All Caps, Bold and Italic

One of the talking heads on MSNBC, in their pre-convention coverage this afternoon, gushed over Barack Obama’s plan to give Federal money to First Responders so they can become more capable.

Mark me.  Wherever there is Federal money, there is ALWAYS Federal control.  The money Obama’s promises will have strings attached.  Knowing who Obama is, and what political party he represents, those strings will be affirmative action mandates.  Most likely, they will require almost the total elimination of any semblance of standards for black and Hispanic hiring and promotion candidates.

Ironically, then, Obama’s Federal money will make many Police, Fire and EMS services more black and Hispanic, and therefore less competent.

Maybe Rosita Swinton Should Have Made This Phone Call

AP:

7 more Philly workers suspended in teen’s death

PHILADELPHIA - Seven city social service administrators were suspended Monday, exactly two years after the emaciated, maggot-infested body of a 14-year-old girl with cerebral palsy was found in the squalid home of her mother, who has been charged with murder.

The suspensions came after of a grand jury report said the administrators failed to supervise derelict employees and, in some cases, falsified paperwork to cover up the neglect that led to the death of Danieal Kelly.

Just days ago, two other department workers were among nine people charged in the death of the disabled teen, who died of starvation and infection in 2006 while under the Department of Human Services’ supervision.

In announcing the discipline at a news conference Monday, Mayor Michael Nutter choked up while noting his own daughter is just a year younger than Danieal was when she died.

This isn’t hard.  Philadelphia, like many other major American cities, is essentially black owned and operated (even if there is a figurehead white mayor), and thus most city agencies are full of affirmative action incompetents.

What gets me is that, anywhere else, the CPS/DFS abuses of power make the IRS blush.  They’ll go in and raid a Mormom sect based on the allegations of abuse by someone who’s already in prison and will be for a long time.  But when you really need them, they’re not around.

A La Carte

Says BHO is only a contender ’cause he’s black.

Denouncing affirmative action and racial pandering, are we, Bobby?  Three words:  A la carte.

Where’s Waldo?

New York Daily News:

A razor-wielding drug thug grabbed U.S. prosecutor [*****] in a headlock yesterday and slammed her to the floor at his sentencing in Brooklyn federal court.

Victor Wright had [*****] by the hair and seemed ready to wield the makeshift weapon when his lawyer and a court reporter leapt in to save her.

“I think he was going to slash her throat,” defense lawyer [*****], 72, told the Daily News. “He fully intended to maim her.”

“His face was full of rage,” agreed [*****], the 60-year-old court reporter.

Wright, 37, was a key lieutenant of drug kingpin Kenneth (Supreme) McGriff who founded the Supreme Team in the 1980s, a drug gang that wreaked havoc in southeast Queens.

McGriff is serving a life sentence for murder at Florence ADX Penitentiary in Colorado, the nation’s most secure federal prison. Wright’s sentencing was adjourned after the shocking courtroom attack.

It didn’t appear that escape was the intention of the powerfully built inmate - just revenge.

“He thinks she framed him,” said Batchelder.

The havoc in Judge [*****] courtroom started as Wright was led in through a side door shortly after 3 p.m.

He made a beeline straight for [*****], chief of the narcotics section for the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, and took her down.

“He had her by the hair, she was screaming,” said courtroom clerk [*****]. “She was at the bottom of a pile.”

Wright dropped the makeshift weapon on the carpet during the struggle with Batchelder and Tolkin.

Eugene Corcoran, chief U.S. Marshal for the Eastern District of New York, said an internal investigation is underway to determine how the weapon was smuggled into the courthouse.

Yes, Mr. Corcoran.  While you’re at it, you can also investigate why your Marshals didn’t tackle Mr. Wright, leaving the job to his own defense lawyer and a court reporter.  Either someone at the jail and/or someone in the Marshal’s service didn’t do their jobs.  And knowing how affirmative action-crazy the city and state of New York are, not to mention the Federal government, my bet is some black authority figure(s), such as jail guards, jail administrators, Marshals, etc., let him smuggle the weapon out of the jail and into the courthouse, because they agreed with what Mr. Wright wanted to do.

The Affirmative Action Commissar Who Would Be Governor

Should Eliot Spitzer deny us any more fun.  This is Lieutenant Governor David Patterson, who is currently a defendant in a racial discrimination civil lawsuit brought by a white photographer.

Check Her ‘Dex

Byron York, in NR:

But there are still problems. As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” she says.

“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service. “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

What she doesn’t mention is that the helping industry has treated her pretty well. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office. And that does not count the money Mrs. Obama receives from serving on corporate boards. She would have been O.K. even without Jack’s magic beans.

Another advantage that Mrs. Obama has over the average Zanesvillian is that she and Barack had “Rezko” in their phone’s address book.  Not a bad guy to call in a time of need.

He Was Once a Federal Prosecutor Himself

Former affirmative action Federal prosecutor Eric Tolen, who was already accused of doing a pair of 15-year old boys in his Town and Country home, is now back in the can after his former colleagues found evidence that he tried to tamper with one of the victims, in that he forced the alleged victim to make a written retraction.

As a former prosecutor, one would think that he would be so aware of the pitfalls of the system that he would not want to do those things if he were on the wrong side of the law, as he is now. This must mean that he was no Perry Mason.

Servant of Two Masters

AP:

A federal grand jury Thursday indicted former Newark Mayor Sharpe James on corruption charges involving land sales and allegations that he spent extravagantly on himself and several women using city-issued credit cards.

The 33-count indictment charges James with fraud for allegedly facilitating and approving the cut-rate sales of city-owned land to a female companion.

It also charges James, 71, with using the city-issued credit cards on himself and eight women during trips to destinations including Rio de Janeiro, Puerto Rico and Martha’s Vineyard, U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie and state Attorney General Anne Milgram announced.

(snip)

Ethical questions have long surrounded James, who has a home on the Jersey shore, a yacht and a Rolls Royce. He has been a state senator since 1999, while also serving as Newark’s mayor until last year, when he decided not to see re-election.

So, for seven years, he was a Mayor and a State Senator simultaneously. It’s a wonder he had any time for being corrupt.

He earns $49,000 a year as a senator and collects an annual pension of about $125,000 from Newark. Additionally, he accrued more than $1 million in a retirement account at Essex County College, where he worked two decades ago. After leaving the mayor’s job last year, he directed an urban institute at the college — at a salary of $150,000 annually — before retiring in June.

Nice work for an affirmative action’s lifetime.

Misecgonation, Anyone?

The authorities in Canton, Ohio claimed that he did it, and she, as a confidant of his from their high school days, helped obstruct justice.

GMA this morning on ABC, seen locally on KDNL-ABC-30, had a short segment of some ditzy reporterette talking to the Canton police chief about former officer Bobby Cutts, Jr., and his troubled record as a cop, much less a man. Ditzy ABC reporterette asked why the Department in Canton didn’t have better pre-hiring screening, and wasn’t able to recognize a bad apple.

Stupid: They did, that’s why they fired him. And if you’re so upset about him becoming a cop to begin with, realize that the standards are lowered in an affirmative action push to get more non-whites on police forces, either because the affirmative action loons themselves run big city police departments and want it that way on their own, or the Federal judiciary and Federal Justice Department, flanked by Federal civil rights laws, force them to do that.

UPDATE 6/27:  Affirmative action cop.  Confirmed.

King-Harbor on the Brink

Already covered at St. Louis CofCC Blog. AR blog posters have informally renamed the place “King-Kevorkian.”

I will add this: If this were a “mainstream” hospital, i.e. run by non-protected races of people, and had such a long and vast track record of incompetency and dangerous care, do you think the state of California would have waited until now to move to close the joint?

I bet they were afraid of Sharpton-like bloviators in southern California.

A parallel can be drawn to the St. Louis City Public Schools.  The state took it over last week, but if it were a white school district with such poor results and administration, it would have been taken over years ago.  The state was afraid to step on important black toes.

In my opinion, the time differential between now, when the state really took action, and some time in the past, when the state would have took action were it not a black-run hospital, is the time in which the California Department of Health Services is collectively and almost singularly responsible for the bad health care at King-Harbor. The death which finally got the state off its rump is blood on the hands of the CDHS Board of Directors.

Now That’s What I Call Affirmative “Action”

Eric Tolen, a former affirmative action Federal prosecutor from the eastern district of Missouri, is alleged to have a little too much “action” with two 15-year old teenage boys in his Town and Country, Mo. home.

St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCullough alleges that Tolen allowed the two teens to reside at his house, and gave them material favors in exchange for sex. Tolen’s lawyer told KSDK reporters that the charges are false, and stem from consensual relations that his client had with two 15-year old boys. Hey stupid, look up Missouri’s statutory rape laws. Fifteen-year old people cannot, by legal definition, have a consensual sexual relationship with anyone age 21 or older.

About the only thing scarier than an ex-cop going to prison is an ex-prosecutor.

Tolen was fired in 1999, for, among other things, and as quoted in the legal documents filed in Tolen’s lawsuit in 2004 against the U.S. Justice Department alleging improper dismissal based on racial discrimination:

Eric Tolen (“Tolen”) was employed by the Department of Justice as an Assistant United States Attorney from 1987 until his termination in 1999. His termination followed allegations of, inter alia: perjury in connection with his brother’s bank robbery trial, the unauthorized outside practice of law, making false statements to investigating officers, using government time, clerical assistance, and space for personal reasons, and misusing his position as an Assistant United States Attorney for personal gain. Pursuant to Department of Justice policy, Tolen was placed on administrative leave while the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (“EOUSA”) completed an investigation into the allegations and ultimately recommended Tolen’s dismissal.

This goes to show you how much of a rotten apple he was. He was hired in the U.S. Attorney’s office by (supposedly anti-affirmative action) Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Attorney for Eastern Missouri, and fired by Bill Clinton’s.

Tolen also represented former Overland Mayor “Raggedy” Ann Purzner in her futile effort to save her job and to legitimize her illegal attempts to dismiss Overland City Attorney Bob Herman.

Whites Out, Non-Whites In, At Major Urban Police Departments

AP:

Police departments around the country are relaxing age and fitness standards, forgiving minor criminal convictions and easing other requirements to relieve shortages in their ranks and find officers who are wiser, more worldly and cooler-headed in a crisis.

In recent years, St. Petersburg and Tampa, Fla., dropped the need for a two-year college degree if the candidate has military or law enforcement experience. Oakland, Calif., is no longer disqualifying applicants for minor, long-ago drug convictions or gang involvement. And Boston this spring raised the upper age limit for recruits from 32 to 40.

“Being well-rounded, having some life experience, makes for a better person and patrolman — someone who is coming up on a conflict who is mature and measured, as opposed to some young kid right out of school,” said Boston City Councilor Michael Flaherty, who proposed the age-limit increase.

The relaxation of standards — a trend that emerged in Associated Press interviews and reviews of policies in 50 cities — has been prompted in large part by a dire need for police recruits.

A federally funded study last spring by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington advocacy group for police chiefs and commissioners, found that 10 percent of the nation’s police departments had severe shortages of officers.

New York City is looking to hire 3,000 officers. The Los Angeles police want 1,000 more cops; Houston needs 600; Washington is short 330; Phoenix is down about 200; and the Boston force is about 100 officers below its 2000 level.

Among the reasons: The strong economy is offering other job possibilities, aging cops are retiring, starting salaries are low, and the Iraq war is drawing off both would-be police recruits and police officers who are in the National Guard and Reserves.

Wrong. It’s all race. Whites with brains won’t join, because they know they will be in a daily situation where every traffic stop or accost of a non-white is a potential career-ender, and because of it, they won’t be able to do their proper jobs. So to fill the void, (or to fill court-mandated race quotas), non-whites are recruited, so to get enough of them, standards (especially juvenile rap sheets and gang membership) have to be ignored or weakened.

Guns vs Hoses

The St. Louis City Police Department has opened an investigation of the St. Louis City Fire Department. There are allegations that a Fire Commander took recruits at the Fire Academy away from training in groups of four at a time, for a total of twenty recruits affected, and made them clear junk and debris from an apartment building the Commander owned. The news of the Police investigation of the Fire Department broke yesterday.

Today, Fire Department officials are fighting back, claiming that it’s all political, based on the fact that City Hall has been trying to force the Fire Department (against its will) to promote a bunch of white firemen. A recent promotion test, based on skill and qualifications, showed that nearly all of those that should be promoted are white, and the affirmative action junkies that run the Fire Department took it to Federal court, and lost, i.e. the courts said the test was not discriminatory. Since that point, City Hall has been lobbying to the Fire Department to make the promotions formally, but they’re dragging their heels.

It’s a goofy theory, and here’s why.

In the first place, City Hall has almost no control over the Police Department, as black anti-police activist keep reminding us. Four of the five members of the Police Board are chosen by Missouri’s Governor, while the Mayor gets the fifth seat. So even if City Hall wanted to use the Police Department to do this or anything, it couldn’t make them.

Second, the Police Department is run by the same mentality of affirmative action goober that runs the Fire Department. I don’t think that the PD would engage in a politically-motivated vendetta on the FD based on the fact that the FD wants to use affirmative action. The PD wouldn’t do that sort of thing either at the behest of others, or on its own.

That’s why I think this investigation is legit.

Back from the Conference

I have returned. Cheering is permitted, but keep the jeers to yourself.

Stay tuned to the CofCC National Website and the Citizens Informer for more coverage of the 2007 National Conference in Greenville, South Carolina. I will post local and miscellaneous interest photos on the St. Louis CofCC Static Website later this week.

Two items from the Conference but not related to it:

1. The patient with the rare form of TB who came back into the USA and went on all those international flights was identified as 31-year old Andrew Speaker, an Atlanta personal injury lawyer whose work required international travel. The McPaper article revealing his identity went on to say that U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Susan Collins (RINO-ME) are all fulminating over the ineptitude of the U.S. Border Patrol in that they let him back into the country. Keep in mind that both Schumer and Collins are for amnesty and open borders.

2. A nearby installation of the Air Force Reserve held a meeting in an adjoining conference room at the hotel on the same weekend. If you want to believe that the Pentagon is telling the truth when it claims that the Armed Forces doesn’t use affirmative action, consider this: I did an impromptu survey, and comparing people of similar ages in appearance, blacks had higher ranks than whites. One black woman in the group, who appeared to be in her mid-to-late 30s, had a rank that was only one notch of Sergeant below a black man in his 50s, who himself appeared to have the highest rank of anyone in the group. There did not appear to be any officer-grade men or women, just all E-level personnel.

Two Strikes And You’re Out

I think this story is mistitled.

City Pages of Minneapolis-St. Paul:

Gun Shy
After the Virginia Tech tragedy, even talking about concealed carry is grounds for suspension

(snip)

Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle “Tough Guy Scheffler,” Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn’t make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.

“Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn’t have happened if the school wouldn’t have banned their permits a few months ago,” Scheffler wrote. “I just don’t understand why leftists don’t understand that criminals don’t care about laws; that is why they’re criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”

If one would stop reading the article there, one would think that he was suspended only for his conceal-carry advocacy. But read on:

After stewing over the issue for two days, Scheffler sent a second email to University President Linda Hanson, reiterating his condemnation of the concealed carry ban and launching into a flood of complaints about campus diversity initiatives, which he considered reverse discrimination.

“In fact, three out of three students just in my class that are ‘minorities’ are planning on returning to Africa and all three are getting a free education on my dollar,” Scheffler wrote with thinly veiled ire. “Please stop alienating the students who are working hard every day to pay their tuition. Maybe you can instruct your staff on sensitivity towards us ‘privileged white folk.’”

I think that’s what did it. He insulted affirmative action and the whole racial pandering and preferences system. If he only said this, and nothing about conceal-carry, I think he would have been suspended. This after his e-mails about the guns, and university creeps probably started worrying that they had another Cho on their hands.

We will probably never know if he was liable for a “third strike” of being a serious fundagelical Christian who proselytized on campus.

Deposed New Orleans Judge Is Disbarred

Topix via New Orleans Times-Picayune:

On Friday, the Louisiana Supreme Court completely disbarred former Orleans Parish Juvenile Court Judge Yvonne Hughes, who was ordered off the bench in April 2004. The Supreme Court said in its three-page decision that the “seriousness and pervasiveness of respondent’s misconduct in all aspects of her legal career readily demonstrates that she is not fit to maintain her license to practice law.”

When the court removed Hughes from the bench, the justices noted that she had released from jail almost 900 adults arrested for municipal and traffic violations, sometimes held court by phone and allowed convicted felons to work in her courtroom around juveniles.

I wonder how those who defend affirmative action in admissions for law schools would respond to this. My bet is that they would say that this is just an example of an egg that has to be broken on the way to making the omelet of equality and diversity.

What’s Important to NBC

Is not ratings, but diversity.

To think, NBC turned down American Idol, and House, which follows Idol on Fox Tuesdays, is distributed by NBC.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute About to Become a Worthless Affirmative Action Degree Mill

McPaper:

Officials at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts say they will make college entrance exam scores optional in admission, making it the first nationally ranked science and engineering institute to do so.

Beginning with the entering class of 2008, WPI applicants will have the option of submitting either ACT or SAT test scores or some other indicator of academic achievement, such as a research paper, science fair project, or similar effort that demonstrates a student’s organizational skills, knowledge of subject matter, motivation and initiative.

“This helps us capture a completely different side of a student, and also potential leadership ability,” says Kristin Tichenor, associate vice president for enrollment management.

WPI’s announcement brings to 739 the number of schools moving away from requiring a standardized test from applicants, says the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), a Cambridge, Mass., non-profit that is critical of testing.

Since last spring, 18 liberal arts colleges have de-emphasized scores in admissions, as has George Mason University, a large public institution in Fairfax, Va.

(snip)

She says she hopes the new policy will help WPI attract more women and minorities, who tend on average to earn lower scores, and “lower the flame” on the admissions frenzy.

Now we know what the end run will be for public colleges and universities that want to engage in affirmative action, but are based in states that have banned affirmative action in admissions, such as Michigan and California.

If you’re non-white, all you have to do to gain admission into WPI is to write a thousand-word essay about how your algebra class in your senior year of high school was poisoned by a white racist teacher who was a Klan member, and about how traumatizing it was that your algebra book had photos of too many white faces.

West Point: I Want My Affirmative Action

Greg Bruno via Modern Tribalist:

Academy officials say increasing the diversity of the cadet corps, and ultimately, mirroring the nation’s racial profile, is vital for the long-term stability of the Army.

Anyone laughing yet?  The Army is so weak and putrid, and not coincidentally, it’s the blackest of the Armed Services, that the Pentagon is relying on the Marines to keep the peace in Baghdad.

Dr. Missouri Affirmative Action

Otherwise known as Henry Givens, Ph.D., someone that all the state’s political power brokers turn to when they want a diverse face on anything they do, has been appointed by Governor Blunt to be on the state’s school safety task force, created in reaction to the Virginia Tech massacre.

Where They Can Get Diversity

Officials with the Beverly Hills, Calif. School District, evidently upset that their Arab and Oriental school district isn’t diverse enough, are going to extend “diversity permits” (i.e. self-afficted inter-district desegregation) to more black and Hispanic students.

If they need more black students, then they ought to open their doors to St. Louis City Public Schools students. Many of them will be seeking new schools, as the state takeover of the SLPS means that they can transfer.

What? You say a 1,837-mile one-way commute is stretching it? As the state of Missouri has spent billions on deseg expenses in the last few decades, we know that money is no object when it comes to ensuring a diverse student body in all classrooms and school districts. Perhaps the BHSD and the state of Missouri could build and operate a fleet of Concorde-style supersonic jets to shuttle black St. Louis students from here to southern California and back each day. Or maybe they could spare that expense, forget about making the students commute, and purchase a 10,000-sf Beverly Hills residence for each St. Louis family that wants to transfer their SLPS student to BHSD.

Affirmative Action Philadelphia Fireman Hates White Cops

And wrote a rap song advocating cop-killing. Don’t fool yourself, when men like him say “pigs,” they specifically mean white cops.

Philadelphia Inquirer via Modern Tribalist:

“The most deplorable part of it is that this is coming from someone we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with in times of danger,” said Costello, who noted that he was not speaking on behalf of the FOP.

“To have someone like that turn on you is unconscionable. It’s not a case of expressing one’s opinion; he’s advocating homicide.”

I don’t think it’s a matter of Mr. Jaques “turning” on anyone; I think he was what he was all along. The trouble is affirmative action in hiring and promotion in police and fire departments, the latter worse than the former. If there were any “turncoats” here, it’s the gaggle of white pandering city officials in Philadelphia, every big city in the country, and in American governments in general.

What surprises me is not that he was hired, but that he wasn’t a cop himself. The good progressive egalitarians in Philly are losing their mojo.

Sure, He’s a Worthy Individual

Let’s say you’re a white high school senior in the St. Louis area, who doesn’t come from a wealthy or influential family, and is in fact the son of a single mother.

You attend a school district, e.g. Bayless, Hancock Place, Affton, that’s average or decent, but not particularly great, e.g. Ladue, Clayton.

Your resume includes a 3.9 GPA based on relatively easy course work, a 30 on the ACT (whose scoring scale has probably been “recentered,” i.e. dumbed down at least once in the last decade), football, Air Force JROTC Captain, tutoring and mentoring, and National Honor Society.

On top of that, no officers in the admissions office of Harvard are closely related to current or former officers of the school district you attend.

What do you think your chances would be to get into Harvard, and to have your education expenses almost completely financed by grants and scholarships, and without the specter of upper-five or lower-six figure debt hanging over your head in your early 20s?

I rest my case.

Be All the Affirmative Action You Can Be

Time has this long expose on the depleted and overextended U.S. Army.

During one juncture, Time alludes to the real truth, when it talks about how educational, age, domestic criminal record, and other standards have been lowered to boost recruitment and reenlistment.

Compared to the other branches of the Armed Services, the Army is the most non-white (historically, black, but increasingly also Hispanic).  It might be no surprise that the Pentagon is relying on the Marines to keep the peace on the ground in Iraq.

A Picture Is Worth 1,0000 Words

From the Eric Vickers-organized rally today at the downtown casino hotel under construction, complaining about how the project does not have enough black workers.

That photo in itself might be the answer why not.

Bruin Bucks

White Los Angeles business executives team up with University of California Los Angeles Black Alumni Association to raise $1.75 million for affirmative action black scholarships and grants.

Meanwhile, non-rich white UCLA students will have to mortgage their next five lifetimes to go to UCLA, and many of them will go bankrupt after they are affirmative actioned out of employment worthy of their UCLA education.

Affirmative Action Mortgages

The next time you hear President Bush or any race-pandering neocons talking about the gains that black Americans have made in home ownership, drop this little piece of bad news from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in their laps:

Vardiman is African-American, a fact that could be significant. One large national study — which has been replicated in other smaller studies — concludes that African-Americans and nonwhite Latinos are more likely than whites to be victims of predatory lending. And they’re more likely to be steered into high-risk, high-interest-rate subprime mortgages.

The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit homeownership research group based in Washington, projects that 16 to 20 percent of all subprime loans made last year in Missouri and Illinois will end up in foreclosure.

Such findings are raising concerns that discriminatory lending practices could derail recent gains made in black homeownership. In 2006, 51 percent of black households were owner-occupied, up from 48.4 percent in 2004. By comparison, 75 percent of white households are owner-occupied.

This means that the increasing home ownership rate among blacks has come due to blacks either taking out low-rate ARMs during a time of record low mortgage rates, (a very risky thing to do), and/or affirmative action lending by banks, in that banks will be more likely to approve loans for marginally credit unworthy non-whites than they would for whites, ceteris paribus.

Speaking of African Politics

Deval Patrick is doing such a bad job in Massachusetts that it’s even giving the MSM and some of the state’s liberals pause.

Reuters:

Deval Patrick rode a populist wave to become Massachusetts’ first Democratic governor in 16 years and the second African American elected governor in U.S. history.

No, not “populist wave.” Affirmative action pity in a liberal state on what turned out to be a good day for Democrats. Then again, this man’s history is bouncing from one affirmative action admission, hiring, sinecure, appointment and election to another.

Most of the rest of the article follows suit, save this paragraph:

Romney, elected as a moderate, was heavily criticized for tacking to the political right in his single term and carving out conservative stances on hot-button policy issues such as abortion to rally conservative Republicans ahead of his presidential bid — stands that angered liberal Massachusetts.

Actually, Romney’s conservatism as Governor only existed during the last few months of his term. His “moderate” record as Governor is what’s getting him in trouble now for his Presidential campaign.

Donna Shalala’s Upcoming Blackwash

She and Bob Dole are going to investigate Walter Reedgate.

Seriously, you can’t expect a woman who, while she was President of the University of Wisconsin, implemented one of the worst and most draconian left-wing speech codes of any institution of higher learning in the country, to tell you the truth about Walter Reed Hospital, can you?

“Affirmative action” will not be two words that cross her lips.

Walter Reed Hospital Fit Hits the Shan

AP:

As several House committees prepared to delve into the scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, outraged lawmakers vowed quick action and called for an independent commission to examine poor conditions for soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s national security panel, headed by Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., scheduled a hearing at the hospital’s auditorium Monday morning. The list of Army officials, hospital staff and patients invited to speak includes the medical center’s previous commander, Maj. Gen. George Weightman.

The defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee also scheduled a hearing on Walter Reed for Monday.

In a letter Sunday to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., asked for an independent commission, possibly headed by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, to investigate all post-combat medical facilities and recommend changes.

“To think that men and women are serving their country in the most honorable and courageous way possible and all we give them is a dilapidated, rat-infested, run-down building to recover is a disgrace,” Schumer wrote. “My fear is that Walter Reed is just the tip of the iceberg, and merely highlights the pervasive and systemic mistreatment of our service members.”

And yet, most of these same Democrats who want an investigation over the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed, (and they’re doing so just to embarrass the Bush White House), also want universal health care (read: essentially making the entire American health care system a Federal government agency), and as Walter Reed’s problems were in part caused by bureaucracy, every hospital and clinic in the country will be like Walter Reed if Schumer, Tierney et al. get their way.

Another taboo factor in the Walter Reed scandal, and one that is probably more likely to be true, as Walter Reed is a Federal government operation and is in Washington D.C., and also ironic in that Democrats are demanding these hearings, is affirmative action in hiring and promotion.