Wall Street Journal —A decision endorsing ‘disparate impact’ analysis will turn a law meant to prohibit discrimination into a vehicle for race-conscious housing decisions.
Last week, on the day before the Supreme Court blessed a legal doctrine that equates racial disparities with racial discrimination, the New York Times published an op-ed that illustrated the potential ramifications of the court’s wrongheaded ruling.
The op-ed, “Is Special Education Racist?,” was written by professors of education Paul Morgan and George Farkas. They argued that the overrepresentation of black children receiving special-education services was best explained by factors other than racial bias. Black children…
The ObamaCare consultant who once mocked the “stupidity of the American voter” had a bigger impact on the healthcare law than previously known, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.
Jonathan Gruber frequently contacted Obama administration officials via email while crafting ObamaCare, according to the newspaper.
The Journal said that previously unreleased messages show that Gruber repeatedly messaged the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) between January, 2009 and March, 2010.
He offered advice on healthcare policy and informed officials about media and lawmaker interviews concerning ObamaCare, the report added.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told the newspaper that the communications disprove Gruber’s past assertions that he was a limited participant in creating the healthcare law.
The House Oversight Committee chairman added that his committee had obtained 20,000 pages emails after working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Gruber is an economist.
“His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted,” Chaffetz said of Gruber’s relationship with the Obama administration, according to the Journal.
“There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said,” he added.
Chaffetz also said on Sunday he has sent HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell a letter for additional information over Gruber’s contract with her agency.
Outrage erupted last year when video footage emerged of Gruber insulting the American electorate over ObamaCare.
He was filmed in 2013 reportedly praising “the stupidity of the American voter” for helping pass President Obama’s sweeping healthcare reform law.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton takes the stage to speak in New York City on Saturday.
CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS
Hillary Clinton is often at the center of controversy. But it would be a mistake to think this has undermined her candidacy, at least based on polling so far. As a political figure, she has a strong foundation.
Here are five charts, showing why she remains formidable—and where she has potential vulnerabilities.
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1. When matched against GOP rivals, Mrs. Clinton retains a big lead among minority voters. These voters were a pillar of President Barack Obama’s winning coalitions and make up a growing share of the electorate.
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2. Moreover, Mrs. Clinton shows signs of expanding the Obama coalition by drawing more white women, a group that Republicans won by 14 percentage points in 2012. When matched against likely GOP rivals, Mrs. Clinton leads among white women.
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3. Views of the economy—likely the top issue in the campaign—play to Mrs. Clinton’s advantage. She leads likely rivals among voters who say job creation and the economy are their top or second-highest concern:
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4. Where is Mrs. Clinton vulnerable? Voters tend to cast ballots for people they like, and so Mrs. Clinton’s declining public image could prove to be a problem. The share of people with a negative view of her is rising.
A top article trending on Vox, an exclusively online (and leftward leaning) news platform is entitled "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me." According to a professor of a "mid-size state school" who preferred to remain anonymous to protect his job, "The student-teacher dynamic has been re-envisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best. " Of course for anyone paying a speck of attention to the free speech environments of American campuses, this is nothing new. In 2012, George Will penned an article in The Washington Post entitled "Colleges have free speech on the run." He described, "The right never to be annoyed, a new campus entitlement" and the "Legions of administrators, who now outnumber full-time faculty, are kept busy making students mind their manners, with good manners understood as conformity to liberal politics." Meanwhile FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), whose president Greg Lukianoff describes himself as "a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, lifelong Democrat," has been trying to bring the lack of free speech on public and private college campuses to public attention since its founding in 1999. But no matter. Now that college intellectual oppression is affecting not only the few conservative professors who dared to enter the polarized world of American academia but also liberal professors, some in the liberal media are prepared to listen. The professor described the he fear he held that students would rate him poorly on evaluations or report him for insensitivity to the administration if he assigned readings that "affect the student's emotional state." He pointed to "a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice" that focuses on emotions, as the culprit for turning millennial students into fragile flowers. According to the professor, this trend toward ever-increasing censorship "affects liberal, socially conscious teachers much more than conservative ones." It remains unclear how that logic pans out. However, he also believes these conservative professors will be liberal academia's savior from itself, as "there's nothing much to do other than sit on our hands and wait for the ascension of conservative political backlash. " PS: The Wall Street Journal had the story of students going after liberal prof Laura Kipnis for an essay on "growing sexual paranoia" on campuses. Via: Newsbusters Continue Reading.....
A weak, slow or no-growth economy; diminished capacity and lack of resolve on a dangerous and threatening world stage; civil order breaking down as a result of political leadership mismanaging our police forces — these realities are a product of President Obama’s tone and policies, and they reflect his worldview.
In an article in The Post, “Obama’s new patriotism,” Greg Jaffe analyzed “how Obama has used his presidency to redefine ‘American exceptionalism’” in a “new and radical form.” He says that Obama’s six-plus years in office have led him to “a patriotism that embraces the darker moments in American history.” Well, I guess when you don’t take pride in America’s traditional accomplishments and you don’t believe that America’s forceful presence in the world is essential, then you have to shape a narrative that declares the “dark moments” are actually what define us.
Many in the media try to twist the president’s failures into a tortured definition of how America should be or declare that Obama’s non-patriotism is just a new way to show fealty to our country. Liberals seem to be more than willing to declare the president’s failures as victories and herald any outcome as a result of the president’s sophisticated thinking. But the headlines don’t lie, and the growing anxiety about our country’s future is real.
A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal screams out: "Islamic State's Gains Reveal New Prowess on the Battlefield."
The article discusses how the Islamic State recently captured Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in Iraq. The Islamic State victory, according to the report, involved the execution of a complex battle plan "that outwitted a greater force of Iraqi troops as well as the much lauded U.S.-trained special-operations force known as the Golden Division."
Flipping to the editorial page, an opinion piece discusses the increasing dominance of Russia, Iran and China in their parts of the world "as the U.S. retreats."
But what is keeping America's commander in chief up at night?
President Obama spent most of his recent address to the graduating class of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy talking about climate change.
According to our president, climate change "constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security."
The president continued to say that the science regarding climate change is "indisputable."
In 2013, the president tweeted, "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, manmade and dangerous."
But this is false.
Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph and a senior fellow at Canada's Fraser Institute, and others have pointed out the dubious methodology used to arrive at the claim that 97 percent of scientists agree on climate change science. It's not even close to being accurate.
As Fortuneobserves, Warren Buffett is one of the Left’s favorite billionaires, but he occasionally says things they don’t want to hear. At such times, liberals politely ignore him and wait for him to say something useful to their cause, at which point the fulsome praise resumes.
They prefer not to dwell on such hypocrisies as the energy Buffett devotes to lawfully avoiding the high taxes he philosophically supports, which is no surprise, because hypocrisy is the grease that keeps the gears of socialism turning. Aristocratic privilege is the enticement leftists have always offered to useful industrialists.
The Left isn’t going to like what Buffett had to say about the minimum wage in the Wall Street Journallast week. After reviewing the numbers for income inequality (growing, especially during the Obama years, although Buffett tactfully avoids pointing that out) and poverty (static, despite trillions of dollars spent in the War on Poverty), he blows a hole through liberal class-war boilerplate about the rich somehow getting richer off the backs of the poor:
No conspiracy lies behind this depressing fact: The poor are most definitely not poor because the rich are rich. Nor are the rich undeserving. Most of them have contributed brilliant innovations or managerial expertise to America’s well-being. We all live far better because of Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Sam Walton and the like.
Buffett explains at length that specialization is both the source of our incredible national wealth, and the difficulty some people – and, more disturbingly, some families - encounter when trying to access it. In a pre-industrial age when most of the population could perform most of the available jobs, and failure to perform generally resulted in starvation, there wasn’t much “income inequality” until the wealthiest aristocrats and hereditary royalty were considered. Sociologists regard the evolution of an independent middle class as an important achievement, but it inevitably creates a larger, more distinct underclass as well. “Poverty” was not as compelling a subject when just about everyone was equally poor… and commoners had few opportunities to significantly improve their station.
The federal government’s lawsuit against ratings agency Standard and Poor’s has been hit by a potential bombshell. In January, the Wall Street Journalreported that Harold McGraw III, Chairman and CEO of S&P’s parent company, testified that after the agency downgraded the nation’s triple-A credit rating, he received a telephone call from then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner saying the ratings agency would be “looked at very carefully.”
On Monday, the Wall Street Journallearned that the call between Geithner and McGraw occurred only five minutes after Geithner met with President Obama in the Oval Office.
S&P, which garnered the information by examining Geithner’s public schedule, included it as part of a filing in federal court in the Central District of California. They contended that the timing of the Obama-Geithner conference could support the idea that they were singled out for retaliation, rather than the government’s claim they are guilty of fraud. Unsurprisingly, the Justice Department is accusing the agency of a “fishing expedition” and is urging U.S. District Judge David Carter to deny them access to the records.
In the January affidavit, McGraw submitted a sworn statement to the court, describing an unsettling chain of events that began with S&P’s U.S. debt downgrade, issued on August 5, 2011. He contends that on August 8, he was informed by an official from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that Geithner “was very angry at S&P.” Geithner who had previously run the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, allegedly called McGraw. When McGraw returned the call, Geithner allegedly “expressed anger at the downgrade.” An argument ensued, with former Treasury Secretary contending that S&P had made an error in their assessment. McGraw countered that the agency had relied on official statistics provided by the Congressional Budget Office. According to the affidavit, Geithner continued to insist that S&P had made an error. “You are accountable for that,” he allegedly warned McGraw.
The Federal Communications Commission will amend a proposed study of newsrooms in South Carolina after outcry over what some called "invasive questions," the commission's chairman said Friday.
The survey was meant to study how and if the media is meeting the public's “critical information needs” on subjects like public health, politics, transportation and the environment. Now, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said questions about news philosophy and editorial judgment will be removed from the survey and media owners and reporters will no longer be questioned.
The uproar caught on fire after one of the Republican commissioners, Ajit Pai, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week blasting the survey and saying the government had no place in newsrooms. The FCC is required by law to conduct media studies.
"Any suggestion the Commission intends to regulate the speech of news media is false," FCC spokeswoman Shannon Gilson said Friday in a statement, adding that a revised study will be released within the next few weeks. Additionally, she said media owners and journalists will no longer be asked to participate in the pilot study.
"Any subsequent market studies conducted by the FCC, if determined necessary, will not seek participation from or include questions for media owners, news directors or reporters," she said.
A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal screams out: "Islamic State's Gains Reveal New Prowess on the Battlefield."
