"Democrat messaging is full of shit", sez Democrat James Carville

According to Wikipedia, C. James Carville Jr. -- the "C" is for "Chester", not "Crazy" -- is an American political consultant, author, and occasional actor who has strategized for candidates for public office in the United States and abroad. He is a certified liberal and a registered Democrat. 

Mr Carville is redeemed (in Walt's eyes) by the fact that every now and then he tells Democrats that their emperor -- Slick Willy, the Prez, or Demented Joe, it doesn't matter -- has no clothes. 

This weekend, Mr Carville went on an extended rant on Politicon. WARNING: We haven't embedded the video because of Mr C's Very Strong Language. Click on the link to hear the craziness yourself. Although Brother Carville sounds like the angry grandpa from South Park, he's trying to tell Dumbocrats some stone truths. 

In the "wut?" part of his message, starting at 6:15, Mr Carville says Democrats are losing younger voters and black voters because they are ignoring the economy. "The generational thievery that has occurred in this country is criminality of the first order. 

"We keep wondering why these young people are not coming home to the Democrats. Why are blacks not coming home to the Democrats? Because Democrat messaging is full of shit, that’s why. 

"And talk about cost of living, and we’re going to help deal with this. Don’t talk about fucking Gaza and student loans. That is so out. Why are we forgiving student loans for people that go to Harvard? Which, according to Scott Galloway, quite accurately, is nothing but a hedge fund that has classrooms. Well, they got a $52 billion fucking surplus. 

"Why are taxpayers going to bail these people out? Why don’t you come out with a proposal to tax every university with an endowment of over $5 billion and use that money to give their former students relief?

"We all know where where we are. We all know the position we are in. We all know what the polls say. We all know how old President Biden is. Quit fucking arguing what’s in front of your face and start laying something out."

Sounds to me like Mr Carville has a pretty good grip on the reality of the policies of the Democratic Party today. Will the Dumbocrats listen to him in time to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? Not bloody likely! Lifetime pct .989.

It also sounds to me as if Mr Carville has read -- and taken to heart -- Listen, Liberal, a brilliant but obscure book by Thomas Frank (Henry Holt & Co., 2016), which Walt recommended in "Stumbling towards the decline and fall of the USA", WWW 23/5/24. The Democrats didn't pay attention to Mr Frank in 2016, so why would they do so to Mr Carville now? Is a puzzlement.

VIDEO: Thomas Sowell told the truth about affirmative action in college admissions... 33 years ago!

As Walt told you in "SCOTUS bans racial discrimination in college admissions", today was a great day for America! President Trump said so and Walt agrees, not just because The Donald said it, but because the decision corrects an injustice that has been perpetuated in the name of "social justice" (more recently "DEI" -- "diversity, equity and inclusion") for decades.

Thomas Sowell, an American economist, author, and social commentator, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, recognized and talked about the unintended negative consequences of affirmative action 23 years ago.

This video is clipped from a C-SPAN Booknotes interview on 10 June 1990. Dr Sowell, while discussing his book Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, explained how affirmative action and campus ideologues create a vicious cycle of black student failure and resentment by both blacks and whites. Give a listen.

 

A brief history of the affirmative action debate.

Affirmative action has its pros and cons. [Some say affirmative action is itself a "con". Ed.] The issue has been hotly debated since the 1970s, when colleges and universities on the east and west coast, in a paroxysm of white liberal guilt, started to give priority to applicants for admission whose SAT scores were lower than others because the tests were Eurocentric, racist, yada yada yada.

Thet issue had been canvassed by the Supreme Court for half a century (!), and until now SCOTUS has geneally upheld affirmative action (read: reverse discrimination), with some limits. Racial quotas that reserve a certain number of seats for minority students have been deemed unconstitutional, but the court has said colleges can consider race as long as it's one of many factors in the decision. 

Prospective students' race can be used as a "plus factor" to give them an edge, said the court, can't be the defining factor. Schools must be able to show they consider race in a "narrowly tailored" way, because there is no "race-neutral" approach that would meet the same "compelling interest" in increasing student diversity.

That language comes from Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 Supreme Court decision which upheld admissions policies at the University of Michigan's law school. SCOTUS last examined affirmative action in 2016 -- 26 years after the publication of Dr Sowell's book -- when it upheld the admissions process at the University of Texas in a suit filed by a white Texan who was denied admission to the university

The lawsuits which were decided today were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a Virginia-based group that says race should play no part in the admission process. The group argued that Harvard and the University of North Carolina intentionally discriminate against Asian-American applicants.

Examining six years of data at Harvard, the group found that-Asian American applicants had the strongest academics but were admitted at the lowest rates compared to students of other races. It also found that Harvard's admissions officers gave Asian Americans lower scores on a subjective "personal" rating designed to measure attributes such as likeability and kindness... as if these things were indicators of intelligence or the likelihood of academic success!

In 2019, a federal judge upheld Harvard's admissions practices, saying they were "not perfect" but not unconstituional. The judge said race-conscious practices always penalize groups that don’t get an advantage, but are justified "by the compelling interest in diversity" on college campuses. An appeals court upheld the ruling in 2020. 

Students for Fair Admission brought similar claims against UNC, saying its process disadvantages white and Asian-American students. A federal judge sided with the university last year. In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the group asked the Supreme Court to review both cases, and also to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, saying it was impossible to construct a "narrowly tailored" approach which would not offend the equal rights provisions of the Constitution. 

The Supreme Court of the United States agreed at last! It's a great day for America!

Some prescient thoughts about "safe spaces" and the American media

Walt here. As Ed. told you, I'm a bit under the weather [clear and cold. Ed.] but the news that the Mueller report is likely to prove a colossal dud cheers me up enough strengthens me to attach the keyboard for awhile. What follows are excerpts from penultimate chapter of a book which I'll identify at the end. [No peeking. Ed.] Your task is to guess the date on which it was written. The picture of the author may help. Or not.

"The world is full of dangerous ideas, and we are both naive and stupid if we believe that the way to prepare intelligent young [people] to face the world is to try to protect them from such ideas while they are in college. Four years in an insulated nursery will produce gullible innocents, not tough-minded realists who know what they believe because they have faced the enemies of their beliefs." [Quoting Dean Wilbur J. Bender of Harvard University]

As a people...we could all stand a little more education. ...I did not get the impression in my travels up and down the country...that we were very well informed either about the world or our own land; nor did we always grasp the very issues on which our existence depended. The public opinion polls piled up evidence of our ignorance. Even Dr. Gallup...confessed that "today for the first time I am concerned lest lack of information lead the American people to decisions which they will regret."

...the amazing thing was not that the good people could read a newspaper and listen to the newscasts daily and still be so ignorant, but that their daily journals and news broadcasts were of such an amazingly low quality that the millions who read and listened were bound to be left in almost total ignorance of what was going on in the world.

...Have our newspapers lost a sense of their historical function to keep the public informed about the issues of the day? asked Dr Gallup. "Have they begun to worry too much about having the most popular comic strips and the most complete sports pages, and too little about keeping their readers interested in, and informed about, the important problems of the day?"

The author is William Lawrence Shirer (February 23, 1904 – December 28, 1993) an American journalist and war correspondent. The book is Mid-century Journey, published in 1952. Next time you hear some libtard preach about "safe spaces", read them the quote from the Dean Bender. It seems there are no more Dean Benders at Harvard or any of America's other institutions of higher learning, but that just shows you how the left has taken control not just of our media, but also our educational system [Is dis a system? Ed.] and virtually every aspect of our daily lives.

Walt wishes Senator Warren good luck running for President!

The ladies who blab at The View and the lamestream media generally are gushing [Please don't go for a cheap joke... yet! Ed.] over reports that Senator Elizabeth Warren has formed an exploratory committee to see if it would be feasible to throw her headdress in the ring for the presidensity of the Excited States of America in 2020. She would presumably be vying for the Democratic nomination, along with at least a dozen other presidential wannabes including Senator Bernie Sanders [Isn't he an Independent, again? Ed.] and Senator Camela Harris. But Ms Warren is the first to announce, and that oughta count for something, right?

Senator Warren became a darling of the left in 2011 when she appeared in a viral video in which she defended federal taxes, which she spoke of as a form of "social responsibility", against the efforts of the newly-elected Republican majority in the House of Representatives to resist the efforts of the Prez [Who? Ed.] to raise taxes as an alternative to cutting out-of-control federal spending.

Before entering the Senate, Ms Warren had a job teaching bankruptcy law at Harvard. Her appointment had something to do with the university's affirmative action programme, but we'll come to that in a minute. In the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2008, she was named by Guess Who to chair the Congressional Oversight Panel which oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the government's trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street.

Sadly for Ms Warren, her reach exceeded her grasp. She jumped the shark [for the first time? Ed.] when she proposed the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency that lacked congressional oversight, and which many conservatives contended was established in violation of the Constitution. Republicans in Congress blocked her appointment to lead the new agency, but she rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of that defeat to become a Senator from Massatushetts.

During her campaign for the Senate, it was discovered that Ms Warren had somewhat overstated her claims of Cherokee heritage, made at a time when Harvard Law School was under severe pressure to hire and promote female and minority faculty members. Critics took to calling her "Pocahontas", after the famous 17th-century daughter of an Indian chief and a popular figure in American history and pop culture.

Donald Trump stuck the "Pocahontas" appellation on her during the 2016 presidential campaign and she has worn it, along with "Fauxcahontas" and "Focahontas" ever since. Obviously stung by suggestions that she was guilty of cultural appropriation [at least! Ed.], Senator Warren took a DNA test a few months ago, and thought it not unwise to publish the results showing that she might have 1/1024 Native American ancestry. (Apparently there aren't enough full-blood Indians in the database to give reliable result.)

Though Senator Warren and her supporters touted the results as proof of her family lore, critics noted that it may actually have proven the opposite, since she had no more Native American ancestry than a typical white American like, for instance, Joy Behar. Being a charitable person, Walt accepts Ms Warren's claim for what it's worth, and wishes her well in her quest to run against President Trump. Anyone wishing to place money on the outcome of a Trump-Warren race should contact me at the usual address. Your dollar gets 1000 of mine if Focahontas wins. Lifetime pct .989.

Stupid iliterate inumerate kids!

Two related items caught Walt's eye yesterday. The first was a speech given by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to the Centre for Policy Studies. In his address, entitled "What would Maggie [Thatcher] do today?", Bojo averred that achieving economic equality is impossible because some people are simply too stupid to get ahead in the modern world.

Mr. Johnson's remarks were immediately decried by the usual suspects as elitist and possibly racist, but no-one had the temerity to challenge his basic premise. That's because it's true! Remember what George Carlin used to say about the stupidity of the average person. If you think the average person is as stupid as he/she appears, consider that half the population is even more stupid than that!

Apart from genetic differences, today's younger people are the victims of bad education. Boris Johnson may have been thinking about a major study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which showed that that young adults in England scored among the lowest results in the industrialised world in international literacy and numeracy tests.

Out of 24 countries, England ranked 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy. The study also showed that, unlike in other developed countries, young people in England are no better at these tests than people in the 55 to 65 age range.

When this is weighted with other factors, such as the socio-economic background of people taking the test, it shows that England is the only country in the survey where results are going backwards. The older cohort scores higher than the younger.

British Skills Minister Matthew Hancock was shocked -- SHOCKED -- by the report. "This shocking report shows England has some of the least literate and numerate young adults in the developed world," he said. Then he came to the nub of the problem. "These are Labour's children," he added, "educated under a Labour government and force-fed a diet of dumbing down and low expectations." [My emphasis. Walt.]

Walt wonders if Mr. Hancock has visited North America. If the average British yoof is thick as a plank, the average American (and his/her Canadian cousin) is thick as two planks! If you don't believe me, ask one of them. A couple of days ago Walt saw a news reporter asking students at Harvard to name the capital of Canada. The only one who could was a visiting student from, errr, China.

And that's Harvard, the institution which educates America's brightest and best! Those kids aren't the ones who would have been left behind but for the Bush league educational reforms. If you want to see what those kids are like, try conversing with one of the gum-chewing, glassy-eyed "associates" at the Gap.

These are the kids who graduated from high schools and colleges unable to read their diplomas or make change without using a calculator. See also "Downward mobility haunts US education", from BBC News, December 2012.

The problem is with "child-centred education", the 60s fad that persists half a century later, under which no-one is "left behind" and no-one "fails" because that would be damaging to their self-esteem [and probably racist too! Ed.] Instead, our educational institutions turn out [churn out? Ed.] graduates utterly unprepared to cope with a troubled economy and shrinking job market. It is there -- in the real world -- that these kids fail.

The problem is hardly new. Dr. Rudolf Flesch wrote about it way back in 1951, in the original Why Johnny Can't Read. Why Johnny Still Can't Read: A New Look at the Scandal of Our Schools appeared in 1981. And yes, Dr. Flesch does propose a solution -- part of the home schooling answer to the crisis in education.

What you should do is teach your kids phonics! Walt recommends Why Johnny Can't Read and What You Can Do About It, from Harper Collins. The book is endorsed -- but apparently not followed -- by the US Department of Education. You can find it at your local library. Your community does still have a library, doesn't it?