"As a law student, I worked in the mayor's office in Detroit during the 1967 riot, and I can tell you what happens to major cities with sustained increases in violent crime..."

"... Very large parts of them are destroyed. That's what I fear could happen again. It's all the more likely if liberal mayors and their cheerleaders in the press act as many did during the 'mostly peaceful' BLM protests. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser tweeted that it was 'shameful' for federal police to use force to clear Lafayette Square on June 1. Those overrunning it tried to topple the statue of Andrew Jackson and started a fire in St. John's Church, 'the presidents' church,' just to the north. That civic space was violated just as the Capitol was on Jan. 6.  ... Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton argued in The New York Times for sending the National Guard and federal troops into cities where rioting got out of hand, as was often done from 1967 in Detroit to 1992 in Los Angeles. That common-sense suggestion sent young Times journalists into tears, and they demanded — and got — the firing of editorial page editor James Bennet. It's easy to make fun of the double standard here, with Bowser decrying the active duty military being 'used on American streets against Americans' in June and having no problem with it in January. Or with then-President Trump decrying rioters in June and spurring them on in January."

Writes Michael Barone (at Rasmussen).

"The Shame of the Universities."

An alternate title that would work for 2 recently published books, according Michael Barone. (Both are books I've blogged about before: Greg Lukianoff's "Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate," and Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor's "Mismatch/How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.")

Via Instapundit, whose own "Shame of the Universities" book is referred to in Barone's article.

George Zimmerman is "one-fourth black, four times as black as Warren is Indian, though the New York Times describes him as a 'white Hispanic.'"

Writes Michael Barone, noting that Elizabeth Warren asserts that she is "1-32nd Native American [and] George Zimmerman, the Florida accused murderer, had a black grandmother."

If we're doing plain old arithmetic here, Zimmerman is 8 times as black as Warren is Native American. (At the genetic level, it could be a lot more complex — were the identified ancestors 100%? — but that doesn't explain the error.)

I did the math in my head as I was reading the column, and then — despite the depressing innumeracy — I was completely cheered up, reading the comments and running into rhhardin, who is one of my all-time favorite commenters over here on the Althouse blog. With characteristic succinctness, he says:

"That makes Warren 1-32nd Native American. George Zimmerman, the Florida accused murderer, had a black grandmother. That makes him one-fourth black, four times as black as Warren is Indian"

Eight times.

ADDED: Fractions are hard. It's not so easy to use the calculator. You can turn 1/4 into decimal without straining, but 1/32 is tricky. But if you stop and struggle long enough to encounter your inner Barbie...



... and you feel a little queasy about doing math, maybe your queasiness will carry over into wondering what the hell are we doing calculating racial percentages! It really is quite disgusting.

"A double-vanilla ticket will be attacked as un-diverse by the media."

Double-vanilla! Michael Barone uses the term in discussing Mitt Romney's reasons for picking a white male VP. (His "vanilla" males are Paul Ryan, Rob Portman, Mitch Daniels, and Bob McDonnell.)

Did Barone invent that term? He says "what opponents might call a double-vanilla ticket." Do opponents already say that or is that a Barone invention?

Is "double vanilla" an acceptable term?
	No, we should be color blind.
	No, race is a serious topic and that trivializes it.
	Yes, lighten up... I mean... appreciate a little levity.
	Yes, because it brings the lingering historical problem of white supremacy to the surface.
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"The 2012 congressional redistricting cycle following the 2010 Census... seems likely to make much less difference than many of us expected."

Writes Michael Barone:

I predicted that this cycle, like the 2002 cycle, would produce significant gains for Republicans. Their success in electing governors and legislators in 2010 gave them control in big states like Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina. And voters in Democratic California approved a ballot measure turning redistricting over to a nonpartisan commission.

But it turns out Republicans will probably only gain 1 new seat in Congress as a result of all this.

"The man-cession has become a (not large) man-covery."

Explains Michael Barone:

Men have gained jobs in the retail sector where women have lost them. The retail, manufacturing and finance sectors employed 253,000 more men in May 2011 than in June 2009 and 433,000 fewer women.

And men have gained more jobs than women in health and education -- two sectors where employment grew during the past decade.

So underneath the recovery news (dismal though it is) are really horrible numbers for women. Why are men faring better? Because they were originally hurt more, or is this some real shift favoring men over women?

What I see beneath these data is something like this -- a picture of men hustling to acquire new skills and learn how to do different jobs than they have in the past, while women have been more likely to sit back and accept whatever the macroeconomy doles out.

Why does Barone see that? Is that a stereotype about male and female psychology?

"The liberals who long to return to the Midcentury Moment seem to forget that it was a time of enormous cultural uniformity that stigmatized being unmarried or unchurched or gay."

Observes Michael Barone, explaining "liberal nostalgia" for what he calls "America's Midcentury Moment":

The huge menu of lifestyle choices from which we can choose today was a very short menu with very few choices then. It could not last. Baby-boom children, raised in prosperity, were not content with being small units in large machines....

Vietnam, urban riots, Watergate, stagflation—all undermined confidence in big government, big business and big labor, and by the late 1970s the Midcentury Moment was long gone....

So the Obama Democrats, partially successful in expanding the size and scope of government, largely unsuccessful in reviving private-sector unions, are on the defensive politically. As Mr. Levison and other liberals recognize, most Americans don't accept Keynesian economics and don't favor expansion of government as they did during the Midcentury Moment....

[T]he Midcentury Moment's confidence in big institutions was inextricably connected with an acceptance of a cultural uniformity that almost all of today's liberals, and probably most non-liberals, would find unacceptable.

Read the whole thing. There's much about the unifying effect of WWII and the military draft. Do you buy this — the notion that belief in big government depends on cultural uniformity?

"The Liberals, the governing party for most of Canada’s history, have been relegated to a third-place rump..."

Michael Barone, on Canada's election, which took place yesterday.

What seems to have happened is that the Conservatives have picked up enough seats, particularly in Toronto and in the 905 area code belt around Toronto, to win an absolute majority....
The New Democrats surged to second place, largely by replacing the Bloc Quebecois in the vast majority of Quebec seats; they will be the official opposition party...

What this looks like is the emergence of a two-party politics in what had been a four-party dominion. Conservatives have a solid majority and the left-leaning, statist New Democrats are the relatively weak opposition...

After the 2008 election I noted that Canada’s large metro areas were very different politically, with different parties competitive and/or dominant in each one in what was a four-party system. Now in what looks like a two-party system, they’re more alike.....

Mitch Daniels? Not glamorous?

Via Instapundit, Michael Barone profiles Mitch Daniels and ends on a predictable downbeat:

You can almost see the green eyeshade as he speaks. It's been noted that Daniels is short, balding (with a combover), that he speaks with just a bit of a Southern country twang (he moved to Indiana from Tennessee and Georgia at age 10): hardly a glamorous candidate.

I say he defines the new glamour!

"Like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision," new Presidents may "do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did."

Says Michael Barone, in a column all about how Barack Obama needs to "grow up."

Is that the problem?