Remember the Ricci v. DiStefano case in New Haven? The test scores of white and Hispanic firefighters seeking to become sergeants were thrown out by the city after not enough blacks passed. The firefighters sued and Sonia Sotomayor, then a District Court judge and wise Latina, ruled in favor of New Haven. The Supreme Court disagreed and overturned her defense of discrimination.
The controversy that followed almost ruined Sotomayor's chances of sitting on the Supreme Court. You'd think the Justice Department would get the message that these so-called "disparate impact" cases, usually brought against police and fire departments, are a bad idea. Instead the nutty Thomas Perez, who heads up the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, gave a speech last week downplaying the Ricci case. He also bragged about lawsuits filed against a Department of Corrections in Massachusetts and a sheriff's office in Oklahoma, among others. The offense of all these defendants is that they were judging others based on their merit rather than their sex or skin color.
The Oklahoma case is particularly hilarious. The Sheriff of Bryan County was reassigning pregnant female confinement officers to desk duty while they were pregnant. The Justice Department hit them with a discrimination rap. Now, the Bryan County sheriff's office has to provide mandatory training against "pregnancy discrimination."
Welcome to BHO's America, where "diversity" is more important than law enforcement keeping us safe, and the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
It’s fun to laugh at Barack Obama’s blunders on his one-year anniversary, but remember that the president is a radical Chicago pol. He’s inexperienced of course, but he’s also gotten away with some pretty egregious things during his first year. Here are 25 of the worst, in no particular order.
1)Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, says that Fox News isn’t a real news network. Days later, Fox is denied an interview with Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg, even though Feinberg is made available to the other networks. The White House ultimately retreats from this sinister and anti-American activity.
2)Obama appoints John Holdren to be his Science Czar. Holdren is a eugenicist who believes overpopulation will destroy the planet and who has written that forced abortions or sterilizations could be justified under the Constitution.
3)Obama appoints Kevin Jennings to be his Safe Schools Czar. Jennings once headed up GLSEN, a radical gay group that promoted pornographic sex books for children. When asked by a young student what to do about a sexual encounter with an older man in a bus station, Jennings dismissively said, “I hope you used a condom.”
4)Under the influence of Obama’s Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd, and following widespread attacks on the "The Fairness Doctrine", the FCC embraces “localism” and starts thinking of ways to take down large radio companies (most of which employ conservative personalities) and redistribute their money to smaller, minority-owned stations.
5)Obama appoints Ron Bloom to be his Car Czar, a union hack who once called the free market “nonsense.”
6)Obama tries to jam the Employee Free Choice Act through Congress, a union grab bag that would shift power to Big Labor and eliminate the secret ballot for workers voting on whether or not to unionize.
7)Obama gives the United Auto Workers labor union massive ownership stakes in General Motors and Chrysler after both businesses accepted government bailouts. Using the government to hand companies over to their workers? Classic Obama Marxism.
8)Obama’s Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office use Enron-style accounting tricks to disguise the negative consequences of their radical policies. Most recently, the OMB announced it would be counting jobs “funded” rather than actually “created” by its stimulus bill.
9)Obama’s Pay Czar, Kenneth Feinberg, is given truly tyrannical power. He can determine the salaries of corporate CEOs and mid-level employees, and “claw back” money already paid.
10)Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor has previously stated that empathy is a crucial factor in judging, and that her Hispanic upbringing somehow made her more qualified to sit on the highest court in the land.
11)Obama’s Justice Department sues the state of New Jersey because they administer an exam to aspiring police sergeants which more whites pass than minorities. The lawsuit is purely racial and resembles the Ricci case in Connecticut that got Sotomayor in so much trouble.
12)Hillary Clinton gives a speech celebrating the creation of the UN Population Fund, a group dedicated to providing women with “reproductive services” and that has been convincingly accused of working with China to enforce its one-child policy.
13)After Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona criticized Obama’s stimulus, the White House phones up Arizona’s governor and threatened to withhold stimulus funds to that state if Kyl kept up his criticisms.
14)Obama makes another sick deal with Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. In exchange for Nelson abandoning his concerns about abortion in the health care bill, Obama offers to have the federal government pay all of Nebraska’s Medicare costs…at the expense of taxpayer money from the other 49 states.
15)Obama is caught at the center of a scheme to sell his former Senate seat in Illinois. Most of the blame appropriately falls on Governor Rod Blagojevich, but some of the president’s chief advisers are implicated on tape as well, including Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett. Neither is fired nor disciplined in any way.
16)Obama pays off the AARP. With A. Barry Rand, a longtime Obama crony, helming the AARP, Obama bought off the organization by giving them an astonishing $18 million in stimulus money. In return, the AARP strongly supported the health care bill, even though it included massive Medicare cuts, which the group had criticized in the past.
17)Obama brings in Van Jones as his Green Jobs Czar. Jones was entrusted to coordinate the president’s strategy on so-called green jobs, despite his former membership in a group called STORM that advocated the overthrow of the government, and despite a long history of radical and inappropriate comments. Jones later resigns after it’s revealed he signed a petition questioning whether the government destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11.
18)Obama brings in Jeff Jones. This Jones is a former Weather Underground terrorist (along with Bill Ayers) who later established a group called the Apollo Alliance. The Apollo Alliance wrote the cap and trade bill that Obama later tried to ram through Congress.
19)Obama appoints Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, (Rahm’s brother), to be one of his budget advisors. Emanuel has previously written at length about the need to ration health care.
20)Obama appoints Patrick Gaspard to be his political director. Gaspard is all tied up in the network of corrupt community organizations that produced Obama himself, including the SEIU, ACORN, and the Working Families Party. He has observed that his greatest achievement is "raising two children of color in the U.S." Instead of, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was born?
21)Obama’s National Endowment of the Arts, under the leadership of Rocco Landesman, tries to coax artists into creating pieces that lionize Obama. In other words, taxpayer money is used to fund artistic propaganda.
22)Obama appoints Robert Bauer to be his White House counsel. Bauer is an ardent ACORN defender and wrote a memo to the Justice Department during the 2008 election asking them to investigate whether the McCain campaign broke the law by criticizing ACORN.
23)Obama gives a speech at the University of Cairo in which he constantly praises the Muslim world and attempts to whitewash its problems with terrorism. The speech is appeasing and useless, since a Muslim bomber would attempt to blow up a Detroit flight less than a year later.
24)Obama attempts to pass a health care bill that, among other egregious provisions, requires every American citizen to purchase health insurance. This tyranny is unprecedented in America’s history, as a requirement for citizenship has never before been in place.
25)Obama joins Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in failing to accept the election results in Honduras, where a peaceful coup overthrew brutal Marxist Manuel Zelaya, who had refused to leave after being voted out of office. Zelaya is now hiding out in the Brazilian Embassy.
Remember the New Haven firefighters? They studied hard and passed an exam qualifying them to be firefighters in the city of New Haven, Connecticut. But their results were thrown out after New Haven determined that the test was invalid because not enough African-Americans had scored highly. The firemen sued the city and Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, ruled against them.
This toxic racism has spread from Sotomayor's office to Barack Obama's Justice Department. Today, Justice announced that it is suing the state of New Jersey. Why? New Jersey requires candidates seeking to become police sergeants to take an exam, and not enough African-Americans and Hispanics are passing.
According to the press release, Justice wasn't going to allow any employment practices that resulted in something called "disparate impact." Disparate impact, also known as adverse impact, is a legal theory loved by liberals that forbids any employment practice "that does not appear to be discriminatory on its face; rather it is one that is discriminatory in its application or effect." It's affirmative action gone wild -- if enough minorities can't pass the test, then the test itself is illegal, even if the intent was never to discriminate.
This travesty of a lawsuit is the result of Thomas Perez, the head of the Justice Department Civil Rights Division. Perez has pledged to increase hate crime prosecutions, among other racially discriminatory practices. He has promised to use his position to make sure any alleged victims of discrimination "are made whole." Thanks to disparate impact, Obama's Justice Department will practice Sotomayor Justice -- judging by skin color rather than the law.
Barack Obama's Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor set an unprecedented low for the court today.
"In an otherwise dry opinion, Justice Sotomayor introduced one new and politically charged term into the Supreme Court lexicon.
Justice Sotomayor’s opinion in the case, Mohawk Industries v. Carpenter, No. 08-678, marked the first use of the term 'undocumented immigrant,' according to a legal database. The term 'illegal immigrant' has appeared in a dozen decisions."
The precedent of the Supreme Court is to say "illegal immigrants" whereas the politically correct parlance of the far left uses "undocumented immigrants" or sometimes "undocumented workers." Calling a person "illegal" -- even if their first act in this country was to break the law crossing its border -- doesn't show enough empathy.
Sotomayor's other notable decision on the Supreme Court has been to vote to take up the case of Jason Getsy, an Ohio hitman who opened fire on a businessman and his mother, killing both. Getsy had been sentenced to death by an Ohio court and had appealed his verdict to the Supreme Court. His trial had been fair and by the book, but Sotomayor evidently decided that the homicidal hitman deserved another chance.
