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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (17041)	1/27/2007 12:21:17 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

"With Michigan's new ban on affirmative action going into effect, and similar ballot initiatives looming in other states, many public universities are scrambling to find race-blind ways to attract more blacks and Hispanics," the New York Times reports. Racial preferences are illegal at public universities in California, Florida and Washington state, and were barred in Texas under a federal appeals court order until 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the constitutionality of some racial preferences. Within the Times article appears this astonishing admission: Nationwide, after 30 years of debate, and litigation, over affirmative action, universities have made strikingly little progress toward racially representative student bodies. Doesn't this show that affirmative action has failed? Perhaps if universities could employ outright quotas--declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in University of California v. Bakke (1978) and again in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003)--they could achieve "racially representative student bodies," albeit at the cost of wide disparities between the races among their students. But the court is unlikely to revisit its antiquota precedents, and even the Grutter-permitted preferences expire in another 21 1/2 years, if Justice O'Connor's obiter dicta can be believed. If affirmative action as now practiced in 46 states does such a poor job of meeting its own goals, why do universities cling to it so tenaciously? opinionjournal.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (17041)	1/28/2007 11:14:57 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Re: "good news from Iraq.... Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's 'plan'...." Oh, please.... (They are playing us like professional comics.) Did you bother to notice that the Badr Brigades have recently promised --- yet again --- to 'suspend violence' and rejoin the Parliament they have been boycotting? (Just long enough to keep them on the protected list... then, back to killing Sunnis.) Their votes are still propping up the Government of Maliki. Without their vote: no more majority and the government falls. So, please... hold off on trumpeting PRESS RELEASES from the PM's office as fundamental 'good news' for a while! No one is buying that scam any more.... Certainly not me. (Actions, not words. Actions, not words.)