UPDATE (March 29): Eric, you are correct. As I write in my upcoming weekly column, “Granted, Trayvon’s tweets are not germane to the facts of his slaying. They are, nonetheless, telling.” The Courts in recent decades have moved to strip a prosecution or a defense of the legitimate contextual arguments (such as priors) that go to character and motive. For example, the stripper in the Duke lacrosse case was a shady sort who shook down others. This, we are supposed to believe, had no relevance in the Nifonging of the players. So I think a full picture of this boy and his shooter are relevant to the inquiry. I’m for more, not fewer, facts, so long as they are not confused with the facts of the crime.
Increasing interventionism is always accompanied by the use of brute force, the legitimacy of which the nation’s Supreme Politburo Of Proctologists(the SCOTUS) is currently debating.
Not surprisingly, “the four jurists appointed by Democratic presidents — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — seemed sympathetic to the government’s defense of the [ObamaCare], at times offering Solicitor General Donald Verrilli helpful answers to their colleagues’ questions,” reports the National Journal’s Margot Sanger-Katz. “Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia — who had been considered by some Court watchers to be in play — seemed to stand firmly with the challengers.”
Equally predictable: “Chief Justice John Roberts, whose questions suggested a discomfort with the health care law, … also defended the government’s argument at times.”
Both Kennedy and Roberts will probably find a way to make ObamaCare palatable by papering over arguments against it. While they “seemed particularly concerned about the question of whether upholding this law would mean that Congress’s authority to pass regulation would be virtually unbounded, [t]hey repeatedly asked Verrilli to identify a limiting principle that would allow this mandate to go forward without opening the door to requirements to purchase other products.” [NJ]
The gist of the case being argued:
The 26 states challenging the mandate say it is an unprecedented demand, one that regulates economic “inactivity” and forces people into purchasing a product they do not want. If the government can compel the purchase of health insurance, they argue, then nearly any sort of purchase mandate could also be permitted. The administration counters that there’s basically no avoiding the health care market: Everyone needs health care at some time, often with little warning or financial preparation. Health insurance is not a standalone product, but merely a means of regulating the financing of that activity, it says
The elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses are unconstitutional. However, despite the fact that there is no warrant in the Constitution for most of what the Federal Frankenstein does, the Proctologists will find a way around what is already a dead-letter document.
Is balance so much to ask for in the Trayvon Martin case? By balance I do not mean “Fair and Balanced” a la Fox News, or Andy Cooper’s “Keeping them Honest” deal.
What I mean is this: The deceased youth, Martin, appears to have been targeted unfairly. The facts of the shooting should be reviewed impartially. But for every Trayvon victimized by an Hispanic (if this is indeed the case), thousands of whites are brutalized by a sinecured black, criminal class, members of whom never get called out for what are crimes rooted in racial hatred.
Courtesy of “Suicide of a Superpower” come the FBI’s crime figures for 2007: “Blacks committed 433,934 violent crimes against whites, eight times as many as the 55,685 that whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black-on-white, with 14,000 assaults on white women by African American males in 2007. Not one case of white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.” (Page 243.)
Not so long ago, the slaughtering of twenty-one-year-old Channon Christian and twenty-three-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2007, was dismissed as a racially neutral, garden-variety murder and rape.
Read my description of the crime in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, and explain to me how white America can thus forsake its children by accepting the racial innocence of their defilers:
Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused “by the tearing,” or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash. White trash. (pp. 35-36)
There are quite a few like it every year. Here’s one. Here is another. And still another. Want more? You got it. The name of the black rapist and killer of an 85-year-old lady: Tyrone Dale David. Oh, but this wasn’t racial subjugation, only sexual attraction, right? Yeah, right.
An even treatment of the Trayvon travesty would recognize and dignify the reality of crime in this country, and the daily black-on-white brutality, much of it rooted in a deep racial hatred, animus nurtured by the media and the political and academic cognoscenti.
UPDATE I: In reply to a Facebook reader: The racial extravaganza—show of brute force from race hustlers—is most certainly an issue here. Thus, to encourage an examination of the facts of the case, sans hysteria, one has to discount the circus. To do that, one has to discuss the reality of crime; who, on aggregate, brutalizes who in this country. To do that, you have to dispense with the idea that blacks are habitually victimized. They are not. Then you go on to deal with the offender in this case as an atypical offender.
UPDATE II (March 24): A doff of the hat to our reader for providing information that has emerged since Zimmerman’s public vilification began. It confirms that all information has to be gathered and processed before public pronunciations are made:
Witness: Martin attacked Zimmerman: MyFoxTAMPABAY.com
“The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me: ‘help, help…and I told him to stop and I was calling 911,” he said.
Trayvon Martin was in a hoodie; Zimmerman was in red.
The witness only wanted to be identified as “John,” and didn’t not want to be shown on camera.
His statements to police were instrumental, because police backed up Zimmerman’s claims, saying those screams on the 911 call are those of Zimmerman.
“When I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point,” John said.
Zimmerman says the shooting was self defense. According to information released on the Sanford city website, Zimmerman said he was going back to his SUV when he was attacked by the teen.
Sanford police say Zimmerman was bloody in his face and head, and the back of his shirt was wet and had grass stains, indicating a struggle took place before the shooting.
Judicial punishment can never be used solely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for society, but instead must in all cases be imposed on a person solely on the ground that he has committed a crime….woe to him who rummages around in the winding paths of a theory of happiness looking for some advantage to be gained by releasing the criminal from punishment or by reducing the amount of it….
Not a day goes by when examples of this crookedness don’t present themselves. While French SWAT teams were taking days to bring to an end a stake-out at a Toulouse apartment building in southern France—they were waiting on the killer of three French paratroopers, a rabbi and three children to “surrender” or kill more innocent bystanders—a cabinet minister told RT that the purpose of democracy was to capture criminals alive, not kill them.
Given the ever-expanding remit of democracy, the French official is probably correct. All I know is that the purpose of a just government is to protect the lives and property of non-aggressors.
Next, on the grounds that “capital punishment is wrong in principle and should be abolished,” and that a worldly, wise authority should enforce this universal understanding—the perverse EU is threatening Belarus’ Lukashenka regime “with sanctions … listing 21 judges and top police officers who face travel bans and asset freezes in the EU.”
“Lukashenka had last week refused to pardon the two men, Dzmitry Kanavalau and Uladzislau Kavalyou, both aged 26, who were convicted last year for a number of offences, including a deadly attack on the Minsk metro,” in which 15 people were killed and over 200 injured.
It’s one thing to question the quality of justice and due process in Belarus, and advocate for judicial review of proceedings in the trial. But it is quite another to have demanded that the two men be pardoned (as Human Rights Watch has done)—they have since been executed for the massacre in the metro station of the Belarusian capital—no less, and the death penalty repealed, which is what these arrogant internationalists are demanding.
