Legal Commentary

Does Obama?s ?Stimulus? Discriminate Against Minorities?

Posted on March 07, 2010
Yes, according to the view of ?civil rights? that is dominant in the Obama administration. The Associated Press reports today that minority firms are getting ?less stimulus? funds than they deserve. Hispanic and black businesses are receiving a disproportionately small number of federal stimulus contracts, creating a rising chorus of demands for the Obama administration to be more inclusive and more closely track who receives government-financed work...

An Example Of Why The ?Stimulus? Doesn?t Stimulate

Posted on March 07, 2010
Title VI Complaint by San Francisco Bay Area Coalition Has National Implications by Urban Habitat In the first successful action of its kind in the nation Urban Habitat, helped organize a coalition that filed a civil rights complaint to stop $70 million in stimulus funds from being allocated to a $500-billion boondoggle elevated ?people-mover? known as the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC)...

Measuring The Dem?s Decline

Posted on March 06, 2010
Remember Nancy Pelosi?s famous declaration after the November 2006 elections made her the new Speaker of the House? The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history...

Gay Penn

Posted on March 04, 2010
A couple of months ago I asked, Does Sexual Equality Require Preferential Treatment, which pointed you, with encouragement, to this article on Pajamas Media by an all too frequent DISCRIMINATIONS contributor. That article asked, among other things, ?Will the movement for gay rights follow the same trajectory as racial equality ? from non-discrimination to preferential treatment based on sexual persuasion?? Now he?s back, with The Logical Outcome of Illogical Non-Discrimination Policies at Universities, starting about where the former article left off and discussing a new policy at the University of Pennsylvania to recruit gay students.

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Oscar Equality?

Posted on March 04, 2010
[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED] The New York Times has an OpEd this morning by Kim Elsesser, ?a research scholar at the Center for Study of Women? at UCLA, calling for ?gender-neutral? Oscars. ?Surely,? she points out, if separate awards were given ?for best white actor and best non-white actor,? if Morgan Freeman were not allowed to compete in the same category this year as Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Colin Firth, and Jeremy Renner, the academy would be derided as intolerant and out of touch; public outcry would swiftly ensure that Oscar nominations never again fell along racial lines...

UPDATE!

Posted on March 03, 2010
Race-Based Methodist Scholarships has been UPDATED.

Why Diversify?

Posted on March 03, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a gushing article this morning on the extraordinary lengths Rochester Institute of Technology has gone to in its effort to ?diversify its faculty,? such as beginning the recruiting effort years before a candidate receives his Ph...

College Credit For 9th Grade ?Ethnic Studies?

Posted on March 03, 2010
Reader (and Townhall columnist) Joseph Phillips sends word of a new program in San Francisco (where else?) in which ?high school students, just months out of middle school, can start earning San Francisco State college credit this fall through a ninth-grade ethnic studies...

No Noose Is Good Noose

Posted on March 03, 2010
The news from San Diego is that the noose was not really a noose. (I stole my title from reader Fred Ray, but I like to think I would have thought of it on my on.)

Race-Based Methodist Scholarships

Posted on March 03, 2010
[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED] Reader Daniel Love Glazer sent the following email, which I quote with permission: I am a member of The United Methodist Church, and my daughter is a high school senior planning to go to college next year. Someone suggested that our daughter, as an active Church member, might be eligible for one of the scholarships the United Methodist Church provides...

Dick Durbin?s Double Standard

Posted on March 01, 2010
I have MSNBC?s ?Morning Joe? on to provide background noise, and I just heard (about 7:45 AM) Sen. Dick Durbin give a breathtakingly novel defense of why Rep. Charlie Rangel should keep his chairmanship. You have to understand, Durbin said, that when Rangel went in the army he was assigned to a segregated barracks, and that?s why we have to keep him...

Meanwhile, From Australia...

Posted on February 28, 2010
BUSINESSES will be forced to employ minimum numbers of females in the workplace under new laws being considered by the Federal Government. Well, at least they?re not being required to employ maximum numbers....

More University Of California Intolerance...

Posted on February 28, 2010
Now a column in University of California, Irvine, has ?generated more tension? on a campus already riled by racial and religious conflict. Among the most inflammatory assertions by Hanna Guthrie, a sophomore English major who writes for UCI?s New University newspaper who had audacity to question Black History Month: it is a known fact that things like affirmative action give preferential treatment to American minorities...

Culturally Deprived, Retarded White People

Posted on February 28, 2010
A few days ago, in Utah Democrats Oppose Racial Equality, I wrote of Democratic opposition to the pending effort to revise the Utah constitution to prohibit racial preferences. Now it appears that without ?diversity? white people would be culturally retarded...

Causation And Our Partisan Civil War

Posted on February 28, 2010
As any professional (or amateur or former) historian can tell you, causation is a tricky business, often fraught with more moral or political judgment than scientific analysis. Slavery, for example, is widely thought to be ?the? cause of the Civil War, but that view arguably assumes something that shouldn?t be assumed...

Minorities And Immigration

Posted on February 28, 2010
A new survey by Zogby of Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans found that substantial and similar majorities of all those groups believed that ? immigration is too high; ? illegal immigration is caused by a lack of enforcement, not by overly strict limits on legal immigration; ? there are plenty of Americans available to fill unskilled jobs; and that ? illegal immigrants should be forced to return home rather than be offered a ?pathway to citizenship...

Abysmal Coverage Of Race In The New York Times

Posted on February 27, 2010
I?ve been writing about how the mainstream media covers race issues for so long, and so much of that coverage is so bad, that I thought I was long past being shocked by the thoughtless (or worse, premeditated) dumbness that so often appears in publications widely if mistakenly thought to be reliable...

Is One Of These Things Not Like The Other?

Posted on February 24, 2010
Sometimes it?s hard to tell the difference between higher education and Sesame Street, and today is one of those days. A few days ago I had occasion to quote the Cookie Monster?s well-known song: One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song? Today?s news from higher academia raises the question of whether all the following things are alike: ? Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education report that PLoS Medicine, an open access medical journal, will no longer publish papers where, according to an editorial, ?support, in whole or in part, for the study or the researchers comes from a tobacco company...

Utah Democrats Oppose Racial Equality

Posted on February 22, 2010
A joint resolution (HJR24) seeking to amend the Utah constitution to prohibit racial and ethnic preferences, modeled on California?s Proposition 209 and similar measures in Washington and Michigan, is working its way through the state legislature. Democrats, of course and as usual, oppose the measure...

?Diversity? Derangement

Posted on February 21, 2010
If you want to see ?diversity? run amok, look no further than San Francisco, and this enlightening article in the New York Times (even though the author, Jesse McKinley, a San Francisco parent, thinks that a school assignment policy that has resulted many schools where ?more than 60 percent of the student body is of a single race? amounts to more ?segregation?)...

The Only Problem With Affirmative Action? It?s Name!

Posted on February 19, 2010
A remarkable essay by Raina Kelley, ?Don?t Call It Affirmative Action,? appeared online in Newsweek yesterday. She must be some sort of columnist there, but I can?t say for sure because when I clicked on the sidebar item for the author?s biography the screen that appeared was blank...

The Patronizing Exclusiveness Of Inclusiveness

Posted on February 18, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the San Francisco Chronicle all report this morning on a new $16 million gift to the UC Berkeley from the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund (think Levi Strauss) to (quoting the CHE) to support diversity initiatives, including five endowed chairs and a new scholarship fund for students who transfer from community colleges...

Talk About Subtle!

Posted on February 18, 2010
A Washington Post article today describes the deep hole Rep. Rick Boucher (D, Va), a 14 term incumbent representing Virginia?s coal country, finds himself in because of the unpopularity of Obama in his district (not to mention Boucher?s self-destructive vote in favor of cap and trade, which angered his coal-dependent constituents)...

?Reverse? Discrimination Against A Half-Japanese Professor

Posted on February 17, 2010
Every time I hear or read about ?reverse discrimination,? I?m reminded of reversible clothing, like this sweater (?Two looks, two colors, one soft finish?), which in turn always calls to mind the observation (mine, I think; no one else would claim it) that all clothing is reversible ...

Is Racial Data Privileged?

Posted on February 17, 2010
The San Jose Mercury News has been trying to collect racial data from the biggest firms in Silicon Valley, with some but limited success. SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Google, the company that wants to make the world?s information accessible, says the race and gender of its workforce is a trade secret that cannot be released...

What ?Affirmative Action? Means Around The World...

Posted on February 15, 2010
... For example, Jamaica: Chairman of the Jamaica Association of Young Professionals, Junior Rose, is calling for the introduction of an ?affirmative action? policy which would require companies in the island to have a minimum percentage of their workforce aged 20-29...

Muslim Group: Speech Is Aggression; Disruption Is Speech

Posted on February 15, 2010
Inside Higher Ed reports this morning that the Muslim Public Affairs Council defends students and others who disrupt speakers they dislike. At the University of California at Irvine last week, for example, eleven students were arrested for disrupting a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren...

The Cluelessness Of Democratic Leaders

Posted on February 15, 2010
Amid all the stories of how shocked, surprised, and ?stunned? Democratic leaders were over Evan Bayh?s decision not to seek re-election comes this gem-like reminder from Politico that a large reason why they remain clueless is that they are incapable of reading clues...

BAMN, Affirmative Action Supporters Claim Equality Is Unconstitutional

Posted on February 15, 2010
Once again defenders of racial preferences are marching into federal court to argue that racial equality is unconstitutional. Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this morning that BAMN will challenge California?s Proposition 209 by arguing that the California measure, adopted by that state's voters in 1996, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U...

Incredible Credulity

Posted on February 14, 2010
David Broder has been called (among other things) the ?Best Reporter,? ?Hardest Working,? and ?Least Ideological?; ?the high priest of political journalism?; and ?probably the most respected and influential political journalist in the country? who has ?few challengers as the most influential political journalist in the country...

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