Eric-Odessit, who has his own blog at Conservative Liberal, has taken the heated (but always polite) discussion that’s been going on in comments here about racism, and run with it. I won’t summarize or quote here what he has to say. I’ll just give you my conclusion: he’s right. As you read his post, keep in mind (and he’ll remind you) that he grew up in the former Soviet Union. this means that he, unlike most Americans, has a very clear understanding of true government power versus the personal preferences and beliefs of individual citizens.

John McWhorter, who supports Obama, has pointed out what he sees as a profound problem with the Obama campaign, which is the way identity politics has made it impossible to treat Obama as an adult, rather than a child, for fear of being called “racist”:

Yet there is an element of surprise, a tincture of dismay, in how many view the sliming of Mr. Obama. If Grover Cleveland or John Kerry got slimed, what do you expect? But if Mr. Obama gets slimed, well.

There is a tacit sense that decent people would make an exception for him. Otherwise, why would so many think of it as news that the Clintons or anyone else would get nasty in trying to push past him?

Let’s face facts: People see this commonplace phenomenon as news because of a tacit idea that as a black man, Mr. Obama should be treated with kid gloves.

Lawrence Bobo, professor of sociology at Harvard, gives it away comparing the Clintons’ attacks on Mr. Obama to, specifically, the Willie Horton ad and the 2000 vote count. That is, events traditionally classified as “racist” — as if Republicans have not sought to best Democrats in ways disconnected to race. Upon which the Swift-boat thing is germane. Mr. Bobo appends that to his list, too — but misses that the guiding theme is not racism but hardball.

Welcome to reality: being judged by the content of our character means that we black people will not be exempt from hardball. We should not be seduced by the fantasy that we must pretend to be fragile.

Well, yes. This is what I’ve been saying all along. I recently wrote a post saying that one of my fears about Obama as a candidate is that it would be impossible to run against him in the ordinary rough and tumble way we’ve come to expect in a Democracy. Any negative comment would be deemed “racist,” and the Republican candidates, all carefully groomed and controlled by their handlers, wouldn’t even want to get near that.

It did occur to me, though, that McCain might be the candidate who would stand up to Obama, who would not fear being called a racist. He is a man confident and feisty enough to get into a fight on its merits, and not pull his punches for fear of collateral damage. I don’t know how well those qualities would serve in the increasingly surreal world of the White House, but it might be just what is needed to level the playing field against America’s first black presidential candidate (something that would be more fair to Obama, too, since it would treat him like an adult and not a child or a half wit).

The strongest tie that binds me to conservatism is my belief that the principle that “that government is best which governs least” applies most strongly in the area of economics.  I believe that government should make a few big rules — don’t discriminate, don’t cheat, don’t commit fraud, etc. — and then it should stand out of the way and let the marketplace take over.  (As an aside, I don’t think McCain will be great in this area, but he’ll still be so much better than Obama and Hillary that it goes without saying that people like Rush and Ann and Michelle should should sheath their nails and vote for him.)

The moment government starts micromanaging the market, bad things happen.  Earl has just tipped me off to the fact that the recent mortgage collapse, which was the first pebble in the avalanche that is now a nascent recession, started with government insistent on manipulating the mortgage market to advance social policy:

PERHAPS the greatest scandal of the mort gage crisis is that it is a direct result of an intentional loosening of underwriting standards – done in the name of ending discrimination, despite warnings that it could lead to wide-scale defaults.

At the crisis’ core are loans that were made with virtually nonexistent underwriting standards – no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant’s ability to make payments; no down payment.

Most people instinctively understand that such loans are likely to be unsound. But how did the heavily-regulated banking industry end up able to engage in such foolishness?

From the current hand-wringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards – at the behest of community groups and “progressive” political forces.

In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of “redlining” – claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.

In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications – but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.

Yet a “landmark” 1992 study from the Boston Fed concluded that mortgage-lending discrimination was systemic.

That study was tremendously flawed – a colleague and I later showed that the data it had used contained thousands of egregious typos, such as loans with negative interest rates. Our study found no evidence of discrimination.

Yet the political agenda triumphed – with the president of the Boston Fed saying no new studies were needed, and the US comptroller of the currency seconding the motion.

No sooner had the ink dried on its discrimination study than the Boston Fed, clearly speaking for the entire Fed, produced a manual for mortgage lenders stating that: “discrimination may be observed when a lender’s underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants.”

Some of these “outdated” criteria included the size of the mortgage payment relative to income, credit history, savings history and income verification. Instead, the Boston Fed ruled that participation in a credit-counseling program should be taken as evidence of an applicant’s ability to manage debt.

Sound crazy? You bet. Those “outdated” standards existed to limit defaults. But bank regulators required the loosened underwriting standards, with approval by politicians and the chattering class. A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.

Read the rest here.

What is being described above is precisely the same type of racism my daughter is having foisted on her by her classmates, little kids who are channeling the ideology of their liberal parents:  to make up for past bad racism, we’re going to engage in present “good” racism.  None of these highly educated people seem to have figured out that what we need to do is eliminate racism entirely.

My 5th grader came home from school and told me that all the kids were saying that people should vote for Obama because he’s black.

I asked, “Do they know anything else about him?”

“No,” she replied.  “They’re just saying [read:  their parents are just saying] that people should vote for him because he’s black.”

My next question:  “Should people vote against him because he’s black?”

“Oh, no,” she answered.  “That’s racist.”

“Then why,” I asked, “is it any less racist to vote for him simply because of the color of his skin?  Any decision we make about someone solely because of their skin color is racist. People should be voting for him based on his experience, skill, and beliefs, not because of his skin color.”

Either because she’s smart, or because she’s a “yes” girl when it comes to her own mother, my daughter agreed that I had a point.  That’s good.  What’s sad is that it seems as if a substantial number of kids in her school are being taught that the only thing that matters is a person’s race.  Martin Luther King is rolling in his grave at this inversion of his Dream.

The problem with Obama’s race is that you’re not allowed to dislike him simply because you don’t like him. From my point of view, irrespective of skin color, I find Obama boring and platitudinous, I dislike and distrust his friends, I find appalling his lack of practical experience, and I disagree with him from top to bottom when it comes to his political positions. He is, to me, an utterly undesirable candidate. However, in the world of identity politics, all of this is clearly a front for my unspoken racism. It is impossible for those on the Left to believe that, if someone is in a politically correct minority, he can be disliked for reasons other than his minority status. Cynthia Tucker, a liberal columnist, is upfront about this belief:

After a recent column describing Barack Obama as “a presidential candidate who happens to be black — not a black presidential candidate,” I received countless responses from readers, a handful of them odd. That odd handful declared they take no notice of superficial traits such as skin color, and they took me to task for making any reference to Obama’s race.

“I thought of (Obama) as a person. I did not see black or white or Hispanic or that he was a man — I saw a person! If people really, truly want racial equality, then the first step has to be to STOP looking at skin color,” wrote one reader.

“When I look at a person, the last thing I think about is skin color or heritage,” wrote another.

Sorry, but I’m not buying it. While I am sympathetic to any desire to get past dated and useless habits of mind — especially the contentious politics of the color line — that’s just nonsense. None of us, black, white or brown, is colorblind.  (Emphasis mine.)

Sorry, Cynthia, but I’m not buying that. I refuse to be denied the right to dislike someone based upon the content of their character. More to the point, given Obama’s church, his verbal vapidity, and what’s emerging about his somewhat checkered Chicago political past, I’m not even sure precisely how much character the man has. And that is entirely separate, of course, from my disliking his political positions.

Nor do I think I’m deluding myself about my innate racism. The fact is, I’ve never seen Obama speak. I get my news through the written word. Or, if I’m getting my news through the spoken word, I hear it on the radio. I never watch the candidates on TV, ever. That is, my impressions of Obama are purely cerebral. And I still don’t like him.

Hillary, interestingly, doesn’t have quite the same protection Obama does. People have gotten so used over the years to finding her entirely dislikeable that it’s pretty darn hard to attribute negative feelings to her sex, rather than her personality. With Obama, though, we don’t have a past history with him to justify broad dislike. That is, while Obama has a personal history (which I don’t think holds up to scrutiny), there hasn’t been a long-term relationship between the man and the American public that could lay the groundwork for disliking him without a concurrent charge of racism. For example, we don’t hear too many cries of racism if we dislike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, both of whom have shown themselves to be completely disreputable personally and politically for too many years to be entirely immune from attack (although we may well be accused of being racists for not supporting their race-based political agenda). That is, most people, left or right, seem to concede that the guys lack broad personal appeal.

It will be interesting, assuming Obama continues in politics for a while (whether as a 2008 presidential candidate or a 2012 candidate), to see if we’re allowed to dislike him without being tarred with the racist brush. It will also be interesting if, God forbid, he wins the 2008 presidential primaries, to see if the press will be able to make itself write anything even slightly negative about him. And considering the horror with which Hillary’s attacks against him are being greeted, will the Republican candidate be able to say anything negative, no matter how substantive, without being tarred with the racist brush?  The one thing I can promise you is that, if Obama loses, it won’t be because he’s boring, antisemitic (or, at least, his friends are), uninformed, unexperienced and a leftist. In the eyes of the MSM, whose opinion will be disseminated around the world, he can lose only because he’s black. And that’s the problem with Obama’s race.

The San Francisco Chron has a long article about the fact that, in the Bay Area, blacks are locked up disproportionately for drug crimes, as compared to whites:

San Francisco imprisons African Americans for drug offenses at a much higher rate than whites, according to a report to be released today by a nonprofit research institute.

In a study of nearly 200 counties nationwide, the Justice Policy Institute found that 97 percent of large-population counties have racial disparities between the number of black people and white people sent to prison on drug convictions.

The institute, which is based in Washington, D.C., and researches public policy and promotes alternatives to incarceration, says whites and African Americans use illicit drugs at similar rates. But black people account for more than 50 percent of sentenced drug offenders, though they make up only 13 percent of the nation’s population.

San Francisco locks up a higher percentage of members of the African American community in drug cases than any other county in the study. In the county, 123 people out of every 100,000 are sent to state prison each year for drug offenses. Of those, whites are incarcerated at a rate of 35 per 100,000 white people, while blacks are incarcerated at a rate of 1,013 per 100,000 black people.

“It is not that San Francisco is sending a lot of people to prison for drug offenses, it is that the people they are sending are black,” said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the institute. “An average citizen who uses drugs in San Francisco has a pretty low chance of going to prison, but if you are African American, the chances are fairly high.”

***

San Francisco has a small population of African Americans – 6.7 percent of the total, according to the Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey – but Ziedenberg said the numbers have a concentrated impact within that community. African Americans are going to prison for drug offenses at a rate that is 28 times higher than the rate for whites.

“If you go to any courtroom in the Hall of Justice, you will see that the majority arrested are African American,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi. “At every stage of the criminal process – arrest, conviction and those who are sent to prison – there is a disproportionate impact on blacks.

“It is a tradition in San Francisco to focus sting operations in communities where there are larger populations of African Americans, and there are state and federal grants that support those stings.”

Alameda and San Mateo counties also have disproportionately high rates of incarcerating African Americans for drug offenses, according to the report. In Alameda County, 159 per 100,000 people are admitted to prison each year for drug offenses. Of those, whites are imprisoned at a rate of 23 per 100,000 white people, while blacks are incarcerated at a rate of 797 per 100,000 black people.

In San Mateo County, 76 out of every 100,000 people are admitted to prison each year for drug offenses. Of those, whites are imprisoned at a rate of 26 per 100,000 white people, while blacks are incarcerated at a rate of 946 per 100,000 black people.

In addition to the racial disparities, the report found that counties that spend more on policing and the judicial system imprison people for drug offenses at higher rates, even if the crime rate isn’t higher. It also found that counties with higher poverty and unemployment rates send people to prison more.

I have no quarrel with the numbers.  It is absolutely true that more blacks go to prison than whites for drug crimes, even though there are fewer blacks in the overall population.  What I wondered about, and what the article does not address, is the types of drugs at issue.

Are the blacks and whites using the same drugs, or are the whites using softer drugs?  I ask this because, when I was a young lawyer in San Francisco, everyone I knew smoked pot, the drug that makes you boring.  (Incidentally, I didn’t.  I tried it once and found the effects of inhaling so distressing, both physically and mentally, that I never wanted to touch it again.)  Pot is illegal.  It is also ubiquitous amongst young whites (and, I guess, among young people of all other races) and is the kind of thing that police officers definitely do not seem to target — probably because stoned people are inert and harmless.

Getting away from pot, there wasn’t much else going on drug-wise among the white young people I knew (and this includes high school and college, too.)  While there was a brief boom of cocaine amongst some of the Yuppies with whom I worked (and one of them distinguished himself by driving off the roof of a two story parking garage while high), I was unaware of any other, harder drugs:  heroin, meth, crack, etc.  And my sense has always been that it is those drugs, which destroy communities and increase the overall crime rate, that attract the attention of law enforcement.

So, based on my wild hypothesizing, I’m not going to assume that law enforcement in the Bay Area is racist until I have more information, not just about arrest numbers, but about the types of drugs that drive those arrests.

Previous posts:  Are San Francisco Cops racist?

I have to say that, this week, when I was casting my votes for the Watcher’s Council, I had a really hard time.  The caliber of articles that the council members submitted this week — both their own and someone else’s — was incredibly high.  I kept going back and forth between articles, practically parsing sentences in an effort to rank the top two in each category (Council and non-Council).  For that reason, I am incredibly honored that, with the votes counted, my post called “The MSM’s Rush Limbaugh Horror Story,” ranked first.  First is always nice, of course, but first in such an august field is something that really gets my day jump started.

(Let me say here that I know that two Weasel members couldn’t vote at all, and one only voted a little, so there was some serious vote discounting going on under the Council rules.  Nevertheless, since I’m not a math person, and don’t fully understand the complexities behind the vote count, I’m going to bask in my victory however it comes my way.)

To make things even nicer for me, the non-council submission that I nominated won too, as it should have.  That was Michael Yon’s Resistance is Futile, a truly important post about the difference between America’s Iraq coverage and the situation on the ground in Iraq — and the way in which the former has the potential to destroy everything good that’s happening regarding the latter.   (As you can see, my Weasel theme for the week was media manipulation and malfeasance, something that clearly struck a chord with other Council members.)

The second place (and third and fourth and fifth, etc) winners in each category were equally good, I thought.  On the Council side there was a tie for second.  One of the second place positions went to Big Lizard, with whose writing I’m becoming ever more enamored, for An Inconvenient Demographic Truth.  In this post, he took apart Obama’s idiotic cry of racism when it came to a DoJ official’s statistically accurate statement that, because minorities tend to die younger, systemic inequities that affect the elderly actually have less of an effect on minority elderly — because there are fewer of them.  It was a garbled and inelegant statement, but as Dafydd explains, it does not reflect racism but, in fact, its opposite, which is an almost overly strong sensibility about the situation of minorities.

The other second place went to Soccer Dad for Walking Back the Cat x 2, a lucid and fascinating analysis of the Israeli strike into Syria.  The title comes from the fact that intelligence analysts can check for internal dissension in another country by examining what was said in that country before an event and comparing it to revealed facts.  Often, this type of analysis exposes who is disaffected, who is out of the loop, who is close to power, etc.  Soccer Dad used this type of before and after comparison to expose a lot of interesting information about the Israel incursion.

On the non-council side, there was also a tie for second place.  One second place went to Daled Amos for The Niggers of Palestine, a really strong entry that shows the fallacy of equating Palestinians to African-Americans during the slave era — a fallacy that Condi Rice, herself a victim of Jim Crow segregation, seems prone to make.  The other second place went to The Pakistan Policy Blog for The Massacre at Karsaz Bridge: Analysis of the Bhutto Blast (Part 2), the title of which is self-explanatory.
The above are the top six winners, but let me say again that this was an unusually strong week of submissions.  If you’re at all looking for something to read, this is definitely the place to start.

I complained yesterday about tightly constrained, programmed Presidential candidates. I can stop complaining now. We’re about to have a candidate who says anything that comes into her head, no matter how stupid. FogCity Journal, citing “reliable sources,” says that Cynthia McKinney is planning on throwing her hat into the ring as Green Party candidate for the Presidency:

According to a reliable source, former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga) will officially announce her candidacy for U.S. president as early as next week. According to the source, the Green Party has been actively courting McKinney to switch party affiliation and run as a Green. (*)

McKinney has been outspoken about the Iraq war, AIPAC’s lobbying influence over U.S. foreign policy, the 9/11 Commission Report, and the partisan decision by a partial body of the Supreme Court to elect George W. Bush to the presidency in 2000.

She is also trumpeting the call of millions of Americans calling for the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for perpetrating war crimes against humanity.

McKinney is in San Francisco this weekend. Her schedule includes an appearance at a CodePink party tonight at El Rio, and an appearance tomorrow at a campaign rally to elect mayoral candidate Ahimsa Sumchai.

(*) Update 3:10 p.m: According to a source, McKinney officially registered as a member of the Green Party yesterday.

This should be fun, especially since I suspect that she’ll leech some moonbat energy away from the mainstream Democratic candidates.

By the way, if you haven’t been thinking about McKinney lately, let me remind you of why you’re familiar with her, when most minor former Congress people don’t cross your mental radar. She’s been in the press for:

1. Assaulting police officers.
2. She’s got a reputation for being anti-Semitic and supportive of radical Islamists. (In this, sadly, she is entirely in step with the Democratic party’s problem with anti-Semitism.)
3. She inadvertently criticized one of her aides on air, and then tried to censor the remark.
4. She’s been a Truther since at least 2002.

And there’s more and more and more, some of which is detailed in a 2002 Slate article. The bottom line is that she is a perfect reflection of the angry, extreme end of the Democratic party. Her candidacy, assuming she is able to garner some media attention, should be amusing.