† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: Some NFL scouts think that former Stanford halfback and Heisman Trophy runner-up Toby Gerhart is not good enough to be a running back because he is white, reports Yahoo Sports:

When NFL scouts look at Gerhart, they see a 6-foot, 231-pound power back who ran for 1,871 yards and 27 touchdowns last season, getting edged out by Alabama’s Mark Ingram in the closest Heisman vote in history. When they look at Gerhart’s numbers from the NFL scouting combine, they see that he ran a 4.50-second 40-yard dash and registered a 38-inch vertical leap, both impressive numbers for a player his size.

Yet they also see a white guy trying to make it in the league as a feature back, something that has become increasingly rare in this era. …

Race shouldn’t be an issue, of course, but Gerhart can’t help but believe that it has colored the opinions of at least some potential employers.

“One team I interviewed with asked me about being a white running back,” Gerhart says. “They asked if it made me feel entitled, or like I felt I was a poster child for white running backs. I said, ‘No, I’m just out there playing ball. I don’t think about that.’ I didn’t really know what to say.”

One longtime NFL scout insisted that Gerhart’s skin color will likely prevent the Pac-10’s offensive player of the year from being drafted in Thursday’s first round.

“He’ll be a great second-round pickup for somebody, but I guarantee you if he was the exact same guy – but he was black – he’d go in the first round for sure,” the scout said.

The Stiletto doesn’t understand football – baseball’s her game – but she sure knows reverse racism when she sees it.

† What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims (The U.S. Edition): More cartoon violence, this time from radical Islamic website RevolutionMuslim.com, which has posted a threatening message directed to "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone warning that they could end up like Theo van Gogh for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit in the 200^th episode of the show, which was broadcast on Comedy Central last week. FOX News reports:

"We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show," the posting reads. "This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them."

Reaching by phone early Tuesday, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, the author of the post, said he wrote the entry to "raise awareness." He said the grisly photograph of van Gogh was meant to "explain the severity" of what Parker and Stone did by mocking Muhammad.
 

 

"It's not a threat, but it really is a likely outcome," al Amrikee said, referring to the possibility that Parker and Stone could be murdered for mocking Muhammad. "They're going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It's just the reality."

Al Amrikee told FOX, "We should do whatever we can to make sure it does not happen again" (emphasis, The Stiletto). Dead men draw no cartoons, and as past experience shows, this is no idle threat.

† The Media Love Obama, But He Doesn’t Love Them Back: "Don't ask, don't tell" took on a new meaning when reporters were prevented from asking questions of gay rights protesters and telling their readers and viewers about why they were picketing the Obama White House, Politico reports:

Police chased reporters away from the White House and closed Lafayette Park today [when] several service members in full uniform handcuffed themselves to the White House gate to protest "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." 
  

People who have covered the White House for years tell me that's an extremely unusual thing to do in an area that regularly features protests.

A reporter can be seen in the YouTube video above calling the move "outrageous" and "ridiculous."

U.S. Park Police spokesperson David Schlosser later fell on his sword (we “screwed up”), and claimed that the “transparent” Obama White House had “nothing to do” with preventing journalists from exercising their First Amendment rights.

† Healthcare “Reform” Horror Stories: The New York Times calls NY’s mandate to extend individual and small group health insurance coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and to require insurers within each region of the state to charge everyone the same rates for the same benefits “a working laboratory for the core provision of the new federal health care law” and deems it “an expensive lesson in unplanned consequences”:

Premiums for individual and small group policies have risen so high that state officials and patients’ advocates say that New York’s extensive insurance safety net … is falling apart. …

Healthy people, in effect, began to subsidize people who needed more health care. The healthier customers soon discovered that the high premiums were not worth it and dropped out of the plans. The pool of insured people shrank to the point where many of them had high health care needs. Without healthier people to spread the risk, their premiums skyrocketed, a phenomenon known in the trade as the “adverse selection death spiral.”

“You have a mandate that’s accessible in theory, but not in practice, because it’s too expensive,” said Mark P. Scherzer, a consumer lawyer and counsel to New Yorkers for Accessible Health Coverage, an advocacy group. “What you get left clinging to the life raft is the population that tends to have pretty high health needs.”

Since 2001, the number of people who bought comprehensive individual policies through HMOs in New York has plummeted to about 31,000 from about 128,000, according to the State Insurance Department.

At the same time, New York has the highest average annual premiums for individual policies: $6,630 for single people and $13,296 for families in mid-2009, more than double the nationwide average, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry group. …

The new federal health care law tries to avoid the death spiral by requiring everyone to have insurance and penalizing those who do not, as well as offering subsidies to low-income customers. But analysts say that provision could prove meaningless if the government does not vigorously enforce the penalties, as insurance companies fear, or if too many people decide it is cheaper to pay the penalty and opt out.

† Global Warming Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: Hard as climate(change)ologists worked to convince people that man-made global warming is “settled science,” a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59 percent of Americans believe there is “significant disagreement” amongst scientists on this point, an increase of seven points from early December when the “Climategate” scandal broke. In both this latest survey and the one conducted four months ago, 25 percent said scientists agree on global warming. Comparing the relative importance of job creation vs. stopping global warming, 72 percent prioritize jobs while just 16 percent prioritize climate change.

† Multiculturalism Vs. Animal Rights (second item): In what The National Law Journal terms “a strong endorsement of classic First Amendment principles,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to void a 1999 federal law criminalizing the creation, sale or possession of "crush videos" depicting animals being tortured, maimed and killed:

Virginian Robert Stevens was indicted in Pennsylvania under the statute for videos of pit bulls and dog fights that he claimed had educational value. The district court upheld the law and Stevens was found guilty, but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the statute was unconstitutional.

The high court agreed with the appeals court, and sharply criticized the government's defense of the law. In its brief, the Obama administration had said that a balancing test assessing "the value of the speech against its societal costs" could be used to determine if a category of speech belongs inside or outside the protection of the First Amendment.

"That sentence is startling and dangerous," Roberts wrote. The First Amendment, he said, does not only protect speech "that can survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits." …

The Court also dismissed as irrelevant the government's pledge to apply the law narrowly to depictions of extreme cruelty. "This Court will not uphold an unconstitutional statute merely because the Government promises to use it responsibly," Roberts wrote.

While Justice Samuel Alito disagrees with President Barack Hussein Obama on campaign finance laws (second item), he found merit in the administration’s position that does agree with the administration that 18 U. S. C. §48 “was enacted not to suppress speech, but to prevent horrific acts of animal cruelty” and called crush videos “a form of depraved entertainment that has no social value.” In his dissent, Alito dismissed Roberts’ characterization of the federal law as being so broadly written it could include all depictions of killing animals, even hunting videos because the law “clearly” exempted hunting (“[D]epictions of ordinary hunting and fishing activities do not fall within the scope of the statute”), adding “I do not think that the record supports the conclusion that §48, when properly interpreted, is overly broad.”

As far as The Stiletto is concerned Alito’s reasoning is, um, reasonable:

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it most certainly does not protect violent criminal conduct, even if engaged in for expressive purposes. Crush videos present a highly unusual free speech issue because they are so closely linked with violent criminal conduct. The videos record the commission of violent criminal acts, and it appears that these crimes are committed for the sole purpose of creating the videos. In addition, as noted above, Congress was presented with compelling evidence that the only way of preventing these crimes was to target the sale of the videos. Under these circumstances, I cannot believe that the First Amendment commands Congress to step aside and allow the underlying crimes to continue.

The high court’s ruling leaves open the possibility that less expansive legislation banning crush videos would not be struck down on Constitutional grounds.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item,  How ACORN Got Buried By “Squirrelly Right-Wingers”): U.S. Department of Justice attorney Mark Stern asked the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for an emergency stay of a preliminary injunction by Eastern District Judge Nina Gershon to prevent enforcement of a law banning federal funding of ACORN and its affiliates, reports New York Law Journal:

Gershon found that the legislation was an unconstitutional bill of attainder, a rarely litigated bar in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9) on legislation punishing a single person or group.

She denied the government's motion for a stay pending appeal on March 31 and Stern headed for the 2nd Circuit, where he argued Tuesday before Judges Roger J. Miner, Jose A. Cabranes and Richard C. Wesley in ACORN v. United States, 10-992.

Stern claimed that Congress had the right to instruct agencies to withhold funding from ACORN amid "indisputable reports of ACORN mismanagement nationwide."

"This is a case of taking steps on the appropriation of federal funds," Stern said. "And if Congress sees widespread mismanagement, it says 'time out.'"

But Jules Lobel of the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing ACORN, said his client has a "liberty interest in not being suspended from a government contract for more than 30 days without due process."

For her part, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis told reporters that the group is on “life support” and vowed that "[w]e're going to fight like hell to stay alive."

Update: The appellate court granted the DOJ's motion, reinstating the funding ban.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): Thanks to that volcanic eruption in Iceland, Fabian Forde’s two-week vacation to the U.S. with his family threatened to stretch out indefinitely - Virgin Atlantic said May 1^st would be the earliest they could get a confirmed flight back to London - taxing his finances and his employer’s patience. Reading about his predicament in The Washington Post, several Americans came to the rescue, and this latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on them:

Flights from St. Lucia to London are more readily available than they are from the East Coast of the United States.

The Washington-St. Lucia leg will be covered by a local man who is donating his frequent-flier miles and cash vouchers to the family. "I've been there myself, where you're in a tight travel situation," said the donor, an active-duty member of the military, who said he wanted to remain anonymous. "It's always nice in a situation like that to have someone help you out."

The family's plight also brought forth donations from Charles County merchants.

Forde tells The WaPo: "It's been more than a happy ending. … We're absolutely delighted and absolutely grateful."