I liked this letter:

Jonah,

I know, I know, you only wanted folks whose hearts and minds were won over by Mr. Kemp’s statement, but I was just wondering if I was the only one shaking my head (making that funny ‘waugle-waugle’ sound) trying to figure out if there were some paragraphs missing along about grafs 4 and 5? What purpose does it serve for Mr. Kemp to jump from college admissions equity to the practice of red-lining (actually banned by 1975’s Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and really, really banned in 1977 with the Community Reinvestment Act– when Congress was seriously in the business of banning things they already banned).

From red-lining, Mr. Kemp’s jumps to the 1992 FRB Boston study purporting to show a disparity of denials between blacks and whites (17% for blacks vs. 11% for whites). However, George Benston, writing for the CATO Institute in 1999, showed that the 1992 FRB Boston study was flawed. Benston writes:

“…FDIC economist David Horn in 1997 reviewed that [1992 Federal Reserve Bank Boston} study and, in addition to finding mistakes in the data, concluded that more relevant measures of a borrower’s credit history, such as past delinquencies and whether the borrower met lenders’ credit standards, explained the difference between lending levels to blacks and whites. In fact, 49 of the 70 banks studied did not reject any minority applicants. Two of the remaining 21 were responsible for half of the denials of black applicants. One of those banks was minority-owned, and the other had extensive minority outreach programs.”

You can read Benston’s article on-line at: http://www.cato.org/dailys/09-28-99.html

Dont’ get me wrong. I’m not writing to bash Mr. Kemp. So then, what’s the point of all this? First, I guess it’s hard enough to debunk liberal misinformation and outdated study results without having conservative leaders like Mr. Kemp perpetuating bad data as facts. Second, the whole jump just seems like a reach, the sort of “feel-your-pain me-tooism” that a lot of liberal lip-biters engage in.

Well I feel better now. Thanks.

[Name withheld]

Dallas, Texas