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The Commerce Department is considering naming Arab Americans a socially and economically disadvantaged minority group that is eligible for special business assistance. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) petitioned Commerce earlier this year to ask that Arab Americans be made eligible for the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), which helps minority entrepreneurs gain access to capital, contracts and trade opportunities. ... Commerce is asking for comment about whether there is social and economic discrimination against Arab Americans, along with examples of it occurring. The MBDA will decide whether or not to accept the petition by June 27.

Is Obama as right as he seems? New evidence reveals his college class got lower SAT scores than Dubya Average SAT score of Obama's 1981 transfer group to Columbia was 1,100 Bush got into Yale with score of 1,206 out of 1,600 Obama refuses to release his academic record Barack Obama may have got worse high school grades than George W Bush after new evidence showed the current president was among a college class with poor average SAT scores. Doubts about the supposedly superior intellect of Mr Obama were first raised after he refused to release his academic record. He...

Right Wing Nut set-up down drink and click-em Pic-of-Squaw for heap big Haw Haw.

I have no idea whether Barack Obama’s recently discovered bio and Elizabeth Warren’s periodic (and selective) ethnic box-checking represent mistakes, misrepresentations, or some combination of the two, but I do have first-hand experience with the powerful academic incentive to make one’s background as exotic as humanly possible. As perhaps the only regular Corner poster who’s also a veteran of an Ivy League law school admissions committee (at Cornell, where I taught for two years), I’m unfortunately completely inadequate for the task of communicating to readers how critically important “diversity” is to admissions and promotions in academe. Simply put, once you...

It’s official: Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren isn’t even 3 percent Cherokee. Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart.com counts coup: The slender thread upon which Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee rests—a purported 1894 marriage license application—has been exposed as non-existent. Based on a review of the original marriage records found in the files of the Logan County, Oklahoma Court Clerk’s office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the statements of ReJeania Zmek, the Court Clerk of Logan County, Oklahoma, it is likely that the ephemeral 1894 marriage license application never existed. “In modern times we keep marriage license applications,” she said. “The...

Danica Patrick wasn't pleased with Sam Hornish Jr. in Saturday's Nationwide Series race at Talladega and made it known by wrecking him after the checkered flag. In light of what had just happened moments earlier with Eric McClure having to be airlifted to the hospital after a multi-car wreck, her behavior is all the more astonishing. However, neither driver was called to the NASCAR hauler after the incident. Hornish finished 12th and Patrick 13th in a race won by Joey Logano. Sam Hornish Jr.: "... After the race was over, we got right-reared by the 7 car (Danica Patrick). I...

~snip~ Elizabeth Warren a/k/a Fauxcahontas The Supreme Court, in a case known as Fisher v. University of Texas is about to consider whether public universities should be forbidden use of "diversity" in consideration for admission. This week, Elizabeth Warren, candidate for Senate in Massachusetts has shown how rotten to the core and easily gamed is the entire notion of diversity -- something which in my opinion has substantially undercut the academic rigor of American universities and the productivity of its businesses. Ms. Warren parlayed a not overtly distinguished college and law school career into a tenured position at Harvard Law...

In today's episode of "My Government Scares The Crap Out Of Me", let's take a look at the Department of Labor's "environmental justice" program. First, before we get started, I thought it would be really, really swell to hear from an expert on "environmental justice". So, without further ado, I bring you Chairman Obama's former "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones. Take it away, Vannie! *********************************** "Mother Jones: Can you briefly explain what 'environmental justice' means to you? Van Jones: Environmental justice is the movement to ensure that no community suffers disproportionate environmental burdens or goes without enjoying fair environmental benefits."...

If the presidential election can come down to whether it's more offensive to eat dogs or put one in a kennel on top of your car, I guess it's fair for a Senate election to come down to whether Elizabeth Warren is 1/10,000th Cherokee.The newest front in the "war on women," apparently: Calling a female pol out on her self-serving B.S. Despite claiming she never used her Native American heritage when applying for a job, Elizabeth WarrenÂ’s campaign admitted last night the Democrat listed her minority status in professional directories for years when she taught at the University of Texas...

The Perfect Storm of Liberalism has arrived. A professional collapse inside the several departments and agencies of the United States government created by a decades-long erosion of standards. An erosion fed by all manner of deadly liberal obsessions from racial quotas to political correctness to an addiction to lawsuits, the tolerance for a culture of out of control spending, wildly improper personal behavior, and more. This deadly combination is now surfacing repeatedly in scandals as seemingly different as those engulfing the Secret Service, the GSA, the U.S. military, the Department of Justice, and every other tentacle of the federal government...

BERKELEY, California – Fifteen years ago, California voters were asked: Should colleges consider a student's race when they decide who gets in and who doesn't? With an emphatic "no," they made California the first state to ban the use of race and ethnicity in public university admissions, as well as hiring and contracting. Since then, California's most selective public colleges and graduate schools have struggled to assemble student bodies that reflect the state's demographic mix.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday that Democratic attempts to highlight presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s wealth are not only unfair, but likely to backfire. Earlier this week, President Barack Obama said that he and his wife Michelle were not born with a “silver spoon” in their mouths, a comment which was widely considered to be a jab at Romney, the son of a successful CEO. Although Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney denied that was the case, the Democratic Party has been attacking the former Massachusetts governor in an effort to paint him as out-of-touch...

Late last week I heard from a theologian of liberal leanings, someone with whom I have been in (often friendly) correspondence for years. He wrote me to voice his objections to my recent “diatribes” against President Obama. That didn’t particularly surprise me. What did surprise me is how he framed his objections. He didn’t take issue with the facts I’ve presented or even my interpretation of the facts. Rather, his concerns were expressed this way: When I read your constant barrages aimed at the first black president, I think to myself, “Doesn’t Pete, the devout Christian, understand what it took...

The face of medical education is changing and patients may not like it one bit. “There is a movement towards principles and concepts rather than specific courses,” Bailus Walker, Jr. of the Howard University School of Medicine said on April 4, 2012 at a conference in Crystal City, VA. “Entrance to medical schools will be based on principles and concepts rather than biochemistry knowledge.” “The old departmental barriers and walls are coming down.” Dr. Walker thinks this is a good thing. He calls it a “convergence of disciplines.” “That will lead to more STEM education,” he said, referring to training...

Affirmative action proponents took a hit Monday as a federal appeals court panel upheld California’s ban on using race, ethnicity and gender in admitting students to public colleges and universities. The ruling marked the second time the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned back a challenge to the state’s landmark voter initiative, Proposition 209, which was passed in 1996. 0 Comments Weigh In Corrections? Personal Post . Affirmative action proponents, who had requested that the court reconsider its 1997 decision after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that affirmative action could be used in college admissions, said they...

With its decision to take up racial preferences in admissions at public colleges, the Supreme Court has touched off a national guessing game about how far it might move against affirmative action and how profoundly colleges might change as a result. But no matter how the court acts, recent history shows that when courts or new laws restrict affirmative action, colleges try to find other ways to increase minority admissions. The aggressiveness of those efforts, and the results, vary widely by state, but generally they increase minority enrollment — though not as much as overt affirmative action once did. And...

Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black, with only six white women out of more than 3,000 drivers, according to Metro documents — a lack of diversity at one of the region’s largest employers that has led to an acknowledgment of failure in affirmative-action documents and spawned a series of lawsuits. The homogeneity, interviews with dozens of current and former Metro workers indicated, is a proxy to a clubby culture of favoritism in which merit has little to do with promotions, and accountability, such as noting safety violations, is a...

President Obama said Saturday he can’t do much to lower gas prices, and renewed his call for Congress to end tax breaks for oil companies. “The truth is, the price of gas depends on a lot of factors that are often beyond our control,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly address. “Unrest in the Middle East can tighten global oil supply. Growing nations like China or India adding cars to the road increases demand.” The president didn’t mention one of the few direct actions he could take to try to lower gas prices in the short term — releasing oil...

EVEN IN THE DAKOTA, the storied apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side, home to such cultural icons as Yoko Ono and Lauren Bacall, Buddy Fletcher stood out. African American, fantastically accomplished, and wealthy, Fletcher had grown up in modest circumstances, gone to Harvard, and graduated as “first marshal” of his class in 1987. From there he hit Wall Street, earned millions before he turned 25, and started his own firm, Fletcher Asset Management. By the time he was 30, the company was operating as a hedge fund and boasting of triple-digit returns. Fletcher made multimillion-dollar donations to Harvard,...

In Eric Holder’s world, the need for racial preferences will never end. Later this year, the Supreme Court will review the constitutionality of the use of racial preferences in college admissions in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. The battle lines will once again be drawn over the meaning of the equal-protection provisions of the Constitution. So it’s noteworthy that Attorney General Eric Holder has just made it clear he’s never bumped into a racial preference he didn’t like, and that he sees no time limit on such policies. Last month, in an appearance at Columbia University, his...

Eric Holder has gone all-in supporting race-based hiring preferences and race-based benefits. Given that the majority of Americans despise this rot, surely the presidential candidates will pounce. In a little noticed interview at the “World Leaders Forum,” Holder makes statements that should be the subject of a direct mail piece in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Virginia: Holder expressed support for affirmative action, saying that he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.” “Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” Holder said. “The question is not when does it end,...

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, is unfailingly polite, mild-mannered, and soft-spoken. Thus I was shocked when I received an email from him today that uncharacteristically SHOUTED his nearly incredulous response to comments in a “scandalous” interview of Attorney General Holder by Columbia University president (and former University of Michigan chief preference pusher) Lee Bollinger: “So,” Roger asked, “preferences FOREVER then? And racial preferences have not even STARTED yet?” Eager to see what had set him off, I rushed to look at the offending interview, and this is what I found: One of Bollinger’s...

Edward Blum has the kind of zeal for public policy that usually leads to a career in politics. Mr. Blum does not like elections, though — he has lost two of them. And he has discovered what may be a more powerful instrument for advancing his beliefs: the court system. A self-described autodidact who has no law degree or formal scholarly background, Mr. Blum is the driving force behind Fisher v. University of Texas, the affirmative action case headed to the United States Supreme Court that could halt the use of race in university admissions. For Mr. Blum, the lawsuit...

Texas A&M recently reaffirmed their commitment to affirmative action. University President, Dr. Loftin, wrote a letter to the campus community explaining that "the university has developed an affirmative action program" dedicated to increasing the amount of minorities at the school and has established an "annual placement goal" at the university. To highlight the absurdity of affirmative action policies, conservative students at Texas A&M circulated a satirical petition around campus. The conservative students asked their liberal peers, who were in favor of race-based preferences, if they would also be in favor of applying such policies to the school's athletic teams. VIDEO:...

The news that the Supreme Court is revisiting the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions, just nine years after upholding it in a University of Michigan case, has admissions officials worried about maintaining diversity and confounded that the question is being reconsidered so soon. “Nine years, when you’re talking about a decision of this magnitude, it really took me aback,” said Tom Parker, the dean of admissions at Amherst College. “What happens with the next president, the next Supreme Court appointee? Do we revisit it again, so that higher education is zigging and zagging? If the court...

The Supreme Court will once again confront the issue of race in university admissions in a case brought by a white student denied a spot at the flagship campus of the University of Texas. The court said Tuesday it will return to the issue of affirmative action in higher education for the first time since its 2003 decision endorsing the use of race as a factor in admissions. This time around, a more conservative court is being asked to outlaw the use of Texas' affirmative action plan and possibly to jettison the earlier ruling entirely. A broad ruling in favor...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court once again will confront the issue of race in university admissions in a case brought by a white student denied a spot at the flagship campus of the University of Texas in Austin. The court said Tuesday it will return to the issue of affirmative action in higher education for the first time since its 2003 decision endorsing the use of race as a factor in admissions. This time around, a more conservative court is being asked to outlaw the use of Texas’ affirmative action plan and possibly to jettison the earlier ruling entirely.

Who will be the next justice to retire, and who will be nominated to replace that person? SCOTUSblog does some prognosticating and says California Attorney General Kamala Harris could be the next nominee tapped for the U.S. Supreme Court, replacing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There's one big problem, though: Harris may not want the job. “In the lists of names, only one truly stands out as checking every box: Kamala Harris,” Goldstein writes. Like the president, she is biracial, and she will be 50 years old in 2015. She is liberal, but she has a law enforcement background. The only...

The chart above (click to enlarge) is an update of the chart from this CD post from about a year ago, showing medical school acceptance rates for Asians, whites, Hispanics and blacks based on data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) for the years 2009-2011 (aggregated). For 2011, the average GPA of students applying to medical schools was 3.53 and the average total MCAT score was 28, and the chart displays the acceptance rates for students applying to medical schools with average GPAs (3.40-3.59) and average MCAT scores (27-29) in the highlighted blue column, and the acceptance rates...

AP) SAN FRANCISCO — Backers of affirmative action asked a federal appeals court Monday to overturn California's 15-year-old ban on considering race in public college admissions, citing a steep drop in black, Latino and Native American students at the state's elite campuses. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal heard arguments in the latest legal challenge to Proposition 209, the landmark voter initiative that barred racial, ethnic and gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting. The affirmative action ban has withstood multiple challenges since voters approved it in 1996, but advocates say their campaign to...

Reviving California's fierce debate over affirmative action programs, dozens of black and Latino students will turn to a federal appeals court this week in a bid to end the state's 16-year-old ban on using race and ethnicity as factors in public university admissions. In arguments set for Monday in San Francisco, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will consider the latest challenge to voter-approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action programs in all public agencies across the state. The same court in 1997 upheld Proposition 209, but civil rights advocates, armed with a decade of new data on student...

So a guy whose contract was terminated by NPR on a phony pretext for not toeing the liberal line enough, including writing a book ("Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It") which indicted the modern civil-rights movement for, well, undermining Black America, now appears to want eliminate "Constitution" and "Founding Fathers" from the lexicon of Republican candidates -- and possibly, it would appear, from political discussion in general -- because, well, they're racial code words. How ironic. Two weeks ago at the Fox News/Wall Street Journal...

Last month, the Obama administration issued important guidance to colleges and universities on how to increase racial diversity on campuses, explaining ways to navigate the narrow legal channel charted by the Supreme Court. The benefits of diversity, the Department of Education said, contribute to “the educational, economic and civic life of this nation.” The administration’s support for such efforts stands in stark contrast to the policy of the George W. Bush administration to discourage them. That difference has played out between the political parties for decades, as it will in this presidential election. Race-conscious programs in education — affirmative action...

The Obama administration's decision to make it easier to consider race in promoting diversity in our schools comes at a propitious time for California. Race and ethnicity are front and center in the state's education system with minorities now representing 70 percent of public school students and more than half of those attending community colleges. The billions of dollars in education budget cuts have and will continue to hit these students the hardest. But new federal diversity guidelines, if followed, hold out new hope for these students' college-going prospects. Under the Bush administration, colleges and universities were advised to avoid...

DES MOINES — Talking about race in American politics is uncomfortable and awkward. But it has to be said: There has been a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years, and in this dawning presidential campaign. You can detect this undertone in the level of disrespect for this president that would be unthinkable were he not an African-American. Some earlier examples include: Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “you lie” at one of Mr. Obama’s first appearances before Congress, and House Speaker John Boehner rejecting Mr. Obama’s request to speak to a...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here .

WHEN THE SUPREME COURT, in the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, narrowly upheld the use of racial preferences at the University of Michigan Law School, it emphasized that such preferences were barely tolerable under the Constitution. They could be used only as a last resort, the court ruled, they must not unduly harm non-minorities, and public universities had to start finding ways to phase them out. "We are mindful … that '[a] core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race,'" Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for a 5-4 majority....

T o many, America’s industrial heartland may look like a place mired in the economic past—a place that, outcompeted by manufacturing countries around the world, has too little work to offer its residents. But things look very different to Karen Wright, the CEO of Ariel Corporation in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Wright’s biggest problem isn’t a lack of work; it’s a lack of skilled workers. “We have a very skilled workforce, but they are getting older,” says Wright, who employs 1,200 people at three Ohio factories. “I don’t know where we are going to find replacements.” That may sound odd, given...

This caught my eye in the inbox tonight: Ann, I just listened to your interview on financial sense. I am a retired FBI White Collar Crime Supervisor who supervised a Securities Fraud Desk, in the {city name redacted} Division, prior to retiring in {year redacted}. Your analysis of the CME, the Obama Administration, and the sad state of our republic is right on the money. In addition, your 8(a) minority, affirmative action hire comment could not be more true. The effectiveness of federal law enforcement has been jeopardized by the politically correct hiring practices ongoing since George Herbert Walker Bush...

The Obama administration on Friday urged colleges and universities to get creative in improving racial diversity at their campuses, throwing out a Bush-era interpretation of recent Supreme Court rulings that limited affirmative action in admissions. The new guidelines issued by the Departments of Justice and Education replaced a 2008 document that essentially warned colleges and universities against considering race at all. Instead, the guidelines focus on the wiggle room in the court decisions involving the University of Michigan, suggesting that institutions use other criteria — students’ socioeconomic profiles, residential instability, the hardships they have overcome — that are often proxies...

I guess Obama's home state is no longer part of his 57 states.

The lathe that killed Yale student Michele Dufault ’11 last April, which had no guards and no emergency stop button, would not pass muster under the university’s strict new safety rules. And the shop where Dufault died alone—which, under the new rules, is deemed one of the most hazardous on campus—is no longer accessible to undergraduates without a faculty or staff supervisor. Those are two of the most significant changes under the new safety standards, which Yale put in place this summer in the wake of Dufault’s death. The 22-year-old physics and astronomy major from Scituate, Massachusetts, was asphyxiated after...

One day back in the late fifties, when I was ten or eleven years old, there was a moment when I experienced myself as an individual--as a separate consciousness--for the first time. I was walking home from the YMCA, which meant that I was passing out of the white Chicago suburb where the Y was located and crossing Halsted Street back into Phoenix, the tiny black suburb where I grew up. It was a languid summer afternoon, thick with the industrial-scented humidity of south Chicago that I can still smell and feel on my skin, though I sit today only...

A jury has awarded three veteran Los Angeles police detectives $2.5 million in a gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit against their supervisors. The verdict, delivered Friday after only a few hours of deliberation, is the latest in a long string of costly lawsuits brought by LAPD officers against fellow cops and supervisors for retaliation, harassment and other workplace abuses.

ABIGAIL FISHER, a white student, says she was denied admission to the University of Texas because of her race. She sued in Federal District Court in Austin, causing Judge Sam Sparks to spend time trying to make sense of a 2003 Supreme Court decision allowing racial preferences in higher education. “I’ve read it till I’m blue in the face,” Judge Sparks said in an early hearing in Ms. Fisher’s lawsuit. But the meaning of the central concept in the decision — “this esoteric critical mass of diversity of students,” he called it — kept eluding him. The 2003 Supreme Court...

Herman Cain has been caught lying in last night's GOP debate. Cain, who was the former deputy chairman and then chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve throughout the 1990's, had been opposed to an audit of the Fed. He had also said that Ron Paul supporters frequently ask him "annoying questions" about a Fed audit, even accusing the Paul campaign of sending agents to harass him at every event he attends. According to the Daily Caller: The Daily Caller obtained an advance copy of Cain’s book, “This is Herman Cain,” which goes on sale Oct. 4. In the manuscript,...

Mitt Romney is part of a cult — the cult of ever higher defense spending. Republican members of this cult believe that the only way in today’s media and political culture to signal you are “strong” on defense is to propose a bigger defense budget than Democrats. Democratic members of this cult believe that the only way to avoid losing elections to Republicans is to call for as much or more defense spending than the GOP. Guess what happens to the boundaries of debate when this “my defense budget is bigger than yours” mentality dominates official Washington? As with so...

Okay here me out on this.

Minimum Wage To Rise In 8 StatesBumps Range From 28 Cents To 37 Cents Per Hour Tami Luhby UPDATED: 2:54 pm MDT October 3, 2011 NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Minimum-wage workers in eight states could see their paychecks grow by hundreds of dollars next year, thanks to automatic annual increases in the rates. Colorado, Montana, Ohio, Washington and Oregon recently announced their 2012 minimum wages, which contain bumps ranging from 28 cents to 37 cents per hour. This translates into annual raises of between $582 and $770 for full-time workers at that end of the pay scale depending on where...

<p>The U.C. Berkeley College Republicans struck a national nerve today by holding a bake sale with racially discriminatory pricing: Higher prices for white and Asian students, lower prices for black, Hispanic and female students. Why the intentional discrimination? To protest a pending new statewide law which attempts to re-introduce Affirmative Action into university admission standards, something that was been banned years ago with California’s popular Constitutional amendment requiring race-neutral admissions.</p>