Gavin McInnes with hilarious satire on the problem of Asians having it too easy in America.

…Nobody clutches their purse to their side when an Asian walks into the elevator. If an Asian applies for a job at a bank or on the police force, he or she is welcomed with open arms. When an Asian commits a crime, people are shocked. When an Asian is appointed to the head of the Department of Energy, everyone knowingly nods their head. Asian privilege pervades every part of our day-to-day life and it’s time they joined the conversation about race.

Though they comprise less than 4.8% of the American population, they make up 8.3% of all doctors. Only 2.3% of doctors are African American, yet they’re 13% of the population. Thirty percent of African American men will go to jail, but only 1.6% of prisoners are Asian. Nobody sees the problem with that?

McGill University is one of the most elite schools in North America, and to walk through their campus is to be transported into a pastoral Chinatown. This is true of all Ivy League schools. Asian Americans have the highest education level of any racial demographic and they’re also the wealthiest. While African American households earned an average of $30,939 in 2005, Asian Americans walked away with twice that…

Read the whole thing at the link.

Leave it to MSNBC, the most race obsessed news outlet in America, to find a racial angle to the scandals.

His last line is a bit muddled, so:

“It’s going to be very very difficult for us to erase some of the things they’ve embraced,” he added. “They simply want this to be a figment of his pigmentation.”

(This is a repost from last March. Perez is set to be confirmed.)

The executive branch has vast regulatory powers. When regulators decide to seize authority not bestowed by Congress, it gets very ugly and undemocratic.

Consider Obama’s choice to run the Labor Department, one Thomas Perez. He’s the son of Dominican parents.

He’s an ardent leftist, and key proponent of “disparate-impact.” That’s the notion that companies can be guilty of racial discrimination simply because different races might, say, get better terms on mortgages.

The lender argues: but we don’t even collect racial information on our customers. How can we discriminate? The DOJ answers: the numbers don’t lie, pay a fine.

Is this even legal? That’s the point of a long WSJ editorial today explaining how Perez orchestrated the dropping of a case that the Supreme Court was set to hear, a case that might have meant the end of disparate-impact.

…To recap: A senior Justice Department official, Mr. Perez, intervened to undermine two civil complaints against the City of St. Paul in order to get St. Paul to drop a Supreme Court case that might have blown apart the legal rationale for his dubious discrimination crusade against law-abiding businesses.

Justice officials claim to be confident that their disparate-impact cases are legal, but if that’s true then why not welcome a chance for the Justices to rule in their favor? Why go to such lengths to kill such a judicial review? Justice didn’t respond to our requests to speak with Messrs. Perez and West or otherwise respond to this chronology.

Meanwhile, Mr. West has been nominated for the number three job at Justice, Associate Attorney General, and now the talented Mr. Perez is being elevated to the Obama cabinet. The question the Senate needs to ask during confirmation hearings is whether a man who is willing to play politics with disparate-impact law and the Supreme Court can be trusted with the vast enforcement power of the Labor Department?

Separately, the Supreme Court asked the Solicitor General in October for advice on whether to hear Mount Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, another case that examines the legality of disparate impact under the Fair Housing Act. Given the Obama Administration’s behavior, the Justices shouldn’t wait for an answer. They should take the case and give Mr. Perez the legal ruling he fears so much that he was willing to subvert other cases to stop it.

Remember, the arch-segregationists were southern Democrats. (Al Gore’s father voted against the Civil Rights Act.) And, no, they didn’t switch parties.

South Carolina Democratic Chairman Dick Harpootlian is getting some heat today for a comment he made about that state’s Republican governor at Friday night’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner, shortly before Vice President Joe Biden took the stage. Harpootlian’s comment came during his introduction of South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Vincent Sheheen. “In about 18 months from now,” he said, “hopefully he’ll have sent Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from.”

The comment drew cheers and laughs from the audience in attendance, but Harpootlian is now facing harsh criticism, given Governor Nikki Haley‘s Indian heritage. “Unfortunately, this seems to be a trend coming from the South Carolina Democratic Party,” Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey said in a statement. “Fortunately, the people of South Carolina are better than Harpootlian and his ilk, and we have faith that they will see right through their consistent attempts to play to the lowest common denominator.”

Note that Harpootlian is not just some pol, but the Democrat party chairman.

The Economist

ABOVE the entrance to America’s Supreme Court four words are carved: “Equal justice under law”. The court is pondering whether affirmative action breaks that promise. The justices recently accepted a case concerning a vote in Michigan that banned it, and will soon rule on whether the University of Texas’s race-conscious admissions policies are lawful. The question in both cases is as simple as it is divisive: should government be colour-blind?

America is one of many countries where the state gives a leg-up to members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups by holding them to different standards. The details vary. In some countries, the policy applies only to areas under direct state control, such as public-works contracts or admission to public universities. In others, private firms are also obliged to take account of the race of their employees, contractors and even owners. But the effects are strikingly similar around the world (see article).

The burden of history

Many of these policies were put in place with the best of intentions: to atone for past injustices and ameliorate their legacy. No one can deny that, for example, blacks in America or dalits in India (members of the caste once branded “untouchable”) have suffered grievous wrongs, and continue to suffer discrimination. Favouring members of these groups seems like a quick and effective way of making society fairer.

Most of these groups have made great progress. But establishing how much credit affirmative action can take is hard, when growth also brings progress and some of the good—for example the confidence-boosting effect of creating prominent role models for a benighted group—is intangible. And it is impossible to know how a targeted group would have got on without this special treatment. Malays are three times richer in Singapore, where they do not get preferences, than in next-door Malaysia, where they do. At the same time, the downside of affirmative action has become all too apparent.

Awarding university places to black students with lower test scores than whites sounds reasonable, given the legacy of segregation. But a study found that at some American universities, black applicants who scored 450 points (out of 1,600) worse than Asians on entrance tests were equally likely to win a place. That is neither fair on Asians, nor an incentive to blacks to study in high school. In their book “Mismatch”, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor produce evidence that suggests affirmative action reduces the number of blacks who qualify as lawyers by placing black students in law schools for which they are ill-prepared, causing many to drop out. Had they attended less demanding schools, they might have graduated.

Although the groups covered by affirmative action tend to be poorer than their neighbours, the individuals who benefit are often not…

Daniel Greenfield

Ever since the Civil Rights movement became a “Grand Myth”, the 20th Century equivalent of wagon trains headed West and the Minutemen at Concord, an activity so redolent of national values that it becomes a metaphor for what being American is, every generation has been given its marching orders to fight for a new equality.

Fighting against inequality requires inequality in the same way that Manifest Destiny needed land area to work. It becomes harder to spread out once you’ve hit the Pacific Ocean. Fighting for civil rights becomes a struggle when everyone has the right to vote, drink from water fountains and do everything else.

After that it’s all imaginary territory. You aren’t really expanding the borders; you’re just paving over swamps, slopping split level housing all over them and pretending that the next lawsuit over racial profiling or the article over pay inequities is just like those people in the black-and-white photos marching at Selma.

Racism is a resource and like every other resource, it’s in danger of running out. We hit Peak Racism decades ago. Peak Sexism peaked even earlier. Even Peak Homophobia peaked a while back. The cool kids are trying to push Islamophobia while peddling worn copies of Edward Said’s Orientalism that the campus book store refuses to buy back at more than 10% of the sale price, but once you get past the keffiyahs and a 10 year-old photo of what looks like a guy in black Klanwear in Iraq, (which looks like the world’s most confusing hate crime), the calm waves of the Pacific Ocean are there telling you that maybe it’s time to put away that thesis on “Othering in The Simpsons” and enjoy your job as Director of Sensitivity Innovations in the Department of Human Resources.

Fighting for equality stopped making sense when everyone became legally equal. Bringing back the word for a battle over gay marriage was refreshing after it had to be buried for so long during the long march through affirmative action and all sorts of positive discrimination gimmicks. But that’s just a blip on the radar.

Equality stopped being the issue before most of the people fighting inequality today on a professional basis were even born. Instead the issue became carving out niches of inequality that would preserve “inequality safaris” for the edification and lawsuits of future generations.

Bigotry is too prized a resource to just watch it drain away in some communal pool of brotherhood and sisterhood. The only thing to do is to find ways to dam it up and create national parks of bigotry that will allow future generations of civil rights warriors to rough it by camping out under the burning crosses while admiring themselves for their artificial courage in defense of a manufactured cause…

If dictator sounds like hyperbole, consider that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — created by Dodd-Frank– grants absolute authority over vast swathes of our economy to one man. (Unlike, say, the FCC which is a commission of five.)

Which is why the GOP refused to vote on the nomination of Richard Cordray to hold the post, and why Obama illegally used a recess appointment.

Now, we see the fruits of this. Congressman John Campbell writes in the WSJ

…Currently, if you apply for a car loan through a bank, credit union or one of the car manufacturers like Ford Motor Credit or Toyota Financial, you are judged on matters such as your credit score, income and debt. The financial institution won’t know your race or ethnicity or even necessarily your gender. It will approve or disapprove the application and offer you an interest rate based on the data. That’s just as it should be.

Most likely, lenders would be sued for using racial information.

But it is not good enough for the CFPB. In a quest to make sure that all individuals falling within the “protected classes” under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act get the same interest rate as those who are not covered by it, the agency wants financial institutions to guess your race, ethnicity and gender based on your name and the address on your application. Put bluntly, they want lenders to profile you.

It sounds bizarre. But during a conference call on March 21 to congressional offices explaining how auto lenders were supposed to comply with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (as outlined in CFPB’s Bulletin 2013-02), agency staff advised us that they would recommend that financial institutions use “proxies to give probabilities of the race, ethnicity and gender of borrowers” to guess if an applicant falls into a protected class, or not, for the purpose of setting interest rates. In other words, they would like lenders to use stereotypes associated with your name and location in order to monitor compliance with equal-opportunity requirements.

Does that mean a person named Jefferson who lives in the Bronx is to be presumed an African-American, but not a Jefferson in Wichita? Is Taylor Rosenstein living in Miami a woman or a man? He or she must certainly be Jewish, right?

Dodd-Frank was supposed to stabilize our financial system not become another tool for racialist activism.

Readers of this and other conservative blogs know about the corrupt money giveaway known as Pigford. Breitbart was all over it. So was National Review.

Now, two years later, the New York Times discovers the story is fit to print.

In a nutshell: the racialists in the Obama administration have given away $1.33 billion to black and Hispanic. The tab will likely get much bigger.

Sequester that, honky!

SHARON LaFRANIERE

In the winter of 2010, after a decade of defending the government against bias claims by Hispanic and female farmers, Justice Department lawyers seemed to have victory within their grasp.

Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm.

But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost.

They were wrong.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud.

“I think a lot of people were disappointed,” said J. Michael Kelly, who retired last year as the Agriculture Department’s associate general counsel. “You can’t spend a lot of years trying to defend those cases honestly, then have the tables turned on you and not question the wisdom of settling them in a broad sweep.”

The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. But an examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion.

Yesterday, someone on the radio said he hoped there would be no repeat of the rash of anti-Muslim hate crimes after 9/11.

Was there such a rash or is it just an urban myth?

Looking at the FBI stats for hate crimes in 2002, a year I chose because 2001 was three-quarters over when the Twin Towers were destroyed.

Some highlights:

• A review of the 7,459 single-bias hate crime incidents showed that 48.8 percent were racially motivated, 19.1 percent were based on a bias against a religious group, 16.7 percent were motivated by a bias against a sexual orientation, 14.8 percent resulted from an ethnicity/national origin bias, and 0.6 percent were based on a disability bias.
• Eleven of the hate crime victims in 2002 were murdered. Four of these murders were associated with a racial bias, four with a sexual-orientation bias, two with an ethnicity/national origin bias, and one with a religious bias.
• A breakdown of the data regarding victims in single-bias incidents [I guess that means only one bias, which would exclude beatings of black gay men, for example] revealed that 49.7 percent were victims of racial bias, 18.0 percent were victims of religious bias, 16.4 percent were victims of sexual-orientation bias, 15.3 percent were victims of ethnicity/national origin bias, and less than 1 percent were victims of disability bias.

Let’s jump ahead to 2011 stats: of the 1,480 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

• 63.2 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
• 12.5 percent were victims of an anti-Islamic bias.
• 5.7 percent were victims of an anti-Catholic bias.
• 4.4 percent were victims of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
• 3.4 percent were victims of an anti-Protestant bias.
• 0.3 percent were victims of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
• 10.5 percent were victims of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).

A few days ago, I sent a link of a recent Thomas Sowell column to a liberal friend (some of my best friends are liberal).

He called it nutty, and seized upon an arguable historical detail, ignoring Sowell’s point that ethnic groups often determine their outcomes via their cultural values.

These are obviously broad measures, but so are the methods the DOJ is applying when punishing companies for “disparate racial outcomes.”

So, anyway, I saw these photos in today’s LA Times. First, the winners of yesterday’s LA Marathon:

The winners in the California Academic Decathlon

Thomas Sowell:

Once we recognize that large differences in achievement among races, nations, and civilizations have been the rule, not the exception, throughout recorded history, there is at least some hope of rational thought — and perhaps even some constructive efforts to help everyone advance.

Even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, “We owe London to Rome” — an acknowledgment that Roman conquerors created Britain’s most famous city at a time when the ancient Britons were incapable of doing so themselves.

No one who saw the illiterate and backward tribal Britons of that era was likely to imagine that someday the British would create an empire vastly larger than the Roman Empire — one encompassing one-fourth of the land area of the earth and one-fourth of the human beings on the planet.

History has many dramatic examples of the rise and fall of peoples and nations, for a wide range of known and unknown reasons. What history does not show is what is so often assumed as a norm today: equality of group achievements at a given point in time.

The Roman conquests had historic repercussions for centuries after the Roman Empire had fallen. Among the legacies of Roman civilization were Roman letters, which produced written versions of Western European languages centuries before Eastern European languages were written. This was one of many reasons why Western Europe became more advanced than Eastern Europe, economically, educationally, and technologically.

Meanwhile, the achievements in other civilizations — whether in China or in the Middle East — surged ahead of achievements in the West, though China and the Middle East later lost their leads.

There are too many zigzags in history to believe that some single overriding factor explains all or even most of what happened, either then or now. But what seldom, if ever, happened were equal achievements by different peoples at the same time.

Yet today we have bean counters in Washington turning out statistics that are solemnly presented in courts of law to claim that, if the numbers are not more or less the same for everybody, that proves that somebody did somebody else wrong.

If blacks have different occupational patterns or different other patterns from those of whites, that arouses great suspicion among the bean counters (more…)

The Hill

The chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus said she is concerned that President Obama has not yet appointed African-Americans to his second-term Cabinet.

Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) said Obama’s appointees do not reflect the nation’s diverse population — at least, so far.

“I am concerned that you have moved forward with new cabinet appointments and yet, to date, none of them have been African American,” her letter to Obama states. “You have publicly expressed your commitment to retaining diversity within your cabinet. However, the people you have chosen to appoint in this new term have hardly been reflective of this country’s diversity.”

Well, Secretary of State John Kerry is married to an African-American woman. She’s not black, but she was born in Africa and is American.

The south had Jim Crow, but some nasty racial battles took place in Boston over school busing.

Daniel Henninger on the case before the Supreme Court that would free certain southern states from supervision by the DOJ.

Chief Justice Roberts: General, is it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?

General Verrilli: It is not, and I do not know the answer to that, Your Honor. . . .

Chief Justice Roberts: Well, once you said it is not, and you don’t know the answer to it?

General Verrilli: I—it’s not our submission. As an objective matter, I don’t know the answer to that question.

Shelby County was one of those moments when one wished the Supreme Court allowed its oral arguments to be televised. Some cases are crucial to the nation’s sense of itself, and this is one of them. At its center lies Justice Roberts’s blunt question: Is the American South irredeemably racist?

The answer should matter for a country that chose to call itself the United States of America and sacrificed much to preserve the idea. The common goal, one may assume, is to be united.

But racism is something liberals just can’t let go. Justice Breyer came up with this:

“Imagine a state has a plant disease, and in 1965 you can recognize the presence of that disease. . . . Now it’s evolved. . . . But we know one thing: The disease is still there in the state.”

Since proving a negative is logically impossible, the restriction would last forever. Henninger continues:

If I’m a 40-year-old southerner, born in 1973 and raising a family in one of these states, this view by four justices on the Supreme Court in 2013 of what I might do is insulting and demeaning.

The liberal justices’ remarks explain Solicitor General Verrilli’s conflicted response to Chief Justice Roberts. He isn’t saying the South is more racist than the North, but he doesn’t know if it is. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But we can’t trust them, so they must answer to Washington.

This is an impossible world defined by Alice’s Queen of Hearts, and it may be one reason the South today is filled with red states. They stand charged with being the only people in the United States who are potentially racist because they reside in Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana.

Justice Breyer addressed that directly: “What do you think the Civil War was about? Of course it was directed at treating some states differently than others.” In fairness, he then asks if this singling out must persist forever. “What is the standard for when it runs out? Never?”

On the evidence of the comments here, and by other liberal commentators on this case, the answer indeed is “never.” Justice Kennedy, the court’s great middle man, puckishly noted: “The Marshall Plan was very good, too, the Morrill Act, the Northwest Ordinance, but times change.”

Make work for lawyers, throttle economic growth — just another day for the Obama administration.

This demonstrates how an administration “interprets” a law can effectively create law well outside the legislative process.

Roger Clegg

The Obama administration this month issued regulations formally adopting the “disparate impact” approach to its enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, the 1968 law designed to protect buyers and renters from discrimination (racial and otherwise). This approach is increasingly becoming standard in housing and every area of the law.

Landlords, businesses, local governments and others can be held liable for policies that have disproportionate racial effects—even if those policies make no racial distinctions, are adopted with no discriminatory intent, and are applied in nondiscriminatory ways.

Yet if the numbers come out wrong, then none of the rest matters, unless a defendant can prove to the satisfaction of a judge or jury that there is some high degree of “necessity” for the policy or practice in question. Even then, defendants can lose if a judge or jury is persuaded that some other procedure would have been as good and wouldn’t have resulted in those numbers.

The disparate-impact standard for anti-discrimination law pushes people to do one or both of two things: Get rid of legitimate selection criteria, or use a racial double standard to ensure that the numbers come out right. This approach first became infamous in a 1971 Supreme Court opinion as a way to strike down hiring and promotion tests in employment. For example, the federal government and civil-rights groups have challenged police and firefighter written exams for having disparate racial impact, and physical exams for having a disparate impact on women.

The Obama administration is still doing plenty of that, but also much more. In 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Kaplan Higher Learning Corp. for running credit checks on job applicants. Kaplan did so to cut down on employee theft of student payments. The Obama administration objected because the checks had a supposedly disparate impact on black applicants. I say “supposedly” because Kaplan kept no racial data on its personnel. The government hired “experts” to look at DMV photos and apply a “race rating.” Mercifully, a judge threw out the lawsuit last month.

The magic of disparate impact can also mean that if a recipient of federal funding doesn’t provide a service—say, a driver’s license exam—in a foreign language, it can be held liable for national-origin discrimination.

The Obama administration is challenging school-discipline policies (more…)

Glenn Reynolds:

SO WITH TIM SCOTT’S APPOINTMENT, the GOP has the nation’s only black senator and both of its two latino governors. Kinda busts the racial narrative, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: The narrative isn’t giving up:“The linked WaPo article identifies Thurmond — ‘the former segregationist’ — as a Republican, but when he was a big-time segregationist, he was a Democrat.”

Yep. Just like DNC-member Bull Connor. Plus, from the comments:

A female, Indian GOP Governor appoints a black man to the Senate.

Do you really need any more evidence to believe that the GOP is engaged in a racist, sexist war on minorities and women?

Not if you’re at the WaPo, apparently.

Ethnicity, per progressives, must include racial identity and grievance. Everyone else is an Uncle Tom or house slave.

Change we can all believe in.

U.S. Rep. Tim Scott, who overcame poverty in North Charleston to build a successful business and political career, will be appointed today by Gov. Nikki Haley to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Republican Jim DeMint, The New York Times and CNN reported this morning.

Haley has scheduled a noon news conference to announce her pick. DeMint and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from Seneca, are scheduled to attend.

Scott, 47, would become the first black U.S. senator from the South since Blanche Bruce of Mississippi in 1881.

The Low country Republican would succeed DeMint, who announced on Dec. 6 that he was resigning with four years remaining in his second six-year term to head the Heritage Foundation think tank next month.

Tim Scott beat Strom Thurmond’s son in the 2010 House primary. Now he will sit in the seat Thurmond once occupied.

Instapundit:

THE WASHINGTON POST FANS THE FLAMES OF RACISM AND SECESSION with this execrable editorial on the Susan Rice confirmation battle:

Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.

Could it be that the Editorial Board of the Washington Post is a pack of pathetic political hacks who’ll engage in racial hate speech in order to advance the White House’s agenda?

Apparently, whole swathes of the electorate are illegitimate just because of their birth. If you really believe that, you’re doing more to promote division than anyone who signs a dumb White House petition for secession. Disgraceful.

Related: Remember When Condoleezza Rice Was Called a ‘House Nigga’?

Infantilize them, tribalize them.

A dozen female members of the House staunchly defended U.N. ambassador Susan Rice against Republican criticism over her remarks on the deadly Sept. 11 Libya attack, suggesting the GOP lawmakers’ comments were racist and sexist.

“It is a shame that anytime something goes wrong, they pick on women and minorities,” Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, the next chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told reporters Friday at a Capitol Hill news conference.

Who dared name a black woman “Fudge?” How racist.

“To batter this woman because they don’t feel they have the ability to batter President Obama is something we the women are not going to stand by and watch,” said Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis. “Their feckless and reckless speculation is unworthy of their offices as senators.”

Just because words rhyme is no reason to use them. Feckless means ineffective. If the criticism were ineffective, they wouldn’t be out making public asses of themselves.

Said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C.: “We will not allow a brilliant public servant’s record to be mugged to cut off her consideration to be secretary of state.”

Rice told a whopper on five TV shows. She has to explain that. Or does being a black woman mean never having to say you’re sorry? If so, then can the nation afford to appoint black women to important positions?

The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.

The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.

“To expect less from one demographic and more from another is just a little off-base,” Juan Lopez, magnet coordinator at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, told the Palm Beach Post.

JFK Middle has a black student population of about 88 percent.

“Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn,” Lopez said. “To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair.

And there many more listed here that are not Fortune 500, but big.

Are they self-made men?

No one is entirely, but they didn’t rise to the top without hard work and smarts.

Elizabeth Price Foley at Instapundit

THE WHITEST MAN TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT (BUT THAT’S NOT RACIST BECAUSE THE PERSON WHO SAID IT IS  A PROGRESSIVE):  And being a progressive makes it okay, of course, to say all kinds of outrageously offensive, racist things.  You can’t make this stuff up, people:  Stephanie Li, an English professor blogging over at the Huffington Post, says Mitt Romney  “truly is the whitest man to run for president because he doesn’t realize how his whiteness has influenced his life and how his class standing provided him with remarkable educational and financial opportunities.”  Further (as though she really needed to go further!):

This theme and the Romney’s repeated vow that they are the creators of their own success taps into long standing myths of the self-made American man, a man who is always implicitly white. But Romney’s narrative of rugged individualism is as false as the image of self-reliant colonists and frontiersman who made their fortunes in large part by relying on the slave trade and the exploitation of Native Americans. Romney’s blindness to his own racial privilege is a further function of his whiteness and its invisible entitlements.

So let me get this straight:  The “myth” of being “self-made” can only be attained by white males– and specifically a subset of white males who “rely[] on the slave trade and the exploitation of Native Americans”?

This race-obsessed view of things is of course common in progressive circles, including the critical race theory circles in which former adjunct law professor Barack Obama ran.  Consider also this incendiary op-ed by Lee Siegel that ran in the New York Times, in which Siegel said,

The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.

Of course, I’m not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.

Yes, you heard that right:  Not only is Romney the “whitest white man” but this label means that such super-white folks have a “retro vision of the country” involving white picket fences, stay-at-home moms (watch those lady parts, y’all!), and fathers “unashamed” of working hard for “corporate America” (and what a shameful thing that really is).

Wow.  Really– just wow.  Can you feel the hatred?

Roger Simon on Anthony Villaraigosa, who is being featured at the Democrat National Convention:

Is “Villaraigosa” Spanish for “village idiot”?

Claro que no, but it might as well be, considering the remarks of the Los Angeles mayor, a sleazy party hack who — as most Angelenos know — spends more time chasing skirts than doing anything for this city, which is in by far the worst shape it has been in any time since I arrived here in 1968. And those who are suffering most are the Hispanics and blacks Villaraigosa relied upon for his election and pretends to help.

To set the record straight, yes, I know Antonio Villaraigosa’s name is actually a combination of Vilar and Raigosa, taken when Antonio Vilar married Corina Raigosa back in 1987 to affirm their “lifetime of fidelity.”

According to The New Yorker, Corina first filed for divorce in 1994 when she, in the midst of treatment for thryoid cancer, discovered Antonio was having an affair. They reconciled two years later. Multiple affairs thereafter Corina finally dissolved the marriage in 2007. Not surprisingly, Villaraigosa’s serial philandering continued with other partners after the divorce. (You can check the sorry history on Wikipedia, if you want to bother. The Villaraigosas have four children and eighteen grandchildren.)

So why are the Democrats trucking out this smarmy creep — who has the knowledge base of a high school junior with absolutely no genuine accomplishments of which I am aware — for the election?

Because he’s Hispanic, obviously. If Villaraigosa were an Anglo, they’d be hiding him under the bed.

This is yet another example of the deeply destructive race politics game played by the Democrats. Since they have no real ideology or program anymore, Keynesian economics having been shipwrecked off the coast of Greece, the Dems are reduced to exploiting racial and ethnic groups while accusing Republicans of racism that even a few Democrats must know does not exist.

(Andrew Breitbart, as will be recalled, offered 100K to anyone with concrete evidence of Tea Party racism and never got a single taker. Of course, some, like Lawrence O’Donnell, are so around the bend they claim acknowledging that Obama plays golf is coded racism. I better stop drinking those Arnold Palmers or they’ll be after me next.)

This race politics is a form of sadism that is only marginally unconscious. The more these groups are exploited, the worse their condition becomes. All the way back to the “Great Society,” minorities have been seduced by the Democratic Party into a permanent dependency situation, which, as most would recognize from their personal lives, only encourages negative self-worth and depression. It certainly hasn’t improved their economic position in any significant way…

President Obama didn’t think much of the Republican National Convention.

He told some 10,000 people Saturday at a rally in Urbandale, Iowa, that the agenda set out by nominee Mitt Romney and other speakers in Tampa was “better suited for the last century” more often than not.

“It was a rerun. We’d seen it before. You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV,” Obama said, clearly enjoying himself. “If you didn’t DVR it, let me recap it for you. Everything is bad, it’s Obama’s fault, and Gov. Romney is the only one who knows the secret to creating jobs and growing the economy.”

Okay, let’s say the GOP convention was a rerun of “Gunsmoke” or “Raw Hide.”

What’s that make Obama and his Democrats? “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo!”

Everything is about race, race race. If you can stick it out to the end, O’Donnell uses the word “slavishly” to describe Mitch McConnell. Racist!

MSNBC has an obsession about race. They edited a clip of a man at an Obama rally carrying a gun to suggest he was a racist white hater, when in fact, as the CNN video showed, the man was black.

Lately, they’ve been hearing mysterious “dog whistles,” supposed code that the GOP uses to stir up whitey against Obama or other minority liberal candidates.

But a trip down memory lane shows how selective their outrage can be. It’s okay to draw Condi Rice as a parrot. But why the thick lips? Do parrots even have lips?

Jeff Danzinger’s 2004 cartoon is a classic.

And speaking of appeals to racial identity, Obama doesn’t even bother with code.

If you’re black, conservative and female, how will the diversity-loving members of the left treat you?

Mia Love found out.

By editing your Wikipedia page within moments of your speech, writing:

“…she is a total sell-out to the Right Wing Hate Machine and the greedy bigots who control the GOP and love to see people like Mia Love be exploited like the House Nigger she truly is.”

So sayeth the Left Wing Love Machine.

Artur Davis, the black former Congressman who seconded Barack Obama’s nomination:

There has always been a measured slickness in how Barack Obama’s political operation has handled race, the third rail in politics. They have taken the guards off the rail and made an old obstacle an instrument of fashion. And they have done so with an instinct for the genuine and legitimate guilt surrounding race in American life. As political maneuver, it is a thing of grace in some ways.

At least until the thing turns shameless and expedient. Bill Clinton got the first dose of the treatment, when he protested that Obama’s credentials as an anti-war stalwart were “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” That comment was then shape-shifted from a hard political jab at Obama’s rhetorical dodges on the Iraq War to an insinuation that the notion that Obama could win the presidency was wishful fantasy. No dispassionate observer who saw the video and heard Clinton in full cry would have arrived at the seamier interpretation, but with the nudging of Axelrod and Co., and with a little help from South Carolina’s congressman Jim Clyburn, the idea that Clinton meant much worse took hold.

The punch that Clinton absorbed was uncocked repeatedly. Sometimes on defense — when the Jeremiah Wright tapes surfaced, for example, the reasonable question of what drew Obama to a church with a history of incendiary rhetoric was cleverly converted to a teaching moment about an older generation’s fixation with race. When questions about the link between Obama and his old neighbor and fundraiser William Ayers started to burn, the line of inquiry was brushed off as an indirect method of raising fears about black radicalism, and it soon faded.

More often, the blow was an offensive one. The “Yes We Can” mantra always carried the insinuation that Obama’s primary wins were a triumph over the color line. Hillary Clinton’s campaign never found a way to channel that kind of power, even with another glass ceiling at stake. To the contrary, the Clintonites only added fuel to the fire through their (more…)

LA Times

Female athletes have won 56% of Team USA’s medals and 66% of its golds, both all-time bests. With women’s participation at a record level, these Olympics are being hailed as a gender-equity milestone.

Two-to-one is equity? Call your math teacher.

There’s a disparity here, and you progressives better get on the case about this disparate impact.

And it’s not just male-female: We must work harder to make sure there are more Hispanic, Asian, white, Pacific Islander and Native Americans in the sprint finals.

Sarcasm aside, congratulations to the women’s track team. Not only did they win big, they seem like a classy group of ladies representing our nation.