This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 3rd, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Obama administration has an odd approach to human rights.

For the White House, apparently equality before the law means fixing unemployment for some

and dealing with the disparities in the incidents of stomach cancer among various demographic groups.

Roger Pallone, Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Cato Institute, says the White House

is giving human rights the UN treatment.

The Obama administration joined the UN Council on Human Rights just last year.

We had walked out of the older commission in 2004,

after Sudan in the midst of ethnic cleansing in Darfur was unanimously named to the Commission.

Thereafter, the Commission was dissolved and in 2006 it was reconstituted as the UN Council on Human Rights,

populated by such human rights exemplars as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Cuba.

On this new council, all UN members have to file self-assessments every four years of human rights conditions in their country.

Just last week, the Obama administration filed its assessment

and it reads like a politically correct policy statement of what it's being doing over the past two years.

In fact, it is replete with the kind of identity politics that we've come to expect from this administration.

For example, they say that we have human rights problems because, and I'll quote here,

work remains to meet our goal of ensuring equality before

the law.

So what do they mean by inequality before the law?

Well, they pose such things as unemployment is higher among blacks and

Hispanics than among whites, that racial and ethnic disparities in home

...