Patterico's Pontifications

5/8/2007

Trivial Story Written

Filed under: Dog Trainer — Patterico @ 4:45 pm



I wonder if the L.A. Times‘s Andrew Blankenstein is embarrassed at having to write an entire piece about Paris Hilton’s jail accommodations.

Wouldn’t he have to be?

This country is completely insane on the whole celebrity thing.

Terrorist Suspects Residing Illegally In The U.S.

Filed under: Media Bias,Terrorism — Justin Levine @ 12:42 pm



[posted by Justin Levine] 

With all of the coverage over the latest terrorist suspects to be arrested in the U.S., it will be interesting to see how much the media will focus (if at all) on the fact that three of them were illegally residing in the United States.

Don’t hold your breath…

[Update: It’s also not every day that the Internet publishes the cell phone number of a terrorist suspect. Should I try calling him up to see if he wants to be on the Bill Handel Show? Or would that just be bad case of media sensationalism?]

Those Non-Partisan Careerists at DoJ

Filed under: General,Race — Patterico @ 12:03 am



TPMmuckraker reports:

ABC’s Washington D.C. affiliate WJLA-TV crunched some numbers in the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section — the section charged with prosecuting the worst civil rights offenses like hate crimes. And here’s what they found:

The I-Team has learned that since 2003…the criminal section within the Civil Rights Division has not hired a single black attorney to replace those who have left. Not one.

As a result, the current face of civil rights prosecutions looks like this: Out of fifty attorneys in the Criminal Section – only two are black. The same number the criminal section had in 1978 – even though the size of the staff has more than doubled.

As Richard Ugelow, the former deputy section chief of the employment section in the Civil Rights Division puts it, “We would sue employers for having numbers like that.”

Well, maybe that’s the problem!

Two attorneys out of fifty is four percent. That’s twice the percentage of black law graduates with high grades, according to this link, which notes that “black law graduates with high grades make up just 1 to 2 percent of law school graduates with high grades.” This link notes that “less than 2 percent of the 428 clerks hired by current [Supreme Court] justices have been black.”

Yet this yahoo felt it was appropriate to have the Department of Justice suing entities that hired twice as many black attorneys as the percentages graduating with good grades.

Note to this guy: if the percentages of qualified graduates just aren’t there, there may be societal problems to address — but suing willy-nilly based on numbers alone, without regard for the qualifications of the pool of applicants . . . that’s just irresponsible. Thanks for providing that little window into the way you conducted business in the Civil Rights Division.

TPMmuckraker says:

Ugelow, you might have guessed, is one of the dozens of career lawyers who have left the division in the past six years.

Good riddance.


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0615 secs.