Republicans should heed David Frum's point about generalizing from November's elections:

Be very careful about projecting forward from the 2010 congressional results to the 2012 presidential vote. These elections almost occur in two different countries.

Be very careful about assuming that Republican success in 2010 signifies that Republicans have overcome the longer-term problems that I’ve been writing about these past five years. If Republicans cannot connect better to the huge new Millennial generation, next month’s success will only be a happy interval before 2012’s grim challenges.

African Americans are overrepresented in the nation's prisons and jails, and it's common to attribute some of this to systemic forces; poverty, poor schools, inadequate legal representation, drug-enforcement policies, and sentencing laws. It's not that black people are more prone to criminality; it's that they are more likely to find themselves affected by the things that guarantee high rates of incarceration. Of course, some people disagree. Like, for instance, two justices on the Washington state Supreme Court: