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Discrimination is discrimination. It doesn't matter what the purpose behind it is. I don't want my son to have opportunities taken away from him because he isn't black/asian/female/criminal (delete as appropriate).

The opportunities aren't taken away from him; he'd just have to compete for them on a level playing field. That's all the concept is after; it's not the fault of minorities that many companies and schools have rendered it down to a pure numbers game, killing the spirit to serve the letter.

But that's exactly my point - every time I hear a new government 'target' for a particular number and/or percentage of people from [insert name of 'minority' group here] to be given opportunity X, I just want to crawl under the bed.

The problem is the playing field is not level and never, ever, should be. Selection should be based on merit alone and that means different people suited to different things.

To get back to the OP, if the GOP want a new platform to run on, they should stop gay-bashing and vilifying those with diffferent religious beliefs and try instead hard work and individual worth - celebrating the fact that everyone is different.

Freedom and justice for all. I'm sure I read that somewhere...

And merit shouldn't be based on who your mommy and daddy are, and how much they make. That's not YOUR merit, it's theirs.

As for a new focus for the GOP, if they shifted away from where they are, they alienate the base that they have... maybe, if they start now, they could rebuild it by midterms, but I wouldn't put any folding money on those odds.

Thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm a Democrat. And the Republicans are in trouble. Not just this year, but in the near future as well.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of wildly divergent interests - to pick a few out of the hat, you've got the enviros, labor, conservationists, urban, social justice, women's rights, gay-rights, and numerous others. Along with some other fringe groups on the way-left, who are way too-numerous to mention.

The Republican party, in the last forty years, has gradually become composed of essentially three groups. The libertarian wing (minimize or eliminate government), the neo-con wing (America Uber Alles), and the theo-con wing (social conversatism that can't tolerate social progressives).

While the Democratic party is a patch-job - its a lot of little patch-jobs. You can strain those patches or snap them from issue to issue, but they're relatively easy to repair or rebuild, because the fundamentals underlying them are relatively strong.

The modern GOP is a patch-job with three essential point failure sources - and essentially have had a civil war from day one. The libertarian Republicans and the theocon republicans have goals that are pretty diametrically opposed. And even the libertarians and the neocons don't really agree when it comes to foreign policy.

The libertarian and neocons provide most of the underlying philosophy and the funding...but the theocons provide the votes.

Whats going to happen after today is that the Republicans are going to have a civil war to determine which wing takes control. The Neo-Cons have essentially run the Republican party for the last thirty years - and have pretty callously used the libertarian wing and the theocon wing. (To be honest, not much different than the vaunted DLC). What you're going to see is a civil war between the libertarian wing (which has the big money), and the theocon wing (which has the people in numbers).

Two years from now, if the leading spokespeople of the Republican party are Sarah Palin and Hucklebee, you'll know that the theocons have won.

In 1964 the Dems walked away with 69 senators and a 290-145(ish) lead in the House. The Republican party did not come to an end. This to shall pass.

And for all those Affirmitative Action fans. The next time you go to the hospital make sure your doctor was put there because of his race over his abilities. We'll weed you guys out faster that way.

DarthDiggler wrote:In 1964 the Dems walked away with 69 senators and a 290-145(ish) lead in the House. The Republican party did not come to an end. This to shall pass.

Yeah, but that was pretty much the beginning of the modern Republican party and its Southern Strategy (essentially, deliberately use the issue of race to divide the country so they could win elections.)

I'm not counting the Republicans out - but I do think that if they want to win elections, they're going to need to change signficantly. When the actions of your party's leadership drives long-respected Republicans like Colin Powell over to the other side, you really need to look and see if you're doing something wrong.

sebster wrote:

JohnHwangDD wrote:No, I'm saying that, if my kid would have gotten in if he were black, he should get in if he's Asian.

Besides, with grade inflation being rampant and accelerating, actual grades are likely to be meaningless by the time he applies for college.

The problem I see is that an admissions ceiling still exists. Whether the ceiling is 0 (to deny minority admissions), or 1000 (for "diversity"), matters little if you're the 1001st kid, and therefore denied admission despite otherwise qualifying.

How can there not be a ceiling? There’s only so many students a college can take before the lecture halls are all full, the lecturers don’t have the time to talk to students directly and the TAs have too many papers to mark. Someone has to be the 101st best applicant for a class that only has 100 places.

Except we're talking classes of 10,000+ students, and artificial limits being placed on Asians (only) so that they do not take "too many" of those 10,000 spots. If Asians (or women or whomever/whatever) take the top 10,000 spots, that's fine by me.

So in your example, my kid might be the 51st best applicant. But because program won't allow more than 50 Asians out of 100 total, he's denied admission and opportunity purely on the basis of the color of his skin.

That is unconstitutional institutional racial discrimination, because, if he were any other race, he'd have earned and been granted admission. From a practical standpoint, it is no different than setting a ceiling of ZERO because you are denying opportunity and access when both are otherwise available.

Otherwise, what's to define 1 black or 1 woman as "1 too many"?

Chimera_Calvin wrote:Discrimination is discrimination. It doesn't matter what the purpose behind it is. I don't want my son to have opportunities taken away from him because he isn't black/asian/female/criminal (delete as appropriate).

That is *exactly* what I just said. Remove the ceilings.

lord_sutekh wrote:The opportunities aren't taken away from him; he'd just have to compete for them on a level playing field.

That is *exactly* what I am demanding - a level playing field so that he has the same opportunity as any other kid of any other race.

JohnHwangDD wrote:

Chimera_Calvin wrote:Discrimination is discrimination. It doesn't matter what the purpose behind it is. I don't want my son to have opportunities taken away from him because he isn't black/asian/female/criminal (delete as appropriate).

That is *exactly* what I just said. Remove the ceilings.

lord_sutekh wrote:The opportunities aren't taken away from him; he'd just have to compete for them on a level playing field.

That is *exactly* what I am demanding - a level playing field so that he has the same opportunity as any other kid of any other race.

The problem is that there's multiple glass ceilings. Asian-Americans are good a breaking through the first, but upper-level management and leadership positions remain mostly out of reach.

As a white guy, I started out with an advantage over a black man of identical economic status. I don't honestly think that's just.

Mannahnin wrote:As a white guy, I started out with an advantage over a black man of identical economic status. I don't honestly think that's just.

How is that so? In what manner? Did someone give you a white man's special gift certificate to The GAP when you were born? This is one I'm just not going to agree with you on.

Grignard wrote:

Mannahnin wrote:As a white guy, I started out with an advantage over a black man of identical economic status. I don't honestly think that's just.

How is that so? In what manner? Did someone give you a white man's special gift certificate to The GAP when you were born? This is one I'm just not going to agree with you on.

Poverty is generally looked down on in this country. Black people are generally poor. They also happen to have an uncontrollable physical characteristic which makes it very easy to associate them with a group before actually interacting with them. Which, of course, also makes it much easier to come general conclusions which do not necessarily have any relevance to fact.

dogma wrote:

Grignard wrote:

Mannahnin wrote:As a white guy, I started out with an advantage over a black man of identical economic status. I don't honestly think that's just.

How is that so? In what manner? Did someone give you a white man's special gift certificate to The GAP when you were born? This is one I'm just not going to agree with you on.

Poverty is generally looked down on in this country. Black people are generally poor. They also happen to have an uncontrollable physical characteristic which makes it very easy to associate them with a group before actually interacting with them. Which, of course, also makes it much easier to come general conclusions which do not necessarily have any relevance to fact.

I'm not following you...Do you mean that it is easier to make generalizations because of a shared unavoidable physical trait which is discrimination rather than any explicit segregation, or is this mean to be taken as sarcasm? I'm not criticizing, I'm just not sure I'm reading that correctly.

I'm not a fan of Krugman in general and I think he's forgetting history. Clinton won by positioning himself not as a liberal but as a moderate. I don't see any reason why the GOP won't move more center as it tries to re-capture control of Congress.

Ozymandias, King of Kings

Centurian99 wrote:Thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm a Democrat. And the Republicans are in trouble. Not just this year, but in the near future as well.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of wildly divergent interests - to pick a few out of the hat, you've got the enviros, labor, conservationists, urban, social justice, women's rights, gay-rights, and numerous others. Along with some other fringe groups on the way-left, who are way too-numerous to mention.

However, those interests are beginning to see that the solution to all of their problems is best accomplished through economic reform. Not legislative craziness. That's what is giving Obama his edge, and argument grounded in numbers, as opposed to social possibilities.

Centurian99 wrote:
The Republican party, in the last forty years, has gradually become composed of essentially three groups. The libertarian wing (minimize or eliminate government), the neo-con wing (America Uber Alles), and the theo-con wing (social conversatism that can't tolerate social progressives).

While the Democratic party is a patch-job - its a lot of little patch-jobs. You can strain those patches or snap them from issue to issue, but they're relatively easy to repair or rebuild, because the fundamentals underlying them are relatively strong.

The modern GOP is a patch-job with three essential point failure sources - and essentially have had a civil war from day one. The libertarian Republicans and the theocon republicans have goals that are pretty diametrically opposed. And even the libertarians and the neocons don't really agree when it comes to foreign policy.

Good point.

Centurian99 wrote:
The libertarian and neocons provide most of the underlying philosophy and the funding...but the theocons provide the votes.

Whats going to happen after today is that the Republicans are going to have a civil war to determine which wing takes control. The Neo-Cons have essentially run the Republican party for the last thirty years - and have pretty callously used the libertarian wing and the theocon wing. (To be honest, not much different than the vaunted DLC). What you're going to see is a civil war between the libertarian wing (which has the big money), and the theocon wing (which has the people in numbers).

Two years from now, if the leading spokespeople of the Republican party are Sarah Palin and Hucklebee, you'll know that the theocons have won.

That's what I see for them, in 2012 at least. Theocons on top, supported by Libertarian economic theory. The Neocons are pretty much a dead horse. Interestingly enough that kind of GOP has the makings of an incredibly weak opposition party. Not unlike the Democrats have been for 30 odd years. At least until the Theocons get bred out of power.

Grignard wrote:

dogma wrote:

Poverty is generally looked down on in this country. Black people are generally poor. They also happen to have an uncontrollable physical characteristic which makes it very easy to associate them with a group before actually interacting with them. Which, of course, also makes it much easier to come general conclusions which do not necessarily have any relevance to fact.

I'm not following you...Do you mean that it is easier to make generalizations because of a shared unavoidable physical trait which is discrimination rather than any explicit segregation, or is this mean to be taken as sarcasm? I'm not criticizing, I'm just not sure I'm reading that correctly.

Yea, it's easier to discriminate because of skin color. However, I'm also fairly sure that driving force of modern racism is really a kind of classism. The intellectual push towards individualist thinking tends to attribute social status to the merits of the individual. As such, there is little impetus to actually help those who are impoverished because the belief is that they deserve what they have and no more. Combine this with America's racist history, and the ability of any given racial group to self-discriminate, and you end up with two sides to the issue talking in completely different linguistic terms. Each side has a point of course, but their ideology prevents them from reaching a middle ground.

Ozymandias wrote:I'm not a fan of Krugman in general and I think he's forgetting history. Clinton won by positioning himself not as a liberal but as a moderate. I don't see any reason why the GOP won't move more center as it tries to re-capture control of Congress.

Ozymandias, King of Kings

That isn't as easy as it sounds. The GOP, being the party of supply side economics, is going to have a hard time selling itself when the majority of the country believes that supply-side thinking caused the credit bubble. In order to govern from the center they will have to reinvent their ideology, which is not going to play well with the faithful.

Its not hard Dogma, just wait until 1) Congress over-reaches (aka about 90 days); 2) the economy stays south in a Democratic year. The out party, in this case Republicans gain seats. Thats how it works time in / time out. Everyone acts like the Republicans losing is something historic.

EDIT: There's also the face effect. Right now the Democrats are "new." Give a little bit of time and the same old faces in front of the camera will get annoying real fast. Congress has already been Democratic since 2006. Pretty soon they are going to have to actually do something. Once they do that their days of dominance are numbered. Its the endless Big Bang Cycle of US politics.

Frazzled wrote:Its not hard Dogma, just wait until 1) Congress over-reaches (aka about 90 days); 2) the economy stays south in a Democratic year. The out party, in this case Republicans gain seats. Thats how it works time in / time out. Everyone acts like the Republicans losing is something historic.

That's overly simplistic. Most of the Democratic seats which are up for grabs are in bastion states like Illinois, California, and New York. This will protect them from short-term economic pressures. Anyone up for reelection as a Republican is simply going to to be tied to Bush, and therefore the economic crisis.

The Republicans losing isn't historic in and of itself. What is historic is the timing of the loss relative to the financial crisis, and the constitution of the upcoming midterms.

Anyway, how is Congress going to overreach? What does overreaching constitute?

dogma wrote:

Centurian99 wrote:Thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm a Democrat. And the Republicans are in trouble. Not just this year, but in the near future as well.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of wildly divergent interests - to pick a few out of the hat, you've got the enviros, labor, conservationists, urban, social justice, women's rights, gay-rights, and numerous others. Along with some other fringe groups on the way-left, who are way too-numerous to mention.

However, those interests are beginning to see that the solution to all of their problems is best accomplished through economic reform. Not legislative craziness. That's what is giving Obama his edge, and argument grounded in numbers, as opposed to social possibilities.

Actually, what they're beginning to see (and what I've been advocating amongst my contacts in some of the groups), is that they're all linked. For example, for years, I've been pointing out to enviro contacts that they need to make nice with people in the Military - especially those in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps that are responsible for long-term planning and theory. Because the national security implications of climate change are simply staggering, and its no coincidence that Republicans are dead-set against a NIE on the effects of climate change.

dogma wrote:

Centurian99 wrote:
The Republican party, in the last forty years, has gradually become composed of essentially three groups. The libertarian wing (minimize or eliminate government), the neo-con wing (America Uber Alles), and the theo-con wing (social conversatism that can't tolerate social progressives).

While the Democratic party is a patch-job - its a lot of little patch-jobs. You can strain those patches or snap them from issue to issue, but they're relatively easy to repair or rebuild, because the fundamentals underlying them are relatively strong.

The modern GOP is a patch-job with three essential point failure sources - and essentially have had a civil war from day one. The libertarian Republicans and the theocon republicans have goals that are pretty diametrically opposed. And even the libertarians and the neocons don't really agree when it comes to foreign policy.

Good point.

Thanks.

dogma wrote:

Centurian99 wrote:
The libertarian and neocons provide most of the underlying philosophy and the funding...but the theocons provide the votes.

Whats going to happen after today is that the Republicans are going to have a civil war to determine which wing takes control. The Neo-Cons have essentially run the Republican party for the last thirty years - and have pretty callously used the libertarian wing and the theocon wing. (To be honest, not much different than the vaunted DLC). What you're going to see is a civil war between the libertarian wing (which has the big money), and the theocon wing (which has the people in numbers).

Two years from now, if the leading spokespeople of the Republican party are Sarah Palin and Hucklebee, you'll know that the theocons have won.

That's what I see for them, in 2012 at least. Theocons on top, supported by Libertarian economic theory. The Neocons are pretty much a dead horse. Interestingly enough that kind of GOP has the makings of an incredibly weak opposition party. Not unlike the Democrats have been for 30 odd years. At least until the Theocons get bred out of power.

The problem becomes that a little thing called the "Constitution" keeps the theocons from operating really independently - unless their churches are willing to forgo tax-exempt status and really become political entities. The Theocons have had it easy, from a certain point - their issues get raised, and they get people to the polls. Of course, nothing of substance actually gets done on their issues, because the libertarian and neo-con wings still control the policy. The occasional bone gets thrown to them, but in realistic terms, on issues of importance to the theocon base, nothing of substance has been accomplished. The number of abortions in America has actually gone UP during Republican presidencies, as have things like teen pregnancy and the like.

By the way, my money's actually on the theocon wing winning the civil war. If only because the Theocon wing has national figures that can step up to the plate and rally the theocon base. People like Huckabee and Palin.

The neocons are pretty discredited right now, but I wouldn't count them out. The Bush administration was the result of over thirty years of planning and working, and they've not stopped.

The libertarian/business wing has the money, but really lacks recognizable leaders who can bring the Republicans together. The closest they've got at this point is Mitt Romney, and although I hate to say it, his Mormon faith makes him close to unacceptable to the theocon base. Ron Paul is another leader in this area, and could be one to watch - but again, he's only marginally more acceptable to the religious base.