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Barnes: Sotomayor ‘benefited’ from affirmative action ‘tremendously.’

By Matt Corley on May 28, 2009 at 8:01 pm

On MSNBC yesterday, Pat Buchanan repeatedly attacked Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor as an “affirmative action candidate,” echoing right-wing claims that she has “been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life.” On Bill Bennett’s radio show this morning, Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes argued “that she’s one of those who has benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously.” When Bennett noted that she graduated Summa Cum Laude from Princeton, which he called “a pretty big deal,” Barnes dismissed it, saying “I guess it is”:

BARNES: I think you can make the case that she’s one of those who has benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously.

BENNETT: Yeah, well, maybe so. Did she get into Princeton on affirmative action, one wonders.

BARNES: One wonders.

BENNETT: Summa Cum Laude, I don’t think you get on affirmative action. I don’t know what her major was, but Summa Cum Laude’s a pretty big deal.

BARNES: I guess it is, but you know, there’s some schools and maybe Princeton’s not one of them, where if you don’t get Summa Cum Laude then or some kind of Cum Laude, you then, you’re a D+ student.

Listen here:

On Tuesday night, former Bush adviser Karl Rove said that despite her stellar academic credentials, Sotomayor was “not necessarily” smart. “I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools,” said Rove.

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Tancredo Accuses Senators McCain and Martinez of Complicity in KKK Activities; Will They Fight Back?

By Matthew Yglesias on May 28, 2009 at 7:48 pm

Earlier today, Representative Tom Tancredo, a noted anti-immigrant extremist, went on television and denounced Sonia Sotomayor for her association with the National Council of La Raza. NCLR is a Latino advocacy group akin to the NAACP. But to Tancredo it’s the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan, a violent racist terrorist organization:

TANCREDO: If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

SANCHEZ: Alright. We’re not talking about — we’re not talking about La Raza –

TANCREDO: She’s a member! She’s a member of La Raza!

Check out the video:

Now as Dave Meyer points out, this is not just a vile slur on Sotomayor and the NCLR, it’s a serious slur on Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who delivered the keynote at NCLR’s 2004 conference and also addressed the group in 2008. Meanwhile, Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) accepted an award from NCLR earlier this year.

The question arises as to whether McCain and Martinez are going to stand for this. Will they take on the maniacs in their own party who are slandering them, or will they decide to just lay low and hope that nobody notices what’s going on. I know that if someone accused me of having delivered the keynote address at a Klan rally, I’d be mad as hell. Is McCain?

Climate Progress

Climate politics scoop and question of the week

By Joe Romm on May 28, 2009 at 7:07 pm

Okay, I don’t know if it is a scoop, heck, I don’t know for certain it is true, but  very reliable source tells me that speaker Pelosi wants the climate bill on the House floor the last week in June.

That is consistent with what Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said (see “House Majority Leader says climate bill will see fast action“).  But it will require a lot of speedy deal-making.  Still, it suggests the speaker does not see any deal breakers in the path to House passage, even though, as Wonk Room reports, “Brown Dogs Poised To Block Green Economy Legislation.”

And Sen. Boxer (D-CA) can certainly get something close to the Waxman-Markey bill out of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee by the fall.  And let’s assume for now it doesn’t get mired in any other committees

And that brings me to the climate politics question of the week:

Read more

Climate Progress

Yes, the House climate bill helps make a deal with China possible, and yes, the New York Times got the story wrong

By Climate Guest Blogger on May 28, 2009 at 6:42 pm

We have a real chance of a deal with China before the big international talks in Copenhagen this December (see “Exclusive: Have China and the U.S. been holding secret talks aimed at a climate deal this fall?“). But it won’t be easy, especially since the 2020 target in the Waxman-Markey climate bill falls far short of the 40% cut from 1990 levels that China recently demanded developing nations achieve by 2020.  A confused New York Times story yesterday noted, “A leading Beijing expert on climate change economics, Zhang Shiqiu, said Wednesday that she was optimistic that the two nations would reach some accord on global warming before the Copenhagen meeting,” but then misreported, “The Center for American Progress, a Democratic-leaning research organization, said in a report published Wednesday that the House legislation was unlikely to win enough Chinese support for the two nations to present a united front at the Copenhagen talks in December.”  In fact, leading international experts from CAP also believe a deal is doable — and that Waxman-Markey helps — as they explain in a post first published here and reprinted below (along with their response to the NYT).

UPDATE:  The Times has agreed to correct the mistake in their story.  The squeaky wheel does get greased!

We are now entering the six-month period before the U.N. climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, which are intended to hammer out a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol that expires in 2012. Progress on climate policy domestically will increase U.S. leverage in these talks, but President Barack Obama should look for additional ways to improve the American negotiating position than what we currently have on the table.

In particular we need a better accounting of what the United States””and other countries as well””are doing to achieve meaningful carbon reductions. Importantly, a more detailed analysis would reveal that the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACES, recently passed through committee by Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA), would achieve more carbon reduction than first meets the eye.

The soft underbelly of ACES is its 2020 midterm carbon cap targets, which have been assailed by some environmentalists. At 17 percent below 2005 levels these targets apparently give the Obama administration precious little to meet global expectations about U.S. action on climate change. For starters these caps fall below the European Union’s agreed-upon 20 percent reductions below 1990 levels by 2020. If we were to meet our allies at these goals then the European Union will increase their midterm reductions to 30 percent. At its current levels ACES does not trigger this critical shift.

More troubling, there are already clear signs that ACES’s targets are far less than we need to garner China’s full engagement in an international agreement on capping emissions.

Read more

Media

Fox News Embraces Right-Wing Theory That Obama Is Forcing GOP-Owned Car Dealerships To Close

By Ryan Powers on May 28, 2009 at 6:00 pm

Citing a handful of right-wing bloggers yesterday afternoon, the Washington Examiner reported ominously, “Evidence appears to be mounting that the Obama administration has systematically targeted Chrysler dealers who contributed to Republicans” for closure. Not to be outdone, Fox and Friends hosted conservative blogger Michelle Malkin this morning to play up the conspiracy theory. “Believe me Steve, over the last several years, we’ve all documented the Obama-Chicago-gangland tactics that certainly make this a possibility,” Malkin said.

Malkin’s speculative hysterics were apparently enough to pique the interest of Fox News White House correspondent Major Garrett. As he’s done with other right-wing conspiracy theories, he asked the White House for its response to the charges:

GARRETT: There is some concern in the blogosphere that of the of the Chrysler dealerships being closed, a disproportionate number appear to be in which the operators contributed to Republicans. And hardly which contributed to democrats have been closed down. I’m not saying the White House knows anything about this but would you be concerned about any taint of politics in any of the decisions.

Watch it:

As Press Secretary Robert Gibbs explained to Garrett, it is Chrysler — not the federal government — that is in charge of selecting which dealerships will be closed. Further, as Nate Silver explained in a post that was published just hours after the Examiner’s initial report yesterday, “There is just one problem with this theory. Nobody has bothered to look up data for the control group: the list of dealerships which aren’t being closed.”

Silver explained, “It turns out that all car dealers are, in fact, overwhelmingly more likely to donate to Republicans than to Democrats — not just those who are having their doors closed.” In all, Silver found that “88 percent of the contributions from car dealers went to Republican candidates and just 12 percent to Democratic candidates,” while, the list of Chrysler dealerships being closed “gave 92 percent of their money to Republicans — not really a significant difference.”

Yglesias

Black-Latino Tensions in Perspective

By Matthew Yglesias on May 28, 2009 at 5:26 pm

black-brown-unity-1

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a great item up about the need to bring some perspective to the question of whether or not the country is afflicted by a substantial level of animosity between Latinos and African-Americans. He’s responding to Tim Pagett’s idea that Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment “is perhaps the most potent symbol yet of a 21st century rapprochement between the U.S.’s two largest minorities, Latino Americans and African Americans, who in the 20th century could be as violently distrustful of each other as blacks and whites were.”

I have not known Latinos in the 20th Century to perpetrate a Red Summer. I have not known blacks to lynch Latino veterans, returning from war, in their uniforms. The fact is that there was no violent distrust between blacks and whites in the 20th century. Rather there was a one-sided war waged against black people by white terrorists, which government, in the best cases, failed to prevent, in many cases, stood idly by, and in the worst cases actually aided and abetted. [. . .] Leaving aside the differences between how blacks relate to Puerto-Ricans in the Bronx, versus how they relate to Cuban-Americans in Florida, it is borderline delusional to pretend that some beef between some folks in L.A is the equivalent of Martin Luther King. Or even Rodney King. It isn’t. And the fact that we can’t tell the difference is still haunting us.

That’s exactly right. And while the worst of white violence against blacks is in the past, there continues to be a very tangible legacy of this kind of thing. Jefferson Davis was the political leader of an organized insurrection against the United States government, whose aim was to perpetuate the enslavement of black people. And there’s a highway named after him just a few miles from where I type. When I drove back to DC from North Carolina on Tuesday, I passed the Stonewall Jackson Shrine, which is an official National Parks Service site. Black-white racial conflict has always been the racial conflict in the United States and to a pretty shocking extent white America continues to decline to live up to what it’s been all about.

Health

Can We Do A VAT And Preserve Employer-Sponsored Heath Insurance?

By Igor Volsky on May 28, 2009 at 5:00 pm

Ezra Klein argues that “if you rebuild health care financing around a single tax, you’d also have to rebuild health insurance offerings around what is, in effect, a single payer”:

Employer-based insurance, for instance, only exists because employers pay for it. If the government were paying for it through a VAT, then that insurance would no longer be attached to employers. That would be a good thing because employer-based insurance is a bad thing. But it would also mean individuals would “lose” their current insurance (even though it would be instantly and seamlessly replaced). Which is why we won’t have a VAT.

Back in 2003, the Center for American Progress proposed a universal plan that allowed Americans to keep their employer-based coverage, established a new health insurance exchange modeled on the FEHB, strengthened Medicaid, offered coverage subsidies and financed it all through a Value Added Tax (VAT). And as Len Burman notes, the tax has some advantages:

- It is the only plausible revenue source that would pay for universal access to health insurance without very tight targeting by income.

- A VAT combined with free health insurance is highly progressive

- A VAT that is earmarked to pay for health care would serve as a brake on health care spending because otherwise the VAT would tend to increase

- Announcing a future VAT would stimulate spending in the short term

- When fully phased in, a VAT would encourage savings (since it is untaxed by the VAT), which will boost long-term economic growth and provide a cushion against future recessions.

Personally, I’m not convinced by the above arguments, but it is clear that one can preserve the current employer based system and fund the expansion of coverage through some form of new revenue, whether it be a VAT of some other combination of taxes. (Preserving employer coverage would obviously require a smaller VAT and as Matt Yglesias points out, we’ll probably need some form of taxation to sustain the system in the long run.) I just hope that we don’t over-rely on taxation. The present system wasted a lot of dollars and improving its efficiency may be the only way to build sustainable reform.

Politics

Tancredo: Sotomayor Is A Member Of The ‘Latino KKK Without The Hoods Or The Nooses’

By Ali Frick on May 28, 2009 at 4:47 pm

Seizing the opportunity to vilify a female, Hispanic Supreme Court nominee, noted bigot Tom Tancredo has emerged from obscurity to denounce Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Earlier this week, Tancredo declared her to be a “racist” who should be “disqualified” from serving on the bench.

This afternoon on CNN, he went further, attacking her affiliation with the National Council of La Raza as equivalent to being a member of the Ku Klux Klan:

TANCREDO: If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

SANCHEZ: Alright. We’re not talking about — we’re not talking about La Raza –

TANCREDO: She’s a member! She’s a member of La Raza!

Watch it

The La Raza line is the latest right-wing attack on Sotomayor. Right-wing groups have been waging war against La Raza since the 2006 immigration rallies. Conservatives, including Rep. Charles Norwood (R-GA), claim the group “supports racist groups calling for the secession of the western United States as a Hispanic-only homeland.” The right-wing blog Stop The ACLU calls La Raza “an anti-white extremist group.”

These attacks — promoted by Drudge — are only going to escalate. Of course, the characterizations are wildly false. La Raza is the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization that focuses on such nefarious issues as “civil rights/immigration, education, employment and economic status, and health.” Used to these attacks, La Raza has a long fact-sheet debunking the unhinged claims of the right, including pointing out that “La Raza” translates as “the people,” not “the race,” as the right wing suggests.

Tancredo echoed a popular right-wing myth, claiming the group’s slogan is “All for the race, nothing for the rest.” When ThinkProgress asked a La Raza spokeswoman, she replied, “No. That’s very much incorrect.” In fact, the true slogan is “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” A far cry from Tancredo’s egregiously false, race-based characterization.

Media

Hug It Out

By Matthew Yglesias on May 28, 2009 at 4:43 pm

28hugs_600-1

There’s something mildly hilarious about Sarah Kershaw’s New York Times article on teenagers who hug each other as a greeting and the adults who think this is weird. The whole piece seems to have been constructed as if never previously in the course of American life have teenagers picked up a social custom that many parents and school officials deem weird. Or as if it’s unheard of for teenagers to start doing something non-customary in order to mark themselves off from the behavior patterns of older people:

Comforting as the hug may be, principals across the country have clamped down. “Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory,” said Noreen Hajinlian, the principal of George G. White School, a junior high school in Hillsdale, N.J., who banned hugging two years ago. “It was needless hugging — they are in the hallways before they go to class. It wasn’t a greeting. It was happening all day.”

I remember when all the kids had slap bracelets and then schools across the land started banning them.

Yglesias

The Asymmetry of Majority and Minority

By Matthew Yglesias on May 28, 2009 at 4:01 pm

diversity_matters_photo_without_wording__-1

Jewish people are not in any serious way oppressed in the United States of America. But still, being a member of a religious minority group is a distinctive experience. Even in a country that doesn’t officially make Christianity an official state religion, Christianity seems to be the official religion of the state. When Christmas comes around, everyone gets days off so that people can go spend the holidays with their families. When Passover comes around, you get nothing. Mail comes on Saturday but not on Sunday. Liquor stores are closed on Sunday. That’s life, and it’s hardly the worst thing in the world. But it does give you a different perspective on things. And I think it’s a perspective that would probably help a Jewish judge to understand the claims of minorities religious groups in general. Not just other Jews, but Muslims and Hindus and Jehovah’s Witnesses and all the rest. These insights don’t necessarily determine outcomes, but you could imagine a Christian missing some of the real dynamics here. And by the same token, it strikes me as plausible to say that a Muslim judge or a Hindu judge would have similar virtues.

But this is a way of saying that membership in a religious minority group could enhance a judge’s insight into the constitutional protections due to members of religious minority groups. It’s not a claim about Muslims and Hindus and Jews. It would make no sense to look a Hindu judge in India and attribute special insights to him. For a Christian in the United States to say that being a Christian gives him special insight into religious freedom litigation would be creepy and possibly offensive. But if he was saying that his background growing up as a Christian in Lebanon gives him special insight, that would be a totally different thing.

More broadly, you don’t need to make any claims about the special virtues of any group in particular in order to see the point that a diverse group of decision-makers is going to reach a better understanding of issues than a monolithic group would.

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