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ACQUISITION

Because The Rest Of Us Think Your're An Idiot

Politicians are like diapers, they need to be changed often and for the same reason

London Financial Times re Mormons

The rise of a new generation of Mormons

By James Crabtree

Published: July 9 2010 17:10 | Last updated: July 9 2010 17:10

Ben McAdams is neat, he’s helpful, he’s unfailingly polite. The 35-year-old is a family man, one of six siblings and a father of three. People warm quickly to him, and talk of his modesty and strong work ethic. He neither drinks nor smokes. And when we meet for breakfast in a sparsely decorated canteen in Salt Lake City, he is wearing a dark suit and a tie.

In other words, McAdams is what the world expects of Mormons.

In other ways, however, he is less typical. Until recently, he was a fast-rising star at Davis Polk, a prestigious New York law firm – a job he won straight from Columbia University’s law school. He then worked for both Bill and Hillary Clinton , before becoming, at 35, Utah’s youngest state senator. His is the most conservative state in the US, and yet he’s a moderate Democrat who won his district – and his reputation – by helping to broker a deal over gay rights. This, mind you, from a man whose church was pilloried for bank-rolling California’s successful 2009 “Proposition 8” referendum against gay marriage. Whose faith was a headache to Mitt Romney throughout Romney’s 2008 presidential run. And whose religion has been unable to shake a reputation for “plural marriage”, officially abandoned in 1890.

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (second row left) and his wife Ann Romney speak with Senate majority leader Harry Reid

Put simply, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS for short, has an image problem; and yet, tellingly, McAdams doesn’t. And he’s part of a much bigger crowd: for the first time in its nearly two-century history – one that began, according to the founding myth, with an illiterate farmhand, Joseph Smith, being visited by an angel in western New York state – Mormons are moving from the periphery of modern American life to the very centre. From Romney’s failed tilt at the presidency to the tales of everyday polygamous families in HBO’s popular drama Big Love, Mormonism has become increasingly visible over the last generation. Where its most famous acolytes were once the Osmonds, leading lights now include politicians such as US Senate majority leader Harry Reid (a Democrat) and Romney (a Republican); Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight vampire saga; Glenn Beck, the popular conservative talk-show host; and self-help guru Stephen R. Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Those are the household names. As important are the Mormons who play central roles at the companies and institutions that make America tick: Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University (one of the biggest in the US); David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airlines; J.W. (“Bill”) Marriott, head of Marriott International; and Jon Huntsman Jr, ambassador to China – to name a few. And while firm data are hard to come by, off-the-record interviews conducted for this article suggest that a generation of Mormons in their thirties and forties is accelerating the trend. For every Hill Cumorah Pageant – an annual set of performances starting this weekend in which a cast of 650 enact scenes from the Bible and Book of Mormon before massive audiences near Joseph Smith’s birthplace – there are much more mundane scenes being played out across the US: an investment banker in New York said, “I was at my final day of interviews at JPMorgan during my senior year in college. They took students from Princeton, Yale, Harvard, U-Penn and Brigham Young University [a Mormon university in Utah]. I was like, ‘what the hell? BYU?’ Then I slowly realised how many Mormons there are on Wall Street.”

‘Twilight’ author Stephenie Meyer

The CIA has its eye out for Mormons, who, people say jokingly, ace the mandatory drugs and lie-detector tests. Blue-chip corporations are recruiting, too. And at Harvard Business School, female students note ruefully that attractive male classmates are invariably associated with one of the “three Ms”: the military, the management consultancy McKinsey or Mormonism.

In that complaint lies the conundrum: much of the US still sees Mormons as weirdly strait-laced at best, cultish at worst. Yet elite institutions are embracing them. What does that fact say about the world’s youngest major religion – and about success in modern America?

. . .

Despite its public reputation, the Mormon church is the outstanding religious success story of the past hundred years. Approximately 1.7 per cent of the US population are LDS members, just slightly fewer than describe themselves as Jewish. Global membership rose from 250,000 in 1900 to one million in 1948, to 13 million today. The church is probably the world’s richest per capita religious institution, too, with assets estimated at between $25bn and $30bn. (That’s £16bn-£20bn; the Church of England’s portfolio in 2009 was £4.4bn.)

Religious sociologist Rodney Stark, at Baylor University in Texas, has predicted that the LDS will in the latter half of this century become the first new world religion since Islam – just one reason that Smith, who founded the church in the 1830s, is sometimes described as the “American Mohammed”. There is something special about Mormons, but what is it? The most fashionable theory regarding religious success at the moment comes from economics, drawing on approaches developed by the University of Chicago’s Gary Becker. Becker, a sociologist and economist, argues that American church pews are kept full – while those in Europe empty out – because the US is unencumbered by religious monopolies (such as the Church of England or the Catholic Church), leaving plenty of room for competition and choice. And indeed, one-quarter of US Mormons are first-generation converts. The US’s National Council of Churches data from 2008 rank the LDS fourth among church membership in the US, with 5.8 million members – a rise of 1.56 per cent from the previous year.

Yet growth alone doesn’t explain why some religions break into the boardroom and why some don’t. American Jews and Hindus stand out in socio-demographic surveys for their exceptional incomes and professional accomplishment, but this flows not from growing membership, rather from heavy investment in education and, in the case of Hindus, successive waves of immigration by highly trained elites such as doctors and engineers. Mormon success is different: unlike Hindu immigrants, the newest LDS members in America – converts – tend to be poorer and less educated than those with longer heritage in the church. And older generations aren’t exactly funding ever-greater achievement by younger ones: the PEW Forum on Religion in Public Life describes Mormonism as lying “roughly in the middle of other religious traditions on the socioeconomic spectrum”.

. . .

Actor Jon Heder, who starred in ‘Napoleon Dynamite’

Perhaps the most telling sign that Mormon success springs from different roots is this fact: the church’s most successful members, in terms of education and wealth, are also its most fervent. In most religions, piety and professional success mix badly. Devout Jews earn less, and tend to be less educated, than their less-orthodox brethren. American Christian evangelicals save and earn less than those from more moderate traditions.

Back at the canteen in Salt Lake City, McAdams reflects on why growing up Mormon seems to help with professional achievement in modern America. “I grew up here in Utah in a working-class family,” he tells me. “My dad had any number of jobs over the course of my childhood. Never one for too long, and with gaps in-between. He wasn’t the greatest Mormon either, drinking and smoking. So we pretty much lived pay cheque to pay cheque.” His was a childhood of limited horizons. It wasn’t the case that money and success begot more money and success. Rather, says McAdams, the thing that started to make a difference was being a missionary.

At age 19, all Mormon men are expected to spend two years on a mission. (Women serve too, but for 18 months, and at age 21.) It’s tough. They pay their own way, often saving from childhood. There is no discussion over destinations: McAdams served in São Paolo, despite learning French for four years at school. And the pre-mission training is gruelling: held at one of two dozen training centres around the world (one is in Preston, Lancashire), “you get up early and work 12 hours a day”.

At the MTC’s headquarters, in Provo, Utah, visitors are not allowed: my request for a tour gives pause to the church’s otherwise well-oiled public affairs department. It takes weeks for the OK to arrive. When I visit the campus in late February, I find a dozen redbrick buildings with views of snow-capped mountains. Inside one building, I walk down a long, empty corridor with pictures of Joseph Smith on the walls alongside framed snaps of missionaries. A young man in white robes stands, mid-baptism, waist deep in the sea; the photo is labelled “Suava, Fiji, 1999”. In another shot, two teenagers in blue overalls stand next to a bale of hay: “Seridal, Japan, ‘85”.

Here and at the other training centres, new arrivals are assigned a “companion”; they will study, eat, exercise and sleep side by side through the length of their stay. Life inside is regimented, and leaving the grounds is not allowed. Ralph Smith, the MTC’s president, says: “These young people are like most 19-year-olds, going to school and playing video games. And here they are plunked down into a situation here which is very structured, with significant demands on them to study, work hard and set goals for themselves.” He swivels round his monitor to show me a typical timetable, for a female missionary heading to Ukraine. Her day begins at 6.30am, with lights out at 10.30pm, sharp. She spends most of her time studying Ukrainian, with shorter periods for eating, exercising and religious study.

McAdams says the MTC opened his eyes, not so much to discipline as opportunity. “I found myself there alongside peers whose fathers were bishops in the church, or from wealthier families. It was an environment which wasn’t predetermined by who my parents were.”

. . .

Rodney Stark’s work shows that successful religions normally find ways to “socialise the young”, and he argues that “nothing builds more intense commitment than the act of being a missionary”. If missionary training is tough for young Mormons, the sink-or-swim experience that follows is often worse. I met with McAdams after our talk in the canteen, for a conversation outside Utah’s gold-embossed senate chamber. I wanted to discuss his time as a missionary in Brazil. “Everybody says going on a mission is the best two years of your life,” he says. “But that quote is not given by anyone in their first six months.” McAdams remembers that, despite his language training, “I still couldn’t really speak to anyone, and no one understood me. I remember dreaming in English and then waking and remembering I was in Brazil, where there was no one I could communicate with. It was incredibly frustrating.” During a missionary posting, all contact with family is banned, except for phone calls at Christmas and on Mother’s day. And reading anything other than Mormon scripture is frowned on. A senior investment banker and Mormon based in London, who was also a missionary in Brazil, recalls how alienating this could be: “I remember one of the very first lunches. All I wanted was a drink of water, and I was ashamed because I didn’t know how to say it. I literally started to break down.”

Armaund Mauss, professor emeritus of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University who specialises in the study of Mormons, has noted a “seeming paradox” in religion, in which some faiths inspire loyalty precisely because “people become committed to that for which they suffer or sacrifice”. And yet the suffering built more than loyalty; it helped McAdams and his peers develop skills eminently useful in modern-day business and government. As his fluency improved and he learnt to overcome the rejection that followed unsuccessful attempts to convince converts, McAdams embraced the experience.

Mormon and management guru Stephen Covey, who served his mission in the 1970s in London, says the time abroad changed his life. While he is careful to stress that the ideas in his books are not based on his Mormon faith but upon what he calls universal, timeless principles, he does remember particularly enjoying the chance to preach in public. “I would hold public meetings at the front of movie lines, on the top of buses, at Speakers’ Corner, or outside the Tower of London. Anywhere I could get an audience.” He returned to America to tell his father he no longer wanted to enter the family business. Instead he wanted to be a teacher, ultimately signing up to become a student at Harvard Business School, and then an academic. His mission, he says, “taught me to take responsibility early in life. It gave me my voice.”

. . .

At the time, Covey’s decision to go to Harvard Business School was unusual. But a former senior figure at the school told me that, over the past 20 years, there has been a significant rise in Mormon applicants. A more worn path for those missionaries with ambitions leads to Utah’s Brigham Young University, the Mormon equivalent of Harvard. The church subsidises entry, so LDS students pay only about $5,000 a year, one-tenth of what full-paying students at Ivy League colleges do. In some ways, BYU looks every inch an elite American institution. In others it is starkly different: the day I visit, the campus is at a standstill for a sermon from a church elder. I have come to meet Kim Smith and Jim Engebretsen, two former executives at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and now both professors at BYU’s Marriott School of Business. Smith says Mormons were rare on Wall Street when he first got a job in the early 1980s. But, as he puts it, “banks like nothing more than finding an undervalued stock. And Mormon graduates were just that: a stock which was cheaper to buy, and which over-performed.”

Engebretsen uses a different analogy: Michael Lewis’s baseball book, Moneyball. “Remember how Lewis talks about how the Oakland A’s would find a second-rounder, and bring him in the first round instead? He’d perform way better. The same is true for someone at BYU. If they think this is their chance to play in the big leagues, they are going to work really, really hard.”

They are also going to get more support, from family and community. I’d seen piles of free wedding magazines near the dining hall, and no wonder: about half of BYU students are married when they graduate. A professor who asked not to be named says: “Being married, perhaps already having a family, makes you more serious about life. It’s OK to tell your parents your grades aren’t good, but try explaining it to your spouse.”

Smith argues that church membership smooths out other hassles, too. During his time at Goldman Sachs, he was asked to move to Tokyo, “a completely alien culture”. But, he says, “I was made to feel part of the LDS community within days. Because I felt comfortable, and my family felt comfortable, and I was more effective at work.” McAdams tells a similar story, of first arriving in New York for graduate school: “My wife and I packed up a van and drove our stuff across country. When we showed up at our place, there were 15 people there to help us unload. We’d never met any of them before, but they moved us in and invited us over for dinner. We had an instant social network.” He found that this same church network also provided helpful connections, both within his own law firm and to other people in the same industry.

The networking advantage is particularly important in understanding Mormonism because the church has no professional clergy. Mormon boys enter the priesthood at age 12, taking the title of deacon. At 14 they become a “teacher”, then a full priest at 16. Each title, and each progression, comes with new responsibilities, and at each stage a smaller number become leaders among their own age-group. The system isn’t perfect. Not everyone is comfortable with the responsibility the church demands. And most senior leaders are men; the church seems to implicitly rely on a traditional, single-earner family structure to help its male leaders balance jobs, church responsibilities and families. But the result remains that most of the church’s senior leadership positions are filled by professionally successful Mormons taking time off from their careers. Perhaps the most celebrated example is Kim Clarke, who quit as dean of Harvard Business School in 2005 to become head of BYU’s campus in Idaho. His colleagues were baffled: “For them, it was like going into the wilderness,” he tells me. Later he hit upon a phrase to explain his choice: “Try to imagine you got a phone call from Moses.”

. . .

Ben McAdams believes that going on a two-year Mormon mission, at age 19, helped prepare him for professional life

In the meantime, the calls are coming from headhunters. Scott Nycum, a managing director at JPMorgan, confirmed that BYU is now seen as a top source of graduate talent: “These students are bright, mature, well-educated, share our emphasis on adhering to highest standards of integrity, have impressive work ethic and are very team-oriented,” he says. “They fit extremely well with our firm’s corporate culture.”

Focus group research conducted with corporate recruiters by BYU’s Marriott School of Business found that its MBA students, while not noted as flashy leaders, were known in particular for their “outstanding values, principles, and work ethic”. A Goldman Sachs executive, meanwhile, says the bank is hiring LDS graduates in increasing numbers, also impressed by their work ethic. The same was true, I heard anecdotally, at top-tier law firms in the US. And the CIA is reported to snap up LDS graduates for, if nothing else, their language skills.

Will any of this change perceptions of the Mormons? As the late writer and journalist Molly Ivins wrote, anti-Mormon bigotry is an “old dog that still hunts”. But more up-to-the minute cultural analysis suggests otherwise: an episode of South Park cheers the way a newly arrived LDS family wins over the local community with pleasantries and acts of kindness.

Ben McAdams thinks that while outright discrimination is rare, many successful Mormons keep their heads down at work. Still, he says, “I didn’t stand out like a sore thumb in my New York law firm until someone offered me a drink and I said ‘no thanks’.”

The majority of LDS members are now abroad. Building a professional elite in foreign cultures may prove harder than winning success in all-American environments like Wall Street. But, interestingly, LDS is especially fast-growing in countries with dynamic economies, particularly Brazil.

In a corridor of the LDS Missionary Training Centre there’s a plaque listing the dozens of languages taught to missionaries who study there – including Cebuano, Hmong and Tagalog. Next to it is a world map showing the countries in which the church operates, highlighted in bright colours. Only China and a handful of Middle-Eastern states remain grey. The last century saw a Mormon conquest in America. During our lifetimes, we may see the rest of the world follow, too.

James Crabtree is the FT’s comment editor

Northrop Grumman X-47B

USU ARL Student Receives National Honor

Utah State Today - Utah State University

Mum's the Word for NASA's Secret Space Plane X-37B

You would think that an unpiloted space plane built to rocket spaceward from Florida atop an Atlas booster, circle the planet for an extended time, then land on autopilot on a California runway would be big news. But for the U.S. Air Force X-37B project — seemingly, mum's the word.

There is an air of vagueness regarding next year's Atlas Evolved Expendable launch of the unpiloted, reusable military space plane.

Granite Park teacher honored by National Science Teachers

By Faroe Robinson

Deseret News

Published: Friday, Oct. 16, 2009 6:04 p.m. MDT

A Salt Lake City middle school teacher has been chosen by the National Science Teachers Association to participate in a yearlong professional development program.

Mark Towner is only in his second year teaching biology at Granite Park Middle School in Salt Lake City. He was a research biologist but then decided to go into teaching to give back to the community.

Towner, along with 184 other teachers nationwide, will learn how to promote quality science teaching, improve teacher content knowledge, enhance teacher confidence and promote classroom excellence. He will also work with a veteran teacher, participate in Web seminars and attend the NSTA National Conference in Philadelphia.

Towner feels he was selected because of the life experiences he can incorporate into teaching.

"This award is very important to Granite Park Junior High, the Granite School District and the state of Utah because it shows that professionals who have developed decades of life experience can pass that on to a younger generation," Towner said. "Instead of talking about science from a textbook, I have lived the science in the freezing cold of Alaska," he added.

Towner hopes to plug into a network of "crazy scientists" and be involved in a clearinghouse of ideas and experiments to improve his teaching.

The 2009 fellows were selected on the basis of several criteria including science background and interest in improving as a science educator.

Towner hopes the program will help him improve the lives of his students. "I am teaching eighth-grade science to Hispanic, African and Iraqi kids that will likely never have the opportunities that I have already lived," Towner said.

He added, "I have come to love these kids, and I just want to expose them to as many experiences as possible before the realities of their lives will likely take over."

e-mail: frobinson@desnews.com

© 2009 Deseret News Publishing Company | All rights reserved

Mark E. Towner Named New Varsity Head Coach for Kearns High School, Lady Cougers Fastpitch Softball

Go Lady Cougers

Middle school teacher receives award

Middle school teacher receives award

by JM Martin

3 days ago | 11 views | 0 | 0 | |

Granite Park Junior High School’s Mark Towner was one of 185 science teachers across the country to be named Science Teacher Fellow the National Science Teacher Association.

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A science teacher working in a Title I school in South Salt Lake City has been chosen to receive a national award.

Mark E. Towner, a biology teacher at Granite Park Junior High School, was one of 185 science teachers selected nationwide to be a Science Teacher Fellow by the National Science Teacher Association for the 2009-2010 school year. This year will be Towner’s second teaching at the school.

“I love working with kids [and] I love science,” Towner said.

Before becoming a teacher, Towner was a research biologist. He was also founder and CEO of his own company before retiring from the private sector in 2003.

Towner said he decided to pursue teaching because he “wanted to give back to the community.” He also wanted to help fill the ongoing shortage of math and science teachers in the public schools.

Currently, Towner is working as a biology teacher while pursuing a master’s degree in education. Towner is pursuing higher education while working as part of the Alternative Route to Teacher Licensure Program through the state of Utah, a program designed to attract qualified individuals to teach in their field of expertise while completing licensure requirements.

Towner said he learned about the opportunity for the NSTA Science Fellow award through Todd Campbell, Ph.D., an assistant science professor teaching one of the classes Towner’s taking at Utah State University.

According to the website, the NSTA was “founded in 1944 and headquartered in Arlington, Va. [It] is the largest organization in the world committed to promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all. NSTA's current membership of 60,000 includes science teachers, science supervisors, administrators, scientists, business and industry representatives and others involved in and committed to science education.”

Benefits of the award include the opportunity to participate in professional development, mentoring programs, an invitation to the NSTA national conference and access to online pedagogy programs to help develop classroom skills and science lesson plans.

Towner said he hopes that his time as an NSTA Science Teacher fellow will provide him the opportunity to better serve the students of Granite Park Jr., many of whom are economically disadvantaged.

Utah Science Teacher Mark E. Towner Selected For Fellowship Program in Prestigious NSTA New Science Teacher Academy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contacts:
Kate Meyer, NSTA
(703) 312-9211
kmeyer@nsta.org

SALT LAKE CITY — September 21, 2009 — The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the largest professional organization in the world promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning, in partnership with the Amgen Foundation; Agilent Technologies Foundation; Astellas Pharma US, Inc. (“Astellas”); and Bayer Corporation, today announced that Mark Towner, a science teacher at Granite Park Middle School in Salt Lake City, Utah, was chosen from hundreds of applications nationwide to participate as an Amgen-NSTA Fellow in the 2009 NSTA New Science Teacher Academy. The only teacher selected from Utah, Towner will participate with 184 other science teachers from across the country in a year-long professional development program designed to help promote quality science teaching, enhance teacher confidence and classroom excellence and improve teacher content knowledge.

“At NSTA, we believe it is important to help educators develop their skills as teachers so that they can not only bolster student achievement, but better inspire passion for science in their students,” said Dr. Francis Eberle, executive director, NSTA. “We congratulate this year’s group of Fellows and are grateful for their commitment to science education and to their students.”

The 2009 Fellows were selected on the basis of several criteria, including showing evidence of a solid science background and displaying a strong interest in growing as a professional science educator. Each Fellow will receive a comprehensive NSTA membership package, online mentoring with trained mentors who teach in the same discipline, and the opportunity to participate in a variety of web-based professional development activities, including web seminars. In addition, each Fellow will receive financial support to attend and participate in NSTA’s 2010 National Conference on Science Education in Philadelphia.

Agilent Technologies Foundation and Bayer Corporation will each fund the participation of 10 science teachers as Agilent Foundation-NSTA Fellows and Bayer-NSTA Fellows, respectively. Astellas will support 15 science teachers from the Chicago area as Astellas-NSTA Fellows. The remaining 150 science teachers will be supported by the Amgen Foundation and named Amgen-NSTA Fellows.

Launched during the spring of 2007, the NSTA New Science Teacher Academy, co-founded by the Amgen Foundation, was established to help reduce the high attrition rate in the science teaching profession by providing professional development and mentoring support to early-career science teachers.

For a list of the 2009 Fellows or to learn more about the NSTA New Science Teacher Academy, please visit www.nsta.org/academy.

If they made a Movie, Nobody would believe it

Andrea, My Oldest Daughter is speaking....

The miracles of adoption never ceases to amaze me. When we first got Jiji's file we asked the orphanage for updated photos of Jiji. They sent us the photo below with Jiji standing next to this darling little girl.

We had made friends with a couple from Holland who had a baby that looked similar and I wrote them and told them that I think our daughters might have been cribmates. They were unsure as they just had a photo of their baby and had not picked her up yet, but there was a possibility. While we were in China I got an email from a mom that said she just about fell out of her chair when reading our blog and saw a photo of their daughter.

I visited her blog and sure enough the mystery baby in the photo was now named Tess and home with her family in ......ready for this......Rock Hill South Carolina only 45 minutes away from us!!!

From all the places in the world these two could have been sent to be sent to the same area is no less than a complete miracle. Ready for the next amazing part ..... Tess's name is Tess Hyde!! So we have Lizzie Heid and Tess Hyde, cribmates in Xiushan China, now living 45 minutes away from each other.

We had Tess's family over for dinner tonight and had a wonderful time. They brought photos of Tess and Jiji taken on the same day as the photo that I have in the same outfits. Precious. They are a great family and we quickly became good friends. Tess's mom visits her dad every other week who lives about 10 minutes from us, so we will have lots of play dates to keep these girls close as they grow up. As they grow older it will become such an important friendship. Very much like sisters.

Here is a photo of them in the crib at the orphanage...

and here is one of them playing tonight....

Next I need to find a mom who's daughter was called Tintin at the orphanage. Anyone? She was there when we picked up Jiji and was going to be picked up by her parents soon. The nanny told us that Tintin and Jiji played together a lot.

I was going to close this blog soon as our China story is over but I changed my mind. I'm going to continue to add to it every now and then with updates on Jiji and talk about special needs children in China that are looking for their families.

I'm still trying to figure out how to post the video I made so hopefully that will come soon.

Sarah Barracuda to resign as Alaska Governor, Watch for a National TV Deal on Fox

Palin resigning as Alaska governor (AP)

AP - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin surprised supporters Friday and announced she is resigning from office at the end of the month without explaining why she plans to step down — throwing into question whether she would seek a run for the White House in 2012.

White Firefighters could Backdraft Sotomayor Appointment

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer Mark Sherman, Associated Press Writer – 8 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide and make it harder to prove discrimination when there is no evidence it was intentional.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could give Sotomayor's critics fresh ammunition two weeks before her Senate confirmation hearing. Conservatives say it shows she is a judicial activist who lets her own feelings color her decisions. On the other hand, liberal allies say her stance in the case demonstrates her restraint and unwillingness to go beyond established precedents.

Better Hope Mitt runs because if he doesn’t, an ominous scenario presents itself:

John Kerry on Sanford: Too bad Palin didn’t go missing too

posted at 6:38 pm on June 24, 2009 by Allahpundit
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Don’t be too hard on Waffles. His humor’s always been laced with nastiness, which is why he periodically finds himself in clusterfarks over “botched jokes.” It’s not that he hates Palin. He’s just a jerk.

The Bay State senator was telling a group of business and civic leaders in town at his invitation about the “bizarre’’ tale of how South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had “disappeared for four days’’ and claimed to be hiking along the Appalachian Trail, but no one was really certain of his whereabouts.

“Too bad,’’ Kerry said, “if a governor had to go missing it couldn’t have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin.’’

The Democratic-centric crowd laughed.

He said this before Sanford’s presser so it’s not an adultery dig at her, just an “I wish you were lost and left for dead somewhere” dig. Which, believe it or not, isn’t the nastiest Palin attack circulating in the ’sphere today.

Pew’s got a new poll out today showing Romney’s net favorable rating at +12, compared to just +1 for Sarahcuda. With Sanford and Huntsman now out of the game, Jindal almost certainly biding his time until 2016, and Palin possibly too polarizing to win against The One, we’d all better hope Mitt runs. Because if he doesn’t, an ominous scenario presents itself: