An Associated Press article posted by CBS News says:

Decades after the civil rights movement, racial disparities in income, education and home ownership persist and, by some measurements, are growing in the United States.

CBS cites a report recently released by the US Census Bureau as the source of this information. The article doesn't assert that racism is directly responsible for the disparities, but it implies that it is. Among the statistics quoted from the report:

The median income for white households was $50,622 last year. It was $30,939 for black households, $36,278 for Hispanic households and $60,367 for Asian households.

CBS does not suggest that the fact that Asian income is 20 percent higher than white income means that Asians are discriminating against whites.

I'm always suspicious of data partitioned along such arbitrary lines as race and ethnicity. Who is to say that, in terms of income, education and home ownership, one black person is more like another black person than he is like some white person? What would the results have been if the data were partitioned according to income, education and home ownership instead of race and ethnicity? I think it would show that the gap has widened between those who started at the lower end and those who started with higher means. The fact that the gap has widened between blacks and whites might be due more to the fact that blacks started with less than due to some kind of discrimination.

Is this evidence that Affirmative Action is not working? AA was supposed to help compensate for the fact that blacks on average were starting out with less than whites on average. Predictably, there is a call for more government (taxpayer) spending:

(Hilary) Shelton, of the NAACP, called for more government funding for preschool programs, improving public schools and making college more affordable. "Income should not be a significant determining factor whether someone should have an opportunity to go to college," Shelton said.

Perhaps it shouldn't but it always has been and most likely always will be. Utopia is still over the horizon.

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If you are a regular reader you probably have already noticed that I have changed the look and layout of my blog.  I did this because a reader reported that my previous theme doesn't always display properly.  I had noticed too that other blogs that use the same theme don't always display properly in my browser.  If this theme has any display (format) problems please let me know via e-mail or by leaving a comment on this post.

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Last night on The O'Reilly Factor Bill was discussing the problems the airlines are having with luggage delivery. New security restrictions are causing more passengers to check their luggage instead of carrying it with them in the cabin. This has caused the airlines to lose so much luggage that some travelers are shipping their luggage through Fedex rather than risk it with the airlines. Bill's solution: More government regulation of the airlines!

He said that the airlines are focusing on the most lucrative routes and are, therefore, neglecting most of the less lucrative routes. If I were a shareholder in an airline I would certainly hope that is what they're doing. The airlines are businesses, not social services.

I agree with O'Reilly on most of his positions but on some he is just out there. Perhaps he takes an occasional sip of that Kool-Aid that he likes to talk about. How he could think that the government could manage air travel more efficiently than the free market is beyond me. Cheap air travel is not a right. If people want to travel the less lucrative routes and have their luggage delivered on time they will just have to pay more.

O'Reilly's belief that 'Big Oil' is an elaborate conspiracy to keep gasoline prices high is another one of his strange ideas. He wants the government to regulate the oil industry. How about the news media Bill? Do you want the government to regulate that? Do you think we would get more reliable opinions from you if you were government regulated?

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Jonah Goldberg has a great column at Townhall.com addressing diversity and affirmative action programs at universities. I've expressed my feelings about promoting or 'celebrating' diversity in a previous post. I've also linked to columns by Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell on the subject.

From Goldberg's column:

When the University of Michigan's admissions policies were being reviewed by the Supreme Court, former school president Lee Bollinger explained that diversity was "as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare" because exposure to people of different hues lies at the core of the educational experience.

This is the problem I have with diversity programs: They assume that students at Yale benefit more from being exposed to a child of a black physician living in Connecticut than being exposed to a child of a white farmer living in Mississippi. In this sense diversity programs are racist. There are plenty of potential black students that are more like the majority of white Yale students than many potential white students.

If universities were really interested in building a diverse student body they would recruit students from across the country and from different socio-economic backgrounds -- regardless of skin color.

Update: Jennifer Gratz, a young white woman who was denied admission as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, sued the university on the basis that the undergraduate college had unconstitutionally awarded other applicants a set number of points solely for not being white. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in her favor. OpinionJournal, in an article by John Fund, reports that:

She believes universities could look to socioeconomic factors rather than racial ones when considering applicants. Economic elements "should be taken into account, regardless of your skin color." (emphasis mine)

Obviously she is wise beyond her years -- since she thinks like me.

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In a column at FoxNews.com, Lee Edwards of The Heritage Foundation says:

Wishful thinking liberals have tried to interpret the 2006 elections and the ensuing lively debate among conservatives about the future as signs of a conservative crackup or breakdown. But intense uninhibited debate is a sign of intellectual vigor, not decay.

I predict that the current debate among conservatives will lead to a renewed fusionism of the major strains -- traditionalist, libertarian, neoconservative -- of conservatism. It will be a fusionism based on the ideas of limited government, the free market, individual freedom and responsibility, a balance between liberty and law, a belief in a transcendent moral order, and a commitment to virtue, private and public.

These are the core beliefs, bounded by the Constitution, on which American conservatism rests and by which its most successful leaders have sought to govern.

I hope he is right, and I hope we can find more of those successful leaders that will govern based on his ideas -- because liberals are moving out sprightly. They are gearing up to increase government involvement in the workplace and to further criminalize speech and attitudes:

The president of the largest national gay-rights group, Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign, said he has high hopes for two long-pending proposals that failed to get through the GOP-controlled Congress. One would outlaw employment discrimination against gays, lesbians and transgender people; another would include them among the groups protected in federal hate-crimes legislation.

This is from an article at MSNBC titled, "Liberals aim to ram measures past Congress."

I'm not aware that our constitution says anything about "gay-rights". I don't think it says anything about straight-rights either. It does say quite a lot about human-rights. If a person is treated unfairly in the workplace, for any reason, there are laws and mechanisms to deal with it. When a crime is committed there are laws that provide for punishment without having to account for the social attitude of the perpetrator.

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Fox News reports:

Six Muslim imams were removed from a US Airways flight at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Monday and questioned by police for several hours before being released, a leader of the group said.

According to Fox, some passengers became concerned when three of the six stood and said prayers together. If I had been on that plane I would have been one of the passengers concerned when Muslims start performing a religious ritual. If they hadn't been removed I would have removed myself. Aren't they telling us every day, and showing us quite often, that they intend to kill us any way they can?

A commercial airliner is no place to perform religious rituals. If a Baptist had stood and started preaching I'm sure that he would have been asked to sit down and keep quiet -- and possibly removed. If a practitioner of voodoo had stood and started placing curses on the passengers or crew I'm sure that she would have been handled similarly. If the six Imams had stayed in their seats and said their prayers silently, most likely they would not have been removed from the plane.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is already on the attack. They will file complaints and extract apologies and probably get a nice donation from US Airways. (Jesse, how did you let these people invade your market?) This is part of the conditioning process. Keep hammering away at Americans to accept Islam as just another religion while it insidiously erodes our values and destroys our culture. Take a close look at what is happening in Europe if you don't believe me. We need to realize that they don't have to resort to violence to destroy us. Americans just elected the first Muslim to the US House of Representatives. Will the second one be elected in 2008?

Update:  Al Jazeera is coming to America -- if they can get a satellite or cable company to carry them.  Read all about it here.

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FoxNews.com has an Associated Press story titled, "Some Muslims Call Detention of Imams at Airport Bias." Well, of course it's bias. They're biased against people that might blow up their airplane and kill all the passengers.

Omar Shahin, president of the North American Imams Federation and one of the passengers removed, said the removal of the Imams was discrimination and called for a boycott of US Airways. The US Airways shareholders are probably hoping that Muslims do boycott the airline. It will probably increase their ridership.

According to the Associated Press:

US Airways Group Inc. issued a statement saying it was interviewing crew members and ground workers to find out more about what happened.

"We are always concerned when passengers are inconvenienced and especially concerned when a situation occurs that causes customers to feel their dignity was compromised. We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind," the airline said.

Their last statement is obviously not true. They discriminate against people who don't have tickets. They discriminate against people who want to carry a bomb on board. They discriminate against people who appear to be raving lunatics. They discriminate against people who are falling down drunk. I suspect that they would discriminate based on skin color if a person with green skin tried to board an airplane.

Yes, I know they meant to say that they don't discriminate unfairly. But what is fair when you are trying to operate commercial airline flights safely? Of course the Imams don't think they were treated fairly; they knew they weren't planning to blow up the airplane. But the rest of the passengers didn't know this; so most of them probably felt great relief when the America bashing Imams were removed. Fair is in the eye of the beholder.

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In a column  on FoxNews.com, Martin Frost says: "It is unacceptable that the richest and greatest nation in the world does not have an adequate health care system for its people." That is former Democrat US Representative Martin "Let me count the ways I can get government involved in your lives" Frost.

I wonder if Frost even realizes why we are "the richest and greatest nation in the world." It's because we favor a free market over socialism. It's because we have mostly avoided the temptation to look to the government to supply our basic needs (education, sadly, is one exception). How many more failed experiments will it take for Frost and his ilk to understand that the government doesn't do anything as well as the private sector? (Providing for the national defense used to be a notable exception, but I'm not sure that it is any more.)

When calling our health care system inadequate, Frost is apparently referring to the fact that everyone can't afford the best health care available. Surely he knows that the health care available here is among the best in the world. Can everyone afford the best of anything? Of course not. Not everyone can afford the best food available, or the best housing, or the best transportation. In fact, not everyone gets the best possible education, despite the availability of the government-run public education system. But Frost wants a government bureaucracy running health care like the government bureaucracy running the public schools. Do you suppose he expects a better result?

Health insurance and health care are available to everyone. But not everyone chooses to buy health insurance instead of the latest SUV or HD TV. To purchase or not purchase health insurance is just another one of the important decisions we make. Many will decide that food and shelter are more important than health insurance. Who am I or you to disagree with that choice? But that is exactly what we do when we impose a universal government-run health care system on people making that choice. We tell them that they cannot choose to spend their money on food and shelter instead of health care. One way or another, directly or indirectly, the government will take the money to pay for the universal health care system.

A rant against government-run health care is not complete without pointing out that the systems run by the United Kingdom and Canada are not meeting expectations. Health care is available to everyone but not everyone is happy with the level of care they are getting. Long waits are common for certain procedures -- even some that are somewhat critical. Those that can afford it often resort to traveling abroad to get better care. Some say that the goal of national health care systems is to provide the same mediocre health care to everyone. The UK and Canadian systems have achieved that -- for the less than wealthy.

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