Ted

In January of this year, there was a short flurry of posts about the incredible discrepancy between the wealth of black households and white households. I had no idea that the median white household has seven times the assets of the median black household. It’s primarily a legacy of history; there’s a gap in wages between white and black workers, but it’s not a 7-1 gap. Black households even save slightly more than white households at the same income level.

This has all sorts of implications, as family wealth (for example) makes higher education and entry into the housing market much easier for a young adult. As Dalton Conley notes, black college students are more likely to drop out than white college students, even if their families have the same incomes. When you control for wealth, however, black and white students perform equally as well.

(My posts on the subject are here, here, and here. Kevin Drum, Kieran Healey (the link is probably not working), and Rob Lyman all had excellent posts on the subject.)

Recently, I got an email from Jonathan Maccabee with more detail about the value of owner-occupied homes, the primary source of wealth for most families. He took a look at the US Census’ American FactFinder, table HCT 66, “Median Value of Owner-Occupied Housing Units.” (I’m restricting this to white and black for the sake of simplicity.)

Says Jonathan,

As you can see, the racial gap in housing prices is significant. Though in New York State, to my surprise, the gap works in reverse, as most minorities who own homes live in the very expensive New York City area. The percentage of those who live in owner-occupied housing, of course, is very low in much of New York City and generally lower for minorities than whites; the Census doesn’t calculate the percentages, but the comparison is at Summary File 4, HCT 2 – Tenure (translation: living in owner-occupied housing vs. renter-occupied housing). This is one reason why these numbers enormously understate the wealth gap between whites and minorities.

It’s worth making the point that the proportions of white and black households who own their own homes are very different. According to the Local Initiatives Support Coalition, black home ownership rate was at 46.3% in 2000, while white home ownership was at 73.8%.

I can’t get over it. I finally got Dalton Conley’s book, Being Black, Living in the Red, and I’ll have to report on it later.

because the Pixies are getting back together.

In April, the legendary Pixies will reunite for the first time in over a decade. The notoriously quarrelsome quartet have buried the hatchet, clearing the way for all four original members to hop onstage together for a world tour, according to a spokesperson for the band.

If all goes as planned, the triumphant return of one of the most influential rock bands of the late ’80s might also be followed by a new studio album, the source said. The band has not yet gotten together to begin rehearsing for the tour, but, given their ugly breakup in 1993, the announcement is one of the most unlikely and anticipated reunions in the history of indie rock.

Best band ever. I couldn’t be more delighted.

(link via TMFTML)

Mark Kleiman has a timely reminder that Al Sharpton is a horrible person.

If you just manage to hang around for long enough in politics, you can achieve some kind of undeserved quasi-respectability. If Al Sharpton spent his time apologizing to his victims instead of demeaning the Presidential race, the world would be a better place.

I see that Christopher Walken nearly walked out of the remake of The Stepford Wives because he was unhappy with changes in the script.

When the star of The Country Bears, Kangaroo Jack, Gigli, Jungle Juice, Joe Dirt, The Prophecy 1,2, and 3, Blast From the Past, and Mouse Hunt nearly leaves your movie because of the script, that’s got to hurt your feelings a little bit.

From Donald Rumsfeld:

Mr. Rumsfeld did not mention any of the domestic critics by name. But he suggested that those who have been critical of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq and its aftermath might be encouraging American foes to believe that the United States might one day walk away from the effort, as it has in past conflicts.

From Christopher Durang:

You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter is about to drink in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says, “Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won’t die.”

So, we all started to clap. I clapped so long and so hard that my palms hurt and they even started to bleed I clapped so hard. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, “That wasn’t enough. You did not clap hard enough. Tinkerbell is dead.” And then we all started to cry. The actress stomped off stage and refused to continue with the production. They finally had to lower the curtain. The ushers had to come help us out of the aisles and into the street.

You hear that? CLAP LOUDER!

More from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Arthur Silber, Kevin Drum, Atrios, and Tim Dunlop.

We all know that polls taken more than a year before the election are going to have virtually no predictive power. But this analysis caught my eye:

Some 41 percent of all registered voters say they will definitely vote against Bush; just 29 percent say they will definitely vote for him. So Bush must woo about seven in ten swing voters — not a difficult task for a popular incumbent, but far from a certainty.

Does it make sense to call him a “popular incumbent” in the sentence immediately after the one that says that 41% of likely voters will vote against him, and 29% will vote for him?

I’d like to point out that if you’re not reading the “Pointless Waste of Time” Newsskim, you’re missing out.

ASTEROID TO END CIVILIZATION IN 2014…

…says scientists after discovering what NASA has labelled “God’s Flyswatter.”

All nine Democratic Presidential candidates have held press conferences blasting President Bush for leaving the Earth vulnerable and “naked in the dark Detroit alley of the cosmos,” (John Kerry) and for “transforming the planet – through a series of irresponsible tax cuts for the rich – into a virtual Meteor Magnet,” (Howard Dean).

The Bush Administration, meanwhile, has assembled a $60 billion emergency task force made up of NASA and military officials to devise a way to deflect the oncoming Democratic criticism. Their first pro-Bush advertisements are expected to be deployed by Spring of 2004.

…

Action star Charles Bronson died of pneumonia over the weekend to the delight of hack comics everywhere, who are now able to use the approximately 167,933 Death Wish play-on-word jokes they have been stockpiling for decades….

Subsequent performances in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Battle of the Bulge and The Dirty Dozen cemented Bronson’s legacy as the ugliest man ever to have a camera pointed at him for the purposes of showing others for money. Acting without the benefit of a “Tom Cruise smile,” a “Brad Pitt chin” or even a “Kevin Spacey mild presentableness,” Bronson proved that a disturbingly ugly man can make it to the top in Hollywood, then die of pneumonia.

In other news, Kieran has previously noted that my pro-Stalin agenda has come under blistering attack. In my defense, I’d like to point out that fluffy bunnies are adorable.

All right, I’ve lowered the tone enough. Sorry.

A little while ago, Kos asked for good things Bush has done. (Specifically, he asked for three good things.) Whatever your list looked like, there’s a new addition:

WASHINGTON D.C. – President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 today, marking the first time the U.S. government has ever passed a law to deal with sexual assault behind bars…

The law calls for the gathering of national statistics about the problem; the development of guidelines for states about how to address prisoner rape; the creation of a review panel to hold annual hearings; and the provision of grants to states to combat the problem.

Also due for praise are the sponsors of this bill, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) in the Senate and Frank R. Wolf (R-Va) in the House.

Iain at Grim Amusements is a little less hopeful, noting that it’s an unfunded mandate and that states will have an incentive to minimize evidence that the situation exists. Still, I agree with Glenn Renolds that “It’s not like it’s going to solve the problem, but at least it puts it on the table.” Kudos.

Out of curiosity, I started looking at the affiliations of some high-ranking members of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. I struck paydirt right away with the National Chairman, Massey Villareal.

No, as far as I know, he isn’t a former member of MEChA. But he is a current member of another extremist organization: The Texas GOP.

MEChA has been widely attacked on the basis of this document: El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan.

So, in the interest of equal time, I’m pleased to take a look at the Texas GOP platform from 2000.

And I didn’t even have to translate anything to do it! Good thing, too- the official Texas GOP platform “supports the immediate adoption of American English as the official language of Texas and of the United States of America.”

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Every once in a while, you’ll see a story about some local government regulations that force an 11-year old girl to shut down her lemonade stand. Most readers (including me) come away with the feeling that the law that prevented the kid from opening a lemonade stand is ridiculous and should probably be eliminated.

But should they? Keep in mind that there are countless 11-year olds who have no intention of starting a lemonade stand. Some children who began lemonade stands would surely run them poorly. We can’t just go around lifting regulations willy-nilly until we can be sure that 11-year olds have reached a consensus. If we start lifting regulations and leaving the decision about whether to sell lemonade to individual choice, it will devalue the whole concept of commerce. What if some of them fail?

Needless to say, this is an absurd argument. Which was why I was amazed to see Jonah Goldberg trying it against gay marriage, in a column titled “Gay men not rushing to the altar”.

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I don’t think that I have too much more to say about MEChA; there are a lot of people who I’m not going to convince. But I wanted to share this comment on Kevin Drum’s site from “J” :

Why won’t Bustamante make a statement against separatism or fascism or racism? First of all, it hasn’t been exactly established that this is a MEChA stance. I read the Juan Non-Volokh piece, and in his fisking of Barlow, he also made one mistake that I noticed immediately. He linked to the Berkeley MEChA website, which links to that Aztlan plan that everyone is quoting. However, and there probably is no way Non-Volokh could have known this, Berkeley MEChA is actually not the official MEChA of Berkeley — they split off from the regular MEChA. The regular MEChA branch, however, doesn’t have a website. The Berkeley MEChA is decidedly more radical. You can check out the Office of Student Life listing of student groups and see that there are two MEChA’s listed (this website is for last semester, neither MEChA has registered for the Fall yet). What this says to me is that each MEChA branch is likely to have its own statement of purpose, so someone needs to investigate the branch that Bustamante actually belonged to before they demand that he renounce anything.

I certainly didn’t know that. Hat tip to Henry, who tipped me off.

About a month ago, there was a press release from Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club. They had filed a FOI act claim against Dick Cheney’s secretive energy task force. Among the documents that they had obtained were maps of Iraq’s oilfields and a document entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” Some people took this as proof that the war on Iraq had been planned before September 11, 2001, in order to transfer control of Iraqi oilfields to American companies. After a few small mentions in the mainstream media, the story died, except on left-wing blogs.

I don’t know why the story didn’t hit the national news. Maybe it was because Dick Cheney’s office stonewalled, and the press couldn’t get enough information to make it a worthwhile story. Maybe the media is so cowed by right-wing carping that they won’t pursue stories about right-wing malfeasance without either airtight evidence or a lot of momentum from the press pack.

But I’d like to believe that the story died because honest reporters looked into the allegations and saw that it was a bullshit story. There is nothing suspicious about an energy task force gathering information about major oil wells, no matter where they are. Oil is a commodity, Iraqi oil was on the market under the oil-for-food program, and it would have been very strange if Cheney’s group had neglected this. Furthermore, when you read the “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts” document, it seems to be all about non-US companies who began working with the Iraqi oil company under the oil-for-food progam. There are no American companies on the list.

I bring this up because the same news outlets whose commitment to truth and honesty brought you such bullshit stories as “Paul Wellstone’s memorial was nothing but a political rally,” “Bill Clinton’s staff vandalized the White House on the way out,” and “Gen. Wesley Clark is a deranged liar” are proud to bring you a new one:

“Cruz Bustamante is refusing to repudiate his association as a student with the racist group MEChA. Why is the media ignoring this story?”

Now, the MEChA question actually seems to come up quite a bit in stories about Bustamante. But I can’t deny that major media haven’t given the question the prime-time treatment. Why is that? Again, I don’t know. I’d like to think that it’s because the media have examined the charges, called some members of MEChA, and decided that a full-court press is inappropriate.

You see, this is a bullshit story.

Let’s look a little closer.

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