Free Republic

The biography provided by Barack Obama to his literary agent specified his birthplace as "Kenya". And, over the course of 17 years, despite multiple revisions by Obama, the Kenyan birthplace remained a fundamental part of the bio on the agent's website. Was Barack actually born in Kenya? I seriously doubt it, even though Michelle Obama has publicly stated that Kenya is her husband's "home country". Contemporary newspaper listings in Honolulu, for example, list the time and place of his birth. While this isn't ironclad proof, to be sure, it's good enough for me. No, my suspicion is that Mr. Obama...

A former supervisor in the Dayton VA Medical Center’s dental clinic blamed intervention by the NAACP for foiling his efforts in the early 1990s to remove a dentist whose lax infection control practices put patients’ safety at risk. Dr. Dwight M. Pemberton continued to practice dentistry at the Dayton VA, often failing to change latex gloves and sterilize dental instruments between patients...Between 1992 and July 2010, 535 patients who had invasive dental work by Pemberton may have been exposed to bloodborne pathogens, the VA said. Nine have preliminary positive results for hepatitis B or hepatitis C. In the early 1990s,...

Admission to a prestige institution such as the University of Michigan or its law school is what computer types call a "binary" decision. It's yes or no. You're in or you're out. There is no partial or halfway admission. The effect of any factor in that decision is also binary. It either changes the result or it doesn't. It makes all the difference or it makes none at all. Those are the only possibilities. For any individual, the process of turning factors into that yes-or-no decision doesn't matter. Any factor that changes the result has the same impact as if...

Supreme Court Decision Day By Harold Johnson FrontPageMagazine.com | March 31, 2003 On Tuesday (April 1), the U.S. Supreme Court will hear challenges to the University of Michigan "diversity" schemes that give explicit advantages to racial minorities in the admissions process. The ideal result would be for Bakke vs. Regents of the University of California to be affirmed as law of the land. I don't mean the confusing, self-contradictory Bakke ruling that the High Court handed down 25 years ago this June. While purporting to outlaw quotas, that decision said race could still count, in some ill-defined way, in university...

My colleague, Charles Krauthammer, a formidable intellect, a wise man, asserts in the February 10 issue of Weekly Standard that the courts, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States should not be the architect of social revolution. He argues that those changes should percolate over time from the people through their legislatures and in life outside the realm of politics and law. I'm sure he's right about that. I also agree with him that "...racial preferences of any kind are not only destructive of the American ideal of equality but devalue minority achievement and poison ethnic relations" and...

After graduation recently, 2.5 million American seniors enrolled in either a two-year or a four-year college. Almost a million did not. They were overwhelmingly poor, male and white. Much to the surprise of social scientists who traditionally have looked for educational problems among minorities, low-income black and Hispanic men are more likely to go to college right out of high school than white guys. So are young women of any background, in fact.