Category Archives: Crime

Breaking: Obama Promises Further Federal Incursion Into States For ‘Trayvon’

Barack Obama, Conflict, Crime, Federalism, Race

The president saw fit to intervene for the second time on the side of a party in a legal matter that has, to date, been resolved in the country’s courts. Whereas his first divisive comments, last year, saw President Obama identify with Trayvon as the son he might have had; Obama moved closer, this time: “Trayvon could have been me 35 years ago,” he said.

Obama praised the grieving parents of the late Trayvon Martin, which was understandable, but chose to intone about the specter of growing up with the sense that his presence, as a black man, elicited fear. By the way, even baby Obama crawling into a room ought to have made the company present clutch purses, for here was a baby who would go on to preside over an unparalleled explosion in the USA’s national debt ($17 trillion, and counting).

I will credit the president (of only a segment of the country) for mentioning the rationale behind the frailties of those “racists” who allegedly feared him: The black male’s propensity for violent crime. Black men are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of violent crime. Obama, for the first time ever, stated this brute reality—although he proceeded to blame The System rather than the many individuals who brutalize other human beings. (“Sticks and stones,” right?)

But then Obama is no methodological individualist, now is he?

“From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of the state’s creation. If not for government, Obama would have never managed to write himself into history. As a product of the state, Barry Soetoro sees it as the source of all possibilities.” Obama thus promised to follow with a federal fix by way of even more federal incursion into the States.

Note: Not one kind word did Obama offer to six remarkable women: the jury that adjudicated—and agonized over—the State of Florida Vs. George Zimmerman.

As I said, this is a factional president.

UPDATE III: The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins (Walter Block Adjudicates)

Affirmative Action, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Intelligence, Law, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism

“The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… In the course of doing her journalistic due diligence, Van Susteren stumbled upon another falsity peddled by the administration’s front man, Attorney General Eric Holder, mass media and the rest of the “Racial Industrial Complex.”

The slick-tongued Holder had told his primary constituency, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that “people who feel threatened have a duty to retreat,” and that “‘Stand Your Ground’-style laws —such as the one that figured into the George Zimmerman case—’undermine public safety,’ and ‘create dangerous conflicts in our neighborhoods.'”

Why then did the “Instructions read to the Zimmerman jury by The Honorable Debra S. Nelson, Circuit Judge,” state the reverse? Again, I excerpt from Justice Nelson’s instructions on the “Justifiable Use of Force”:

“If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in anyplace where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

It just so happens that Zimmerman was unable to retreat. As the facts showed, conclusively, Tryavon Martin was atop, pounding Zimmerman into the ground. By trial’s end, the prosecution no longer disputed this unassailable fact.

Holder’s lie was compounded by the fact that, as Van Susteren discovered in the course of digging in federal statutes, the law generally recognizes the right of the person who is not the aggressor to stand his ground. …

The complete column is “The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins.” Read it on WND. .

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UPDATE I: Greta Van Susteren is investigating “The Zimmerman arrest affidavit,“ belatedly, about which a Colorado law-enforcement officer wrote the following last year:

“…is so deficient in properly sourced factual information and full of unsubstantiated, unsourced conclusions, I am appalled that a State’s Attorney would even give it a second look. …”

MORE.

UPDATE II: JIMMY CARTER. I would have expected that an old “white guy” like Jimmy Carter would have a bit of the Cartesian logic in him and come down on the side of the fine jury Zimmerman had. Indeed, here is Former President Jimmy Carter on the George Zimmerman trial:

“I think the jury made the right decision based on the evidence presented,” Carter told Atlanta station WXIA-TV.
“The prosecution inadvertently set the standard so high that the jury had to be convinced that it was a deliberate act by Zimmerman that he was not at all defending himself.” he added.
“It’s not a moral question, it’s a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.”

MORE.

UPDATE III: Walter Block Adjudicates The Law In A Just Society Over at Economic Policy Journal:

Zimmerman was akin to a private (hence justified) cop. He had every right to do what he did. Martin had no right to resist. The only problem I have with this is that Zimmerman should have had some sort of uniform, or badge. Let’s change [the] scenario slightly. Suppose Zimmerman was a real (unjustified govt) cop. There’s no doubt there would not have even have been a trial.

Black Criminality Is Not Part Of The One-Sided ‘Conversation’ On CNN

Crime, Justice, Law, Race

“Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley in “Race, Politics and the Zimmerman Trial”:

Liberals in general, and the black left in particular, like the idea of talking about racial problems, but in practice they typically ignore the most relevant aspects of any such discussion.
Related Video

Political Diary editor Jason Riley on why black civil rights leaders focus on white racism instead of personal responsibility. Photo: Getty Images

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. The U.S. criminal-justice system, which currently is headed by one black man (Attorney General Eric Holder) who reports to another (President Obama), is a reflection of this reality, not its cause.

“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice.” “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”

The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia, under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks. …

The homicide rate claiming black victims today is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.

“Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We’ve got to face that. And we’ve got to do something about our moral standards,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.

MORE.

Still more in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

CNN’s Activist-Anchor Don Lemon: Stupid And Sanctimonious

Affirmative Action, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Intelligence, Journalism, Propaganda, Race, Racism

I am not sure what is worse about Don Lemon, CNN’s deeply stupid host, who held the fort (or the funny farm) during the weekend of George Zimmerman’s acquittal; his racial agenda or his retardation.

Below is an example of a Don-Lemon conducted exchange. Lemon is not working with much (he cautions against drawing a “false equivalent” …), but, like “Judge Glenda Hatchett,” who doesn’t know what constitutes an aggravated assault, Lemon retains his plumb position as activist-anchor.

On July 14, Lemon told a commiserating co-anchor that, and I paraphrase, “People accuse you of having an agenda when in fact you are a journalist, trying to make them see certain things beyond their biases.”

The job of a journalist is to report the facts, not to nudge viewers into the politically pleasing opinions that are held by the cognoscenti at CNN.

But there is something way worse than Lemon’s blatant, aggrieved black-man schtick; Lemon’s stupidity is worse than his sanctimony.

In the transcript below, Lemon doesn’t challenge the guest with whom he agrees; he cheers her on with giggles. David Webb in the opposition is only half the man he is on Fox News, which is a shame:

“So let’s bring in our panel now. I have a feeling that we’re going to have to separate all of these guys. Attorney and TV host Mo Ivory joins us from Atlanta, along with diversity and inclusion expert Buck Davis. In New York, we have radio host and New York City Tea Party co-founder David Webb.

So, Mo, I’m going to start with you first. How does President Obama’s statement affect the fallout from the Zimmerman verdict, if at all?”

MO IVORY, ATTORNEY/TV HOST: Sure, Don. I think the statement gives us a little bit of comfort, and he is the president of the United States and we want to hear from him. We need to hear from him. It’s especially comforting after saying that Trayvon could have been his son. He would have looked like him. I wanted to hear him say something. So it brought me some comfort, but just a little bit because I’m still angry, I’m still upset. I’m trying to process this verdict and figure out where we go from here. So it’s a wonderful thing that he did that but —

LEMON: What are you angry about, Mo? Mo, mo, mo.

(CROSSTALK)

IVORY: — that a murderer got away with murder? No, David, what am I angry about? That you’re asking me that question.

LEMON: No, it’s Don! It’s Don. It’s Don.

IVORY: Ok, Don, I’m angry because a murderer got away with murder. I’m angry because in our system, George Zimmerman’s brother Robert just said that Trayvon had plans for George Zimmerman, and that that rhetoric is going on. A boy was walking to the store and he was getting a snack and he got murdered. And a murderer got away with it yesterday. That’s what I’m mad about.

LEMON: Do you have to be mad about it? Because, listen. People don’t like verdicts all the time. And do you think it’s productive to be angry? I mean, maybe it’s not the right emotion that you’re — I don’t know —

IVORY: No, Don. It’s the right emotion. No, it’s the right emotion. I’m angry about it. I’m angry that we live in the society where this kind of thing can still happen. And that we’re having this conversation like, oh my gosh, I don’t even understand why people are pulling a race card.

You don’t have to pull the race card. It’s out. We live with it everyday. We wake up and it’s out. We go to work and it’s out. We get in our cars and it’s out. We go to trials, and the race card is out. Nobody has to pull it because it lives outside in America every day. That’s why I’m angry. And I think everybody, not just African- Americans, everybody should be angry a 17-year-old boy was murdered in cold blood and the murderer is free.

LEMON: Okay. All right. Mo, let’s get in – Buck, I promise you’re going to get to talk this time. Mo, why are you shaking your head in disagreement here? David? David?

DAVID WEBB, NYC TEA PARTY CO-FOUNDER: Well, look. I understand outrage over not getting the verdict you want. If Mo would actually reach back to the legal premise that exists here which is Skittles is not a crime, walking is not a crime, a hoodie is not a crime. Again, this is a terrible tragedy. But the incident that happened happened —

IVORY: No, shooting somebody in their chest.

WEBB: However, let me finish.

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: Let him finish. Let him finish.

WEBB: Because a young black man was just murdered in Chicago for refusing to join a gang.

LEMON: Wait. Hold on. David, David, David, David, David, David, David, David, David.

(CROSSTALK)

IVORY: What kind of a comparison is that?

LEMON: Stop both of you. Mo! Mo! Stop. David, stop. David, do not do that false equivalent. That is not —

WEBB: No, I’m not trying to equivocate. But the outrage —

LEMON: Yes but listen.

WEBB: I’m not comparing —

LEMON: Crime happens all the time, and because a crime happens, it does not mean that you should shift the focus from what happened here. Let’s stick to this particular plan.

WEBB: Okay. On this issue —

LEMON: We’re talking about this case.

IVORY: Thank you.

WEBB: On this issue, then, the system played out. Again, we needed to see due process, not outside agitation. He was tried. The jury was picked. They were selected. They had a jury that made a decision on second-degree manslaughter – on second-degree murder. On the manslaughter charges, they acquitted him. The system worked.

Now, if you don’t like the verdict, I can understand that. But to take it beyond that into the continued hyperbole of it’s race – in the dark, rainy night with a hoodie on walking away from him and with a 911 call to back it up, he couldn’t even identify him clearly. So he wasn’t racially profiling him. This is a tragedy, and a travesty is when you get to the point where race becomes the overwhelming issue rather than the justice system.

BUCK DAVIS, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION EXPERT: David —

IVORY: The justice system is broken.

LEMON: OK, all right, hold on, guys. You have to let me lead this conversation. So, you have two people of color. I assume you’re both African-American. Excuse me for assuming that.

IVORY: I am. I’m not sure about David.

WEBB: I’m a black man. I’m an American. That’s what it is.

IVORY: Oh, okay. Keep with that.

LEMON: Okay. So – (LAUGHTER) girl, you are crazy. So, you have two people —