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Diversity: The Invention of a Concept Hardcover – by Peter Wood

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Diversity: The Invention of a Concept February 25, 2003
by Peter Wood (Author)
Peter Wood traces the birth and evolution of diversity, illuminating how it came to sprawl across politics, law, education, business, entertainment, personal aspiration, religion and the arts as an encompassing claim about human identity.

The issue of affirmative action is now being revisited by the Supreme Court after evaluating the pros and cons of renewing it after 25 years. Read this book to see how it was conceived, legislated and implemented and what happened to some of the prominent challenges such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, case decided in 1978 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court held in a closely divided decision that race could be one of the factors considered in choosing a diverse student body in university admissions decisions. The Court also held, however, that the use of quotas in such affirmative action programs was not permissible; thus the Univ. of California, Davis, medical school had, by maintaining a 16% minority quota, discriminated against Allan Bakke, 1940–, a white applicant. The legal implications of the decision were clouded by the Court’s division. Bakke had twice been rejected by the medical school, even though he had a higher grade point average than a number of minority candidates who were admitted. As a result of the decision, Bakke was admitted to the medical school and graduated in 1982.

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Jason L. Riley: The Supreme Court’s Opportunity on Racial Preferences As they hear arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the justices can help explode harmful myths about race-based college admissions.

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

“It seems that almost every year since the middle 1970s,” wrote Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, “we have awaited with hope or anxiety the determination of some major case by the Supreme Court, which would tell us that affirmative action transgressed the ‘equal protection of the laws’ guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment . . . or, on the contrary, determine that this was a legitimate approach to overcoming the heritage of discrimination and segregation and raising the position of American blacks.”

Mr. Glazer wrote that in 1987 and couldn’t possibly have imagined it would hold true some 26 years later. Yet on Wednesday the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in this year’s major affirmative-action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. It will be the high court’s second go-round with the case, which concerns a plaintiff named Abigail Fisher who says the university discriminated against her as a white woman in rejecting her application.

In 2013 the justices voted 7-1 to send the case back to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals without ruling directly on the constitutionality of Texas’ affirmative-action program. Instead, the appeals court was instructed to re-evaluate whether a race-based admissions policy was really essential to the university meeting its diversity goals. The Fifth Circuit issued a second ruling last year, once again siding with the university, and now the case is back before the Supreme Court.

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Notable & Quotable The ambassador from Tripoli tells John Adams and Thomas Jefferson that the Barbary States have a religious duty to wage war on non-Muslim nations.

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

From a March 28, 1786, letter written by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were American diplomats at the time, to U.S. Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay reporting on their conversation in London with the ambassador from Tripoli regarding piracy by the Barbary States:

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet; that it was written in their Koran; that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman [Muslim] who was slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

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House Votes to Restrict Travel by Foreigners Who Visited Iraq, Syria- Measure passed 407-19; expected to be wrapped into spending bill and become law By Siobhan Hughes

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

WASHINGTON—The House overwhelmingly approved legislation Tuesday to limit certain travel privileges granted to citizens of 38 friendly foreign countries, the first step in what lawmakers expect will be a larger response to an evolving terrorist threat.

The terror attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Paris have prompted a new emphasis on security but left lawmakers struggling to determine the appropriate response. The strikes reach into so many different policy areas—travel, guns, technology, mental health, immigration and intelligence—that coming up with a comprehensive plan has been challenging.

Instead, a piece-by-piece approach appears to be emerging. The initial step was legislation to put some restrictions on the visa-waiver program, which allows travelers from the 38 mostly European and Asian nations to enter the U.S. without obtaining a visa. The measure would ban people from those nations who had traveled to places including Iraq or Syria since March 2011 without first getting a visa.

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Bernie’s Climate Honesty The Senator’s energy plan shows where Democrats want to go.

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Bernie Sanders has no chance to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but the breathtaking details of the climate-change plan he released this week are still worth noting. They show where the Democratic Party is headed.

The Vermont Senator calls climate change “the single greatest threat facing our planet,” and he seems to mean it. He is proposing a 40% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, and an 80% reduction by 2050, which is significantly more than the up-to 28% cut by 2025 that President Obama has pledged at the Paris climate confab.

To reach this developing world level of CO2 emissions, Mr. Sanders would: impose an unspecified carbon tax; ban all offshore drilling and fossil-fuel leases on federal lands; stop “dirty pipeline” projects; ban natural gas and oil exports; force states to ban fracking; ban mountaintop coal mining; impose a new fuel-efficiency standard of 65 miles per gallon by 2025; spend “massive” federal dollars on subsidies for wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, home-efficiency programs and energy storage; federally underwrite electric-car charging stations, high-speed passenger and cargo rail, a smart grid, and clean-energy job training; shut down the nuclear industry; and provide “clean energy funding” to the rest of the world.

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Feds shelling out billions to public relations firms:Getty Images By Megan R. Wilson

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

The federal government has spent more than $4 billion on public relations services since 2007, according to a watchdog group, with more than half of the money going to the world’s largest firms.

A review conducted by Open the Books found that there are now 3,092 public affairs professionals working in the government, an increase of 15 percent — or about 400 people — over the past seven years.

During that time, 139 federal agencies inked $2.02 billion in outside contracts with firms that perform public relations, polling, research and marketing consulting.
“We always applaud agencies who make information available,” Open the Books said in its report. “But … agencies are not charged with making that information interesting or newsworthy. Agencies certainly aren’t charged with using taxpayer funds to engage in thinly-veiled propaganda campaigns that are primarily designed to protect their budgets and hype outcomes.”

The $2 billion tally calculated by the watchdog group includes millions of dollars on international polling for the State Department and $57.7 million in marketing and advertising contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to promote the National Flood Insurance Program.

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OPEN YOUR EYES AND OPEN THE BOOKS ON FEDERAL SPENDING

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Federal agencies spend billions on self-promotion By Kellan Howell

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/7/federal-government-agencies-spend-billions-on-self/

The federal government for years has been using Americans’ tax dollars to pay for its own PR through carefully coordinated marketing campaigns, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Over the past seven years, federal agencies have spent more than $4.3 billion on self-promotion and marketing, according to government contract data compiled from USASpending.gov in an oversight report by spending watchdog OpentheBooks.com.
Federal agencies spent $2.35 billion in salary and bonus payments to federal employees with the job title of “public affairs officer” and more than $2 billion on outside contractors for additional public relations projects, according to the report.

In fact, the U.S. government employs so many public affairs officers that it ranks as the second-largest public relations firm in the world in terms of the number of employees.

Although it is certainly important and necessary for federal agencies to engage in public relations in order to make information available to taxpayers and to understand the markets they serve, the report highlights cases in which the government’s marketing budget appears to border on propaganda and pandering.

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Judicial Watch: New Benghazi Email Shows DOD Offered State Department “Forces that Could Move to Benghazi” Immediately – Specifics Blacked Out in New Document

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

“They are spinning up as we speak.” U.S. Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash Tuesday, September 11, 2012, 7:19 PM

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

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The President As Pangloss{ Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on national security. He needs a better strategy for describing and defending his policies to the American people.

With public approval of his anti-ISIS efforts at 33 percent, President Obama took to the airwaves last night to bolster support for his counterterrorism strategy. Judging by the reaction in the national press, the speech fell flat. We shall see what the polls say, but it seems safe at this point to rule out a dramatic surge in the President’s support as a grateful nation responds to his dramatic appeal. A president once compared to Lincoln as an orator and Eisenhower as a strategist by his adoring supporters no longer seems credible or even interesting on the terror threat that many voters now think is the biggest concern facing the nation.
Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on this topic; it is waiting for 2017 and the decisive repudiation of a global strategy that many of the President’s closest advisors and senior aides believe has failed. One thinks of the famous Boston Globe headline about a Jimmy Carter speech, added by a printer as a placeholder that somehow survived to the first morning edition: “More Mush From the Wimp.” Fairly or not, that is what more and more Americans hear when Obama speaks about terror.The political consequences of the perceived failure of Obama’s national security approach are already on display. Secretary Clinton is running against the foreign policy of the man she served for four years

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Arabs, the Holocaust, and Peace with Israel : Andrew Harrod

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Could the Holocaust have a humanizing effect upon Arabs – Palestinians in particular – and aid Israel in its quest to establish peaceful regional relations? Washington Institute for Near East Policy experts Mohammed S. Dajani and Robert Satloff sure think so, as indicated by their vision of Arab-Israeli peace rising from the Auschwitz ashes.

Dajani, a Palestinian sociologist and peace activist, and Satloff, a Jewish-American historian, recently spoke about the unlikely topic that brought Arabs and Jews together: the Nazi genocide and its legacy. Dajani, who was once a radical nationalist, related hispersonal journey “out of the cave of ignorance” from the taboo- and hate-filled Palestinian society. His Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking quest as a former professor at Jerusalem’s Al Quds University prompted him to lead a Palestinian study tour of Auschwitz as an act of Israeli-Palestinian historical reflection.

While the Arab and wider Muslim world is rife with Holocaust denial, Arab historical memory emphasizes Israel’s 1948 creation as a catastrophe (“Nakba” in Arabic) for Palestinians. Dajani rejected the common Palestinian comparison between the Holocaust – a singular act of genocide – and this Palestinian suffering. As he and Satloff wrote in aMarch 2011 editorial, Israeli-Palestinian would benefit from a rejection of the “facile equation that ‘the Jews have the Holocaust and the Palestinians have the Nakba.’”