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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court served notice Friday that it may make a far-reaching change in civil rights law in 2009 and knock down a pair of long-standing rules that give special protection to minorities in the workplace and the voting booth. The justices, after meeting privately, announced they had voted to hear two cases that concern the lingering role of race in American life. The cases could put the court on a collision course with the new administration of President-elect Barack Obama. One of them arose when a Connecticut city, seeking to maintain diversity in its fire department, scrapped...

DISCRIMINATION against dominant white males will soon be encouraged in a bid to boost the status of women, the disabled and cultural and religious minorities. Such positive discrimination -- treating people differently in order to obtain equality for marginalised groups - is set to be legalised under planned changes to the Equal Opportunity Act foreshadowed last week by state Attorney-General Rob Hulls. The laws are also expected to protect the rights of people with criminal records to get a job, as long as their past misdeeds are irrelevant to work being sought.

RALEIGH, North Carolina: Enrollment of minorities in U.S. colleges has increased substantially in recent years, but not fast enough to keep up with demographic changes. Among Hispanics, a lower proportion who are in theri late 20s has completed at least a two-year degree when compared with those age 30 and older. Unless the trend is reversed, the increases in Hispanic participation in higher education won't be enough to ensure that a growing proportion earn a college degree. The findings are highlighted in a biennial report to be released Thursday by the American Council on Education, supported by the GE Foundation....

It's kind of hard to talk about affirmative action in college admissions when you have a black man from the Ivy League leading in the home stretch of the race for the nation's presidency. How much more proof of equal opportunity do we need? But I was alarmed last month by the stance of a UCLA political science professor who resigned from the school's admissions committee because he suspects that "cheating" on the admissions process accounts for the recent jump in blacks. He quit in protest after UCLA officials, citing privacy concerns, declined to give him access to student applications...

SEATTLE, WA (September 24, 2008) – Washington Mutual, Inc. (NYSE:WM), one of the nation’s leading banks for consumers and small businesses, has once again been recognized as a top employer by Hispanic Business magazine and the Human Rights Campaign. Hispanic Business magazine recently ranked WaMu sixth in its annual Diversity Elite list, which names the top 60 companies for Hispanics. The company was honored specifically for its efforts to recruit Hispanic employees, reach out to Hispanic consumers and support Hispanic communities and organizations. The Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil rights organization, also...

SEATTLE, WA (September 24, 2008) – Washington Mutual, Inc. (NYSE:WM), one of the nation’s leading banks for consumers and small businesses, has once again been recognized as a top employer by Hispanic Business magazine and the Human Rights Campaign. **snip** The Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil rights organization, also awarded WaMu its second consecutive 100 percent score in the organization’s 2009 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which measures progress in attaining equal rights for GLBT employees and consumers. WaMu joins the ranks of 259 other major U.S. businesses that also received top marks...

Referencing my column yesterday on illegal immigration and the mortgage mess, Hans Bader at Open Market shares his experience. I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails with similar stories. Tip of the iceberg: When I and my wife, a legal alien, bought our house, the mortgage company told me that if my wife were an illegal alien, rather than legal, we would have qualified for certain loan programs with big banks. But because she was a legal alien waiting for her green-card (which she had recently applied for), we didn’t qualify. Mark Krikorian, an activist against illegal immigration, argues that...

This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone September 19-22, 2008, among a random national sample of 1,082 adults, 916 registered voters and 780 likely voters. The survey includes additional interviews with randomly selected African Americans, for a total of 163 black respondents. The added interviews (commonly referred to as an "oversample") were completed to ensure there were enough African American respondents for separate analysis; the group was not over-represented in the reported results from the full sample. The results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Error margins...

THEY GAVE YOUR MORTGAGE TO A LESS QUALIFIED MINORITY September 24, 2008 On MSNBC this week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter tried to connect John McCain to the current financial disaster, saying: "If you remember the Keating Five scandal that (McCain) was a part of. ... He's really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country." McCain was "in the middle of" the Keating Five case in the sense that he was "exonerated." The lawyer for the Senate Ethics Committee wanted McCain removed from the investigation altogether, but,...

DENVER This year's Colorado ballot is loaded with high-profile initiatives on hot-button issues, the kind that tend to stir passions, mobilize voters and swing elections. It's even possible that the ballot - which includes measures on abortion, labor unions, education and affirmative action - could determine the outcome of the presidential contest in Colorado. But not probable, say political analysts.

Ghosts from civil rights era are fading away OXFORD -- University of Mississippi Chancellor Robert Khayat is well aware of the significance of the nation's first black presidential nominee, Democrat Barack Obama, arriving this week on the same campus where James Meredith broke the color barrier in 1962. When the international media spotlight returns for the Friday debate, the chancellor knows questions about race will come from the expected 3,000 members of the media. Feeling confident about the work the school has done in recent years, Khayat believes many journalists with opinions of the university forged by the riot...

The Cornell Review controversy over printing an article about campus “ghettos,” “bitter minorities” and affirmative action became even more pronounced yesterday when students proposed a resolution to the Student Assembly to ban the use of the Cornell name by the biweekly journal’s title. The article, “What to Expect: The Angry Minority,” said students in program houses — only at Cornell because of affirmative action and scholarships — complain about brutal oppression from “whitey.” Students Nikhil Kumar ’11, minority representative-at-large, and Nicole Rivera ’09, president of the Minority Business Student Association, brought the resolution to the table. “As a student here...

For the past 30 years I've been a Black guy in America. When a person is born black, male, to a single mother, living in Harlem, at the lower end of the tax bracket, in 1978, well society didn't have very high expectations. Nonethless there I am floating in a pool at the condo that I own in Boulder, CO. Not to say that I am some pinnacle of success and prosperity, I asure you that is not the case, but if a stock beat market expectations by such a large margin, and still only cost $10 a share, well...

Government professor Lisa L. Martin, who served as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' first diversity dean and chair of the Standing Committee on Women, has left Harvard for the University of Wisconsin at Madison, criticizing Dean of the Faculty Michael D. Smith's commitment to hiring minority and female professors on her way out. As a leader of female and minority recruitment, Martin compiled and released two reports on hiring. Her first report raised alarm when it found that the female tenure rate in 2005-2006 had fallen to 21 percent - half the rate of the previous year. Martin started...

Candidates who are willing to say "enough is enough" on these matters - and related ones such as affirmative action - are likely to find that they have tapped into an undercurrent of discontent that can sweep them along towards victory in November. More importantly in the long run, they will also find themselves at the forefront of the defence of American liberty in regards to freedom of speech, academic freedom, freedom of worship and parental rights. In other words, they will be doing the right thing.

PERHAPS the greatest scandal of the mortgage crisis is that it is a direct result of an intentional loosening of underwriting standards - done in the name of ending discrimination, despite warnings that it could lead to wide-scale defaults.

Charlotte, N.C. — Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden says electing a black person to the White House would be transformative. Biden, campaigning in Charlotte, said Sunday that choosing a black candidate would be a "transformative event in American politics and internationally." His running mate, Barack Obama, seeks to be the first black president in the United States. Biden said Obama's policies make his presidency even more transformative. North Carolina hasn't voted for a Democrat in three decades but has a large black population galvanized by Obama's candidacy. Both Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain have been airing television...

Dayton may be sued for lack of minorities in police department DAYTON — City Commissioner Dean Lovelace said he has learned the U.S. Department of Justice may sue Dayton over the city's historical lack of minorities in its police department. Lovelace said if it solves the problem by quickly identifying solutions, he welcomes it. There are 35 black officers out of the 421 in the police department, 53 women and four other, according to city records. "This has been a concern in the community for a long time," Lovelace said. Dayton City Manager Rashad Young has scheduled a 2 p.m....

In his 19 years as a law professor at UCLA, Richard Sander has pondered a nagging question: Does affirmative action help or hinder African Americans who want to become lawyers? Two years ago, he published research suggesting that racial preferences at law firms might be responsible for black lawyers' high rate of attrition and difficulty making partner. He hypothesized that in the interest of promoting diversity, law firms sometimes hired black lawyers who were underqualified, and that when there was a "credentials gap" between black and white lawyers at a firm, black lawyers often were less likely to advance and...

The violence and despair of the inner city are real. So's the problem of street crime. The longer we allow these problems to fester, the easier it becomes for white America to see all blacks as menacing and for black America to see all whites as racist. To close that gap, we're going to have to do more than denounce Mr. Murray's book. We're going to have to take concrete and deliberate action. For blacks, that means taking greater responsibility for the state of our own communities. Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior....

Ever since California voters banned the use of racial preferences in government and education in 1996, the University of California has tried to engineer admissions systems that would replicate the effect of explicit racial quotas while appearing color-blind. To some observers, the legality of those efforts has long been suspect, but proof of wrongdoing has been hard to come by. Now a professor who sat on UCLA's committee on undergraduate admissions is charging that the school is deliberately taking race into account when deciding which students to admit. The university has refused to give him access to the data to...

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday it was "unacceptable" that there were so few black people like herself in the US diplomatic corps. "I want to see a Foreign Service that looks as if black Americans are part of this great country," Rice told a gathering of black colleges and universities in Washington. "I have lamented that I can go into a meeting at the Department of State," said Rice, the second black person to become secretary of state after her predecessor Colin Powell. "And, as a matter of fact, I can go into a whole day of meetings...

Last week's column demonstrated the harm, suffered by black students, that results from law school race-based admission policies. The bottom line was that black students who might have done well at lower-tier law schools were recruited to more highly competitive law schools and turned into failures. One might be tempted to place the full blame for such callousness on deans of law schools, but the true villain is the American Bar Association. The American Bar Association is the accreditation agency for all law schools. If a law school has not been accredited by the ABA, it is ineligible for federal...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday that African-Americans are better served by colorblind programs than affirmative action. Thomas, addressing leaders of historically black colleges, said affirmative action ''has become this mantra and there almost has become this secular religiosity about it. I think it almost trumps thinking.'' A longtime opponent of race-based preferences in hiring and school admissions, Thomas said, ''Just from a constitutional standpoint, I think we're going to run into problems if we say the Constitution says we can consider race sometimes.''

One wonders: What did Sarah Palin ever do to inspire the rage and bile that exploded on her selection by John McCain? What is there either in this woman's record or resume to elicit such feline ferocity? What did we know of her when she was introduced? That she was a mother of five who had brought into this world a baby boy with Down syndrome, thus living her Christian beliefs. That she was a small-town conservative who had risen from mayor of Wasilla (Pop. 9,700) to be governor of a state twice the size of Texas. That she was...

“Let me be clear: While we will fully comply with the law, we would continue to evaluate units and administrators on their ability to achieve diversity,” Perlman said. “We would continue to devote resources to compensate for the disadvantages placed upon us by this initiative.” If race- and gender-based affirmative action is banned, Perlman said, UNL will respond by redoubling its efforts, ensuring its applicant pools reflect diversity and stepping up recruitment in more racially diverse cities outside Nebraska. A new Multicultural Center on campus — groundbreaking is scheduled for later this month — also will serve as a visible...

The former dean of the University of Washington School of Law said Friday that Nebraska universities must be ready to adjust if voters approve a measure to ban most types of affirmative action in the state. W.H. “Joe” Knight Jr.’s message to the Nebraska Legal Diversity Summit in Omaha: “Prepare yourselves.” In 1998, voters in Washington approved a similar measure. Knight said minority enrollment decreased immediately, and has just now started to catch up because of the university’s hard work — and more money spent — on recruitment. Schools have also sought more scholarships from private donors, who can designate...

Last week, just before Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) big speech, Tim Cavanaugh and I attended a small fundraiser for Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root. The chatty Vegas sports bettor, memorably profiled by David Weigel two months back, was in a mind to talk about a fellow classmate of his at Columbia University back in the early 1980s, a guy by the name of Barack Obama. Root is no fan of the Democratic nominee: "A vote for Obama is four years of Karl Marx, and no one should be happy about that," he told us and a few...

Arguing that UCLA admissions policies are being manipulated to circumvent the state's ban on consideration of applicants' race, a professor there has resigned from a faculty committee that he says refused to allow him to study the matter. Political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned Thursday from the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, saying high-ranking university administrators and fellow committee members are engaged in a "coverup" to block illegal activity from being discovered. "A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions," he wrote in an 89-page report posted on a UCLA website. University...

A professor who said he suspects UCLA is cheating to illegally admit black students resigned Thursday from its admissions committee, saying the university refused to provide him the data he needs to investigate his suspicions. "A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions," political science Professor Tim Groseclose wrote in a report he released Thursday. "Specifically, applicants often reveal their own race on the essay portion of the application."Students typically report their race on their applications, but the people who evaluate their files don't see names, race or ethnicity. If race does come up in...

Denver -- There is a powerful, often painful, thread of memory in the American mind with regard to race. It is a flowing narrative from the time of slavery to the Civil War and on to the nation's struggle for racial equality. That story includes Martin Luther King's life and death as a martyr. Today the story continues in a nation where one-third of the population is made up of racial minorities. There is also an unprecedented number of immigrants and record levels of prosperity among the black and Hispanic middle-class. Now we have Barack Obama's astonishing political rise, advancing...

My father always said that anyone who lived through John F. Kennedy’s assassination remembers what they were doing at the precise moment the president was shot. This may well be true, but we also lucidly recall the circumstances of far lesser events such as the controversy surrounding the publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The furor its conclusions caused is forever ingrained in my memory. At the time I was a psychology graduate student and found that most of my associates were familiar with the work but...

The Democratic Party has historically attracted women and minority voters, and this year's national platform reiterates the party's support of affirmative action programs. So why do so many Colorado Democrats support Amendment 46, the measure on the November ballot that would end state-sponsored affirmative action programs? Three recent polls show that support for the measure — which would ban race and gender preferences in state hiring, contracting and education — is higher among Democrats than Republicans. Critics of the measure and political observers say the polls likely reflect voter confusion over what the measure would really do. They say some...

Barack Obama has a problem. He really, really doesn't want this campaign to be about race. He wants it to be about change, President Bush, the economy, gas prices, Iraq, Afghanistan -- almost anything else. But it is going to be about race, at least in part. That's the lesson of recent weeks, when the McCain campaign brought up race (on the pretext that Obama had brought it up first). Once the chum was in the water, the media sharks went wild. Obama should take that as a warning. Race will be central to this campaign because McCain needs it...

In these times I am rarely surprised by most notions put forth by political pundits. But I must admit to being taken aback by the suppositions of Terry Michael in "Obama as the End of Identity Politics as We've Known Them" (Reason magazine, 6/10/08). Michael appears to believe that under an Obama presidency, we soon will be on "the beginnings of a journey away from the Great Society mind-set of the Democratic Party" and on a course that will put "the Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, and the white identity politics liberals out of business." Michael envisions the end of...

The Democratic Party and the mainstream media work together on behalf of terrorists. That fact has been extensively covered in this column. But that working combination does damage in many areas of national life, one of the most important being in the area of race relations and civil rights. The Democratic Party, the mainstream media and black leaders keep identifying racism as a central problem in our society and they thus manage to create a real and effective roadblock to ending any problems caused by past racism and improving the life and well-being of blacks and minority groups. The Democratic...

The Democrats live and die by the ad hominem of racism. http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=20016813&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8

Politics: Trying to figure out why their man doesn't poll better, liberals are starting to fall back on an old excuse — that Republicans win only by appealing to voters' worst instincts."Much of America's political conversation is couched in code," says Anna Quindlen, writing earlier this month in Newsweek. And what's the code telling us? That the campaign of John McCain is playing a "Caucasian card," Quindlen's way of saying that it's appealing to white racism. We're hearing more and more such talk as the summer drags on and Barack Obama struggles to put McCain away. Obama leads in the...

Most people know the tragic state of black education today. We know that billions of dollars are spent on federal government programs such as No Child Left Behind and the billions spent by state and local governments. If you were to ask an education "expert" to explain the tragedy, you'd get answers such as racial discrimination and underfunding. My colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell has written volumes on black education and an article worth reading is one he wrote some years ago in The Public Interest (Spring 1976) and reprinted in his book "Education: Assumptions Versus History." Washington's Paul Laurence Dunbar...

The year was 1984, and the state was Iowa. A white man who had just voted walked out of his precinct caucus and saw Rev. Jesse Jackson standing outside. "I did all I could," the man told Jackson ruefully, "but I just couldn't bring myself to pull the lever and vote for you." L. Douglas Wilder laughs as he relates the story Jackson once told him, the sting eased by time and Wilder's vantage point as the first black to be elected governor in the United States. Now it's a quarter of a century later, and the man everyone's talking...

With his request for access to historical bar exam data from the California State Bar repeatedly rejected, a law professor has turned to the state Supreme Court. UCLA School of Law professor Richard Sander, along with former State Bar governor Joe Hicks and the California First Amendment Coalition, filed a writ petition Thursday asking the court to direct the State Bar to hand over those records with redactions to protect test takers' privacy. CFAC Executive Director Peter Scheer said that the wrestling match had become a matter of access to public records and freedom of information. "I believe very strongly...

Maureen Dowd recently preened that Obama "didn’t even tell Harvard Law School that he was black on his application." To the extent that her own research led her to believe this, or she would know accurately, one should still wonder why in the world Barack Obama, the child of a white woman and African father, would check the affirmative action box? When he applied to law school, there was nothing in the circumstances of his birth or even his upbringing up to then that located him in the African-American experience. Obama's recent evocation of some sort of reparations, the resurgence...

To avoid recent rules which insist on better women’s representation on company boards, a number of firms are changing their status from public limited companies (ASA) to ordinary limited companies (AS), which have no such requirements. Recent rules require more women on company boards. Sanctions for not reaching a minimum 40 percent of both sexes, include companies being forced to disband. From 2006 to the present, 199 ASA’s have reregistered as AS-companies. A total of 138 companies have done the opposite, writes daily newspaper Aftenposten. Social scientist Marit Hoel thinks that it is primarily smaller companies which have changed status...

One third of whites claim they are victims of racism Last updated at 10:16am on 12.08.08  A growing number of white people believe they are the victims of racial prejudice in Britain, official research has found. Almost one in three - 29 per cent - said they now expected to be treated worse than other races by key public services.  And the number of whites claiming to have been refused a job or discriminated against at work for reasons of race has doubled in the last five years, according to the Government study.   Flashback: Riots in Burnley, Lancs, 2001 when...

Perhaps the best place in the country to examine how the issue of race affects the 2008 presidential campaign, and specifically Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy, is Colorado. Colorado is among the so-called swing states, including Ohio, Florida and Michigan, that Democrats and Republicans tend to agree may help decide the election. Colorado also has a proposal on this fall’s ballot that would ban the use of race in college admission, government hiring and contracting across the state. See the ballot language here. The success of similar measures in other states and polls showing very strong support for it in Colorado...

Divisive social issues will be on the ballot in several states in November, including constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in Arizona, California and Florida, and limitations on abortion in California, Colorado and South Dakota. Although research indicates that ballot measures do not drastically alter voter turnout, they have begun attracting the attention of both presidential campaigns. Unlike 2004, when same-sex marriage bans were considered in 11 states, no single issue will dominate statewide ballots. “Tax and spending issues are typically one of the main focuses of these measures, but this time that’s less true,” said Jennie Drage Bowser, a policy...

Much of America's political conversation is couched in code. And so it was that recently the McCain campaign accused Barack Obama of playing the "race card," two four-letter words that, taken together, trail a wealth of innuendo like a comet's tail. Using the term "race card" as a pejorative is almost always meant to promulgate the big lie that takes hold everywhere from the workplace to the classroom: that black men and women commonly use race as a bludgeon and an excuse, and that they will always blame failures or disagreements on racism. This is belied by objective reality. To...

No Democratic candidate for president has ever come so close to calling for an end to the era of identity-based affirmative action as has Barack Obama. Since 2004, the first black major party nominee from either party has been offering comments suggesting that economic status should match or even trump race and gender as a criteria for who should benefit from the program — though he has yet to propose a specific policy, let alone one that matches his rhetoric. After four decades of affirmative action, Obama’s historic candidacy itself is seen by some as proof that such programs are...

Reparations By Another Name Election '08: Barack Obama says Washington shouldn't just offer apologies for slavery, but also "deeds." Don't worry, he says, he's not talking about direct reparations. Relieved? Don't be. ...Among other things, he proposes: •...faith-based grants "targeting ex-offenders." • Subsidizing supermarket chains that relocate to the inner city to deliver "fresh produce" to blacks, helping wean them off unhealthy fast food. • Imposing "goals and timetables for minority hiring" on large corporations...deemed too white. • Continuing to fund ...Head Start and HUD public housing subsidies. • Funding Small Business Administration loans for minority businesses who train ex-felons...for...

Election '08: Barack Obama says Washington shouldn't just offer apologies for slavery, but also "deeds." Don't worry, he says, he's not talking about direct reparations. Relieved? Don't be.'I consistently believe that when it comes to . . . reparations," Obama recently told a gathering of minority journalists, "the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds." A few days later, he clarified his remarks, saying he's not calling for direct cash payments to descendents of slaves, but rather indirect aid in the form of government programs that will "close the gap"...