Kanye West wrong. Bush doesn't hate black people.

[Rex Kickass]

Unelected partisan hack Bill Bennett on his radio show earlier this week.

 

If it were your sole purpose to reduce crime, You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."… "That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

 

The former Secretary of Education for Reagan and Drug Czar for Bush Sr., Bennett wrote the best selling "Book of Virtues."

 

He then became a gambler in Vegas - losing millions on high limit slot machines.

After this comment, he reaffirms what he proved when his gambling habit came out to pasture. Bill Bennett is no racist. He's just stupid. (Only 4% of slot players win.)

 

Again: I don't think he's a racist. I think he's stupid. But I think it needs to be posted here. Because if Barbara Streisand's political views are considered in this forum and taken as liberal orthodoxy, perhaps we should take into account the asshattery of unelected buffoons on both sides of the aisle.

[EvilMonkey]

Is what he said wrong? Abort every black baby, there is that many less people around to have the possability to committ crime. Even ignoring the fact that he was tring to discredit someone elses arguement by making an equally ridiculous statement, since what he said was basically true, why is that a bad thing? About every white baby and crime will go down too! I did like Bill's comment while defending himself, saying that he will never take take a moral judgement from Teddy Kennedy! Yeah, Teddy, we all know what a pillar of virtue you are to lecture others on moral responsibility.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Is what he said wrong?  Abort every black baby, there is that many less people around to have the possability to committ crime.  Even ignoring the fact that he was tring to discredit someone elses arguement by making an equally ridiculous statement, since what he said was basically true, why is that a bad thing?  About every white baby and crime will go down too!  I did like Bill's comment while defending himself, saying that he will never take take a moral judgement from Teddy Kennedy!  Yeah, Teddy, we all know what a pillar of virtue you are to lecture others on moral responsibility.

 

 

I LUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUV it when people get taken out of context.

 

:rolly

[Kalapse]

I heard it live when he said it. Context is everything people, the fact that people actually believe that he hates black people simply based on this quote is complete bulls***. He was talking to a guest, when he made this statement he was making a point, not insulting black people.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

I heard it live when he said it. Context is everything people, the fact that people actually believe that he hates black people simply based on this quote is complete bulls***. He was talking to a guest, when he made this statement he was making a point, not insulting black people.

As Rex Kickass said -- he wasn't saying Bennett was a racist...just a f***ing buffoon.

[Mercy!]

I heard it live when he said it. Context is everything people, the fact that people actually believe that he hates black people simply based on this quote is complete bulls***. He was talking to a guest, when he made this statement he was making a point, not insulting black people.

And you know this because.......you're a black person? Unless you are, I don't believe you get to tell members of the target group that they shouldn't feel insulted. Remember, Mr. Virtue didn't talk about aborting babies in general, or white babies, or babies of mafia dons, or babies of terrorist jihadists. No, no - he just plucked the descriptor, "BLACK" out of thin air? Hmmm. Yeah, no reason to get insulted.

 

Boy, I really wish he'd theorized about aborting the babies of Southside White Sox fans. Wouldn't that have been a hoot?

[White Sox Josh]

Look when your famous like this you have to be careful about what you say. Now do i think he is racist. No. But it's very stupid to say. And he deserves to be blasted for it.

[Rex Kickass]

I don't remember all these people complaining about context remembering about context when Howard Dean says something stupid.

 

It's funny how people will defend whatever someone says if they're politically allied with them. Just admit it, Bill Bennett is a douchebag. And by the way, someone who wrote "The Book of Virtues" shouldn't be using moral relativism as a defense. What Ted Kennedy did in 1969 has nothing to do with him talking about aborting black babies.

[Balta1701]

Is what he said wrong?  Abort every black baby, there is that many less people around to have the possability to committ crime.  Even ignoring the fact that he was tring to discredit someone elses arguement by making an equally ridiculous statement, since what he said was basically true, why is that a bad thing?

Actually...interestingly enough...at least according to the author of the book Freakonomics, which Bennett was trying to cite, what Bennet said is actually wrong. Bennett in fact seems to have basically made the assumption that Black people commit more crimes, so removing all of them would cut the crime rate, when in fact, the authors of that text found that race was not a significant factor in their regressions on the crime rate.

 

This block from MMFA

 

On the September 29 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett defended comments he made the day before linking crime rates and abortion by blacks. Bennett, who said that "it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime ... you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," claimed that he was taken out of context, and that his comment was based on a 1999 Slate.com online discussion between Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005), and right-wing columnist Steve Sailer, in which Bennett claimed that Levitt "discusse[d], as I did, the racial implications of abortion and crime." Levitt did not. In fact, in the Slate debate that Bennett cited, Levitt said the opposite of what Bennett claimed: "None of our analysis is race-based because the crime data by race is generally not deemed reliable."

 

On his September 29 broadcast, Bennett said: "The author of Freakonomics, Steve Levitt engages the theory that abortion reduces crime, and he also discusses, as I did, the racial implications of abortion and crime. And he does that in an extended debate on Slate.com." But in the course of the three-day Slate.com discussion, Levitt barely mentioned race. In fact, on the first day of the discussion, Levitt noted specifically that race was not a key part to his theory:

 

    As an aside, it has been both fascinating and disturbing to me how the media have insisted on reporting this as a study about race, when race really is not an integral part of the story. The link between abortion and unwantedness, and also between unwantedness and later criminality, have been shown most clearly in Scandinavian data. Abortion rates among African-Americans are higher, but overall, far more abortions are done by whites. None of our analysis is race-based because the crime data by race is generally not deemed reliable.

 

In a September 30 response to Bennett's comments, Levitt further asserted the marginality of race with regard to his theory: "Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that [co-author Stephen J.] Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics."

 

The only significant discussion of race during the Slate debate came from Sailer on day two. Sailer writes for the anti-immigration website VDARE.com and has defended the Pioneer Fund -- an organization designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its support of the work of white supremacists, eugenicists, and others dedicated to proving the genetic superiority of certain races.

 

On his September 28 broadcast, Bennett stated that he disagreed with Levitt and Dubner's theory that abortion reduces crime because "there is just too much that you don't know." But in commenting that black abortions would reduce the crime rate, Bennett appeared to accept and extend it beyond what they intended. As Levitt noted in his September 30 response to Bennett: "There is one thing I would take Bennett to task for: first saying that he doesn't believe our abortion-crime hypothesis but then revealing that he does believe it with his comments about black babies. You can't have it both ways."

Here is the full text of Mr. Levitt's response to Bennett's remarks.

[EvilMonkey]

Actually...interestingly enough...at least according to the author of the book Freakonomics, which Bennett was trying to cite, what Bennet said is actually wrong.  Bennett in fact seems to have basically made the assumption that Black people commit more crimes, so removing all of them would cut the crime rate, when in fact, the authors of that text found that race was not a significant factor in their regressions on the crime rate.

 

This block from MMFA

 

Here is the full text of Mr. Levitt's response to Bennett's remarks.

 

OK, according to Levitt,

None of our analysis is race-based because the crime data by race is generally not deemed reliable.

Then how does this jibe with his comment?

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm

Prison Statistics

Summary findings | BJS publications | Selected statistics |

Also by BJS staff | Related sites

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Summary findings

On June 30,2004,

 

-- 2,131,180 prisoners were held in Federal or State prisons or in local jails -- an increase of 2.3% from midyear 2003, less than the average annual growth of 3.5% since yearend 1995.

 

-- there were an estimated 486 prison inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents -- up from 411 at yearend 1995.

-- the number of women under the jurisdiction of State or Federal prison authorities increased 2.9% from midyear 2003, reaching 103,310 and the number of men rose 2.0%, totaling 1,390,906.

At midyear 2004 there were 4,919 black male prison and jail inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,717 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 717 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.

 

I think Levitt tried to keep race out of it as much as possible to keep the race-baiters of the world (Jessie & Co.) from drowning out whatever message he was trying to get across. Even if you said that half the black males that were listed here were innocent, they would still outnumber any other group there.

[Rex Kickass]

Prison population by race does not necessarily jibe with crime rate.

 

A black person is something like five times more likely to be sentenced to prison time than a white person if I remember correctly.

[KipWellsFan]

I loved John Gibson's explanation of this whole situation. Liberals are just mad about the Benett comment because it's going to make black people think about how abortion has stopped 10 million black children from being born therefore they would think abortion is a bad deal for them because it has reduced their power. :banghead

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Prison population by race does not necessarily jibe with crime rate.

 

A black person is something like five times more likely to be sentenced to prison time than a white person if I remember correctly.

 

 

I dont have the stats but Im willing to bet thats because such a high percentage of blacks have already run afoul of the law. When they get picked up later on they become repeeat offenders and as such are pretty much guaranteed to get jail time.

[Rex Kickass]

When all things are equal, a black person charged with a crime is more likely to receive a stiffer sentence than a white person charged with the same crime.

[Balta1701]

OK, according to Levitt,

Then how does this jibe with his comment?

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm

I think Levitt tried to keep race out of it as much as possible to keep the race-baiters of the world (Jessie & Co.) from drowning out whatever message he was trying to get across.  Even if you said that half the black males that were listed here were innocent, they would still outnumber any other group there.

Ok, I can't get to the bloody web page I linked to above and I don't know why, but here's the Google Cache link

 

Here's the key block:

 

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

 

3) Some people might think that my comments in (2) above are just ducking the race issue because it is politically correct to do so. Anyone who has read Freakonomics knows that I am not afraid to take issues of race head on. Much of the book deals with challenging issues of race (e.g. black-white test score gaps, black naming patterns, etc.). I mean it when I say that, from a purely fact-based and statistical perspective, race is not in any way central to our arguments about abortion and crime.

[WilliamTell]

I don't remember all these people complaining about context remembering about context when Howard Dean says something stupid.

 

It's funny how people will defend whatever someone says if they're politically allied with them. Just admit it, Bill Bennett is a douchebag. And by the way, someone who wrote "The Book of Virtues" shouldn't be using moral relativism as a defense. What Ted Kennedy did in 1969 has nothing to do with him talking about aborting black babies.

 

Can you admit that Howard Dean is a fruit loop? We here in Iowa can tell you that first hand.

[Rex Kickass]

I believe I already have.

 

He's good for fundraising though.

[WilliamTell]

I believe I already have.

 

He's good for fundraising though.

 

 

lol yeah you're right, he is good for fundraising.

[Rex Kickass]

See?

 

Everyone has a purpose.

 

Howard Dean raises money.

 

Tom DeLay launders money.

 

Squeegee Guy on the Dan Ryan off ramp cleans your windshield.

 

Circle of life man, circle of life.

[WilliamTell]

See?

 

Everyone has a purpose.

 

Howard Dean raises money.

 

Tom DeLay launders money.

 

Squeegee Guy on the Dan Ryan off ramp cleans your windshield.

 

Circle of life man, circle of life.

 

 

lol nice

[3 BeWareTheNewSox 5]

http://bushn****s.ytmnd.com/