Rightank

It seems that Democrats are more and more nomadic–wandering from presidential epithets to anguished groans about Bush’s judicial nominees, searching desparately for a identity (apart from liberal insanity, that is).

Victor Davis Hanson authored a tremendous piece on the failings of the modern Democratic party and why the Democrats will continue to fail. Hanson highlights some of the Democrats hypocrisy:

[T]here is the widening gulf between word and deed — and Americans hate hypocrites most of all. When you meet a guy from the Chamber of Commerce or insurance association, you pretty much know that what you see is what you get: comfort with American culture and values, an upscale lifestyle that reflects his ideology and work, and no apologies for success or excuses for lack of same.

But if you listen to Dr. Dean and his class venom, it hardly seems comparable with how he lives or how he was brought up. John Kerry’s super power boat, Teresa Kerry’s numerous mansions, Arianna Huffington’s gated estate, George Soros’s jet, Ted Turner’s ranches, Sean Penn’s digs — all this and more, whether fairly or unfairly, suggest hypocrisy and insincerity: Something like, “High taxes, government regulation, racial quotas, and more entitlements won’t hurt me since I have so much money at my own disposal anyway, but will at least make me feel good that we are transferring capital to the less fortunate.”

Worse yet, such easy largess and the cost of caring often translate into contempt for the small businessman, entrepreneur, and salesperson who is supposedly illiberal because he worries that he has less disposable income and is less secure. And when you add in cracks about Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and the “Christian Right” — all the things the more cultured avoid — then the architects of a supposedly populist party seem to be ignorant of their own constituencies.

The Democrats in power are just as elite (if not more so) than the Republicans. The difference being that the Democrats represent values opposed to traditional morality, capitalism, and the Constitutional text while right-thinking Republicans (there are some dimwits) uphold, cherish, and pursue policies that preserve the national structure installed by the Framers. It’s a shame the Dems can’t get away with it anymore . . . and it’s entertaining to see their puerile fins flailing.

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Party won re-election yesterday in Great Britain. However, Labour (read: liberal) lost seats and carries a very small majority while the Conservative party (read: conservative) gained more than 30 seats (197 total) with the Liberal Democrats (read: liberal wackos) grasping hold of 62.

NRO has an excellent take on the election results.

Here’s an interesting immigration perspective.

Liberals have wet their pants over a UCLA law professor Richard Sander who actually said that affirmative action is negatively affecting the number of black law students who become attorneys (See my previous post here).

Another Legal Lib has taken Professor Sander’s claim to task. Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate and who (wonkers!) has taught at Yale Law School (should I start bowing now?), summarizes forthcoming legal critiques, one of which I previously bashed (Ayers and Brooks). Bazelon’s article is basically two themes: (1) non-stop collegial laudatory for critics of Sander and (2) affirmative action is actually really good for black law students. Oh, and did I mention that Bazelon’s article is racist?

Take this sentence about potential solutions for the dearth of black attorneys:

One way to increase the number of black lawyers might be to write a test that relies less on trick multiple-choice questions, or to convince the state bar associations that administer the exam to quit failing more and more would-be lawyers each year, as several have taken to doing. (Fewer new lawyers means less competition.)

So, Emily, are you saying the blacks can’t hack tests that contain “trick” multiple-choice questions? What makes them “tricky”? . . . that the examinee has to actually reason and critically analyze the question in order to determine the correct answer? Or are they “tricky” because the questions are written in the genre of all other races?

What about your second solution? Convince state bar associations to dumb-down their bar examinations? How would you convince them? Tell the state bar associations that it is in their best interest to have less intelligent lawyers? Are you implying that the harder the bar examination, the end result is that more blacks fail than pass? How easy should the bar exam be? Let me guess: Just show up on time, spell your name, recite 10 legal principles you learned in law school, and absolutely no “tricky” multiple choice questions?

To insinuate that black students are less capable then white or asian or any other student of a different racial make-up is racist. However, bar examination test data probably inform the unbiased interpreter that students who have lower LSAT scores entering law school and lower grades are probably more likely to fail the bar examination than students with higher LSAT scores and higher grades. Affirmative action, as Bazelon admits “isn’t a great long-term solution to black underperformance.” Yeah, and it isn’t an excuse to profer solutions to increase the quantity of black attorneys that stigmatize and carry racist overtones.

The ACLU has lambasted Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for applauding the Minuteman Project’s efforts at the southern Arizona border. How did the ACLU refer to the Minutemen? Vigilantes. How did President Bush refer to the Minuteman? Vigilantes.

It’s perplexing when the linguistic license of President Bush becomes the propaganda mouthpiece for the socialist ACLUers and should cause one to pause and digest the happening. Is Bush’s mischaracterization merely coincidental or will it prove consequential in terms of immigration policy and how Bush supporters view his judgment with regard to protecting our Nation’s borders?

Time will tell. Erstwhile, the Minutemen have prevented a significant amount of illegals (maybe even a terrorist) from entering our country and free-riding on our liberty–a whopping 98% decrease in the area they patrolled. Thank you, Minutemen.

Al Gore spoke to every Communist’s and Anarchist’s home-away-from-home: moveon.org. As LGF depicts, Al Gore is fire-breathing, Bush-bashing, Depends wearing, putz–the most disgraceful former Vice President in United States history.

I do have to say something nice about the former VP: Hey Al, thanks for the internet.

The ACLUers that are harassing the Minuteman Project were caught smoking pot (no doubt exclusively for medicinal purposes).

Perhaps, they decided to celebrate International Pot Day (April 20th) a little early . . .

On another note, the Minutemen are halting the deluge of illegals at the border. With what? A bunch of old-fashioned patriotism–pure and simple. Ain’t America great?

Affirmative action is consistently lauded among the Libs, within Academia, and the pandered-to, weak-kneed Corporations. Law school is no different. Affirmative action is emphasized in admissions policies, in recruiting, and on-campus placement. Moreover, the need for “diversity” clings on the coattails of affirmative action and is becoming more important in hiring practices of elite and medium-sized law firms than the merit of a particular candidate. (I had a classmate who excelled academically, earning his way into the Top 10% of my class. However, he was rejected by a law firm because he was white. He told me that the firm recruiter informed him in a 2nd interview that “We would hire you if you weren’t white”).

After the Michigan cases were decided last year (in which the Supreme Court held that race could be used as a category or factor in the admissions process), the ACLU gleefully uttered their approval:

Today’s ruling recognizes that there is still work that needs to be done to fulfill the promise of equal educational opportunity that the Court set in motion nearly 50 years ago in another landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, said ACLU Legal Director Steven R. Shapiro.

With today’s ruling, the Court has kept the door open for thousands of academically qualified students of color to continue to pursue the American dream through our nation’s colleges and universities.

Thousands of academically qualified? Well, not really.

UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander has questioned the usefulness of affirmative action in producing enough black lawyers (forget about hispanic or the other selectively disadvantaged races) . . . and the legal profession (or at least some of them) are fastidiously working to dumb-down such intellectual absurdity. Yale Law Professor Ian Ayres apparently disagrees and believes affirmative action increases the odds of more blacks becoming attorneys. However, his analysis (in a forthcoming law review article) reveals how discrminatory the law school admissions process is vis-a-vis “academically qualified” white candidates. Specifically, he (and Professor Richard Brooks) estimate that 42.6% of blacks entering law school had less than a 50% chance of becoming lawyers. (while virtually no white students — .23% — were in this high risk category).

What? How could nearly 43% of “academically qualified” blacks have less than 50% chance of passing the bar compared with a mere 2/10 of a percent of similarly “academcially qualified” white students? In other words, blacks are 853 times as likely not to pass the bar then their white classmates. How much, then, does the race of these candidates factor into their total score when law schools are vetting their candidate pools each year?

It is disheartening that law schools (both elite and podunk) are goading a good chunk of black law students into believing that they have what it takes to graduate from law school and pass a state bar examination. Furthermore, those who fail carry are saddled with the financial burden of $100K or more in loans and no law license to help pay them back. It would make an interesting study to see if those blacks who graduate and pass the bar examination would have been admitted to law schools without affirmative action and how many of those who flunk out or fail the bar leapfrogged other “academically qualified” students of other races only through affirmative action (i.e., using race as a factor in the admissions process).

Who pays the price? An academic culture blinded by race? Law schools? Blacks? Whites? You decide. But don’t tell me that the “benefits” of affirmative action outweigh its costs on society dependent upon capable lawyers to uphold the Constitution.

John Kerry is still crying about his election year LOSS courtesy of 52 million plus Americans who told him and Edwards to get lost. Among other things, he claims that leaflets were distributed to Kerry voters instructing them to vote on the wrong day. Thus, Kerry supporters were disenfranchised (I’m surprised P-Diddy made it to the polls). I wonder: What is the IQ of those voters eager to vote for Kerry but who raced to vote on the day after Election Day? 40? Perhaps, this also explains why the “Vote or Die” slogan was chosen by the Hollywood Libs as their voter-get-out-of-your-crib slogan: any word larger than four letters or containing more than one syllable is too much to handle for their dopish brains.

Waffle Warning: Kerry is after a bigger electoral fish: the papal election.

Today, the Washington Times reported that the Central American gang Mara Salvatrucha (aka “MS-13″) will target the American citizens who are going to take part in the Minuteman Project. Here’s the purpose of the Minuteman Project:

It is a call to peacefully assemble at the Arizona-Mexico border to bring national awareness to the decades-long careless disregard of effective U.S. immigration law enforcement. It is a reminder to Americans that our nation was founded as a nation governed by the “rule of law”, not by the whims of mobs of ILLEGAL aliens who endlessly stream across U.S. borders.
Accordingly, the men and women volunteering for this mission are those who are willing to sacrifice their time, and the comforts of a cozy home, to muster for something much more important than acquiring more “toys” to play with while their nation is devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens.
Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious “melting pot.”

Funny, the ACLU announced that they would send “monitors” make sure the American volunteers don’t break the law (i.e., don’t catch any illegals).

Street gangs and ACLU–Now that’s a match made in hell.

As for the Minutemen, God speed. I hope you shed some needed light and attention on the masses of illegals that trampel over our borders, break our laws, and defy our sovereignty.

More Dzurinda. He has assisted in the implemenation of a “flat tax” for Slovakia . . . and guess what, it’s working:

We have gained valuable experience from the tax reform. We have introduced a flat rate tax for both legal and natural persons. We harmonised VAT rates into a single rate. Without any exceptions. The result is improved tax collection and administration, higher transparency, less bureaucracy, and higher tax revenues for the state budget.
The result of this reform is also a significantly higher influx of foreign investments, which brings new jobs and a faster economic growth.

High transparency and less bureaucracy! That doesn’t sound like the IRS. The U.S. has set an example of democracy and freedom for Slovakia. Perhaps, Slovakia could teach us something about tax collection.