July 15, 2013

NYT/NBC: "Zimmerman Prosecutors Duck the Race Issue"

An op-ed in the NYT by Gloria Allred's daughter elaborates the emerging spin I remarked upon earlier: George Zimmerman wasn't convicted of murder because the judge only allowed the prosecution to accuse him in the opening statement of "profiling," not the high crime of "racial profiling." 

The interesting question now is not the details of this run-of-the-mill exurban tragedy, but why so many people these days find this kind of condemnation of pattern recognition so persuasive.

Being right is racist.
Zimmerman Prosecutors Duck the Race Issue 
By LISA BLOOM 
Driving to Target on his Sunday grocery run on Feb. 26, 2012, George Zimmerman looked out the window of his S.U.V. and saw a stranger who he instantly concluded was “a real suspicious guy.” 
“Punks,” he said, adding an expletive. “They always get away.” There were unsolved burglaries in his community, and as he said in a call he made to the police, “this guy looks like he’s up to no good.” Mr. Zimmerman’s recorded profanity-laden police call became a focal point at his murder trial, but not because of its obvious significance: that Mr. Zimmerman jumped to insulting conclusions about Trayvon Martin primarily on account of Mr. Martin’s race. 
What began as a local crime story gained national attention after African-American journalists and civil rights leaders immediately grasped the racial implications of the confrontation between Mr. Zimmerman and Mr. Martin, and ended with Mr. Martin’s death. Mr. Zimmerman’s acquittal on Saturday sparked nationwide civil demonstrations against racial profiling and hate crimes. But in the courtroom, race was a topic carefully controlled by the judge and handled awkwardly by the prosecution team. 
In an odd ruling, Judge Debra Nelson decided that the word “profiling” — but not the phrase “racial profiling” — could be used in opening statements. But what other kind of profiling could possibly have been involved here? Could jurors — and the public — seriously imagine that Mr. Zimmerman considered Mr. Martin a criminal solely because he was walking slowly in the rain as he chatted on the phone? Lawyers were free to use the profanity involved in the case over and over again, but initially the “r” word was off limits. 
Shortly thereafter, it seemed the prosecution was building its case, at least partly, around Mr. Zimmerman’s obvious racial profiling, which was the run-up for the altercation and shooting that followed. The state fought hard outside the jury’s presence to enter into evidence police calls Mr. Zimmerman had made in the months before the shooting; 100 percent of the calls about suspicious persons involved African-Americans. 

Think about that for awhile.
Though the judge ultimately granted the state’s request and admitted tapes of these calls into evidence, the prosecution did not use the evidence and remained strangely silent on Mr. Zimmerman’s pattern of racial profiling during its two closing arguments. ...
To those who followed the trial closely, as I did, it seemed a decision was made midstream to abandon the strategy that included calling attention to Mr. Zimmerman’s pattern. Prosecutors apparently trusted jurors to dispassionately evaluate photos of a dead teenager’s remains and of the bullet hole through his heart as well as photos of blood dripping from George Zimmerman’s head. But the state was too squeamish to put the touchy issue of race squarely before the six-woman jury. ...
The most discordant note in the entire three-week trial came in the prosecution’s rebuttal closing argument, its last chance to drive its points home with the jury. John Guy, a prosecutor in the case, insisted forcefully that the case was not about race; relying on a strategy reminiscent of John Grisham’s book “A Time to Kill,” Mr. Guy asked the jury to consider a role reversal: would Martin be convicted if he had followed and then shot George Zimmerman? After this obvious, if implicit, reference to race, Mr. Guy finished up by reminding the jury that the case was not about race. 
Huh? 
Mr. Martin’s family, too, wavered on the subject. Mr. Guy’s remarks mirrored those made by Benjamin Crump, the Martin family lawyer, who said in September that the case “shouldn’t be about race,” though if the roles of the two young men were reversed, an arrest would have occurred quickly. (Mr. Crump had concluded with “that’s why race is involved in this case.”) 
And after Mr. Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel testified to the only racial epithet uttered in the courtroom — Mr. Martin’s characterization of Mr. Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” — another family attorney stood alongside Mr. Martin’s parents at a news conference and said, “To this family, race is not a part of this process. Anybody who tries to inject race into it is wrong.”

I like that part about Trayvon Martin's expression of racial and sexual orientation animus being "the only racial epithet uttered in the courtroom." Obviously, the prosecution was remiss in not simply making up some some racial epithets and wrongly attributing them to the defendant.
Lisa Bloom is a lawyer, author and NBC News legal analyst.

Unlike the wimpy prosecutors, you won't catch NBC News failing to edit the tape to make Zimmerman look racist.

Slate commends profiling (of males)

From Slate:
Massachusetts’ Simple Solution for Preventing Domestic Homicide 
By Amanda Marcotte | Posted Monday, July 15, 2013
In theory, domestic homicide should be easy to prevent, since men who kill their wives or girlfriends (85 percent of victims are female) generally give us lots of warning by beating, stalking, and even raping their victims, usually for years before they finally kill. ... 
Rachel Louise Snyder, writing for the New Yorker, details one solution that's being implemented in Massachusetts. Domestic violence social workers there developed a high-risk assessment team that, using statistical methods and employing the court system in creative ways, has figured out a way to target the men most likely to kill and take special care to make it that much harder for them to do so. ... 
How do they do it? They take the details of each reported case of abuse, looking at risk factors such as stalking and chronic unemployment, and rate each abuser on a point system for how violent and controlling he is. Men who are rated high are then subject to heightened risk monitoring, and their victims are given extra resources to stay safe. If the abusers start acting up, they can have their child visitations terminated or be made to wear GPS trackers. They may even be put in jail or in a psychiatric hospital for violating probation or restraining orders—courtesy of a preventive detention program that was mostly used to prevent gang or drug violence in the past, a program that gives the government leeway to restrain you even if your behavior otherwise falls short of the threshold to charge you with further crimes. 

Moving the goalposts

A commenter writes:
Has anyone outside the Steve-o-Sphere noticed that, in typical fashion, the grounds for outrage keep subtly shifting? 
Month 1- "A crazed white vigilante murdered an innocent, angelic boy!". Then it turned out that Martin wasn't so innocent or angelic, and was for all practical purposes a man, not a boy. Zimmerman was also revealed to be not so crazed and not so white. So that angle was dropped. 
Later- "It's those awful 'Stand your Ground' laws, that's what's wrong!". But the defense didn't even need to mention that law at trial, because was totally irrelevant to the case. That line was abandoned pretty swiftly by the smart media players, though some stragglers still haven't wrapped their heads around it yet. 
During the trial (after it became clear that there was no way to prove murder)- "Zimmerman recklessly provoked a confrontation, ignoring police instructions!". But police testified that he cooperated fully and followed all their instructions, and the jury subsequently agreed. 
After the acquittal- "Anyone who is going to carry a deadly weapon should be more careful, and more knowledgeable!" i.e., GZ was a little bit of a bumbling incompetent, which is more-or-less true. 
This kind of "outrage distillation" is common when the press push a bull***t narrative and then discover that they were mostly wrong. The can't continue lying, but they can focus the same amount of anger and opprobrium onto smaller and smaller sins.

July 14, 2013

Obama restarts hate crime investigation of Zimmerman

From the NYT:
Justice Department to Restart Hate Crime Investigation in Trayvon Martin’s Death 
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Sunday that it was restarting its investigation into the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin to consider possible separate hate crime charges against George Zimmerman.

The federal inquiry, which was started shortly after the shooting last year but had been delayed while the state criminal trial in Florida was under way, was being restarted after civil rights leaders called on the Justice Department to re-examine the case. The leaders said Sunday that they remained convinced that the shooting had a racial element. Mr. Martin, 17, was black. 
“There is a pattern of George Zimmerman making dozens of calls to 911 over several years, frequently about young men of color,” Benjamin T. Jealous, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said in an interview on Sunday. . ... 

Zimmerman is guilty of disparate impact in noticing things. Noticing things is a hate crime.
But the Obama administration’s Justice Department has been cautious in its use of the expanded law. In 2010, for example, it turned down calls by civil rights leaders to file charges in New York City in the 2006 death of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old black man who was fatally shot by police officers outside a Queens club just hours before he was to be married.

Yeah, but that's merely the little old NYPD. The Zimmerman Menace is the main threat to civil rights.

Earlier, Newsday reported:
The U.S. Justice Department, which opened an investigation into the George Zimmerman case Sunday, could charge him with federal civil rights violations, local attorneys said. 
While a Florida jury found neighorbood watch volunteer Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder, a federal probe would examine whether he violated Martin's civil rights when he fatally shot him Feb. 16, 2012, in Sanford, Fla. 
To prove such violations requires a different standard of evidence and law than what was used in the state case against Zimmerman. So a federal prosecution would not be double jeopardy, they said.
Robert Valli, a Garden City-based civil rights attorney said if a probe proceeds, the local federal prosecutor would likely seek a grand jury indictment on charges that Zimmerman violated the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act. 
Valli said potential charges would be the government's "version of a homicide charge, coupled with the intention to do so because of the person's membership in a protected class."

Constitutionally speaking, wouldn't it just be simpler for Obama to order a drone strike on Zimmerman's condo?

Peter Schaeffer: The meaning of "amnesty"

Peter Schaeffer writes on the Senate immigration bill:
Paul Ryan says it’s not Amnesty. Believe it or not, he is actually correct. It's far better than Amnesty. 
In a tax Amnesty, you still have to pay your back taxes. In an Amnesty for property crimes, you still have to return the stolen property. 
If this was just an Amnesty for illegals, they would have to pay a fine and go back to their own countries without legal sanction for having violated our immigration laws. 
This is far better than Amnesty. More like winning the lottery and getting a pot of gold. 
The advocates claim that it's not Amnesty because of the trifling fines ($500). Guess what? The 1986 Amnesty had fines too and no one lied about it not being Amnesty. Indeed, the authors admit that the 1986 law was Amnesty. This time, only the honesty to use the 'A' word is missing.

Breaking News in NYT: Emmett Till murdered

In the top story at NYTimes.com at the moment, Adam Nagourney reports:
Emmett Till, 14, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, reportedly after flirting with a white woman.

Obama: "a jury has spoken"

The President has released a statement appealing for calm, etc. 

The funniest line was, "But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken."

You've got to give Obama credit for being gifted at these tiny lawyerly passive-aggressive verbal digs: "a jury has spoken," not "the jury has spoken." 

This choice of indefinite over definite article doesn't commit the Obama Administration to any action, but holds out hope for Obama's supporters that Obama will have his feds subject Zimmerman to double jeopardy in front of another jury. (The Justice Department just announced they are mulling trying Zimmerman over again.) Plus, it quietly questions the legitimacy of a jury with no blacks on it, suggests that a different jury would have found differently, and so forth. 

Of course, 99% won't notice the difference, but Obama probably feels pretty satisfied about his wording right now.

Well played, Mr. President!

Top headline at NYTimes.com: "Talk of Race, Barred in Trial"

This seems to be the New York Times' designated complaint:
Talk of Race, Barred in Trial, Drives Verdict Reactions

Similarly, a week ago the NYT tried to alert its true believers to the likelihood of an acquittal with the headline:
Zimmerman Case Has Race as a Backdrop, but You Won’t Hear It in Court 

That was a doozy of a news article, as you'll recall, reading like a parody I had written.

In other words, the jurors would have come up with the appropriate verdict if only the judge hadn't restricted the trial to mostly just the evidence. How can a jury be allowed to come up with a verdict based on facts without us explaining to them The Narrative?

Local News

From the Chicago Tribune on Sunday morning, police beat reporter Peter Nickeas' standard summary:
At least 8 wounded in overnight shootings 
Shootings left at least 8 people on the South and West sides wounded overnight, according to police. 
Three of the shootings happened between 4:50 and 5:40 a.m., police said. 
A 60-year-old woman was shot in the chin about 4:50 a.m. in 4500 block of South Wolcott Avenue in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side. Police said she wasn't the target and are investigating whether she was stuck in crossfire between two shooters. She was taken to John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, where her condition has stabilized.

And so forth and so on.

These are just the usual dog-bites-man (or thug-with-poor-marksmanship-wings-grandmother) stories, which help explain both the pit-bull like obsessiveness with which the national media glomped on to their Trayvon-Zimmerman man-bites-dog story, and also why it predictably unraveled.

July 13, 2013

Zimmerman-Trayvon, from the files

I blogged on June 12, 2012:
George Zimmerman, Wrecker 
From the Chicago Tribune: 
New records released by prosecutors in the George Zimmerman murder case show federal civil rights investigators interviewed dozens of his friends, neighbors and coworkers, but found no one who said Zimmerman was a racist. 
And if they had? 
This whole brouhaha is basically the equivalent of a 1930s Stalinist show trial of "wreckers." The Five Year Plan not going as planned? Find some engineers to be blamed for throwing wrenches in their turbines out of spite. Blacks still shooting each other in large numbers? Find a Great White Defendant to play the symbolic role of Racist Wrecker. Of course, the whole thing rapidly turned into a fiasco with the GWD turning out to look like a cross between Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez, and the victim of profiling turning out to have a history of burglary. ... 
To step back: I've got to figure that, in contrast, the next time the gay lobby decides to go all in on some killing of a gay, they'll make sure to get their ducks in a row better than the black lobby did on Trayvon. And if the story still turns out to be a fiasco, the gays will be able to use their media power to massage The Narrative. Blacks still have a ton of symbolic clout, but they don't have a lot of competent people in positions of power to suavely manage the storyline, so things tend to unravel on them like this. No wonder nice white people are slowly switching from blacks to gays as their Most Favored Oppressed Minority. We live in an era that values skillful marketing above just about anything else, and blacks, while they have moments of genius, generally don't execute as well as gays.

The Oberlin case was, of course, a subsequent fiasco involving mostly blacks. Did the gay lobby go all in on Marco McMillian "the openly gay Mississippi mayoral candidate who was murdered"? That was another fiasco, but I think the big time gay lobby had the good sense not to fully commit to that rough trade killing and instead left it to blacks and the more Pavlovian haters of Southern whites to look like fools over that. 
December 1, 2012 
Quiz: Can you pick out the "white Hispanic" amidst all the Hispanic Hispanics? 
With immigration reform and Puerto Rican statehood much in the news as Republicans ponder how to leave behind their image as racist white men, I thought I'd go through my recent posts to find Hispanic experts in the media who have their finger on the pulse of What Hispanics Want, who know deep in their Latino bones how the masses of la raza feel. It's time for white people to stop ignoring Hispanics just because they look different and lack White Privilege! Fortunately, the press assiduously brings to our attention these fresh new voices with their fresh new kind of face. A gallery:

The hunt for the Great White Defendant: a reading list

I've been writing for years about what Tom Wolfe calls the "mania for the Great White Defendant." Here are some links to this recurrent phenomenon in fact and fiction:
Bonfire of the Vanities on the Great White Defendant 
Duke Lacrosse Hoax 
The Jena Six 
Nestor Camacho in Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood
Quentin Unchained 
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 
The KKK at Oberlin 
Marco McMillian
Law & Order: the 100% irony-free Bonfire of the Vanities 
Tom Wolfe v. Dick Wolf 
Chandra Levy and Rep. Gary Condit 
Amanda Knox: The Hot White Defendant 
Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman 

The only way to have any effect on how more than few people are equipped to think about the world is to repeat yourself over and over.

Here's the paragraph where Wolfe introduced the concept in the Great New York Novel in 1987. Three assistant district attorneys are discussing a case that had interested the publicity-mad head D.A., known as Captain Ahab:
Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John's Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab's mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, "What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail." Kramer had been raised as a liberal. In Jewish families like his, liberalism came with the Similac and the Mott's apple juice and the Instamatic and Daddy's grins in the evening. And even the Italians, like Ray Andriutti, and the Irish, like Jimmy Caughey, who were not exactly burdened with liberalism by their parents, couldn't help but be affected by the mental atmosphere of the law schools, where, for one thing, there were so many Jewish faculty members. By the time you finished law school in the New York area, it was, well ... impolite! ... on the ordinary social level ... to go around making jokes about the yoms. It wasn't that it was morally wrong ... It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.

Breaking: George Zimmerman not guilty on both counts

From the Miami Herald. (Expect slow loading due to heavy web traffic.)

Will the jury's repudiation of the national media's Narrative cause any second thoughts about the press's prejudices that caused so many to get this story so wrong for so long? It would be nice to hope that this long, sad story at least causes a few people to notice the biases of the conventional wisdom.

I doubt it, though.

July 12, 2013

Amnesty v. Path to Citizenship

The Washington Post's moderate Republican columnist Kathleen Parker opinionizes:
Likewise, Republicans are not shooting straight when they insist that the Senate bill’s path to citizenship is de facto amnesty. As paths go, it’s a 13-year pilgrimage along a precipice lined with bramble bushes — taxes, fines and various burning hoops through which one must leap in order to stand in line. Hardly rose-petal strewn.

I don't think Ms. Parker is being disingenuous here. She's just got it stuck in her head that "amnesty" is what some Democratic extremists want, while "a path to citizenship" therefore must be the moderate compromise between the liberal la-la land of "amnesty" and the horrors  of "self-deportation" (i.e., going home).

In reality, of course, "a path to citizenship" is just amnesty plus the vote and other privileges. Karl Rove, for example, proposed in 2004 amnesty without "a path to citizenship." He didn't call it amnesty, of course, for the simple reason that it was amnesty.

Mickey Kaus explains:
GOP legislators said the biggest question was whether to give the 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States a path to eventual citizenship, as provided by the Senate measure.–CNN, July 11 
For months, Democrats have been saying they won’t agree to an immigration bill unless it has a “path to citizenship.” Reporters wrote it down. Many Republicans have also been saying the key sticking point is over the “path to citizenship”–they oppose it. Reporters wrote that down too, and declared  “citizenship” the big line-in-sand battleground in the immigration debate. 
The only problem is, this was BS.  Citizenship isn’t the big dealbreaker issue. That’s because Democrats would ultimately–reluctantly, of course–accept a bill that did not give illegal immigrants a “path to citizenship” if it gave Dems what they really want, namely quick legal status before any new enforcement measures must be in place.  Legalization gives the undocumented most of what they need from immigration refom–they can work, get driver’s licenses, etc. without fear of ICE. And if the legalization comes before enforcement, not only wouldn’t the undocumented have to wait very long, but Democrats would have the chance to water down the enforcement as soon as the the undocumented were in the clear (as Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, did after the 1986 reform). 
Legalization First–that’s the real dealbreaker issue for Dems.

Now, that reminds me of a sociological issue. Ms. Parker, for example, appears to be a nice, well-adjusted lady. From Wikipedia:
Parker grew up in Winter Haven, Florida, graduated from Winter Haven High School in 1969, and attended Converse College before transferring to Florida State University where she majored in Spanish Literature. She also holds a Master's degree in the subject from Florida State. 
She is married to an attorney, has three sons, and currently resides in Camden, South Carolina.[5]

A political party like the Republicans should be proud that it represents a lot of fine, upstanding, agreeable Core Americans like Kathleen Parker. The problem is that to avoid getting taken to the cleaners by the Democrats on an issue that they enjoy thinking about far more than the typical well-adjusted Republican, you also need a few smart, cynical misfits, too. 

Mickey, for example, is the kind of guy who graduates from Harvard Law School and then never practices law. A reasonable person who goes to all the expense and trouble of going to Harvard Law School and then doesn't practice law usually has something even better-paying to do. My cousin, for example, went to a fine law school, but then didn't take the bar exam because his older brother helped him get started in San Francisco real estate and development, in which he has done very well for himself. Mickey instead goes to work for the Washington Monthly magazine, run by the notoriously cynical/honest Charles Peters. Not a wise career move! In an age of feeding the blog beast, Mickey ekes out superbly crafted post every few days.

Janet Napolitano & UC's "powerful coterie of lesbians"

Department of Homeland Security honcho Janet Napolitano has been appointed to head the multicampus University of California system, despite little experience with academia, California (she attended the private U. of Santa Clara in the 1970s, but that's about it), or much of anything of seeming relevance.

Maybe she's got some files? But that raises the question: Does DHS get access to the Panopticon's good stuff, or are they treated like the dim stepbrothers of the Surveillance State, getting stuck just with lists of weird metal objects that people were carrying in their pockets while attempting to board airliners?

Hey, here's the premise for a thriller about blackmail in the halls of power and finance: Assume DHS inherited from the INS the list of all the illegal aliens caught coming over the Mexican border for the last 40 years. If you had access to that list, just think about all the major players in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood whom an unscrupulous high government official could blackmail by threatening to expose their darkest secrets: that they're actually Mexican illegal aliens!

Not an undocumented worker
(not Janet Napolitano, either)
There's like ... well, no ... uhhhmmm ... okay, it's taking a little longer to think of anybody powerful in America who might actually be a Mexican illegal alien than I figured, so I'll just get back to you on this. It must be because of all that living in the shadows ... Wait a minute -- the guy who made the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots movie! Oh ... looks like Guillermo del Toro didn't permanently move to America until his dad, the owner of an automobile factory, got kidnapped in 1998 and held for a giant ransom, which James Cameron helped raise.

But now that I think about it, James Cameron doesn't have anything to do with the topic of this post. Perhaps Napolitano's being rewarded for her famous physics breakthrough in 2005: 
“You show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That’s the way the border works.”

Probably of more relevance is that Napolitano's career in high office is an offshoot of The Year of the Woman. From Wikipedia:
In 1991, while a partner at Lewis and Roca LLP, Napolitano served as an attorney for Anita Hill.[9][10] Anita Hill testified in the U.S. Senate that then U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her ten years earlier when she was his subordinate at the federal EEOC.[11] 
In 1993, Napolitano was appointed by President Bill Clinton as United States Attorney for the District of Arizona.[9] ...
Napolitano is an avid basketball fan and regularly plays tennis and softball.[66]
Napolitano has never married or had children; as a result, there has been speculation about her sexual orientation. ... She is not gay, she has said, "just a straight, single workaholic".[68] ...
In July 2012, Napolitano was accused of allowing discrimination against male staffers within the Department of Homeland Security.[56][57] The federal discrimination lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, was filled by James Hayes Jr. who is presently a special agent of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in New York City.[58] The suit alleges that Dora Schriro and Suzanne Barr mistreated male staffers and promotions were given to women who were friends of Napolitano, and when the abuse was reported to the Equal Employment Opportunity office, that Napolitano launched a series of misconduct investigations against the reporting party, Hayes.[59] Immigrations and Customs Enforcement's spokesman stated that he would not comment on "unfounded claims".[60] 
Suzanne Barr, who was one of Napolitano's first appointments after she became secretary in 2009, went on leave after Hayes filed his lawsuit and then resigned on September 1, 2012. Although she called the allegations in the lawsuit "unfounded", others suggested that her resignation raised serious concerns regarding personnel and management practices at the Department of Homeland Security.[61]

Here's some forgotten history: The University of California system had a series of financial scandals in the 2000s focusing on successive female chancellors (i.e., presidents) of UC Santa Cruz and $192,000 per year jobs for their special lady friends. When Santa Cruz chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood was promoted to the #2 job in the whole statewide system, provost, she was succeeded as chancellor by Denice Denton (who briefly became nationally celebrated for claiming to "speak truth to power" in the Larry Summers brouhaha).

A local Santa Cruz newspaper columnist noted that for years people in the know whispered about how "a powerful coterie of lesbians has gained power and influence within the UC system." He was immediately disciplined for mentioning something so uninteresting.

Another boring aspect of this nonstory that got deservedly little attention is that on June 24, 2006, UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Denton, age 46, climbed to the roof of her lesbian lover's luxury 42-story apartment building in San Francisco and leapt to her death.

Of course you didn't hear much about it when it happened, much less been reminded of it since then. It was just a dog bites man story. College presidents jump off skyscrapers all the time. It's not a world-historical news story like Trayvon Martin. And it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Janet Napolitano's new job.

18 million more non-working native Americans over last 13 years

Peter Schaeffer notes:
Immigrant Gains and Native Losses In the Job Market, 2000 to 2013″ 
By Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler
“While jobs are always being created and lost, and the number of workers rises and falls with the economy, a new analysis of government data shows that all of the net gain in employment over the last 13 years has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). From the first quarter of 2000 to the first quarter of 2013, the number of natives working actually fell by 1.3 million while the overall size of the working-age (16 to 65) native population increased by 16.4 million. Over the same time period, the number of immigrants working (legal and illegal) increased by 5.3 million. In addition to the decline in the number of natives working, there has been a broad decline in the percentage holding a job that began before the 2007 recession. This decline has impacted natives of almost every age, race, gender, and education level. The total number of working-age (16 to 65) natives not working — unemployed or out of the labor force entirely — was nearly 59 million in the first quarter of this year, a figure that has changed little in the last three years and is nearly 18 million larger than in 2000.

Fortunately, Schumer and Rubio have a plan to change this.

How much of Edward Snowden' revelations are novel?

I've been reading since 1982 the work of lawyer-journalist James Bamford on the National Security Administration. So, Snowden's revelations haven't come as a big surprise to me. How much has he revealed that is truly new, versus how much is he just a great personal story, a man who will risk everything to cut through the haze and apathy?

Eric Holder and Rev. Bacon

From Investors Business Daily
Taxpayers Helped Sharpton Stir Anti-Zimmerman Anger 
Race War: The Obama administration spent thousands of federal dollars to help the Rev. Al Sharpton pressure the state of Florida to railroad George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting case. 
The Justice Department not only met with Martin's parents and the notorious racial arsonist Sharpton, as we reported earlier this week. It even helped them organize rallies against Zimmerman, who trial evidence shows shot Martin in self-defense. 
Newly released documents reveal the department spent more than $5,320 to send officials to Florida "to work marches, demonstrations and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen." 
According to Washington-based Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group that uncovered the records through a Freedom of Information Act request, the department launched six separate deployments to Sanford, Fla., between March 25, 2012, and April 12, 2012, when officials got their way and Zimmerman was arrested for murder. 
The purpose of one trip from March 30 to April 1, according to the expense report, was "to provide support for protest." Sharpton was a featured speaker at the March 31 protest, dubbed "The March for Trayvon Martin," where he agitated for Zimmerman's arrest. 
... Behind the scenes, Attorney General Eric Holder assured Sharpton that he would take "swift action" in the case to investigate whether local police had committed a "civil rights crime" in releasing Zimmerman from custody. Holder also deployed FBI agents to Sanford. 
Soon after, Sanford's police chief was fired. Bill Lee now says he was axed due to "political pressure" and that "outside forces" hijacked the Zimmerman case.
"They just wanted an arrest" to placate protesters threatening violence, Lee told CNN earlier this week, even though the evidence provided no probable cause to arrest Zimmerman. He said it was purely a matter of self defense, and he was right. 
As soon as the case was taken away from Lee, evidence was leaked to the Martin family and Sharpton and his thugs. They got to hear the 911 tapes and coordinate their stories. 
Who leaked them? The same person who fired Lee — Sanford City Manager Norton Bonaparte, a member of the National Forum for Black Public Administrators. 
Before he sacked the police chief, Bonaparte met in Washington with — you guessed it — Eric Holder. The attorney general had summoned both him and Sanford's mayor to discuss the allegedly "unprovoked hate crime against a black teen." 
The evidence is clear that Zimmerman was framed to look like a homicidal racist. It's also now clear there was a larger political orchestration behind the racial rabble-rousing, one that was led from the highest levels in Washington.

July 11, 2013

Prosecutor sums up: Zimmerman hasn't proven his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt

From the NYT:
In Closing, Zimmerman Prosecutor Focuses on Inconsistencies

Okay, but isn't that what the defense normally does -- point out inconsistencies in the prosecutor's story to try to raise the possibility that the prosecution hasn't proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt? Isn't this whole trial taking place in Mirror Land?
SANFORD, Fla. — In a murder case of chain reactions, the chief prosecutor, Bernie de la Rionda, began with the very first link when he delivered his closing statement on Thursday in the George Zimmerman trial.

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager carrying nothing but snacks, died of a gunshot to the heart for one reason, he said: Mr. Zimmerman saw himself as a cop and Mr. Martin as a hoodie-clad criminal. 

"For one reason"?
“He went over the line,” Mr. de la Rionda told the jury. “He assumed things that weren’t true and, instead of waiting for the police to come and do their job, he did not. He, the defendant, wanted to make sure that Trayvon Martin didn’t get out of the neighborhood.” 
“In this defendant’s mind he automatically assumed that Trayvon Martin was a criminal,” Mr. de la Rionda added. “And that’s why we’re here.”

Profiling!

Fortunately, in his retirement, Michael Bloomberg probably won't end up in a condo complex in Nowheresville, Florida, so he's safe.
Mr. Zimmerman, 29, a neighborhood watch volunteer who said he shot Mr. Martin in self-defense, is charged with second-degree murder in the Feb. 26, 2012, death of Mr. Martin, who was 17. If convicted, he could face life in prison. On Thursday, the judge, Debra S. Nelson, said the jury would also be able to consider manslaughter as a lesser charge. This charge is typically included in Florida murder cases if either side requests it. Manslaughter with a firearm carries a sentence of up to 30 years in prison.

The judge should order a directed verdict of not guilty on the absurd Murder 2 charge, which would make it harder for the jury to decide to just split the difference and go with the manslaughter charge as a compromise that would bring them the least criticism.