Ace:
If you read Allah’s digest — I didn’t watch the speech; I have to rely on his digest — it’s pretty anodyne and… empty, of course. A few gestures of Racial Solidarity to sugar-coat the bitter pill that they’re not going to do anything to George Zimmerman except continue to harass him.
There are little nods he gives to his base, which are forgivable, I suppose, as far as these things go — he is, after all, simply a debased Chicago-machine politician; we can expect little better of him — and then an extended riff that appears to designed to get as much wrong about stand your ground and self-defense generally as possible.
The point is, I’m not outraged by the speech; as usual, Obama doesn’t really say anything enough to be outraged by. Usually he speaks in constructions that might be termed Notional Sentences, that is to say, assemblages of words which mirror the structure and form of a content- and idea-conveying sentence but which actually contain far less than the sum of their word-parts.
To the extent that his empty words have any meaning whatsoever, they contain three major elements:
1. Things which are true, but so obvious a kindergartener knows them. (We are each shaped by our experiences.)
2. Things which are not obvious, because they are also untrue. (Stand your ground laws give white people the right to shoot black people without cause.)
3. Heroic self-reference. (As did Jesus incarnate God the Father, so I Barack Hussein Obama, in a moment of apotheosis, incarnate the lamb Trayvon Martin.)
What I’m more outraged about is the reflexive need of the left to say all sorts of asinine things, like that Obama’s saying things no president has said before, and, Serious You Guys, we’re really getting into some next-level ish with this latest edict from DOTUS (the Deity of the United States).
Four Charts That Prove Obama’s Right About Being Black In America
http://thinkprogress.org/justi…
1. Justified killings of Black people under ‘Stand Your Ground.’ PBS’s Frontline made this instructive chart on the way that defendants who invoke ‘Stand Your Ground’ — the policy that allowed George Zimmerman to walk free on the night that he killed Trayvon Martin — fare. PBS explains, “The figures represent the percentage likelihood that the deaths will be found justifiable compared to white-on-white killings.” The result? A huge racial disparity of when the defense works — and when it doesn’t.
2. Stop-and-Frisks of young Black men. In May, the Public Advocate for New York put out a report
detailing the way that the city’s controversial ‘Stop-and-Frisk policy is unevenly applied. Not only did it find that Blacks and Latinos make
up, on average, 85 percent of stops under the program, but it also conveyed exactly how skewed those numbers are compared to the city’s demographics.
3. Drug arrests for White and Black users. The number of White drug users is about the same
as the number of Black users — but you wouldn’t know it from the arrest statistics. In recent history, Black people have been four times as likely to be arrested on marijuana charges.
4. Death penalty for Black prisoners. In Texas, the state that accounts for the most executions in the nation, 40 percent of death row inmates are Black. That reflects a national trend; across several states that have the death penalty, Black inmates make up a hugely disproportionate number of those sentenced to death, despite Black people’s relatively small percentage of the population. But perhaps the chart that best makes the point is this, from deathpenaltyinfo.org, that shows the racial breakdown of who gets the death sentence for interracial crimes.
@This one:
1. Disingenuous at best, more like an outright lie in the Zimmerman case. The Stand your ground law was never invoked, nor was it part of the trial. And what allowed Zimmerman to walk free the night of the incident was a lack of any evidence that conflicted with Zimmerman’s account of the events that night. Without Probable Cause, the police CANNOT make an arrest, as much as you would like to be otherwise.
2. Has it occurred to anyone that maybe, just maybe blacks in Metropolitan NYC commit a larger proportion of crimes than their demographics indicate?
3, Maybe the black population gets arrested more because they get caught more often? Maybe because they are more blatant in their violations, less discrete?
4. Maybe, just maybe, blacks commit more violent crimes than other races, hence the stiffer sentences.
And using thinkprogress.org as a reference hardly shows any inclination to balanced research. But then again, I wouldn’t expect that from you.
Are you going to answer the question I asked you earlier? You know, the one about who committed the first violation of state law? Zimmerman or Martin?