Sep 20 2008

Obama should have taken the chance to practice

Category: election 2008,McCain,media,Obama,politics,White House — harmonicminer @ 11:31 pm

Which Obama will show up for presidential debates? – Yahoo! News

Which Barack Obama will show up for the first presidential debate?

It could be the tone-deaf debater who condescendingly told Hillary Rodham Clinton during a Democratic debate that she was “likable enough.”

Or perhaps the confident candidate who absorbed a jab from Clinton about using her husband’s former advisers and responded with a devastating one-liner of his own: “Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.”

For a man known as a powerful speaker, Obama has rarely wowed people in political debates. He can come across as lifeless, aloof and windy.

But Obama didn’t make any serious mistakes in the many debates during the Democratic primary, or when he was running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He sometimes showed flashes of wit and charm. And, with a couple of exceptions, he got better with time.

“A year ago, he was not nearly as polished,” said Timothy O’Donnell, a professor at the University of Mary Washington and chairman of the collegiate National Debate Tournament. “He equivocates less. He’s quicker with examples.”

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Sep 20 2008

Bigotry towards whites masquerades as reporting on race

Category: diversity,election 2008,multi-cultural,Obama,politics,race,racism — harmonicminer @ 9:08 am

It will get worse before election day, as the Main Stream Media does it’s best to guilt everyone into voting for Obama even though they disagree with his policies and/or think his leadership and experience is lacking, just for fear of being called racist.

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks, many calling them “lazy,” “violent,” responsible for their own troubles.  The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004, about two and one-half percentage points.

Of course, “deep seated racisl misgivings” on the part of blacks will cause 90+% of blacks to vote FOR him, with a total margin greater than 2 1/2% of the vote.

More than a third of all white Democrats and independents, voters Obama can’t win the White House without, agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views.

There is no foundation established here to conclude that a voter will not select a particular individual just because the voter makes generalized observations about a demographic group. And the huge piece of missing information here: how would blacks respond to the same survey? We all know the stories of black cab drivers who won’t pick up young, male blacks at night. Are they bigots, too?

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Sep 20 2008

If you doubt the validity of affirmative action, you must be a racist

Category: affirmative action,diversity,education,Group-think,higher education,multi-cultural,politics — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

As usual, anyone who tries to scientifically study the actual effect of affirmative action is accused of racist motives.

In his 19 years as a law professor at UCLA, Richard Sander has pondered a nagging question: Does affirmative action help or hinder black people 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 hire black lawyers that are under-qualified, and that when there is a “credentials gap” between black and white lawyers at a firm, black lawyers often fail.

The research stirred debate throughout the legal community, and Sander said he was surprised at the vehemence with which people attacked his motives. A former Vista volunteer, fair-housing activist and campaigner for Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, Sander insisted he was simply trying to examine an important question.

Now the law professor has waded into another controversy. Sander says his goal this time is to examine whether law schools set up many affirmative action beneficiaries for failure by admitting them into rigorous academic environments in which they are ill-prepared to compete. He proposes to study almost 30 years of data on California Bar Association exam-takers. In the end, he hopes to explain why, as reported in a Law School Admission Council study in the 1990s, blacks are four times as likely as whites to fail the bar exam on the first try.

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