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trayvon-martin-photo-media-george-zimmerman-photo-bias-sad-hill-news2It’s time once again for an update on what has been going on in the apparently never-ending saga of George Zimmerman and the race baiters, criminals and politicians (I know; they’re one-in-the-same) that just can’t leave it alone.  I had hoped, when the trial was finally over, to have a respite, but the show goes on–and on, and on, and on…

You Can’t Sue Me!  I’m Immune!

The Orlando Sentinel reports that Angela Corey is claiming absolute immunity to Florida whistleblower laws.  I wrote about this issue recently, but the Sentinel adds an update:   

Lawyers for State Attorney Angela Corey say she has ‘sovereign immunity’ and are asking a judge to throw out a lawsuit filed against her in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case.

Ben Kruidbos, her former information technology director, was fired in June after he testified that prosecutors did not turn over all information to Zimmerman’s defense team in the shooting death of the 17-year-old. Kruidbos said he was a whistleblower and under the law cannot be fired.

The lawsuit says Kruidbos testified in response to a subpoena, and the firing was retaliation for his testimony.

He is asking for $5 million in damages and his job back.

In court papers filed this week, Corey’s attorneys say the state attorney cannot be sued because she has sovereign immunity as an elected official.

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, sovereign immunity is the legal doctrine that says the government cannot be sued without its consent.

The motion says Corey, a government official, does not consent.

‘I think it’s an absurd assertion that she’s above the law,’ said attorney Wesley White, who is representing Kruidbos.

Mr. White is correct.  Prosecutors do have substantial immunity from acts arising from their work as prosecutors, but there is no exception in Florida law regarding whistleblowers.  If the law still holds in Florida–and that’s always an iffy proposition–the lawsuit will continue.

Teenage Angst:

At Carrick High School in Pittsburgh, homecoming nearly became “Honor Trayvon Martin Day.”  The local CBS affiliate has the story:  

Parents were upset after Carrick High School approved a plan to have a Trayvon Martin theme day during the school’s homecoming.

The homecoming committee, and school voted and approved the theme which is part of school spirit week.

Parents were upset that kids were being encouraged to wear hoodies to school during the Wednesday theme…

Tensions have since eased and headlines have faded, but at Carrick High School, Martin’s memory has not. And to commemorate Martin, students planned to wear hoodies to make it a positive thing.

But it was not seen as positive by all.

Fortunately, parents and others complained with sufficient numbers and intensity to prevent a high school having no connection to Martin or the case from celebrating the life of a teenager very much unworthy of emulation.

They Just Can’t Leave It Alone:

The Tampa CBS affiliate has the story:  

Former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young stated that Trayvon Martin is one of several martyrs under the cause of civil rights violence and injustice.

In a lead-up to President Barack Obama’s address marking the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement March on Washington, the former U.N. ambassador under President Jimmy Carter interrupted MSNBC guest host Joy Ann-Reid’s question on troubles in the African-American community to express his thoughts on the Trayvon Martin case.

‘No, Trayvon is a martyr. We’ve had a string of martyrs from the time of Emmett Till. Every generation has its string of martyrs and they’re going to continue. And we celebrate them and we lift them up to know that they’re not lost,’ said Young.

Young finished strong, if insane:

The world is falling apart and nobody can bring it back together and nobody can define a vision of victory but a president of the United States.

Oh, well.  In that case, we’re doomed.

Are They Really This Deranged?

Indeed they are.  The LA Times provides some entirely predictable, if historically tone deaf and unbalanced commentary on Trayvon Martin.  Some examples, beginning with Ta-Nehisi Coates:

You should not be troubled that George Zimmerman “got away” with the killing of Trayvon Martin; you should be troubled that you live in a country that ensures that Trayvon Martin will happen. […] When you have a society that takes at its founding the hatred and degradation of a people, when that society inscribes that degradation in its most hallowed document, and continues to inscribe hatred in its laws and policies, it is fantastic to believe that its citizens will derive no ill messaging.

It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended.

I agree, it is a problem when people like Trayvon Martin “happen,” but I don’t recall the Constitution being inscribed with degredation.  However, Coates is right: in the Zimmerman case, the law did work as it was intended.

And in the mindless anti-gun diatribe unencumbered by the facts of the case department, Scott Lemieux takes this week’s award:

The problem with the acquittal was not a racist and unreasonable jury, either. Rather, the acquittal of Zimmerman reflects something else equally serious and unsettling: the failure of the law in many states to keep up with the realities of America’s gun culture. In a society in which many African Americans are presumed to be criminals and large numbers of people carry concealed deadly weapons, some ways of defining self-defense (even if they do not entail a right to stand one’s ground) may no longer be workable. […] Carrying a deadly weapon in public should carry unique responsibilities. In most cases someone with a gun should not be able to escape culpability if he initiates a conflict with someone unarmed and the other party ends up getting shot and killed. Under the current law in many states, people threatened by armed people have few good options, because fighting back might create a license to kill.

It’s hard to know where to start, so unschooled in the law and the facts of the Martin case is Lemieux, but the law of self-defense is clear, unforgiving, and applies to everyone.  Carrying a concealed weapon does carry unique responsibilities, and those that do are uncommonly law-abiding.  The “conflict” in the Zimmerman case was initiated by Martin–there is not a scrap of evidence otherwise, and Lemieux’s last sentence is so irrational as to be unworthy of response.

Finally (there is more at the link if you’ve the stomach for it), Jeff Cord of Gawker, notes:

For people of color, it’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.

Are there really people that think this way?  Don’t they know the realities of crime in America?  Disturbing.

The Zimmerman Family Circus:

I’ve written previously that I’ve little interest in the continuing media eruptions of traffic stops and domestic spats regarding George and Shellie Zimmerman.  The media has a continuing interest in painting George as ultimate evil and a social justice, racist, politically correct, etc. symbol.  Thus, we will continue to hear about the kinds of daily non-dramas that would draw a collective yawn were anyone else involved.  But just for the sake of completeness:

08-26-13 (ish): It was revealed on 09-26-13 that near the end of August, George was stopped by the Florida Highway Patrol for having dark tinting on the windows of his vehicle.  He apparently also had improperly displayed tags.  Zimmerman muttered something about having tinted windows due to continuing death threats.  A likely story.  Apparently no citations were issued.  Will Zimmerman’s lawlessness never stop?

09-03-13: 

In Lake Mary, FL, George was ticked for speeding.  A police spokesman said:

George Zimmerman is kind of like the Loch Ness Monster — anytime you get a glimpse of him, it’s making international news,” said officer Zach Hudson, a spokesman for the Lake Mary Police Department, which issued Zimmerman the ticket.

The Loch Ness Monster is reported to have politely accepted the ticket.

09-09-13:  

Shelly Zimmerman, after announcing her impending divorce, showed up unexpectedly at a home she and George had been sharing.  An argument ensued and George punched Shellie’s father in the nose.  The media went wild, claiming George threatened her and the universe with a gun and laid waste to the North American continent.  Oh yes: there was domestic violence, lots and lots of it.

Actually, no gun was involved, no one got hurt, no one wanted to press charges, but an iPad got broken.  As of this writing, the local police have not filed charges against anyone.

09-26-13:  Headline: Shellie Zimmerman Doubts George’s Innocence!  Appearing on the Today Show, Shellie said:

I think anyone would doubt that innocence because I don’t know the person that I’ve been married to,’ Shellie Zimmerman said in the interview.

But then she went and messed up a perfectly good and politically correct headline:

But she added that she still believed the evidence in the case and denied that George Zimmerman racially profiled Martin before shooting him.

That darned evidence.  It really gets in the way of the narrative.

The media, has, however, done a public service by carefully describing, even posting video and photographs, of his vehicle.  Hey, the public has a right to know!

Department of Collegiate Lunacy:

And at the University of Florida, via Fox News:  

An email sent to students by a University of Maryland official that cites the Trayvon Martin shooting as evidence “it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida” is being blasted as the latest evidence of a left-wing bias on campus.

The email, from William Dorland, director of the school’s Honors College, starts by welcoming students back to campus, but then quickly veers into politics.

‘This year, we learned that it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida,’ it reads, in a reference to the trial of George Zimmerman, who was cleared of all charges in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The email went out to all students in the Honors College.

But it was, of course, all very innocent.  Dorland just wanted people to attend a lecture by former NAACP President Julian Bond:

Jim Purtilo, a University of Maryland computer science professor, said the comments struck him as inappropriate.

‘It’s over the top. But very much business as usual on this campus,’ he said.

Dorland, reached by phone, told FoxNews.com that his goal was merely to stir student interest in the Julian Bond speaking event.

‘I didn’t regard it as a political statement, I regarded it as trying to stir some student interest in an activity going on on campus,’ Dorland told FoxNews.com.

Well sure.  There is certainly no other way to interest students in the comments of a radical leftist like Bond.  An example of his thought from an August, 2013 speech:

We march because Trayvon Martin has joined Emmett Till in the pantheon of young black martyrs. We march because a United States Supreme Court has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, for which we fought and died. We march because every economic indicator shows gaping white-black disparities. We march for freedom from white supremacy.

But none of this is inappropriately political, no.  Surely not at a modern American university.

Lott on Obama On Racism:

Economist and scholar John R. Lott Jr. has an interesting article at National Review Online about Mr. Obama’s failures in delivering his promised racial healing.  An example:

President Obama’s election brought hope that he would bring Americans of all colors together. The opposite has occurred. Criticisms of the president are often framed as based on racism rather than legitimate policy disagreements.

A new Pew Research Center poll finds that compared to 2009 almost twice as many of both blacks and whites think that race relations have been getting worse. While Obama’s comments might hearten blacks who feel discriminated against, is anyone surprised that polls show race relations have been getting worse since his election?

Sadly unsurprising. The entire article–it’s relatively brief–is worth your time.

Bao Bows Out:

Dr. Shiping Bao, the medical examiner whose bizarre testimony blew up in the faces of the prosecution during the Zimmerman trial (as I outlined in Update 32.5) is out.  Fox News Has the story:  

Shiping Bao was fired from his position as an associate medical examiner last week, Fox News confirms. The examiner’s last day on the job was Sept. 6.  Dr. Bao has retained a lawyer and is suing Volusia County.

In a letter dated Aug. 23 released by Volusia County on Tuesday, Bao was granted 30 days to find employment at another office, and he declined to resign at the end of that period. An attorney Bao has retained didn’t immediately return a message from the Associated Press.

Bao began his employment with Volusia County in July 2011 and made an annual salary of $175,950.

Bao, regular readers may remember, changed his opinion about evidence while on the stand, appeared to have no knowledge of and less interest in the Martin autopsy, and materially helped to sink the prosecution.

Counter-Trayvonism: 

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal posted an interesting article, which is now, unfortunately, behind their pay wall.  Taranto first notes a number of false accusations of racist hate crimes on college campuses:

Four ‘hateful text messages’ appeared on the phone of a 16-year-old black student who was running for Student Council president at St. Peter’s Preparatory School in Jersey City, N.J. ‘We have NEVER and will NEVER have an (n-word) to lead our school,” read one of the messages, according to a report in the Jersey Journal.

The message went on to call President Obama by his middle name Hussein and used a racial slur in referring to Obama, a police report said. ‘We will never make that mistake again. Drop out right now . . .’ it continued, a police report said.

Can you guess where this is going? The Journal reports that the unnamed student ‘sent the texts to himself, a school official confirmed last week.’ (He lost the campaign for president, was elected vice president instead, and eventually complied with his own demand: ‘A source said he no longer attends the school.’)

This isn’t the only fake ‘hate crime’ to come to light in the past week. Last March, as The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross notes, administrators at Ohio’s Oberlin College shut classes for a day and held “campus-wide teach-ins focusing on racism and homophobia” after ‘virulently racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages’ appeared around campus and ‘a person wearing a hood and robe resembling a KKK outfit’ was spotted ‘near the Afrikan Heritage House.’

The perpetrators in the Oberlin case, Ross reports, turn out to be ‘privileged Obama-supporting white kids.’ One of them, Dylan Bleier, conducted a voter registration drive for the 2008 Obama campaign and belonged to a group called Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism (apparently he was from the upstate New York town where Cornell University is located).

Interestingly enough, the KKK incident may have actually happened.  Reportedly, a female student, a bit chilly in the night air, was walking near that place with a blanket wrapped around her.  No information is available as to its color, and whether it had a hood or eye holes.

Taranto comments on Ann Althouse, whose thesis is that it is counterproductive for conservatives to bring to the fore incidents in which white people are brutalized by blacks, as a sort of “counter-Trayvonism,” an attempt, of sorts, to balance the scales.

Because, in part, several notable liberals have declared themselves upset by such counter-trayvonism, Taranto eventually concedes that it may have some utility after all.  I agree.

Most Americans aren’t aware that blacks, particularly young black men, commit crimes, and particularly crimes of violence, far out of proportion to their population density.  Therefore when race baiters complain that there are more black men in jail than in college (which is ridiculously false as a matter of fact, by the way), far too many don’t know any better.  White people committing crimes, particularly violent crimes, against blacks is rare.  Black people committing crimes against blacks is very common, and against whites, somewhat less so.

For anyone wanting to know the truth about this issue, I recommend these excellent articles by Heather Mac Donald:

Is The Criminal Justice System Racist?  Spring, 2008.

Distorting the Truth About Crime and Race  14 May 2010

The Post Zimmerman Poison Pill   July 19, 2013

Safe Streets, Overruled  13 August 2013

Surely, all Americans should understand that we live in a color-blind society.  The noble goals of the civil rights movement have been mostly achieved long ago.  Actual racists are social pariahs, not welcome in civil society anywhere.  Stating the facts of the racial distribution of crime, particularly when so much of what the media and racial grievance mongers are saying is simply false, is not only a good thing, but a valuable public service.  It reaffirms that America has come a very long way, and that actual incidents of racism are few and far between, and the responsibility of immature or foolish individuals, not entire segments of society.

Of course no one should attempt a sort of reverse race baiting.  All black people are no more criminals than all Asian people are geniuses, or all Jews are bankers.  The spreading of stereotypes, particularly false stereotypes, contributes only to mistrust and strife, both of which Mr. Obama has contributed mightily to.

One fact remains: Trayvon Martin was no civil rights pioneer or advocate.  He was a teenager involved in drugs, crime, violence and thug culture, with poor parental supervision.  Like so many similar young men, his negative and destructive aspirations and behaviors caught up with him.  His actions are not worthy of emulation, nor is he in ay way a role model.

Counter-Trayvonism may not be quite as useful as being determined to tell the truth about related issues, particularly in the face of a media that simply will not allow a false narrative to die.