From the WSJ: In Ricci v. DeStefano, firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut who passed a qualifying exam were denied promotions to lieutenant or captain because of the color of their skin. They were white. The High Court will decide whether New Haven violated civil rights law and the Constitution when it threw out the results of the examinations after no black test takers passed. The city doesn’t deny that its

Family issues forced him south, and now he’s kinda stuck without funds. If anybody can spare some change, please send it his way; any little bit helps: vermontaigne – at – gmail – dot – com is the email address to use through PayPal.

Betrayal! (h/t cj)

So, I’m here in sunny Florida, visiting M&D and having a last family vacation before Brendan goes off to college, and really as family vacations go, it’s not bad, because one of the things that I learned by watching my dad closely is that it’s absurd to go into these things with any expectations or specific objects in mind, and expect to return home with your sanity intact. He’s a

Some torture is more forgivable than others, I guess. h/t Gregory and CP. **** related in kind: Byron York: If you go to Memeorandum, the most talked-about story on the Web today, or at least as of 11:20 this morning, is Peter Baker’s New York Times piece, “Banned Techniques Yielded ‘High Value Information,’ Memo Says.” The story begins: President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last

From Scott Powell, vice president of ELP Capital and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, writing in IBD: […] why would the Obama administration say they want to regulate venture capital firms? Some suggest that it may be an end run in the undeclared war on wealth because venture capital can create enormous fortunes outside of taxable income. But there are several other plausible answers. The first is that

Darleen’s already done the hard work of putting together the post, but I wanted to extract something former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson said in his Hewitt interview for special emphasis, because I think it gives insight into one prong of the strategy behind Obama’s remarkable and unconscionable buckling to his far-left base on the issue of potential “torture” prosecutions: I think it’s a terrible error for a couple of

NYT: President Obama’s top economic advisers have determined that they can shore up the nation’s banking system without having to ask Congress for more money any time soon, according to administration officials. In a significant shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout fund further than they had expected a few months ago, simply by converting the

Surprisingly, that’s not a rhetorical question. Byron York: […] I asked William Anderson, a friend who is a political conservative, a medical doctor, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard. “They are angry, but I think they are also scared, and I think it’s because they have a sense that their triumph is a precarious one,” Anderson told me. Democrats won in 2008 in some part because of the cycles