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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (10563)	10/3/2003 10:29:59 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793670

And here is an article on "Prop 54" along the same lines. "National Review." ____________________________________ October 03, 2003, 9:57 a.m. California Goes Colorblind? Minorities support 54. By Deroy Murdock California voters Tuesday will pick a winner in the surrealistic pillow fight for the governor's office. They also may bring the ideal of colorblindness closer to reality. Proposition 54, the California Racial Privacy Initiative, occupies a quiet corner on the boisterous recall ballot. With limited exceptions, RPI would forbid state and local governments from ethnically classifying residents for public education, employment, or contracting. Although it has been overshadowed by the gubernatorial brawl, RPI enjoys surprising support among the Golden State's minority voters. The 2003 Multilingual Survey of California Voters found that every ethnic group polled favors RPI. Hispanics endorse it 46 percent to 33 percent. Asian-descended voters are pro-RPI, 42 percent to 40, while blacks back it, 41 percent to 33. Whites, interestingly enough, support RPI 31 percent to 25 with a hefty 44 percent undecided. Still, as Miami-based pollster Sergio Bendixen told the Sacramento Bee: "Mathematically, it is impossible for Proposition 54 to be defeated unless minorities oppose it." Bendixen's private company interviewed 1,608 voters between September 6-16 in Cantonese, English, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese. "This poll gives me hope that a broad coalition of individuals can think outside the box and reject the racialist company line," says San Franciscan Kevin Nguyen, RPI's official proponent and a Saigon native whose father spent six months in a Vietcong reeducation camp. Nguyen recalls placing a Buddha pendant in his mouth to hide it from pirates as he and his parents fled Vietnam in a rickety boat. He laments that America historically has used racial data to oppress Chinese railroad workers, jail Japanese Americans during World War II and "most recently to suppress the number of Americans of Asian descent in our public and private colleges and universities." Martha Montelongo Myers, a Monterey radio host and RPI advocate, believes Hispanic support for Prop. 54 parallels her experience. She remembers how upset her Mexican-born father became when she returned from school near Los Angeles with racially nosy paperwork. "He always said: 'Why are they asking? What difference does it make? It's none of their business.' Then he just checked the 'white' box." "I can't think of anyone more 'American' than black people, one of our oldest populations," says Joe Hicks, a 1960s Black Power activist and RPI supporter in Los Angeles. "Blacks have a vested interest in voting against the notion that they are members of a group, rather than individuals." RPI sensibly would permit racial-data collection for medical research, police identification, and compliance with court orders and federal law. That aside, it dramatically would diminish race-obsessed policies that teem with difficulties, among them, defining who belongs to which ethnic group. Intermarriage and mixed children have rendered ethnic taxonomy nearly unworkable. One attempted fix is detailed self-identification. However, this produces box-covered government forms that resemble crossword puzzles. The U.S. Census Bureau now lets Americans fill however many boxes they wish so they may describe their ethnicity almost molecularly. This has produced 126 official skin tones including this hyper-diverse shade: "White-Black-Asian-American Indian or Alaska Native-Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander-Some Other Race." How could anyone measure whether someone of that heritage felt more discrimination than, say, a "Black-Alaska Native-Pacific Islander-Hispanic?" (Inconceivable? I happen to be a black American with a Scottish surname and roots that burrow from Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Martinique clear through to India and China.) Even worse, some bureaucrats add racial labeling to their duties. New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein fell into hot water last month when he directed principals to judge the backgrounds of mothers and fathers who lead local parent associations. "You should provide the information to the best of your knowledge based on your own visual identification," said Klein's September 18 memo to school principals. "If you are uncertain about a person's race or ethnicity, or if a person appears to be of mixed race, please indicate 'other.'" The RPI could doom such un-American nonsense from coast to coast. Prop. 54 could help unite us as citizens rather than keep us divided into increasingly meaningless micro-categories based on skin color, hair thickness, or the angles at which our eyes see the world. The beautiful irony is that California's voters of color may lead a new American march toward colorblindness. nationalreview.com

To: TimF who wrote (10563)	10/3/2003 11:07:28 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793670

Pitch Battle Should annoying phone calls be illegal? Jacob Sullum Reason Magazine The guy says he's calling on behalf of a police organization, mainly to tell me and my family to buckle up and not to drink and drive. Having reminded me of the legal authority wielded by the people he represents, he hits me up for money. In exchange for my donation, he will send me a car decal identifying me as a supporter of the police, presumably to increase the odds of lenient treatment if I happen to be pulled over. How much protection money would I like to pay: $35, $50, $100? Zero is not an option. This is one of my least favorite telephone pitches, but it's not covered by the Federal Trade Commission's "do not call" registry, which was scheduled to take effect at the beginning of the month. The FTC's rules, which threaten an $11,000 fine for each telemarketing call to a number in the database, exempt charitable solicitations, along with calls from pollsters and political groups, even though such calls are at least as annoying as attempts to sell newspaper subscriptions or long-distance telephone service. According to a federal judge, that distinction is not only illogical but unconstitutional. Although the U.S. Supreme Court says the First Amendment does not protect commercial messages as much as other categories of speech, U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham ruled, the government still must justify a decision to impose special restrictions on sales pitches. "The mechanism purportedly created by the FTC to effectuate consumer choice instead influences consumer choice, thereby entangling the government in deciding what speech consumers should hear," Nottingham wrote in his September 25 decision. "The registry creates a burden on one type of speech based solely on its content, without a logical, coherent...reason supporting the disparate treatment." Nottingham's argument is pretty persuasive, especially when you realize that the second-class status of commercial speech has no basis in the Constitution. The First Amendment, after all, does not distinguish between a proposal to refinance your mortgage and a request for money to help save the baby harp seals. Once you think of telemarketing as a form of speech that people are free to accept or reject—in contrast with, say, an assault or a burglary—you have to wonder whether the government has any business trying to stop it in the first place. It's hard to see how your rights have been violated when you pick up the phone and find that the caller is a stranger you'd rather not talk to. Don't get me wrong. I hate telemarketers as much as the next guy—probably more. I've got caller ID and the Telezapper, a device that's supposed to convince automated dialers your phone is disconnected. If I answer the phone and there's a tell-tale second or two of silence, I hang up immediately—at the risk of missing calls from distracted friends or hanging up on my mother when she calls from Jerusalem. Still, it seems to me that telemarketing is a nuisance that should be addressed by phone companies, which could prohibit come-ons to customers who don't want them, threatening to cut off service to offenders. If the good will of their customers is not sufficient motivation, they could charge a little extra for solicitation-free service—or, alternatively, charge marketers to reach receptive households. The government could encourage such private solutions by removing regulatory barriers and fostering competition in local telephone service. Instead, the Federal Communications Commission is promising to enforce the rules that Judge Nottingham stopped the FTC from implementing. That stance in undeniably popular, but it's a mystery why a plan that violated the First Amendment when the FTC tried it would be constitutional with the FCC in charge. The popularity of this program does not reassure me. The same day Nottingham issued his ruling, almost every member of Congress voted to override another judge's determination, announced just two days before, that the FTC did not have statutory authority to establish the do-not-call registry. "Fifty million people can't be all wrong," Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) declared. I doubt that the 50 million or so people who signed up for the registry were expressing an opinion about whether the FTC's revised Telemarketing Sales Rules were authorized by the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act. But Schumer's sentiment is clear: Might makes right. If something annoys you, there ought to be a law. And if enough people share the feeling, there will be. Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Saying reason.com