….of aiding the enemy [the most serious charge].
Why am I not surprised?
And thus ends yet another richly evocative intelligence psyop*….
(See also, Martin-Zimmerman case; Snowden E; Assange, J; etc. etc).
Are you getting the picture?
It’s show-and-tell time.
I’ll leave it to all of you bright things out there to figure out who’s showing and who’s telling……
And what.
One of the few well-considered posts about this case that I have read from the right. It exactly captures my sentiments about how both left and right forgot their wits in the media frenzy.The big libertarian/conservative sites were no exception, sad to say.
Arnold Ahlert at Patriot Post:
“From the moment the Trayvon Martin shooting rose to the national spotlight, the story became entangled in the nation’s diseased dialogue on race. Racial arsonists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson descended on the scene at the head of the left-wing lynch mob to force a verdict of guilty on Zimmerman because he was allegedly white. Without the benefit of evidence, George Zimmerman became a caricature of everything lynchers like Sharpton and Jackson claim America to be — hateful, bigoted and indifferent to the loss of African-American life.
Thus, provoked by years of race-baiting from the left, many conservatives have responded in kind, indulging in a parallel demonization campaign of Trayvon Martin designed as a protest against past injustices by civil rights racists against whites (think no further than the destruction of Paula Deen and the acquittal of O.J. Simpson). In an effort to right decades of racial wrongs, many conservatives have hastily embraced caricatures of Trayvon Martin, painting him as a vicious street thug who deserved his fate. Quite apart from the merits of the legal case, this unseemly effort shows the power of the racist left over the mind of the nation. A look at how this works will hopefully serve as a corrective.
One prominent example of anti-Martin slander is a chain email currently being circulated on the Internet:
Do you know who this is?
It is Little Trayvon Martin…! At 17 yrs of age.
For those of us who thought we were well informed and weren’t…..quite the reality check. That old adage applies here: “there are two sides to every story.”
We don’t always get the truth from the media. One of my favorite rants – the liberal controlled media, television news, newspapers, magazines, radio; all continue to show 12 year old Trayvon; NOT 17 year old Trayvon.
In fact, there are plenty of 17-year-old pictures of Trayvon available but this one (above) is not one of them. It is a photo of Jayceon Terrell Taylor, also known as “The Game,” a 32-year-old rapper from Compton, CA. Yes, Trayvon had tattoos but they didn’t look anything like this. There were two of them. One was a tattoo on his chest of two praying hands with pearls and the names of his grandmother and great-grandmother. The other was a tattoo on his wrist of his mother’s name.
Family photos of the teen shown here give a much different impression of Martin, who is seen on horseback, wearing a jacket, tie and glasses, and posing with other members of his family. Friends and family remember him as warm and funny, as well as a standout athlete with an enormous appetite. Far from being a gangbanger, Trayvon grew up in a close knit middle class family despite a divorce. His mother is a college graduate who has worked for the Miami-Dade housing authority for twenty-four years. His older brother is a well-spoken, mild-mannered senior at Florida International University. His father, a truck driver, maintained a close relationship with his son, even after the divorce. The boys regularly spent weekends at their father’s house and often were there during the week. The night he was killed, Trayvon asked his father’s permission to go to the store for the Skittles and an Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail.
According to the many texts about Trayvon, he towered over Zimmerman. Thus the chain email alleged: “In reality ‘little Trayvon’ at the time of his death stood almost 6’2? tall and weighed 175 muscular pounds.” But according to the autopsy report Martin was actually 5’11” tall and weighed 158 pounds, while Zimmerman was only three inches shorter and weighed 200 pounds.
Trayvon’s football coach, Jerome Horton, characterized him as a fine young man, noting that his father attempted to keep him in line when he acted up. “I’ve watched his dad take him off the field because he messed up in school. We’d beg and plead, but he would just say, ‘No, he isn’t going to play.'” On a recent “Nancy Grace Show,” Martin’s coach said he had seen Trayvon the week before the shooting. Trayvon told him he was quitting football because he wanted to go to aviation school and become a pilot. The coach said black people don’t become pilots. Martin replied, “Then I’m going to be the first.”
Trayvon had incidents of misbehavior, but none as serious as Zimmerman, who was jailed for attacking a police officer. On the other hand, the anti-Trayvon literature, of which “The Game” email is representative, portray him as an of out-of-control gangster with a criminal record, who sold drugs and “had numerous run-ins with authorities (both at school and local police).” He is described as a “drug dealing … tattooed thug whose name on one of his Facebook profiles was ‘Wild Nigga’ [and] who ‘finds’ jewelry and burglary tools on the way to school.”
But Martin’s documented “numerous run-ins with authorities” show him to be little more than a rambunctious teenager. They consist of three suspensions from school. The first one, according to his parents, was for tardiness and truancy. His second was for graffiti, when he and some of his friends wrote “W.T.F.” on a school locker. The day after that incident, a school police investigator, who had seen Martin on a surveillance camera, went through his book bag in search of the graffiti marker. He discovered 12 pieces of jewelry, in addition to a watch and a large flathead screwdriver he described as a “burglary tool,” according to a Miami-Dade Schools Police report obtained by the Miami Herald. Martin said the jewelry belonged to a friend. The jewelry was impounded and Martin’s official suspension was for the graffiti.
The third suspension was for possession of a bag with marijuana residue and a “marijuana pipe,” as reported by Miami-Dade police. Martin was not criminally charged, but the school suspended him for ten days due to its zero-tolerance drug policy. Half the populations of private schools in Beverly Hills have probably seen more serious drug use than this.
Martin has also been accused of slapping a bus driver in the face and being “almost arrested.” The basis for the claim is his Twitter account, since taken down. Martin tweeted under the handle “NOLIMITNIGGA.” According to WAGIST.com, a message was sent to Martin on February 21st that read, “yu ain’t tell me yu swung on a bus driver.” The message was tweeted five days before Martin was killed. No evidence has ever emerged that Martin assaulted a bus driver, yet the story continues through rumor and misinformation.
That’s the extent of Martin’s “record.” Unlike Zimmerman, Martin had no police record.
The Game photo is far from the only fake image of Martin to have surfaced. One of those fakes was allegedly of Martin wearing “county orange” flipping off the camera with both hands, with his pants sagging down around his waist. The photo was posted on Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy.com, a conservative website. The young man in the picture was indeed of a Trayvon Martin, but it was another Trayvon Martin who is alive and well and whose relatives live in Savannah, GA. Twitchy.com issued an apology.
Perhaps Trayvon Martin isn’t a candidate for sainthood. The 17-year-old used foul language, made obscene gestures on camera, probably smoked marijuana, and engaged in other troublesome teenage behavior. But he was no gangster. Perhaps he was too volatile that night when Zimmerman followed him. Perhaps Zimmerman did fear for his life in the scuffle that ensued. Perhaps the failure of the prosecution to establish that it wasn’t a case of self-defense means that Zimmerman should be acquitted. Nonetheless, what happened should be seen as a tragedy involving two well-meaning individuals who acted without fully appreciating the possible consequences of their actions. It should not be seen as an acting out of the nation’s melodrama on race. That is reserved for the crowds of spectators who have clamored for a verdict before the trial and distorted the facts but who, in a more healthy time, would have left the wheels of justice to turn on their own.”
The reformed libertarian.blogspot.com:
“Being a gun-owner myself I believe people have the right to own guns and defend themselves or others if the extreme circumstance presents itself. However, in my opinion these “Make My Day” laws take defense a step too far. These law allow not only the ability to fatally shoot someone if you think they may threaten you, but they also let someone provoke a fight and still claim self-defense and they also allow you to fatally shoot someone to defend property. So if a shootout happens between two gun owners, whoever “wins” gets to claim self-defense. This is like a return to old spaghetti western movies. While I love those movies I don’t like the idea of them happening in real life.
So, where are all these “Make My Day” laws coming from? Well, they start out being sponsored by Walmart and gun manufacturers to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is a Koch brother’s (among others) sponsored conservative organization that creates boiler plate legislation to be pushed through state legislatures, in this case with the help of the National Rifle Association (NRA) [Source 1].
Why would Walmart want this legislation pushed through? Well, Walmart is one of the largest gun retailers in the United States and if guns that were sold in their stores are linked to non-justifiable homicide they are open to possible litigation and damages. How better to avoid this risk than expand what counts as justifiable homicide?
Conspiracy theories aside, the facts show that since the introduction of these instances of “justifiable” homicides have skyrocketed. In Florida alone the number of reported “Justifiable Homicides” jumped from 12 to 36 after the passing of their statute [Source 2]. That is a 300% increase! All of the other states with similar statutes have seen the same remarkable jumps in justifiable homicides. Whether these laws have actually lowered the instance of crime, will not be known until crime statistics get released for 2011.
So, there is a time and a place for defending yourself but our laws should not allow for people to shoot without thinking and have no repercussions. We live in a civilized modern society, please lets not revert back to the dusty streets of the cowboy westerns I so love watching.”
1) ALEC info, ALEC Exposed, http://alecexposed.org/wiki/What_is_ALEC%3F
3) Justifiable Homicides, Think Progress, http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/04/09/460542/stand-your-ground-laws-coincide-with-jump-in-justifiable-homicides
Comment:
Think Progress is a liberal outfit, funded by Soros, so I’m going to have to look twice at those figures and see that they really are accurate, but the Walmart angle is interesting.
The Atlantic Wire clears the record on the racial optics of stand-your-ground in Florida:
“There’s one specific situation in which blacks “benefited” from the “stand your ground” law, if you will. Killings of whites by blacks were slightly more likely to be found justified than killings of whites by whites. But otherwise, the law has been less than helpful to the state’s black community. Nearly four-in-five killings of black people where it has been invoked have resulted in the killer being freed. It’s hard to see the benefit in that.”
More evidence of Florida’s police-state mentality:
“Well, it’s official. Florida governor Rick Scott signed into legislation the “Internet Cafe Ban,” which effectively closed down around 1,000 such establishments in the state. The ban went into effect immediately, though some cafes shut their doors a week ago under the assumption that the ban would go through.
A report in Florida Today paints a picture of displaced senior citizens who had been meeting at the cafes to socialize with one another, hop on the Internet, and for legal gambling, the latter of which is what prompted the ban in the first place.”
Eric Holder was the Assistant Attorney General at the time of the disgraceful shooting of Randy Weaver, the murder of David Koresh and his followers at Waco, and the pardon of Marc Rich.
Now, again, he has shown his dangerous talent for inflaming an already incendiary situation. It seems best that he step down.
It is not simply his role in racializing the national debate over the Trayvon Martin case in a way that probably led directly to the prosecution over-charging Zimmerman (and thus losing the case).
There is a further issue. The issue of stand-your-ground laws need to be addressed by someone with credibility on the subject, an honest broker, not a race-huckster.
Third problem. Holder continues to stir racial feeling by threatening to pursue a civil rights case, even when it has no application, as in the Martin case.
“The Constitution’s Reconstruction Amendments primarily target state officials, not private individuals, for depriving others of their federal rights. Zimmerman was not acting under “color of law” — indeed, the state of Florida has just tried to prosecute him.
Holder may envisage prosecuting Zimmerman under laws prohibiting private conspiracies to deprive people of their federal rights. But that approach would pose serious constitutional problems.
Martin’s killing, however tragic, is purely intra-state, by one private individual against another. There is no broad conspiracy to frustrate federal law, perhaps in silent cooperation with state authorities, as happened in days gone by with the Ku Klux Klan.
The prosecution’s own witnesses admitted at trial that Zimmerman had not acted out of racial bias. The FBI’s findings confirmed that. Even under federal hate crime law, which itself may be unconstitutional, a federal prosecution would be unsuccessful without proof of racial motive.
Holder’s decision is the most recent example of his practice of abusing prosecutorial discretion, misinterpreting the law, and deploying criminal justice for political ends. “
From Tampa Bay.com:
Tavarious China Smith was not particularly lucky. A small-time drug dealer in Manatee County, Smith sold crack and marijuana not once, not twice, but three times to undercover cops.
But in one respect, Smith, 29, hit the jackpot.
On two occasions, more than two years apart, he committed homicides but was not charged thanks to provisions of Florida’s “stand your ground” law. Smith claimed self-defense in both cases and prosecutors agreed. He never faced a judge or jury for fatally shooting Nikita Williams, 18, in February 2008 in a drug-related incident or Breon Mitchell, Williams’ 23-year-old half-brother, in December 2010.
Smith’s only punishment stemmed from using a gun to kill Mitchell. Since he was by then a felon, convicted on drug charges, Smith wasn’t allowed to carry the Ruger .357 Magnum he used to shoot Mitchell outside a Palmetto nightclub in 2010. In January, a federal judge in Tampa sent Smith to prison after he pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The state’s expanded self-defense laws have come under scrutiny since the fatal shooting in February in Sanford of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. A task force appointed by the governor is reviewing whether the 2005 law is being applied correctly.
Prosecutors say it has too often been used to protect gang members and drug dealers in shoot-outs. Although it does not apply if the defendant is committing a crime, the law does not define criminal activity and courts have differed on their interpretations of the statute. As a Times database of nearly 200 “stand your ground” cases shows, simply being a felon in possession of a gun or a drug dealer has not prevented defendants from successfully invoking the law.
Arthur Brown is the assistant state attorney in Manatee County who reviewed both of Smith’s homicides and declined to prosecute Smith in the Mitchell case. He said both were clear-cut cases of self-defense and that provisions of the “stand your ground” law only strengthened Smith’s claims.
“I agree this was probably not the class of people lawmakers were trying to protect when they wrote this law,” Brown said. “But the law provides a larger umbrella than simply the homeowner that’s protecting his house.”
Another good piece at Slate (by William Saletan) about the Trayvon Martin case, which basically agrees with me that Zimmerman is no hero. He was an idiot who provoked an entirely unnecessary and deadly conflict. The only thing I disagree with him is that Florida law was not an issue.
It sure was. A juror indicated that it was the defining factor in analyzing whether Zimmerman had a right to self-defense and if so, how it was constituted. Stand your ground informs the whole CopsRUs attitude of a lot of folks down here.
“Chief prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda conceded in his closing argument that these words were ambiguous. De la Rionda also acknowledged, based on witness and forensic evidence, that both men “were scraping and rolling and fighting out there.” He pointed out that the wounds, blood evidence, and DNA didn’t match Zimmerman’s story of being thoroughly restrained and pummeled throughout the fight. But the evidence didn’t fit the portrait of Martin as a sweet-tempered child, either. And the notion that Zimmerman hunted down Martin to accost him made no sense. Zimmerman knew the police were on the way.
[Lila: There Saletan forgets that some prescription drugs can make you overly anxious and paranoid]
They arrived only a minute or so after the gunshot. The fight happened in a public area surrounded by townhouses at close range. It was hardly the place or time to start shooting.
That doesn’t make Zimmerman a hero. It just makes him a reckless fool instead of a murderer. In a post-verdict press conference, his lawyer, Mark O’Mara, claimed that “the evidence supported that George Zimmerman did nothing wrong,” that “the jury decided that he acted properly in self-defense,” and that Zimmerman “was never guilty of anything except protecting himself in self-defense. I’m glad that the jury saw it that way.” That’s complete BS. The only thing the jury decided was that there was reasonable doubt as to whether Zimmerman had committed second-degree murder or manslaughter.
Zimmerman is guilty, morally if not legally, of precipitating the confrontation that led to Martin’s death. He did many things wrong. Mistake No. 1 was inferring that Martin was a burglar. In his 911 call, Zimmerman cited Martin’s behavior. “It’s raining, and he’s just walking around” looking at houses, Zimmerman said. He warned the dispatcher, “He’s got his hand in his waistband.” He described Martin’s race and clothing only after the dispatcher asked about them. Whatever its basis, the inference was false.
Mistake No. 2 was pursuing Martin on foot. Zimmerman had already done what the neighborhood watch rules advised: He had called the police. They would have arrived, questioned Martin, and ascertained that he was innocent. Instead, Zimmerman, packing a concealed firearm, got out and started walking after Martin. Zimmerman’s initial story, that he was trying to check the name of the street, was so laughable that his attorneys abandoned it. He was afraid Martin would get away. So he followed Martin, hoping to update the cops.
Mistake No. 3 was Zimmerman’s utter failure to imagine how his behavior looked to Martin. You’re a black kid walking home from a convenience store with Skittles and a fruit drink. Some dude in a car is watching and trailing you. God knows what he wants. You run away. He gets out of the car and follows you. What are you supposed to do? In Zimmerman’s initial interrogation, the police expressed surprise that he hadn’t identified himself to Martin as a neighborhood watch volunteer. They suggested that Martin might have been alarmed when Zimmerman reached for an object that Zimmerman, but not Martin, knew was a phone.
[So if Martin threw the first punch, it was probably because he thought he was going to be shot, which, given the way the militarized police think, is a pretty darn good guess.]
Zimmerman seemed baffled. He was so convinced of Martin’s criminal intent that he hadn’t considered how Martin, if he were innocent, would perceive his stalker.
[Lila: Bingo!]
Martin, meanwhile, was profiling Zimmerman. On his phone, he told a friend he was being followed by a “creepy-ass cracker.” The friend—who later testified that this phrase meant pervert—advised Martin, “You better run.”
[Lila: Martin thought the guy was going to rape him, at gun point. He was 200 pounds, you know. Martin was a teen boy. The worst thing he feared was being raped by a man.]
She reported, as Zimmerman did, that Martin challenged Zimmerman, demanding to know why he was being hassled. If Zimmerman’s phobic misreading of Martin was the first wrong turn that led to their fatal struggle, Martin’s phobic misreading of Zimmerman may have been the second.
In court, evidence and scrutiny have exposed these difficult, complicated truths. But outside the court, ideologues are ignoring them. They’re oversimplifying a tragedy that was caused by oversimplification.
Martin has become Emmett Till. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is using the verdict to attack Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which wasn’t invoked in this case. The grievance industrial complex is pushing the Department of Justice to prosecute Zimmerman for bias-motivated killing, based on evidence that didn’t even support a conviction for unpremeditated killing. Zimmerman’s lawyers have teamed up with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, inadvertently, to promote the false message that Zimmerman’s acquittal means our society thinks everything he did was OK.”
Comment:
I agree with everything in this insightful piece, except for the exoneration of the laws of Florida.
With the qualification that these sorts of reports from the establishment alternatives might be part of a co-ordinated effort to push forward gun control, the numbers of killings of black men by police/vigilantes is the context you need to keep in mind when looking at the Zimmerman case.
This case isn’t really about race, which is how it was massaged, so much as it is about the police state, and Florida is possibly the best example of that in the US.
Not only can you have a jury of only SIX people for a murder trial (rather than the usual 12), you have the state’s ambiguously worded stand-your-ground laws, and a culture of impunity for the police.
The cops are everywhere in Florida, usually ticketing and harassing ordinary citizens over petty issues. There are too many of them. There’s too much money in the business. They have to manufacture incidents. Zimmerman had sucked in that poisonous atmosphere. He was a cop wannabe, as I said.
Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extrajudicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012 according to a recent study. This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours. The report notes that it’s possible that the real number could be much higher.
The report, entitled “Operation Ghetto Storm”, was performed by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an antiracist grassroots activist organization. The organization has chapters in Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth-Dallas, Jackson, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, and Washington, D.C. It has a history of organizing campaigns against police brutality and state repression in black and brown communities. Their study’s sources included police and media reports along with other publicly available information. Last year, the organization published a similar study showing that a black person is killed by security forces every 36 hours. However, this study did not tell the whole story, as it only looked at shootings from January to June 2012. Their latest study is an update of this.
These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face. Mass incarceration ofnonwhites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13.1% of the nation’s population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the same rate as whites, they are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses.
“Operation Ghetto Storm” explains why such killings occur so often. Current practices of institutional racism have roots in the enslavement of black Africans, whose labor was exploited to build the American capitalist economy, and the genocide of Native Americans. The report points out that in order to maintain the systems of racism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation, the United States maintains a network of “repressive enforcement structures”. These structures include the police, FBI, Homeland Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies, along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.“
Robert Wenzel at EconomicPolicyJournal:
From FreeAdamKokesh:
Adam was forcibly arraigned very early this morning. He is being held without bail pending a probable cause hearing. Early this morning, he was dragged barefoot in shorts out of the cage they put him in and carted to the arraignment in a wheelchair. He did not participate in the arraignment because he has been denied access to a lawyer.
Adam was able to make a call to his father. His father thinks that Adam may not be allowed to make another call anytime soon.
Adam wants a lawyer. He has requested access to a lawyer constantly since being caged. He refuses to go to court without a lawyer. Adam’s manager, Lucas Jewell, is working on getting him trusted counsel ASAP.
Adam is being held in solitary confinement in a 6.5? x 7.5? cage without bedding. He was kidnapped while wearing shorts and has not been given proper clothing to protect him from the frigid temperatures that have become standard operating procedure in America’s prisons.
Adam reports via his father that the cage he has been locked into is infested with ants. Furthermore, the lights are kept on by the guards 24 hours per day without any break for rest.
A public defender is expected to be appointed at 3PM Eastern today. 3:20PM EDT Update: I spoke with the public defender’s office and they still have not received the paperwork from the court that is required before appointing a public defender. One will not be appointed today (11 Jul 2013).
Adam’s phone call to his father was monitored by a sheriff’s deputy standing right next to him as he spoke with his father.
During the attack on his home Tuesday evening, the flashbang (stun grenade) deployed by militarized US Park Police exploded right in front of Adam. He reports that he has yet to receive any medical care inside the prison.
During the attack, Adam reports that the Park Police covered his chest with laser-sight red dots even when he had his hands up.
A sheriff’s deputy informed Adam that charges of illegal transportation of a firearm, sedition and armed sedition are being considered against him, presumably by federal prosecutors. (Oxford defines sedition as “conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.”
Eyewitnesses to the attack on Adam and his companions Tuesday night report that US Park Police brought large brown paper evidence bags in with them before their search that appeared to be full. There is a concern that they planted evidence…”
