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Mark Steyn compares Julia and Liz Warren.
Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding license application. And now it’s here!
Have you dated a composite woman? They’re America’s hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In “Dreams from My Father,” the world’s all-time most-unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend:
“When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough…”
But being yourself is never going to be enough in the new composite America. Last week, in an election campaign ad, Barack revealed his latest composite girlfriend – “Julia.” She’s worse than the old New York girlfriend. She can’t even be herself. In fact, she can’t be anything without massive assistance from Barack every step of the way, from his “Head Start” program at age 3 through to his Social Security benefits at the age of 67. Everything good in her life she owes to him. When she writes her memoir, it will be thanks to a subvention from the Federal Publishing Assistance Program for Chronically Dependent Women but you’ll love it: Sweet Dreams From My Sugar Daddy. She’s what the lawyers would call “non composite mentis.” She’s not competent to do a single thing for herself – and, from Barack’s point of view, that’s exactly what he’s looking for in a woman, if only for a one-night stand on a Tuesday in early November.
Then there’s “Elizabeth,” a 62-year-old Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts. Like Barack’s white girlfriend, she couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be a composite – a white woman and an Indian woman, all mixed up in one! Not Indian in the sense of Ashton Kutcher putting on brownface makeup and a fake-Indian accent in his amusing new commercial for the hip lo-fat snack Popchips. But Indian in the sense of checking the “Are you Native American?” box on the Association of American Law Schools form, which Elizabeth Warren did for much of her adult life. According to her, she’s part Cherokee and part Delaware. Not in the Joe Biden sense, I hasten to add, but Delaware in the sense of the Indian tribe named in honor of the home state of Big F—kin’ Chief Dances With Plugs. …
Speaking of Warren, we have another post from Volokh Conspiracy.
Aside from Brian Leiter, whose contention that being Native American provides no affirmative action edge in law school hiring fails the straight-face test, it is obvious to everyone else why Elizabeth Warren self-identified as Native American all those years–which was to get an edge in hiring. Even less plausible, of course, is her own explanation–that she was looking for people to have lunch with (once she got to Harvard was it that she no longer was interested in having lunch with other Native Americans or that the strategy was so successful that she had just had too many lunches through the years?). Larry Sabato states the obvious:
“This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.”
Sabato also said that Warren’s claim that she didn’t list herself as a minority to gain an employment advantage is not believable.
“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious she was using (the minority listing) for career advancement.”
So assume the only reasonable explanation–that contrary to Leiter’s statement she did this to get a leg up in hiring and contrary to her own statement she didn’t do it to find lunch partners. …
Leaving BS in the academic field, we find another area where it reigns supreme. Thomas Sowell explains how unions lie.
Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being — not by what they actually are or what they actually do.
Many people, who do not look beyond the vision or the rhetoric to the reality, still think of labor unions as protectors of working people from their employers. And union bosses still employ that kind of rhetoric. However, someone once said, “When I speak I put on a mask, but when I act I must take it off.”
That mask has been coming off, more and more, especially during the Obama administration, and what is revealed underneath is very ugly, very cynical and very dangerous.
First there was the grossly misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” that the administration tried to push through Congress. What it would have destroyed was precisely what it claimed to be promoting — a free choice by workers as to whether or not they wanted to join a labor union. …
More from Thomas Sowell.
A small headline in the 2nd section of the Wall Street Journal last week told a bigger story than a lot of front page banner headlines. It said, “U.S. Firms Add Jobs, but Mostly Overseas.”
Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free class warfare. Some people may be inspired by President Obama’s talk about making “the rich” pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes, or taking away corporations’ “tax breaks.” But talk is not always cheap. It can be very costly to those working people who are looking for jobs that the Obama administration’s anti-business policies are driving overseas.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs were overseas.” All these companies have at least 50,000 employees, so we are talking about a lot of jobs for foreigners with American companies overseas.
If the Wall Street Journal can figure this out, it seems certain that the President of the United States has economic advisers who can figure out the same thing. But that does not mean that the president is interested in the same thing.
In this, as in so much else, Barack Obama is interested in Barack Obama. Whatever bad effects his policies may have for others, those policies have had a track record of political success for many politicians in many places. …
A few years ago Pickerhead went to the Social Security office to sign up. Was it filled with a bunch of old people? Nope, all youngsters. James Pethokoukis explains why.
Now that the labor force participation rate is at its lowest level since 1981, it’s a good time to take another look at how the rising number of disabled Americans affects the official size of the workforce. Here are disturbing facts from Bloomberg:
– The number of workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance jumped 22 percent to 8.7 million in April from 7.1 million in December 2007, Social Security data show.
– That helps explain as much as one quarter of the decline in the U.S. labor-force participation rate during the period, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.
– Disability recipients may account for as much as 0.5 percentage point of the more than 2 point drop since the end of 2007, the economists calculate, and that contribution could grow when some extended unemployment benefits expire at the end of this year.
– More than 99 percent of all SSDI beneficiaries remain in the program until retirement age, David Greenlaw, a managing director in New York at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a March research note, citing government data. The program provides an average of $1,111 in monthly income to eligible workers with a physical or mental impairment that will last at least 12 months or result in death, according to Social Security. …
Der Spiegel takes us on a visit to the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea.
… Visitors who managed to slip into the country past the authorities’ careful scrutiny … can see the results in the capital Pyongyang. The new apartment blocks were built at a breakneck pace, buildings that are 12 to 15 stories high, ranging from structures resembling public housing in the West to avant-garde apartment towers to huge blocks of houses that look almost inviting with their terraced roof decks.
It was a massive undertaking. The government was ruthless as it moved forward with its plans, reports a European Union envoy in Pyongyang. To obtain the necessary land, people were “collectively thrown out” of their old apartments. An entire residential neighborhood of four-story buildings on the banks of the Taedong River, in a prime downtown location, was leveled in a single weekend.
According to the EU envoy, a column of military trucks arrived one Saturday morning. The residents were forced to load up their belongings in next to no time and were then taken away to relatives. Two circular apartment towers painted gray and blue now stand on the site, within full view of the few guests at the Yanggakdo International Hotel across the river.
To visitors, Pyongyang’s modern skyline looks impressive at first glance, seeming to belie descriptions of North Korea as a poverty-stricken realm stuck in the stone age of communism. But there is a catch: These new buildings are off-limits, even to diplomats.
The supposed proof of the success of the “aspiring nation” quickly turns out to be nothing but Potemkin villages. The new residential towers are often uninhabited and little more than empty shells. The country has had problems with its energy supply. There was even less electricity this past winter than in the year previous, and heating systems were not working well. In the cold months, many families burned wood in small, homemade ovens to at least keep one room warm, report foreigners in Pyongyang.
Because of insufficient water pressure, there is often no running water on the upper floors of the apartment towers. To get water, residents carry buckets and tubs to taps on the street, or they fetch their water from the polluted river. …