Daily Archives: 10 January 2014

Obama’s Global Policy

Posted on by
1

There has been much discussion concerning the motivation behind President Barack Obama’s major foreign policy initiatives; Power Line has offered a useful summary and links (which should be followed).  PL then offered its own view from that summary:

In my view, the deeper source of Obama’s strong tilt towards Iran is the same as the one that caused his “reset” with Russia, his early cozying up to Assad, and his support for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  That source is an attraction to anti-American strongmen, a familiar phenomenon among American leftists for the better part of a century.

Given the outcomes of Obama’s initiatives (and of his other moves, particularly vis-à-vis Israel), that’s certainly a plausible view, and I don’t entirely disagree with it.

However, I also don’t think that’s all there is to it, and I don’t think that’s even a major part of Obama’s motivation.  I think his motivation is (nearly) entirely domestic.

He spent most of his first administration ramming through Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, and he has been pushing for his version of immigration reform and his version of various welfare programs, and he’s had to fight with the minority party every step of the way.

I think he knew that would be the case from the jump—as far back as his community organizing days and his time in the Illinois Senate.  I think he just wanted to reach accords—any accords—with our major adversaries and outright enemies so he could back burner external affairs and focus on his domestic agenda.

Recall that his first foreign policy initiative was bringing about America’s surrender to the Russians concerning our now functionally scrapped ability to defend ourselves against missile attack—Iran’s or Russia’s.  Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, terrorist organizations, the EU, etc, etc, etc were, and are, just additional distractions from his domestic imperatives, and that’s why his external policies have been so poorly thought out and hastily executed.  This also explains his choice of State Department Secretaries—shallow thinkers who won’t distract him too much with external initiative wants or needs.

He’s given those and his Secretaries all of the attention that distractions get.

A New Phase

Posted on by
Reply

…in the Obama administration’s war on education.

The DoJ and the Department of Education have sent out another of their Dear Colleague letters, this time concerning the disparate impact of punishing minority students in our public schools.  Investor’s Business Daily summarized the letter,

Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Wednesday issued “recommendations” urging schools to find ways to avoid suspending or expelling students who act out.  …

The two Cabinet members argued that suspensions deny minority students time in the classroom….

And suspensions of “majority” students don’t have the same effect?  No, that’s not Eric Holder’s and Arne Duncan’s argument.  They argued in their 32 pg letter that “minority” students get the treatment disproportionately—disparately.  Never mind that these students misbehave…disparately.

The danger of applying this pernicious and racist disparate impact meme is clearly identified by Commissioner Gail Heriot of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in her remarks on the Commission’s School Discipline and Disparate Impact report:

There are two sides to the “disparate impact” coin.  Secretary Duncan focuses only upon the fact that, as a group, African-American students are suspended and expelled more often than other students.  By failing to consider the other side of the coin—that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms—his policy could easily end up doing more harm than good to the very group he is attempting to help.

Indeed.  This disparate impact policy on school discipline will have a disparate impact on minority students’ ability to get an education in a classroom full of disparate impact-protected misbehavers.  All while carefully ignoring the underlying causes of one group having a higher misbehavior rate than another group.

More, a footnote in Heriot’s remarks also hints at the fundamental lawlessness of the Obama administration [emphasis added]:

4 [page 98 of the report, the same page as the portion of Heriot’s remarks quoted above] I agree with Commissioner Gaziano that Title VI simply does not permit the Department of Education to proceed against schools on a disparate impact theory and that the Department’s regulation nonetheless adopting that theory, 34 CFR sec. 100.3, is therefore unauthorized by law.  It requires actual discrimination.  See Section 601 (Title VI) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 USC sec. 2000d (No person shall “on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”).  See also Alexander v Sandoval, 532 US 275 (2001). I also agree with Commissioner Gaziano that the problem with disparate impact analysis is not simply that it goes beyond what Congress authorized in Title VI; it actually contradicts Title VI.  If one group receives more school discipline than another because (for whatever reason) its members violated more school rules than the other, race-conscious efforts to alter the “disparate impact” are usually themselves discriminatory.

Sadly, this phase, in addition to denying minority students access to their education, is also another example of the unconscious racism of the Left.