SkyBox Davis makes a brilliant hire as he brings on ex-Senator Steve Peace as his director of finance.
Peace is famous for two things: he’s fabulously temperamental, and as far as I know, not widely loved in the Legislature (I’ll go to Ann Salisbury for confirmation), but even better, he was the main water-carrier for the corporate energy interests that demolished the budget with their ill-planned (from the state, utility, and consumer’s point of view) deregulation of the energy markets.
If there’s a state political figure who ought to be at Tassajara Zen monastery, cutting wood and thinking about humility, it’s Peace.
Instead the Gov. is tossing him into what will be one of the bloodiest and highest-stakes political battles we’ve seen here in CA in this decade.
Thanks, Gray!!

So I scanned the research study on hiring today.
Personally, I’d have designed it slightly differently, to track two other dimensions: the effect of names that are obviously ethnic but non-African American (Juan, Ashish, Yuri, Isao and Wei come to mind immediately) as well as names that are fairly obviously white but ‘non-traditional’ (Rainbow, Sunshine, Redwood).
The fact that the investigators were only looking along the white-African American axis and ignored these other effects leaves their study subject to criticism (which it seems to be receiving in bulk … I almost said ‘in spades’, then decided to save myself the hate mail.).
First I should qualify my comments by the fact that I have a hard time with most social science ‘research’. Coming from a physical sciences background, I find that many, if not most of the research I’ve seen in the social sciences is just bad science, which simply sets out to document the prejudices of the researcher (Bellesiles, anyone?). So I have a knee-jerk reaction … call it a prejudice … when I first read about studies like this.
I tend to see them as interesting anecdotes, and in some ways find it frustrating that pseudo-quantitative research gets standing above meaningful personal anecdote.
Having stood on a chair and ranted for a bit, I’ll also defend the study as a useful anecdote.
I’ll defend it from two points of view.
The first is my own, as someone who has from time to time been involved in ‘mass market’ hiring and has seen for himself that certain resumes are shoved to the side for reasons that have little or nothing to do with their content.
The second is that we have to look on the study as reflecting what really happens when we take a pool of African American applicants…LaToyas and Muhammeds…real people…and try and understand what they see in the world.
And the reality is that for a million reasons, they face barriers that others don’t.
Some of the barriers are self-imposed.
But some of them aren’t.
And whether those barriers mean it’s 50% harder to get an interview or 5% , that’s just damn wrong.

CNN has the latest proposals for the WTC site.
Go check them out, and vote early and often.
I voted for #2, but reserve the right to decide that they all suck.

Go read this right now. Don’t go to bed. Don’t change the channel. Rachel Lucas: Guns and Freedom.
If I wore a hat, I’d doff it in respect to Rachel Lucas and her commenter/essayist Bill Whittle.
(via Instapundit)

Here’s the original paper. (requires Acrobat Reader)
I’m reading it and would love to hear folk’s positions on the research design.

Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy referred to Learned Hand’s great 1944 speech (one that forensics students have studied for years and years) given on I Am An American Day.
It’s useful to compare this speech with those ofthe Dixiecrats just four years later to remind ourselves that the world has always been a pretty complicated place. An excerpt:

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

As a devout nonchurchgoer, I can tell you that the final directly Christian phase evokes the great contibutions of Christianity to Western and liberal thought.
But the key phrase to me is: “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right…” That’s something I’m working on pretty hard, and something I look for and care about in other commentators.

Hmmm. Just read OpinionJournal – Best of the Web Today, who comments on the NY Times story on race and hiring I comment on below:

Employers were more likely to ask the “applicants” with “white names” in for an interview than those with the “black names.” But something’s wrong here. A chart that accompanies the print version of the Times story but doesn’t appear online shows the frequency with which people with “white” names and “black” names got called for interviews:
“White” names
Kristen: 13.6%
Carrie: 13.1%
Laurie: 10.8%
Meredith: 10.6%
Sarah: 9.8%
Allison: 9.4%
Jill: 9.3%
Anne: 9.0%
Emily: 8.3%
“Black” names
Ebony: 10.5%
Latonya: 9.1%
Kenya: 9.1%
Latoya: 8.8%
Tanisha: 6.3%
Lakisha: 5.5%
Tamika: 5.4%
Keisha: 3.8%
Aisha: 2.2%
Now, what’s “white” about names like Laurie and Jill? Wouldn’t a fair comparison have included some odd-sounding white names, like Dweezil or Moon Unit? And if employers discriminate against people with “black” names, how come Latonyas and Latoyas were more likely to get called back than Emilys were?

Uh-oh…better go to the actual statistics before I go making claims about this…
[Update: did a quick run of the numbers through Excel, and got a statistically significant difference between the two sets, so there is something going on. I’ve got a friend who’s trying to get both the ‘shooting’ research below and this as original papers.]

In today’s Slate, Timothy Noah types: The Legend of Strom’s Remorse – A Washington lie is laid to rest, and goes after what he calls the ‘myth’ of Strom’s redemption.

For many years, there’s been a cherished Washington lie about Strom Thurmond. The lie is that Thurmond, though once a leading segregationist, later renounced that view as morally wrong.
…
But there never was any such expression of remorse or plea for forgiveness. Thurmond has never publicly repudiated his segregationist past, and with his 100th birthday and a Senate career behind him, it’s doubtful he ever will. The legend of Strom’s Remorse was invented, by common unspoken consent within the Beltway culture, in order to provide a plausible explanation why Thurmond should continue to hold power and command at least marginal respectability well past the time when history had condemned Thurmond’s most significant political contribution. Now that Thurmond is finally leaving Washington, the lie serves no further purpose and will fade away.
…
Is Chatterbox saying that the Strom of today (what’s left of him) is identical to the Strom who ran for president in 1948 on the pro-segregationist Dixiecrat platform? He is not. Clearly, Thurmond made shrewd accommodations late in life to changing times. In the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to hire a black staff aide and to sponsor a black man for a federal judgeship. In the 1980s, he voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (not because he agreed with it but in belated deference to “the common perception that a vote against the bill indicates opposition to the right to vote”). Strom also came to support making the birthday of Martin Luther King (about whom he’d once said, “King demeans his race and retards the advancement of his people”) a federal holiday. Thurmond didn’t do much else to promote equality among the races, but these token gestures were enough to demonstrate that he was no longer the 1948 Dixiecrat who had said, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” (Pedantic aside: Standard accounts of the speech render “Nigra” as “Negro,” but when listening to an NPR sound clip, Chatterbox wondered whether the word Thurmond uttered was “nigger.” In transcribing, Chatterbox gave Thurmond, who even in his worst days was not known publicly to throw that ugly epithet around, the benefit of the doubt…)
…

Let’s see.
In the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to hire a black staff aide.
In the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to sponsor a black man for a federal judgeship.
In the 1980s, he voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
He came to support making the birthday of Martin Luther King a federal holiday.
I donno, they may be ‘token’ to Timothy, but they seem kind of substantial to me. He also enrolled his children in an integrated school, which strikes me as a fairly personal level of at least tolerance.
I guess it would be nice to have a kind of ‘Paul of Tarsus’ public epiphany, preferably on Oprah, in which he renouced his evil ways.
Kind of like my desire to get my Republican friend to agree that some form of racial redress was good public policy.
Then again, he’s just married to an African American woman (and had children with her) instead. Which makes the moral high ground kind of hard to find here.

Here’s some data on the issue of race.
From the Toronto Star:

Asked to make split-second decisions about whether black or white male figures in a video game were holding guns, people were more likely to conclude mistakenly that the black men were armed and to shoot them, a series of new studies reports.
The subjects in the studies, who were instructed to shoot only when the human targets in the game were armed, made more errors when confronted by images of black men carrying objects like cellphones or cameras than when faced with similarly unarmed white men. The participants, who in all but one study were primarily white, were also quicker to fire on black men with guns than on white men with guns.
…

So to restate: a sample of people were tested with a videogame which required them to make a “shoot / don’t shoot” decision, and they were more likely to shoot with sketchy information if the person they were facing was African American, and they shot more quickly (i.e. spent less time deciding) if the person was African American.
Hmmm.
And from the N.Y. Times, via Calpundit:

To test whether employers discriminate against black job applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300 help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston and Chicago and submitted multiple résumés from phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first names on the résumés, choosing from one set that is particularly common among blacks and from another that is common among whites.
…
So Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs from the same pool of want ads and had equivalent résumés. Nine names were selected to represent each category: black women, white women, black men and white men.
…
The results are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7 percent of those with black-sounding names.
…
Their most alarming finding is that the likelihood of being called for an interview rises sharply with an applicant’s credentials — like experience and honors — for those with white-sounding names, but much less for those with black-sounding names. A grave concern is that this phenomenon may be damping the incentives for blacks to acquire job skills, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates prejudice and misallocates resources.
…

So, to restate, given a randomized set of resumes, those attached to African American sounding names are significantly less likely to get called in for an interview than the same resume attached to a name more likely to be white.
Now I’ve typically got some fairly harsh things to say about affirmative action, and about the ways that the African American political leadership has substituted entitlement and patronage for responsibility and service.
And I’ve been amused to find myself shocked, just shocked to meet the wife of a Midwestern, Jewish, arch-Republican co-worker and discover that she was black. (and note the photo of Instapundit’s future sister-in-law).
So the reality is that race remains an incredibly complex issue here.
I’ll say two things to close for now (I still owe a longer piece):
I can’t imagine a better time or place to be black than the United States in the 21st century;
As noted above, we still have some fairly significant issues to deal with.

In the Washington Post, a look at the Administration’s new plan for tax justice (and fiscal stimulus):

Economists at the Treasury Department are drafting new ways to calculate the distribution of tax burdens among different income classes, which are expected to highlight what administration officials see as a rising tax burden on the rich and a declining burden on the poor. The White House Council of Economic Advisers is also preparing a report detailing the concentration of the tax burden on the affluent and highlighting problems with the way tax burdens are calculated for the poor.
The efforts would thrust the administration into a debate that until now has lingered on the fringes of economic policy: Are too few wealthy Americans paying too much in taxes for too many, and should the working poor and middle class be shouldering more of the tax burden?
“The increasing reliance on taxing higher-income households and targeted social preferences at lower incomes stands in the way of moving to a simpler, flatter tax system,” R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, warned at a tax forum at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday.
…
The Treasury Department is working up more sophisticated distribution tables that are expected to make the poor appear to be paying less in taxes and the rich to be paying more.
Answering critics who say the working poor do face high taxes because they pay high Social Security payroll taxes, outgoing White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey told the AEI tax forum that the 12.4 percent Social Security levy should not be considered when tax burdens are calculated. Lindsey said the Social Security tax is ultimately returned to the taxpayer as a benefit.
Lindsey compared the Social Security tax to a deposit in a neighborhood bank’s Christmas Club. In such clubs, periodic deposits are returned in a lump sum during the holiday season, and Lindsey said no one would consider such deposits a tax.

Some things just speak for themselves.
I wonder if they would have had the nerve to float this if Gore hadn’t dropped out, and the reality that GWB will essentially run unopposed hadn’t set in?
(added to quote in order to clarify point)