St. Louis CofCC Blog

Spot the contradiction.

Washington Times:

Rice hits U.S. ‘birth defect’

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national “birth defect” that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country’s very founding.

“Black Americans were a founding population,” she said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”

As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that.”

“That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today,” she said.

And then Fox News:

Rice Says Zimbabwe President Mugabe Is `Disgrace’ to His People and to Africa

JERUSALEM  —  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday branded Zimbabwe’s president a “disgrace” to his people and to Africa, and expressed concerns about verifying whether the country held free and fair elections.

Rice, in the Mideast for peace talks, made the harsh comments after voting Saturday in Zimbabwe that presented Robert Mugabe with the toughest challenge to his 28-year rule. The main opposition party on Sunday claimed an early lead; preliminary results were expected by Monday.

“We’ve made very clear our concerns about how this election might be conducted, given the very bad record of Mugabe concerning his people, the opposition and the region,” Rice told reporters after meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

“We’ve tried to make a case … that there needed to be free and fair elections in Zimbabwe as much as it was possible. It’s difficult since really no international observation was allowed,” the top U.S. diplomat said.

“But really, the Mugabe regime is a disgrace to the people of Zimbabwe and a disgrace to southern Africa and to the continent of Africa as whole,” she said.

It seems like all Robert Mugabe did was atone for Rhodesia’s “birth defect.”

Australia’s Ruddgime has denounced “Fitna,” but can’t seem to gather as much as one-tenth as much condemnation for radical Islamic terrorism.

As he has Australia, the EU, the UN and most of the Muslim world mad at him, Geert Wilders must be doing something right. A certain religious figure told us about two thousand years ago that the more you’re ticking off the world, the better you’re doing by God and the Truth.

USA Today:

Texas’ 10% admission could teach colleges a thing or two

Ten years ago, after a federal court blocked Texas colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions, the state, with George W. Bush as governor, came up with an innovative alternative. In an attempt to make affirmative action colorblind, the top 10% of graduates at each of the state’s high schools was granted automatic admission to state universities.

(snip)

Ten years later, we know a little more about the law: It works. Maybe even a little too well, given that the president of the University of Texas asked the Legislature last week to scale it back.

Examples of its success at the University of Texas at Austin include:

* Students admitted under the 10% rule get better grades than other students. Plus, they graduate at higher rates.

* Racial diversity at the Austin campus improved. The number of Hispanic students has risen by 29% and the African-American student population by 32%.

* Economic and geographic diversity improved as well. Before the law took effect, the Austin campus drew from 616 high schools. Now it draws from 853 schools.

A student at the 90th percentile at a black school could very well be as dumb as rock in reality, but have a polished transcript because of grade inflation and course title inflation.  A student at the 89th percentile at a white suburban school could probably run circles around the former when it comes to brain pans and other academic accomplishments, but W thought that the former was more worthy of automatic admission to state schools than the latter.

And ten years on, note that of the three things USA Today are most proud of, two of them involve diversity.