“RACE-SENSITIVE ADMISSIONS POLICIES:” Sonia Sotomayor Picks New Euphemism For Affirmative Action. If you really want balance in college admissions, there need to be quotas for white women, who are hugely overrepresented.

UPDATE: Asian-Americans, affirmative action, and the “political restructuring” doctrine: Does the doctrine work when there are minority groups on both sides of the issue? Interestingly, Asian-Americans weren’t mentioned at all in any of the opinions. In an older America, with a big white majority, a black minority, and not a lot of other diversity, the notion of affirmative action preferences for blacks as a benign gift — near-reparations — from whites to blacks had some traction. Now, however, preferences for blacks disadvantage other minorities.

TIM CARNEY: K Street battles Tea Party in GOP primaries.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Toss Out Abusive College Administrators.

IN THE NEW MEXICO GOVERNOR’S RACE, a Dem with a Weather Underground connection.

JAMES TARANTO: First Among Equals: An Orwellian dissent from a muddled ruling.

Justice Stephen Breyer concurred in the judgment on much narrower grounds. He was part of the Grutter majority in 2003 and still thinks racial preferences are constitutionally permissible. He ducked the question of whether the political-process doctrine applied to the substance of the Michigan amendment by saying it didn’t apply to the process. Because racial preferences were imposed by unelected university administrators, he argued, the process change isn’t a “political” one at all. It appears to be a way of evading the central questions of the case, but it does have the virtue of being relatively simple.

Then there’s the Sotomayor dissent, which begins as follows: “We are fortunate to live in a democratic society. But . . .” An empty piety, followed by an equivocation, followed by a total of 58 pages–you know this is going to be a tough slog.

The most quoted part of Sotomayor’s opinion is this: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” This is a rejoinder to Chief Justice John Roberts’s assertion, in Parents Involved v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (2007), that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” (Roberts in turn rebutted Sotomayor in a separate concurrence to today’s decision, which we’re leaving out of our ranking by clarity.)

Robert’s statement was trivially true, which means that Sotomayor’s defies logic. Her argument amounts to an assertion that a ban on racial discrimination is a form of racial discrimination–that everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. Also Orwellian is her claim that she wants “to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.” Such an assertion is almost always disingenuous. After all, the way to speak openly and candidly is to speak openly and candidly. Declaring one’s intention to do so is at best superfluous throat clearing.

And while Sotomayor may be open, she isn’t candid. She presents a potted history of race in America in which there is a straight line from Jim Crow segregation through literacy tests to the Michigan amendment, which “involves this last chapter of discrimination”–even though it bans discrimination, and even though Sotomayor acknowledges that its substance is perfectly constitutional.

She also repeats the phrase “race matters” a lot. But then, it does. It’s how she got her job.

UPDATE: words matter.

YA THINK? U.S. Foreign Policy: In Troubling Disarray: The Obama Administration must prove to America’s allies that it is competent to lead.

CALIFORNIA: Gov. Brown’s legal strategy to prop up bullet train faltering.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Benghazi attack could have been prevented if US hadn’t ‘switched sides in the War on Terror’ and allowed $500 MILLION of weapons to reach al-Qaeda militants, reveals damning report.

FLORIDA: Tea Party Claims First Victory of 2014.

WHILE ALL EYES ARE ON UKRAINE: China Challenges Obama’s Asia Pivot With Rapid Military Buildup.

Related: A rising China shadows Obama’s Asia trip. “China is on the move, backed up by a very real military buildup. President Obama is on the move, too, traveling to Asia to breathe life into a strategic ‘pivot’ that is being undermined by his own proposed cuts to the Pentagon budget.”

ROGER KIMBALL: The Supreme Court Deals A Body Blow To Racial Discrimination.

The original effort to redress legitimate grievances—grievances embodied, for instance, in the discriminatory practices of Jim Crow—have mutated into new forms of discrimination. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee because blacks were openly barred from war factory jobs.

But what began as a Presidential Executive Order in 1961 directing government contractors to take “affirmative action” to assure that people be hired “without regard” for sex, race, creed, color, etc., has resulted in the creation of vast bureaucracies dedicated to discovering, hiring, and advancing people chiefly on the basis of those qualities. White is black, freedom is slavery, “without regard” comes to mean “with regard for nothing else.”

Yeah, pretty much. And with an enormous helping of sanctimony and self-regard.

CHANGE: US troops arrive in Poland for exercises across Eastern Europe amid Ukraine crisis.

POLL: GOP Primary Wide Open in Alabama Race. “A new internal poll shows the crowded primary in Alabama’s open 6th District is wide open less than two months before the primary, according to information provided first to CQ Roll Call. The poll, conducted for GOP surgeon Chad Mathis’ campaign, found two of the six candidates in a statistical dead heat, with the third- and fourth-place contenders not far behind, and a large portion of respondents remain undecided.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Four Law Schools’ Debt Classified as ‘Junk Bonds.’

DETROIT WOULD BE MOST FITTING: 15 cities to submit bids for 2016 DNC convention. “The cities chosen by the DNC for inclusion in the process were Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Salt Lake City.”

CURMUDGEON VS. THOUGHT POLICE: Ed Driscoll Interviews Charles Murray.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: WSJ: Skyrocketing Graduate Student Debt Threatens Income-Based Repayment Programs.

Who could have seen this coming?

RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE: MSNBC host pens radical ‘climate justice’ manifesto.

Hayes, a former Nation writer who remains an editor-at-large at the publication, compares the Southern economy based on slavery — worth trillions in today’s dollars to the slaveholders — to the economy based on carbon fuels. Energy companies, and energy-producing nations, have ever-increasing stores of recoverable oil and gas that are almost unimaginably valuable in today’s economy. And with today’s rate of exploration and technological advances, those reserves are increasing by the minute. But burning all that fuel, Hayes argues, citing various influential environmental writers, would destroy the planet. The oil and gas must stay in the ground if human civilization is to survive.

“It’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion,” Hayes writes. “So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth.”

Note the phrase: “convince or coerce.” If persuasion were to fail, coercion — presumably by the federal government or some very, very powerful entity — could be pretty rough. Certainly by writing that the “climate justice movement” should be known as the “new abolitionism,” Hayes makes an uneasy comparison to a 19th century conflict over slavery that was settled only by a huge and costly war — a real war, not a metaphorical one. Is that how environmentalists plan to save the planet from warming?

By any means necessary, so long as they are in the driver’s seat.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Merger Plans Collapse For Struggling Virginia College.

TEXAS TO BLM: Molon Labe.

TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: IRS agents who didn’t pay their taxes get $1 million in bonuses.

CHARLTON HESTON tried to warn us.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Toss Out Abusive College Administrators.