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Justice

WSJ Op-Ed Reveals Hidden Agenda Behind Racial Attacks On Sotomayor

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 8, 2009 at 4:39 pm

obamacantwinProving that no conservative can say something so wrong that they can’t later be published in the Wall Street Journal, today’s WSJ features an op-ed by Shelby Steele, author of A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. In his op-ed, Steele repeats the tired right-wing claim that any minority named to a position of prominence must owe their success to the color of their skin:

What is most notable about the Sotomayor nomination is its almost perfect predictability. Somehow we all simply know — like it or not — that Hispanics are now overdue for the gravitas of high office. And our new post-racialist president is especially attuned to this chance to have a “first” under his belt, not to mention the chance to further secure the Hispanic vote. . . .

The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit.

Ironically, Steele’s claim that Sotomayor lacks the “individual merit” necessary to succeed on her own was published the same day as an interview with former Princeton University President William Bowen, who describes Sotomayor as a “woman of enormous ability” who “was going to succeed and going to thrive wherever she was, in any setting.” Moreover, his claim that a successful woman of color must owe their position to racial preferences is far from the most troubling aspect of Steele’s op-ed. Indeed, buried deep within Steele’s piece is a startling window in to the right-wing’s anti-civil rights agenda.

One of the centerpieces of federal civil rights law is the ban on disparate impact discrimination. In 1964, Congress passed a law forbidding race discrimination in hiring, but it soon became very clear that racist employers rarely leave a paper trial proving that a job applicant was turned down because of their race. The ban on disparate impact discrimination was a response to this reality, intended to “smoke[] out hidden bigotry” by forcing employers to justify practices that have an adverse impact on minorities.

Read more

Security

Lugar Bucks Right-Wing Criticism Of Obama’s Cairo Speech: ‘I Don’t Agree’ That It Makes America Look Weak

By Ben Armbruster on Jun 8, 2009 at 4:02 pm

Soon after President Obama delivered his enlightened speech at Cairo University in Egypt last Thursday, the right wing reflexively launched into attack mode. Led by Fox News, conservatives off all stripes began (again) touting the speech as another “tour of apology.” Charles Krauthammer claimed Obama “was exceedingly weak” on Iran, while a sizable right-wing chorus bemoaned what they deemed as instances of “moral equivalency” in the speech. “I think it makes America look weak,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) complained of the speech.

However, during an interview with Bloomberg News this past weekend, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), ranking member of Foreign Relations Committee, broke ranks with his party’s criticism of Obama. Lugar called it an “important speech,” adding that he “thought” it “struck the right tone.” Asked if Obama was “tough enough” on Iran, Lugar responded, “Oh I suspect so for that particular purpose.”

When Hunt asked if “there was a moral equivalence message in the speech,” Lugar didn’t take the bait. “I think there was some attempt to find a balanced nuanced situation,” he replied. And then he distanced himself from Boehner:

HUNT: How about the charge of some critics like Republican leader John Boehner that it was too apologetic, that it was too weak and almost groveling?

LUGAR: I do not agree with that.

Watch it:

Lugar expounded on the “moral equivalency” charges, especially with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian issue by pointing out that Obama was simply “asking people to forget the past” because the arguments about which side has suffered more bring you “back to square one.”

Commenting on the right wing’s “apology tour” cries, Lugar said there is “a lack of sympathy for our country,” adding, “We probably as Americans need to give a lot of speeches in the Arab world.”

Transcript: Read more

Media

Are Rival Websites Killing Newspapers?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 8, 2009 at 3:55 pm

A very useful point from Conor Clarke about the contention that the Huffington Post is damaging an institution like The New York Times by being parasitic on its work. As Clarke points out, it appears to be that there’s a rising tide of “reading stuff on the internet” that’s lifting both boats:

nyt-and-huffingtpon-post-readership

My guess is that this point applies a fortiori to more “nromal” blogs (like, say, this one). Far from being “parasitic” on heavily linked-to news sites, these are complementary endeavors, driving readers to the sites that the bloggers use as their main sources of information. And of course America’s best newspapers are already hugely successful websites—thanks to the Internet, far more people read The New York Times today than at any previous point. The problem for everyone trying to make money on the internet—and that goes for everyone from the NYT to Josh Marshall to Arianna Huffington to whoever decided to hire Ezra Klein—is that ad rates on the web just don’t bring in very much money. In England, two of the best sources of information, the BBC and the Guardian, are already run as non-commercial enterprises and I have a feeling that more and more of the serious newsmedia will come in that form in the future.

Economy

Bailed Out Bank Accused Of Intentionally Steering Minorities Toward Subprime Loans

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 8, 2009 at 3:47 pm

ap0810030154761A favorite conservative trope is to blame the housing crisis (or even the entire economic meltdown) on lending in low-income, typically minority, neighborhoods, done under the auspices of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). “I don’t remember a blaring call that said, Frannie and Freddie are a disaster, loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster,” Fox News’ Neil Cavuto put it.

As CAP’s Tim Westrich noted, the reality is that “CRA-covered institutions succeed at bringing conventional, prime loans to lower-income communities, while non-covered institutions are the ones that drove bad practices.” And according to some of its former loan officers, bailed-out bank Wells Fargo was, for a decade, “systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages”:

These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services. Wells Fargo, [former loan officer] Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

As Nick Baumann at the Mojo Blog put it, “if this is true, there’s a word for it: evil.” The nasty racism is bad enough, but the fact that these aspiring homeowners were actively steered toward subprime loans when they qualified for a prime loan makes it all even worse.

After all, as the New York Times noted, “for a homeowner taking out a $165,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points in the loan rate — a typical spread between conventional and subprime loans — adds more than $100,000 in interest payments.” As Judd Legum pointed out, “many of the individuals who were pushed into these loans may have been able to avoid foreclosure if they were offered the prime loans for which they were qualified.”

This is all part and parcel of the ugly growth of subprime lending — driven by non-CRA covered institutions and encouraged by Wall Street banks ready to buy and securitize anything. That — and not lending in low-income neighborhoods — was really the culprit behind the housing implosion.

Politics

GOP rushes to placate Palin after trying to prevent her from upstaging Gingrich at fundraising dinner.

By Amanda Terkel on Jun 8, 2009 at 3:18 pm

Gov. Sarah Palin Last month, the NRSC and the NRCC issued a joint press release announcing that Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) would deliver the keynote address at their annual fundraising dinner. Palin’s staff quickly quashed the excitement and said the governor would not be attending. (She was allegedly “worried about overexposure.”) Instead, the NRSC and NRCC turned to former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Palin “hadn’t been expected to attend the event until last week, when her advisers approached organizers saying she would be near Washington and would like to come.” However, as news outlets reported today, Palin’s team is now balking because the governor will no longer be allowed to speak:

Gingrich has done more than his part, according to many involved in raising the money, and Sessions didn’t want the former Speaker overshadowed by someone who had not helped raise the millions the dinner is expected to pull in. Sessions said Palin could be introduced, but would not be allowed to speak.

Palin’s team was offended that she was not given the chance to speak and said they would not send the governor to the dinner, even though she is in Washington on Monday. In the end, it was Palin’s camp that leaked word of the spat.

Over the weekend, Cornyn did his best to smooth over the ruffled feathers. The NRSC chief called Palin on Sunday; that call has not been returned.

Greg Sargent reports that Sessions is now rushing to make nice with Palin. Ironically, Sessions plans to stress that the GOP is “a unified party” in his speech at the fundraising event.

Update

Chris Cillizza reports that Palin is now planning to attend the fundraiser.

Yglesias

Very Old Quote of the Day

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 8, 2009 at 3:13 pm

capitol-1

Here’s a line allegedly from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws that I’ve only ever actually seen quoted in other works:

As Rome, Sparta, and Carthage have lost their liberty and perished, so the constitution of England will in time lose its liberty, will perish: it will perish, whenever the legislative power shall become more corrupt than the executive.

I’m not sure this means American liberty is doomed, but I think it would be hard to deny that the corrupting influence of special interest politics weighs heavier on the Hill than it does on the White House.

Meanwhile, I do think you can see an inkling of what Montesquieu is talking about in the fact that there’s a persistent impulse in the contemporary United States to say that if something is really important, we need to basically cut congress out of the loop. This probably happened first with the steady decline of congress’ war powers. But you also saw it in the way that the Treasury/Fed response to the financial crisis was shaped by an overwhelming desire to avoid the need to go back to congress, by the way that proposals for improving the operations of MedPAC all involve trying to circumvent congress, etc. Tellingly, the judgment that congress can’t handle these issues is a judgment largely shared by congress. In the England of Montesquieu’s day, of course, the “executive” was understood to mean the unelected King, so a shift in the balance of power from legislature to executive constituted the death of liberty. Here in the US, obviously, it’s a different situation.

Politics

Limbaugh jokes: ‘Would a white male judge have fractured his ankle’ in the same way Sotomayor did?

By Ryan Powers on Jun 8, 2009 at 2:30 pm

Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor broke her right ankle today after stumbling at La Guardia airport in New York. According to a spokesperson, she was treated at George Washington University Hospital and released to attend “her full schedule of meetings on Capitol Hill this afternoon.” Conservative talker Rush Limbaugh couldn’t resist making a joke in response to the news of her injury. Noting the incident on his radio show today, Limbaugh wondered aloud whether a “white male” would have broken his ankle under similar circumstances:

LIMBAUGH: She fractured her ankle in an airport. She stumbled in the airport on her way to senate meetings. Now, the question is, would a white male judge have fractured his ankle in the same circumstances in the same airport on the way to Senate meetings?

Watch it:

Rush’s “joke” was an apparent reference to a comment Sotomayor made in a speech on diversity in 2001.

Yglesias

China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 8, 2009 at 2:26 pm

china-1

For quite a while, I subscribed to the theory that China’s capitalist development would require the diffusion of modern information technology, and the diffusion of modern information technology would necessarily tend to undermine the Communist Party’s dictatorship. But over the past few years, the dictatorship has proven itself to be much more resourceful about squaring this circle than a lot of us used to assume was possible. The key factor is that the Chinese market is so enormous that China can impose rules like this new one and know that many companies will want to play along:

China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet. The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC’s starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.

This also highlights why political developments in China are so crucial for the entire world. If, say, Iran tried to do this it almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But companies will fall all over each other to cater to the Chinese market. Then, once the technology is in place other autocracies can try to piggyback on work that’s been done in and for China. But absent China, almost all of world output would be happening in democratic nations, and it would be easy to structure the global economy in the kind of way optimists were hoping it would work for China.

Health

Hatch Peddles Luntz Talking Points, Misrepresents Kennedy’s Health Bill

By Igor Volsky on Jun 8, 2009 at 1:50 pm

During an interview with Fox News this morning, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) criticized the draft version of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) health care bill as a “one-size fits all government mandated health care plan.”

Hatch repeated the Frank Luntz-inspired charge that a government plan would place a bureaucrat between “you and your doctor” at least four times during the segment. And he wildly misrepresented the HELP bill while pressing Democrats in Congress to track a bipartisan path towards passing health reform. Watch it:

Hatch joins a long line of conservative lawmakers who rely on poll-tested Republican talking points that are intended to stall reform rather than fix the system.

For instance, contrary to Hatch’s insistence that the bill would put a bureaucrat “between you and your doctor,” Section 2 of the draft legislation explicitly states that “a strong doctor-patient relationship is essential to the practice of medicine, and patients have a right to an effective doctor patient relationship”:

helpbill

Moreover, Hatch argues that a public health care plan would “crowd out” private coverage and cites a Lewin Group study which found that 119.1 million Americans (Hatch actually rounds the number up to 120) would leave private health insurance if the public plan used Medicare payments and was opened to all employers. The draft of the HELP bill, however, specifies that the public plan would reimburse providers at 10 percent above Medicare rates and most Democratic proposals — including the President’s campaign health care plan — would likely allow only small businesses and individuals to buy-into the public plan. Under such a design, far fewer Americans “would leave private health insurance.”

All this suggests that Hatch is overstating his willingness to work with Democrats in a “bipartisan” fashion. After all, the first step towards compromise is truthfully characterizing legislation.

Politics

Hatch Peddles Luntz Talking Points, Misrepresents Kennedy’s Health Bill

By Igor Volsky on Jun 8, 2009 at 1:50 pm

During an interview with Fox News this morning, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) criticized the draft version of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) health care bill as a “one-size fits all government mandated health care plan.”

Hatch repeated the Frank Luntz-inspired charge that a government plan would place a bureaucrat between “you and your doctor” at least four times during the segment. And he wildly misrepresented the HELP bill while pressing Democrats in Congress to track a bipartisan path towards passing health reform. Watch it:

Hatch joins a long line of conservative lawmakers who rely on poll-tested Republican talking points that are intended to stall reform rather than fix the system.

For instance, contrary to Hatch’s insistence that the bill would put a bureaucrat “between you and your doctor,” Section 2 of the draft legislation explicitly states that “a strong doctor-patient relationship is essential to the practice of medicine, and patients have a right to an effective doctor patient relationship”:

helpbill

This suggests that Hatch is overstating his willingness to work with Democrats in a “bipartisan” fashion. After all, the first step towards compromise is truthfully characterizing legislation.

Cross-posted from The Wonk Room.

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