Digesting the sweeping Democrat/Left triumph involved in Thursday night’s Hate Crime Bill vote is not a happy experience.

For one thing every single Democrat not literally on their death beds (like Byrd and Kennedy) voted for it. What amazing pressure the other side must have exerted! After all, this was actually a vote on an extremely dubious legislative stratagem – not directly on the merits of the bill itself, questionable though they are.

This terminates my interest in Jim Webb (D-Va), despite Peter Brimelow’s personal affection for him.

Secondly, a fifth of the Republicans dodged the vote. Inside-the-Beltway creep Lindsay Graham (Establishment-SC) was to be expected: but what happened to Alexander and Corker from Tennessee?

Illustrating how bad S.909 (now part of S.1390, the Department of Defense Authorization Act) is one can invoke, amazingly, the ACLU:

The American Civil Liberties Union believes that without the speech and association protections included in the House bill, the Senate hate crimes legislation could have a chilling effect on constitutionally protected speech and membership…Unless amended to block evidence of speech and association not specifically related to a crime, the Senate hate crimes amendment could chill constitutionally protected speech and association. An otherwise unremarkable violent crime should not become a federal hate crime simply because the defendant visited the wrong website, belonged to a group espousing bigotry, or subscribed to a magazine promoting discriminatory views.

Hat Tip, TalkLeft

The Liberty Counsel group believes the fight is not lost.

I hope they are right.

You have to feel a little sorry for Sonia Sotomayor. Here she’s spent all these years giving speeches about what she believes to boring little Diversity colloquia. And now she finally gets on the big stage … and her P.R. handlers tell her she has to dissemble about everything closest to her heart, that if the public knew what she really stood for she might not get ultimate power. (“Trust us, Sonia, it worked for Obama, didn’t it?”)

And, then, some Republicans, surprisingly, grow a bit of a spine and make her repudiate all her best zinger lines … over and over and over.

It had to have been humiliating for her. And she probably figures that when she finally gets on the Supreme Court, now Scalia will mock her by quoting constantly her testimony back to her. “Of course, we all know where Madame Justice stands on this issue; as she so eloquently put it during her colloquy with Senator Kyl etc. etc.,” while Alito chuckles and Thomas does that thing where he just stares at you like you are the most boring waste of time ever.

Seriously, as deficient as these hearings were in various respects, they were still better than the utterly innocuous questioning that Obama bathed in during the 2008 election campaign, when the only man to stand up and speak truth to (future) power was Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Obama spent 20 months running for President without anybody reading to him from his own memoir.

We need Presidential candidates to be subjected to more hostile questioning by truly hostile, well-informed individuals. Presidential debate cross-questioning is lame because candidates can’t afford to be too hostile or probe too deeply. And moderators are useless at hostile questioning because they are supposed to be moderate.

I’d never thought about it much before, but reading Stephen Hunter’s nonfiction book American Gunfight about the two Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists who came close to assassinating Harry Truman in his bedroom in 1950 turned me into a Puerto Rican nationalist.

Seriously, why does America rule a populous Spanish-speaking island in the Caribbean?

It’s just a leftover from the era of Teddy Rooseveltian American imperialism, a war prize from the Spanish-American War of 1898. It’s hard to figure out from Googling around why the U.S. government ever wanted Puerto Rico. (more…)

William Saletan in Slate has a good article, Mortal Skin: Race, Genes, and Cancer, about how blacks are more likely to die of three sex-related cancers (breast, ovarian, and prostate) than whites, even when researchers statistically hold all else equal.

But, Saletan goes on to make his usual argument that “race is a rough, transitional category:” (more…)

Well funded ethnic hucksters continue to batter their heads against the wall of Hispanic culture’s traditional aversion to education. (Only 9.6 percent of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans get a post-high-school degree compared with 45.1 percent of all Americans.)

Mentors show Hispanic youths college possible, San Francisco Chronicle, July 17, 2009

Ashley Vegara, a 16-year-old who says her older sister dropped out of college after getting pregnant, vows she will become the first in her family to get a bachelor’s degree.

To achieve her goal, Vegara of Roswell, attended a four-day Hispanic Youth Symposium this week designed to boost dismal nationwide statistics on how many Hispanic students graduate from college.

The Hispanic College Fund is organizing six symposiums this summer on college campuses in Albuquerque, Baltimore, Dallas, Fairfax, Vir., Los Angeles and Fresno, Calif., and plans to expand the program next summer.

Only 7.2 percent of Hispanics received bachelor’s degrees compared with 72 percent of white students in 2005-2006, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s most recent statistics on college graduation rates.

College? The do-gooders should start with getting Hispanics to graduate from high school since around half do not. And speak English.

The preceding article reminded me of a Richmond High School girl who had the desire to advance but was unclear that scholastic requirements were involved. While Iris strongly believed she was entitled to go to college, she was unable to pass California’s easy 10th grade English test needed to graduate from high school: Exit exam a test of determination [San Francisco Chronicle, Feb 27, 2006].

“I need a diploma,” said Iris, a chestnut-haired girl who was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the Mexican state of Jalisco. “I want it. I deserve it. I’ve been going to school and studying. I want to have a profession.”

Iris said all of this in Spanish. She returned to California in 2004 after the grandmother she’d been living with in Mexico died. Now she lives with her Spanish-speaking mother in an apartment near Richmond High in the West Contra Costa Unified School District.

Iris’ English is so iffy that pronouncing the words makes her blush. When pressed, she easily identified a shrimp but was stumped by a spoon. Asked by a reporter to write something in English, Iris crafted several simple sentences, including, “I was born in the United States,” and “I think that the exit exam is innecesary.”

Meanwhile, Asians come to America and make good use of the educational opportunities available to young people. Forty-eight percent of Chinese living in America have graduated from college, and well paid mentors don’t seem necessary given the Confucian cultural emphasis on hard work and scholarship.

Peter Brimelow was on the Mark & Jim Show, Salinas, Cal., KION 1460 AM recently, and since they don’t stream over the internet, here’s an MP3 of the interview, in which he discusses the Sotomayor hearings, and the questions they didn’t ask.

When I wrote below that the hate crimes bill had passed, the issue at the time was could they sleaze it through onto the Defense Authorization Bill, which they did, giving it a clear shot, since Obama isn’t going to veto a hate crimes bill on principle, because he doesn’t have that kind of principle.

So, I thought, it’s inevitable, once it’s attached to the Defense Bill, because who could be opposed to national defense? Barack Hussein Obama, that’s who!

According to Liberty Counsel,

Hate Crimes Amendment Will Face More Hurdles After Passing Senate in Late Night Vote
Senator Harry Reid’s bullying tactics paved the way for the Senate to pass the so-called Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act as an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill late last night. The cloture vote taken late last night was 63-28, with every Democrat voting for the amendment, except Senators Byrd (WV) and Kennedy (MA), who were not present. Approval of the cloture motion meant that the hate crimes amendment was adopted.

The hate crimes amendment will not become law unless the $680 billion Defense Authorization bill passes and the amendment is reconciled with the version of the hate crimes bill passed by the House. The Senate Defense Authorization bill includes funding for F-22 jets. President Obama has threatened to veto the Defense bill if it funds the F-22.

I confess I didn’t know how judges were appointed in Florida, but it turns out that in an attempt to take politics out of the process, they’re appointed from a list produced by a judicial nominating commission drawn from members of the bar. One such commission produced a list of six white candidates, and Governor Charlie Crist refused to make an appointment from it. This is exactly the same fact pattern we saw in Ricci, where after they got the results of the test and found that no blacks had passed it, they threw it out. Florida Supreme Court Justice Jorge Labarga, (“second Cuban-American justice on Florida Supreme Court” )said that Crist’s attempt to discriminate was “well-intentioned”–but not allowed by Florida’s constitution. Nor, according to Justice Alito, by the American Constitution.

Fla. Justices: Crist Can’t Reject White Judge Nominees

Thursday, July 2, 2009 2:25 PM

Newsmax.com

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Supreme Court says Gov. Charlie Crist can’t reject an all-white list of appeals court nominees, even though he wants to appoint someone who will make the judiciary more diverse.

The justices unanimously ruled Thursday that the Florida Constitution leaves Crist no choice but to pick one of the six white candidates submitted by a judicial nominating commission.

Crist refused to make an appointment to the Daytona Beach court after the commission refused to give him a more diverse slate. The 10-member court has no black judges.

Crist said he was disappointed by the ruling but respected it.

Justice Jorge Labarga wrote that the high court applauded Crist’s “well-intentioned” interest in promoting diversity, but that the governor could not refuse making an appointment

Via American Renaissance, who didn’t believe the story about “French youths” for a moment–in the 241 words reproduced below, the only words that even hint that these French youths are black and Arab are the last two, “ethnic minorities.” And even at that, they don’t actually say that the car-burners are members of minorities themselves–the could theoretically be white French communists. But they aren’t:

French youths burn cars on eve of Bastille Day
Over 300 cars were burnt and 13 police officers injured on the eve of the Bastille Day.
AFP / Expatica, July 14, 2009

Paris – French youths burned 317 cars and wounded 13 police officers overnight during the now traditional bout of street violence on the eve of the Bastille Day national holiday, police said Tuesday.

(more…)

The Hate Crime Bill has passed–five Republicans voted for it. According to The Hill,

Five Republican senators joined Democrats in supporting the bill: Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Richard Lugar (Ind.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and George Voinovich (Ohio).

I checked to see if these were thes same Republicans who  voted that Bill Clinton was not guilty of perjury or obstruction of justice, and two them were–Collins and Snowe. Jim Jeffords and Arlen Specter were also Republicans who voted to acquit Clinton, but they’re not Republicans anymore, and Specter voted–with every single Democrat in the Senate–for passage of the hate crimes bill.