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Michael Barone says the Warren story highlights the corrupt system of affirmative action.
… The important thing is the Warren story illustrates the rottenness of our system of racial quotas and preferences. Although the people in charge of administering them deny this, just about everyone with eyes to see knows that you’re more likely to be hired and promoted if you have checked one of the non-Asian minority boxes: black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander.
You don’t hear Republicans criticizing this system, and it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who introduced it in the federal government in 1970. It quickly spread to academia and corporate America.
People who classify themselves as approved minorities get into schools and get jobs that they wouldn’t if they classified themselves as white. Not surprisingly, some people, perhaps including Warren, game this system.
The original justification was that this would overcome the disadvantages that American blacks endured during decades of slavery and segregation. That made sense to many people at the time. Those disadvantages were real, and most Americans wanted to be fair.
But the extension of minority status to other groups and the perpetuation of racial preferences for nearly half a century since the abolition of legal segregation means that there is increasingly little correlation between membership in the favored categories and genuine disadvantage. …
You think the Warren story could not get better? Turns out the great great great grandmother who might have been a Cherokee, was married to a man who helped round up the Cherokees for their displacement from the Southeast to Oklahoma (Trail of Tears). Hot Air has the story.
… But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren’s great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.
This new information about Ms. Warren’s true heritage came as a direct result of a lead provided to me by William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection, who in turn had received the information from one of his readers. Jacobson, who has questioned Warren’s explanation for her law faculty listing, calls this discovery “the ultimate and cruelest irony” of the Warren Cherokee saga. …
Fred Barnes on the president’s full time job – campaigning
President Obama is breaking new ground in his campaign for reelection. He is going where incumbent presidents have never gone before. He is doing things for which President George W. Bush would have been pilloried. And Obama is doing all this in plain view.
Yet the media have rarely found the new ploys and gambits of Obama’s campaign worth mentioning, much less spotlighting. For instance, in his address at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Obama treated his agenda and Jesus Christ’s as one and the same. Since the media didn’t raise any flags, one might have concluded a comment such as Obama’s was normal for that event. It wasn’t.
Obama offered his own version of the WWJD question—what would Jesus do?—on the issue of raising taxes on the rich. Obama wants to, arguing that seniors, young people, and the middle class shouldn’t be forced to “shoulder the burden alone.”
Instead, “I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense,” he said. “But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’?”
Linking his tax plan to Jesus was anything but routine. Presidents have been speaking to the prayer breakfast, a Christian-sponsored event, since the 1950s. Their talks have tended to be mildly Christian, not at all political, and never exploited as a vehicle to claim Christ’s endorsement of their policies.
Obama, however, got off without so much as a slap on the wrist from the press. …
David Hansanyi says we can do without the “to do list.”
… But according to White House press secretary Jay Carney, the function of the to-do list is that it ensures that come election time, Republicans will have to explain to their constituents “what they did while they were in Washington these last two years. Did they just say no?”
Correct answer: I didn’t say “no” enough.
The problem is that so-called fiscal conservatives say “yes” too often to populist notions masquerading as policy. With the state of the economy, what’s scarier, that the administration would pretend that these are serious proposals or that the president might actually believe they are?
Jennifer Rubin posts on more stupidity from Joe Biden.
One theory is that Karl Rove has kidnapped the real vice president and is now going around sowing discord and spreading gaffes as fast as the press can record them. That would be the most charitable explanation for why, just a couple days after making a mess on gay marriage, Vice President Biden chose in a speech to the Rabbinical Assembly’s annual conference to deliver Mitt Romney more ammunition.
He declared: “When we took office, let me remind, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran. We were the problem. We were diplomatically isolated in the world, in the region, in Europe.”
The Romney camp pounced, releasing a statement from policy director Lanhee Chen that read: …
Daniel Henninger can’t understand why anyone under 25 would vote for this president.
Why would anyone under the age of 25 vote for Barack Obama in November?
Mr. Obama resumed his College Tour 2012 last week, visiting campuses in Iowa, North Carolina and Colorado for the purpose of replicating his 66% youth-vote total from 2008.
In 2008, he reeled them in with promises of hope and change. In 2012 he’s offering cash, promising to protect 3.4% interest on their college loans. We’re about to find out if it’s true that when you’re young, hope springs eternal.
Put differently, the past three years have been a Peter Pan presidency for Peter Pan voters. If you’re going to college, it’s good to vote for Barack Obama again, so long as you’ll never have to turn 23. But for many young Americans, there will be no Tinker Bell showing them how to land a job with lovely thoughts.
The youth unemployment rate for Americans has hovered around 16%. Anecdotal stories abound of college graduates living in the bedroom they grew up in, jobless. But hey, the president they voted for as freshmen is promising 3.4% interest on the average $25,000 or so of college debt they owe four years later. …
Jeff Jacoby says “income inequality” is not a defining issue of our time. You’ll never guess who says it is.
… But what Americans honor is equality in the eyes of the law, political equality — not equality of income or material circumstances. The two kinds of equality are inherently in conflict, as every effort to impose egalitarianism eventually proves. “There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal,” wrote Friedrich Hayek in 1948. The fact that some people make much more money than others has never convinced the American people that a fundamental overhaul of society is necessary or even desirable. For all the extravagant claims made last year about Occupy Wall Street’s significance, is anyone surprised that the movement has fizzled?
For months President Obama has been calling income inequality “the defining issue of our time,” but relatively few Americans agree. In a recent Gallup poll, only 2 percent of respondents identified the gap between rich and poor as their top economic concern. Even among the Democrats in Gallup’s survey, inequality didn’t show up as a major worry. …
Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.
Leno: So President Obama had an imaginary girlfriend. Big deal! He also had an imaginary economic plan.
Leno: Obama’s new campaign slogan: “Forward.” Good one. It tells voters, ‘Don’t look back at all those promises I made but didn’t keep. Just look Forward.’
Fallon: Joe Biden and New York Mayor Bloomberg play golf together. Biden shot an 89 while Bloomberg shot the guy who arranged a round of golf with Joe Biden.
Leno: President Obama getting around these days. He was in Afghanistan last week as part of his ‘Did I Mention I Killed Osama bin Laden Tour?