Tag Archives: Affirmative Action

News

Leftist ABA rates record number of Obama judicial appointees “not qualified”

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From Judicial Watch.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s quest to transform federal courts by appointing unqualified leftist ideologues is worse than previously imagined, according to a mainstream newspaper that reports the notoriously liberal American Bar Association (ABA) has rejected a “significant number” of potential judicial nominees, most of them minorities and women.

This is hardly earth-shattering news considering Obama’s judicial appointments so far. However, the ABA rebuff sheds light into the magnitude of the president’s crusade to stockpile the federal court system, where judges get lifetime appointments, with like-minded activists. In fact, Obama has made it an official policy to “diversify” the federal bench when it comes to gender, race and even life experiences.

But the White House has agreed not to nominate any candidates deemed unqualified by the ABA, the 400,000-member trade association that provides law school accreditation. Though it claims to be an impartial group of lawyers, the ABA usually takes liberal positions on divisive issues and Democratic/liberal nominees are more likely to receive the group’s highest rating of “well qualified” compared to their Republican/conservative counterparts. This has been documented in various studies, including a recent one conducted by political science departments at three Georgia universities.

With this in mind, one can only imagine how deficient Obama’s rejected candidates really are. Their identities and negative ABA ratings have not been made public, but inside sources tell the paper that broke the story this week that nearly all of the prospects were women or members of a minority group. Nine are reportedly women—five white, two black and two Hispanic—and of the five men one his white, two are black and two are Hispanic.

The number of Obama hopefuls stamped “not qualified” already exceeds the total opposed by the ABA during the eight-year administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the story points out. That means Obama’s rejection rate is more than triple what it was under either of those previous administrations.

I don’t know for sure, but I expect that the nominees would be people like Obama’s friends: the racist Jeremiah Wright, domestic terrorist Bernadine Dohrn and Marxist Bertha Lewis.

I posted this to highlight another way that electing an unqualified leftist harms the country. It’s no wonder that companies are shipping jobs overseas – what company would want to run afoul of a judge whose only judicial qualification is being a member of politicized left-wing hate groups?

News

Berkeley College Republicans hold affirmative action bake sale

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Berkeley College Republicans affirmative action bake sale
Berkeley College Republicans affirmative action bake sale

From the NY Daily News.

Excerpt:

A controversy over cupcakes is heating up at UC Berkeley in California, where campus Republicans are planning to hold an affirmative action bake sale on Tuesday.

At the sale, white men will be charged $2 for a baked good, Asians will pay $1.50, Latinos $1, African-Americans 75 cents and 25 cents for Native Americans, KGO-TV reported.

Women will get a 25 cent discount.

“The pricing structure is there to bring attention, to cause people to get a little upset,” Campus Republican president Shawn Lewis told the TV station. “But it’s really there to cause people to think more critically about what this kind of policy would do in university admissions.”

The Campus Democrats immediately slammed the sale, which Lewis said is meant to take a stand against an affirmative action-like bill for the University of California system that is awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.

On Friday, the student newspaper reported that the student government could vote to defund the Republican group over the bake sale. A hearing is scheduled for Sunday on the fiery issue.

So the response of the left is to censor the people who offend their feelings. But that’s not all.

Look at the emotional language from the opposition in this CNN article.

Excerpt:

ASUC President Vishalli Loomba said many students who attended a community meeting Monday night expressed disgust that the bake sale would take place.

“As a woman of color, when I first saw the event, I was appalled someone would post something like this on the Internet — not only a different pay structure, but also to rank the races,” she said. “It trivializes the struggles that people have been through and their histories.”

Now, for anyone who wants the research on affirmative action, and why it hurts minorities, I recommend two books by my favorite economist Thomas Sowell. (I also have to mention that he’s black, because otherwise the secular leftist commenters will cry racism, which is all they learn to do in four years of college). The first book is “Inside American Education” and the second book is “Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study“, published by Yale University Press. I only recommend the best to my readers. The first book is better for beginners, the second is more academic. Sowell’s conclusion? Affirmative action certainly doesn’t help minorities, and in many cases it actually hurts minorities. You can read a summary of Sowell’s findings here.

So on the one hand, you have the whiny secular left woman expressing real racism and sexism (“woman of color”), whining, blaming, and being disgusted and appalled. And on the other hand, you have Hoover Institute economist Thomas Sowell and the Yale University Press.

How Vanderbilt persecutes Christian groups on campus

But there’s more! I notice that the secular left is becoming increasingly bold about censoring Christians as well. (H/T Wes from Reason to Stand)

Excerpt:

Is Vanderbilt University flirting with the suppression of religion? Yes, according to Carol Swain, a professor at Vanderbilt’s Law School.

Specifically, Swain is referring to four Christian student groups being placed on “provisional status” after a university review found them to be in non-compliance with the school’s nondiscrimination policy.

Vanderbilt says the student organizations cannot require that leaders share the group’s beliefs, goals and values. Carried to its full extent, it means an atheist could lead a Christian group, a man a woman’s group, a Jew a Muslim group or vice versa.

If they remain in non-compliance, the student organizations risk being shut down.

So what’s behind this? Flashback to last fall. An openly gay undergrad at Vanderbilt complained he was kicked out of a Christian fraternity. The university wouldn’t identify the fraternity, but campus newspaper the “Hustler” reported it was Beta Upsilon Chi. As a result, the school took a look at the constitutions of some 300 student groups and found about a dozen, including five religious groups to be in non-compliance with Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy. All were placed on provisional status.

Among the groups threatened with shut down is the Christian Legal Society. It ran afoul with this language from its constitution. “Each officer is expected to lead Bible studies, prayer and worship at chapter meetings.” CLS President Justin Gunter told me, “We come together to do things that Christians do together. Pray, and have Bible studies.”

[…]Vanderbilt officials refused to be interviewed, and instead released a statement saying in part “We are committed to making our campus a welcoming environment for all of our students.” In regard to the offending student organizations, officials said they “continue to work with them to achieve compliance.”

Some people who are Christians give money to Vanderbilt, and other universities. But they shouldn’t do that. The only two colleges worth giving money to are Hillsdale College and Grove City College.

News

Supreme Court throws out anti-business class action lawsuit

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You have to read this post by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

Except:

The Supreme Court took a big bite out of the pockets of class-action trial lawyers today, at least in the field of employment discrimination.  The court unanimously rejected a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart on behalf of 1.6 million female employees that attempted to argue that the retail giant purposefully and systematically discriminated on gender for compensation.  But a narrow 5-4 rulingon a companion issue promises to make filing any more such class-action lawsuits nearly impossible:

The justices divided 5-4 on another aspect of the ruling that could make it much harder to mount similar class-action discrimination lawsuits against large employers.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the court’s conservative majority said there needs to be common elements tying together “literally millions of employment decisions at once.”

But Scalia said that in the lawsuit against the nation’s largest private employer, “That is entirely absent here.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court’s four liberal justices, said there was more than enough uniting the claims. “Wal-Mart’s delegation of discretion over pay and promotions is a policy uniform throughout all stores,” Ginsburg said.

The contrasting opinions gives a good indication of what is at stake.  In mostcorporations (especially national retail chains), compensation decisions are almost always delegated to individual locations or regional management.  For one thing, the labor market varies from region to region, and what amounts to competitive compensation in one region might be insufficient in another, depending on the cost of living, labor availability, and so on.

Ginsburg’s identification of this as a prima facie indication of discrimination would have exposed virtually all US retailers to such class-action lawsuits.  Not only would that have sapped retailers of billions in capital, but it doesn’t make any sense on its face anyway.  If compensation decisions are decentralized throughout an organization, how can that possibly demonstrate a coordinated, centralized, and explicit effort to discriminate on the basis of anything?

Reining in judicial activism and trial layers is a good way to incentivize corporations to create jobs. If you want to lower unemployment, stop these frivolous class-action lawsuits.

It’s also worth pointing out that lawsuits like this are bogus in a free market, because if people really area being underpaid, they can always go to a different employer to get a higher salary – IF THEY ARE WORTH IT. We really need a national loser-pays law to deter these nuisance lawsuits.