Archive for May 2009

Jared Taylor

President Obama has surprised no one by appointing a vividly race-conscious Hispanic as his first nominee to the United States Supreme Court. Some of Sonia Sotomayor’s choicer observations have now been widely reported: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She also says sex and race “may and will make a difference in our judging.” (These remarks appeared in a publication that is called—apparently with a straight face—the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal) Miss Sotomayor is certainly no stranger to identity politics. She is a member of the Puerto Rican Bar Association, the Hispanic National Bar Association, the Association of Judges of Hispanic Heritage, and the National Council of La Raza.

Miss Sotomayor’s record bears out her self-proclaimed bias. She dismissed the right of New Haven’s white firefighters to bring suit when their promotion exam was thrown out because only whites got the top scores—and she didn’t even think it necessary to write an opinion explaining why.

She clearly thinks her role is to rule, not to ensure that the laws are Constitutional. In another of her well-circulated comments she said that a “court of appeals [the level at which she sits] is where policy is made.” No, Sonia, the legislative branch is where policy is made. It would be hard to think of a statement that so blatantly demonstrates a lack of what we used to call “judicial temperament.” This woman has sharply liberal politics and exercises her power in an attempt to advance those politics. Not surprisingly, her opinions are frequently reversed on appeal.

Miss Sotomayor’s record shows that, like Justice Ruth Ginsberg, she is likely to give foreign legal opinions considerable deference. One European legal flourish much admired by liberals is to justify hate speech laws by arguing that some opinions are so loathsome they are not protected by the right of free speech. Miss Sotomayor has not yet had a chance to try this argument out on the First Amendment, but I suspect she would love the opportunity. If she is confirmed, she will end up like Thurgood Marshall, a justice whose racial preoccupations and biases eventually became so simple-minded as to be almost comical.
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“It’s well established that schools with large minority populations tend to have lower quality teachers,” Dr. Jackson said. “But it is unclear whether these schools are merely located in areas with a paucity of quality teachers, whether quality teachers avoid these schools because of the neighborhood or economic factors surrounding a school, or whether there is a direct relationship between student characteristics and teacher quality.”

Dr. Jackson’s findings suggest that it’s not neighborhoods keeping high-quality teachers away; it’s the students—and it’s directly related to their race.

“This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower quality instruction,” Jackson said. “This relationship may be a substantial contributor to the black-white achievement gap in American schools.”

The study focused on the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district in North Carolina. In 2002, the district ended its race-based busing program, which distributed the district’s minority population across its schools. When the policy ended, some schools had a large and sudden inflow of black students. Since the racial makeup of the schools changed suddenly but the neighborhood and economic factors surrounding them stayed the same, Jackson could test the impact the student body itself had on teacher quality.

Using data supplied by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, Jackson found that schools that had an increase in black enrollment suffered a decrease in their share of high-quality teachers, as measured by years of experience and certification test scores. Teacher effectiveness, as measured by teachers’ previous ability to improve student test scores, decreased in the black inflow schools as well. The change in quality for each school generally occurred in the same year that the busing program ended, indicating that teachers moved in anticipation of more black students.
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Franz Joseph Haydn

The Year of Our Lord 2009 is the bicentenary of the death of Franz Joseph Haydn (d. May 31, 1809), known in the last two decades of his long life by the affectionate moniker of “Papa Haydn.” In the aftermath of the most recent American presidential election, just before Barack Obama’s inauguration, I wrote that sane people might do themselves a favor to withdraw their attention from the sordidness of contemporary politics and reacquaint themselves with J. S. Bach’s great work The Art of the Fugue. I have a similar purpose in mind in recommending to the contemporaneously anguished a healing visitation to the richness of Haydn’s large and varied compositional catalogue. Wolfgang Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven shot up and fell back like glorious meteors. Both owed an artistic debt to the older man. Haydn, the most important Western composer after Bach, established his career early and, by gradual self-emancipation from service to the aristocracy, became a public composer, writing steadily for a bourgeois audience, who responded with gratitude. Haydn, in contrast to Mozart and Beethoven, lived long, lived well, and managed to integrate himself securely in the middle-class world of late Eighteenth Century Europe.

Haydn’s Titanic productivity can only humble ordinary people. Having more or less invented the string quartet and the symphony, Haydn supplied them almost wholesale, without ever lowering his standard. His late-in-life oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, made him a London celebrity, and consummated his long relation with a genial English following. One can sometimes entertain the impression that Haydn – pardoning the artistic blasphemy – is a greater composer than Beethoven. I once guiltily confessed this disposition to my friend Steve Kogan, one of the most cultured men I have ever known, who answered with a laconic but telling, “So, you too?”

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Immigration policy has brought an array of cultural beliefs and behaviors which few Americans could have imagined before 1965, when Washington flung the doors open.

Case in point: the recent attempt in Roanoke, Virginia, by three young African teens and one citizen to kidnap wives of wealthy American men for ransom.

The kidnap gang consisted of Luke Musa Elbino (age 19, from Sudan), Joshua Kasongo (19, from Rwanda), Mohammed Hussein Guhad (19, from Somalia) and Anthony Eugene Muse (18, of Roanoke), a local who was willing to use his granny’s rural trailer for stashing their victims. [Vdare.com note: From his photograph, Mr. Muse seems to be a regular African-American, I.E. someone whose ancestors have been in this country since before the Civil War.]

Kasongo is listed as a Roanoke County firefighter (a job Americans won’t do?) and Elbino was a student at a community college. Anthony Muse and Mohammed Guhad were students at Roanoke’s Patrick Henry High School (“Home of the Patriots”!).

Virginia—the mother of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison and others—is apparently becoming another unmelting pot of criminal diversity.

The plot began to come apart on April 6, when the Africans tried to muscle their way into the home of George and Audrey Levicki. The gang posed as Red Cross volunteers doing a door-to-door survey. They had phoned to make sure that Mr. Levicki, CEO of Delta Dental of Virginia, was not there. The kidnappers had researched possible victims on the internet to find wealthy people and had driven around the area looking for big expensive houses.

The scheme fell apart when Mrs. Levicki slammed the door shut on one of the Africans as he tried to push his way in. The gang then jumped into a waiting car to escape, but they were noticed by an alert neighbor who followed until police appeared. (Read the original crime report on WSLS.com.)
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According to the Los Angeles Times, Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed a scheme to completely eliminate all forms of social assistance in the state of California.

Read that sentence again.  Yes, you got it right.

Here’s the governator’s response to last week’s rebuke to his proposal to increase taxes:  “Let them eat cake!”  Our governor would turn people out of their homes, let schoolchildren starve, and set up tent cities and communities under bridges statewide.  This is classic Republican governance, not that I have any admiration for Democrats.  It’s also the best illustration I can think of why a foreign national should never be allowed to hold office in this country.

We have passed the point where our own government is the enemy.  Heck, Washington threw us to the wolves years ago.  Arnold is just kissing bigger butts these days.

California has a $24.3 billion dollar deficit - up from $16 billion just one year ago.  This is due in part to government fraud and waste, but even more to the lavish support we give to illegal immigrants.  Illegal immigration costs our state $10.5 billion annually - a full HALF of the deficit!

Our gutless legislators are too afraid of the lobby these people represent to deal with this like, um, men.  So, we the people get to pay the bill.

Our government provides numerous services to illegals that are not available to citizens.  Education, welfare, food stamps, rent assistance and medical care, while restricted in recent years, are still lavished on those who are here seeking to take our money, our jobs and our land.

Actually I have a lot of sympathy with those who come here seeking a better life.  If I lived in a corrupt, failed nation with Santa Claus just over the border, I’d hop the fence too.   Immigration is historically one of America’s sources of greatness.  Millions have come here from every corner of the world, become citizens and made contributions to society.  This is no less true of Hispanics than any other nationality.  But there are also millions of Mexican nationals in California and the Southwest who are serious about taking over territory and forming their own nation within our borders.  It’s called reconquista, and if you think it’s an urban myth, you haven’t been paying attention.  We give them jobs, housing, and education in their own language without requiring them to learn English, and they are laughing at us.  The money they send home - sucked out of our economy to support the failed nation to our south - is Mexico’s largest source of revenue, even surpassing oil.
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The South Sioux City Chief of Police, S.E. Ford, acknowledges that this is the most heinous crime he has ever seen in South Sioux.

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