dissenting. Traditionally class based, with workers viewed as the engine driving society to a better future, the left is now largely a collection of racial, ethnic and gender interests plus some academic defenders of multiculturalism--progressives all, but with no agent of progress and hence no real reason to believe in progress, in sight or in mind.

With little to unite it except opposition to the dominant culture, the left today has lost both the desire and the ability to lay claim to any significant portion of the landscape of American values. Equal opportunity? It has a disparate impact. Free speech? It protects racist and sexist epithets. Self-determination? A principle useful only for bashing the Russians or protecting oil sheiks. This is overstated, to be sure, but not by much. From what precinct of the left today could an authentic voice claim something like "This land is your land, this land is my land . . ."? Patriotism is an expression of solidarity, a principle long favored on the left, but the term itself reveals our predicament. Solidarity of whom? With whom? For what? It is a far but revealing cry from "Solidarity Forever" to "Solidarity in Support of Diversity," a banner displayed during the recent controversy over affirmative action at Georgetown Law School.

That’s a hard flag to rally around.

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Minding The Campus has a very interesting (at least to me) critique of yet another survey finding a “gender gap” in science salaries. I encourage you to read it since it’s just the sort of commentary that could have been posted here.

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Much of the criticism of Arizona’s recent immigration law is that the state presumptuously, and illegitimately, trespassed on federal prerogatives by stepping in where the federal government refused to. This criticism would be more credible if critics also complained about all the “sanctuary cities” that vociferously defy federal law and the recent decision of the city of Philadelphia to cease an important area of co-operation with federal immigration authorities.

Philadelphia is expected to end the arrangement that permits federal immigration agents to scrutinize the city's computerized list of arrests, including country of origin and other data, Everett Gillison, the deputy mayor for public safety, said Sunday.

Immigrant advocates say the year-old agreement between the city and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, known as ICE, has resulted in deportation proceedings against immigrants arrested on even minor charges.....

Mayor Nutter has expressed concern about the human rights of all immigrants, regardless of their legal status.

Perhaps cities that are not “sanctuary cities” should provide one-way bus tickets to all the illegal immigrants they come across to Philadelphia, San Francisco, and similar urban islands of resistance to federal law.

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There has been a good deal of news and commentary over the past few days about the G-20 nations’ rejection of Obama’s push for “continued global stimulus” as the “G20 summit rebuffs Obama.”

Almost overlooked in this controversy, however, is one area where Germany, a leading critic of Obama’s continuing deficit spending, has launched a major new spending program, “the Excellence Initiative,” that is also very un-Obamian in nature. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning, “Germany Pursues Excellence Over Egalitarianism.”

Like the United States, for much of the post-World War II era Germany “recoiled from ... elitism.” According to Margret Winermantel, president of an organization that represents Germany’s 258 institutions of higher education,
“We had this tradition that all are kind of equal. Of course,” she continued, “everyone knew this was not true, this was a fiction.”

All too real, however, was the fact that the country’s once pre-eminent universities no longer commanded universal esteem, and the depths to which they had fallen was driven home by the relative dearth of German institutions in the top echelons of the newly influential global-rankings tables, dominated by American and British universities.

In 2004 the federal government proposed the Excellence Initiative in a bid to foster outstanding research and propel more German institutions ahead in the rankings. Yet the notion of rewarding individual universities for excellence was still controversial enough that the word “elite” was quickly expunged from official discussion of the program.

Excellence is well on the way to becoming un-American.

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A new study in the Harvard Educational Review purports to confirm a highly criticized older study that purported to find racial “bias” in a handful of questions on the SAT. (On that earlier study, see my “Biased ‘Bias’” from October 2003, which has a couple of links to thorough, and thoroughly critical, analyses of it.)

The alarmist conclusions of the new study are amplified through the educational megaphones of Jay Matthews’ influential Washington Post blog (“New evidence that SAT hurts blacks”) and Scott Jaschik’s article on Inside Higher Ed (“New Evidence of Racial Bias on SAT”), which has a number of interesting comments.

Those two cheerleading posts were severely, and effectively, criticized by the invaluable blogger, JunkScienceMom, on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism (“Junk Reporting – the Hidden Truth Behind Claims Of Racial Bias In the SATs”) and on her own blog (“Blatant Bias”), where she notes all the evidence for test bias comes from “two questions from four tests.”

Those two questions with a significant DIF [differential item functioning, the technical term for test items said to be biased] were also on one of the other SATs used in the study, but they were presented in a different order. Those exact same questions on a different test showed no significant DIF. Neither Mathews nor Jaschik found these facts worthy of inclusion in their articles which makes me wonder: Were they were deliberately ignoring them because calling the SAT racist will attract a lot more readers than a headline reading, “SAT is pretty much fair to everybody,” or did they just not read the study or understand what they were reading?

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Why is the press so single-mindedly focused on whether McChrystal will be fired and largely ignoring whether or not everything he and his associates said was true? Oh wait, I think I know.

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In his Presidential Proclamation declaring Father’s Day, President Obama declared the following:

Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a grandfather, or caring guardian....

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I’m not a pollster, I don’t follow polls very closely, and I’m certainly not familiar with polling terms of art or other conventional usage. Still, I found Gallup’s recent headline rather odd, given the data it presented:

U.S. Voters Split on Obama Re-Election in 2012

Little change seen since March on this measure
by Frank Newport

PRINCETON, NJ — U.S. registered voters remain split on whether President Obama deserves to be re-elected in 2012, with 46% saying he does and 51% saying he does not — little changed from earlier this year.

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(If the title of this post is confusing to you, see the explanation in Version 2.0 two days ago, quoting the first one in the series from last September.)

This morning the San Francisco Chronicle has a fascinating criticism of ObamaCare. Naturally, it’s by “a lifelong Democrat,” but that’s not surprising since there probably aren’t any Republicans in San Francisco or among the Chronicle’s readership. It shows, unwittingly, that even when Democrats get it, they don’t get it; even when they see the light they’re still in the dark.

David Kline, the author, identifies himself as self-employed and the co-author of Great Again, due in 2011 from Harvard Business Press. “As a lifelong Democrat,” he begins his piece,

I’m accustomed to hearing Republican charges that Democrats don’t understand the needs of small business and middle-class taxpayers. Claims such as these were a frequent feature of the debate over health reform, and as always, I dismissed them as propaganda.

I got my first post-health-reform premium hike notice. And then learned of a hidden feature of the new health law that deliberately targets small businesses and self-employed people like myself to shoulder the cost of health reform.

Exactly one week after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed on March 23, I received a notice from Regence Blue Cross of Oregon saying that it was “excited to introduce” certain non-negotiable changes to my family’s self-paid health insurance coverage. The premiums for my wife and two young children were going up a mind-boggling 45 percent (from $480 to $697 per month). Their benefits, meanwhile, were effectively being cut in half, thanks to the doubling of our deductibles from $500 to $1,000 each.

When you add in the cost of my own separate Regence policy (whose premiums also jumped 20 percent this year), my middle-class family with its self-employed breadwinner will now be paying $19,000 a year.

In other words, it would appear, the Republican (and let us not forget Independent) criticism of ObamaCare was “propaganda” ... until it turned out to be true. But at least Kline is both perceptive and honest enough to recognize and admit that the middle class is being hit much harder by ObamaCare than his fellow Democrats have been willing to admit. “And it does not appear,” he concludes, “that Democratic lawmakers have the stomach to fight the insurers over premium hikes.”

Duh! Well, of course the premiums had to go up, to cover all the previously uninsured and all those with pre-existing conditions. “The simple truth,” Kline now recognizes,

is that if the new health reform bill had passed with no protections for the uninsured — or no protections for those with pre-existing conditions — my fellow Democrats would have been outraged. So why, then, is it OK for health reform to leave middle-class rate payers like me with no real protection against extortionist premium hikes?

Oh, great! Why didn’t the Democrats go after the billionaire drug companies or the predatory health insurance companies and make them pay for health reform? No, they had to stick it to small business — the one group with no real lobbying muscle in Washington.

So I have one question for my Democratic president and Democratic legislators: Are you actually trying to prove the Republican propaganda right?

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Rep. Steve King (R, Iowa) “is not apologizing for saying that President Barack Obama ‘favors the black person.’”

Politico reports that “King stands by Obama bias claim,” as though King actually said something wrong. Chris Harris of MediaMatters said King has “routinely accused the president of ‘playing race-bait games’ and favoring ‘the black person.’”

Next thing you know MediaMatters and Politico will be accusing King of routinely asserting that the sun rises in the east. It has apparently escaped their attention that the president and his administration do routinely favor black people by, for example, continuing to promote and support policies that provide preferential treatment to blacks.

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Last September I began Scene & Herd In San Francisco by noting that

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....

“Streets are for the people”

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted, 8-3, a few days ago to defeat a proposed ordinance “that would make it illegal to sit or lie on public sidewalks during certain hours.”

The idea sprang from frustrated residents and merchants in the Haight-Ashbury who are fed up with people congregating in front of their homes and businesses, menacing passersby.

Critics, including homeless advocates and civil rights organizations, said the proposal would unfairly criminalize day laborers and homeless people.

parted from the board's moderate voting bloc on this proposal, saying he could not support something ''that on its face is going to have to be selectively enforced. ... I've got to believe that we can do better than this law and do something that's more meaningful for the public.''

He is calling for the creation of a court that focuses on inebriants.

“$800,000 to define ‘major service change’”

“Believe it or not,”

Believe it or not, BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] is spending $800,000 to come up with a definition of just what constitutes a "major service change."

It turns out, however, that San Francisco is not always responsible for all of its wackiness.

It all started a few months back when the Federal Transit Administration nixed $70 million in stimulus money that would have helped BART build a people-mover line from the Coliseum Station to Oakland International Airport.

The feds said BART hadn’t considered what impact possible higher fares and a “major service change” would have on low-income, minority and limited-English-speaking riders.

The oversight amounted to a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and could jeopardize more than $100 million in future funding for the airport line, plus other projects.

First: 17 public meetings all over the Bay Area to identify the low-income, minority and limited-English-speaking riders they needed to hear from.

That meant hiring a consultant at a cost of about $100,000 to organize the meetings and issue a 28-page “public participation plan.”

To make sure everyone was heard, BART had to provide foreign language translators — with a minimum of two for every language spoken.

At one meeting in Richmond, a dozen translators speaking six languages were on hand, at a cost of about $7,200.

Once BART officials decided whom they should talk with, they had to actually talk with them. That meant another 18 community meetings — now under way — at which riders are being asked their opinion of what constitutes a major service change. That means more consultants and yet another report — and another $200,000 in costs.

Toss in room rentals, day care for riders’ kids at the meetings, food and other extras, and the final bill is expected to run about $800,000.

I think we need a “major service change” in both Washington and Sacramento, and that advice won’t cost anybody a dime.

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Ramesh Ponnuru has a powerful critique of some conservative — and especially libertarian — civil rights views in National Review. Read it. It will bother some of my friends, offend others, and please still others who, like me, believe that civil rights laws regulating even (some) private behavior are both necessary and constitutional.

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Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor, has a new book, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, calling for banning beauty bias. (See here for a favorable review.)

Rhode notes in a recent Washington Post OpEd that lookism is pervasive.

• According to a poll by the Employment Law Alliance, “16 percent of workers reported being victims of appearance discrimination ... “;

• From a whole bunch of studies: “Unattractive people are less likely to be hired and promoted, and they earn lower salaries”;

• One study estimated that prejudice against ugly lawyers “can translate to a pay cut of as much as 12 percent”;

• “Not even justice is blind. In studies that simulate legal proceedings, unattractive plaintiffs receive lower damage awards.”
  

Just like racial or gender discrimination, discrimination based on irrelevant physical characteristics reinforces invidious stereotypes and undermines equal-opportunity principles based on merit and performance....

Appearance-related bias also exacerbates disadvantages based on gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and class. Prevailing beauty standards penalize people who lack the time and money to invest in their appearance. And weight discrimination, in particular, imposes special costs on people who live in communities with shortages of healthy food options and exercise facilities

It’s not a pretty picture. (In fact, phrases like “pretty picture” may soon be condemned as insensitive.)

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A few days ago I referred you to Dorothy Rabinowitz’s superb piece in the Wall Street Journal, “The Alien in the White House.” She was referring, by the way, to his attitudes, values, and ideology, not to the circumstances or location of his birth, but even so describing him as “alien” may be too weak.

For starters, take a look at this thorough (and thoroughly disgusting) analysis of the Obama Justice Department’s going to bat for the New Black Panther Party and then covering up its actions.

That friendly and sympathetic treatment of racist thugs pales by comparison, however, the Dept. of Homeland Security’s apparent determination to deport Mosab Hassan Yousef, whom the Wall Street Journal describes as the

best-selling author who wrote "Son of Hamas” about his life as a Palestinian who became an informant for Israeli intelligence. He’s probably near the top of every Islamist terror hit list, yet, incredibly enough, the U.S. may soon deport him as a terror threat.

Homeland Security is well aware of the author’s history, and in fact is using it against him. According to Mr. Yousef, a letter from Homeland Security attorney Kerri Calcador cites passages in “Son of Hamas” as evidence of his connection to terrorist leaders and suggests that the work he did for Hamas while spying for Israel provided aid to terrorists. “At a bare minimum, evidence of the respondent’s transport of Hamas members to safe houses . . . indicates that the respondent provided material support to a [Tier I] terrorist organization,” the U.S. lawyer wrote.

But unless Ms. Calcador knows more than she’s saying, this is bizarre. As a spy for Israel, Mr. Yousef had to make his colleagues believe he was a loyal member of Hamas. He used that trust to gain information that he provided to Israeli intelligence, which used it to prevent terror attacks and save lives. One of Mr. Yousef’s handlers at Shin Bet confirmed his book’s account to the Israeli daily Haaretz, and his father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has disowned him from the Israeli prison he has occupied since 2005....

Mr. Yousef is a native of the West Bank, which is where he would presumably return if he is deported and where Hamas would immediately seek to kill him....

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Richard Kahlenberg, long-time advocate for class-based affirmative action, notes with alarm the findings of a new National Center for Education Statistics report finding that

poor and minority students are increasingly concentrated in high poverty elementary and secondary schools. Between the 1999-2000 and 2007-08 school years the proportion of students who attended high poverty schools increased from 12% to 17% - a 42% jump.

It may be true that poor students would have more “strong teachers” if they went to un-poor schools, but wouldn’t the involvement of their parents, expectations, etc., remain the same?

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Blogging may be a little spotty for the next few days (then again, it may not), since Helene and I are on the way to Pasadena to watch her receive her PhD at the Caltech commencement on Friday. (Then, as long as we’re there, we’ll stay in Calif. for a couple of weeks, culminating in my happily annual visit to a wonderful gathering Ward Connerly hosts every summer at the Reagan Library. Don’t worry; we have wonderful dog sitters at home.)

Anyway, I’m writing from Dulles, in a hurry, but wanted quickly to point you to two noteworthy items in today’s news, one sublime and one ridiculous. The sublime piece is by Dorothy Rabinowitz in today’s Wall Street Journal, “The Alien in the White House.” No, she’s not a birther, and in any event the alienation she describes is much more profound than a mere accident of birth. If you can’t read it online, go buy a copy of the WSJ today. It’s worth it.

At the other extreme, Jonathan Capehart’s “Rage: Why Obama won't and can't give you what you want” in today’s Washington Post is ridiculous. It appeared first yesterday online in a Post blog, PostPartisan, and even more ridiculous is the judgment of Post editors that it deserved space on the print OpEd page today.

“Let me ask you a question,” Capehart begins.

When was the last time you saw your black male colleague, especially if you're in a white-collar profession, show anger or rage in public? My hunch is never. There's a reason for that. African American men are taught at very young ages (or learn the hard way) to keep our emotions in check, to not lose our cool, lest we be perceived as dangerous or menacing or give someone a reason to doubt our ability to handle our jobs. Think of the emotional corset women in leadership positions are expected to maintain to ensure they never cry in public or show TOO much compassion for fear of raising the same doubt and seeming weak.

Quoting a friend’s email, Capehart dug his hole even deeper:

Black men, especially educated black men, grew up with images of non-violent protests in the face of aggressive policemen, consequences of actually “displaying anger” like the Rodney King situation and are conditioned not to “act out” in crisis situations. Even in sports, you see “fits of rage” with black athletes, but even that is more controlled than, say, hockey, where if black athletes were to display that level of rage -- it would be called a riot!

If Obama were to display anger he runs the risk of Angry Black Man syndrome, becoming too scary or threatening to the public, immediately non-presidential!

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

Perhaps the most influential example of this phenomenom was the publication in 1959 of Slavery: A Problem in American Intellectual and Institutional Life, by the influential American historian Stanley Elkins. Influenced by the research of psychoanalyst Bruno Bettleheim, who had argued that Nazi concentration camps had “infantalized” their inmates, Elkins argued that the institution of slavery, like the concentration camps, was so oppressive and so all-encompassing that it broke the wills and psyches of slaves, making the “Sambo personality” real, not a figment of the imagination of deluded slaveowners. Elkins himself, by the way, was a liberal, and his analysis influenced many policy initiatives in the 1960s, not least of which was his friend Daniel Moynihan’s call for efforts to shore up the black family.

More later...

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In the post immediately below I discussed “white flight” in California — not from Los Angeles or San Francisco or other urban centers but from the entire state. Now comes the Dallas Morning News with a major series whose first installment is “ ‘Black flight’ changing the makeup of Dallas Schools.” (HatTip to InstaPundit)

“The number of black children attending DISD [Dallas Independent School District] schools,” the article notes, “has reached its lowest point since 1965.”

Black students formed a majority in Dallas schools through the 1980s and '90s. Over the last 10 years, though, the number of black children has fallen by nearly 20,000, or about a third. Meanwhile, Hispanic children have filled their seats as the district's overall enrollment remains fairly flat at about 157,000.

Today, about 41,000 black students attend DISD schools. They make up 26 percent of the district compared with 106,000 Hispanic children, or 68 percent. White students are 5 percent of the district.

Adelfa Callejo, a Latina civil rights activist, said it’s like history repeating itself.

“They’re doing exactly what the whites are doing, abandoning the school district,” Callejo said. “That will leave us with a lack of black leadership. You need leaders of all races to make it happen.”

Racial friction between blacks and Hispanics has long been a reality in Dallas ISD, from the hiring of Superintendent Michael Hinojosa to racial divisions among board members to arguments over funding priorities for civil rights-era learning centers.

Many black parents are concerned about the attention and money spent bringing native Spanish-speakers up to speed. Some say their children are ignored.

“Nothing is geared towards us; it’s all geared towards the Hispanics,” said Shirley Daniels, spokeswoman for the Black Coalition to Maximize Education, a civil rights group and plaintiff in DISD’s federal desegregation case, which lasted from 1970 to 2003.

On the other hand, community activist Jesse Diaz, whose daughter attends a DISD school in Pleasant Grove, said he believes that some of the district’s naysayers have a prejudice against non-English-speaking Hispanic children and poor kids. The percentage of DISD students labeled “economically disadvantaged,” meaning they qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, has increased from 73 percent in 2000 to 87 percent this year.

Hinojosa disagreed that DISD is losing focus on black children.

“We cannot be successful if those kids are not successful, absolutely not,” he said.

He pointed to a district initiative to improve math skills of black students.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It is now well known that court-ordered busing to promote racial balance in the schools was a major impetus to “white flight” from the affected cities to the suburbs. “Back in 1975,” Time reported in 1978 (“Education: Forced Busing and White Flight”),

Chicago Sociologist James Coleman, having looked at the early figures, felt called upon to report what most Americans thought they knew already: court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance in large U.S. cities and to ensure that more blacks and whites go to school together was causing a great deal of ... white flight from city schools.

In major metropolitan areas, white flight to the suburbs ... accelerated with court-ordered busing in the North in the early 1970s. With the rise of “chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs,” racial homogeneity of urban school districts increased. In his 1978 book on busing [Must We Bus?: Segregation and National Policy], Gary Orfield wrote that our nation’s pattern of fragmented metropolitan areas, combined with continuing residential segregation, made desegregation a difficult task: “The rapid departure of young white middle class families from the central cities, together with the plummeting birth-rate, means that an increasing number of cities and some inner suburbs are left with few whites to integrate” (Orfield 1978, 55).

California’s white population has declined since 2000 at an unprecedented rate, hastening the day when Hispanics will be the state’s largest population group, according to newly released state figures.

There were half a million fewer whites in California in 2008 than in 2000, a period when the state’s overall population grew by 4 million to 38.1 million, according to a study released Thursday by the state Department of Finance.

By 2008, whites made up 40 percent of Californians, down from 47 percent at the turn of the century. In 2000, Hispanics comprised 32 percent of the population; that number grew to 37 percent in 2008.

Wait a minute! I have an idea for a compromise that would rival the famous (or infamous) Compromises of 1820 and 1850 produced by the conflict over the expansion of slavery: Liberals have been reluctant to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out, but maybe they could be persuaded to drop their opposition in return for conservatives agreeing not to oppose efforts California might take to build a wall to keep whites in.

Such a “wall,” of course, need not be limited to a physical structure. Perhaps, for example, California could impose a draconian “exit tax” on whites leaving the state. A wall to keep whites in could be supplemented by other state policies designed to attract more white immigrants, such as promising whites who move to California lower taxes than their new Hispanic, Asian, and black neighbors. After all, treating races differently in the tax code should raise no more pesky principle problems than treating them differently everywhere else. (In Draft ’Em!: Release 3.0, I have discussed many similar measures that could be taken to promote “diversity.”)

I have frequently — and persuasively, if I do say so myself — objected to the term “reverse discrimination” to describe discrimination against whites meant to help blacks. There’s nothing “reverse” about it, I always insist; discrimination on the basis of race is discrimination on the basis of race. But those who insist on using that term may also want to think about starting to regard what will be increasingly necessary (from their point of view) efforts to require or induce whites to provide “diversity” to the growing Hispanic population as “reverse diversity.”

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As regular (and even irregular) readers of DISCRIMINATIONS know all too well, I spend a great deal of time and text criticizing “diversity,” which I put in scare quotes to distinguish “diversity” as it is practiced today — it is usually nothing more than naked racial preference — from true diversity. But in a largely unrecognized colossal historical irony, the fundamental principle that today’s “diversity” violates is actually a product of the real diversity that lay the foundation for much that is uniquely American about the American experience.

That principle, perhaps the most fundamental American core value, is that citizens have a right to be treated by their governments without regard to race, creed, or color. Stated another way, the state must treat its citizens equally, which in practice requires it to be neutral. When I assert that that value is fundamental, however, I don’t mean that it is a moral command, derived from Natural Law. I believe it is a principle that was forged by our history.

I tried once before, at some length, to explain what I mean. And since I think the argument is important, I hope you will indulge me in repeating a part (but believe it or not, only a part) of that earlier post:

Race and Sects in American History

....

One of the most cherished myths of American history is that our foremothers and forefathers fled the Old World for the New to escape religious bigotry and build a new society based on religious freedom. In fact, the Puritans’ strongest complaint against the Old World was that it was too tolerant, that it was swimming in a sea of such moral sloth and corruption that it had lost all interest in purifying the church. The New World appealed to them because it was empty (except for the “heathens” ripe for conversion), and they could establish Godly communities the way they were quite certain God intended.

And yet within several generations religious toleration had broken out all over. Despite the best efforts of the Puritan divines, diversity could not be denied. The Baptists and Quakers proved irrepressible. Mennonites appeared, and Methodists sprouted like weeds in the wake of itinerant ministers. Even many Congregational churches split asunder as revivalist “New Lights” walked out and founded competing congregations.

What happened? Unintended and unplanned, America began to happen. What Voltaire said cynically about England came to be celebrated here: “If there were one religion . . . , its despotism would be terrible; if there were only two, they would destroy each other; but there are 30, and therefore they live in peace and happiness.”

Toleration developed not because it was valued but because it was necessary. “Freedom came to the Western world,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, one of our greatest theologians, “by the inadvertence of history. Toleration was an absolute necessity for a community which had lost its religio-cultural unity and could find peace only if toleration and freedom were accepted.”

America discovered, however, that toleration alone was not sufficient. Strict neutrality was also required, a prohibition against the state favoring any of the contending sects. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in Zorach v. Clauson (1952), “it is only by isolating the state from the religious sphere and compelling it to be completely neutral that the freedom of each and every denomination and of all nonbelievers can be maintained.” Or as the Court held in Abingdon School District v. Schempp (1963), “the government is neutral, and, while protecting all, it prefers none.”

But if the very structure of American society requires a principle of neutrality that in turn requires a separation of church and state ... , should it not also compel a separation of race and state? After all, as the eminent Berkeley historian David Hollinger has written, in our time “ethno-racial affiliations have come to play a role similar to that played by religious affiliations at the time of the founding of the republic and throughout most of American history.” (POST-ETHNIC AMERICA, Basic Books, 1995, p. 123). Surely racial and ethnic preferences are at least as “divisive” today as debates over school vouchers, which seem to have bothered a few litigants and the courts much more than the society as a whole.

In that regard let me refer you to — no, let me all but insist that you read — an absolutely superb article by Jerry Kammer, “It’s Not All about Nativism: Historian John Higham’s Widening Views on Modern Efforts to Limit Immigration.” Kammer is a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award recipient currently a senior research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, and John Higham, who died in 2003, was perhaps the foremost historian of American immigration of his generation. His Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1965, 2002) is still widely regarded as the classic, standard text on American nativism.

As immigration scholars Peter Skerry and Noah Pickus have noted, John Higham’s Strangers in the Land “continues to be widely and approvingly cited by those concerned with underscoring the history of prejudice and intolerance toward newcomers in the United States.”

Yet, Skerry and Pickus also noted that Higham explicitly rejected efforts to frame as nativists those who favor more restrictive immigration policies.

As Congress debated immigration policy in the 1980s and 1990s, Higham warned that U.S. policies were promoting divisiveness by limiting the diversity of immigration sources that had helped the country avoid the ethnic cleavages that beset other countries.

Higham testified during the run-up to two major rounds of debate over immigration — first before a congressional committee in 1986, later before Barbara Jordan’s U.S. Commission on Immigration Reforn in 1993. He said the history of immigration offered cautionary lessons.

The United States had avoided ethnic divisions because of the powerful effects of assimilation, the internal mobility of American society, and the diversity of its immigrants, Higham said.

While immigrants tend to cluster in ethnic communities, “these communities undergo continual erosion through assimilation, especially in the third generation,” Higham said. “Consequently, the proportion of the American people who feel significantly conscious of foreign origins has always been limited.”
....
Discussing the benefits of diversity in the immigration flow, Higham observed that “America’s immigrants have differed from those drawn to other new countries most strikingly in the variety of peoples who have come here.” While conflict had arisen in other countries whose immigration favored particular nationalities, “[t]he United States has escaped any such cleavage not only because our many ethnic minorities have differed too much from one another to form a compact body.”
....
Higham contended that U.S. immigration policy at the time he wrote was not adequately advancing values that he regarded as key: the diversity of immigrants and the innovation that creative immigrants had infused into the nation’s economic life.

On the first theme, Higham complained in 1986 that the existing law’s emphasis on family reunification “tend[s] to reinforce and perpetuate existing patterns of migration.” He noted disapprovingly that in the previous year 73 percent of green cards (which grant permanent residence) had been issued to relatives of persons already in the United States. He quoted the observation of journalist James Fallows that such policy “in bestowing benefits on certain families simply because an uncle or cousin managed to immigrate in the past … closes the door on the classic immigrant, the independent man or woman who sets out to make a new life.”

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A. Barton Hinkle has an excellent column in the Richmond Times Dispatch skewering many of Rand Paul’s critics for the hypocrites they are.

He entertained the Libertarian notion that private entities ought to be allowed to discriminate. His most vociferous critics, on the other hand, vociferously support discrimination by both private and public entities. Hinkle provides many examples of discriminatory policies favored by liberals. One of them:

What about the scholarships offered exclusively to racial minorities -- such as the Ford Foundation's Diversity Fellowships, the Southern Regional Education Board's Doctoral Scholars Program, the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the literally thousands of others like them? If Paul is flatly wrong, then those programs, which perpetuate private -- and even public -- racial discrimination, should be outlawed.

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Yesterday I quoted Matt Bai, writing in the New York Times, arguing that anyone who “question[s] the responsibilities of government and private entities when it comes to race” is an “ideological outlier” but that, even so, “Americans the president’s age and younger are inclined to assume that one can question” those race policies “without necessarily being dismissed as a racist.”

I of course questioned Bai’s argument about the assumption of those youngish Americans. Today I’d like to point to one of them: Matt Bai, meet Irene Monroe, whose picture on HuffPo reveals both that she’s not only an American the president’s age or younger but that she also, as liberals would say when they’re setting about their regulation of racial markets, looks like him.

She writes today:

As we all know, affirmative action is a hot-button issue. At a basic level, it’s an attempt to take race, gender and ethnicity (to name only a few factors) into consideration to promote a level playing field for all. But the sub-text in all affirmative action debates is the fallacious belief that blacks selected to benefit from it are hopelessly and helplessly genetically inferior — that their DNA is chromosomally deficient, if not defective.

What really interests me is not that ubiquitous absurdity but the offensive, and incorrect, accusation that “the sub-text in all affirmative action debates” is the belief of critics that blacks “are hopelessly and helplessly genetically inferior — that their DNA is chromosomally deficient, if not defective.”

I’ve written quite a lot of text here since 2002 criticizing affirmative action. Some readers have read quite a lot of it. I doubt that Ms. Monroe has read any of it, but nevertheless she’s sure that the “sub-text” of all of it is my belief that blacks are inferior. Either she is not American or she is not younger than President Obama or Matt Bai is in a bubble and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning:

High-School Dropout Rate Is Cited as a Key Barrier to Obama's College-Completion Goal

Really? Who’d a thunk.

A senior Education Department official, speaking at a college-readiness forum [in Washington] on Tuesday, singled out the nation’s dropout rate among high-school students as a key obstacle to fulfilling President Obama’s goal of putting the United States atop the world by 2020 in the proportion of residents with a college degree.

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Writing in the New York Times, Matt Bai is bewildered that “2010’s Debates Still Trapped in the 1960s.”

This wrinkle in the political space-time continuum was supposed to have been smoothed out, of course. Barack Obama based his presidential campaign on the notion that the nation needed to step past the cultural chasm of an earlier era, and younger Americans, in particular, endorsed that vision. And yet here we are two years later, arguing over Vietnam and segregation....

Bai’s bewilderment, like the confusion or disillusionment of so many who succumbed to illusions about Obama, is almost touching, but some of it also reflects the peculiar lack of fresh air in the cocoon so many New York Times readers and writers inhabit. For example, he writes,

Americans the president’s age and younger are inclined to assume that one can question the responsibilities of government and private entities when it comes to race without necessarily being dismissed as a racist — even if it does make them [sic], as in the case of Mr. Paul, something of an ideological outlier.

And if it’s true that Americans of the president’s age and younger “are inclined to assume” that one can question the preferentialist race policies of the government and private entities without “being dismissed as a racist,” I know a lot of ideological outliers who, like me, will testify that that assumption is as off the wall wacky as their faith in The One’s campaign promises.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

May 14, 2010
Obama Says He Will Not Rest Until Oil Spill is Contained

Drudge Report, May 25, 2010
Another Vacation? Obama schedules second since oil spill...

Withdrew to Grove Park Inn & Spa as flow began to grow...

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

... until you read this breakfast-spoiling piece by Stephan Thernstrom about what the Kellogg Foundation is doing.

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We’ve encountered Christopher Edley, currently dean of the Boalt Hall law school at the University of California, Berkeley, a number of times:

• here, describing him as a
  

  former White House aide, co-author of President Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” review of affirmative action policies, advisor to Clinton’s race commission, fervent advocate of racial preferences (he described Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White as “a crime against humanity”), and advisor to the 2000 Gore campaign...
  

• here, noting enthusiastically and with approval that “the Supreme Court has the power to make social revolution and to force dramatic social change, even against majority opposition”

• here, responding to Richard Sander’s argument that blacks would flunk out less and pass the bar more if they were not preferentially admitted to top tier schools by noting derisively that
  

  [l]ower-tier law schools tend to be in places like Montana and Wyoming, Edley said, “places that are remarkably - What’s the word I’m looking for? - white”;
  

• here, creating the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at Boalt Hall to research and advocate “the legal limits on aggressive efforts to promote inclusion in higher education,” i.e., to circumvent Proposition 209;

• and here here, predicting “appeals to racial bigotry” in the 2008 campaign against Obama, appeals that never occurred.
  

That would be no problem, he maintains, because, you see, both Harvard and Yale have affirmative action. Because, in large part, of affirmative action, he continues, today “elite” isn’t bad because “Today, ‘elite’ doesn't carry the old-boy, classist, midcentury sense.”

In other words, what was wrong with “elite” in the old, “midcentury” sense is not that elite was, you know, elite, but that it was white (or Asian or something). Now, however, because of “inclusive” affirmative action policies, elite is no longer all white and so no longer bad.

Along the way Edley describes these the effects of the new fetish on “diversity” that elites all its controversial aspects. Thus:

In fact, law schools strive for an elitism that is quite democratic in comparison with many other fields. As at Yale and Harvard, we at Berkeley seek to build a campus community that is as exciting and diverse as our nation. That means a New Jersey physics major who models underwear. A single-parent firefighter medievalist from Denver. A former Navy Seal, a software designer, a late-blooming high school dropout, a dancer with published poetry. And when they are here, they teach each other, they learn to understand each other, and then they remember each other.

But who is it who opposes institutions that are “elite in terms of excellence ... while more democratic in terms of access”? No one that I know or know of. But I do know lots of informed people who oppose what Edley strenuously avoids defending — lowering admissions standards, i.e., requiring less “excellence,” for members of preferred racial or ethnic groups. In short, he engages is the classic preferentialist bait-and-switch: you want more underwear-modeling physics majors (who doesn’t?) or single parent medievalists from Denver or former Navy Seals or software designers or dancers who are published poets? Then lower the admissions standards for blacks and Hispanics.

If this makes sense to you, then you’re a liberal.

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At least since 2000, the American Council on Education has reported, about 57% of college students have been women.

This “underrepresentation” of men may or may not be a problem, and if it is it may or may not be a big one, but even if it is and is a big one it may or may not be a civil rights problem (although all those who assume “underrepresentation” is always smoke caused by the ever-present fire of discrimination will no doubt think it is).

Now comes the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to the rescue, shining its sometimes bright light on the issue of “gender discrimination.” Last December it approved a list of 19 colleges and universities to investigate “for evidence of gender discrimination in undergraduate admissions.”

The commission aims to find out if the institutions — a mix of public, private, religious, secular, and historically black colleges and universities — are violating Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by giving admissions preferences to men as the number of female applicants rises.

Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, prohibits colleges and universities that receive federal funds from discriminating against applicants based on gender— with the major exception of undergraduate admissions at private colleges that are not professional or technical institutions. That exemption, for instance, allows women’s colleges to remain all female in their undergraduate student bodies.

I’m not sure the “underrepresentation” of men in college is a problem, and insofar as it is I’m less sure that it’s a civil rights problem reflecting massive gender discrimination. I do think preferential treatment of men in admissions violates various civil rights laws, and thus is legitimately on the Civil Rights Commission’s plate, but it pales into insignificance (pardon what might a pun here) compared to the clear, present, and overwhelmingly prevalent practice of granting preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity.

I don’t mean to imply that the Commission has ignored that problem, but why divert effort and attention from it now? Title IX, properly interpreted and applied, no doubt does bar gender discrimination against men as well as women, and it would no doubt anger its usual advocates to use it to protect men, but man-bites-dog irony can take you only so far.

Lest we forget, Title VI is equally if not more explicit in barring federal funds to institutions that treat people differently based on race or ethnicity, stating in part:

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.

Does anyone doubt that this sort of discrimination is routine at colleges and universities that practice “affirmative action” in admissions? Why not enlist the Department of Justice to look at that?

Oh, wait. This is Obama’s and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes reality — especially in California — can be stranger than fiction, more humorous than stand-up comedy, more pathetic than loud drunks. A good example was on display in the California Supreme Court about ten days ago.

By approving Proposition 209 in 1996 the voters of California amended their constitution to bar the state from discriminating or giving preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, or gender. So, naturally, the city and county of San Francisco continued to discriminate and give preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, and gender. Two construction companies, ably represented by Sharon Browne and the Pacific Legal Foundation, sued.

The case was heard on May 4, and the Los Angeles Times report reads more like a treatment for a sitcom than a news story about real life.

Sharon L Browne, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, said the ordinance allows the kind of racial preferences that Proposition 209 was supposed to end. Browne argued there was no evidence of significant discrimination to support San Francisco’s law and contended that the ordinance itself gave preferences.

“When racial preference is being used, that is no longer equal treatment,” argued Browne, an attorney with the conservative public interest law group.

But Sherri Sokeland Kaiser, representing the city of San Francisco, countered that the ordinance was needed “to level the playing field” because of “ongoing discrimination by the city.” San Francisco contends the ban on preferences for women and minorities violates the U.S. Constitution.

To their credit at least a couple of the justices appeared skeptical:

Justice Ming W. Chin: “So discrimination in San Francisco is much worse than any other part of the state?”

Kaiser: “It is certainly possible.”

Justice Marvin R. Baxter: “Was any city official fired for intentional discrimination and if not, why not?”

Kaiser: “... the city must abide by confidentiality rules in employment, and the evidence in the case did not address such personnel matters.”

Other justices, however, contributed to the pathetic humor:

Justices Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos R. Moreno noted that Proposition 209 treated minorities and women differently from other groups.

I would say Justices Werdegar and Moreno and any colleagues who agree with them have no sense of humor, but that is overly restrictive since they have no sense at all.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember back when the Dems didn’t have enough votes to pass health care they trotted out “a so-called ‘deem and pass’ strategy that would allow House members to approve the Senate version of health care bill without an actual vote before taking up a second ‘fix-it’ resolution, known as reconciliation”?

Now they’re at it again, in effect redeeming deeming by their current plan to propose the following budget resolution for this year:

{BeginDemBudget}

{/EndDemBudget}

You will have noticed that something is missing. In fact, if you’re paying attention you will have noticed that everything is missing. According to Business Week,

Democrats will likely skip the annual task of writing a budget for the U.S. government this year amid lawmakers’ unwillingness to endorse a plan sure to include huge deficits.

With the midterm elections looming and primary results showing voters in a sour mood, Congress will probably forgo laying out tax-and-spending plan for the fifth time in the last 12 years.

“It isn’t the vote people fear, it’s the television ad” by a lawmaker’s election opponent on budget issues, said Steve Bell, former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. “Given the discontent of the electorate,” Democrats “know how powerful and damaging such ads can be,” he said.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s understandable that devotees of “diversity” are usually loathe to discuss religion. Although they often speak (speciously) of “culture,” the affirmative action apparatus they have constructed ties “diversity” and “multiculturalism” only to skin color and ethnicity. If forced to confront religion, they must argue either a) that religion is not relevant to “culture” and so cannot be used as a basis for ensuring “diversity”; or b) that organizations should distribute benefits and burdens on the basis of religion, just as they do now on the basis of race and ethnicity. Faced with this choice, they invariably choose c) neither of the above; ignore religion altogether.

So, I wonder if anyone in the White House has noticed that if Elena Kagan is confirmed, the Supreme Court will comprise six Catholics, three Jews, and no Protestants.

I don’t particularly care about the justices’ religion, but you’d think that preferentialists, who are always prattling about the necessity of making sure that all institutions “look like America,” might be concerned about the increasingly dramatic “underrepresentation” (actually, unrepresentation) of a not insignificant group on the nation’s highest court.

A reader, Alex Bensky, put this well in an email:

If [Kagan] is confirmed that will mean three of the nine justices are Jewish. Disparate impact being ipso facto evidence of discrimination, likewise overrepresentation, this is empirical proof positive of favoritsm to Jews. Whether this is the result of a dark conspiracy by you-know-whos (rhymes with “you-know-whos”) I cannot say. But certainly court decisions and liberal thinking indicates that for whatever reason there something fishy going on here.

There is another blatant discriminatory attitude here. If Kagan is confirmed all of the nine justices will be graduates of Harvard or Yale law schools. [Ed: Actually, Justice Ginsburg enrolled in Harvard Law School but got her degree from Columbia, but this doesn’t weaken Bensky’s point.] What’s the diversity here? I am hardly suggesting that justices should be found among, say, University of Idaho graduates. That’s Sarah Palin’s undergraduate school and all us correct thinkers know that means the school is lousy. But no one from the University of Chicago or Cal, Duke, Columbia or, dare I say it, the University of Michigan which gave me my law degree? (I imagine that last fact embarrasses them as much as it does me.)

It would be a benefit of diversity for the Ivy League law graduates on the bench to rub elbows with humbler lawyers who went to less wonderful law schools and isn’t that what diversity is all about?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For a thorough, and thoroughly convincing, puncturing of the bubble of Cornel West, see David Horowitz’s tour de force in National Review.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Elena Kagan has argued, in one of her few substantive law review articles, that the “redistribution of speech” by the government, i.e., restricting the speech of some in order to enhance the speech of others, is not “itself an illegitimate end.” (This restrictive view of the First Amendment is not uncommon among liberal Ivy League law professors.)

Kagan thus argued that the legality of governmental regulation of speech turns on the government’s motive more than the nature or even effect of the regulation.

In her article, Kagan said that examination of the motives of government is the proper approach for the Supreme Court when looking at whether a law violates the First Amendment. While not denying that other concerns, such as the impact of a law, can be taken into account, Kagan argued that governmental motive is “the most important” factor.

I hope Senators pursue Kagan’s views on intent — specifically, whether or not she intends to be consistent in relying on intent to determine the constitutionality of other forms of discrimination. For example, if she believes there is no discrimination absent invidious intent, she must reject the concept of “disparate impact” racial discrimination root and branch.

Does she? Will anyone in the Senate or the press ask? If anyone (else) asks, will she answer?

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The Washington Post reports this morning that “black activists” (you know, Al Sharpton, the NAACP, etc.) are “dismayed that no African American woman has reached President Obama's short list in two searches” for Supreme Court justices, and Kagan’s tenure at Harvard, which they see as “lacking in racial inclusion,” has “served to irritate them further.”

Because of all this irritation, the Post reports, the White House “rushed Tuesday to allay” these concerns, insisting that Kagan is, too, “racially sensitive.” Not hiring any blacks was not really her call, it insists (she didn’t have “final say”), and she did a number of “diversity”-enhancing steps.

“But,” as Roger Clegg incisively points out,

providing this reassurance is a tricky enterprise for the administration, since for the civil-rights groups in question a commitment to diversity requires a willingness to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex in order to reach politically correct results (i.e., quotas). And if, as dean and as solicitor general, a lawyer like Kagan had this commitment, one of two things must be true: (a) She thinks such discrimination is perfectly legal, or (b) she knows it isn’t legal but is willing to break the law. If the answer is (b), then she is ethically unfit to be a justice; if the answer is (a), then it follows she will be willing to uphold such discrimination as a justice.

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Most of you probably thought I was joking when, a little over a year ago, I reprised a number of my calls for drafting students and assigning them where needed to promote “diversity.”

For example, as I had first argued here:

If the yield [of admitted minority students who chose not to attend the University of California] has declined over the past 10 years, that is not the result of [Prop.] 209. That is, 209 didn’t keep those who were admitted but chose not to attend from attending. That was their own choice. [Not altogether frivolous aside: If “diversity” is as important as its advocates claim, draft them! Why should they be allowed to choose not to attend a college that needs them so much when K-12 students who want to attend a different school from the one to which they are assigned are often held hostage to “diversity,” i.e., not allowed to transfer because their leaving would deprive the remaining students of the advantage provided by being exposed to them.

If our national security really depends on having more women engineers, perhaps women should be drafted and sent to engineering schools.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if “diversity” is important enough to the education of non-minority students at selective institutions to justify sacrificing the right of applicants to be free from racial discrimination, it’s important enough to draft some minority students and require their attendance at those schools. Why should their merely personal and individual interest in their own freedom of choice trump the needs of large numbers of otherwise diversity-deprived students to be exposed to them, especially since the trespassing on the drafted minorities’ freedom of choice would affect only a relatively small number of individuals?

If you agree with the preferentialist assertion that education is impossible without sufficient “diversity,” drafting a few minorities and women to provide such an essential service would seem to be a small price to pay for something on which our society depends.

— indeed, almost all students in some entire states — are being woefully deprived of the education they need to succeed in our new global marketplace, etc.

With that in mind, what if the governments of, say, Michigan and North Dakota (black population: 0.7%) agreed ... to pay all the expenses associated with relocating several hundred black families from Michigan (many, but not all, from inner city Detroit) to North Dakota, to provide at least a modicum of [“diversity”] there. If there were not enough Michigan volunteers, the National Guard would round up the balance, choosing those whose material conditions would be most improved by the transfer.

Every time an applicant is rejected who would have been accepted in the absence of “diversity”-justified preferences, we confirm that individual choice must be sacrificed to some supposedly greater national good.

A study of Berea College students has found that white students who were randomly assigned black roommates as freshmen had a significantly larger proportion of black friends over their time in college than white peers whose first-year roommate was also white.... [T]he Berea findings suggest that students may begin college with misperceptions of incompatibility with students of other races that certain forms of interracial contact can help alleviate.

• increasing the number of multi-student suites, which would allow one minority student to provide “diversity” to several whites;

• counting Asians as minorities for rooming purposes, and distributing them among the white students. Although Asians generally don’t count as minorities, one of the attractions of using them for this purpose is that it would be very easy for selective colleges to get more of them, simply by dropping the widespread current practice of requiring them to meet higher admissions standards. Holding Asians to the same standard as whites would also have the added benefit of reducing the number of whites, which is what happened at the University of California when race preferences were dropped;

• requiring participation in appropriately “diversified” intramural athletic sports or other social activities; etc.
  

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

... not racial profiling? Put another way, is “taking race into account” or “being conscious of race” (the favored constructions of the preferentialists) — of course, as only one of many factors — always racial profiling?

I have recently criticized liberals, again, for being hypocritical on this issue, and the very next day warned conservatives that depending on how we discuss the recent Arizona legislation we risk the same charge. A few days after that I presumed to chastise Victor Davis Hanson (what chutzpah!) for responding to that charge by in effect saying to liberal critics, “You’re one, too!” Finally, two days ago, in the post immediately below this one, I noted a controversy that had broken out in National Review Online on this very issue between two justifiably esteemed conservatives, Jonah Goldberg and Roger Clegg.

Now that controversy has escalated, and I think you need to read all of it. It’s a very important issue in the ongoing national “conversation” (shouting match?) about immigration, but it’s especially important to conservatives since opposition to the government distributing burdens or benefits based on race is one of our defining principles. So, go to it, and if you feel it like report back here in comments with what you think:

Jonah, Roger, Peter Kirsanow, Roger, Jonah, Roger, Kirsanow, Andrew McCarthy, Roger, Jonah, Jonah, Roger, Jonah, Jonathan Adler (recommending Nelson Lund, “The Conservative Case Against Racial Profiling in the War on Terror,” 66 Albany Law Review 329 [2002]).

Again, this debate is very important across the board (not to mention the border), but especially so to conservatives, and it is well-argued on both sides. Read it.

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

... even in Arizona. But then, Roger notes, “the Arizona law has already been changed so that, on its face at least, it bans racial profiling,” though he adds that the manner in which it will be enforced still remains to be seen.

Roger takes issue with a column by Jonah Goldberg that, in my view, does a superb job of pointing out the hypocrisy of liberals who abhor racial profiling by the police but heartily endorse it when done by admissions officers, employers, etc. (now where have we heard that before?) — not for that well-done point but for Jonah’s view that “that the two positions aren’t that analogous.”

Read both, make up your own mind, and then stick with that view until and unless it diverges from what is argued here.

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Historians claiming to speak to current controversies with the authority of History itself can be at least as pontifically pompous as lawyers claiming to speak with the authority of The Law. A striking case in point is the almost humorously arrogant OpEd in the Washington Post today by Mount Holyoke historian Joseph J. Ellis, author of several widely acclaimed studies of the Revolutionary generation as well as some widely criticized autobiographical fiction.

His OpEd, “Immaculate Misconception and the Supreme Court,” claims that “the constitutional doctrine of original intent has always struck most historians of the founding era as rather bizarre.” Prof. Ellis may well be right, since I suspect “most historians,” after all, are liberal Democrats and thus believe all sorts of things most liberal Democrats believe. But insofar as they do reject original intent, I hope they are more familiar with the doctrine than Prof. Ellis, who rejects a version of it here that is even flimsier than his own non-existent war record.

His first claim is that “several of the most prominent Founders changed their minds in the ensuing years,” the best example being James Madison, the proverbial “father of the Constitution” who went from being “one of the most ardent advocates of federal sovereignty” to, a decade later, the author of the Virginia Resolutions, “the classic case for state sovereignty over all domestic policy.”

Ellis assumes, I suppose, that the fact that several Founders changed their minds about what the Constitution originally meant means that it didn’t originally mean anything, but it seems to me that that view itself is “bizarre.” Does a contract or legislation have no orignal meaning because some of those who signed or drafted it later change their minds about what they signed or drafted? (See Historical Brown-Out for my extended argument that the meaning of what the plaintiffs argued, and won, in Brown v. Board of Education can be determined by examining what they actually argued, as opposed to their subsequent arguments, many years later, of what they really meant decades earlier.)

Ellis’s notion that a few subsequently changed minds alters or obliterates original meaning, however, is a paragon of legal reasoning compared to the next rather astounding claim he offers:

The doctrine of original intent rests on a set of implicit assumptions about the framers as a breed apart, momentarily allowed access to a set of timeless and transcendent truths. You don’t have to believe that tongues of fire appeared over their heads during the debates. But the doctrine requires you to believe that the “miracle at Philadelphia” was a uniquely omniscient occasion when 55 mere mortals were permitted a glimpse of the eternal verities and then embalmed their insights in the document.

Any professional historian proposing such an interpretation today would be laughed off the stage. That four sitting justices on the Supreme Court -- Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito -- claim to believe in it, or some version of it, is truly strange. We might call it the Immaculate Conception theory of jurisprudence.

One need not believe, in short, that the Founders were “uniquely omniscient,” with privileged “access to a set of timeless and transcendent truths,” in order to believe that the Constitution they wrote and approved meant something to them that is binding on us, unless amended in the prescribed manner. The fact that that meaning is not always clear need not lead inexorably to the view that the Constitution is a blank slate on which we are free to write whatever we choose, which is the clear implication of Ellis’s concluding quote from something Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1816:

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did beyond amendment. . . . Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs . . . Each generation is as independent of the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before.

in his own lyrical way, that we are on our own. Jefferson would vote against any nominee who claimed merely to be an umpire calling balls and strikes in a strike zone already determined by the Founders.

Ellis regards it as “truly strange” that Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito even attempt to determine what the Founders really meant, but he has no hesitation determining Jefferson’s original intent, and declaring it controlling today.

UPDATE

See similar (and hence impressive) comments this morning by Matt Franck, Ed Whelan, and Ramesh Ponnuru.

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The Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors has just released its annual survey of members.

Here’s how the Chronicle of Higher Education begins its report:

Ratio of College Psychological Counselors to Students Improves
By Ashley Marchand
The ratio of paid psychological counselors to students improved for the 2008-9 academic year, according to the results of a survey released by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors.

Stability in Student Mental Health

The alarming spike in demand for mental health services on college campuses that began about a decade ago appears to be leveling off, a just-released survey of counseling center directors suggests.

The findings of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors’ 2008-9 poll of hundreds of member institutions point to a new stasis, where the number of students arriving on campuses in need of counseling or psychotropic medications is remaining constant from year to year, though still likely to keep counseling centers strained.

Whatever the reason, Inside Higher Ed helpfully tells us, in a somewhat backhanded manner, that the net number of counseling positions increased despite bad economic times, etc.

Despite the onslaught of national and local economic problems during the survey year, fewer counseling jobs were cut than were added. Respondents reported a total of 82 new professional clinical positions created, while 34 were lost.

Perhaps related to the stable proportion of students seeking counseling was a decline in the perception by counseling center directors that mental health problems were on the rise at their institutions.

In any event, even though the numbers of students seeking help remained stable, the “perception” of the counseling center directors that severe problems were “on the rise” did not decline very much:

In this year’s survey, 94 percent of respondents said “the number of students with severe psychological problems is [a] growing concern on their campuses.” In the 2007-8 survey, it was 96 percent. In 2006-7, it was 97 percent.

Perception Is Not Reality

Students often overestimate the amount that their peers use alcohol and other drugs.
....
Why do we misperceive?

• 1/3 of Lafayette students drink 3/4 of the alcohol consumed on campus*. These heavy drinkers more often shape our perception than do the 2/3 majority.

• Also, we are more likely to remember extreme behaviors at parties than the majority of students who are in their GREEN ZONE....
  

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the University of Oregon the search for a new Athletic Director is finally underway.

EUGENE, Ore. -- While the search for a new basketball coach is over, the hunt for a new athletic director is just ramping up.

An affirmative action committee approved the university’s selections for an AD search panel. That panel is lead [sic]by Dr. Robin Holmes who also serves as vice president for student affairs.

The most widely known version appears in Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In several posts over the years I have painted a critical (and, to me, depressing) picture of a parade of liberal Catholic politicians struggling to reconcile the pro-life dictates of their faith with the pro-choice demands of their party. These attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable were uniformly unsuccessful, sometimes pathetically so, and thus it is not too much to say — and I have either said it or strongly implied it — that in each case these politicians remained loyal acolytes of their Church ... while changing churches from Catholic to Democrat.

Now the NAACP has gone even farther down that same politics-trumping-principle road.

Last February the New York Times ran an article pointing with shock and awe to Georgia Right to Life, very conscious of “the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions,” reaching out to blacks. The article noted that

that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women.

(2) With the intent to prevent an unborn child from being born based upon the race, color, or gender of the unborn child or the race or color of either parent of that unborn child;

(3) With the actual knowledge that the pregnant woman is seeking the abortion with the intent to prevent an unborn child from being born based upon the race, color, or gender of the unborn child or the race or color of either parent of that unborn child;.

Earlier this month, the Georgia NAACP submitted a letter to support Senate Bill 529. We now fully understand the intention of this legislation and wish to retract our support for it.

At the time, we were of the understanding that this bill would work to benefit the women in our community. However, after many conversations with membership and constituents, we now realize that this is nothing more than using women’s health as a political tool.

Women of color in Georgia need more than divisive messages and deserve better access to health care.

Of course, these days the NAACP, like the liberal Catholic politicians mentioned above, and for similar reasons, regards any message that runs counter to Democratic orthodoxy as “divisive.”

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Two depressing articles about gifted kindergarteners in New York City have just appeared; note the different focus: 10% More Qualify for Kindergarten Gifted Programs in the New York Times on Friday and Six districts in Central Brooklyn and the South Bronx don't have enough kids to open gifted program in the Daily News yesterday (thanks to reader E for the tip).

Both articles mention data that don’t confirm their headlines. That is, the New York Times piece notices that the number of students taking the gifted test declined in poorer, less white areas of the city, and the Daily News article discusses the fact that “[at] the other end of the spectrum, in downtown Manhattan and on the upper East side” more kids than ever took the test and qualified.

As at least partial explanation for the greater number of test takers and qualifiers on the upper west and east sides both articles also noted what I regard as a depressing spectacle: “Experts speculated the increases might be due to more 4- and 5-year-olds studying for the entrance exams” (Daily News); and “[t]he cause of the higher passing rates was not immediately clear, but increased preparation may have been a factor ... hundreds of students citywide had professional tutoring before taking this year’s admission test” (New York Times

I’m not sure which is more depressing: hundreds of four and five year olds, children of driven parents, being herded in to test preparation classes for kindergarten, or hundreds of primarily black and Hispanic children not even taking the entrance test.