The favorite culprits for high black prison rates include a biased legal system, draconian drug enforcement and even prison itself. None of these explanations stands up to scrutiny.

The black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly a function of black crime. Insisting otherwise only worsens black alienation and further defers a real solution to the black crime problem.

Racial activists usually remain silent about that problem. But in 2005, the black homicide rate was more than seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

When prominent figures such as Barack Obama make sweeping claims about racial unfairness in the criminal-justice system, they play with fire. The evidence is clear: Black prison rates result from crime, not racism. The dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s, to which stricter sentencing policies unquestionably contributed, has freed thousands of law-abiding inner-city residents from the bondage of fear.

The continuing search for the chimera of criminal-justice bigotry is a useless distraction that diverts energy and attention from the crucial imperative of helping more inner-city boys stay in school — and out of trouble.

When news of the new "Amazon Tax" spread, most New Yorkers probably thought it just meant they'd have to start paying a little more when they ordered online merchandise. But the law, passed in Albany last month, is likely to have a far greater effect on small businesses than it is on consumers.

Critics of the new law say it is unworkable because tracking multiple sales tax rates is difficult - particularly for smaller retailers - while supporters counter that software tools are making this easier. But the reality is that Amazon and other merchants with affiliate programs won't bother adding the additional capability to collect New York tax; instead, they'll take the far easier step of blocking any New York-based site from their affiliate programs. The result will be a tremendous loss of income for the numerous small New York businesses now participating in affiliate programs.

If New York wants a larger share of online sales tax revenues, it should focus on making the state more attractive for online retailers to set up shop here, and improve enforcement of existing tax laws. Instead, the Amazon Tax will hurt New York's small online businesses and entrepreneurs, and ultimately may lower overall tax revenues, while strengthening New York's reputation as being unfriendly to small businesses.

Snobbery and the resentment of snobbery (and it is really snobbery, and not elitism as such, that we have all been discussing) are always going to exist in societies with significant upward social mobility.  The more opportunities available to people through merit (or at least largely through merit), the more pretensions the arrivistes will put on to demonstrate that they do, in fact, belong in their new status group.  Snobbery may not be limited to arrivistes, which is to say those who have succeeded in making their own way, but I suspect it is most obvious among these people, because they are the ones who most have to prove that they have adopted the mentality associated with their new status and their new peers.  

Evidently, there are a lot of people on the left who find the controversy over Obama’s San Francisco remarks absolutely infuriating because he ”told the truth” and is being punished for it, but for everyone else the remarks were not just condescending–they were insulting because they were false.  More than that, a politician presumed to know why people did or believed certain things, when he probably cannot know their motives and, more importantly, shouldn’t care.  In an election, it is the politician’s motives, his beliefs, that are at issue.  The pol is the one who is supposed to be scrutinised by the voters, not vice versa.

A while back there was a story in the Washington Post about a Latino Museumon the National Mall. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) introduced the bill to set up a commission to study the idea's feasibility. The museum would be based in Washington, around the National Mall and "might be under the umbrella of the Smithsonian Institution."

According to the story by Jacqueline Trescott, "This is one issue that unites our community," said Raul Yzaguirre, the president of the National Council of La Raza.

Let me be the first one to disagree and state for the record that this is one of the worst, most divisive ideas to have come out of anyone's minds in years. And I think that I am definitely part of the "community."

Why have a separate, segregated museum for Latinos? Why not get more Latinos in the existing national museums, period.