Two follow-up questions: Of that one-third, how many are registered Democrats? Of that one-third, how many are on welfare? (Daily Mail) — A survey has found that around one third of U.S. citizens would fail the country’s citizenship test for immigrants. The study, conducted by the Center for the Study of the American Dream at
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Survey: One in Three Americans Would Fail US Citizenship Test
Earlier this week, a two-year old YouTube video surfaced that floated some raw sewage in the Obama Administration’s energy punchbowl. In it, EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Almendariz, speaking to a group of Texas citizens, chuckles while comparing his agency’s environmental enforcement strategy vis-à-vis oil and gas operators to conquering Roman legionnaires’ strategy of random crucifixion. How quaint. So the Washington politicians did what politicians have done since Roman times : go into damage-control mode and attempt to distance themselves from the offending act. From the Washington Post: “Frankly, [the comments] were inflammatory but also wrong,” [EPA Administrator Lisa] Jackson said Friday when asked about a YouTube video discovered this week by Oklahoma Republican Sen. James M. Inhofe’s staff. “They don’t comport with either this administration’s policy on energy, our policy at EPA on environmental enforcement, nor do they comport with our record as well.” The offending comments were uttered, not by low-level functionary deep in the bowels of EPA, but by a Presidential appointee , the Administrator of EPA Region 6 . Region 6 covers “Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and 66 Tribal Nations” and as such is home to 56% of domestic crude oil production and 59% of natural gas production . Needless to say, statements of the Region Administrator on enforcement policy carry some weight. The tough-guy policies certainly seemed consistent with the treatment of Range Resources . Range was the subject of a Region 6 “endangerment order”, an EPA accusation of groundwater contamination that was contradicted by the scientific evidence and ultimately dropped. Plus, these weren’t the words of a leaked internal email. He said it in public. In the private sector, it can be a problem when the public statements of a senior executive “don’t comport” with official policy. A recent example: BP CEO Tony Hayward uttered the ill-advised “I’d like my life back” in the process of a public apology for the BP spill. Those five words resulted in a PR firestorm that led to Heyward’s dismissal by BP’s Board. Twenty-nine congressmen, including all of Texas’ Republican representatives, have signed a letter calling for Almendariz’s ouster (excerpted below the fold). They have been joined in the call by Reps. Scalise, Alexander, Boustany, Fleming and Landry in Louisiana. It is clear that [Almendariz's] deep seated biases are hindering his competent management of the office he holds. … The men and women who work for oil and gas companies are our constituents, our friends and our neighbors. They are not criminals in need of deterrence. They are Americans who care deeply about the communities they live and work in. … Where violations of the law take place and punishment is appropriate, there should be punishment. But no American should be subject to the spiteful whims of an Administrator who is so blinded by his ideology that he cannot discern the difference between enforcement and crucifixion. The White House is also backing away from Almendariz’s comment. In fact, the White House totally hearts oil and gas: White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday: “The truth is better illustrated by .?.?. the impact that the administration’s policies have had, which is that oil and gas production has increased every single year that President Obama has been in office.” This is so easily refuted as to be laughable. First there’s this study from the Institute for Energy Research: Fossil fuel production on federal lands at 9 year low The growth in oil and gas production has mostly been on private lands under state jurisdiction and regulation . If the Federal government deserves any credit for the increase, it is because EPA has not regulated hydraulic fracturing — but they’re thinking about it. It is true that production of domestic oil and gas have increased each year during the Obama Administration. Officials’ ham-handed attempts to glom credit for oil production increases are ironic because the Left usually emphasizes the long lead times of oil and gas projects as a key reason to oppose them. In 2002, they opposed development of ANWR because it would take so long to bring oil to market — 10 years! — that it would hardly be worth the trouble. No oil and gas exploration or development happens overnight. Even small onshore projects near existing infrastructure typically require six to eighteen months to satisfy all the permitting requirements and bring a well on production. A major field would take much longer. Multiple wells are required to define the accumulation, then that estimate is used to plan the facility and pipelines required. There are usually multiple layers of permits and Environmental Impact Studies required. Ten years might be a typical delay for a really world-class field in a challenging environment like the deepwater or the Arctic. One place where oil production has increased on Federal lands is in the Gulf of Mexico (although production remains well below levels forecast before the BP spill moratorium). A portion of the recent production increase is attributable to a handful of deepwater Gulf of Mexico fields that began producing during the Obama Administration. Of course, the plans to develop these fields were all approved under the George W. Bush Administration; some of the leases even date back to the Clinton era. President Obama is fond of reminding people of the problems he inherited from President Bush. In oil and gas, he inherited a solution : today’s politics drive him to take credit for it, while his ideology demands he suppress it. Crossposted at stevemaley.com . Follow @VladimirRS
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EPA and the White House Wash Their Hands of the ‘Crucifixion’ Mess
The Obama administration has proclaimed its interest in a pivot to the Pacific, but Europe grows more interesting all the time.
Remember the “Racial Justice Act”? I told you about it here , in February. It is a North Carolina law that says: we don’t care whether there was racial bias in this case. The issue is whether there is racial bias by prosecutors in the system as a whole. Oh — and we are going to measure racial bias by prosecutors by looking at the aggregate numbers of blacks prosecutors excuse, regardless of whether their excuses are justified by racially neutral reasons. In February, I focused on the irony of the fact that the act was being invoked by . . . a racist — someone who killed a white guy for being white: Welcome to a country where a law called the “Racial Justice Act” is employed to potentially reduce the punishment of someone who killed a man because of his color : For nearly three weeks, convicted murderer Marcus Reymond Robinson has listened quietly inside a county courtroom here to intricate testimony about statistics — dry statistics that could get him off death row. . . . . The issue of race has dominated Robinson’s hearing before a Superior Court judge here. Prosecutors have pointed out that Robinson said “he was going to get him a whitey” before he killed 17-year-old Erik Tornblom with a shotgun blast to the face and robbed him of $27. An accomplice is serving a life sentence. I write today to tell you that Robinson’s case has been decided. You’ll be pleased to learn that he has been let off death row due to the Racial Justice Act : A county judge in North Carolina issued a landmark ruling Friday that overturned an inmate’s death sentence after a finding that race played a key role in the jury-selection process. Wait. In the jury selection process of Robinson’s case? Or in cases as a whole? The Wall Street Journal is frustratingly unclear on this critical point. Friday’s decision came in the case of Marcus Reymond Robinson, who was convicted in 1994 of murdering a white 17-year-old during a robbery. Judge Weeks was tasked with determining whether race played an improper role in jury selection at Mr. Robinson’s trial 18 years ago. The judge, an African-American who has 23 years on the bench, vacated Mr. Robinson’s death sentence and resentenced him to life in prison without parole. The state indicated it would appeal the decision. During a hearing in February, attorneys for Mr. Robinson cited a study by researchers at Michigan State University to show that North Carolina prosecutors struck prospective black jurors from juries far more frequently than white jurors . As he announced his decision Friday, Judge Weeks said the Michigan State study was a “valid, highly reliable study.” The state had argued that the study was flawed, and offered affidavits from prosecutors stating that their dismissals of prospective black jurors could be otherwise explained. Reading that, do you have any idea whether the judge was focused on bias in Robinson’s case, bias in other cases, or both? The article later suggests that the answer is “both”: Judge Weeks, who took about two months to announce his decision, said in court Friday that North Carolina “prosecutors intentionally discriminated” against potential black jurors during jury selection historically and in the Robinson case. Well, look. If prosecutors intentionally discriminated against jurors in Robinson’s case, then this reversal is a no-brainer, and the Racial Justice Act had nothing to do with it. If they didn’t, then we have a problem. Because, as I explained in February, prosecutors often have valid, racially neutral reasons to strike black jurors: Let’s say there are six whites and six blacks on your panel. Four of the whites and two of the blacks say they can treat everyone equally, while two of the whites and four of the blacks say they can’t apply the death penalty and that they don’t trust police. You, as the prosecutor, strike the latter six from your panel. You have just struck twice as many blacks as whites. You racist. And yet, you were doing your job: excusing biased jurors for race-neutral reasons. So it’s hard to know how angry to get about this. But I will say that, any way you slice it, it is rather ironic that theories of racial justice are saving the life of a guy who killed someone because of his race. UPDATE: The decision is here .
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Racial Justice Act Saves Racist from Death Row?
This is the second part of The American Spectator ‘s recent interview with Thomas Sowell. Today we discuss issues of bilingual education, other racial issues, and whether Republicans can prevail in November. Sowell has just released the second edition of his book, Intellectuals and Society . AmSpec: Now that the U.S. has so many Hispanic immigrants, how much damage can something like bilingual education do? Sowell: It holds Hispanics back. They are following the opposite pattern that was successful for David Hume and the Scots. They’re keeping a language that does not give them access to all the knowledge that is available in the society around them which I believe they are perfectly capable of using to advance themselves just as other groups have. Multiculturalism, when you think about it, its advocates are doing what the caste system did. They’re saying that where you were born and what you were born into is what you are stuck with for life. If you were born into this one particular culture, then you shouldn’t even aspire to get into a different culture. Your teachers shouldn’t try to facilitate you using the benefits of other cultures. The big difference is that the caste system, at least, never pretended that it existed for the benefit of those at the bottom. Multiculturalism does. AmSpec: Let’s turn to the question of race and intelligence. Why is mixing those two things together so explosive? Sowell: I guess just the emotional impact of it is explosive. In the early part of the 20th century the Progressives were saying that some people were only capable of being “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” I wish I’d been more explicit about this in the book that there are really two questions. One question is about the range of intelligence in different races. The other is about the statistical average of intelligence in different races. As far as the Progressives were concerned, they collapsed that into one question. There are some groups that can’t get above a certain mental level, and that’s it. But that’s not what the more recent discussions such as those centering around The Bell Curve are about, which is about statistical averages. There are all kinds of reasons why two races with initially identical genetic potential for intelligence could end up with different averages. I was just reading Matt Ridley’s book in which he was arguing that during medieval times in England, the upper classes tended to leave more offspring than did the lower classes. The net result was that as time went on, a larger and larger proportion of the British population were descendants of the upper classes, even if all those descendants didn’t remain in the upper class. So they had upper class values that bred through the society, where today we have the opposite. Ridley didn’t say this, but I wondered what if the British upper classes had higher intelligence? That would have meant that the average intelligence of the British was rising over time. We have no data on that. But the opposite can also happen, especially if you have a welfare state. You subsidize the production of more people in the lower classes, you can have a falling level of intelligence. The point being the statistical average doesn’t really tell you about the genetic potential of a particular race. AmSpec: You quoted the late Tom Wicker at some length about this notion that when racial problems and disparities occur, it must be due to the racism of whites or some other societal injustice. Can you talk about that type of thinking, where it leads and why people like Wicker engaged in it so often? Sowell: Wicker engaged in it not only on racial issues but on international issues. He was upset when the Czechs broke away from the Communist Bloc and were celebrating their freedom. He wrote that “freedom is not a panacea.” Well, nothing is a panacea. But I have a feeling in a different way, and this has to be speculation of course, I think people like Wicker and Derrick Bell have personal, circumstantial problems they can resolve in their writings. In the case of Wicker, it was his being a Southerner. I’ve long said, “Heaven save me from guilty white Southerners.” It’s not that they don’t have things to be guilty about, but the fact is their guilt is only adding to the problem, not solving it. Get rid of your guilt at your own expense, not at the expense of the taxpayers and the cohesion of the whole society. In case of the race, it’s amazing, Wicker’s reasoning and the New York Times ‘ editorials’ as well. They lament the fact so many more blacks are being imprisoned today than in the 1950s, and then there are black families breaking apart and so on. And they blame this on things like the legacy of slavery or else the shortcomings of whites today. But the obvious question arises, are you telling me in 1950 there was less racism than there is today? Are you telling me 1950 was not closer to the age of slavery than today? To even examine the internal logic of what they are saying makes their whole argument collapse like a house of cards. AmSpec: One of the notions that you brought up in the book is “critical mass.” That is the idea that students can only excel if surrounded by students of the same race or gender. Sowell: Again, one of those ideas that is impervious to facts. All the evidence I’ve seen, and all the impressions I’ve gotten myself and from others who have taught black students in different settings say just the opposite. One study, for example, found that the more black students there are in a class, the more negative effects that has on the students around them, especially on those black students with higher IQs. Higher IQ blacks do better in a class where there are not a lot of other black students. That buttresses another study that found whereas white or especially Asian-American students who have straight-A averages, are on average more popular with their classmates than people of lower achievement. With blacks it is just the opposite. Blacks that are straight-A students are less popular with other black students. That is just a huge handicap particularly for people who are going through adolescence where peer approval can be so important. AmSpec: Anything else on the subject of race and intellectuals? Sowell: Yes, let me make a remark about racial justice, which many people consider part of social justice. Well, what they call “social justice” I’d call “cosmic justice.” There are two different questions regarding justice and society. The first question is, Is life fair? The second is, Is society fair? Those are two radically different questions. Life has never been near being fair in any society recorded anywhere in thousands of years of human history. Now, the question becomes, is a particular society fair? The particular society might have rules that are fair in that they are applied to everyone equally and that people are rewarded or punished according to the same criteria. But that will not get you anywhere close to fairness in life chances. The family you were raised in, they will have far more to do with that. I’m especially sensitive to that because I was one of those people who was adopted in infancy, grew up unaware of my siblings who were adopted by other families hundreds of miles away. Later on as an adult I learned they were raised in families similar to mine in being poor and not well educated. But the family in which I was raised happened to consist mostly of people who themselves had never gotten passed elementary school but were absolutely determined that I would have an education. But none of my other siblings had that same good fortune. When you consider all the factors that are at work, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that different individuals or groups are going to have the same achievements. AmSpec: Turning to politics, the most controversial has been your promotion of Newt Gingrich as the best for the GOP in November. What led you to that position? Sowell: The ability to articulate, which is enormously lacking throughout the Republican Party. Think about it. We are in a country where millions more people identify themselves as conservatives than liberals, and yet in 2008 the Democrats won overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress along with the White House. When someone loses and they were dealt low cards, you say, we’ll that’s the way it is. But when they were dealt the high cards and lost, then they are doing something wrong. And it’s not just a matter of glibness on Gingrich’s part. When he discusses issues, he does have a depth of understanding that is very obviously greater than that of the other candidates. Unfortunately, he has personality characteristics that have just negated all of that, and which make his chances now virtually zero. After the Illinois vote, and especially the Tea Party endorsing Romney, it’s pretty much over. AmSpec: It always seemed to me that, yes, Gingrich is very articulate, but he is very volatile and very self-absorbed, even for a politician. It seemed to me that those qualities would prove fatal in November. The voters need to like you. In addition to being articulate, you have to be likeable. And Gingrich is not that likeable. Sowell: Yes, there’s that. But the real question now is whether Romney can be brought up to the point where he has a serious chance of defeating Obama. And that is by no means a slam dunk.
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Thomas Sowell Live, Part II
