Legal Commentary

Robinson Redux

Posted on August 29, 2008
There he goes again. 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. See here for a recent example, citing a number of earlier ones...

Obama: Today, Rorshach Inkblot; Tomorrow, ?

Posted on August 29, 2008
Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom ask a series of penetrating questions whose answers will determine whether President Obama will work to heal our racial divide ... or exacerbate it. Sen. Obama?s words were very pretty Thursday ? and reassuring. But if believes, as most African Americans do, that American society today is fundamentally warped by racism, he will appoint judges committed to race-conscious policies and propose a host of radical policies designed to promote ?racial justice...

Juan Williams? Plea To Obama

Posted on August 28, 2008
Juan Williams has an eloquent ? although, I?m afraid, futile ? plea to Obama to, finally, ?take a stand? on race issues. After paying hopeful homage to the promise he sees in Obama?s biracial background, Williams writes: Yet given this central racial dynamic, it is incredible that on any issue of racial consequence Mr...

Obama Tries To Censor Critical Ad

Posted on August 26, 2008
The Associated Press reports that the Obama campaign is trying to force broadcast stations not to air an ad critical of of Obama?s ties with unrepentant 60s domestic terrorist William Ayers. Barack Obama is striking back fiercely and swiftly to stamp out an ad that links him to a 1960s radical, eager to demonstrate a far more aggressive response to attacks than John Kerry did when faced with the 2004 ?Swift Boat? campaign...

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UPDATE!

Posted on August 25, 2008
Excuses, Excuses, below, has been updated.

Excuses, Excuses

Posted on August 24, 2008
Here?s another chorus of the liberals? racism refrain, this time bleated by Jacob Weisberg of SLATE. ?If Obama loses,? he wails, ?racism is the only reason....? If Obama loses, he repeats, he will do so ?for a simple reason: the color of his skin.? Refuting this myopia by pointing to all the reasons millions of people, of all hues, will vote against Obama that have nothing to do with ?the color of his skin? would be about as fruitful as pointing out the various hues in a vista of brilliant Fall foliage to a blind man...

Big Bang Biden?

Posted on August 24, 2008
Barack Obama has often been accused of being too full of himself, of looking in the mirror and seeing not simply a future president but a profile for the next carving on Mount Rushmore. His infatuation with himself, seemingly buying into the myth of Barack as The One, the new Messiah, has been fueled by rhetoric such as the unfortunate example I quoted recently (here), where, referring in a speech to his impending nomination, he stated that he was absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick, and good jobs for the jobless...

Class War?

Posted on August 22, 2008
Michael Kinsley opposes ?class war,? which he thinks would result from substituting affirmative action based on class for affirmative action based on race. Although he recognizes that ?racial affirmative action is ... a raw sore on our body politic,? he does not explain why he believes class-based affirmative action would lead to ?blood in the streets resentments? but race-based affirmative action leads only to ?a raw sore,? presumably treatable with sufficient applications of liberal rhetorical balm...

ACRI Offers $10,000 Reward For Proof Of Fraud

Posted on August 22, 2008
While the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative is headed for ballot approval (see post immediately below), the struggle continues in Arizona, where BAMN, ACORN, and others have engaged in a massive, paid effort to disrupt the signature-gathering process ?by any means necessary...

NCRI Headed For The Ballot!

Posted on August 22, 2008
The Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative has been informed by the Secretary of State that it submitted ?more than enough? valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot. The formal announcement should come this afternoon. Congratulations, Doug Tietz, director, and everyone who worked on the petition drive...

Is The Coverup Of A Coverup Worse Than The Coverup Of A Crime?

Posted on August 20, 2008
Every since Watergate it has been a truism that the coverup is worse than the crime. But I wonder if now we don?t need an Obama/New York Times (ObamaTimes? The New York Tobama?) corollary: the coverup of the coverup is even worse than the coverup of the crime...

California Dreamin (Of Quotas)

Posted on August 20, 2008
Caltrans, the California state transportation agency, remains addicted to quotas, even after the passage of Prop. 209 a number of years ago should have forced it to go cold turkey. The agency tried to do without quotas for a couple of years but went into a deep funk when a ?disparity study? purported to reveal ?underrepresentation? of, for example, certain subsets of Asian American contractors (actually, it found only an ?inference of disparity,? but that was enough for government work), and it consequently asked the U...

The Kiss of Nuance

Posted on August 18, 2008
Liberals like nuance (?a refined or subtle distinction in ideas?), in part, I suspect, because they think they are smart enough, and conservatives too dumb, to appreciate it. Sally Quinn likes nuance; she swoons over Obama because she thinks he is ?nuanced...

The Obamessiah: Prophet Of Chiliastic Millenarianism

Posted on August 17, 2008
Drop whatever you?re doing (well, finish this post first) and proceed post-haste to read this fine article by Michael Paul Beran on some truly scary aspects, dimensions, implications of what he identifies as Obama?s charisma. (It was reprinted on the Wall Street Journal site over the weekend, here...

Who?s ?Ignorant About Affirmative Action??

Posted on August 16, 2008
George Curry, a prominent black journalist, writing in New America Media (?Expanding The News Lens Through Ethnic Media?), after quoting one of McCain?s many statements that he opposes quotas, writes that Obviously, John McCain is ignorant about affirmative action...

Spoof? I Need Proof

Posted on August 16, 2008
Some of you may know The Spoof as a site that features (allegedly) funny but entirely bogus headlines and news stories. A recent story, ?Obama Considered Ending Affirmative Action in Quest for National Unity, White Vote,? however, makes me wonder if someone didn?t spoof The Spoof, submitting a real story instead of a fictional one...

Good Advice, Incredibly Dumb Argument

Posted on August 13, 2008
First, let me say that everything written by Peter Beinart, an Editor-at-Large of The New Republic and currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is not dumb. Second, the advice he gives Obama in a Washington Post OpEd today to abandon race-based for class-based affirmative action is good ? good for Obama, good for the country...

McCain, Obama Respond To NAACP

Posted on August 12, 2008
Roger Clegg points to the very revealing responses from McCain and Obama to a questionnaire from the NAACP. McCain was refreshingly straightforward, direct, and hard-hitting. Noting that ?[t]he affirmative action remedies designed forty years ago should be re-examined,? he identified himself completely not only with the philosophy of ?without regard? colorblind equality but also with the actual language of the pending anti-preference state initiatives: I believe that government should ?not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, and individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting...

Change We Can Believe In: McCain Should Take The Initiative...

Posted on August 11, 2008
No, make that the initiatives, as in the initiatives that will be on the ballots of Colorado, Nebraska, and Arizona in November that would prohibit those states from awarding preferential treatment based on race. As I argued here (and many other places), McCain could gain additional support in several highly contested ?battleground? states ? including, as it happens, Colorado, as well as Michigan (which passed a similar initiative by a wide margin in 2006) and Virginia ? is he would take a strong stand in favor of colorblind equal treatment...

Is It An Insult To Call Obama An Affirmative Action Candidate?

Posted on August 05, 2008
I always get a kick out of the columns, and now talking head (on MSNBC) commentary, of Washington Post Obamanut Eugene Robinson. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here for some representative examples.) I would say that he?s such a perfect affirmative action columnist (by which I mean, mainly, that he writes often about affirmative action) that if he didn?t exist we?d need to invent him, but that?s not really true since so many other affirmative action columnists say pretty much the same things...

Evidence Of Racism (Or Not)

Posted on August 05, 2008
Politico reports this morning that ?Race-card flap reopens Clinton camp wounds.? ?I am not a racist,? Clinton said Monday in a testy interview with ABC News in Monrovia, Liberia, in response to a question that wasn?t quite related to that subject. ?I?ve never made a racist comment and I never attacked [Obama] personally...

Althouse: Half Right

Posted on August 03, 2008
I?m a big fan of Ann Althouse?s blog, even when I disagree with her, which is about half the time. This post is a good example, both of her strengths and my reaction to them. Regarding the current ?look like? controversy over ?playing the race card,? she effectively ridicules the Obamanaut arguments that the Obama campaign is ?fighting back? against the Republicans injecting race into the campaign...

Best Article On Obama

Posted on August 03, 2008
This article by Stanley Kurtz in The Weekly Standard is the best thing I?ve read on Obama anywhere ? in papers mainstream and otherwise, magazines, and blogs (including this one). I?ll have more to say about it presently, but since it?s long and since you?re required by official DISCRIMINATIONS edict to read the whole thing I wanted to mention it now so you so you can get started...

Obama DOES Look Like He?s From Central Casting...

Posted on August 02, 2008
According to reporter Michael Powell?s article in the New York Times today, ?Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles.? Perhaps Powell and his editor were on vacation when Obama described small town whites as ?bitter? and ?clinging? to guns and God; when he characterized Rev...

Response To McCain ?Switch?

Posted on August 01, 2008
DISCRIMINATIONS reader and frequent commenter, Michael Bertolone, has an excellent letter in today?s USA TODAY. He?s given permission to post it here: McCain switches sides for the better Michael A. Bertolone - Rochester, N.Y. Barack Obama said he was disappointed with John McCain?s change of heart on affirmative action, but I find it encouraging (?McCain sides with ban on affirmative action,? News, Monday)...

Al-Obama

Posted on July 31, 2008
Now it is apparently safe, at least for celebrity humorists, to make fun of The Obamessiah. On Tuesday, the nationally televised comedian David Letterman offered a ?Top Ten Signs Barack Obama Is Overconfident.? One, he said, was Obama?s proposing to change the name of Oklahoma to ?Oklobama?; another, ?measuring his head for Mount Rushmore...

Obama Plays The Race Card, Again

Posted on July 31, 2008
[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED twice three times.] It?s been said that every time a United States Senator looks in the mirror he or she sees someone who should be president. In this regard Obama is no different from any other Senator, or any other presidential candidate...

Where, If Anywhere, Does McCain Stand On Preferences?

Posted on July 30, 2008
McCain has already punctured the balloon of optimism from his supporters that rose over the weekend when he indicated his support for the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative. He seems stuck in a time warp, fumbling to announce his opposition to ?quotas? at every opportunity, as though ?quotas? had some connection to the current effort to eliminate racial preference programs...

Is McCain Already Backtracking?

Posted on July 29, 2008
The left?s predictable attacks on McCain for his ?divisive? support of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative banning racial preferences ? and the enthusiastic applause of his supporters for the same stand ? had hardly begun to trail off when the Arizona Senator gave a confused, and disturbing, reply to CNN?s Wolf Blitzer about the identical initiative in Colorado...

Obama Supports Quotas As Well As Preferences

Posted on July 28, 2008
In his first speech and talk with reporters back in the U.S. after his campaign swing through Europe, Obama said, ?I am a strong supporter of affirmative action when it is properly structured, so that it is not just a quota, but acknowledging or taking into account some of the hardships and difficulties communities of color have experienced and continue to experience...

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