South Knox Bubba is good today on Bush's proposals for admissions at Michigan:

"Isn't it funny how Bush interprets the 14th Amendment one way to get himself "elected" and another way to fight affirmative action? The 14th Amendment sure seems to be a versatile tool."

"... For God's sake don't attack Bush's race relations point man, John Ashcroft, on his record or you'll set race relations back another fifty years. Quid pro quo, you know. Besides, everything is fine in his home state, with college admissions of blacks at 6.5% in a state where the black population is 11.2%. And only about 45% of prison inmates are black."

Tapped has a thoughtful, well-reasoned analysis as well:

"But intellectual consistency requires that if you oppose affirmative action for one group (in this case, minorities), then you should also oppose affirmative action for all groups, including de facto affirmative action for rich whites -- aka legacy preferences in college admissions. You simply can't deploy the rhetoric of pure meritocracy -- as conservatives routinely do and as Bush did yesterday -- to rail against affirmative action, and then turn around and say it's OK for colleges to ignore these meritocratic imperatives when it comes to the children of alumni."