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Abby and Stephen Thernstrom, authors of America in Black and White, point out one of the blessings of this campaign. They claim Obama’s success shows we have made great strides in our country. Their book is filled with illustrative stories like a rural Georgia county, which at the advent of the automobile, discussed the desirability of having two, separate (but presumably equal) road systems.
One of the most notable — yet unremarked-on — lessons of this year’s Democratic presidential nominating contest is the demolition of the long-held belief that whites simply won’t vote for black candidates for higher office. Before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, who could have predicted the remarkable outpouring of white support for Sen. Barack Obama?
As recently as 2006, when Congress held hearings on the renewal of the expiring parts of the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates delivered a united message, echoed by the House Judiciary Committee. “It is rare that white voters will cross over to elect minority preferred candidates,” the committee’s report concluded — a statement from which there was no congressional dissent.
The 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, it seemed, were living proof of this. Overwhelmingly, they had been elected in “majority-minority” districts drawn specifically for African American candidates; only a handful had been elected in districts in which most voters were not black or some combination of black and Latino.
So it’s not surprising that, as the 2008 prePDFsidential race got underway, many observers — white and African American alike — thought Obama’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination were very poor. …
… After nearly two dozen primaries, we now know beyond dispute that the pessimists were wrong. Obama won the majority of white votes in Virginia, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, and he received extremely high vote totals among whites in the other states he’s run in as well. …
Alan Dershowitz points out our problems confronting enemies who wish to die.
Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women’s magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.
At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya — the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 — Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: “if you’re not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don’t want you.”
Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. …
John Fund says some of the vanity prez candidates are facing tough primaries.
Congressmen Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich had a great time running for president over the past year, allowing both men to showcase their non-mainstream views in a slew of nationally-televised debates. But now both are haunted by the political ghost of former GOP Congressman Bob Dornan, who similarly enjoyed his 1996 run for president, then found he had alienated the folks back home by neglecting his day job. He failed to be reelected to Congress.
Both Messrs. Paul and Kucinich face serious primary opponents tomorrow. Mr. Paul appears to have the easier time. …
Thomas Sowell on how the “rust-belt” drove away jobs.
It is fascinating watching politicians say how they are going to rescue the “rust belt” regions where jobs are disappearing and companies are either shutting down or moving elsewhere. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is being blamed for the jobs going elsewhere. Barack Obama blames the Clinton administration for NAFTA, and that includes Hillary Clinton. Senator Obama says that he is for free trade, provided it is “fair trade.” That is election year rhetoric at its cleverest.
Since “fair” is one of those words that can mean virtually anything to anybody, what this amounts to is that politicians can pile on whatever restrictions they want, in the name of fairness, and still claim to be for “free trade.” Clever. We will all have to pay a cost for political restrictions and political cleverness, since there is no free lunch. In fact, free lunches are a big part of the reason for once-prosperous regions declining into rust belts. …
Charles Krauthammer defends lobbyists.
… To hear the candidates in this presidential campaign, you’d think lobbying is just one notch below waterboarding, a black art practiced by the great malefactors of wealth to keep the middle class in a vise and loose upon the nation every manner of scourge: oil dependency, greenhouse gases, unpayable mortgages and those tiny entrees you get at French restaurants.
Lobbying is constitutionally protected, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it all. Let’s agree to frown upon bad lobbying, such as getting a tax break for a particular industry. Let’s agree to welcome good lobbying — the actual redress of a legitimate grievance — such as protecting your home from being turned to dust to make way for some urban development project.
There is a defense of even bad lobbying. It goes like this: You wouldn’t need to be seeking advantage if the federal government had not appropriated for itself in the 20th century all kinds of powers, regulations, intrusions and manipulations (often through the tax code) that had never been presumed in the 19th century and certainly were never imagined by the Founders. What appears to be rent-seeking is thus redress of a larger grievance — insufferable government meddling in what had traditionally been considered an area of free enterprise. …
Regular Pickings readers know Pickerhead is a sucker for studies of animals that are social predators like humans. NY Times reports on folks studying hyenas.
… Brain imaging studies have revealed that when people think about other people, parts of the frontal cortex become active. Advocates of the social brain hypothesis say the frontal cortex expanded in our ancestors because natural selection favored social intelligence.
Most of the research on the social brain hypothesis has focused on primates. One reason for that bias, Dr. Holekamp said, is many scientists thought that no other animals were worth studying. “Primatologists have argued for years,†she said, “that primates are unique in terms of the complexity of their social lives.â€
From her experience with hyenas, Dr. Holekamp had her doubts. So she began to run experiments on spotted hyenas similar to the ones run on primates. She would play recordings of hyenas, for example, to see if other hyenas recognized them individually. They did. She soon came to see the primates-only view of the social brain as deeply flawed.
“I would argue that’s not true at all: spotted hyenas live in a society just as large and just as complex as a baboon,†Dr. Holekamp said, noting that spotted hyenas live in the largest social groups of any carnivore. “We’re talking about 60 to 80 individuals who all know each other individually.†…
Burlington, VT TV station says winter carnival activities cancelled because there’s too much snow. Where’s Owl Gore? Did anybody tell him?
OK, what is the protocol for waking the prez at 3 am? Slate has the answers.