Prometheus 6 blogs

A little more on Sowell, by someone other than me

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:35:53 -0400

Faheem at Black Perspective and Introspection beat me to Sowell's latest.

I would like to first deal with the term Black Redneck , in my assessment this phrase is equal to phrases like White Nigger and Sand Nigger which ascribes the behavior as described or represented by the ladder word to the group that the first word represents. Hence, a White Nigger would be a white person that engages in nigger behavior, but what is nigger behavior? We know the word Nigger does not have a history as being a word that describe a particular behavior; it was and still remains a disparaging word that describes Black people regardless of behavior or background. So what accounts for phrases like "Sand Nigger"? A word commonly used to describe Arabs. If we were to compare these two phrases; "Sand Nigger" and "White Nigger" what we will find is that the one thing those who are called these words have in common with those who were first referred to as plain old Niggers is that good ole white folk dislike them, thus a "Nigger" becomes a word ascribed to anything or anyone white folk find objectionable.

Such is the case with the word Redneck; Rednecks are considered to be white trash ignorant and backwards, in the past they were considered, lawless, lazy and sexually immoral. The most famous of all Rednecks is Jeff Foxworthy, who has made millions from describing what and who is a Redneck and if any of you have seen his show, you know most of the things he says that makes one a Redneck does not describe things that represent Black folk in thought or behavior which means the term Redneck as used in the term Black Rednecks is Thomas way of calling Black folk a disparaging name that will not easily offend us but ensures that white folk who love his work and find Rednecks objectionable understand that he share their resentment towards us and also think of Black folk as trash, ignorant, backwards, lazy, lawless and sexually immoral. I wonder how those white folk who are proud to be Rednecks will feel about him using a word they self identify as to describe Black people in a negative light.

I admit there's a certain elegance to his junk

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 11:41:17 -0400

It seems Thomas Sowell has a new book.

Mr. Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author, most recently, of "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," published this week by Encounter Books.

I'll not be buying it (though I would review a free copy...).

That quote came from the credits for an OpinionJournal thing he wrote that Baldilocks linked to.

For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population--whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever--have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race--that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites.

Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.

Where Sowell says "race" you should read "genetically determined traits." I don't think that's what Sowell means...but what he writes makes sense if you make that substitution.

I have been slipping

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 09:46:13 -0400

Okay, the email link really, really works.

I know I've been distracted but I believe I'm getting a grip again, so if anyone has seen any weird behavior by the site, please let me know.

The health care industry is about industry, not health care

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 09:47:47 -0400

Quote of note:

...any effort to reduce this waste would hurt powerful, well-organized interests, which have already demonstrated their power to block reform. Remember the "Harry and Louise" ads that doomed the Clinton health plan? The actors may have seemed like regular folks, but the ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, an industry lobbying group that liked the health care system just the way it was.

and

The main message of that report is that U.S. health care is doing just fine. Never mind the huge expense, the low life expectancy, the high infant mortality; it's a market-based system, so it must be good.

The report even takes a Panglossian view of uninsured Americans - one that is completely at odds with the grim statistics I cited above - suggesting that "many of them may remain uninsured as a matter of choice," perhaps because "they are young and healthy and do not see the need for insurance."

The president's economists had only one criticism of the system: insurance is too comprehensive, which encourages people to consume too much health care. As they see it, insurance covers too large a percentage of medical costs. The answer to this problem is the creation of, you guessed it, private accounts, which have now superseded tax cuts as the answer to all problems.

A Private Obsession
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Just as with pollution control in California, I expect the Bushistas to be obstructionist

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 08:05:17 -0400

Quote of note:

But Mr. Spitzer's inquiry may put him in competition with national regulators. Oversight of the mortgage industry has typically fallen under four separate federal agencies, which have seen their role as preventing systemic collapse rather than protecting consumers.

And in January 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department issued new regulations that effectively give only the federal government the authority to regulate national banks.

New York Begins Inquiry Into Possible Mortgage Bias
By ERIC DASH

A new preliminary inquiry by Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, is seeking credit data and other information from mortgage lenders that should offer regulators a clearer picture of whether discrimination is responsible for the higher interest rates that minority borrowers often pay.

This tax cut thing has become suicidal

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 07:48:12 -0400

Congress Passes Budget With Cuts in Medicaid and in Taxes
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: April 29, 2005

WASHINGTON, April 28 - The House and Senate broke a lengthy impasse over federal spending Thursday night, narrowly adopting a $2.56 trillion federal budget for 2006 that aims to trim the growth of Medicaid by $10 billion over five years, add $106 billion in tax cuts and clear the way for oil drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge.

The back-to-back votes - 214 to 211 in the House and 52 to 47 in the Senate - ran mostly along party lines. As the roll was called in the Senate, shortly before midnight, Vice President Dick Cheney sat in the chamber, ready to cast his vote to break a tie, if necessary.

It would have been a good question to ask Giuliani when he was collecting for a possible run for Senator from New York

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 07:44:08 -0400

Quote of note:

We're not saying that's what happened here. But when two dozen employees of an out-of-town company whose president once held a lucrative concessions contract at Los Angeles International Airport make contributions that many can't remember and few can explain, it does tend to raise a red flag.

The $31,000 Question
April 29, 2005

Imagine you're running for mayor of Los Angeles and a reporter discovers that at least 20 employees at two related Florida companies have, combined, donated about $31,000 to your campaign. The reporter telephones these contributors whose donations, thanks to city law, are public record and finds that some of them can't explain why they gave $1,000 to a politician running for office in a city 3,000 miles away and others can't even remember writing a check. So the reporter asks you why these folks in Florida would give you so much money.

You reply:
(a) "If there are questions about contributions, we will look into them immediately and take action."
(b) "They think it's time for a change. People are supporting me because people have seen over the last four years we have an administration that's adrift."
(c) "I don't know that anybody's shown that anybody's done anything wrong yet."

Anyone with an ounce of sense can tell you that the best response under these circumstances is "a." It was the answer delivered in writing by Ace Smith, campaign manager for City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who is running for mayor and did face that question this week.

But before Smith could get to him, Villaraigosa himself answered "b," a peculiar response that managed to be both relentlessly "on message" and completely off target. (We'll get to "c" in a bit). What kind of change, exactly, would these Florida workers want that a future mayor of Los Angeles could deliver?

That is the $31,000 question.

They count on that lack of economic understanding noted the other day

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 07:36:59 -0400

Quote of note:

At this point, you may be wondering whether it's really possible that professional editorial writers at a first-rate newspaper people who, after all, are paid to think seriously about issues like this could make such a simple statistical mistake. Are they really so dishonest or so dumb as to think that you can measure the fairness of a tax code by looking at what share of the taxes various groups pay without considering how much they earn? I can tell you, as a regular reader of that page, that the answer is: Yes, they really, really are.

A Very Special Kind of Math
Once again, the Wall Street Journal plops down numbers in arguing that the rich pay too much in taxes. Do figures lie or do liars figure?
Jonathan Chait
April 29, 2005

You'd think he'd have learned

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 07:30:17 -0400

Maybe he has, I dunno...

Quote of note:

Just last week, Schwarzenegger and his aides sought to clarify his statement to a convention of newspaper publishers that the nation should "close the borders." Before his speech was over, an aide told reporters that Schwarzenegger had meant to say that the U.S. should secure its borders not shut them down.

Gov. Praises 'Minuteman' Campaign
Schwarzenegger says group's patrols against illegal immigrants have been effective. One critic calls remarks 'nothing short of base racism.'
By Peter Nicholas and Robert Salladay
Times Staff Writers
April 29, 2005

SACRAMENTO Calling the nation's borders dangerously porous, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday praised the private "Minuteman" campaign that uses armed volunteers to stop illegal immigrants from crossing into the U.S.

Well, that's 61 cities in 61 days

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 20:14:14 -0400

Why a special news conference to repeat himself?

Ah. He's been honing the language during his tour.

Problem is, he's suggesting the impossible.

There's a Presidential news conference tonight?

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 20:01:05 -0400

Gee...

Let's see if we can do better this century

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 16:30:21 -0400

A solidarity of sorrow
Gerald Caplan
In this keynote address to the Toronto Armenian Community on the 90th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Gerald Caplan explores the solidarity of sorrow between the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides. What these three genocides have in common transcend their differences and all people who believe in justice should work together for genocide prevention, he writes.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots in the spring rain.

T. S. Eliot wrote these haunting, unforgettable words in his epic poem The Waste Land. This was 7 years before the Armenian genocide, which we commemorate on April 24 and which we have no evidence Eliot was touched by. It was 21 years before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the 2nd World War, during the black heart of the Holocaust, which we commemorate on April 19 and which Eliot could hardly have conceived only 2 decades later. And it was 72 years before the genocide in Rwanda, the great genocide of the late 20th century, occurring almost exactly half a century after the world, emerging from the nightmare of Hitler, vowed Never Again. April, when the lilacs bloom again.

The 20th century has gone down in historical infamy as the Century of Genocide. I'm sorry I don't know whether the 1904 genocide by the German army of the Herero people of south-west Africa (now Namibia), the first genocide of the last century, also took place in April. But we do know that the near-genocide of the Fur people of western Sudan has now entered its 3rd April with little respite and no adequate international intervention. We also know from Rwanda and Darfur that Never Again has been trivialized as so much rhetorical bombast by public figures on public occasions, sound and fury signifying little. We now know that unless major strategic or economic interests are at play, if nothing is at stake beyond mere human life, on however massive a scale, then the accurate description of the state of our times is Again and Again and Again.

What we also know, I'm afraid and this is an equally dismaying observation---is that for a very large number of those descended from victims and survivors of the genocides of our time, the precise concept is in any event NOT Never Again. It's that never again will OUR people be the victims of such a calamity.

It's copyright infringement, but I don't have the URL

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:26:27 -0400

You want this woman on the Supreme Court?

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:38:53 -0400

WILLIE SEARCY: Priscilla Owen had a "reputation for slowness in handling her caseload." There were times she got so behind that court clerks tell of "other justices [ordering] opinions to be taken from her chambers." In the case of Willie Searcy, Owen stands accused of contributing to his death with her dalliance. After a defective seat belt left the teenaged Searcy paralyzed, a jury awarded his family millions of dollars in damages. Attorneys on both sides of the case asked for an expedited ruling but the family especially needed the money as they did not have the funds "to provide the medical care he needed." The case languished for years. When Owen finally got around to writing the opinion, she took issue with a question that was not even raised, "left the family with nothing and ordered a new trial."(When the court issued its ruling, it included an "odd" addendum paragraph that somewhat apologized for the delay.) Searcy died while awaiting the Owen-ordered new trial. The family attorney declared, "There's no question, absolutely no question, that the delay contributed to causing Willie's death. We could have saved his life if we'd had the funds to do it."

As we were saying...

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 11:07:54 -0400

Leading With the Women

If war breaks out in the Senate over judicial nominations, the initial battle is likely to center on two women, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. Republicans seem to think that those nominees will come off as so likeable that Democrats will be forced to back down from their threats of a filibuster. But when the American public looks beyond the photo-op, it will be clear why these women do not belong on the federal bench. Both have records of kowtowing to big business and showing contempt for ordinary people who are the victims of injustice.

Of course, it will be said this represents an unacceptable litmus test of these judges' political positions.