Monthly Archives: October 2014

Blame Game

Posted on by
Reply

President Barack Obama has some skin in this one.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, on Wednesday continued to advance on the strategic city, despite intensifying if still limited American airstrikes. And if Kobani falls, the White House is already blaming “our partner and friend” Turkey.

A senior Obama Administration official headlined a leading story in Wednesday’s New York Times about American frustration with Turkish “inaction” in Syria. “There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border,” this anonymous official said. “This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border.”

Blaming others for the existence of problems is all that this President knows how to do. He has no concept of actually tackling those problems; he has no concept of responsibility beyond the premise that responsibility always is someone else’s.

(Never mind, too, that this isn’t a NATO fight, anyway, unless Obama or his carefully anonymous “official” can name a member that’s been attacked by ISIS. Turkey’s obligation flows from its moral obligation—as does ours—and Turkey’s proximity.)

If Obama and his cronies in State and Defense spent half as much energy on fighting ISIS as they spend blaming others for not, the US already would have crushed these terrorists.

On the other hand,

If Mr Obama wants Turkey to help avoid a massacre, he should get on the phone and press for a joint military operation, reassuring Mr Erdogan that the US military will back up Turkish forces against ISIS, even if it means ground forces. This is what real wartime leadership would look like.

But that would require Obama and his administration to be able to be trusted. It cannot be.

Another…Ally

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote earlier about the behavior of one of our purported Middle East allies. This is another example of that one’s un-ally-like behavior.

Kurdish protesters in Turkey demanding a show of force against Islamic State instead felt their government’s heavy boot Tuesday, as rubber bullets and tear gas rained down and heavy trucks rolled in to major cities where people took to the streets to decry the fall of the Syrian border city of Kobani.

As many as 19 people were killed around the nation in clashes with police over the government’s unwillingness to aid Kurds trapped in Kobani, a Syrian city a stone’s throw from the border and under siege by Islamic State.

And

[W]hile US-led fighter planes have led a Western coalition in bombing runs in an effort to halt Islamic State’s advance, Turkish troops have remained massed on the border.

Turkey seems perfectly happy to let ISIS do its thing if it means the Turks get to burn, or see burned, the Kurds.

A Thought on Disparate Impact

Posted on by
Reply

Disparate impact is the theory that a policy, or standard, or… is inherently racist if it has an outcome that impacts one group of Americans more than it does other groups of Americans, regardless of any racist intent. If the standard simply affects one group more than another, it must be racist (sexist). Let’s take as an example for this article student discipline in our grade schools. Disparate impact says that discipline standards that result in more black students being disciplined than white students must be racist, even if the discipline is meted out to members of both groups for the same misbehavior, with either no exceptions or identical exceptions allowed.

Let’s unroll that a ways.

Why are more black students disciplined than white? Because they misbehave more often.

Well, why do they misbehave more often? One major reason is lack of discipline at home—lack of home bringin’ up in the parlance of my youth. Either these kids don’t know how to behave at school, or they’re used to getting away with misbehavior.

Why is there that lack? A major reason for this is the higher incidence of broken homes—single parents (usually, single mothers)—in black homes than in white homes. Another reason, closely related, is the greater poverty in black homes than in white, which drives and is driven by that single parent status: the (mother) is occupied with trying to bring in enough money to support her family and lacks both time and energy at the end of her day to deal with her children.

Why is there that difference in poverty? Certainly, racism plays a part at this origin of the students’ behavior problems: the black mother is less likely to be able to get a job at all than is the white mother otherwise similarly situated solely because the one is black and the other is white.

But there’s another major source for this origin. Government welfare policies, with their attendant welfare cliffs, both encourage dependency on government (even to the point of eliminating welfare work requirements that had been in place since the early Clinton years) and make it extremely expensive to move up an income ladder that’s based on earned income. This traps welfare recipients in their poverty, which traps those single-parent families in their poverty, which traps those single parents in their time and fatigue cycle, which severely harms those parents’ capacity for teaching their children behavior standards—giving them that home bringin’ up—which leaves those children more likely to misbehave in school, which exposes those children to disciplinary action by the school.

But the Left doesn’t want to address the disparate impact of that origin—their welfare programs. Or acknowledge that what’s being illuminated by disparate impact is not racism or sexism, but an underlying failure of existing policy. Not at all.

And so, not only do we have the disparate impact of government policy, the remaining true racism that interferes with a black mother’s ability to get a job is obscured and made more difficult to address directly.

Born in Jerusalem Means Born in Israel?

Posted on by
Reply

There is a case on the Supreme Court’s docket this session (which began Monday) that can be summarized thusly:

Born in Jerusalem: The case of an American born in Jerusalem who wants his passport to list his birthplace as Israel underlies a major dispute between Congress and the president, with Middle Eastern politics as the backdrop. The United States has never recognized any nation’s sovereignty over Jerusalem, believing the city’s status should be resolved in peace negotiations. The administration says a 2002 law passed by Congress allowing Israel to be listed as the birthplace of Jerusalem-born Americans would in essence be seen as a US endorsement of Israeli control of the city.

This should be a no-brainer, and it never should have reached this point.

“The Administration” signed the bill into law; it wasn’t merely “passed by Congress.” If the President didn’t like the way it would be perceived by foreign nations, he should have vetoed it, instead.

The courts cannot rule on American domestic law on the basis of how foreign nations might perceive the thing. The courts can only rule on what the law says, in its context—which is domestic. Even at that, what the law says must be primary.

Perceptions of the law by foreign nations are matters of politics not of law, as the separate existences of Articles I and III in our Constitution make clear. The courts have nothing to say on matters of politics.

Finally, if the present administration—or the present Congress, come to that—no longer believe this law to be appropriate in any way, including because of foreign nations’ perceptions, those two should work together on this purely political matter to alter or rescind it. Resorting to the courts is inappropriate and a waste of judicial (and Congressional and administration) resources.

(Aside: that neither Congress nor the President should worry overmuch about foreign opinion when considering American laws is a separate matter.)

Another summary of the case, which gives an outline of its legal history, is here. In my view, the district court, as summarized by this link, erred in both of its rulings. Having held originally, the matter was a non-justiciable political question, the judge should have required State to follow the law. The court was not equipped to rule otherwise, since it had not found the law “illegitimate,” which is to say unconstitutional.

The judge’s second error, when told (correctly) by the Supremes to quit waffling and make a decision, was to rule the relevant section of the law to be an unconstitutional interference with the President’s sole authority to recognize foreign states. Of course, the section does no such thing; it merely accepts that Jerusalem is a part of Israel. The President’s recognition power is unaffected.

A Thought on Gerrymandering Congressional Districts

Posted on by
Reply

This is triggered by a summary of a case that’s before the Supreme Court in the just-started Court session.

Alabama redistricting: Democrats and black lawmakers contend that Republican leaders in Alabama drew a new legislative map that illegally packed black voters into too few voting districts to limit minority political power. Republicans say they complied with the law by keeping the same number of districts in which black voters could elect candidates of their choice.

This question should be irrelevant today.

Instead, we should have square districts, except where the district abuts a state border (perhaps, also, where a small part of a district would be on the other side of a natural barrier, like a river, with no nearby path across/around the barrier). Political districts should be drawn without regard to the population encompassed.

There should be no special treatment for one group of Americans over another; this accomplishes nothing beyond harming the groups denied the same special treatment. There should be no differential treatment under law for one group of Americans compared to any other; this accomplishes nothing beyond harming the groups denied that same differential treatment. The 14th Amendment makes this clear, as if it’s not morally so, already.

Especially, there should be no special political district shapes carved to accommodate, or to disaccommodate, one group or another. We each have one vote, of equal value to each other vote, regardless of our skin color or ethnicity. We are, after all, each equal to another before God and law. We are, after all, each of us Americans; in this this political, legal, religious context, there are no relevant distinctions among us. Full stop.

As a Supreme Court Justice already has recognized, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.