I read this article yesterday. Superb. The Democrats still supporting slavery, just like they did at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

The black middle class is overwhelming dependent on government largess (via employment, generally), education, and corporate affirmative action policies. Given that we are seeing austerity in at least two of those major industries, there is sure to be some stagnation and perhaps decline in black social mobility.

On the other hand, such mobility disproportionately comes at the expense of taxpayers and people who lose the affirmative action game. I would be far happier if black progress was predicated on things that weren't zero-sum games.

I think conservatives in the private and non-profit sectors need to be aware of the opportunities and obligations here. Example: Must affirmative action preferences necessarily lower performance standards of minorities? In my experience not necessarily, not if you know where to look for talented black students, and that is in inner city Catholic schools. Conservatives need to becomes more imaginative about the way they think about opportunity issues; they must not become as stagnant as liberals.

But most of our students are not in Catholic schools. The low standards in public schools are even lower in inner city schools and since public school teachers come from that source, the problem is self-perpetuating. I suppose it is easy for some of us (mostly whites?) to say that dependence on government is as good for people as dependence on heroin to any individual. I had morphine for a shattered arm, once and loved what it did. After the couple of days that I really needed it had passed I never looked back. Yet people become dependent on pain-killers and dependence on government social programs really seems to be comparable to life lived on pain-killers. Government social programs apparently are necessary to ease the pain of life within society. When those things are temporary, they might be highly beneficial; maybe not strictly necessary, but surely a great comfort. When they are permanent, people become dependent and cannot imagine life without that needful. Surely long-term dependence is deadening.

I have known heroin addicts (old friends) who say that going through withdrawals is worse than death. (Though since they did not ever die, they don't know for sure.) Hence the comparison to the Black community dependent on government programs -- asking them to leave government aid of all kinds -- has them responding as if it were a fate worse than death.

Did you see this interview with Walter Williams?

https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704881304576094221050061598.html?mod=rss_opinion_main&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fxml%2Frss%2F3_7041+%28WSJ.com%3A+Opinion%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

It is titled: The State Against Blacks
'The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do. . . . And that is to destroy the black family.'

The Democratic Party did not exist until 1828.

Well, Art, maybe that's what they teach in Texas?

The decline in vocations within the Church has not been evenly distributed. It has been far more severe in the religious orders than among the parish clergy. Perhaps 50 new priests enter the religious orders each year. As for the sisters, I spoke to a woman in the Congregation of St. Joseph some years ago who told me the following: the median age within her order was 70; from 1971 to the present, the number of women who had taken their final vows was about half the number who had done so in 1961 and 1962.

All of this has destroyed the economy of Catholic education. You have to hire lay teachers. The teachers have families and do not live communally, so you cannot get by paying them small stipends. The teachers manifest the haphazard catechesis of the post-conciliar Church even when they are nominal Catholics and the order or diocesan apparat running the school is not hopeless. (See the following: https://www.lifesitenews.com/?/news/sacramento-bishop-no-place-in-catholic-schools-for-abortion-supporters). The Catholic schools cannot for the foreseeable future be a solution to much of anything.

I went to school in California.

Okay fine - I will be more specific and retrace..

The Democrats still supporting slavery, just the like THE FOREFATHERS OF THEIR PARTY did the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

I wonder to what degree Mead's essay is a delayed response to the Fenty/Gray race in DC.

Well, there were advocates of slavery at the Constitutional Convention and in the ratification conventions and some were later associated with Jefferson's Republican Party and the Democratic Party was derived from the more vulgar, western, and parochialist components of the Jeffersonian organization. The thing is, both the Whig Party and (initially) the Federalist Party had considerable Southern contingents and neither was an abolitionist organization, so I cannot see how the Democratic Party is the heir to the advocates of slavery in 1787.

Jefferson was a member of the Anti-Federalist Party and help founded the Democrat-Republicans which later spawed the Whig Party and also the now Democrat Party. Jefferson was a slaveholder.

Democrats from the beginning of their inception to today have always been the party that supported slavery, Jim Crow laws and entitlement programs. Lincoln "freed the slaves" while his Democratic opponents supported slavery. Matter of fact the guy who shot Lincoln was a Democrat - Hey, they did not talk about that during the Tucson Shootings. Democrats did not support the Civil Rights Acts - the late Democratic Senator Robert C Byrd fillibustered the law for like 13 hours and a majority of Republicans forced Democratic President Lyndon Johnson to sign it into law. Democrats turned hoses and police dogs on blacks in the south and hung black people and murdered Jewish people in the South. The list goes on and on......

Well then, cow, based on your comment here then:

https://nlt.ashbrook.org/2011/01/nbc-toning-down-the-rhetoric-from-the-bottom-of-our-hearts-we-are-disposed-to-exclaim-good-riddance.php#comment-73635

I'd have to guess you went to one of the public schools, right?

Democrats also support abortion. Margaret Sanger was a Democrat who atttended KKK meetings preaching her negative eugenics.

Democrat Margaret Sanger must be dancing in her grave today as her wish has come true. Dr. Gosnell of the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia, has been charged on 8 counts of murder. All those victims were black or Hispanic. This doctor, under the guise of Democrat's right to choose crap, knowingly and systematically mistreated female patients, to the point that one of them dies in his so-called care, committed murder under the cuts into the necks severing the spinal cords of living, law. A law put in place by Democrats. A doctor who cuts into the necks of breathing babies, who would survive with proper medical attention, is a murderer.

Abortion, supported by Democrats and forced down this nation's throat (much like Obamacare), has murdered more unborn black babies since Roe v Wade than slavery did or the number of hangings that took place in the South during the time of Jim Crow laws.

No.

Your ability to divert from a dicussion that you are losing is called "My Ideology is not really working right now so I better try something else like where someone went to school, their spelling or grammar". You are too easy to figure out pumpkin. Just remember. I grew up the SF Bay Area. I am surround by whackjob liberals all the time. I can pick one out a mile away. The only good thing is that they have gray hair and gray beards and they are getting old.

cow, I was trying to come to your defense there. Maybe in your school system they taught you that the Democratic party supported slavery at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 (or did you write that on person just to get a rise out of Art D? - I think he's on your team, cow; you shouldn't do that!).

As for this:
"I am surround by whackjob liberals all the time. I can pick one out a mile away. The only good thing is that they have gray hair and gray beards and they are getting old."

I've got 2 things:

- I presume your definition of "whackjob liberal" is anyone who's Democrat or left of that.

- As for the "they are getting old" - I think you're engaging in some very wishful thinking there:

https://www.gallup.com/poll/118285/Democrats-Best-Among-Generation-Baby-Boomers.aspx

Please do not defend me. It is out of character for you. It is kind of like I would rather hunt with Dick Cheney than accept a ride in your or Ted Kennedy's car.

I don't need anyone on my "Team". I am not a liberal looking for approval. I stand my moral grounds and don't need anyone to "back me up". I am not member of the liberal group hug crap.

Your "2 things" - here let me correct your horrible sentence structure or in other words "okay I will play your silly game":

I have two issues here: (much better). I have got 2 things sounds like a freshman in high school at a California public school. Maybe that is what you are?

Again, as I have made this point ad nausem on this board (and you still don't comprehend it) I grew up in the S.F. Bay Area. We are surround by whack job liberals. All you have to do is go to Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz or Berzkeley. and they are all over the place - hippies and potheads along with campus riots of the 1960's all orginated in Berzkeley. Angela Davis is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at U.C. Santa Cruz which is a total joke. The City of Berzkeley just approved a $20,000 a year fund for city workers to have sex change operations while at the same time they filled in a community swimming pools used by what families are left in Berzkeley because it cost $13,000 a year to maintain. I don't have enough time to even list all the whackjob liberals housed in the Stupid State which is going broke due to the whackjob liberals that have been running the state since the 1970's.

On point two: No wishful thinking - they are getting old. I see them all the time - gray beards, gray hair and really, really faded tie-dyed, flare bottom jeans, and drugged out minds - all over University Ave in Berzkeley, California - home of the ever painfully, liberal whackjob Barbara Lee.

Given that the Republican Party (based on the remnants of the Whigs) was forged mostly over the issue of slavery, the Democrats (quite naturally) became the party of States' Rights. Cow Girl is correct that the Democrats were essentially anti-black (e.g., the Copperheads) until the 1960s (FDR USED the black vote, but he didn't pursue the issue of civil rights). The South was comfortably in the Democratic corner because of the Radical Republic history during the so-called "Reconstruction."

Of course, now things have flip-flopped because LBJ's push for civil rights, which forever lost the South for the Democrats (as he suspected it might). The GOP rebranded itself as the new conservative party primarily because of the leftist drift of the Democrats, which explains why the GOP has never been wholly conservative (lots of Rockefeller Republicans left on the East Coast). Most conservatives haven't had a real party of their own, but that may finally be changing.

Toss in a Tiger Mother, and that's right.