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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Hey, George Zimmerman!
Posted by jurassicpork | 2:26 PM
     You just got away with murder! Where are you going to go next?
     "I'm going to Paula Deen's Lady and Sons Restaurant!"
     Now that Trayvon Martin's rotting corpse has been convicted of Walking While Black, what are we to learn about the criminal justice system in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?
     Well, first of all, we've learned that hulking white men with guns and a criminal record of violence can stalk, accost, assault and kill unarmed black youths in Florida, use the Stand Your Ground law (Thank you, Jeb) and get away with it. Secondly, it also proves the same law that's been successfully used in that same state by old white men with erectile dysfunction doesn't necessarily apply to black women who don't kill anyone but merely fire warning shots in a wall to scare off an ex who'd violated a restraining order and broke into her home.
     And that, if you're in Texas, you can use the even more NRA-friendly "Shoot to Kill to Get Your Whoring Money Back" law.
     George Zimmerman's acquittal last night by a jury of six women shows that laws and One Size Fits All mandatory sentencing can not only be perverted and twisted but that such contortions are almost invariably predicated on purely racial lines.
     Let's take stock from the travesties we've seen just this past summer: George Zimmerman, a large white man, stalked and shot to death an unarmed African American youth who had both hands occupied with Arizona Iced Tea, Skittles and a cell phone. The boy was on his way back to his father's house after a trip to a convenience store and was going to continue watching a football game. Zimmerman, a self-appointed vigilante (NOT a "neighborhood watch captain", as it's been wearisomely reported in the MSM, especially ABC News), called the police and was told by the dispatcher to stand down.
     He then accosted the youth, who was understandably alarmed a white man with a gun who wasn't a cop was following him and acting in a confrontational, hostile and threatening manner, defended himself when Zimmerman assaulted him. The corporate mainstream media, as per its usual standards, then decided to give credence to racists and NRA gun nuts (not that there's any degree of separation between them) by trying Trayvon in the media for being a thug, a tactic used successfully by Zimmerman's attorney, Don "Knock Knock" West.
     We were treated to pictures of guns on Martin's cell phone, Martin's middle finger, Martin in a hoodie, Martin's gold tooth caps, Martin's alleged hostility on the day of his death, Martin smoking pot. Yet, we'd heard precious little about Zimmerman's history of racism, domestic violence and attitude problem toward law enforcement. It was plain that the MSM, which will always portray black people as perpetrators both real and imagined and almost never as victims, put Martin on trial in the court of public opinion.
     And a jury of Zimmerman's peers decided a large vigilante with a gun is justified in killing an unarmed teenager as long as he gets to wave the "I was in fear of my life" defense.
     Earlier this summer, Marissa Alexander had gotten a restraining order on her abusive ex husband just nine days after having his child. He'd broken into her home and in the process, violated a restraining order and began acting in a hostile manner. Marissa, after repeated attempts get him to leave, then grabbed her pistol and fired a warning shot into a wall.
     The jury took all of 12 minutes to convict the black woman, who then automatically got 20 years under Jeb Bush's 10/20 mandatory sentencing laws that were originally written for liquor store robbers and spree killers, not single mothers fearing, like Zimmerman allegedly was, for their lives.
     ALEC and the Koch brothers have Trayvon's blood on their hands for the bottomlessly absurd and endlessly despicable Stand Your Ground laws, another wonderful legacy from Jeb, that have essentially been successfully used by white racists such as Zimmerman while being denied that defense by people of color. Stand Your Ground, and the Zimmerman exoneration, have essentially declared open season on African Americans who may think about breaking an unwritten law in Florida now known as "Walking While Black."

Addendum:  Mrs. JP reminds me that Stand Your Ground was not invoked in the Zimmerman defense, a fact of which I should've been cognizant as that fact was reported in the NY Times last month.

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Dear Martin Family: I'm Sorry White People Are Such Idiots
Posted by Jill | 9:46 AM


I have two friends at work, "Sam" and "Cheri" (not their real names). Sam is in his forties, from an affluent black family in the south. Cheri is from the Caribbean. Both have white spouses and mixed-race children. Sam is often described as "having no boundaries." In this particular individual, that's a good thing, because you know with Sam you are always dealing with an honest broker. It also makes for a lot of no-holds-barred discussions about race.

We often joke around about it. Sam calls Cheri "Blackie" without impunity. They poke gentle fun at my inability to move my head like an angry black woman does. Sam will joke about how if I go to "the 'hood", people will get out of my way because a short middle-aged white woman walking around the hood must be batshit crazy. There's an honesty to this interaction, but I know it is only to a point. And frankly, I wonder how they will bear to look at me -- or anyone else of my race -- tomorrow.

It's easy for us good white liberals to think we are sensitive about race relations. But we do not know what it's like to be pulled over again and again for minor traffic infractions like accelerating on the shoulder of a highway that everyone does. Sam knows that when he is pulled over, he is to keep his hands on the steering wheel until cleared to move them by the officer that pulled him over. Cheri knows that a hundred drivers will be ignored by police for talking on a hand-held cell phone but she will be pulled over. As she said to me not too long ago when I mentioned something heinous that George Zimmerman's defense said, "So? I've been under the bus so long I'm used to it."

It isn't that we didn't know George Zimmerman would be acquitted. From the very beginning, this case was less about evidence than it was about "He said....he said" -- except one of the "he"s is dead and can't speak. Zimmerman made sure of that. He made sure that only HIS story would ever see the light of day. And so today, a seventeen-year-old who was an "A" and "B" student, from a college-educated family with a brother in college, who went to a convenience store to buy candy and a soda for a young relative, lies six feet under the dirt, and his murderer walks free -- free to continue to rake in money from the pencil-dick phony tough guys who populate Fox Newa and talk radio. Free to believe he can rid the world of people he deems to be a problem with his gun. Free to do it again.

How on earth can we go on as a nation? How can we continue to live like this? Five years ago a black man stood on the steps of the Capitol and took the oath of office of the Presidency of the United States. And while liberal America was patting its own back at this great achievement, the giant rock that had covered up the racist, rotten core of the red states was turned over and all the hate and bile that had lain dormant during the Reagan and Bush years and during the Clintonian Sister Souljah interregnum, came spewing out. "Kenya" became code for "the 'N' word". "Anti-colonial" became code for the "N" word. Birthers were simply saying "Can't you see that man is a ni--?". "Voter fraud" became code for "Ni----s are voting, we have to stop them." So were the others who talked about racial preferences and Michelle Obama's derrière and circulated photos of Obama's face photoshopped on some Disney idea of an African indigenous tribe member.

And then just a few weeks ago, no less than the Supreme Court decided to look at that period of dormancy instead of the reality that has black neighborhoods stiffed on voting machines, black names purged from voter roles, Voter ID laws, mass vote suppression of all those who might vote against racism and hate and white supremacy. John Roberts and Samuel Alito ushered in the new Jim Crow era, after making sure that the country was set up to ensure that those who could enforce it were ensconced safely in their Congressional seats for life.

We don't know what Trayvon Martin could have been. He could have succumbed to the streets, or he could have gone to college and graduate school and invented something to make fossil fuels obsolete. He could have become a drug dealer or a doctor. He could have been a deadbeat dad or the doting father of his children and a loving husband. We don't know, and now we never will. But he deserved the chance to choose his own destiny, not to have it taken from him by a loser with doubts about his own manhood who thinks shooting an unarmed kid holding a bag of candy and a soft drink makes him somehow a tough guy with a big swinging dick.

We used to look at photos of Emmett Till and think it was years ago. Now we have our own Emmett Till. We should all engrave Trayvon Martin's face into our brains for all the time we are on this earth. Because until we the people do something about laws that let assholes like George Zimmerman declare open season on black teens, his death is all of our shame.

Also, too.

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Friday, March 30, 2012

Trayvon Martin must have been the biggest badass in the history of badasses
Posted by Jill | 6:51 AM
In order to believe the highly-connected-to-the-system family of George Zimmerman, here's what you have to believe transpired the night Trayvon Martin was killed:

1) You have to believe that after George Zimmerman started heading back to his van, Martin, who had already expressed concern to his girlfriend about being followed, picked a fight with a guy who outweighed him by about 100 pounds.

2) You have to believe that the 140-pound Trayvon Martin knocked the over-240-pound George Zimmerman to the ground, and then proceeded to break his nose by punching him without looking at his face, focusing instead on Zimmerman's waist and seeing the gun.

3) You then have to believe that having seen a gun in Zimmerman's possession, Martin proceeded to get all Samuel L. Jackson at his fiercest, Inigo Montoya, AND Syrio Forel at his most fatalistic, on George Zimmerman and say something like "Tonight you die." Remember -- Trayvon Martin is a 17-year-old kid, and we're assuming that right now he's in a fistfight with a guy with a gun -- and spouting movie lines.

4) And then you have to believe that having suffered a broken nose, extensive lacerations to his scalp, and grass stains on his jacket, that Zimmerman was miraculously healed while in the police car on the way to the station, and that there was also a washer and dryer in the car to remove EVERY TRACE of the ground from Zimmerman's jacket.

On the Web extended discussion from The Last Word last night, my newly-anointed smokin'-hottest-man-on-television-news, Charles M. Blow, put these pieces together into the Theatre of Utter Horseshit that they are:

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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Dear MSNBC: Please give Charles M. Blow his own show
Posted by Jill | 6:34 AM
Here he is on The Last Word last night:



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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

These people do not deserve this country
Posted by Jill | 7:47 PM
=Sigh=

It is a sick, sick, sick country that has people in it who want to demonize a corpse just to defend a bad law.

Again, Charles Johnson ventured into the fetid swamp of racist hate that is Fox News Nation -- so you don't have to.

In 2016, I want the words of these people to follow Jeb Bush around everywhere he goes. I want the name of Trayvon Martin to be mentioned every time Jeb Bush appears anywhere. He signed this horrific law, he owns it. Let's never let him forget it.

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Thursday, March 22, 2012

Of course he used a racial slur!
Posted by Jill | 10:17 PM
I realize that CNN has to be all Fair and Balanced and Presentin' Both Sides and all that, but you have to be an idiot to not be able to make out what George Zimmerman said under his breath on the 911 recordings of the night he went hunting black people and murdered Trayvon Martin, even without the "cleanup":

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And so the Republican line of succession continues...
Posted by Jill | 6:02 AM
Was anyone actually surprised yesterday to hear that Jeb Bush had endorsed Mitt Romney? The man who was SUPPOSED to be the next member of America's self-appointed Family of Nobles to ascend to the White House was ALWAYS going to endorse Romney. Whether this means that Jeb is the pick for the #2 spot remains to be seen, though under Republican tradition, if he isn't, that would make Rick Santorum the Heir Apparent for 2016.

But even if he isn't, this country should never, ever forget that it was Jeb Bush, the man who insisted that the corpse of Terri Schiavo be ventilated forever in the name of being "pro-life", who signed Florida's "stand your ground" law that will in all likelihood let George Zimmerman, who went out packing a gun to go hunting for black males on a regular basis, get away with the cold-blooded murder of Trayvon Martin. I'm calling on myself and my compatriots to not let any mention of Jeb Bush go by ever again without a photograph or mention of Trayvon Martin attacdhed to it. Because this country, when it forgets (as it will) what Jeb Bush's brother did to this country, it must never be allowed to forget just who it was that made it legal to kill people because of the invented "threat" of their race. I want the face of Trayvon Martin to haunt Jeb Bush's dreams for the rest of his life.

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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

The crime of walking while black
Posted by Jill | 5:30 AM
I haven't posted yet about Trayvon Martin because frankly, I don't even know what to say. I don't know what to say because every time I look at the photos of a smiling kid who's now dead for the crime of carrying a can of iced tea and a bag of skittles while walking around a neighborhood in which a sloped-foreheaded asshole fancies himself to be Florida's own Sheriff Joe Arpaio, I just start to cry and I can't stop.

Oh, I'm sure that the fact that I have been working 7 days a week for the last four weeks doesn't help, nor does the fact that I can't seem to sleep more than 5-6 hours a night when I really need 7-8 hours. But it's more than that. It's thinking back to January 20, 2009, when for a couple of minutes, we envisioned this country as it could be...as it SHOULD be, one in which a man (or woman, or a 17-year-old kid) could be judged by the content of his character instead of the color of his skin. It's looking at the American landscape now, in which this country's first black president has been, and continues to be, hounded about his birth certificate by self-appointed vigilantes just like the murderer of Trayvon Williams and the police department that for some inexplicable reason is protecting him. It's looking at a country in which a candidate for president of a major political party can dogwhistle in a way that's hardly even dogwhistling, calling the current occupant of the White House "the food stamp president". It's a country in which someone can put out a bumper sticker reading "Don't Re-Nig in 2012" and insist it's not racist. I would be tempted to say that it's a good thing that the racists and hatemongers who populate this nation have felt safe in coming out from the rocks under which they live, because now we know where they stand and we can expose them, except that the life of an unarmed 17-year-old kid is too high a price to pay for a "dialogue" that isn't going to be a dialogue at all.

I have two black colleagues with whom I'm pretty close. One of them is a man in his 40's who's experienced firsthand what it's like to be pulled over for "driving while black." Another is a woman who has a teenage son. Yesterday I went to work and while the three of us talk about current events all the time, Trayvon Martin's name didn't come up at all. I don't know what my colleagues were thinking, but all I wanted to do was say, "I'm so sorry" and wonder how the heck they can even LOOK at a white person as a friend or ally today.

The sounds of Trayvon Martin screaming for help in a neighborhood, a town, a state, a nation that didn't give a shit about him echo throughout the country. They are etched into my brain and my memory for the long as I live. I will never, ever forget what I heard on those police dispatch recordings. It's a sound that could come out of any black person you know or that you don't, on any given day, just because someone believed that they didn't deserve to walk the earth because of the color of their skin. THAT is the truth about America. And that a black man emerges from the White House every day doesn't change that one iota.

A few other thoughts:

At the Crunk Feminist Collective: Re-Nigging on the Promises: #Justice4Trayvon

ThinkProgress: What Everyone Should Know About Trayvon Martin (1995-2012)

John McWhorter, The Atlantic: What a Florida Teenager’s Death Tells Us About Being Black in America

Adam Weinstein at Mother Jones: The Trayvon Martin Killing, Explained, including some interesting history about race and the Sanford Police Department.

Lawrence O'Donnell:


When Jonathan Capehart knows that he too could be targeted by racist self-appointed "Neighborhood Watch" gun nuts for the crime of walking while black, it's time to stop deluding ourselves that we are "past all that." We aren't. And unless people like George Zimmerman face the full brunt of the law and there is UNIVERSAL outrage about what happened to Trayvon Martin, and what could happen to any black man anywhere in this country, we won't be. And it is to our shame that we aren't.

Also, this.

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