Free Republic

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court served notice Friday that it may make a far-reaching change in civil rights law in 2009 and knock down a pair of long-standing rules that give special protection to minorities in the workplace and the voting booth. The justices, after meeting privately, announced they had voted to hear two cases that concern the lingering role of race in American life. The cases could put the court on a collision course with the new administration of President-elect Barack Obama. One of them arose when a Connecticut city, seeking to maintain diversity in its fire department, scrapped...

DISCRIMINATION against dominant white males will soon be encouraged in a bid to boost the status of women, the disabled and cultural and religious minorities. Such positive discrimination -- treating people differently in order to obtain equality for marginalised groups - is set to be legalised under planned changes to the Equal Opportunity Act foreshadowed last week by state Attorney-General Rob Hulls. The laws are also expected to protect the rights of people with criminal records to get a job, as long as their past misdeeds are irrelevant to work being sought.

RALEIGH, North Carolina: Enrollment of minorities in U.S. colleges has increased substantially in recent years, but not fast enough to keep up with demographic changes. Among Hispanics, a lower proportion who are in theri late 20s has completed at least a two-year degree when compared with those age 30 and older. Unless the trend is reversed, the increases in Hispanic participation in higher education won't be enough to ensure that a growing proportion earn a college degree. The findings are highlighted in a biennial report to be released Thursday by the American Council on Education, supported by the GE Foundation....

It's kind of hard to talk about affirmative action in college admissions when you have a black man from the Ivy League leading in the home stretch of the race for the nation's presidency. How much more proof of equal opportunity do we need? But I was alarmed last month by the stance of a UCLA political science professor who resigned from the school's admissions committee because he suspects that "cheating" on the admissions process accounts for the recent jump in blacks. He quit in protest after UCLA officials, citing privacy concerns, declined to give him access to student applications...

SEATTLE, WA (September 24, 2008) – Washington Mutual, Inc. (NYSE:WM), one of the nation’s leading banks for consumers and small businesses, has once again been recognized as a top employer by Hispanic Business magazine and the Human Rights Campaign. Hispanic Business magazine recently ranked WaMu sixth in its annual Diversity Elite list, which names the top 60 companies for Hispanics. The company was honored specifically for its efforts to recruit Hispanic employees, reach out to Hispanic consumers and support Hispanic communities and organizations. The Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil rights organization, also...

SEATTLE, WA (September 24, 2008) – Washington Mutual, Inc. (NYSE:WM), one of the nation’s leading banks for consumers and small businesses, has once again been recognized as a top employer by Hispanic Business magazine and the Human Rights Campaign. **snip** The Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil rights organization, also awarded WaMu its second consecutive 100 percent score in the organization’s 2009 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which measures progress in attaining equal rights for GLBT employees and consumers. WaMu joins the ranks of 259 other major U.S. businesses that also received top marks...

Referencing my column yesterday on illegal immigration and the mortgage mess, Hans Bader at Open Market shares his experience. I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails with similar stories. Tip of the iceberg: When I and my wife, a legal alien, bought our house, the mortgage company told me that if my wife were an illegal alien, rather than legal, we would have qualified for certain loan programs with big banks. But because she was a legal alien waiting for her green-card (which she had recently applied for), we didn’t qualify. Mark Krikorian, an activist against illegal immigration, argues that...

This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone September 19-22, 2008, among a random national sample of 1,082 adults, 916 registered voters and 780 likely voters. The survey includes additional interviews with randomly selected African Americans, for a total of 163 black respondents. The added interviews (commonly referred to as an "oversample") were completed to ensure there were enough African American respondents for separate analysis; the group was not over-represented in the reported results from the full sample. The results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Error margins...

THEY GAVE YOUR MORTGAGE TO A LESS QUALIFIED MINORITY September 24, 2008 On MSNBC this week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter tried to connect John McCain to the current financial disaster, saying: "If you remember the Keating Five scandal that (McCain) was a part of. ... He's really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country." McCain was "in the middle of" the Keating Five case in the sense that he was "exonerated." The lawyer for the Senate Ethics Committee wanted McCain removed from the investigation altogether, but,...

DENVER This year's Colorado ballot is loaded with high-profile initiatives on hot-button issues, the kind that tend to stir passions, mobilize voters and swing elections. It's even possible that the ballot - which includes measures on abortion, labor unions, education and affirmative action - could determine the outcome of the presidential contest in Colorado. But not probable, say political analysts.

Ghosts from civil rights era are fading away OXFORD -- University of Mississippi Chancellor Robert Khayat is well aware of the significance of the nation's first black presidential nominee, Democrat Barack Obama, arriving this week on the same campus where James Meredith broke the color barrier in 1962. When the international media spotlight returns for the Friday debate, the chancellor knows questions about race will come from the expected 3,000 members of the media. Feeling confident about the work the school has done in recent years, Khayat believes many journalists with opinions of the university forged by the riot...

The Cornell Review controversy over printing an article about campus “ghettos,” “bitter minorities” and affirmative action became even more pronounced yesterday when students proposed a resolution to the Student Assembly to ban the use of the Cornell name by the biweekly journal’s title. The article, “What to Expect: The Angry Minority,” said students in program houses — only at Cornell because of affirmative action and scholarships — complain about brutal oppression from “whitey.” Students Nikhil Kumar ’11, minority representative-at-large, and Nicole Rivera ’09, president of the Minority Business Student Association, brought the resolution to the table. “As a student here...

For the past 30 years I've been a Black guy in America. When a person is born black, male, to a single mother, living in Harlem, at the lower end of the tax bracket, in 1978, well society didn't have very high expectations. Nonethless there I am floating in a pool at the condo that I own in Boulder, CO. Not to say that I am some pinnacle of success and prosperity, I asure you that is not the case, but if a stock beat market expectations by such a large margin, and still only cost $10 a share, well...

Government professor Lisa L. Martin, who served as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' first diversity dean and chair of the Standing Committee on Women, has left Harvard for the University of Wisconsin at Madison, criticizing Dean of the Faculty Michael D. Smith's commitment to hiring minority and female professors on her way out. As a leader of female and minority recruitment, Martin compiled and released two reports on hiring. Her first report raised alarm when it found that the female tenure rate in 2005-2006 had fallen to 21 percent - half the rate of the previous year. Martin started...

Candidates who are willing to say "enough is enough" on these matters - and related ones such as affirmative action - are likely to find that they have tapped into an undercurrent of discontent that can sweep them along towards victory in November. More importantly in the long run, they will also find themselves at the forefront of the defence of American liberty in regards to freedom of speech, academic freedom, freedom of worship and parental rights. In other words, they will be doing the right thing.

PERHAPS the greatest scandal of the mortgage crisis is that it is a direct result of an intentional loosening of underwriting standards - done in the name of ending discrimination, despite warnings that it could lead to wide-scale defaults.

Charlotte, N.C. — Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden says electing a black person to the White House would be transformative. Biden, campaigning in Charlotte, said Sunday that choosing a black candidate would be a "transformative event in American politics and internationally." His running mate, Barack Obama, seeks to be the first black president in the United States. Biden said Obama's policies make his presidency even more transformative. North Carolina hasn't voted for a Democrat in three decades but has a large black population galvanized by Obama's candidacy. Both Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain have been airing television...

Dayton may be sued for lack of minorities in police department DAYTON — City Commissioner Dean Lovelace said he has learned the U.S. Department of Justice may sue Dayton over the city's historical lack of minorities in its police department. Lovelace said if it solves the problem by quickly identifying solutions, he welcomes it. There are 35 black officers out of the 421 in the police department, 53 women and four other, according to city records. "This has been a concern in the community for a long time," Lovelace said. Dayton City Manager Rashad Young has scheduled a 2 p.m....

In his 19 years as a law professor at UCLA, Richard Sander has pondered a nagging question: Does affirmative action help or hinder African Americans who want to become lawyers? Two years ago, he published research suggesting that racial preferences at law firms might be responsible for black lawyers' high rate of attrition and difficulty making partner. He hypothesized that in the interest of promoting diversity, law firms sometimes hired black lawyers who were underqualified, and that when there was a "credentials gap" between black and white lawyers at a firm, black lawyers often were less likely to advance and...

The violence and despair of the inner city are real. So's the problem of street crime. The longer we allow these problems to fester, the easier it becomes for white America to see all blacks as menacing and for black America to see all whites as racist. To close that gap, we're going to have to do more than denounce Mr. Murray's book. We're going to have to take concrete and deliberate action. For blacks, that means taking greater responsibility for the state of our own communities. Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior....