Three Interesting Reads

Odds are slim I'll get to do much blogging this weekend, but I'd like to note three interesting things I ran across while waiting on part of an experiment.

Blaming Whitey Gets Old

Over the past few years, I have noticed that various black celebrities (like Bill Cosby) and intellectuals (like Thomas Sowell) have been urging Black America to take a hard look at itself when thinking about the many social problems that continue to plague it decades after the end of Jim Crow. One very hopeful sign will be the day that it is common to see black leaders doing the same thing. Today, I saw a story out of Milwaukee showing that perhaps this is starting to happen.

Two days before the oldest and best-known U.S. civil rights group holds its yearly convention in Milwaukee, black leaders in the city say their community is being torn apart from the inside.

Civil rights leaders like 57-year-old Prentice McKinney, who fought to free Milwaukee's blacks from the ghetto, say gangs, drugs and violence have left those who still live in the nation's urban cores in fear of the next generation.

"Back then, the enemy was clear, it was white racists, and racist police officers," said McKinney, who was a black teen-age "commando" in the 1960s and now runs a tavern once frequented by fellow activists.

"It was a legalized system of segregation. And so, the challenge was between the white establishment and the African-American [sic] population. Today, the African-American population is being destroyed by its own youth ... an enemy from within."

He and others interviewed before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's six-day meeting beginning on Saturday see a changed city where a generation of blacks freed from the shackles of yesterday's legalized discrimination are held hostage by today's crime and poverty.

The article leaves open what McKinney would advocate, culturally or politically, as a solution, but it is good to see black leaders saying this kind of thing. A major cultural hindrance for many blacks is an unwillingness to take full responsibility for their own lives. As self-examination becomes a stronger cultural force among blacks, so will personal responsibility and, as a result, greater control over one's destiny.

Krauthammer on O'Connor

While I strongly disagree with Charles Krauthammer's stand on separation (or lack thereof) of church and state, I found his column on Sandra Day O'Connor worth reading anyway. He makes the case for nominating as her replacement someone with a coherent judicial philosophy.

Unlike a principled conservative such as Antonin Scalia, or a principled liberal such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, O'Connor had no stable ideas about constitutional interpretation. Her idea of jurisprudence was to decide whether legislation produced social "systems" that either worked or did not.

But that, of course, is the job of the elected branches of government. Legislatures negotiate social arrangements. Judges are supposed to look at their handiwork and decide one thing and one thing only: whether the "system" the politicians produced comports with the Constitution. On what other grounds do judges have the authority to throw out legislation? Do they have superior wisdom about what works, superior capacity to decide which social boundaries require negotiation and which do not?

As he further elaborates on why O'Connor was so bad, he points out this philosophically juicy morsel:

In the case of abortion, the result was the immortal proclamation: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" -- a supremely infelicitous definition of the liberty clause that is not just comically cosmic but infinitely elastic.

Again, while she said this by way of "justification" for a vote she made that I happen to agree with, the idea of having someone "guided" so explicitly by this metaphysics on the court again is very unappealing.

If we can't get someone good on the court, better to have someone with a consistent bad philosophy who will make predictable judgements than someone who would essentially rule by fiat from the bench.

Gertz on Chinese Military Power

This is a short, but disturbing read.

Pentagon officials say an internal political battle has been under way in the Bush administration over the forthcoming annual report on China's military power.

The report was due for release several weeks ago, but was then held up and portions have been removed and modified, said officials familiar with the internal debate.

...

The interagency battle over the report reflects the internal debate within the administration between those who do not view China as a near-term threat and those who are alarmed over China's recent weapons deployments and statements.

We don't need to spin this. We need to know what the hell is going on.

-- CAV