The Unmentionable Injustice

By Mona Charen

Monday, June 18, 2013

In the weeks before the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of Obamacare, the country trembled with anticipation. No such eagerness is evident now -- yet the court is again poised to rattle our world. The case of Fisher v. Texas could upend the system of racial preferences in use throughout American higher education.

The pursuit of racial justice in education has arguably led to some benefits since its inception in the 1960s. But in the two generations that have elapsed since affirmative action began, evidence of its unintended consequences has accumulated -- even as a society-wide taboo has forbidden honest discussion of that evidence.

The vast majority of elite American institutions supports racial preferences. Of 92 briefs filed in the Fisher case, 17 agreed with the plaintiff that racial preferences should be considered unconstitutional, while 73 urged that the current system remain undisturbed (two were in between). The pro-university briefs included submissions by the U.S. government, 17 U.S. senators, 66 members of Congress, 57 of the Fortune 100 companies, numerous education associations, colleges and universities and establishment organs, such as the American Bar Association.

Criticizing affirmative action (which is code for racial preferences) can be a career-endangering step for anyone, particularly for academics or politicians.

Some scholars have nevertheless been willing to follow where the evidence leads and have found that nearly everything we believe about racial preferences is wrong. In their outstanding book "Mismatch," Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. document the paradoxical results of giving large preferences to racial and other minorities.

Sander and Taylor argue persuasively that the trouble with preferences is not the injustice done to people like Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the University of Texas while less qualified black and Hispanic applicants were accepted -- though that is unfair -- but also the harm it does to those to whom such preferences are extended.

Preferences have created a widespread mismatch between minority students and the schools they attend. Minority students at all levels (least so at the very top colleges) tend to wind up at schools for which they are less well prepared than the majority of their classmates. The University of Texas is typical in awarding the equivalent of hundreds of SAT points to minority applicants. This results in minority students (who've been assured that they have what it takes to be successful) plunging to the bottom of the class. Students accepted under the preference regime often experience severe feelings of inferiority, social segregation and much higher dropout rates. Both for affirmative action "beneficiaries" and their classmates mismatch reinforces negative stereotypes. It also causes more African-American students to flee math, science and engineering majors in favor of softer subjects, such as education and sociology. "Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes black to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites."

Yet research has shown that when minority students attend schools for which they are well matched, there is no attrition in demanding fields of study. It isn't that minority students cannot make it as scientists and engineers but simply that they conclude that they cannot succeed when forced to compete with superior classmates. This phenomenon also accounts for the relatively low numbers of minorities who seek academic careers despite (or rather due to) five decades of preferences. It carries lessons for families considering whether to take advantage of "legacies" for their children. The research suggests that academic and career success is more likely when students attend colleges for which they are well matched.

Nor do preferences benefit the disadvantaged. In 1972, more than 50 percent of black freshmen at elite colleges came from families in the bottom half of the socioeconomic distribution. By 1982, that percentage had dropped to one quarter, and by 1992, 67 percent of black freshman came from homes in the top quartile of income. Among blacks attending elite colleges, 92 percent come from families in the top half of income earners.

Deciding who is a member of a historically oppressed minority group also gets trickier with every passing decade. Intermarriage is up.

Immigration complicates matters. A recent study found that 40 percent of African American Ivy League undergrads are first- or second- generation immigrants. A study undertaken by Harvard Law students found that only 30 percent of the African Americans there had four black grandparents. The rest were either of mixed ancestry, foreign students or recent immigrants from the West Indies or Africa.

There is a place for preferences in higher education -- for those who come from poor homes or tough neighborhoods. But there is abundant evidence that awarding preferences based on race and ethnicity is counterproductive, corrupt and profoundly unjust.

Obama Is No Fool on Syria

By Debra J. Saunders

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Last week, Bill Clinton warned that President Barack Obama risked looking like a "wuss" and "a total fool" for not acting sooner on Syria. Shortly thereafter -- but two months after Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel charged that strongman Bashar Assad had crossed a "red line" in using chemical weapons against his own people -- the White House announced that in response to Assad's use of sarin, the administration would send small arms to help Syrian rebels.

Allow me to stand up for the president. Obama didn't look like a fool for not rushing into the Syrian mess at the behest of Beltway foreign policy do-gooders. To the contrary, Obama has shown himself to be the rare Washington leader who learned something from Egypt and Libya. No need to touch that stove too often.

In 2011, during the heady days of mass protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came forward to urge Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak -- a U.S. ally -- "to begin immediately serious negotiations on a peaceful and orderly transition." Now Her Stateness looks totally foolish. Because she had Arab Spring fever, an ally is in chains, and Egypt has new leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood.

At least America had a national interest in ousting Libyan despot Moammar Gadhafi, who ordered the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, which left 270 dead. But with the U.S. military spread thin from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the po][litical ideology of Libyan rebels in question, Obama preferred to leave NATO in charge of the air war over Libya. A White House aide famously dubbed this strategy "leading from behind."

When Libyans killed Gadhafi, Madam Secretary paraphrased Julius Caesar, quipping, "We came; we saw; he died." She has shown less bluster since a terrorist attack in Benghazi left Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty dead. The Libyan non-war doesn't feel like victory anymore.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has faulted Obama for pledging arms after 100-plus Syrians were killed by chemical weapons but not earlier in a civil war that has claimed 93,000 lives. Give this to McCain: He has the moral high ground. I felt the same way about the atrocities committed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Ten years after the Iraq War began, the country is more stable but at a cost so terrible that Americans don't want to walk that path again.

The Obama administration wisely stipulates that there will be no American boots on Syrian ground. Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes asserted that Washington expects U.S. arms will not fall "into the hands of extremists."

The president also has resisted calls to order a "no-fly zone." He would rather spend tax dollars on nation building at home than on civil war management abroad.

There's this view among the foreign policy elite that Obama has to be tough on Syria in order to telegraph to world leaders that American outrage builds at a penalty. In Egypt, the penalty was that a terrorist organization won power, and in Libya, the penalty put more firepower into the hands of hostile militias.

By all means, Mr. President, send arms to the Syrian rebels. Do what you have to do to keep Assad -- and Hezbollah and Iran and Russia -- from winning. But don't feel you have to give in to the risky demands of the foreign policy scolds. Remember: "We came; we saw; he died."

Why We Should Stay Out of Syria

By Michael Brown

Monday, June 17, 2013

It is one thing to provide humanitarian aid to the suffering Syrian people (although that is hardly an easy task to accomplish, as praiseworthy as it may be), but it is a grave mistake for America to attempt to get involved in the military conflict. There is hardly a “lesser of two evils” to side with there.

On the one hand, we know that President Bashar Assad has continued in his father’s tyrannous and murderous footsteps, with the blood of tens of thousands of his people already on his head. In fact, some of the bloodshed has taken place in the very same locations, with Hafez Assad being responsible for the 1982 massacre in Hama that took the lives of between 10,000-40,000 Syrians, while in 2012, Bashar Assad’s troops slaughtered scores of insurgents in the same city.

And there is no doubt that the reports of wholesale torture, imprisonment, rape, and murder of men, women, and children by Assad’s forces are largely accurate. (Can you imagine what the world outrage would be if the government of Israel engaged in atrocities 1/100th this severe?)

It is understandable, then, that we feel the need to take action against the Assad regime.

But what would happen if Assad was toppled? And if we stand against Assad, who are we standing with? (Sarah Palin’s recent quip at the Faith and Freedom Conference, “Let Allah sort it out” – meaning, until we have strong leadership in the White House, we should keep our hands out of Syria – is actually somewhat apropos.)

We have witnessed the slaughter and/or exodus of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians since the fall of Saddam Hussein, an eventuality that the Bush administration apparently gave little thought to, while the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood continues to rise. (The mass exodus of Christians from the Muslim Middle East is well-documented, even if underreported.)

In the same way, there is good evidence that the fall of Assad would open the door to the massacre of the Christian population of Syria, with reports of 300,000 Christians already fleeing the country. Does America want to be party to this? Have we learned our lessons from Iraq? (This is not to say that the war was wrong but rather that we failed to think through the implications of our actions.) Have we learned our lessons from Egypt, where the “Arab Spring” quickly became a “Sharia Fall”?

We helped fund and arm the Mujahedeen in their battle for liberation against Russia in Afghanistan, the end result being that one fundamentalist Islamic movement – meaning, the Mujahedeen, militant Muslim freedom fighters – came into power, only to be displaced by an even more militant Islamic movement (the Taliban). In the eyes of fundamentalist Islam, America may be a useful ally, but ultimately, America is the enemy. What lessons have we learned from this?

There are even some who claim that “the Taliban — and al-Qaeda — were [created] by the CIA in league with Pakistani and Saudi Arabian intelligence.” If true, should we learn something from this?

In recent days, there have been reports of atrocities committed by the Syrian “rebels” in the name of Islam, including the execution of a 14-year-old boy for insulting Mohammed, while YouTube videos show government troops being shot in the head by the “rebels” as others chant “Allahu Akbar”! (I put “rebels” in quotes because calling them “rebels” only tells part of the story.)

On Sunday, June 16th, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the West “against arming Syrian rebels ‘who kill their enemies and eat their organs,’ referencing a widely circulated video that purports to show a rebel fighter eating the heart of a dead soldier,” while at the same time, the Assad government is being aided by the Lebanese-based terrorist organization Hezbollah, and Iran has promised to send several thousand troops to Assad’s aid.

And that is only the tip of the iceberg, as a June 3rd AP report notes that, “The Syrian conflict, now in its third year, has taken on dark sectarian overtones. Predominantly Sunni rebels backed by Sunni states Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are fighting against a regime that relies on support from Alawites and Shiites at home, and is aided by Iran and Hezbollah. The Syria conflict is also part of a wider battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran for regional influence. Sunni fighters from Iraq and Lebanon have crossed into Syria to help those fighting Assad, while Shiites from Iraq have joined the battle on the regime’s side.”

Then, of course, there are the implications for the safety of Israel in the case of either an Assad victory or an Assad defeat, the former assuring Syria’s ongoing cooperation with Hizbullah, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter assuring the rise of a more militant Islamic regime to Israel’s north, with dangerous implications for Lebanon as well.

In light of these realities, and in light of our government’s failure to exercise more foresight in dealing with the Muslim world, we do best at this point to avoid military involvement in Syria while doing our best to provide humanitarian aid to the suffering country and looking for ways to help end the bloodshed. But short term or long, we should not delude ourselves: This is a hornet’s nest.

Two Black Democrats Become Republicans in Louisiana

By Star Parker

Monday, June 17, 2013

Anyone who doubts that the Republican Party can attract black voters needs only look south to Louisiana.

At a conference held in Baton Rouge at the end of May, called @Large and aimed to attract black conservatives, black Democrat Elbert Guillary, a member of the state legislature, announced that he was switching party and becoming a Republican.

Less than two weeks later, just up the road in Central City, Louisiana, black Democrat city councilman Ralph Washington – who attended this same @Large conference, made the same announcement – he’s becoming a Republican.

It’s really not such a mystery. The mystery is why this is not happening more often.

I’m asked all the time why, when it is so clear that blacks are damaged by the left wing political agenda, black voters so uniformly and consistently support candidates – Democrats – who advance this agenda.

My answer is that Republicans need to start acting more like the businesspeople they claim to be.

Any businessman convinced that his product is the best doesn't blame customers for not buying it. He doubles down on his efforts to understand these potential customers better and how to sell to them.

There needs to be more appreciation of the differences in the black population.

A Gallup poll done in 2011 showed that whereas 39 percent of whites say they are “very religious,” 53 percent of blacks do. A large percentage of “very religious” blacks are conservative and very different from blacks on the left who identify with the NAACP.

The @Large conference, where I was a speaker, was hosted by pastor C.L. Bryant, who tells his own story about leaving the left-wing black establishment in his new film “Runaway Slave.”

Bryant was president of the NAACP chapter in Garland, Texas, but his relationship with the NAACP soured when he refused to speak at a Planned Parenthood pro-abortion event.

His eyes began to open and see that his traditional Christian values – protecting the unborn and promoting the traditional family, individual freedom, and dignity – were out of whack with the political agenda blacks were automatically signing onto.

Elbert Guillary is now the first black Republican in the Louisiana state legislature since reconstruction.

Listen to him to understand why a conservative black leaves the Democratic Party.

He called the Democrats “the party of disappointment” and expressed disillusionment with Democratic policies on abortion, gun control, education, and immigration.

Democrats “have moved away from the traditional values of most Americans,” he said. “Their policies have encouraged high teen birth rates, high high school drop-out rates, high incarceration rates, and very high unemployment rates.”

Or listen to now-Republican councilman Washington:

“…the value system I was raised up with, it really doesn’t side with the Democrats...Some of the things I see happening today, with the entitlement programs, we have to change. We can’t continue doing the things we are doing and survive.”

Everyone understands that black American history is unique and complicated.

But wallowing in the past is never an answer to anyone’s personal challenges.

The challenge is clarifying right from wrong and acting accordingly moving forward.

It has always seemed pretty clear to me that traditional values and personal freedom and responsibility must be the agenda moving forward for every American of every background.

Black Americans, like every American, need less taxes taken out of their paychecks, need to be able to choose where to send their children to school, need to be able to pick freely a health care plan that suits their needs, and need to save for retirement instead of paying payroll taxes.

You can’t sum it up any better than what Elbert Guillary and Ralph Washington have said. There are many, many Guillarys and Washingtons out there in black America.

We need more efforts like the @Large conference to reach them.

Liberals and Conservatives, Unite!

By Matt Barber

Monday, June 17, 2013

More often than not, when someone says, “I hate to say I told you so,” they love to say they told you so. Prepare to have a bucket of gloat dumped on your head.

Still, there are those rare occasions when people both say it and mean it. A few possible examples come to mind: Aboard the Titanic. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Standing before the pearly gates (after your stupid bomb squad partner goes ahead and cuts the blue wire). And right now.

Liberals, we conservatives hate to say we told you so.

But we told you so.

In the wake of CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s earthshaking revelation that the Obama NSA has been spying on tens of millions of Americans – conservatives, liberals and moderates alike – by illegally searching and seizing telephone calls and other private data, I tweeted the following: “So can liberals and conservatives all come together now and agree that Obama is a Marxist tyrant?”

Ian Murphy, a liberal freelance writer with Salon.com, AlterNet.org and similar such “progressive” publications, tweeted back: “He’s not a Marxist.”

“We’ll split the difference,” I replied.

The implication behind Murphy’s brief comment is both clear and profound. While he, a proud leftist, inexplicably remains in denial of Obama’s patently evident Neo-Marxist socio-political worldview, he has, nonetheless – and along with a fast-growing number of his “progressive” counterparts – finally come to acknowledge that Barack Hussein Obama, 44th president of these Divided States of America, is, indeed, a grade-A tyrant.

In recent months, as this administration has been rocked by self-inflicted scandal after self-inflicted scandal, a vibrant, three-dimensional picture of Mr. Obama has begun to emerge. So obvious and outrageous are his abuses of power that many of his sycophantic holdouts are finally taking a second, less-jaundiced look at their Dear Leader.

For example, after it was learned that the Obama IRS was intentionally targeting conservative, Christian and Jewish organizations and individuals for harassment and political intimidation, Jon Stewart, liberal comedian and host of “The Daily Show,” did a scathing spot in which he told the president, “You’ve vindicated conspiracy theorists.”

More recently, in response to the IRS and NSA scandals, “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno joked of “Snoop Obama”: “We wanted a president that listens to all Americans,” he said. “Now we have one.”

Both the liberal New York Times and hard-left filmmaker Michael Moore have similarly opined that the Obama administration has “lost all credibility,” while left-leaning Politico observed that, “Nothing brings the left and the right together quite like government snooping.”

This is the tip of the iceberg. Liberals are running from Obama like Occupy Wall Streeters from Irish Spring. Each of these scandals (Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS-gate, spying on the media, NSA spying on the American people, et al.) are, ostensibly, grievous enough, when taken alone, to rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

When taken together, however, they are manifestly impeachable.

Unfortunately, I doubt Congress has the courage to do it. It would take a bipartisan, consensus effort. We’re still not there yet. Even so, we’ve come a long way. No reasonable person, liberal or conservative, can, in good faith, still deny that Barack Obama is the most lawless president in American history.

Oh what a difference a couple centuries make. While Benjamin Franklin famously warned, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” President Obama – with his hand caught in your information cookie jar – now assures us that Franklin had it all wrong: “[O]ne of the things that we’re going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy,” he said, “because there are some tradeoffs involved.”

Yikes.

“The president is conducting an all-out assault on the constitutionally protected rights of American citizens,” responded Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, one of the fastest-growing civil rights legal organizations in America.

“Electronic data collection on this massive scale clearly violates the Fourth Amendment. It is tantamount to having a government official sneak into your home or business and copy all of your papers, records and personal effects. The fact the government may not immediately use copied material except when it needs it is irrelevant. The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit searches and seizures without probable cause only if the government uses the information,” he said.

“We cannot justify such massive collection of American citizens’ data by any government agency under the guise of preventing crime or even terrorism. This government overreach is an indictment on both political parties, as both have been involved in authorizing these unconstitutional acts. Our government leaders and bureaucrats have forgotten the price of liberty and are too willing to give up liberty for a little security,” concluded Staver.

This isn’t a left or right issue. This is about freedom. This is about the rule of law. Barack Obama has exposed himself as an enemy of the Constitution, an enemy of the American people – all of the American people – whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican.

Liberals, let’s agree to disagree where we disagree. Likewise, let’s agree to agree where we agree.

Let’s come together and do something about America’s Barack Obama problem.