ELSEWHERE

Steve Sailer too has some skeptical comments about Sowell's view that black culture is "redneck": "Yet, when we talk of "redneck culture" today, such as country music and Nashville, we are largely talking of Scotch-Irish culture. And the Scotch-Irish generally stayed away from the blacks. They went to the Appalachian and Ozark highlands where disease was less of a problem for Europeans than in the lowland South. Moreover, the Scotch-Irish disliked having to compete with slave labor and tobacco and cotton slave plantations were uneconomical in the highlands. Today, the state with the least educated whites is the prototypical hillbilly state of West Virginia, which had so few slaveowners that it seceded from Virginia and joined the Union during the Civil War. Other Scotch-Irish redneck states like Tennessee and Oklahoma have limited black populations, too..... Of course, the least-discussed cultural influence on African-Americans is also the most obvious: Africa.... Perhaps the biggest social problem of African-Americans, as reflected in the very high illegitimacy rate, is that the culture they brought with them from Africa is one of low paternal investment. America's dominant culture had largely succeeded in inculcating monogamy and bring-home-the-bacon norms in blacks by about 1960, when it suddenly lost its self-confidence and began funding, via AFDC, the traditional African tendency toward mothers supporting their children without much support from their fathers....."

Star Parker on black disadvantage: "The National Urban League recently released its "State of Black America" report for 2005.... Few will be surprised to learn that blacks earn less, own less, are unemployed more, live shorter lives, attend worse schools and are more likely to be convicted of a crime and be sent to prison. How, according to the League, should blacks handle this deficit in equality they continue to experience? .... The report lists 10 "prescriptions" for change. Eight of them are government programs. Of the other two, one suggests blacks should tithe and volunteer more, and the other admonishes blacks to "focus on savings, investing and estate planning." .... There is barely a hint in the League report that black problems might have anything to do with things other than politics. Here are some gaps between white and black America that the study does not see relevant to report: 48 percent of black families vs. 82 percent of white families are headed by married couples; 43 percent of black families vs. 13 percent of white families are headed by a woman with no spouse; Black women are three times more likely than white women to have an abortion; 70 percent of black babies vs. 23 percent of white babies are born to unwed mothers; Whereas blacks represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 50 percent of new AIDS cases. The gaps that the National Urban League reports are gaps in symptoms and results. These gaps show the causes"

Sowell on judges: "The future of the legal and political system of this country may be on the line when two judicial nominees that the Democrats refused to let the Senate vote on in the last Congress are being again submitted for a vote.... This is not about two people being nominated to be federal judges. It is about the whole role of judges in a self-governing republic. The voters' votes mean less and less as time goes by, when judges take more and more decisions out of the hands of elected officials and substitute their own policy preferences, all under the guise of "interpreting" laws. Judges who decide cases on the basis of the plain meaning of the words in the laws -- like Justices Brown and Owen -- may be what most of the public want but such judges are anathema to liberals. The courts are the last hope for enacting the liberal agenda because liberals cannot get enough votes to control Congress or most state legislatures. Unelected judges can cut the voters out of the loop and decree liberal dogma as the law of the land.... An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the law. Nor is the rule of judges the same as the rule of law. Too often it is the rule of lawlessness from the bench."

The furious cries of the American Left about perfectly legal and routine conservative appointments to the Supreme Court ring very hollow when one rembembers that the great hero of the American Left -- FDR -- tried to do far worse: "FDR's revolutionary New Deal plan encountered two big problems: The Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court. When cases challenging the NIRA and the AAA reached the Supreme Court, it held both laws in violation of the Constitution. During Roosevelt's first term, the Court ruled that other parts of his radical economic scheme were unconstitutional as well. Elected by a landslide in 1936, Roosevelt did not intend to let those "nine old men" on the Supreme Court interfere with his transformation of American life.... he came up with a shortcut plan designed to circumvent the constitutional-amendment process and the Supreme Court decisions against his New Deal.... FDR's plan requested Congress to permit the president to appoint an additional Supreme Court justice for every justice over 70 years of age, thereby expanding the size of the Court. By enabling him to appoint new justices who were committed to his economic philosophy, Roosevelt figured that the newly aligned Court would start voting in his favor. Despite his enormous popularity, the American people, to their everlasting credit, rose up in arms against Roosevelt's "court-packing scheme" and, as a result, the Congress failed to enact it. Americans didn't like their president tampering with their constitutional order."

And as Reliapundit says: "Powerline has done a great job of exposing a major MSM flip-flop about the utility/advisability of the FILIBUSTER. Viking pundit adds a link to another NYT whopper. And Powerline gets a Senator. Michelle Malkin has a list of other folks who conveniently change their values when it suits their narrow partisan aims. Bottom-line: Filibusters are NOT protected by - or even mentioned in the Constitution, and they were once scorned by the Left. The Left cannot get away with lying about this."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual big range of select reading.

In my latest quote on MARXWORDS we see that Engels welcomed world war.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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