Obama and the Jewish vote
Obama's enlisting some help in persuading Jewish voters in Florida to vote for him.
...Mr. Obama has lined up surrogates like State Representative Dan Gelber, the House minority leader, and Mr. Wexler, both of whom are Jewish. Mr. Wexler said he would try to convert voters one mah-jongg table at a time, with town-hall meetings in the card rooms of high-rise condominiums and articles in community newspapers.“Many of the political leaders in Palm Beach and Broward County were at my son’s bris,” he said.
That's great, but here's the thing. When you have to work to try to convince Jewish people to vote for a Democrat, that's a pretty good sign that you've got a problem on your hands. Time will tell how successful these efforts will bet, but so far?
Still, Mr. Wexler admits, he has not yet been able to persuade his in-laws to vote for Mr. Obama.
Not looking so good.
Comments
Barry,
The Jewish vote goes always democratic. Usually around 80% - 85% (in my family 100%). And so it will this time. The one who will have major problems with the Jewish vote is McCain. Why? Because of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYjSfIIpIP0
As you know, McCain sought actively the endorsement of Hagee. And he is proud of it. How could he be proud of the endorsement of that antisemite? McCain should be ashamed of himself.
Posted by: Blue Wind | May 22, 2008 02:39 PM
>Usually around 80% - 85%
That's true historically, but so far Obama's polling at about 60%. Thus the concern.
Posted by: BNJ | May 22, 2008 04:35 PM
Where did you see the 60%?
Posted by: Blue Wind | May 22, 2008 04:59 PM
Here you go. Straight from the Israeli New York Times. ;-)
Posted by: BNJ | May 22, 2008 06:57 PM
It is a great newspaper. But I dont think their analysis on this is correct. Obama will carry easily 75-80% of the Jewish vote. That poll was close to the Wright ridiculous story, when Obama's numbers were dropping among all groups.
Posted by: Blue Wind | May 22, 2008 10:06 PM
The Jews I know were going to vote for Obama until they found out his affiliation with a racist and anti-semetic church, and other worrying affiliations.
Blacks hate Jews, even more than ordinary Whites. They feel that Jews used them for "muscle" in the 60's civil rights movement and then ditched them after they got what they wanted.
In truth, Blacks got 1000% what Jews got when they were forcible bused into White schools, which they quickly ruined, dragging all public education down the toilet with them. Jews went on to rule Harvard when the quotas were dropped.
But, it doesn't matter. Blacks always need someone to blame for their cultural failures.
The Jews I know aren't voting for Obama.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 23, 2008 02:22 PM
Anonymous,
Your post above sucks. It is a hateful and, I believe, racist post. You totally lost any credibility with me.
Posted by: Blue Wind | May 23, 2008 08:07 PM
"It is a great newspaper. But I dont think their analysis on this is correct. Obama will carry easily 75-80% of the Jewish vote." (BW)
Actually it's NOT the truth-challenged NY Times (I'd have a rought time believing anything written in that venue without verification), but the Gallup data that Rosner's using and it's a fact that according to the new Gallup data Obama is currently polling about 61% of the vote, when compared with McCain who's currently polling 32% against Obama.
Posted by: JMK | May 23, 2008 09:16 PM
"Blacks hate Jews, even more than ordinary Whites. They feel that Jews used them for "muscle" in the 60's civil rights movement and then ditched them after they got what they wanted." (Barely Hanging)
Charming as always Barely.
You can always be counted on to substitute stupidity for "raw, straight talk."
A minority of blacks (maybe 5% to 8% max) share the odious, Hitlerian views that the likes of Jerremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.
Blacks have voted their own perceived self-interests on what can be called "racial issues" (ie. racial preferences, etc) but most blacks are pro-life, very much against amnesty and open borders and other social issues.
"Anonymous,
Your post above sucks. It is a hateful and, I believe, racist post. You totally lost any credibility with me." (BW)
Now that's funny, BW.
Addressing a retort to "anonymous" = anyone who refuses to post a name.
Of course, "anonymous" HERE is Barely Hanging.
Barely no longer has any credibility with you?
WoW! That's a shocker.
Posted by: JMK | May 23, 2008 09:56 PM
JMK,
Whoever that "anonymous" is has no longer any credibility with me. If it is Bailey, he has no credibility.
P.S. By the way, you have lost any credibility with me long time ago. Just for the record :-)
Posted by: Blue Wind | May 23, 2008 10:04 PM
Uhhhh, it's Barely there BW....and that should be obvious since he's been posting that way for a couple months now. Not to mention the fact that he's one of the few (as in ONLY) posters around here who routinely traffics in ethnic animus.
I am indeed heartened that you feel I have "no credibility with YOU," since REALITY seems to have no credibility with you either.
I site references, sources for virtually every statement of fact I post. I also refrain from saying things like, "I think the NY Times and Gallup got it wrong this time," when I agree with the very real reality they're reporting and polling on, or making predictions based on wishful thinking and reckless speculation, such as "Howard Dean will be the next President of the United States."
I understand that you wish there were some way to fund a guaranteed income for everyone and that people wouldn't be valued primarily on what they do and how much they accrue...I wish it'd rain root beer - same thing.
Oh yeah, except I don't really expect it to rain root beer any time soon.
Posted by: JMK | May 24, 2008 12:52 PM
TYPO:
" I also refrain from saying things like, "I think the NY Times and Gallup got it wrong this time," when I agree with the very real reality they're reporting and polling on..."
SHOULD READ;
"I also refrain from saying things like, "I think the NY Times and Gallup got it wrong this time," when I disagree with the very real reality they're reporting and polling on..."
Posted by: JMK | May 24, 2008 12:55 PM
Howard Dean will be the next President of the United States
Yeaaaaah!
Will he finally release his gubernatorial records ?
Posted by: Rachel | May 25, 2008 01:03 PM
"Howard Dean will be the next President of the United States
"Yeaaaaah!
"Will he finally release his gubernatorial records?" (Rachel)
That indeed was my personal favorite BW prediction. There were some others that were up there, but that one was the topper.
As to those gubernatorial records....hmmmm, seems a little late now.
Posted by: JMK | May 25, 2008 10:26 PM
"Your post above sucks. It is a hateful and, I believe, racist post. You totally lost any credibility with me."
Of course it was a racist post. If you hate racists, then you hate black people ... which makes you a racist, hmmm.
Blacks vote on race. That is racist.
Sorry to have facts bite you in the ass like that.
The busing of blacks into public school did destroy public education for all students. That is a fact.
Everything I said was perfectly true.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 27, 2008 12:42 PM
Barely, thy name is batshit crazy.
Posted by: JMK | May 28, 2008 09:58 AM
So you deny that public schools failed after busing? You deny that they failed because they were forced to lower standards over and over instead of failing black students (racism!)?
Both of my parents taught in those schools. I know, firsthand, what caused great schools to fail miserably inside of ten years.
Don't argue facts, dummy.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 28, 2008 11:17 AM
The public schools have failed because of the teacher's unions, that have put teacher's (the workers) interests above and ahead of their consumers (the student's) interests. That's ALWAYS a recipe for disaster!
Those are the facts, all due respect to your sainted parents.
Posted by: JMK | May 28, 2008 01:32 PM
I'm afraid you are dead wrong. My parents each taught for over 35 years. They had the exact same union from day one to retirement.
The unions had utterly ZERO to do with the sudden crash of public education.
I watched it happen. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. My father taught inside the city limits, my mother in the suburbs.
The city school was utterly destroyed educationally and ended up locked down with two police officers on campus and metal detectors. My father was forced to pass 2/3rds of his student, or else meet with the parents of every student who failed ON HIS OWN TIME, every semester. For a while he did it, but he soon discovered that the parents didn't give a shit. In fact, they blamed HIM for failing their child, who never even attempted to do one assignment. Yeah, he was just a racist. Sure.
After that, he just failed the bottom third of every class. Eventually, even that kind of racism couldn't be tolerated, and they tormented him into just passing them all. He had high school seniors graduate who literally could not read.
The city school's rankings fell like druggie Limbaugh dropped from a plane.
In the suburbs, my mother's school didn't change at all. In fact, it improved a little over the years.
As always, JMK, your *facts* are merely the opinions you heard espoused on the radio by a certain Twinkie/Oxycontin guzzling moron.
Tell me, has your firefighters' union destroyed the fire department? Did the evil union you belong to destroy your ability to put out a fire?
You are beyond retarded.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2008 01:43 PM
Did I touch (yet another) nerve?
It's not just me,
Teachers' Unions are Ruining Our Kids Schools
MAR 16, 2008
BY RICHARD BERMAN
THE EXAMINER
http://www.examiner.com/a-1282766~Teachers__unions_are_ruining_our_kids_schools.html
In an information-based global economy, knowledge is power. And America is risking a power outage.
Released just this December, the Program for International Student Assessment compared the educations of American 15-year-olds with those of their peers in 56 other countries. The results are grim. In science literacy, American students placed 21st out of 30 developed countries - just above the Slovak Republic.
In math literacy, the U.S. placed 25th out of 30, performing worse than third-world Azerbaijan. (Fittingly, due to printing errors on the U.S. test, American students' reading scores were not tabulated.)
Why are these numbers so awful? After all, the U.S. is still the undisputed global leader in countless industries, from high-tech to Hollywood. The answer is simple: While American businesses are shaping the twenty-first century, our public schools are stuck in the nineteenth. With a shortage of schools that can prepare American students for the modern workforce, our economic edge is steadily eroding.
Who would support an education system that cripples America's ability to compete in the global marketplace? The National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and their thousands of affiliated unions.
They have vested interests in maintaining the educational status quo. Even if it makes us lag behind Azerbaijan.
Teachers unions derive their money from the fact that, no matter how badly they function, public schools don't shut down. That's why they bitterly oppose any attempt to introduce competition into education.
It's why the Detroit teachers union organized a walk-out that sabotaged a $200 million private offer to fund charter schools in that troubled city. (The new schools would not have been unionized and would have competed with Detroit's decrepit public education system.)
But competition between schools isn't the only kind that teachers unions can't accept. Competition among individual teachers, with incentives for the best performers, also undermines the unions' chief selling point, collective bargaining.
If teachers are paid on their individual merits - like every other kind of professional, from accountants to dentists to engineers - why would they want to negotiate their salaries through a system that collectively lumps innovative, energetic educators together with slackers doing the bare minimum?
Opposition to merit pay for teachers leads unions to oppose any effort to determine who is teaching well and who isn't. This selfish position leads to the ridiculous systems of industrial-style seniority that dictate most schools' payrolls, where salaries are determined by little more than years spent on the job.
Though she was named Minnesota's Teacher of the Year, Cathy Nelson was laid off when her school's enrollment declined -- because of her union's contract, which required the most junior teachers to be canned first, regardless of ability.
Sarah Gustafson was laid off from her teaching job the day after she was named to the Florida Educator Hall of Fame - again, because her union contract valued seniority over talent.
Union blindness also protects some truly unfit teachers whom no one would want in a classroom. In most schools few teachers need to be replaced, but tenure laws keep the numbers down to very, very few indeed.
In Illinois, a recent study found that only two out of the 95, 500 union-protected, tenured teachers outside of Chicago are dismissed annually for poor teaching. Of the 21 school districts investigated by the Center for Union Facts, not a single one - including Boston, Columbus, Houston, Minneapolis, and Newark - had a tenured-teacher firing rate in excess of 0.5 percent a year. Surely they can't all be that good, in light of our kids' demonstrated skill levels.
In fact, teachers unions and the tenure laws they promote have made it so difficult to get rid of incompetent teachers that it might be more productive to encourage them to quit. To that end, the Center for Union Facts has established the "Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers in America" contest. Parents, students, educators, and concerned taxpayers can visit www.teachersunionexposed.com to nominate the worst. The Center for Union Facts will pay ten "winners" $10,000 apiece to quit.
Call it a down payment on schooling that can keep us ahead of Azerbaijan.
Posted by: JMK | May 29, 2008 09:57 PM
Twenty-Million Ruined Educations
In 1954, most black children were offered an inferior education in America's public schools, especially in the South. The kids learned to read and write and do arithmetic. They learned some history, geography, and respect for western values, and they learned to speak English. However, their education was not equal to the education offered most white children at the same time. White children, in the 1950's, got an excellent education in our big city schools. Now most children, black and white, are offered an inferior education in America's public schools. The education black children get in big cities is worse than inferior. It's pathetic.
Failed urban public schools helped produce a black ghetto whose residents evolved their own language. Having failed to teach English, school bureaucrats in Oakland, California decided to teach the black kids what they already knew. In place of English, they proposed to teach "ebonics." [1]
A question comes to mind. What caused the quality of our big city schools to go from excellent to pathetic in a few decades? Various experts will give you a long list of reasons, but they'll never mention the main one. Public mention of that reason would end the career of an educator or a politician; so they all practice denial. Our urban public schools went from excellent to pathetic because of the actions of renegade federal judges.
THE HOSTAGE THEORY
We discussed the Warren Court's landmark school desegregation rulings in a companion essay. And we learned that they were based on fraudulent constitutional interpretations. However, they served important values, and they now enjoy a high degree of public respect. So let's not beat a dead horse. But let's keep two things about Brown v. Topeka in mind. [2]
First, the Brown case was about busing. The Topeka School Board had required Linda Brown, because of her race, to ride a bus two miles rather than walk four blocks. That injustice caught the public attention. And it helped gain acceptance for legislation by judges. Second, the Brown ruling ordered that students be admitted to public schools "on a racially nondiscriminatory basis." That seemed fair to most Americans and also helped assure public acceptance of a 14th Amendment interpretation that defied the well-documented intent of the Amendment's authors. [2]
The Court soon junked the idea of public school admissions "on a racially nondiscriminatory basis." And it soon lost its distaste for forced busing based on race. Following its direction, federal judges ordered millions of school children, white and black, to do the same thing the Topeka School Board had forced Linda Brown to do. They ordered them all to ride school buses miles past their neighborhood schools. And they selected the victims by race.
The justices' motives had nothing to do with the Constitution. They acted out of wounded pride. In the South, the states had not offered much response to the Brown ruling. Sometimes they even used state or local police power to frustrate its goals. Southern public school segregation remained virtually unchanged until Congress passed an effective civil rights law a decade after the Brown decision. [2]
By the late 1960's, the lack of response to Brown v. Topeka made the ayatollahs on the Warren Court angry. It offended their sense of the Court's power and prestige. All over America racial injustice was on the decline. Pro baseball had welcomed black players a decade earlier. Harry Truman had integrated the armed forces. In 1954, the Supreme Court had tried to grab part of the action too. And "We the People" hadn't paid much attention. Beginning in 1968, our judicial employees expressed their resentment by ordering hundreds of public school systems to integrate, no matter what the cost in resources or damaged lives. The tool of choice was forced busing. [3]
The idea behind forced busing has been described as the "hostage theory". Most citizens, black and white, supported the idea of equal access to public schools. Most white parents were willing for their children to have black classmates. But it was not their top priority. So the justices decided to get their attention. Federal courts took their children hostage and demanded ransom payments in the form of support for their own social engineering project. The ransom note said, in effect: we'll make your children suffer until you make our plan work. [4]
In all the desegregation cases, the judges asserted that the programs were required by the need to uphold the Constitution. However, forced busing based on race was contrary to the plain language of the Constitution. It was also contrary to everything said by the people who framed the 14th Amendment, even the minority who took the broadest view of its meaning. But at least our judiciary occupied the high moral ground. It was only trying to serve the ideal of racial equality. Right?
Wrong. While the Supreme Court was demanding forced busing programs, its members ran their own shop like a plantation. You can read about it in the book, The Brethren, by Woodward and Armstrong. All the high-ranking Court employees were white, all the lowest ranking workers were black; and the justices treated the Blacks like serfs. They forced them to provide personal service on the workers' own time.
Justice William O. Douglas was the worst offender; he ordered black Supreme Court employees to drive him around, clean his home, and do his shopping. Black cleaning women lived in fear of being fired if they broke anything. Within the Supreme Court, racism was plain to see. That racism mocked the justices' claim to be acting out of high ideals. They were acting out of concern for their own power and prestige. [5]
Under the direction of a racist and power-mad Supreme Court, federal judges all over America took millions of children hostage. They poured many billions of taxpayer dollars down various educational rat holes and ruined dozens of fairly successful school systems. The complete story would fill a library. One can, however, learn most of the judicial tricks by reviewing two fairly typical cases: Forty-Six Felons on the Payroll and Three-Billion Dollar Taj Mahals.
The Cleveland case study described in Forty-Six Felons on the Payroll includes well documented numbers that we'll use to compute an estimate of the total damage inflicted on American families and taxpayers by desegregation programs nationwide. In response to federal court orders, the Cleveland schools wasted about one billion dollars in a little over two decades during which about 200,000 students passed through the system. That averages out to about $5000 per student. The billions of dollars wasted in the Kansas City case, Three-Billion Dollar Taj Mahals, was atypical. But the story illustrates the incredible gall of our renegade judicial employees.
ADDING UP THE SCORE
The Cleveland busing story was replicated dozens of times during the 1970s and 1980s. For most of the period in question, about forty-five million students, give or take a few million, were in U. S. public schools. In a typical year federal judges ran school systems containing at least 20 percent of the forty-five million. That works out to about nine million victims each year. [6]
Each of those nine million children, on average, stayed in the public schools for about a decade. In thirty years, the nine million victims turned over about three times. So 27 million ruined educations is a reasonable estimate.
We'll assume that the $5000 per-student-cost in Cleveland was not far from average for the nation as a whole. We know that 27 million is a reasonable estimate for the total number of students affected by integration programs nationwide. Twenty-seven million times 5000 equals 135 billion.
Now we should probably admit that a minority of students in schools run by courts somehow managed to get a decent education. And all the above numbers are kind of rough anyway. Let's just round off the estimates to $100 billion wasted and 20 million ruined educations.
There is growing alarm over the income gap between those who are well educated and those who are not. Renegade federal judges deserve some of the blame for that gap. They ruined the educations of twenty million people. Most of the twenty million are on the wrong side of the gap.
Ruined public schools led middle class Whites to abandon dozens of large cities. This wrecked the economies of those cities and the quality-of-life they could offer to those who remained. Tax receipts went down and crime rates went up. That caused most of the rest of the middle class to get out. I don't plan to abuse you with more arithmetic; I won't estimate the cost of the damage to the cities. However, you can bet that it's a very big number.
One can also make an argument that the desegregation programs damaged the educations of most public school children, not only the 20 percent, or so, who were directly involved. The programs warped our public education priorities for more than a generation. The wasted $100 billion came from state and local education budgets. Consequently, that money was not available to cover real educational needs.
The programs also corrupted our public education establishment. For more than three decades it embraced a fraud in order to avoid political problems and increase its cash flow. How could it help becoming corrupt? For those same three decades its cost has been going up and the quality of its work has been going down.
IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT
Beginning in 1954 the Supreme Court assured African Americans that their children had a right to a good public education. And the courts were going to make sure they got it. But the courts didn't deliver. The black kids' educations did not get better; they got worse, much worse.
Liberal supporters of judicial activism needed to deflect attention away from the culprits. They needed somebody else to blame. So they proclaimed that America's white majority is racist. Otherwise it would have followed the Court's leadership.
Let's take a look at that claim. Let's look at two other public arenas in which racial integration programs were put in place; professional sports and America's defense establishment.
Perhaps you watched the 1997 World Series on TV. It was played between the Cleveland Indians and the Florida Marlins. The Marlins won; so that year Florida had the best team in baseball. If you did watch the 97 Series, you saw a lot of black faces when the Marlins took the field. Seven out of nine starting players, on the best team in baseball, were black. So you would probably agree that America's best-loved sport is integrated. By 1954, the year the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Topeka, major league baseball had forty-nine black players. [7]
Major league baseball did not always welcome Blacks. Prior to 1947, they had to maintain their own league in order to play. Everyone familiar with the game knew that plenty of Blacks were good enough to play in the majors. But the major leagues had a whites-only rule. It wasn't written down; it was informal. But the most powerful man in the game enforced it. From 1920 to 1944, the Baseball Commissioner was a former federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Landis made sure the Whites-only rule was enforced.
When Judge Landis retired a man named Branch Rickey decided to stick his neck out. Rickey was president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He decided that it was time to end the rule against black players in the major leagues. Rickey didn't hire lawyers to contrive a fraudulent new rule in the Constitution. He risked his own career and his own money; he hired a talented young black player named Jackie Robinson.
Mr. Rickey brought Jackie Robinson on board in 1947. That was seven years before Brown v. Topeka. Jackie's performance on the field played a key role in the Dodgers' success for the next decade or so. During Jackie's career the Dodgers played in the World series six times and won it all in 1955. Jackie also performed off the field as Mr. Rickey had hoped. Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson changed millions of minds and hearts. The only federal judge in the story was Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Baseball, like most other professional sports, has long been integrated. Black and White professionals respect each other. Millions of white children admire the black players. The story of pro sports gives the lie to the claim that attempts at public school integration failed because most white Americans are racist.
Now let's take a look at race relations in America's armed forces. Until 1948, the Army and Navy had segregated units. In that year, President Harry Truman issued an Executive Order ending the practice. Truman offered no fiction about a need to follow the Constitution. He just issued an executive order. There was a fair amount of grumbling about the White House forcing the Army and Navy to change. Politicians predicted dire results. However, the soldiers and sailors all knew that Harry Truman was Commander-In-Chief. The legitimacy of his order was beyond question. So the officers and men not only followed that order, they made it work [8].
America's armed forces have long led the nation's progress in racial equity. All three services have a higher percentage of Blacks than does the public at large. There are many thousands of Blacks commanding Whites. By the mid 1990's, 7 percent of the Army's Generals, 11 percent of its commissioned officers, and about 35 percent of its sergeants were black [9].
In February 1954, a young black man named Colin Powell graduated from Morris High School in the South Bronx. That was a couple of months before the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Topeka. Powell then began a long and successful career in the U. S. Army. He found bigots there, but he also found a system that allowed him to succeed. About forty years later, Colin Powell retired as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had reached the highest and most visible position in the U. S. Armed Forces [10].
Colin Powell, like Jackie Robinson, gave a class performance in a pioneering role. Whites in America responded to Powell in the same way they had responded to Robinson. It appeared, in 1995 and 1996, that Colin Powell could have become U. S. president in the coming election, had he chosen to run. Leaders of both major parties offered him support. Republicans begged him to compete for the nomination of their party. According to public opinion polls, he could have easily beaten all of the other contenders in the 1996 election [11].
Professional sports and our armed forces both ended segregation. Both successes resulted from legitimate and honest actions. And both enjoyed public support. The efforts of lawless judges not only failed to achieve their stated goals, they wrecked our urban public schools. And they badly damaged millions of lives.
Why did public school integration fail while the other two efforts succeeded? Blaming the racism of the American people is part of a brazen cover up. The attempt by federal courts to integrate public schools failed because it was not legitimate. The people saw judicial lawlessness for what it was. So they refused to cooperate.
THE CONSENT DECREE SCAM
It's probably worth pointing out that lawless judges don't deserve all the blame for the ill effects of forced public school integration; they had accomplices. The nominal plaintiffs were usually school children, but the children were just pawns. The real plaintiffs were special interest groups composed mainly of liberal social engineers and trial lawyers. In some cases, liberal public school insiders also helped them out. The defendants played dead while the lawyer-lobbyists suing them "proved" that local public schools had been segregated on purpose.
None of what's written just above is any big secret. It's well known that bureaucrats often sell out the public and help position judges to legislate in order to get a budget increase. You can read about this in a book written by Richard Posner, a federal judge. Posner suggested that judges played the game because they enjoyed the "patronage" and they were sometimes "drunk" with power. "Patronage" means that the judge gets to misuse public funds to give high paying jobs to his unqualified friends [12].
School busing cases provided the ideal vehicle for lawyers and judges to develop and refine the consent decree scam, a slick way to sneak a political deal into the law. As its name implies, a consent decree is a court order to which the defendant has consented. The scam works especially well when the defendant is a group of public officials like a school board.
A plaintiff, who aims to force a policy change opposed by "We the People," sues in court. He claims that the court must order the change to satisfy the Constitution. The "defendant" likes the proposed change. It will raise his budget or get him out from under the control of the voters. So he plays dead. He allows the evidence presented in court to be biased in favor of the plaintiff's claim. The judge may also favor the proposed change. He moves in the same elite circles as the plaintiff and the defendant. And they all share a fondness for social engineering.
Most of the people oppose the change; but they don't get to vote. This is a matter in which only lawyers get to vote. The lawyers for the defendant and the plaintiff make a deal. They agree to spend millions of dollars of the people's money and to bus thousands of the people's children all over the place. The defendant doesn't care about any of that. It's not his money; they're not his children. The money and children belong to "We the People." Who cares what they think?
The judge signs a court order giving the deal the force of law. So the results of that consent decree will bind the people for decades. The lawyers then call a press conference. They say "thank God; we are now following the Constitution." Then the judge and the lawyers on both sides shake hands all around, and go to lunch. The next summer they attend each other's daughters' weddings.
The people grumble; but they accept the result because they respect the Constitution. Nobody tells them the truth. Nobody tells them their school busing program has got nothing to do with the Constitution; it's just another smelly political deal. The media helps with the cover up.
NOTES & CITATIONS
1. Around the end of 1996, there was much discussion of ebonics in the press. See, for example, the piece in USA Today, Dec. 20, 1996, page 3A. It was written by Anita Manning.
2. The essay, Viking Jurisprudence Part 2, can be found on the Internet.
3. We've argued elsewhere that the Supreme Court is defying the First Amendment by imposing the precepts of an alien religion on "We the People."
4. See Bentley for the original sources of the term, "the hostage theory."
5. The account of the "plantation" in the Supreme Court was taken from Woodward, pages 288 and 289. Beyond that recent evidence, the record shows that the Supreme Court had been a thoroughly racist institution for at least a century. See the online essays, Racism in the Court and Congress Shall Not Have the Power.
6. National statistics on school desegregation were obtained mainly from Welch. Welch's study analyzed 109 of the largest public school districts affected by court ordered desegregation programs. The 109 districts contained a little less than 20 percent of all public school students. They contained a little less than 50 percent of the black students. Information on total student enrollment was spread throughout Welch's book. I found parts of the story on pages 9, 11, 14, and 53. Adding it all up I concluded that, on average, our public schools had about thirty-five million white students and about ten million minority students during the years in question.
7. Information presented on the Jackie Robinson story was all obtained from Allen. See especially pages, 44-75, 195, 196, and 205. You'll have to take my word for the count of black Florida Marlins. Or, if you prefer, call up the team's management and request a check of its records.
8. The story of Truman's order to integrate the armed services was based on material in Bernstein and Matusow, pages 95-114.
9. Moskos, Chapter 1, provided the statistics presented here concerning the success of Blacks in the armed forces.
10. Information on Colin Powell's career was obtained mainly from his autobiography (See the Bibliography).
11. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Colin Powell to the position of Secretary of State, the most prestigious position in the Cabinet.
12. See Posner, 1996, pages 340-1.
For publication data on works cited, check the Bibliography
This article contains matter from the forthcoming book, The Temple of Karnak: An Unexpurgated History of the Supreme Court.
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All Rights Reserved
D. J. Connolly
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2008 02:22 PM
Well, D. J. Connolly aside, it was the teacher's unions that put worker's (teacher's) wishes/wants over their customer's (student's) needs, that ruined America's school system.
Posted by: JMK | June 2, 2008 01:50 PM