USA – Page 10 – praag.org

Black Americans feel less empowered under Obama

Four years after Barack Obama was elected president, this is not exactly a “post-racial” America.

A new study from Washington University in St. Louis finds that under Obama, many black Americans feel less free than whites when it comes to political participation.

From 2005 to 2011, only 45 percent of blacks said they believed the government would allow them to make a public speech, while 67 percent of whites believed they could, the study found.

The study found that while the election of Obama initially boosted feelings of political empowerment among black Americans, those sentiments significantly faded in the years that followed—especially among conservative and religious blacks.

These two groups make up a large segment of the black population, with 56 percent of blacks identifying as “born again,” and 39 percent of blacks as “somewhat conservative,” according to the study.

“First we saw the ’empowerment effect,’ the boost that happens when a member of your group gets elected to an important political position,” says study author James L. Gibson, a professor of government and African-American studies at Washington University. Gibson’s findings are based on national surveys conducted between 2005 and 2011.

In 2009, the year after Obama was elected, 71 percent of blacks reported feeling as free to speak one’s mind as they used to.

“But then perceptions of political freedom deteriorated among conservative and religious blacks,” says Gibson. By 2011, the percentage of blacks who felt as free to speak their mind had dropped to 56 percent, back to pre-Obama levels. (White Americans also reported feeling less free to speak one’s mind under Obama, but the decline was far less than among blacks).

In part, says Gibson, this can be attributed to “ideological polarization.” That split may have begun when Obama dismissed Pennsylvania voters in 2008 who “cling to guns or religion.” But Gibson says many conservative and religions blacks likely believed when Obama was first elected that he would protect their interests as president. “Race produces a level of trust and confidence that one is on your side,” he says.

Over time, that confidence eroded. Gibson cites the contraception debate between the White House and some religious leaders that erupted last year. Black Americans, he notes, are traditionally conservative on social issues.

Another schism may have centered on gay marriage. The Democratic-leaning Coalition of African-American Pastors, for example, recently said they felt “marginalized” and “ignored” by Obama’s seemingly sudden support for same-sex marriage.

Religious fundamentalists and conservative blacks, Gibson says, “have seen their efforts to participate in public life [under Obama] being thwarted over and over and over again.”

Elizabeth Flock is a staff writer for U.S. News & World Report.

‘Some girls, they rape so easy’

The controversial comments led Republican vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman, to withdraw his endorsement of Roger Rivard just hours before Ryan was set to debate Vice President Joe Biden.

It was the second time Ryan has withdrawn an endorsement from a fellow Republican due to offensive rape comments.

Missouri congressman Todd Akin drew widespread condemnation for declaring in August that a woman’s body can prevent conception in cases of “legitimate rape” as he tried to explain his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape.

Ryan, who also opposes abortion in cases of rape, is expected to be pressed on his pro-life views during the debate.

Rivard, a 60-year-old state representative, first made the statement when discussing the case of a local high school student who had been charged with sexual assault for having sex with an underage girl in the school’s band room.

The Chetek Alert paper quoted him in December as saying that his father had warned him “some girls rape easy” — meaning that some girls could decide later that sex wasn’t consensual.

He doubled down on the comments in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Wednesday, saying that he took his father’s warnings about the dangers of premarital sex seriously.

“He also told me one thing, ‘If you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry,'” Rivard told the paper.

“Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she’s not going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.’ All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she’s underage. And (my father) just said, ‘Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,’ he said, ‘they rape so easy.'”

Rivard went on to say: “What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, ‘If you’re going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.’ So the way he said it was, ‘Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.'”

About three hours after speaking to the paper, Rivard — who is engaged in a tight re-election race — sent a statement to the Sentinel in which he acknowledged that “rape is a horrible act of violence.”

“Sexual assault is a crime that unfortunately is misunderstood and my comments have the potential to be misunderstood as well,” his statement said.

“I have four daughters and three granddaughters and I understand the importance of making sure that awareness of this crime is taken very seriously.”

But activists said his initial statement belies his inability to comprehend the realities of sexual assault and are part of a broader problem of blaming victims.

“Unfortunately, comments like these are all too common, and an indication of ways in which the culture is generally undereducated about what sexual assault is,” Pennie Meyers of the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault said in a statement. “Sexual assault remains an underreported and underprosecuted crime.”

Rivard, who is married with six children and ten grandchildren, said in his campaign biography that he learned the “value of a hard day’s work at a young age” while working at his parent’s restaurant in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. Sapa/AFP

Ann Coulter’s Mugged, a review

Many in the Dissident Right/ Right Opposition have criticized Ann Coulter as the epitome of the cable news partisanship. However, next to Pat Buchanan, she probably speaks more taboo truths than anyone else with Main Stream Media [MSM] access.

Coulter calls for cuts in legal immigration, ending birthright citizenship, speaks frankly about the Bell Curve, defends groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens (with some qualifications), and even quotes VDARE.com and Peter Brimelow .

So I was excited when I heard of her latest book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama.

But, as she began promoting it, the controversy seemed to be limited to her attacking liberals and the Democrats for racism and indifference to blacks.

So I got worried that the book would be more partisan Jonah Goldberg-type “Democrats-are-the-real-racists, Martin Luther King-is-a-conservative” platitudes than an actual, much-needed indictment of racial demagoguery.

Fortunately, however, the vast bulk of Coulter’s book focuses on exposing liberal and black hysteria and lies about race.

Coulter notes several actions that now inspire accusations of racism in the Age of Obama:

“not electing Obama president”
“requesting documents from Attorney General Eric Holder” in Fast and Furious
“references to Obama playing basketball”
“the word ‘the’”. The last charge, she notes, was inspired by Donald Trump referring to “the blacks.”

Her book’s subtitle is Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, and Coulter systematically documents racial demagoguery from the 1970s on. She does a great job telling the true story behind supposed acts of racism such as the justified Rodney King beating, the tragic (but not racist) shooting of Amadou Diallo, and the Willie Horton Ad. She exposes the little-known fact that Jim Jones People’s Temple mass suicide was led by a fanatical left-winger driven by “anti-racism” and Marxism, who also had close ties to the Democratic Party.

Perhaps the best part of Coulter’s book is her discussion of hate crime hoaxes. She devotes an entire chapter, amusingly titled “Hey, whatever happened to that story…” to hate crime hoaxes and how the MSM always accepts the lies, only to deep-six the stories when they prove false. In addition to rehearsing well-known hoaxes such as the Tawana Brawley case, she goes into great detail about lesser-publicized frauds, like the non-existent epidemic of black church burnings during the Clinton years. More importantly, she notes that many of these fake hate crimes stirred up actual hate crimes against whites—which were all ignored by the MSM.

Coulter covers the Duke Lacrosse mess later in the book. This is one of the few Hate Crime hoaxes that most people still remember, but Coulter brings up facts often ignored (outside of VDARE and a few other sources) that put it in perspective. She reports DOJ crime statistics noting that there has not been a single case of an actual white-on-black gang rape, while thousands of black-on-white rapes (including gang rapes) occur each year. As Coulter barbs:

If there were a single unequivocal example of a white on black rape in modern times, a lesbian folk singer would have written a song about it and won an Oscar for the accompanying documentary.

There are, however, a few areas where I believe Coulter’s partisanship gets in the way of her otherwise excellent analysis. Like many Conservatism Inc. publicists, Coulter argues the Democrats are in fact the real racists, and that the Republican Southern Strategy was non-racial.

Coulter has occasionally made some statements suggesting that she is sympathetic to Bell Curve arguments. [See her column Murdering The Bell Curve, June 27, 2002 at 2:50 PM]But she concludes her book by asserting

if all black people woke up tomorrow morning with the cultural predilections of Korean Americans, all sociological disparities—income, crime rates, out of wedlock births—would vanish within ten years.

Coulter’s general point that most of the problems in the black community will only improve through cultural change is no doubt true. But the unfortunate fact of average genetic differences means that most of those disparities will never vanish.

These quibbles aside, Coulter’s Mugged ranks with Jared Taylor’s Paved with Good Intentions and Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed as one of the best indictments of American minority and liberal hypocrisy and hysteria on race. – Alexander Hart, VDARE.com

Don’t laugh please, we’re black(face)!

Administrators in the Waverly Central School District have been fielding complaints all weekend after students involved in a Friday pep rally staged a skit critics say was racist and made light of domestic violence.

The issue is getting some national attention after a Waverly High School graduate posted a story on the CNN iReport website early Monday.

Three white students wearing blackface put on the skit, according to the post by 2006 graduate Matt Dishler, with two of the students representing singer Rihanna and her former boyfriend, entertainer Chris Brown, who were involved in a highly publicized domestic violence case in 2009.

A photo posted with the story shows one male restraining another male, with a student portraying Rihanna cowering on the floor. Students and others sitting on the bleachers in the background appear to be smiling and laughing as they watch the skit.

Dishler said he didn’t attend the rally, but heard about it from friends. After confirming the information, he decided to post an opinion piece.

“I can testify there’s not a lot of racial diversity in that school whatsoever. We’re not really exposed to that at that school,” Dishler said. “I felt like something should have been done about this. I don’t believe the kids had any vicious intentions, but the administrators should have said that’s not exactly OK.”

Waverly Superintendent Joseph Yelich said he was not aware that the students were planning to do the skit, but he has received plenty of complaints since then.

“The Waverly School District is committed to creating a positive atmosphere through all activities,” Yelich said. “I’ll be working with building administration, staff and students to develop future activities consistent with that commitment.

“There is a set of concerns that a number of individuals have had, and we want to address those concerns,” Yelich said. “I want to be sure administration and staff and students know what our expectations are.”

Yelich did not indicate what if any specific actions would result from Friday’s pep rally.

A New Hope Center, an Owego-based agency that assists victims of domestic and sexual violence, hate crimes, rape and other abuse, is already working with the Waverly School District on bullying issues, according to Assistant Director Francis J. Bialy.

Bialy wasn’t aware of Friday’s pep rally, but he said, in general, it’s disturbing to try to find humor in grave issues such as domestic violence.

“If it’s intended to be humorous or putting down people, it further perpetuates permission to engage in such behavior,” Bialy said.

“When you look at issues with race, the same thing holds true. If people act in racist ways or support racist behavior, they tell other people it’s OK to act racist.

“I hesitate to judge the intent of something,” Bialy said.

“There’s also a dynamic that well-intentioned actions are done without a full sense of understanding that also end up being damaging as well. I think it should be looked at.”

Dishler said he is still proud of his former high school and didn’t want to be too critical.

“I believe they will take steps to cure it. I just think sometimes things need to be brought to light,” Dishler said.

“(Domestic violence) is nothing to joke about. I wanted people to know this mistake was made and can we please rectify it so it doesn’t happen again.” – stargazette.com

Affirmative action about to be redefined?

The case for racial preferences in awarding places at US universities is no longer about minorities held back by centuries of discrimination, says Simon Barber.

Rather, it is all about letting educators decide what will be best to prepare the youth for racial diversity. That, at any rate, is how proponents of affirmative action are framing the discussion as the matter is about to be heard by the US Supreme Court.

Solicitor-general Donald Verrilli, the Obama administration’s chief litigator, told the court last week: “The core of our interest is in ensuring that the nation’s universities produce graduates who are going to be effective citizens and effective leaders in an increasingly diverse society and effective competitors in diverse global markets.”

Just over half the Fortune 100 chimed in with an amicus brief. “The only means of obtaining a properly qualified group of employees,” they argued, “is through diversity in institutions of higher education which are allowed to recruit and instruct the best qualified minority candidates and create an environment in which all students can meaningfully expand their horizons.”

The case pits Abigail Fisher against the University of Texas. Ms Fisher, who is white, says her rights under the constitution’s 14th Amendment were violated when she failed to get in. The university says that while it does indeed take race into account in selecting candidates, it does so as part of a “holistic” review fully consistent with the court’s precedents, in particular Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion in the landmark 2003 case, Grutter v Bollinger. Writing for a slim 5-4 majority Justice O’Connor held that the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions strategy passed muster: it was adopted in “good faith”, did not rely on demographically-based quotas and was “narrowly tailored to a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body (with a) critical mass” of minority students.

Opponents of affirmative action would like to believe that, with Justice O’Connor’s replacement by the far more conservative Justice Samuel Alito, there is now a critical mass on the court for banning race-based preferences altogether. They hope Ms Fisher will persuade a majority if not to reverse Grutter v Bollinger, then at least, in the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor (who will not be part of that majority), “gut it”.

There is a school of progressive thought which would not mind seeing Ms Fisher prevail. In a new study for The Century Foundation, Richard Kahlenberg looks at how universities have been handling diversity in the seven states, including California, where racial preferences have already been banned by referenda, state legislatures or gubernatorial executive order. The news is good.

Responses include partnerships with disadvantaged schools, new race-neutral preferences for students from all difficult environments, no more automatic slots for offspring of alumni, and guaranteed places, regardless of test scores, for a fixed percentage of top students from all in-state public schools. Many of these are terrible, de facto segregated and disproportionately starved of resources.

“For people who care about social equality, all these new measures are intrinsically desirable,” Mr Kahlenberg writes. But they do not come naturally to university administrators because they are harder and more expensive to implement.

“While higher education’s vigorous defence of affirmative action on one level represents a sincere desire for greater racial equality, it has another less virtuous side to it, as racial preferences avoid the hard work of addressing deeply rooted inequalities and instead provide what (one critic) has called ‘racial justice on the cheap’ … recruiting fairly privileged students of colour is far less expensive than including low-income and working class kids of all races.”

Research by Derek Bok, a former Harvard president, found that 86% of African Americans at universities with selective admissions standards were either middle or upper class. At Ivy League schools, 41% of black students were not even African American, but immigrants from relatively advantaged backgrounds.

While it is invidious to invoke the voices of revered figures who can no longer speak for themselves in support of one’s favoured positions, it is interesting to conjecture what Dr Martin Luther King might have said of class, as opposed to race-based affirmative action. He did say, in calling for a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged in 1967, “it is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness should also be rescuing a large strata of the forgotten white poor”. Simon Barber, bdaylive.com

Racial goals for maths and reading

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.”

Others in the community agreed with Lopez’s assessment. But the Florida Department of Education said the goals recognize that not every group is starting from the same point and are meant to be ambitious but realistic.

As an example, the percentage of white students scoring at or above grade level (as measured by whether they scored a 3 or higher on the reading FCAT) was 69 percent in 2011-2012, according to the state. For black students, it was 38 percent, and for Hispanics, it was 53 percent.

In addition, State Board of Education Chairwoman Kathleen Shanahan said that setting goals for different subgroups was needed to comply with terms of a waiver that Florida and 32 other states have from some provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. These waivers were used to make the states independent from some federal regulations.

“We have set a very high goal for all students to reach in Florida,” Shanahan said.

But Palm Beach County School Board vice-chairwoman Debra Robinson isn’t buying the rationale.

“I’m somewhere between complete and utter disgust and anger and disappointment with humanity,” Robinson told the Post. She said she has been receiving complaints from upset black and Hispanic parents since the state board took its action this week.

Robinson called the state board’s actions essentially “proclaiming racism” and said she wants Palm Beach County to continue to educate every child with the same expectations, regardless of race. – CBS

Blacks show blind loyalty to Barack

African Americans show blind loyalty to President Barack Obama.

Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he’s black? If race is just one factor in blacks’ support of Obama, does that make them racist? Can blacks’ support for Obama be compared with white voters who may favor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, because he’s white?

These questions have long animated conservatives who are frustrated by claims that white people who oppose Obama’s policies are racist. This week, when a black actress who tweeted an endorsement of Romney was subjected to a stream of abuse from other African-Americans, the politics of racial accusation came full circle once again.

Stacey Dash, who also has Mexican heritage, is best known for the 1995 film “Clueless” and the recent cable-TV drama “Single Ladies.” On Twitter, she was called “jigaboo,” “traitor,” “house nigger” and worse after posting, “Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future.”

The theme of the insults: A black woman would have to be stupid, subservient or both to choose a white Republican over the first black president.

Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul and Obama backer, called Dash’s experience “racism.” Said Barbara Walters on “The View”: “If she were white, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Twitter users are by no means representative of America, and many black Obama supporters quickly denounced the attacks. But the reason Dash was attacked is simple: She is a black woman supporting a white candidate over a black one.

There is racial bias amongst whites, and there is racial bias amongst blacks. But as far as the press is concerned, it only goes one way, says a white critic.

When people speak out against a symbol of black progress like Obama, African-Americans tend to feel hurt.

“We still have a civil rights (era) mentality, but we’re not living in a civil rights-based world anymore,” says a black man. “We want to say, `You’re black, you need to stand behind black people.'”

He said one reason he voted for Obama in the 2008 primary against Hillary Clinton was because Obama is black: “Yes, I will admit that.”

Is that racism? Not in his mind. “It’s voting for someone who would understand your side of the coin a lot better.”

Such logic runs into trouble when applied to a white person voting for Romney because he understands whiteness better. Ron Christie, a black conservative who worked for former President George W. Bush, finds both sides of that coin unacceptable.

“It’s not the vision that our leaders in the civil rights movement would have envisioned and be proud of in the era of the first African-American president,” Christie said.

Martin Luther King Jr. fought Jim Crow laws, which deprived blacks of political rights after Reconstruction, upheld by Southern Democrats. But black voters switched after Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the 1960s civil rights legislation and Republicans successfully pursued the votes of white people who disliked the civil rights agenda.

Since then, Democrats have persistently wooed black voters with programs and platforms that African-Americans favor, and the party has been rewarded every four years.

Clinton got 83 percent of the black vote in 1992 and 84 percent in 1996; the third-party candidate Ross Perot probably sliced away some of Clinton’s black support. Al Gore got 90 percent in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004. Obama captured 95 percent in 2008, and 2 million more black people voted than in the previous election.

Christie says he, too, shares the sense of pride in Obama smashing what for blacks is the ultimate glass ceiling. He understands that black pride springs from a shared history of being treated as less than human, while the history of pride in whiteness has a racist context.

Christie says black men shifted from calling candidate Obama “half-white” and “not one of us” to demanding that Christie stop opposing the first black president.

He sees it in the comments of radio host Tom Joyner, who told his millions of listeners a year ago, “Let’s not even deal with facts right now. Let’s deal with our blackness and pride – and loyalty. . I’m not afraid or ashamed to say that as black people, we should do it because he’s a black man.”

The actor Samuel L. Jackson said much the same thing: “I voted for Barack because he was black,” he told Ebony magazine. “Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people – because they look like them.”

In 2011, as black unemployment continued to rise, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus said that if Clinton was still president, “we probably would be still marching on the White House . (but) nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.”

And just last week, the rapper Snoop Dogg posted a list of voting reasons, written by someone else, on a social media account. No. 1 on his pro-Obama list: He’s black. Snoop’s top reason to not vote for Romney: He’s white.

Black voters feel like white people are attacking their dignity whwn they say negative things about Obama, and they are closing ranks around him.

There should not be this resistance to pride over the first black president, says many blacks. The USA should only elect blacks to that position in the future to eradicate racism. The GOP probably agrees, but would prefer an Uncle Tom. – AP

Nobel bailout, EU wins

The European Union has been announced the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2012. Amidst Europe’s as-yet-unsolved crippling economic backdrop, a heated debate emerged over the validity of the prize.

The unanimous decision was reportedly made by a five-person panel chaired by Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjoern Jagland, a strong advocate of the 27-nation block.

The news came 60 years after the creation of the EU’s predecessor organization, the European Coal and Steel Community, which helped rebuild a continent decimated by two World Wars.

“The European Union is in the middle of one of its worst crises, but perhaps it is precisely now the peace and stabilization project deserves a hand from the ‘no’ country Norway?” Norwegian public broadcaster NRK said.

Norway, the Nobel Peace Prize’s host nation, refused membership in the EU in 1972 and again in 1994.

One past winner introduced indefinite detention and expanded the deadly global drone war. Another was the architect of the deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina. Ghandi never got one.

With the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize set to be announced in Oslo, Norway on Friday, the shadow of Barack Obama still looms large. In 2009, the committee awarded the current US president “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Nominations for the award are due by February 1, meaning Obama had served as America’s executive for less than two weeks when the Norwegian Nobel Committee selected him. Perhaps it was wishful thinking.

Since then, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, making it legal to indefinitely detain US citizens. There are also the deadly drone wars in Yemen and Pakistan, the war waged in Libya, the Afghan surge and a secret “kill list” revealed this year by The New York Times, which grants a select few American officials the option to mark perceived national security threats – foreign citizens or otherwise – for assassination. Ironic, yes, but they never could have known.

Even attempts for the committee to play it more conservatively have backfired. Last year, the committee decided to recognize three women for their role in a non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work. The three women included a Yemeni activist, Liberian President Johnson Sirleaf and her fellow citizen and civil society activist Leymah Gbowee.

On Wednesday, Gbowee publically lambasted Sirleaf for failing to fight corruption and nepotism in Liberia.

Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission even put Sirleaf on a list of 52 people who should be sanctioned for committing war crimes for supporting former Liberian warlord and President Charles Taylor in the late 1980s.

Taylor, who infamously campaigned on the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him” during the 1997 general election that followed a war that killed over 200,000 people, fortunately did not win a Nobel Prize.

The post-Obama rehabilitation of the prize might not have gone as smoothly as hoped, but the prize’s history is replete with examples of questionable choices, to say the least.

Chief among them was the 1973 prize awarded to North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. Tho rejected the prize, telling Kissinger that peace had not been restored in South Vietnam. Kissinger for his part accepted the prize “with humility.”

Before, during and after his acceptance of the prize, Kissinger would be implicated in assassination, war crimes and the slaughter of civilians in a large swath of countries: East Timor, Pakistan, Greece, Cyprus, Chile, Argentina, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

This year’s winner was drawn from 231 different nominations, 188 of whom are individuals, while the rest are organizations.

Also on the list was Myanmar’s President Thein Sein, who might be recognized for his role in moderating Myanmar’s notoriously repressive military regime. But even Sein has been implicated in confiscating land from paddy farmers which was later sold to an officer from the effectively paramilitary United Wa State Arm, who then used the land for the production of amphetamines.

This certainly wouldn’t have been the biggest shock in the prize’s hundred-plus years.

Racism worse for whites, study shows

The study polled roughly 200 white people and 200 black people drawn at random from a national census and asked them to rate racist attitudes against blacks and whites in each decade from 1950 to 2000.

Both groups felt racism against black people was substantial in the 1950s and both groups agreed the situation had markedly improved.

However, white respondents to the survey indicated that racism is now on the rise against white people. Eleven per cent of people responding to the survey even gave anti-white racism a maximum rating of ten points.

The authors said the research showed America has not yet reached a “post-racial” era, despite the election of Barack Obama as the country’s first black president.

Instead, they said there are still “several legal and social controversies” highlighting “reverse racism” against white people, and that the white respondents to the survey felt that racism is now a “zero-sum game” – the less racism that is directed against black Americans has been accompanied by a rise in perceived biases against white Americans.

“Whites believe the pendulum has now swung way beyond equality in the direction of discrimination,” it added.

“It is a pretty surprising finding when you think of the wide range of disparities that still exist in society, most of which show black Americans with worse outcomes than whites in areas such as income, home ownership, health and employment,” said Samuel Somers, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts who co-authored the study.

David E. Berstein, a professor of law at George Mason university, told the New York Times that the US policy of affirmative action, which sees universities and employers overtly favour black candidates over whites, had led many whites to complain about the unfairness of the system.

“It is not terribly surprising that whites subjectively perceive discrimination against members of their own group as an especially significant and growing problem, even though, objectively speaking, bias against blacks is far more pervasive, problematic and ill-intentioned,” he said. – The Telegraph

Kim Dotcom says he was spied on without warrant

In the latest episode of the ongoing saga of accused hacker Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload founder says he suspects that the illegal intelligence New Zealand authorities collected on him was shared in real-time with American authorities.

The US government says Dotcom masterminded a multi-million-dollar copyright infringement conspiracy by running the Megaupload cyberlocker, and although the authorities refuse to release any evidence of the alleged wrongdoing, Dotcom says he thinks he was illegally targeted by a secretive snooping-collective with an international reach.

New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has already determined that the country’s spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), illegally monitored Dotcom when they subjected him to a rigorous undercover investigation reserved only for foreign nationals in the months leading up to the January 2012 raid on his home and his subsequent arrest. As a citizen of New Zealand at the time, the Germany-born Megaupload founder was targeted unlawfully and all intelligence gathered on him is now being brought into question. Speaking to the TorrentFreak website this week, Dotcom says the GCSB’s intricate involvement in the global Echelon intelligence network could have let US authorities come into possession with his personal communications.

“The interesting part is that the GCSB is one of the five partners in the Echelon project, the global spying project,” Dotcom says. “They are prying on every type of communication they can get their hands on, from wireless, to Internet, to satellite, to telephone.”

Last month, author and journalist Nicky Hager told Fairfax New Zealand News that the GCSB agents hired to conduct surveillance are “not spies in the normal sense” who have an array of technologies in their arsenal to monitor Dotcom’s activities. By locking into the Echelon network, Hager said the GCSB could “actually just plug in his email address, his name, his company name whatever and see what comes off it.”

Dotcom says he suspects the evidence the GCSB collected on him was fed into Echelon and offered to Americans on-the-spot, but says this could actually help his argument, “because all you can hear is that we were trying to do the right thing.”

“The GCSB was utilized to surveil all my communication in order to give the U.S. Government full access to all my communication, without the requirement of a warrant, and without the ability for me to get access to transcripts or discovery,” Dotcom adds to TorrentFreak. “The US has used this GCSB surveillance to get real-time access to my phone calls, Internet traffic and everything, and I can’t do anything about it. They refuse to cooperate with the court and say it’s all national security,”

The US is refusing to reveal the intelligence, however, despite their case against the file-sharing kingpin not advancing further than the indictment that has been unsealed since early 2012.

In a separate matter, Dotcom’s attorneys have hit another roadblock in their effort to have that indictment dropped, with the US Justice Department declining to play by their own rules as they try to keep their quickly collapsing investigation from fizzling to nothing. Attorneys for Dotcom have argued that the US must serve a company charged with a federal crime at their last American mailing address, but Megaupload never once operated out of the US.

“To this court’s knowledge, no court has ever dismissed an indictment for failure to meet Rule 4’s secondary mailing requirement,” Judge Liam O’Grady ruled last week when he dismissed the defense’s argument.

Dotcom’s attorneys first argued in July that “The Government bears the burden of proving that it has validly served Megaupload within the letter of the Rule… and effectively concedes it cannot carry it.”

Earlier this week, Dotcom’s US-based attorney Ira Rothken told the Inquirer, “Now that these procedures are coming under scrutiny they appear to have violated the law at nearly every part of the process,” adding, “From an illegal search warrant to what we believe is an illegal military style raid, to illegal data sharing with the US, illegal spying and ultimately what we believe is an overbroad takedown of the entire Megaupload enterprise.”

‘We don’t need a race box’

: Abigail Fisher

Abigail Fisher is a slight young woman with strawberry blond hair, a smile that needs little prompting, a determined manner and a good academic record. She played soccer in high school, and she is an accomplished cellist.

But the university she had her heart set on, the one her father and sister had attended, rejected her. “I was devastated,” she said, in her first news interview since she was turned down by the University of Texas at Austin four years ago.

Ms. Fisher, 22, who is white and recently graduated from Louisiana State University, says that her race was held against her, and the Supreme Court is to hear her case on Wednesday, bringing new attention to the combustible issue of the constitutionality of racial preferences in admissions decisions by public universities.

“I’m hoping,” she said, “that they’ll completely take race out of the issue in terms of admissions and that everyone will be able to get into any school that they want no matter what race they are but solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it.”

The university said Ms. Fisher would not have been admitted even if race had played no role in the process, and it questioned whether she has suffered the sort of injury that gives her standing to sue. But the university’s larger defense is that it must be free to assemble a varied student body as part of its academic and societal mission. The Supreme Court endorsed that view by a 5-to-4 vote in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.

University officials said that the school’s affirmative action program was needed to build a student body diverse enough to include minority students with a broad range of backgrounds and for the campus to have a “critical mass” of minority students in most classrooms. Interaction among students in class and around campus, said Kedra Ishop, the university’s director of admissions, helps students overcome biases and make contributions to a diverse society. “The role of U.T. Austin,” Dr. Ishop said, “is to provide leadership to the state.”

The majority opinion in the Grutter case, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, rejected the use of racial quotas in admissions decisions but said that race could be used as one factor among many, as part of a “holistic review.” Justice O’Connor retired in 2006, and her replacement by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. may open the way for a ruling cutting back on such race-conscious admissions policies, or eliminating them.

The Constitution does not permit the government to sort people by race, no matter how worthy its goal. “While racial diversity on college campuses is beneficial, it cannot be attained by racial discrimination,” said Edward Blum, an adviser to Ms. Fisher and a driving force behind the Fisher case.

Three-quarters of applicants from Texas are admitted under a program that guarantees admission to the top students in every high school in the state. The remaining Texas students and those from elsewhere are considered under standards that take account of academic achievement and other factors, including race and ethnicity.

In the fall of last year, freshmen who enrolled under the program were 26 percent Hispanic and 6 percent black. Texas is 38 percent Hispanic and 12 percent black.

The university said the Top Ten program was a blunt instrument and that classes in many subjects have few or no minority students. It adds that the diversity generated by the Top Ten program is “mostly a product of the fact that Texas high schools remain highly segregated in regions of the state,” which “limits the diversity that can be achieved within racial groups.”

Among the kind of student excluded by the Top Ten program, the university said is “the African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas who has strong SAT scores and has demonstrated leadership ability in extracurricular activities but falls in the second decile of his or her high school class (or attends an elite private school that does not rank).”

Ms. Fisher’s lawyers called that “a newly minted interest in elitism dressed up as ‘intra-racial’ diversity.” They added that the university is making the unseemly pitch for “its preferred kind of minorities” at the expense of white students like Ms. Fisher with similar qualifications.

Talking in the hallway after the seminar, Joao Eloy, who was admitted outside the Top Ten program, said he had mixed feelings about the university’s approach. “My only concern is if diversity becomes a priority above merit,” he said, adding that he was wary of any system that “punishes Asians and poor whites, to name a few.”

Nosa Aimuyo, whose parents are Nigerian immigrants and who was also admitted outside the Top Ten program, said race-conscious admissions were needed to address “disparities in opportunity between high schools, which disproportionately affect minorities.”

In an interview in his office in Austin, William C. Powers Jr, the university’s president, said the attributes that the university seeks have many dimensions. “We want diversity in terms of economic background, first generation, geography, inner city, suburban middle class,” he said.

Asked what he would say to Ms. Fisher, whose own background is middle class, about her disappointment at being rejected, Mr. Powers paused for a moment.

“We look at everyone’s holistic characteristics,” he said.

Last month, Ms. Fisher spent a morning chatting with a reporter at a private club in Washington and then took an impromptu tour of the Supreme Court, where the grandeur of the surroundings seemed to bring home to her the gravity of the question she had presented to the justices.

She is working in Austin, where she had wanted to be in the first place, as a financial analyst. She said her college years at Louisiana State had been fine and that she had enjoyed the camaraderie of the bowling team.

But she added that she had lost a benefit that her state’s government had decided to distribute on a basis other than merit.

“The only thing I missed out on was my post-graduation years,” she said. “Just being in a network of U.T. graduates would have been a really nice thing to be in. And I probably would have gotten a better job offer had I gone to U.T.” She said she was trying to come to terms with her role in a case that could reshape American higher education. Asked if she found it interesting or exciting or scary, she said, “All of the above.”

But she did not hesitate to say how she would run an admission system. “I don’t think,” she said, “that we even need to have a race box on the application.”

Conservatives and the diversity dross

The next news item is unremarkable. “The U.S. government,” reports Fox News, “paid a Chicago consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on diversity training workshops that, according to one watchdog, included an exercise in which employees were told to chant ‘our forefathers were illegal immigrants.’”

What do you expect from “the U.S. government”? It’s a criminal gang out to erase every vestige of a history that might rekindle in a pliant people the quest for freedom. The government, and its excrescences, do these things reflexively rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Like a big amorphous amoeba—a simple, single-celled organism—government will instinctively act to preserve its own integrity.

The people to condemn in his story are the “Conservative group Judicial Watch.” While we are grateful to JW for uncovering the bestialities of bureaucrats—in the substance of their complaint, they are almost as complicit as government. They complain that,

“Instead of being diversity-oriented or tolerance-oriented, it’s more about adopting a mindset,” said Lisette Garcia, a senior investigator with the group.

Garcia of Judicial Watch is quite fine with the government conducting mind-control workshops on taxpayers’ dime, so long as these indoctrination sessions transmit true “diversity and tolerance,” as promised.

What kind of a conservatism is this? The watchdogs are worse than the dogs in power (my apologies to dogs). At least the people who dreamed up the “diversity intelligence advantage course” know what they are after. What do Garcia and her friends want?

A truly conservative watch dog would, first, object to the unconstitutional appropriation of taxpayer funds. Second, they would reject the diversity doxology. Americans should not relinquish their birthright for a mess of pottage.

Were Lisette Garcia of Judicial Watch a true conservative she’d take the opportunity to mention that “Thomas Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

Read Ilana’s blog.

It’s not ‘Manifest Destiny’ any longer

by Ned Kowalski

The US is engaged in wars with no end in sight. Unlike the Indians Wars on the North American Continent prior to and after the founding of the American nation, these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be won by “Manifest Destiny”.

Manifest Destiny was the belief widely held by Americans in the 19th century that the United States was destined to expand across the continent. The concept, born out of “a sense of mission to redeem the Old World”, was enabled by “the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven”. The phrase itself meant many different things to many different people. The unity of the definitions ended at “expansion, prearranged by Heaven”. Mid‑19th century Democrats would use it to explain the need for expansion past the Louisiana Territory.

Manifest destiny provided the dogma and tone for the largest acquisition of U.S. territory. It was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico and it was also used to acquire portions of Oregon from the British Empire. But Manifest Destiny always limped along because of its internal limitations and the issue of slavery, says Merk, and never became a national priority. By 1843 John Quincy Adams, a major supporter, had changed his mind and repudiated Manifest Destiny because it meant the expansion of slavery in Texas.

The legacy is a complex one. The belief in an American mission to promote and defend democracy throughout the world, as expounded by Abraham Lincoln and later by Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush, continues to have an influence on American political ideology

It is one thing to occupy a continent with settlers who outpopulate the indigenous peoples. These Native Americans were placed on reservations. The March of Tears during Andrew Jackson’s presidency demonstrates the cruelty necessary to defeat and neutralize entire indigenous populations who have vastly different cultures and religions.

Is it possible to kill enough Afghanistanis and Pakistanis, Africans, Muslims, Chinese, Russians, etc., to accomplish what the US wants in the world? To eliminate terrorism is to eliminate the weak, and if you believe the Pentagon, everyone outside the US is “weak” . Could the British invade and kill enough Irish in Northern Ireland to eliminate terrorism? By changing their tactics, The British finally eliminated terrorism in Northern Ireland, only to have it re-instituted in London by jihadists. It just never goes away.

With the possibility that banks may continue to fail and the deterioration of the economic situation in the US, contingency plans need to be made to deal with this domestic economic crisis. Global warming, food shortages and rising populations are here already. To virtually ignore these crises while chasing the golden ring of oil in the Middle East, is foolhardy at best. The economic collapse of the US is a real risk. Americans have fallen into the trap of hubris, by believing the world is an extension of home.

Both Democrats and Republicans are pursuing, and have been pursuing, the far-right’s foreign policy for decades. Especially plans for “regional diplomacy”. And these thoughts on regional diplomacy are alarmingly thin, on closer inspection. It has become like fighting needles by burning haystacks.

To launch a comprehensive regional and international diplomatic initiative, that includes key nations in the region, to help achieve a new political settlement among different peoples, start a civil war, and initiate a humanitarian catastrophe and regional conflict. But it comes at an enourmous cost to American soft power.

Americans need to pressure their candidates to stop talking in vague general terms, and demand that Washington’s long-practiced foreign policies that have real American people on the front lines, become more realistic.

Those being exploited around the globe for their nations’ resources are not winning Americans any friends. Can they all be either killed or put in reserves?

It’s a boy!

Some couples want a baby boy badly. So badly they’re willing to fly halfway around the world to get one. Destination? The United States.

Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, director of The Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles and New York City, has for several years offered a fertility procedure allowing affluent couples to choose their baby’s gender. Sex selection, outlawed in many countries, is legal in the United States: Steinberg’s clinics have treated “thousands” of couples from India, China, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and 142 other nations.

Steinberg recently told the London Evening Standard that he’s helped around 400 British couples conceive their choice of a boy or girl. They sometimes pay $45,000 or more for one of Steinberg’s package deals that includes treatment, plane tickets, and a hotel. The doctor opened his New York clinic in 2008 to cater to British and European patients, who are perhaps less than an eight-hour flight away. Sex selection is illegal within the United Kingdom, but Steinberg boasted that “leading British politicians” fly to his New York office for that very purpose.

Steinberg admitted his clinics have recently seen a “huge growth” of Chinese clients. Almost all of them—98 percent—ask for a boy. So do most Indian couples. Both countries ban sex selection, but it’s practiced illegally because of cultural preferences for boys.

Several U.S. clinics perform sex selection using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD): Doctors obtain the couple’s sperm and eggs, mix them in a dish, and implant only a few embryos of the desired gender. Steinberg typically performs PGD by fertilizing eight or nine eggs and implanting just one embryo, discarding or freezing the others.

In 2009 Steinberg considered allowing parents to choose their child’s eye and hair color, too (see “Eugenics,” March 28, 2009). He nixed the idea after a pro-life outcry.