So the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission has determined that "racial animus" drove the decision of the Valley Swim Club to cancel visits by a camp of mostly blacks kids. It has ordered $50,000 to be awarded the complaintant a single minority kid and his family.

This would be the same government panel that just a few years ago awarded a former radio employee $600,000 for the insult of being asked to read a book. The book called "New Dress for Success" suggested that people in business refrain from dressing in ethnically stereotypical ways.

The HRC's ludicrous award was appealed by the station. A federal panel tossed it out and that was the end of the matter.

In the swim club case, the club's attorney says the HRC's decision was a "fait accompli" once the media coverage got ahead of the facts of the story. He's got that right.

The media coverage of this story remains pretty poor and the commentary is simply over the top.

The Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial on the matter is jaw-droppingly bad. Here's a portion:

Here was a fully investigated conclusion that, yes, racism still exists in America, and earlier this summer it dashed water into the faces of little black and Latino children who naively ventured to a suburban pool for a swim.

The HRC certainly came to a conclusion all right, the same one the Inquirer and other enlightened types came to month's ago. But the HRC came to a conclusion in the New Dress for Success matter as well. That conclusion was bounced out of court. This one, ultimately, could be too.

There is, after all, plenty of evidence that the swim club as an organization didn't act out of racial malice, especially given the fact that the minority campers were invited to the pool in the first place. There is even more evidence the the club's leadership acted with amazing stupidity and arrogance in unilaterally cancelling their aggreement with the camp. But the case for racial animus remains as weak as ever.

The Inquirer tips it's hand in its lead paragraph:

A state investigation that found a Montgomery County swim club discriminated against a group of minority kids who visited its pool only underscores how much racism still remains a sad part of society. This was no philosophical treatise on the role of racism in some of the more agitated, animated opposition to ideas being put forth by this nation's first black president, in particular President Obama's health-care reform plan.

The editorial board would have us believe that racism not only remains a driving factor in lives of many white people, it explains the opposition to our first black president's idea of health-care reform.

This is a nothing more than a shoddy and disreputable attempt to marginalize people with whom the Inky's editorial board disagrees politically. Even worse, it won't work. The playing of the race card simply doesn't intimidate people like it used to, mostly because it has been played so promiscuously, unfairly and underhandedly for so many years now. This is just the latest example.