A current events round-up for conservatives
THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Turning back the tide of information overload with a digest of the latest developments in news conservatives need to pay attention to:
† Protected class warfare: As the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin became widely reported in the national media, an unarmed black teenager The Washington Post noted that the 28-year-old Floridian who pulled the trigger was “once a Catholic altar boy – with a surname that could have been Jewish.” Only George Zimmerman’s father is white, mother is Peruvian and he has several black relatives:
There may be no box to check for, no tidy way to categorize, define and sort … forcing America to once again confront its fraught relationship with race and identity. …
Zimmerman’s father has sought to emphasize his family’s diversity in hopes of saving his son from condemnation as a racist. … George is “a Spanish-speaking minority,” the father wrote in a letter delivered to the Orlando Sentinel. “He would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever.” George, the father insisted, was more like the boy he killed than people thought. George was a minority – the other – too.
But the argument that the father is making feels hollow and self-serving to Michaela Angela Davis, an African American writer and activist who lives in New York. In her eyes, George Zimmerman’s Hispanic roots don’t give him cover.
“You being a minority doesn’t make you immune to racist beliefs,” she said in an interview Thursday. Davis sees a pervasive cultural imprint, reinforced by media and entertainment imagery: the black man as a symbol of “violence, fear and deviant behavior.”
The New Black Panther party agrees with Davis, and put out a “wanted dead or alive” poster for George Zimmerman and put a $10K bounty on his head.
As he is wont to do, President Barack Hussein Obama rashly jumped into the fray with both feet (related article, second item on the page) before all the facts have come out, declaring, “If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.” As witnesses are coming forward to corroborate Zimmerman’s contention that he acted in self-defense after Martin began beating on him viciously and publically vouching for Zimmerman’s character, the president raised the question whether his hypothetical son would also behave like Trayvon. After all, Obama would reflexively see a victim of racism when he looked at his son – dismissing any possibility that he might actually be a hoodlum.
† AZ becomes the epicenter of civility: The Stiletto is wondering just what those worthies who run the National Institute for Civil Discourse at University of Arizona will do about the rude and downright nasty tweets regarding former Vice President Dick Cheney’s heart transplant. Amongst the worst: “Whoever donated their heart to dick cheney: f*ck you” and “Rick Santorum asks to take Cheney’s old dead heart to show to his family.” Or these twitticisms offered by left-wing comedians like podcaster/comic Marc Maron (um, The Stiletto hasn’t heard of him, either): “Cheney’s heart transplant was the first done with a living donor. He watched as they cut it out, held it and placed it in his own chest.”
† Obama’s family values: In her biography of President Barack Hussein Obama’s mother, Anne Dunham, New York Times reporter Janny Scott discovered that during the 2008 campaign, Obama repeatedly lied about his cancer-stricken mother having to fight her health insurer to pay for treatment for what it classified as a pre-existing condition (related article, penultimate item on the page). As it turns out, the dispute was with the insurer providing her disability coverage, not her healthcare coverage – and Obama, who served as her attorney in the matter, was fully aware that her health insurer reimbursed most of her medical expenses.
Now, the lie is repeated in Obama’s re-election campaign infomercial, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” narrated by Tom Hanks. As Commentary notes:
Having won election and then rammed his ObamaCare bill through Congress in part on the strength of this false argument, he has doubled down on it with the lie now coming from the lips of American’s favorite everyman, actor Tom Hanks as well as in edited clips of interviews with the president and his wife. … [T]he story proves that Obama is willing to do and/or say anything, even lying about the death of his mother, in order to gain an advantage. That he thinks repeating the lie will help him get re-elected says a lot about what he thinks of the intelligence of the American people and the integrity of the press that failed to vet him the first time around.
† When environmental values collide: It's not just golden eagles being sacrificed for what bureaucrats deem a larger environmental goal (related article, third article on the page). A federal judge in Washington, D.C. refused to grant a temporary restraining order sought by the Humane Society to stop the National Marine Fisheries Service from proceeding with a plan to allow 92 sea lions in OR, WA and ID to be killed each year over a five-year period to facilitate the spawning of salmon and steelheads 146 miles up the Columbia River at the Washington-Oregon border, The Wall Street Journal reports:
Both the sea lions and the fish are protected species under federal law. …
[The judge] limited the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho to removing and killing 30 sea lions this year while the case is being heard. …
In court papers, the Humane Society had argued that sea lions eat up to 4.2% of the salmon and steelhead that spawn in the Columbia River, while fisherman are allowed to take up to 17% of the adults and another 17% a year are lost to hydroelectric dams.
The Obama administration routinely picks winners and losers in commerce and industry, and now bureaucrats are deliberately circumventing Darwinism and making decisions to kill one species to help ensure the perpetuation of another species. The other side of the coin is the ruthless application of Darwinism to healthcare treatment decisions so that bureaucrats pick who gets to live and who must die.
† Multiculturalism: Jihad by other means: If the Labor party’s Ken Livingstone is elected mayor of London he promises to “spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands” the Prophet Mohammed’s last sermon, which he believes is “an agenda for all humanity,” The Daily Telegraph (London) reports:
Mr Livingstone was speaking at … the North London Central Mosque, also known as Finsbury Park Mosque, formerly controlled by the terrorist recruiter Abu Hamza.
Hamza was removed in 2003 but the mosque is now controlled by an Islamist organisation, the Muslim Association of Britain, which has been linked to the banned terror group, Hamas. A man who has acted as spokesman for the current leadership, Azzam Tamimi, is on record as supporting suicide bombings. One of the mosque’s current directors, Mohammed Sawalha, is described by the BBC as a former senior figure in Hamas who “is said to have masterminded much of Hamas’s political and military strategy” from his post in London.
In 2009 Mr Sawalha also signed the Istanbul Declaration which calls for attacks against the allies of Israel, which include the UK. The British Government interpreted it as calling for attacks on British troops.
Against this backdrop, the issue of whether to criminalize forced marriages is a hot topic in Britain, writes Huma Yusuf, a columnist for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn: Rights groups estimate that there are between 5,000 and 8,000 forced marriages here each year, most commonly among Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other U.K.-based Muslim communities. In 2007, England passed the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act, recognizing psychological, financial and emotional coercion as elements of a forced marriage. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Forced Marriage Unit gave advice on how to manage coercion and seek help in 1,468 instances of possible forced marriages last year. Last May, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee urged the government (pdf) to criminalize forced marriages; in October, [Prime Minister David Cameron] publicly backed the move, describing forced marriage as “little more than slavery.” … British Muslims have already complained that the new law could be seen as anti-Muslim. … One good thing to come out of this debate is, well, the debate itself. Diaspora communities are relieved that this issue is finally being discussed, Tehmina Kazi, the director of the British Muslims for Secular Democracy, told me. “The debate is encouraging people to speak out about their own experiences.” Chances are, no legislation can be as effective in curtailing forced marriages as growing awareness and empowerment within the affected communities themselves. † Skeletal pundit Alan Colmes is just another liberal ghoul: Back in January, when libs were telling dead baby jokes (related article, second item on the page), The Stiletto observed that the Santorums taking their stillborn child home so his siblings could see him before he was buried was far less weird than women eating their placentas. Nancy Redd – who lived next to a raw food restaurant and a homeopathic pharmacy in Santa Monica, CA and was told by her hospital’s birthing class that “eating one’s own placenta as a natural way to ward off postpartum depression” – now regrets ingesting her afterbirth in capsule form: After our son’s birth, I was meticulous about what went into my body. I declined all pain medication stronger than ibuprofen, and I even stopped using deodorant, fearing the rumors were true that aluminum might seep into my breast milk. I was a cheerful and healthy new mother. … Shortly after my first dose of two pills, I felt jittery and weird. By the next day, after just eight placenta pills, I was in tabloid-worthy meltdown mode, a frightening phase filled with tears and rage. This lasted another couple of awful days before my husband suggested that it wasn’t postpartum mommy madness finally making its appearance, but the hormone-and-goodness-knows-what-else-filled placenta pills. … While the Internet is teeming with individual pro-placenta stories, they are as anecdotal, and in my case as absurdly off beam, as alien sightings. Eight months later my son and I are fine, but I’m kicking myself for being so gullible without a single shred of proof. … Part of the reason I wanted to eat my placenta in the first place is that I am fascinated by the human body and all that it can do. The placenta is an incredible organ that deserves celebration. But – as with the appendix and other organs that the body tends to deem unnecessary – once it comes out, maybe it should stay out. Whether you think either, both or neither of these practices is strange, note that the Santorums wanted to help the rest of their family heal and recover from the loss of their brother and grandson, whereas Redd’s main motivation was her own well-being. † Brooklyn food co-op debates boycotting Israeli products: The Park Slope Food Co-op is being torn asunder over whether to boycott products from Israel to protest the Israeli government’s policies toward Palestinians – or is it? Most co-op members “seem uninterested in, or even annoyed by, all the arguing” amongst pro- and anti-boycott advocates, The New York Times reports: As one co-op member, an Internet entrepreneur, put it, “A lot of people couldn’t care less about the progressive stuff.” … Outside the co-op the other night, activists from each side of the debate tried to buttonhole members, only to be ignored by most. “Can we encourage you to vote no?” an antiboycott activist asked as he thrust a leaflet at Ron Eugenio, who was with his wife, Jenny, and daughter, Violette. “I’ll read it and figure it out,” he replied, quickly moving away. As the couple carried their purchases to their car, Mr. Eugenio, a case manager at an intellectual property law firm, and Ms. Eugenio, an admissions director at a private school in Manhattan, said they joined the co-op for the healthy, inexpensive food. “It’s not to make a political statement,” Mr. Eugenio said. As she waited for a car to pick her up, Mechama Marcus, a graphic designer, patiently listened to an activist’s arguments. After a pause, she said cheerfully, “I’m for good food!” The activist moved toward another target. Ms. Marcus looked down at her brimming shopping cart and sighed. “I have a lot of cooking to do,” she said. † All the news that’s fart to print: Nassau County is not exactly flush with money and County Executive Ed Mangano wants to impose a sewer use fee on area schools (AKA, the “toilet tax”). Nineteen school districts are banding together to sue, WCBS (Channel 2, NY) reports: “This is clearly a tax and the reality is that school districts are tax-exempt organizations,” said Greg Guercio, the attorney for the school districts. The one penny-per gallon fee translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars for bigger school districts. For East Williston, it would amount to $87,000 this year alone. “For us, it’s a large amount of money. It’s like a teacher salary,” East Williston Assistant Superintendent for Business Jackie Fitzpatrick said. The fight will likely go to trial. While the case is pending districts don’t have to pay the fee, but have to budget for it, and that could mean raising taxes. Other not-for-profits like houses of worship and fire houses will not be required to pay the new fee.
I've been following the Trayvon Martin case and my working hypothesis is that Zimmerman accosted Martin as a person who looked like the group implicated in several break-ins in the neighborhood. Young and black, yes, but only because the alleged criminals were young and black, not because he had any racism regarding blacks. He accosted Trayvon Martin and Trayvon Martin stood HIS ground. (credit Rich Lowry for this observation . There was a case here in Alaska where a man started a fight with someone. His opponent had him down on the ground, kicking him in the head and he flailed at him with a knife to get him to back off, severing his femoral artery. The man bled out in minutes and the guy who started the fight was found guilty of second degree murder. That verdict may have been overly harsh but the point remains that you should not be able to claim self-defense in a fight you start.
Note to Obama: Trayvon Martin looks like MY son as much as his. Like anyone's son. 17 with his whole future that just became fiction. Obama's attempt to sneak the race card into the deck was pathetic and sad.
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