Daily Digest |  |
- Short takes — “excessive whiteness,” Myles Leonard, and Vanita Gupta
- Who is Keith Ellison?
- Ride, Sally ride
- Vanita Gupta grossly misleads Senate about Dylan Roof
- Israel, the UK, and the U.S. lead the way on vaccinations
| Short takes — “excessive whiteness,” Myles Leonard, and Vanita Gupta Posted: 10 Mar 2021 12:24 PM PST (Paul Mirengoff) *Did you know that law schools are now being rated according to their “whiteness”? The rating system determines a school’s “excess whiteness” by comparing the degree to which a law school’s student body is more white than the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) applicant pools and state population. Credentials to study law don’t factor in, of course. “The Whitest Law School Report” found Case Western Reserve University’s law school to be less white than approximately three-quarters of the other law schools in the study. The school’s “co-deans” sent an email to students, staff, and faculty bragging about Case Western’s comparative non-whiteness. They were quick to point out, however, that the “whiteness study” result doesn’t mean the school should be satisfied with the diversity of its student body or that “we have an equitable number of students who identify as Black, Native American, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, or other under-represented groups.” The co-deans also noted that “lack of diversity in the applicant pool continues to be a problem.” In other words, there aren’t enough non-whites interested in attending the school to allow the admission of even minimally qualified minorities in numbers deemed “equitable” by the race mongers. The problem isn’t lack of equity. The problem is the strange way that word is being used these days. *Myles Leonard is a basketball player for the Miami Heat. He has been suspended by the team for using an anti-Semitic slur — “kike” — while playing a video game that was live streamed. Leonard is injured and can’t play for the Heat anyway, but the suspension will prevent him from being around the team and will lead to a monetary penalty. As a Jew, I find Leonard’s language mildly offensive. But, in the scheme of things, why should I care what some random basketball player said? NBA players aren’t public officials. As an American, I’m more offended that someone is being punished for his choice of words. American Jews don’t need the NBA to protect them from ugly language. Chinese Muslims, by contrast, could do with some support from the NBA. But the league doesn’t care about them, at least not enough to offend the Red Chinese. Leonard has apologized profusely for what he said. The Miami Heat should lighten up. *Speaking of apologizing, Vanita Gupta, who aspires to be a very high-ranking public official, apologized yesterday for her nasty tweets about U.S. Senators. Gupta doesn’t want to be nixed by the Senate for such tweets the way Neera Tanden was. But Gupta’s apology was marred by her attempt to blame Twitter. She said:
Maybe. But the “Twitter made me do it” defense is lame. Even if Twitter brings out the worst in people, Gupta is still responsible for her “worst.” Moreover, Gupta’s non-Twitter rants in her capacity as head of the Leadership Council on Human and Civil Rights are also snarky and polarizing. It’s true that they don’t go after U.S. Senators directly, only the Republican nominees they voted to confirm. However, Senators shouldn’t confine their distaste for vicious attacks on political opponents to attacks that single them out. Snarky is snarky and viciously partisan is viciously partisan regardless of the target’s identity or station in life. Gupta graciously pledged to stop attacking people on Twitter if confirmed. But if confirmed she won’t need Twitter to go after her political opponents. She will have the power of the U.S. government behind her. That’s scary.     |
| Posted: 10 Mar 2021 03:19 AM PST (Scott Johnson) Our friend Roger Kimball has tuned in to the trial of Derek Chauvin in a major way. Roger has accordingly noted the role played by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in the case, as he did in his current Spectator column “Justice for Derek Chauvin.” Last night Roger forwarded a message he had received in response to his column quoting one of Ellison’s two contributions to the University of Minnesota Daily in 1989-90, when Ellison was a third-year law student. I’ve been reporting on and writing about Ellison for 15 years now. I responded to Roger’s message with the following background that I thought some readers might find of interest. There is much more where this came from. Just ask me! I started writing about Ellison on Power Line in June 2006, when he (surprisingly) won the DFL endorsement to succeed Martin Sabo at the DFL Fifth District Convention that year. Sabo favored his chief of staff Mike Erlandson. Ellison presented himself to the convention as the leftward most viable candidate and prevailed, leading essentially to a three-way primary that he won that August. The first revelation that June was Ellison's Nation of Islam columns published in the University of Minnesota Daily under the pseudonym Keith Hakim. I can't remember without going back who broke that story, but a local political reporter drew my attention to the story and I wrote about it carefully at the time on Power Line. I then got a call from an acquaintance who had been trying to get the Star Tribune to cover Ellison's extensive history with the Nation of Islam. Ellison had been a local leader of the Nation. The acquaintance who called me had a clip file documenting it, going back to the U of M Daily articles. The acquaintance called me in my office and asked if I would like his clip file. I said yes. He asked me to meet him at a corner in downtown Minneapolis a few blocks from my office for the handoff. He was my Deep Throat on Ellison. I did a lot of reporting that summer, including an interview with the Daily editor who had been forced to publish Ellison's columns under his pseudonym despite Daily policy to the contrary. He was still upset about it 15-plus years later. I also interviewed several law students who had tried to get Ellison to withdraw his sponsorship of the lecture by Kwame Toure at the law school in 1990. They were still upset about it. I kept getting calls and leads (mostly from prominent Democrats who didn't want Ellison to be the face of the DFL in Minneapolis) and doing research that year as the Star Tribune performed so pitifully. I wrote an endless series on Power Line called "Who is Keith Ellison?" I summarized my findings in the Weekly Standard article “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman” just before he was elected as the first Muslim member of Congress that fall. I have a very thick file on him. You know that the usual progression is from the Nation of Islam to Islam, like Malcolm X. I read Ellison's memoir My Country, 'Tis of Thee the week it was published. I wrote another Weekly Standard article about the memoir. It's called "The Ellison elision." I turned that article into a Star Tribune column when the book came out in paperback. It's here. I called that column "Keith Ellison remembers to forget" in honor of the old Elvis Presley number "I Forgot to Remember to Forget.” One interesting aspect of the memoir is Ellison’s discussion of his conversion to Islam as an undergrad at Wayne State. Ellison omits his extensive involvement with the Nation of Islam from the memoir. He has lied so much about it. It's incredible. It's all in the clip file. I posted a few items from it in a Power Line post that was a companion to the 2006 Weekly Standard article. I called that companion post "Keith Ellison for dummies." (I was thinking of the Star Tribune reporters who repeated Ellison’s lies as facts.) I reposted it last year here. Ellison ignored the Weekly Standard article I wrote about his memoir, but the Star Tribune article really upset him. He attacked me as a bigot and raised funds off it. Ellison is the only guy I know whose progression ran from Islam to Nation of Islam (snd then back to Islam when it suited his political career). He has never been asked about it. Never. It's amazing. Ellison's support of the killers of Officer Jerry Haaf and his friendship with the gangbanger who planned it are the most disgraceful part of his checkered past. Everything else pales against it. That goes back to his early career in private practice after law school in 1992-1993. I am proud of the work I have done on Ellison. It all goes back to those two U of M Daily columns he wrote as Keith Hakim. I have never worked harder to less effect on anything in my life.   |
| Posted: 10 Mar 2021 02:56 AM PST (Scott Johnson) Below is the ten-minute video of President Biden honoring Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost and Lt. Gen. Laura Richardson in connection with International Women’s Day. I posted an excerpt here yesterday. This longer version is also worth a look. The White House has posted the text of Biden’s remarks here. The style of Biden’s delivery is suggestive of the faux presidency that follows his faux campaign. The substance of the remarks is suggestive of the bizarre hell-world into which we are descending (to borrow an expression from our friends at InstaPundit). Biden stares vacantly at the teleprompter stationed in front of him. He struggles to read it. He struggles to keep his place. He struggles to articulate. He struggles to concentrate. When he avows “You can’t be what you can’t see” as the wisdom of the age, I think you can’t read what you can’t see. Quotable quote: “You know, some of — some of it is relatively straightforward work where we're making good progress designing body armor that fits women properly; tailoring combat uniforms for women; creating maternity flight suits; updating — updating requirements for their hairstyles….And that they can completely, fairly engage in promotion and compete all across the board, including on the — on age and gender neutrality and the physical fitness test.”   |
| Vanita Gupta grossly misleads Senate about Dylan Roof Posted: 09 Mar 2021 11:17 PM PST (Paul Mirengoff) Vanita Gupta opposes the death penalty under all circumstances. That’s a respectable position, though one I disagree with. There is no problem with a high-ranking Justice Department official being personally against the death penalty, as long as her opposition doesn’t cause her to reject the law. Yesterday, when Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked Gupta about her opposition to the death penalty, the nominee assured the Senator that when she was at the DOJ she enforced the death penalty, notwithstanding her personal views. Gupta cited the case of Dylan Roof, the racist who killed Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Gupta said that she enforced the law as to Roof and that he was convicted and sentenced to death “under her watch.” Gupta’s statement is true, but extremely misleading. In reality, Gupta recommended not seeking the death penalty for Dylan Roof. In a memo explaining her recommendation, Gupta claimed that mitigating factors outweighed aggravating ones in Roof’s case. I’ve heard that the U.S. attorney in South Carolina was so outraged by Gupta’s stance that he threatened to go public with a denunciation of the DOJ for not caring sufficiently about the lives of the slain Blacks. Fortunately, as I understand it, the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, rejected Gupta’s recommendation. That’s why the death penalty was sought and obtained. Yes, it happened “under Gupta’s watch.” But it happened over Gupta’s opposition. Gupta’s position that mitigating factors outweighed aggravating ones in Roof’s case was preposterous. If true, it’s hard to imagine how mitigating factors could ever not carry the day when it comes to the death penalty. In other words, it’s hard to imagine a case in which the death penalty would be imposed. Given the absurdity of Gupta’s legal arguments, it seems clear that her recommendation against the death penalty for Roof was driven by her ideological opposition, not by any rational view of the law. Gupta is too intelligent to have believed her legal argument. That argument was a transparent attempt to dress up her ideological preference in legal terms. Thus, the Senate has two good reasons not to confirm Gupta: (1) her intellectually dishonest, ideologically-driven advocacy for leniency towards Dylan Roof and (2) her attempt to mislead Senators on the subject at yesterday’s hearing.   |
| Israel, the UK, and the U.S. lead the way on vaccinations Posted: 09 Mar 2021 09:13 PM PST (Paul Mirengoff) The identity of the three major nations doing the best job of vaccinating their people against the Wuhan coronavirus will probably come as no surprise to readers who have been following the news on the subject. The three are Israel, the UK, and the U.S. Israel tops them all. It has administered an astonishing 98.5 doses per 100 people. The UK is a distant second with 35.1 doses per 100. Next comes the U.S. at 27.2 doses. Israel reportedly paid premium prices for vaccine, enabling it to get off to an incredibly quick start. Now, it is even vaccinating Palestinians who work in Israel — around 100,000 of them per day. Still, Israel’s many enemies criticize it for not taking care of other Palestinians — as if the Israelis have a moral obligation to vaccinate an unrelentingly hostile population, many of whose members favor destruction of the Jewish state. The UK also got off to a flying start. Brits should be grateful for Brexit. The cumbersome EU bureaucracy moved slowly on the vaccination front, and member nations are paying the price. For example, France has administered only 8.5 doses per 100 people. Spain and Italy have done only slightly better (9.6 and 9.0, respectively). The U.S. also started quickly. While the EU dithered, President Trump pushed the FDA to approve the two available vaccines quickly. Two less prominent nations also deserve mention. They are the UAE (65.1 doses per 100 people) and Serbia (23.7 doses). Serbia’s success seemingly is attributable to the realization that, not being an EU member, it could not rely on Brussels. The Serbs aggressively sought and obtained vaccine from wherever it was available — the U.S., China, Russia, and the EU. The UAE was able to put lots of shots in arms because it rapidly approved China’s version of the vaccine. The efficacy of that vaccine is subject to doubt, however. According to Worldometer, the number of new cases in the UAE has actually increased since vaccinations commenced. In mid-December, the UAE was reporting about 1,200 new cases per day. Throughout January, the number was steady at nearly three times that number. Now, it’s about double what it was in mid-December. Is the vaccine used in the UAE at least preventing deaths? The numbers don’t show that it is. Deaths from the virus spiked in the UAE during February. Worldometer paints a far happier picture of the other four vaccination leaders — Israel, the UK, the U.S., and Serbia. New cases in Israel are about one-third of what they were a month and a half ago. So too with deaths. In the UK the results are even more dramatic. At the beginning of the year, it was reporting more than 50,000 new cases per day. Now, the number is around 6,000. The daily death count is down from around 1,500 to around 300. But the UK was doing vastly worse than Israel pre-vaccine, so there was much more room for improvement. In the U.S., new reported cases have plummeted, as well — from around 250,000 per day to around 60,000. So far, improvement in the daily death count has been less dramatic. Still, in the past two months, the decline in deaths per day attributed to the virus exceeds 50 percent. By contrast, vaccine laggards such as France and Italy aren’t seeing a decrease in new cases per day or a significant decrease in deaths. What about Serbia? With its odd array of vaccines, it is getting odd outcomes. New reported cases dropped from around 7,500 per day in early December to around 2,000 in January. But then, the number rose. It’s now between 3,500 and 4,000. The daily death count decreased from around 50 per day in late December to around 20 per day in late January. Since then, it has held steady at about that number. Vaccines produced in Russia and China are, I assume, better than nothing. However, the numbers presented in this post tend to confirm my view that vaccines produced in the USA are vastly preferable.   |
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