Obsidian Wings

This Looks Ugly

by hilzoy

From the Institute of Southern Studies:

"As we covered yesterday, N.C. residents have reported receiving peculiar automated calls from someone claiming to be "Lamont Williams." The caller says that a "voter registration packet" is coming in the mail, and the recipient can sign it and mail it back to be registered to vote. No other information is provided.

The call is deceptive because the deadline has already passed for mail-in registrations for North Carolina's May 6 primary. Also, many who have received the calls -- like Kevin Farmer in Durham, who made a tape of the call that is available here -- are already registered. The call's suggestion that they're not registered has caused widespread confusion and drawn hundreds of complaints, including many from African-American voters who received the calls.

The calls are also probably illegal. Farmer and others have told Facing South the calls use a blocked phone number and provided no contact information -- a violation of North Carolina rules regulating "robo-calls" (N.C. General Statute 163-104(b)(1)c). N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper further stated in a recent memo that the identifying information must be clear enough to allow the recipient to "complain or seek redress" -- something not included in the calls.

It is also a Class I felony in North Carolina "to misrepresent the law to the public through mass mailing or any other means of communication where the intent and the effect is to intimidate or discourage potential voters from exercising their lawful right to vote."

The calls have been denounced by the N.C. State Board of Elections, as well as by voter advocacy groups including Democracy North Carolina, which called them "another in a long line of deceptive practices used in North Carolina and elsewhere that particularly target African-American voters."

Yesterday, I placed a call to the Virginia State Police, which had investigated similar suspicious robo-calls before that Virginia's primaries last February. Their investigation concluded that the source of the calls was Women's Voices Women Vote.

Facing South then contacted Women's Voices, and staffer Sarah Johnson confirmed they were doing similar robo-calls in North Carolina; they later admitted that they were the ones behind the deceptive "Lamont Williams" calls."

If you listen to the call, though, it really does make it sound as though you need to mail in their packet in order to vote. (“Hello, This is Lamont Williams. In the next few days, you will receive a voter registration packet in the mail. All you need to do is sign it, date it and return your application. Then you will be able to vote and make your voice heard. Please return the voter registration form when it arrives. Thank you.”) It would have been easy to say something like: if you haven't already registered to vote... -- something that would make it clear that this is not, in fact, a further requirement. It would also be easy, and proper, for the caller to give not just his name, but his organizational affiliation, if only to make it clear that he has no official standing.

WVWV replies here: they say it's just an attempt to register voters that misfired. They have also apologized. However, this is neither the first time they've gotten in trouble for this sort of thing nor the first time they've said they will stop. In addition to the aforementioned problems in Virginia, the Institute for Southern Studies cites problems in Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Ohio. As the ISS says:

"In each state, the Women's Voices campaigns have brought the same news and the same themes, again and again: Deceptive claims and misrepresentations of the law -- sometimes even breaking the law. Wildly inaccurate mailing lists, supposedly aimed at "unregistered single women," but in reality reaching many registered voters as well as families, deceased persons and pets. Tactics that confuse voters and potentially disenfranchise them.

For such a sophisticated and well-funded operation, which counts among its ranks some of the country's most seasoned political operatives, such missteps are peculiar, as is the surprise expressed by Women's Voices staff after each controversy.

In at least two states, the timing of Women's Voices' activities have raised alarm that they are attempting to influence the outcome of a primary. As we reported earlier, in Virginia, news reports surfaced the first week in February that prospective voters were receiving anonymous robo-calls telling voters that they were about to receive a voter registration packet in the mail.

The timing of the calls was astoundingly off: As the Virginia State Police confirm, the calls were made Feb. 5 and 6 -- about 10 days before the then-critical Virginia primary, but more than two weeks after the deadline for registering in the state had passed (Jan. 14). The Virginia State Board of Elections was deluged with calls by confused voters -- many who were already registered. When they heard the calls from Women's Voices, they feared that they really weren't."

There is speculation that this is somehow linked to the Clinton campaign. The ISS story has various links, some closer than others:

"[Page] Gardner [President of VWVW], for example, contributed $2,500 to Clinton's HILLPAC on May 4, 2006, and in March 2005 she donated a total of $4,200 to Clinton, according to The Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org. She has not contributed to the Obama campaign, according to the database.

Women's Voices Executive Director Joe Goode worked for Bill Clinton's election campaign in 1992 as a pollster; the group's website says he was intimately involved in "development and implementation of all polling and focus groups done for the presidential primary and general election campaigns" for Clinton.

Women's Voices board member John Podesta, former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton, donated $2,300 to Hillary Clinton on April 19, 2007, according to OpenSecrets.org. Podesta also donated $1,000 to Barack Obama in July 2004, but that was well before Obama announced his candidacy for president."

Some of these links are more convincing than others (e.g., half the Democratic Party worked for Clinton in 1992.) I would have thought that the fact that John Podesta "served as Chief of Staff to President William J. Clinton from October 1998 until January 2001" would have been worth mentioning. In addition, Maggie Williams, Clinton's campaign manager, seems to have been on their board until quite recently (h/t el bandito at dKos.) [UPDATE: Williams does not seem to have been on the board while campaign manager. I should have made this clearer.]

I am reserving judgment on the Clinton angle until I know more. I only mention it because the story raises so many red flags. After all, we have a group staffed by very well connected Washington operatives that keeps making the same obvious mistakes over and over and over, despite having gotten in trouble for doing the exact same thing in the past; that sometimes makes them right before important primaries that Obama is projected to win; that is said to be targeting African-American neighborhoods, and using an African-American male voice, when it's supposedly targeting unmarried women.

Whatever is going on, though, it should stop.

The Larger Lessons of the Gas Tax Pander

by publius

Steve Benen says it perfectly, so I’ll just let him take it away:

It’s one thing for a good presidential candidate to embrace a bad idea. It’s worse when the candidate knows it’s a bad idea. It’s worse still when the candidate attacks her rival for failing to embrace a bad idea. And it’s the worst when the candidate feels so strongly about the bad idea that she starts running television commercials about it.

And that, unfortunately, is exactly what we have in the case of Hillary Clinton and the “gas-tax holiday.”

Yep. What’s troubling about the Great Gas Tax Pander is not so much the pander itself, but the larger more general concerns it raises about Clinton (who, of course, remains infinitely superior to McCain).

First, it shows that Clinton is more likely to use arguments that explicitly rely on voter ignorance. She knows that this policy stinks, but she is assuming that low-information voters won’t know the difference. Those silly latte drinkers with their fancy-pants inelasticies don’t understand the working man. But snark aside, the lack of respect for her audience shows far more elitism than Obama’s earlier comments ever did. (See also Michigan primary).

Second, and more troublingly, the pander provides further evidence of Clinton’s instincts to run from progressive positions in the face of political pressure from the right. Like Bill before her, she is very quick to adopt conservative, nationalist positions at the expense of sound policy in these circumstances (e.g., gas tax, “obliterate Iran,” Iraq, Kyl-Lieberman, etc.).

I can think of two explanations for this behavior. One, she’s not very liberal. Two, her guiding political philosophy is to avoid looking too liberal. Either way, not good.

Speaking Of Health Insurance...

by hilzoy

Check out these figures from a new Kaiser poll (Kaiser is a foundation that does incredibly good work on health policy):

"The poll also found that in the past year, 23% of U.S. residents said they or a member of their household had either decided to stay with a current employer, instead of accepting a new job, or had switched jobs because of health insurance coverage. In addition, 7% of respondents said that they, or someone in their household, had decided to get married to obtain health insurance through their spouse. (...)

According to the poll, 37% of U.S. residents reported at least one of six financial troubles over the past five years as a result of medical bills:

20% had difficulties paying other bills;

20% were contacted by a collection agency;

17% had used all or most of their savings;

12% were unable to pay for basic necessities, such as food, heat or housing;

10% had to borrow money; and

3% declared bankruptcy (Kaiser Family Foundation release, 4/29)."

The 17% who used all or most of their savings, the 12% who were unable to pay for basic necessities, and the 3% who declared bankruptcy, are stunning. But I was also appalled by the 7% who said that they or someone in their household got married during the past year to get health insurance. (To be clear: I'm not appalled by those people: under the right circumstances, I might well do the same. I'm appalled that it's necessary. I take marriage seriously, and the idea that people have to marry for health insurance seems awful, in something like the way that having to marry someone to get your family out of debt would.)

I've argued for a while that universal health insurance would free people to change jobs, take risks, and be entrepreneurs in a way they might find it much harder to do if they had to risk not just their money but their health -- or, worse, the health of their kids. But I've always based this on a combination of common sense and anecdotes -- I know people who have stayed with jobs they hated instead of taking great new offers either because those new offers didn't come with health insurance or because they were worried that they wouldn't be insurable because of a preexisting condition. But I wouldn't have imagined that 23% of respondents would say that they or someone in their household had either stuck with an existing job or switched jobs because of health insurance. That's a pretty serious distortion of the labor market.

The most important reason to provide health insurance to everyone is basic decency and fairness. But not providing health insurance has serious costs to our economy and our society. If significant numbers of people are not taking the best jobs they can find, let alone deciding whether or not to marry, because of health insurance, things are badly broken.

McCain On Health Insurance

by hilzoy

The NYT on John McCain's health care speech:

"Mr. McCain’s health care plan would shift the emphasis from insurance provided by employers to insurance bought by individuals, to foster competition and drive down prices. To do so he is calling for eliminating the tax breaks that currently encourage employers to provide health insurance for their workers, and replacing them with $5,000 tax credits for families to buy their own insurance. (...)

Some health care experts question whether those tax credits would offer enough money to pay for new health insurance plans. The average cost of an employer-funded insurance plan is $12,106 for a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy group. Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan research organization financed by foundations and government agencies, said, “For a lot of people, the tax credits he’s talking about would not be enough to afford coverage.”"

Not everyone has an extra $7,106 just lying around, waiting to be spent on health insurance premiums. What, I wonder, would happen to them? And wouldn't you think that eliminating tax breaks for employers who offer health insurance might make some of those employers decide to stop offering it altogether? I would, and I'm not even a member of the party whose entire economic platform is designed around the thought that people are so exquisitely sensitive to tax rates that even a relatively small cut in the capital gains tax will unleash great raging torrents of entrepreneurial energy. McCain is; and yet, curiously enough, he doesn't consider this possibility. Here's what he says about employer-based health insurance: "Many workers are perfectly content with this arrangement, and under my reform plan they would be able to keep that coverage. Their employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged." Except for the ones whose employers stopped offering health insurance, ha ha ha.

Besides, you might be thinking ...

Obama And Wright, Redux

by hilzoy

Here is his statement:

Brief excerpt:

"The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.

They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I might not know him as well as I thought, either.

Now, I've already denounced the comments that appeared in these previous sermons. As I said, I had not heard them before. I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church, he's built a wonderful congregation, the people of Trinity are wonderful people, and what attracted me has always been their ministry's reach beyond the church walls.

But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the US government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the United States' wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. And that's what I'm doing very clearly and unequivocally today."

Here's the Q and A:

Excerpt:

"In some ways, what Rev. Wright said yesterday directly contradicts everything that I've done during my life. It contradicts how I was raised, and the setting in which I was raised; it contradicts my decisions to pursue a career of public service; it contradicts the issues that I've worked on politically; it contradicts what I've said in my books; I've; it contradicts what I said in my convention speech in 2004; it contradicts my announcement; it contradicts everything I've been saying on this campaign trail.

And what I tried to do in Philadelphia was to provide a context, and to lift up some of the contradictions and complexities of race in America, of which Rev. Wright is a part and we're all a part, and try to make something constructive out of it. But there wasn't anything constructive out of yesterday. All it was was a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth. And I can't construct something positive out of that. I can understand it; people do all sorts of things. And as I said before, I continue to believe that Rev. Wright has been a leader in the South Side, I think that the church he built is outstanding, I think that he has preached in the past some wonderful sermons, he provided valuable contributions to my family, but at a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it, in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough."

Watch the whole thing. If you can't watch it, and are wondering whether this is just some sort of pro forma statement, trust me on this: it isn't. He is outraged and angry, and (I think) genuinely saddened by what Rev. Wright said.

As for me...

The Gas Tax Hoax

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lined up with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in endorsing a plan to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for the summer travel season. But Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic rival, spoke out firmly against the proposal, saying it would save consumers little and do nothing to curtail oil consumption and imports.

While Mr. Obama’s view is shared by environmentalists and many independent energy analysts, his position allowed Mrs. Clinton to draw a contrast with her opponent in appealing to the hard-hit middle-class families and older Americans who have proven to be the bedrock of her support. She has accused Mr. Obama of being out of touch with ordinary Americans who are struggling to meet their mortgages and gas up their cars and trucks.

Mrs. Clinton said at a rally on Monday morning in Graham, N.C., that she would introduce legislation to impose a windfall-profits tax on oil companies and use the revenue to suspend the gasoline tax temporarily.

“At the heart of my approach is a simple belief,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Middle-class families are paying too much and oil companies aren’t paying their fair share to help us solve the problems at the pump.”"

As a result, she proposes to divert money from the government to those same oil companies, while saving consumers next to nothing. Dean Baker:

"Actually, almost all economists would agree that the tax cut proposed by Senators Clinton and McCain would save consumers nothing. With the supply of gas largely fixed by the capacity of the oil industry (they claim to be running their refineries at full capacity), the price will not change in response to the elimination of the tax. The only difference will be that money that used to go to the government in tax revenues will instead go to the oil industry as higher profits.

If Senator Clinton is able to use this proposal to draw a contrast with Senator Obama in expressing concern for middle-class families it could only be attributable to the extraordinary incompetence of the reporters who are covering the campaign. While typical middle-class families may not have the time and background to realize that Senator Clinton's proposal would not save them any money, reporters do.

The fact that Senator Clinton, like Senator McCain, sought to deceive them with a bogus tax cut should have been the main theme of today's election reporting."

Len Burman:

"Refineries run near capacity every summer as families rack up miles on their vacations. That's one reason why gas prices always jump in the summer. If McCain's excise tax cut did translate into lower prices, we'd want to drive even more and burn more gasoline. Since the oil patch can't boost production much without building new refineries, the price has to go back up. (...)

Unless the goal is to temporarily boost profits for petroleum refineries and foreign producers, the proposal makes no sense."

Of course, Clinton also proposes to pay for the lost revenues from the gas tax with her new windfall profits tax on oil companies. Essentially, she wants to divert money from the government to the oil companies by suspending the gas tax, and then take it back again by introducing a different tax. McCain, by contrast, is willing to let the oil companies keep their extra profits, deficit or no deficit. I suppose that for someone who has already announced his willingness to increase our deficits by over half a trillion dollars a year, the revenues from the gas tax probably look like a rounding error. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see what has happened to this erstwhile deficit hawk and alleged straight-shooter now that he is running for President.

In a sane world, Obama would get credit for doing the right thing here. His unwillingness to go along with this transparent pander is surely a better indication of his character than his taste in lapel pins.

Eugene Volokh -- Polygamist Raid is "Child Abuse"

by publius

Eugene Volokh sure spends a lot of mental energy discrediting the efforts of the state to protect young children from a life of systematic statutory rape. There are several good nuggets, but this was my personal fav:

So many of the 17-year-olds may have gotten pregnant with no law being broken, and in fact within a legally recognized marriage. Of course, many might have gotten pregnant at 14 or 15, or at 16 outside marriage and with an adult. And naturally if any of these pregnancies were the results of forced sex, that would clearly be a very serious crime.

I like the "if" and "forced sex" bit. Maybe I'm just a prude, but any sex with a 14 or 15-year old by a grown man (particularly in that setting) is forced sex in my book.

He also makes a big contrarian deal about the fact that the AP article states that 31 out of 53 girls on the compound aged 14 to 17 are pregnant or have had kids. Because 17 is the age of consent, the AP is ignoring critical information, Volokh says. In fact, it may be describing "perfectly legal behavior." Even if that's true, 3/4 of this category (14, 15, and 16) are clearly below the age of consent. (And I suspect the remaining 22 aren't virgins). In fact, the category is even larger than that. Girls who have had a baby at 17 more likely than not had sex at 16. Given that (statistically) most of the girls in this group are underage, I don't understand devoting the thrust of a post to this point.

If you want to argue against state intervention, then do it without hanging it on this rather slender pretext.

If You Change Your Sex, Are You Still Married?

by hilzoy

The NYT has a story about a married couple who became New Jersey's first same-sex marriage when, 25 years after their wedding, Donald, the husband, became Denise. They stayed together: "“We’re one of the few of our friends who are still in our original marriage,” Denise Brunner said." But they face some legal problems, since no one seems to have a clue what to make of their marriage:

"The Brunners say they have no interest in obtaining a civil union — they consider it a downgrading of their relationship — but they do worry about their status.

What if the Internal Revenue Service questions their joint tax returns? What if they retire to North Carolina, a state that they say is less legally friendly to transsexuals and same-sex couples? What if they were taking their daughter Jessica to college in Pennsylvania, and were in a car wreck that left Denise unconscious — would the authorities accept Fran as her wife?

“Are they going to recognize that she can make the decision for me?” Denise asked. “We don’t know that, and that’s not the time I want to contest that in court.”"

Green Light for Voter ID Laws

by publius

A split Court today upheld Indiana’s blatantly partisan law requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls (background here). The upshot is that Republican-controlled legislatures just got the green light to enact requirements that disproportionately affect people without valid state-issued photos (e.g., elderly, poor, college students).

The 6-3 coalition (pdf) upholding the law was somewhat strange. Stevens joined Roberts and Kennedy for the “lead opinion,” while the Three Horsemen concurred in a separate opinion. At first glance, it seems strange that Justice Stevens would join the conservative Justices, but I think there’s a method to his madness.

To back up, I think the constitutional issue here is actually a close call. While the law stinks, I’m skeptical of the Court wading in here. The reason is that striking down the law requires the Court to ignore the superficially reasonable justifications Indiana can offer in its defense (e.g., eliminating voter fraud).

I mean, everyone knows why the law was passed — and that voter fraud is a sham. But in terms of finding (and establishing through judicial procedures) specific evidence of intent to suppress votes, well that’s tough to come by. Legislators aren’t as dumb as they used to be.

It’s also difficult because the plaintiffs here filed a broad facial challenge, which requires the Court to hold that the law is unconstitutional in every conceivable case. For me, it’s troubling to grant the Court such wide power to “look behind” the legislative rationale (remember that McCain could very well add a few more Justices who will be reviewing and "looking behind" Democratic congressional legislation).

But that leads back to Justice Stevens. Whatever else you might think about him, Stevens is the most politically savvy Justice. My take is that Stevens knew it was a lost cause — Kennedy must have signaled that he would uphold the law. Thus, Stevens managed to maintain the viability of more narrow “as applied” challenges by upholding the law on more narrow grounds.

In other words, Scalia and pals would have shut down all possible challenges if they could have had a 5-4 opinion all to themselves. By picking off Roberts and Kennedy, Stevens maintained the ability of plaintiffs to bring “as applied” challenges. Or to be more cynical, he kicked the can down the road hoping for a better Court in the future.

One other interesting point that Rick Hasen made is that Scalia’s test would probably justify poll taxes if they were enacted today (despite a footnote distinguishing them). In his concurring opinion, Scalia relies heavily on the fact that the voter ID requirement was a generally applicable law. Thus, the fact that it disproportionately affects individual voters isn’t that big a deal (in the absence of discriminatory intent, that is). He writes:

[W]hat petitioners view as the law’s several light and heavy burdens are no more than the different impacts of the single burden that the law uniformly imposes on all voters.

That’s exactly the logic of a poll tax though — it would be generally applicable and would have a disproportionate effect on poorer individual voters. In the past, the discriminatory intent behind these laws was more clear. But it’s unclear whether Scalia would find such intent if a poll tax were passed today with more savvy legislators.

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux has more (and more).

A Note On Wright

by hilzoy

An addendum to publius' post: yesterday, I was eating dinner, and flipped on CNN. There was Jeremiah Wright, just starting his speech before the NAACP. I watched it, and thought it was very, very funny, but intellectually sort of vapid, in an unexceptionable kind of way. (Repeated theme: "Different does not mean deficient." True enough, but not exactly startling.) There was nothing angry about it, except for a couple of little digs at the media, which were more funny than angry anyways.

I hadn't planned to write about this, since I didn't think it was all that interesting. But this morning I fired up Memeorandum, and what was at the top? Michelle Malkin, with a post on "Jeremiah Wright, racial phrenologist". Wtf, I think, and click over: there I learn that Wright is today's Leonard Jeffries. (Ice people, Sun people; remember that idiocy?) I wonder: Did he make some other speech? Apparently not: the same speech that struck me as blah with humorous bits seems to have sent people on the right round the bend. Ed Morrissey:

"One of the stranger aspects of Jeremiah Wright’s speech came in the supposed neurological explanation of the differences between whites and blacks. Wright claims that the very structure of the brains of Africans differ from that of European-descent brains, which creates differences rooted in physiology and not culture:

"“Africans have a different meter, and Africans have a different tonality,” he said. Europeans have seven tones, Africans have five. White people clap differently than black people. “Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style,” he said. “They have a different way of learning.” And so on."

This sounds oddly similar to claims made in The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, a book that created a firestorm of controversy with claims that race made a difference in IQ scores, among other claims."

I don't know what Morrissey is quoting (he doesn't say), but it's a reasonably accurate summary of the relevant part of Wright's speech. Note, though, that it provides precisely no support for Morrissey's claim that Wright was talking about neurological differences. None. Wright did note that Africans and Europeans have different musical scales, and use different rhythms. This is obviously a claim about their musical traditions, not the structure of their brains; it's no more a "neurological" claim than noting that Europeans tend to render perspective differently than African artists.

Likewise, Wright claimed that black and white children tend to have different learning styles. I have no idea whether this is true or not, as a generalization, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is: it would not begin to imply any differences in brain structure. By the time kids arrive at school (and Wright was talking about school kids), they have, obviously, absorbed a lot from the people around them. In particular, they have gotten used to learning from the people around them in different ways, to paying attention to different sorts of cues, and to different kinds of activities. These are the sorts of things that go into a "learning style": are you a kid who learns best by silently reading? by talking things through with other people? by trial and error? by putting things in your mouth, taking them apart, turning them over so you can see what you can do with them?

There is no earthly reason to think either (a) that kids from different cultures might not have very different learning styles, or (b) that if they did, this would reflect some sort of neurological difference. None at all. In a culture in which children are taught that they should be seen but not heard, they are probably less likely to learn by talking things through, at least with adults. In a culture in which children are expected to be very quiet and not cause trouble, they are less likely to learn by seeing what they can do with things. This is obvious. And it's what Rev. Wright was talking about.

I suppose that what sent Ed Morrissey off on this tangent was this: “Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style,” he said. “They have a different way of learning.” If you just focus on the adjective "right-brained", and leave out what that phrase is supposed to modify ("learning style"), I suppose it can sound neurological. But a right-brained learning style doesn't have to involve any neurological difference; it's just a learning style that tends to draw more on right-brain capacities than on left-brain ones. There's no reason that I can see to assume that the reason someone ends up with a given learning style has to be the structure of that person's brain, as opposed to the ways in which the people around them act. Likewise, I suppose you could call computer programming a left-brain career -- linear, symbolic, logical -- and architecture a right-brained one -- spatial, heavy on seeing things as wholes rather than as collections of parts, etc. But that would be completely different from claiming that what makes someone decide to be a programmer or an architect is the structure of their brain, as opposed to, say, parental pressure, financial reward, getting to know an inspirational person in one or the other profession, etc.

This was a pretty anodyne speech. It had a lot of funny moments, and a few little digs at the media, but nothing that could even remotely be construed as politically controversial.* Or so I thought, before I found out that Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed had decided to construe a relatively minor point about learning styles as a claim about neurological difference, one that (Morrissey) "sounds oddly similar to claims made in The Bell Curve." Other people take it even further: Sister Toldjah thinks he made "remarks about white brains versus black brains", and Rachel Lucas says that his point was "that black people and white people are, in fact, genetically different." (So it's not just neurological; it's a neurological difference explained by genetics!)

It's almost as though they were trying to make him sound strange and scary...