PrintJuly 18, 2010
Clarice's Pieces July 18, 2010
There was so much material this week, it was almost impossible to choose, but here it is: "Immigration," "Green Beans!" "NASA's Wings Clipped," and "The Summer of our (racist?) Discontent"
Immigration
The suit against Arizona -- designed by that diabolical genius, Attorney General Eric Holder, to stir up the base and get them to actually turn out for the midterms, thereby possibly saving the president's bacon -- has flopped. Nine states have joined the suit on Arizona's side. Public opinion polls show large and increasing public support for Arizona, and the more people study the government's suit, the weaker it appears to be. How can the government argue with a straight face that a state law, which tracks the federal law and makes it clear that local law enforcement authorities are to assist the federal government, is preempted, while it makes clear that it will not challenge cities and states which have declared they will not cooperate and will be sanctuaries for illegal aliens?
The NYT reported that Democratic governors expressed concerns to the president that the suit will cost them in the upcoming elections.
Tom Maguire notes the report and says he'd headline it differently: "Dem Governors Eye Falls, Barrel, Send Regrets."
Green Beans!
Newsweek, in a rare moment of sanity, notes that the environment is no longer a surefire political winner.
As Newsbusters observes, this failing publication, which only three years ago published a cover story entitled "Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine," seems to have noticed that not only were they marching to a different drummer, but the parade was long over.
We can't be sure what caused this change of heart -- the last two harsh winters, the international economic crisis, or the public's sensible desire to weigh costs and benefits. Even the Germans are catching on. Newsweek:
In many ways, green projects have become just another flavor of grubby interest politics. Biofuels have become a new label for old-style agricultural subsidies that funnel some $20 billion annually to landowners with little effect on emissions (only Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol produces any significant savings; America's corn ethanol and Europe's biodiesel do not). Germany's solar subsidies, a signature project in the country's battle against climate change, are perhaps the most wasteful green scheme on earth, producing a mere 0.25 percent of the country's energy at a cost to consumers of as much as $125 billion. A leading member of Merkel's Christian Democrats in the German Parliament says there is growing unease both in his party and in the Bundestag "about the scary monster we've created that is sucking up ever larger amounts of money for a negligible effect." [...]
I can't imagine what changed the minds of the Newsweek editors; perhaps it's one of those deathbed epiphanies, but in any event, I hope it's a harbinger of some more realistic thinking. On the other hand, this administration seems to have overlooked the shift and keeps pumping millions and millions of tax dollars into the very kind of green energy projects that did in Spain's economy. Well, "grubby interest politics" is a Chicago specialty.
NASA Gets Its Wings Clipped
Last week, we reported that the Director of NASA said that a big part of his charge from the president was outreach to Muslim countries. Needless to say, no one could find this in the enabling legislation, and common sense suggested this was idiotic. About a week into this knee-slapper, the White House figured out what NASA really does.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs cleared up the confusion:
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that NASA Administrator Charles Bolden must have misspoken when he told Al Jazeera last month that one of his top priorities is to reach out to Muslim countries. "That was not his task and that's not the task of NASA," Gibbs said. Bolden, though, said last month in the interview that it was President Obama who gave him that task. He made a similar claim in February. The White House also backed up Bolden last week when his remarks first stirred controversy.
Steve Gilbert says the White House revelation about NASA's job is incomplete, however, for the NASA website repeats Bolden's view that the mission is promoting Muslim outreach:
Meanwhile, we have this February 18, 2010 slide show, 'NASA's CooperationWith Non-Traditional Partners' (a pdf file):
So whom are we to believe? White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, or our lying eyes?
Maybe the website isn't, as they say, "a leading indicator" of the agency's mission.
The Summer of Our (Racist?) Discontent
Along the lines of the immigration case fiasco, the Democrats are doing whatever they can in the administration of this "post-racial" president to fan racial tensions to stimulate the base to turn out at the polls in November. There is no other explanation for the conduct of the moribund and largely discredited NAACP's conduct this week.
The press has avoided as long as possible the news about the administration's racialist policies at the Department of Justice, its dismissal of a voter intimidation case it had won against the New Black Panther Party, testimony that it was refusing to enforce the provisions of the Motor Voter Act which requires that ineligible and dead voters be trimmed from the voting registers, and that it had a policy of not enforcing the civil rights laws against minority offenders. Reports of this are hardly to be found in the mainstream media.
J. Christian Adams' testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission made it harder to keep the code of silence, and the story leaked out as the once-meaningful NAACP held its convention.
This might have raised some embarrassing questions -- there was testimony that the NAACP had, in fact, lobbied to get the case against the panthers dismissed. And its conduct respecting the Tea Party was as terrible as it was underreported:
An African American, Mr. Gladney was the only victim of a racist hate crime at a Tea Party event. Gladney was viciously beaten and called the "N" word at a Tea Party last August. He reached out to the NAACP for help, but Ken Gladney made a big mistake, you see he was part of the Tea Party protest and the ones that beat him up were members of the SEIU sent by the progressive Democrats to scare away those who object to the Obamacare plans.Instead of helping Gladney, the NAACP called Gladney an Uncle Tom and helped the SEIU thugs who put him in a wheelchair.Incredibly the NAACP took the side of the racists who beat him up.What about the now famous New Black Panther case? A group like the NAACP whose mission is trying to ensure a society in which all individuals have equal rights without discrimination based on race, should have been calling on the DOJ to prosecute the case to the fullest extent of the law. Not this NAACP. Once again, the "Civil Rights" group took the side of the racists, and sent letters to the DOJ urging the dismissal of the case. In fact they have been totally silent about all of the racist statements from the New Black Panther leadership about "killing cracker babies."Today the National Convention of the NAACP is expected to pass a resolution calling for "all people of good will to repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties, and to stand in opposition to its drive to push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.What a horror! What an abandonment of their vision! In the short history of the Tea Party there has been one racist incident, one, and it was a Tea Party protester who was the victim. The NAACP has abandoned its mission and become a partisan political organization.
The charge against the Tea Party is demonstrably false, and if the NAACP can prove otherwise, there's a $100,000 reward Andrew Breitbart has posted -- a reward that will go to pay scholarships for the United Negro College fund. So why has the NAACP offered no evidence and helped out the kids? Because once again, the charge is a lie.
Larry O'Connor at Big Government says he wants the NAACP to get its lies straight:
We want to help our friends at the NAACP out so they can repeat the bogus charges consistently in the future:1. Rep John Lewis never said he was spat upon2. For that matter, Rep. John Lewis never said he heard people calling him the "N-word", it was Rep. Andre Carson who said he heard it. (I know, you've been TOLD that Rep. John Lewis said he was called the "N-Word" that day, but go ahead, Google it. You'll see. He is not on record personally making the charge. Curious, isn't it?)3. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver DID claim HE was spat on, but then after he and everyone else in the world reviewed the video and saw that errant spittle from a man screaming "Kill the Bill!" is what hit Rep Cleaver, he walked back the charge.4. As it is true Rep. Cleaver also said he heard the "N-word" the day he was walking with Rep. Lewis to the Capitol from the Cannon office building, this claim is completely and utterly false. You see Rep. Cleaver wasn't walking with Rep. Lewis that day. We know this because we have video tape of Rep. Lewis and Rep. Carson walking to the Capitol at the precise moment and at the precise place Rep. Carson claims to have heard the "N-word" fifteen times from fifteen people. Rep. Cleaver is nowhere to be found. And the "N-word" is nowhere to be heard.I hope this helps. And, in the future, when you're going to slander an entire group of people with an outrageous and slanderous charge of racism, at least get your lies straight.
Also lost in the coverage is that the NAACP is most unlikely to have proposed the "Tea Party is racist" claim when it did without White House approval, as Michelle Obama was speaking there that day, and certainly, there would be no wish to embarrass her.
By the end of the week, the NAACP president tried to weasel his way out of the attacks on the Tea Party, claiming that the resolution (which NAACP has still failed to post online, even though they passed it) does not call the party "racist."
But before the NAACP tried to backtrack in the face of unfavorable publicity about what it had done, President Obama also slung "racist" around this week.
You'd think perhaps this study on the true impact of the present definition of and emphasis on "diversity" on college admissions might have caught his attention. Certainly, your newspaper and TV news told you of it? No? Well it seems that diversity benefits blacks, many of whom are not economically disadvantaged or even American, but it does work to the injury of poor whites, rural Americans, and Asians. If you thought diversity consideration was a means to help the poor enter college, you were wrong. If you thought it was a small boost-up to blacks, you were wrong, too:
The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student's chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.
This might explain why you might hear a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School say something as ungrammatical as this: "[W]e ate what we were served. My mother never cared whether me or my brother liked what was on our plates."
No. The clearly unconstitutional ham hock on the college admission scales is not of concern to our post-racial president, whose party has stuck racial preferences into both ObamaCare and the misnamed financial reform acts. But he does see and is concerned about some racism in al-Qaeda:
In an interview earlier today with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to air in a few hours, President Obama disparaged al Qaeda and affiliated groups' willingness to kill Africans in a manner that White House aides say was an argument that the terrorist groups are racist.Speaking about the Uganda bombings, the president said, "What you've seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains."
Tom Maguire had some difficulties with this charge.
Mr. Underpants was a black Nigerian Muslim whose father was one of the wealthiest men in Nigeria.Someone could ask the White House whether Al Qaeda recruits wealthy blacks to kill white Americans and poor blacks to kill black Africans - that might be racist, too.And until Al Qaeda puts a woman in a senior leadership role the sex discrimination suit remains in our arsenal.
Anyway, this racism thing is getting awfully complicated, so jmh and bgates prepared two quizzes to help us all figure out whether or not we are racists.
Here's JMH's test:
If you're a typical white person.... you might be a racist.If you've only been speaking truth to power since the Stimulus Bill passed.... you might be a racist.If you drive a pick up truck.... you might be a racist. If you drive a pick-up truck from Wrentham.... you're probably a racist. If you have ever driven a pick up truck across the Mason-Dixon line.... you're a doubleplus ungood racist.If you're a black conservative.... you might be an Uncle Tom, which is the only thing worse than being a racist.If you're black and voted for Obama.... you are not a racist. If you're white and voted for Obama.... you're not a racist anymore.If you're white and voted for McCain.... you're a racist. If you're black and voted for McCain.... you're a traitor to your race, which obviously makes you a racist.If you don't think Sgt. James Crowley is stupid.... you might be a racist. If you think Boston Police are Boy Scouts.... you might be wrong.If you make politically incorrect jokes about racism.... you might want to change your screen name if you aspire to public office.
And here's bgates' test:
If you agree with everything in Martin Luther King's most famous speeches, but you don't think he's as big a deal as Abraham Lincoln, you might be a racist.If you think a college class consisting of a 4th generation North Dakota farm kid, a Mormon missionary, a trust fund baby from Marin County, and a re-entry student from Idaho who did three tours in Iraq is more "diverse" than a class with the presidents of the College Democrats, the African-American College Democrats, the Asian-American College Democrats, and the Latino/a College Democrats, you might be a racist.If you don't think your white grandmother was "typical", you might be a racist.If you belong to the political party that was created to work towards abolition and that elected the first ever (historical! unprecedented!) African-American congressmen, you might be a racist.If you disagree with a stupid idea even when a black person suggests it, you might be a racist.If you think schools should admit the smartest students they can get even if it means more Jews and Asians, you might be a racist.If you call a Yale-educated lawyer's writing "an embarrassment" without reading any of it, and he's not Clarence Thomas and you're not Harry Reid, you might be a racist.If you think there's so much as a hint of something not completely respectable in the fact that in the twenty-first century, upwards of forty members of the Congress of the United States of America are proud members of an organization that denies membership to people based on nothing but the color of their skin -- you might be a racist.(But you're in pretty good company!)
