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A Lesson From L.A. in the Zimmerman Case (+video)

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Photo Credit: RCPBy Lou Cannon. Whatever one thinks of the jury verdict in the George Zimmerman case, history suggests that retrying him on federal charges would not produce a fairer outcome.

The last time a president of the United States and a U.S. attorney general disapproved of a jury verdict in a race-heightened case, they set in motion a series of events that produced a second verdict as suspect as the first.

It happened in 1992 when a suburban Simi Valley jury acquitted four white Los Angeles Police Department officers of excessive force and other charges in the beating of Rodney King, an African-American. The verdict, coupled with a woeful lack of preparation by the LAPD, touched off the deadliest American civil disturbance since the Draft Riot of 1863 in New York City.

By the time the Los Angeles rioting ended on May 4, 1992, 54 people had died with another 2,328 treated for injuries in emergency rooms by doctors practicing what one of them called “battlefield medicine.” The rioting was the costliest in U.S. history, with property losses exceeding $900 million — $1.45 billion in today’s dollars. Thousands of businesses were burned or looted and 862 structures burned to the ground.

President George H.W. Bush was, as he put it, “sickened” by a televised clip of the King beating he had seen soon after the incident occurred a year earlier. In the midst of the rioting the president met with civil rights leaders and made a televised appeal for calm, promising that the Simi Valley verdicts were “not the end of the process.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Jesse Jackson Says Florida is an Apartheid State because of its Zimmerman Verdict

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Photo Credit: AP‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws Are Winning

By Matt Berman. On Tuesday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder said that “Stand Your Ground” laws “sow dangerous conflict,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called her state’s version of the law “important” and a “constitutional right.” And Wednesday, Florida state Sen. David Simmons called Holder’s comments “inappropriate” and “inaccurate.” Stand Your Ground may be getting more attention now after the Zimmerman verdict, but the laws themselves don’t look like they’re going anywhere.

And that’s not for a lack of effort from critics of the self-defense policy. While the exact laws differ somewhat from state to state, Stand Your Ground laws justify the use of force in self-defense when there’s a reasonably perceived threat. It’s on the books in some form or another in more than 21 states. Florida was the first to adopt the law, and the state is the focus of the law’s critics now. Those critics range from Stevie Wonder (who has decided to boycott any state with a Stand Your Ground law) to the dozens of student activists who crowded Gov. Rick Scott’s office on Tuesday.

But the critics aren’t limited to Florida. In New Hampshire, the state’s attorney general on Wednesday called for “another look” at the state’s Stand Your Ground law. “I think what it can do is cause a situation to escalate that doesn’t need to,” he said. Read more from this story HERE.

To Avoid Looking Like A Criminal, Don’t Commit A Crime

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Photo Credit: Human EventsBlack liberals keep bemoaning the danger to their own teenage sons after the “not guilty” verdict in George Zimmerman’s murder trial. To avoid what happened to Trayvon Martin, their boys need only follow this advice: Don’t walk up to a stranger and punch him, ground-and-pound him, MMA-style, and repeatedly smash his head against the pavement.

The Justice-for-Trayvon crowd keeps pretending there hasn’t been a trial where the evidence overwhelmingly showed that Trayvon committed the first (and only) crime that night by assaulting Zimmerman. Instead, the race agitators are sticking with the original story peddled by the media, back when we had zero facts. To wit, that Zimmerman had stalked a young black child and shot him dead just for being black and wearing a hoodie.

Dozens of these hair-on-fire racism stories are retold in my book, “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama.” In the golden age of racial demagoguery, they came at a pace of about one a year. Al Sharpton was usually involved.

A normal person would hear some of the more outlandish allegations and think, “I can’t believe it!” not meaning, “Wow! What a blockbuster story!” but rather, “I would like to hear the facts because I literally don’t believe it.” (That was much of America’s reaction to the media’s claim last year that a neighborhood-watch captain in Florida had hunted down a black teenager and shot him dead just for wearing a hoodie.)Whenever a much-celebrated claim of racism turned out to be false — which was almost always — you’d just stop hearing about it. There would never be a clippable story admitting that the media’s harrumphing had been in error:

Attention, readers! That story we’ve been howling about for several months turned out to be a complete fraud.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jimmy Carter: ‘America No Longer Has a Functioning Democracy’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy Katie McHugh. Former president Jimmy Carter condemned the effect U.S. intelligence programs had on U.S. moral authority in the wake of NSA revelations brought to light by leaker Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel reports.

“America has no functioning democracy,” Carter said at a meeting of The Atlantic Bridge in Atlanta, Georgia on Tuesday.

Carter also claimed there was currently no reason for him to be “optimistic” about Egypt’s internal conflicts and mused whether the standards The Carter Center applies to foreign elections could be fulfilled by U.S. elections, which he believes are plagued by confusing campaign rules and a lack of restrictions on free speech in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

The former president continued that democratic developments — fueled by sites such as Facebook and Twitter — might be damaged by the NSA revelations, essentially strangling emerging democratic revolutions in the cradle by casting doubt on the social media juggernauts’ independent credibility. Read more from this story HERE.

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Jimmy Carter: George Zimmerman jury ‘right’

By Hadas Gold. The jury made the “right decision” in the George Zimmerman murder trial, former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday.

“I think the jury made the right decision based on the evidence presented, because the prosecution inadvertently set the standard so high that the jury had to be convinced that it was a deliberate act by Zimmerman that he was not at all defending himself, and so forth,” Carter told Atlanta news channel WXIA. “It’s not a moral question, it’s a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.”

Carter said he agrees with President Barack Obama and accepts the jury’s decision. “So President Obama said he thought – it was — he regretted the decision, but he had to accept the results of the jury decision,” Carter said. Read more from this story HERE.

Media Fail: only 34% Disagree With Zimmerman Verdict (+video)

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Photo Credit: APBy John Nolte. This is a catastrophic failure for the media and left. After fifteen months of lies, race-baiting, manufacturing evidence, and shrill melodrama — a Rasmussen poll released Wednesday shows that only 34% of Americans disagree with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of teenager Trayvon Martin. A large plurality of 48% agree with the verdict.

This poll might also explain why Barack Obama released a responsible and unifying statement after the reading of the verdict Saturday night. The always-polling and hyper-political White House probably knew that the public was in sharp disagreement with those demanding Zimmerman’s head.

The president’s post-verdict statement was out of character for a president who more than once has chosen to enflame tensions, rather than unify. After all, it was Obama who helped launch the Zimmerman trial into the racially-charged stratosphere with his divisive statement about Trayvon looking like his son. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: MediaiteLarry Elder Schools Piers Morgan on Violence in Black Community

By Jason Howerton. CNN host Piers Morgan on Wednesday made good on his offer to have conservative personality Larry Elder on his show to debate the George Zimmerman trial, Rachel Jeantel and race relations in the United States. The exchange was just as confrontational and explosive as you might expect.

Elder told Morgan that his interview with Zimmerman trial witness Rachel Jeantel was terrible as he “condescendingly” tried to convince her that she was a “victim.”

“This is a young lady who didn’t apply herself, a 19 year old who is still in high school. Instead of saying, ‘Young lady, take this as an opportunity to take stock of your life,’ you treated her like she was a victim. And that’s how you’re doing this whole thing about race and racism,” Elder said.

He went on to point out that there were 7,000 murders last year of black people, almost all of which were committed by blacks. Elder also said there have been 480 blacks killed in Chicago alone and 75 percent of the cases have gone unsolved.

“Where are the cameras, where are the shows?” Elder asked Morgan. “It’s outrageous to act as if black America should fear some non-black guy stalking some black kid at night. The likelihood of a black person being killed by a non-black person is extremely remote, which is why this became a big national issue in the first place.” Read more from this story HERE.

Controversial Black Pastor Confronts Congregants Who Think Zimmerman is Guilty (+video)

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Photo Credit: ATLAH.orgDr. James David Manning, the notoriously controversial chief pastor at the ATLAH World Missionary Church in New York City, recently delivered a bold and controversial message to his congregants about the black community’s perception of the George Zimmerman trial. He urged his mostly black congregation to stop viewing the world through their “black eyes” and start looking at it through the “blood of Jesus.”

If they did that, the pastor explained, there would be no denying that the verdict in the Zimmerman was the correct one. He also told those who are convinced that Zimmerman is guilty that they only believe that because they are black.

“You are focusing on the fact that Trayvon Martin is black and you believe that George Zimmerman is white, he isn’t. His father is baptist, his mother, she’s from Peru. He’s Latin. A mix of Latin and White,” Manning said. “Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and all that crowd jumped the gun, they thought he was white, but he isn’t.”

Read more from this story HERE.

NRA: Holder Exploiting Trayvon Martin Death to Push Gun Control Agenda

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The National Rifle Association (NRA) on Wednesday accused Attorney General Eric Holder of exploiting the death of Trayvon Martin to push the Obama administration’s gun control agenda.

NRA Executive Director Chris Cox blasted Holder’s calls for states to review “stand your ground” laws, which allow the use of deadly force for self-defense. Those statutes received scrutiny during the Florida trial of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who was acquitted Saturday on charges of murder and manslaughter in the shooting of Martin, an unarmed black teenager.

“The attorney general fails to understand that self-defense is not a concept, it’s a fundamental human right,” Cox said in a statement. “To send a message that legitimate self-defense is to blame is unconscionable and demonstrates once again that this administration will exploit tragedies to push their political agenda.”

In a speech Tuesday, Holder said “stand your ground” laws in states like Florida encouraged “violent situations to escalate.”

“Separate and apart from the case that has drawn the nation’s attention, it’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods,” Holder said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Barack Obama Could Have Saved Trayvon Martin

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By Walt Ughes. When the President famously said in the heat of a presidential election “If I had son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he ironically spoke a truth greater than he knew. I assume Obama was talking about the photo of the young, smiling Trayvon that was shamelessly displayed on every major media outlet and on activists tee shirts, not the actually 17 year old troubled youth expelled twice from school with the raised middle finger. Both pictures of Trayvon were taken during Mr. Obama’s Presidency. The lad went from smiley youth to self-described angry “gangsta” on your watch, Mr. President. Mr. First Black President, both versions of Trayvon were your sons and you failed them.

Regardless of your political persuasion, it is a sign of the greatness of this country that black Americans could go from Selma to the White House in part of one lifetime. All Americans should have be proud of that achievement particularly given that the black man ran on an inclusive platform of “Hope and Change,” uplifting ideals if also very fuzzy. Martin Luther King would have been proud.

Much progress has been made since Selma, but not everything “progressive” is good. To say the black family is in crisis is a huge understatement when over 70% of black children are born to single mothers. The education inner city minorities receive is a scandal. Even those few who graduate get a substandard education that leaves them increasingly unqualified in a high tech world. Black teen unemployment is twice white rates. Welfare dependency is a multigenerational problem with young black males incarceration rates astronomically high. Half of all murders are committed by blacks and almost all blacks are killed by other blacks. The black inner city is an urban war zone with wasted lives and destroyed dreams

The black family is imploding and there has never had a greater need for a black voice of authority and reason. Barack Obama, elected as America’s first Black President (or White Black President as the New York Times might say), was uniquely qualified to deliver that message. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APPresident Obama keeps quiet on race — again

By Edward-Isaac Dovere. America’s been waiting five years to hear more from President Barack Obama on race.

The waiting continues.

Trayvon Martin is dead and George Zimmerman was found not guilty — leaving many looking to the president to lead the thoughtful, national conversation about black-white relations they thought was promised in his 2008 campaign speech on race.

Yes, there’s a double standard. No previous president has been asked so often for his personal feelings on race. But for the first black president, that double standard is part of his life, and of his presidency. And black leaders say that, especially after last year’s election, the time has come to deliver more than what he has so far.

“The president is now in his second term. Because of the Voting Rights Act and the Trayvon Martin case” and the disproportionately greater impact on the black community from the recession, said National Urban League President Marc Morial, “I think that the table is set for the president to think about how he can address these issues not just in words, but renew some of the issues that he’s championed.” Read more from this story HERE.

More Evidence Zimmerman Trial Really Was About Second Amendment (+video)

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Attorney General Eric Holder took aim at Stand Your Ground laws Tuesday, saying the measures increase the chance for violence.

“These laws try to fix something that was never broken,” Holder said in a previously-scheduled speech to the NAACP convention in Orlando that marked the Obama administration’s first new policy announcement since neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted last weekend in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

“By allowing and perhaps encouraging violent situations to escalate in public, such laws undermine public safety,” he said.

More than 30 states have passed Stand Your Ground laws, which eliminate the duty to retreat before using deadly force in self defense.

The doctrine has long been recognized across the country with respect to home invasions. But the new laws expand the concept — doing away with the duty to retreat in a variety of other venues. The Florida law authorizes an individual to use deadly force as self defense “in any…place he or she has a right to be.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Hispanic Networks Granted Exclusive Interviews With Obama But Fail to Ask Even One Question About Zimmerman

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Photo Credit: qnrLeading Hispanic television networks Univision and Telemundo were granted two interviews apiece with President Obama today, but not one interviewer asked the president a question about the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, according to transcripts and sources familiar with the interviews.

The four interviews were intended to focus on immigration reform, but the absence of any inquiry related to the high-profile court case surprised even the White House…

Television industry executives also expressed surprise: “It’s unbelievable that any journalist with access to the President this week wouldn’t ask the first African-American president about his reaction to the verdict,” said one D.C.-based executive.

Instead, the interviewers focused on immigration reform, giving President Obama the opportunity to tout the economic benefits of reform and to criticize House Republicans for opposing the immigration bill on political grounds.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hypocritical Nancy Grace Makes ‘Racist’ Claim that Zimmerman is Back to ‘Driving Through Taco Bell and Having a Churro’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Newsbusters Just when it seemed that the racial tensions couldn’t get any worse after George Zimmerman’s “not guilty” verdict regarding the charge of the second-degree murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin, along comes Nancy Grace, the host of a weeknight news/interview program on the HLN cable news network, who did her best to fan the flames even higher.

Responding to lead defense attorney Mark O’Mara’s closing argument on Friday night asking the jury to give Zimmerman his life back, the acerbic host growled: “Give Zimmerman back his life? He’s out on bond driving through Taco Bell every night, having a churro”…

Since then, Grace has been accused of using “a very poor choice of words” herself, with some even going so far as to call her a racist for the language she used.

Read more from this story HERE.