So here's the thing...

There is this segment of the U.S. population that believes that only white people are worth anything.

I really don't understand them, yet they exist. These are the people who will read the report on discipline of public school students in Michigan and dismiss the fact that Black students are disciplined way out of proportion with what you'd expect based on their percentage of the population. They will say that it must be because Black students commit more offenses. They will believe it. I read comments to this effect on a forum which had posted an article on the report. Even though the story specifically stated that this was not the case. It must make life if easier if you can believe that the status quo is also the right thing.

Conservatives going crazy over the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor were incensed over the centrist jurist (with 60 Democrats in the Senate, we still can't get a liberal nominee? le sigh). The main focus of their ire? The Ricci case, in which the New Haven civil service board threw out the test it had chosen to use to decide promotions because only one non-white applicant passed the test and they feared a lawsuit. A federal district court ruled no laws were broken and, on appeal, a three-judge panel which included Sotomayor, affirmed the ruling. I'm not versed in the specifics of the case--I don't know why New Haven thought having a written test designed by an outside consultant was a good way to do promotions. I don't know what the test consisted of. So I am making no comment on the specifics of that case.

What I do want to note is how it has a certain segment of the population fired up. And it seems to me that this is mainly because they find it completely unbelievable that this metric could have possibly been biased. From what I can tell they seem to feel that if white people have a disproportionate share of the power, it's because they deserve it. Pat Buchanan was advancing this idea in an interview with Rachel Maddow (see below). I'm with Elon of This Week in Blackness of this one. I get stuck right there and find it hard to have something to say because it is an idea that makes no sense to me. TWiB is hilarious to me, so here's a link to the episode, 2009 is the New 1952 (there are a few cuss words, if that bothers you).