Free Republic

The dean of California's newest law school is suing this seaside community over its treatment of the homeless. The suit should serve as a warning to the business establishment of Orange County, Calif., -- which has poured over $24 million into the still-unopened University of California, Irvine law school -- that it is creating a litigation monster that will endanger the county's fabled quality of life. The law school will open its doors this fall. Part of its core mission is to train students in "public interest" law []. The term "public interest" law is a masterstroke of misrepresentation, since...

The noblest-sounding justification for racial preferences—that they lift up their beneficiaries—may soon be exposed as fraudulent. A group of law professors and economists examining the effect of law school admissions preferences on students’ bar-exam passage rates is suing the State Bar of California to obtain data for their study. The proposed research could deal a death blow to the quota regime by proving that affirmative action actually damages a student’s chances of becoming a lawyer. Predictably, the race industry has mobilized to crush the project.

Fight on the Right: Laura v. Heather MacDonald! - Oct 15, 2008 Heather MacDonald on Sarah Palin and Obama. It's the first link on the page linked above.

It’s funny how greed only afflicts the other guy. With John McCain jumping on the anti-avarice bandwagon, the consensus that the greed of rich Wall Street CEOs, analysts, and investors is to blame for the financial market turmoil now spans the New York Times editorial page, the Democratic punditocracy, and the highest reaches of the Republican ticket. Liberal columnists, university professors, and crusading politicians railing against market selfishness are all supremely confident that their own salaries reflect exactly their worth and not a penny more—because they would never seek to make a profit from their labor, right? It’s also axiomatic...

True, Palin brings traditional political strengths—such as gun enthusiasm and a pro-life record—to the ticket. Her fight against self-dealing in Alaskan politics counters the inside-the-Beltway corruption that damaged the Republicans in the 2006 elections. And her stance on drilling for Alaskan oil admirably bolsters the Republican Party platform on energy issues. But admit it, fellow conservatives: none of these attributes pushed her over the top. Your enthusiasm for her is driven in large measure by the fact that the McCain camp has beaten the Democrats at their own game, and in so doing, driven Obama’s moment of glory off the...

Since the late 1990s, more than 18 police commanders have left the New York City police department to run their own agencies elsewhere. This unprecedented migration has spread the Compstat revolution—the data-driven transformation of policing begun under New York police commissioner William Bratton in 1994—across the nation. Some of the transplants are well-known: Bratton himself now heads the Los Angeles Police Department; and his former first deputy, John Timoney, has led both the Miami and the Philadelphia forces. But the diaspora also includes lesser-known young Turks who rose quickly through the NYPD’s ranks during the paradigm-shattering 1990s. Now, as chiefs...

Jeremiah Wright draws on a long line of Afrocentric charlatans. The list of Afrocentric “educators” whom Reverend Jeremiah Wright has invoked in his media escapades since this Sunday is a disturbing reminder that academia’s follies can enter the public world in harmful ways. Now the pressing question is whether they have entered presidential candidate Barack Obama’s worldview as well. Some in Wright’s crew of charlatans have already had their moments in the spotlight; others are less well known. They form part of the tragic academic project of justifying self-defeating underclass behavior as “authentically black.” That their ideas have ended up...

The release of another previously classified Justice Department memo on the interrogation of terrorists (here and here) has reignited the specious “torture narrative,” propounded gleefully by Bush-administration critics. The narrative holds that the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib was the direct and even intended consequence of a set of executive-branch legal opinions on the status of terrorist detainees and the president’s wartime authority. The New York Times announced in an April 4 editorial that the latest declassified memo leaves no doubt that the “abuse of prisoners” was “calculated policy” rather than “rogue acts.” “When the abuses at Abu Ghraib became...

October 01, 2007, 6:45 a.m. Orlando Vacation from RealityWhat Patterson got wrong. By Heather Mac Donald The high incarceration rate of black males is not “solely the result of white racism,� wrote Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson in the New York Times on Sunday. Patterson’s startling admission was occasioned by the media-saturated protests two weeks ago in Jena., Louisiana, over attempted murder charges lodged against five black students who had beaten a white student unconscious. This unusual outbreak of frankness on the pages of the New York Times might seem to signal a breakthrough in the otherwise nonexistent public debate...

Mozart’s lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute’s nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano. Nor does it include masturbation, urination as foreplay, or forced oral sex. Europe’s new breed of opera directors, however, know better than Mozart what an opera should contain. So not only does the Abduction at Berlin’s Komische Oper feature the aforementioned activities; it also replaces Mozart’s graceful ending with a Quentin Tarantino–esque bloodbath and the promise of future perversion. Welcome to Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”), the style of opera direction now prevalent in Europe....

Heather MacDonald is a journalist and fellow at the Manhattan Institute. As Congress was debating details of the immigration reform bill, I talked to MacDonald by telephone from her home in New York: Q: What’s good about the Senate immigration bill? A: I think the idea of moving our immigration system to reward people who bring skills that this country needs Q: Is there a worst part of this bill that you would point to? A: The worst part is the overnight amnesty for the 12 million illegals who are here. Q: What is a sound-bite synopsis of your position...

THE LOS ANGELES City Council recently paid $593,000 for a report on how to end the city's rising gang violence. The taxpayers didn't get their money's worth. The much-ballyhooed study, directed by civil rights attorney Connie Rice, makes a whopping 100 recommendations yet can't bring itself to mention the most important driver of gang involvement — family breakdown.  "A Call to Action: A Case for a Comprehensive Solution to L.A.'s Gang Violence Epidemic" recycles all the failed nostrums from the war on poverty, such as government-created jobs, "life-skills training," "parenting education and support" and "crisis intervention." Since the 1960s,...

Proposition 187 drove Hispanics from California’s Republican party! So argue Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman in today’s Wall Street Journal, recycling one of the most cherished myths of the Open Borders Lobby. According to this nostrum, had Californians, fed up with the costs of providing free public services to illegal aliens, not voted to require legal residency to receive those services, California would today, in Bush and Mehlman’s phrase, still be “Reagan country,” its burgeoning Hispanic population reliably pulling the lever for Republicans. Too bad they didn’t read their own op-ed. No Republican presidential nominee has won California since 1988,...

To observe the sentimental fantasy and ruthless political calculation that fuels the Bush administration's immigration plans, one need only turn to Michael Gerson’s most recent Washington Post column. Former Bush speechwriter Gerson was a powerful voice in the White House, especially on the matter of injecting faith into policymaking; his May 25 column provides a window into how the administration deals with facts. Gerson accuses opponents of the Senate’s recent amnesty proposal of a nativist fear of illegal immigrants. Such a fear, he argues, will hurt the Republican party’s electoral chances and miss an opportunity to make the country even...

Mayor Mike Bloomberg has the chance to transform not just New York, but all American cities, by breaking the taboo on talking about the connection between race and crime. Doing so would take courage that no politician has yet mustered. But after the manslaughter and assault indictments of three New York police officers for fatally shooting Sean Bell last November, Bloomberg has an opening: acknowledge that police officers may react too precipitously to perceived threats in charged urban settings, in exchange for a wide-open discussion about the sky-high black crime rates that encourage that reaction. Crime, not police racism, drives...

New York’s anti-cop forces have roared back to life thanks to a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man a week ago. The press is once again fawning over Al Sharpton, Herbert Daughtry, Charles Barron, and sundry other hate-mongers in and out of city government as they accuse the police of widespread mistreatment of blacks and issue barely veiled threats of riots if they do not get “justice.” The allegation that last weekend’s shooting was racially motivated is preposterous. A group of undercover officers working in a gun- and drug-plagued strip joint in Queens had good reason to believe that...

August 23, 2006, 6:10 a.m. Religiously ArguingA response to Michael Novak. By Heather Mac Donald I am honored that Michael Novak took the time to respond (in NRO and First Things) to my article on conservatism and religious belief; I can think of no more thoughtful or knowledgeable an interlocutor.  He has spoken from his heart and his capacious mind.  And I am grateful that he has returned to the threshold question posed by the current Republican association of religion with conservatism: the truth of Christianity. If a belief system is not true, however useful it may be, it...

When Lawyers Go to WarJuly 7, 2006By HEATHER MAC DONALD Al Qaeda has not won the military battle against the U.S., but it has enjoyed legal and propaganda triumphs since 9/11 that no one would have believed possible on that tragic day. America's opinion elites have turned a scrupulously managed, medically lavish detention camp—the one at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—into a symbol of abuse or, as our Europeans friends like to say, into the very image of a "gulag." Meanwhile a handful of attorneys, challenging the detention of al Qaeda prisoners there, have altered the laws by which we are allowed...

Hispanic gang violence is spreading across the country, the sign of a new underclass in the making. Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are developing an underclass culture. Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally - rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002 - driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome, underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over successive generations of Hispanics - they worsen. Debate has recently heated up over whether Mexican...

The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave City Journal ^ | Winter 2004 | Heather Mac Donald City JournalThe Illegal-Alien Crime WaveWhy can’t our immigration authorities deport the hordes of illegal felons in our cities?Heather Mac Donald Winter 2004 Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as...

Feminist hysteria (cont.). IN THE WAKE OF THE embarrassing Harriet Miers nomination, it is time to ask: Shouldn't feminists--the source of the mandate for a female Supreme Court justice--be disqualified from any influence on public affairs? An exchange in the Yale alumni magazine provides the perfect vehicle for analyzing the lunacy of feminist ideology and its unfitness for the real world. In May, the magazine ran several articles on religion at Yale, provoked by the university's decision to sever ties between its chapel and the Congregationalist Church (now known as the United Church of Christ). The magazine's cover showed a...

The heart and soul of the Clinton/Reno Justice Department's anti-anti-terrorism scandal. An oldie, but a goodie. If you want to understand why Atta's presence was ignored a year before 911, read on. The greatest obstacle to domestic security in the war on terror is the worldview of the liberal elites. No sooner had the Twin Towers fallen than the press and an army of advocacy groups were on the hunt for victims—not of Muslim fanaticism but of American bigotry. The liberal commentariat has denounced every commonsensical measure to protect the country the Bush administration has proposed as an eruption of...

July 22, 2005, 2:13 p.m. Looking the Wrong Way New York City's new search policy is a waste. By Heather Mac Donald Time to get real: Only Muslims commit Islamic terrorism. By definition. Ask Osama bin Laden, who called on Muslims, and Muslims only, to kill Americans wherever they can find us. Yet the New York Police Department has promised that its new policy of subway bag checks will be scrupulously random. This senseless sacrifice to political correctness will waste precious police resources with little improvement in public safety. The British police have just released photos of the suspects in...

Will the civil libertarians please shut up now? If they had had their way, London’s public surveillance cameras would have been unplugged long ago, and the British police would not have quickly identified the 7/7 suicide bombers from their pictures in the King’s Cross and Luton train stations—a breakthrough crucial to tracking down other participants in the plot. The London attacks have exposed the privacy fanatics’ campaign against public cameras as folly; it is just a matter of time before reality crushes other civil libertarian excesses as well, including opposition to data mining and to immigration law enforcement. Few crime-fighting...

Real women do not separate their emotions from their reason. This is the central feminist insight propounded by legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick in a recent New York Times op-ed on Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Lithwick's op-ed demonstrates yet again that there are no more faithful proponents of the Victorian view of women than modern-day feminists. If Lithwick's analysis of echt female consciousness is correct, no president who cares about the rule of law should ever contemplate putting another woman on the Supreme Court. Justice O'Connor has a big problem, according to Slate editor Lithwick: She didn't act as a female...

Real women do not separate their emotions from their reason. This is the central feminist insight propounded by legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick in a recent New York Times op-ed on Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Lithwick's op-ed demonstrates yet again that there are no more faithful proponents of the Victorian view of women than modern-day feminists. If Lithwick's analysis of echt female consciousness is correct, no president who cares about the rule of law should ever contemplate putting another woman on the Supreme Court. Justice O'Connor has a big problem, according to Slate editor Lithwick: She didn't act as a female...

<!-- DIV#NavigationBar21LYR { position:absolute; visibility:hidden; top:0; left:0; z-index:1; } DIV#NavigationBar22LYR { position:absolute; visibility:hidden; top:0; left:0; z-index:1; } --> “City Journal is the best magazine in America.”Peggy Noonan SEARCH SITE    Harvard’s Diversity Grovel In earmarking $50 million for “diversity,” President Summers is throwing away more than money. | 3 June 2005 Harvard University has just pledged $50 million for faculty “diversity” efforts, penance for President Lawrence Summers’s public mention of sex differences in cognition. The university would have been better off hiring a top-notch conjuror, since only magic could produce a trove of previously undiscovered female and minority academic stars...

Like many women of a certain age, I have a bad habit, first learned in the 1960s and '70s. Whenever I'm in a professional setting, I count the number of women in the room. These days there are occasions when I don't have enough fingers and toes to do the job. Which brings me to the present, and an ugly little spat that is roiling the waters of opinion journalism in the same way that Lawrence Summers's comments about the dearth of women in math and science rocketed through the academy. Op-ed pages, the accepted wisdom insists, don't carry enough...

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for...

Now that the Bernard Kerik nomination has crashed and burned, President Bush should ask the next candidate for Department of Homeland Security chief the most important question for the job: Will you enforce the law against border trespassers?Nothing compromises our domestic defense against Islamic terrorism more than our failure to control who enters the country. The alien-smuggling trade is the "sea in which terrorist swim," explains David Cohen, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and an ex-CIA expert on al Qaeda.Yet fear of offending the race and rights lobbies has trumped national security at DHS. This spring, for example, Asa...

Ignored In Open-Borders Debate: Rising Cost Of Second Underclass By HEATHER MAC DONALD23 August 2004 Before immigration optimists issue another rosy prognosis for America's multicultural future, they need to confront reality: Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals from Latin America or birthright American citizens, are developing an underclass culture. Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally -- rising 50% from 1999 to 2002 -- driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome, underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not...

Taking Dictation from the ACLU A case study in anti-Patriot Act propaganda. October 18, 2004 By Heather Mac Donald IMAGINE THE New York Times writing a damning article about the Clinton administration's tax policies cribbed exclusively from a Heritage Foundation press release. Can't do it, can you? How about the Gray Lady recycling ACLU misinformation about the Patriot Act without any additional research? This time, no need to imagine anything: Both the New York Times and the Washington Post did exactly that recently and thereby published a tissue of fabrication. Both papers issued tight-lipped corrections the next day, but...

The newsweekly dramatically breaks with elite orthodoxy. The cover says it all: two fists ripping a hole in the American flag. And with that striking image, Time magazine just may have started a revolution in the mainstream press’s attitude towards illegal immigration. For decades, public outrage over illegal immigration met only scorn or indifference from the elite media. The New York Times recently dismissed opponents of border trespassing as the “ ‘what part of illegal don’t you understand’ crowd.” But with its September 20 cover story, WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN?, Time magazine has crossed over to the other side....

The Civilian Complaint Review Board — the city agency that investigates complaints against the New York police — is hoping for a windfall: Surely the protests around the Republican National Convention will bring it a whole new set of clients. Such a fabulous contingency is not something you just leave to chance, however. So the CCRB has sent out about 750 e-mails to anti-RNC groups across the world seeking their business.... The agency also posted information on the Web site of United for Peace and Justice, the umbrella organization for convention protest, on how to file complaints by dialing 311...

Why scrap a program that identified nine of the 19 hijackers? Ask civil libertarians. Even as the Bush administration warns of an imminent terror attack, it is again allowing the "rights" brigades to dictate the parameters of national defense. The administration just cancelled a passenger screening system designed to keep terrorists off planes, acceding to the demands of "privacy" advocates. The implications of this for airline safety are bad enough. But the program's demise also signals a return to a pre-9/11 mentality, when pressure from the rights lobbies trumped security common sense. The now-defunct program, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening...

City Journal The Immigrant Gang Plague Heather Mac Donald        Summer 2004 Before immigration optimists issue another rosy prognosis for America’s multicultural future, they might visit Belmont High School in Los Angeles’s overwhelmingly Hispanic, gang-ridden Rampart district. “Upward and onward” is not a phrase that comes to mind when speaking to the first- and second-generation immigrant teens milling around the school this January.“Most of the people I used to hang out with when I first came to the school have dropped out,” observes Jackie, a vivacious illegal alien from Guatemala. “Others got kicked out or got into drugs. Five graduated,...

“The news for New York City is spectacular," New York’s Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told a City Hall press conference on May 24. He and New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly [Email him] were claiming credit for new FBI crime stats showing major crimes—murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, car theft, larceny and arson—dropping 5.8% in the city in 2003. New York’s crime rate now ranks it 211th of the 230 U.S. cities with 100,000-plus population—behind Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas. Unfortunately, there must have been at least one skeptic at the press conference. Hizzoner reportedly “bristled” at suggestions that...

Irrational paranoia about computer technology threatens to shut down an entire front in the war on terror. A prestigious advisory panel has just recommended that the Defense Department get permission from a federal court any time it wants to use computer analysis on its own intelligence files. It would be acceptable, according to the panel, for a human agent to pore over millions of intelligence records looking for al Qaeda suspects who share phone numbers, say, and have traveled to terror haunts in South America. But program a computer to make that same search, declares the advisory committee, and judicial...

Immediately after 9/11, politicians and pundits slammed the Bush administration for failing to “connect the dots” foreshadowing the attack. What a difference a little amnesia makes. For two years now, left- and right-wing advocates have shot down nearly every proposal to use intelligence more effectively--to connect the dots--as an assault on “privacy.” Though their facts are often wrong and their arguments specious, they have come to dominate the national security debate virtually without challenge. The consequence has been devastating: just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction.

Governor Pataki recently proposed to make welfare reform a reality in New York. That’s why the poverty promoters in Albany are fighting him tooth and nail. The big idea behind the 1996 federal welfare reform law was this: If you want the government to support you, you have to do something in return. You must make some effort to become self-sufficient, whether through working or learning job skills or looking for work. In most of the country, that bargain holds. Not in New York. The dirty little secret of New York’s version of welfare reform is that you don’t have...

The prep-school diversity agenda could not be more destructive. Emphasizing the alleged injustices facing blacks today is a recipe for academic failure: students who believe that external factors (like discrimination) determine academic outcomes work less hard, and are more easily discouraged, than students who believe success results from effort and ability. Achieving students, several studies have found, are optimists who subscribe to the work ethic. Those who complain loudest about inadequate multiculturalism in their classes are the underachievers. As the diversity bureaucrats admit, many minority students reach high school believing in equal opportunity. It makes no sense to convince them...

Times' 'Abuse' Hooey July 28, 2003 By Heather Mac Donald DRIVEN by a precipitate lust to discredit the Bush administration, The New York Times has misread a recent Justice Department report on alleged government abuse of terror suspects. More important, the front-page smear job set off a chain reaction of imitation news articles across the country, parroting the Times' error. Thus has the war on the war on terror been waged - with misrepresentation, group thinking and blinding biases. The Times announced on July 21 that the Justice Department's inspector general had "received 34 complaints of civil rights violations by...

THE fatal shooting of Timothy Stansbury Jr., by an NYPD officer is a calamity for Stansbury's family and a stain on the police department. Officer Richard Neri shot the unarmed 19-year-old while patrolling the roof of a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project late last Saturday night. Neri and his partner went to open a door when it unexpectedly flew open, sending Neri's partner reeling backwards. Startled, Neri shot Stansbury, who was standing on the other side. Politicians and community leaders are right to demand a review of police holstering policies - Neri was patrolling with his gun unholstered - to prevent such...

<p>THE fatal shooting of Timothy Stansbury Jr., by an NYPD officer is a calamity for Stansbury's family and a stain on the police department. Officer Richard Neri shot the unarmed 19-year-old while patrolling the roof of a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project late last Saturday night. Neri and his partner went to open a door when it unexpectedly flew open, sending Neri's partner reeling backwards. Startled, Neri shot Stansbury, who was standing on the other side.</p>

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for...

You can't solve a problem no one will talk about. A RECENT PSEUDO-SCANDAL at the Justice Department is yet another depressing reminder of intractable racial taboos--although not the kind we usually hear about from hand-wringing pundits and civil-rights scolds. At the end of October, the New York Times accused the Justice Department of covering up a study critical of its "diversity" hiring and management. The department had posted the study--a $360,000 piece of boilerplate from the diversity-consulting industry--on its website. About half the text had been very visibly blacked out. Among the redacted portions, gleefully reported on the Times's front...

<p>January 16, 2004 -- PRESIDENT Bush's proposal to legalize the country's 10 or so million illegal aliens rests on a fallacy: that immigration enforcement has failed to stem the tide of illegal aliens. Therefore, the argument goes, amnesty is the only solution to the illegal-alien crisis.</p>

<p>January 16, 2004 -- PRESIDENT Bush's proposal to legalize the country's 10 or so million illegal aliens rests on a fallacy: that immigration enforcement has failed to stem the tide of illegal aliens. Therefore, the argument goes, amnesty is the only solution to the illegal-alien crisis.</p>

The anti–racial profiling juggernaut has finally met its nemesis: the truth. According to a new study, black drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike are twice as likely to speed as white drivers, and are even more dominant among drivers breaking 90 miles per hour. This finding demolishes the myth of racial profiling. Precisely for that reason, the Bush Justice Department tried to bury the report so the profiling juggernaut could continue its destructive campaign against law enforcement. What happens next will show whether the politics of racial victimization now trump all other national concerns. Until now, the anti-police crusade that...

Straight Talk on Homeland SecurityBy Heather MacDonaldCity Journal | August 11, 2003 The backlash against the Bush administration’s War on Terror began on 9/11 and has not let up since. Left- and right-wing advocacy groups have likened the Bush administration to fascists, murderers, apartheid ideologues, and usurpers of basic liberties. Over 120 cities and towns have declared themselves “civil liberties safe zones”; and the press has amplified at top volume a recent report by the Justice Department’s inspector general denouncing the government’s handling of suspects after 9/11. Even the nation’s librarians are shredding documents to safeguard their patrons’ privacy and...