XDA

Remember when CNN and MSNBC were showing the leaked surveillance tape of George Zimmerman every twenty minutes and each time they showed it, one of the talking heads said that he or she couldn't see any injury? The said, "This tape conclusively shows that Mr. Zimmerman suffered no injury to the back of his head." Nancy Grace, who uniquely combines shrill and cloying in every statement she makes, was all over the surveillance tape asking, "Where's the blood?"
Well, today photos of the back of Mr. Zimmerman's head, taken by the police before he received medical care, were leaked or released in preparation for his bail hearing. As the late, much missed Gilda Radner used to say so well.


Never mind.

Labels: Trayvon Martin; George Zimmerman

My eldest daughter was disheartened at trivia last night to learn that there is a war (more like a kerfuffle) over dog treatment currently in the presidential election process. I pointed out that no one would be talking about Obama eating dog in Indonesia when he was 10 if his minions weren't constantly bringing up Romney's putting the family dog on the roof of the family car in a travel cage with a jerry rigged windshield nearly three decades ago. However, sticking to my talking point (which I find quite amusing), I pointed out that putting a dog on the roof of the car was less bad than eating a dog (at least from the dog's point of view). After some pointless rambling about cultural relativism (which I ended by asking if throwing acid in women's faces in Afghanistan was an example of OK behavior for the Afghani culture?) we dropped the subject.

Here's my entry in the Obama ate dog joke contest (h/t Dale):

Someone asked Obama if he knew of a good restaurant in DC and he answered, yeah, I know a place that serves great chow.

Suck it up, minions; you've lost big on this one. I'm laughing at you and your candidate. So are millions; that can't be good for November numbers.

Labels: 2012 Election; Eating Dog versus Transporting Dog

Mark Steyn on the 21st Century mopping-up of European Jews. Money quote:

The Toulouse assumptions [that Jewish school chldren were murdered by a skinhead rather than by a Muslim] were particularly deluded. If the flow of information is really controlled by Jews, as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright assured his students at the Chicago Theological Seminary a year or two back, you'd think they'd be a little better at making their media minions aware of one of the bleakest stories of the early 21st century: the extinguishing of what's left of Jewish life in Europe. It would seem to me that the first reaction, upon hearing of a Jewish school shooting, would be to put it in the context of the other targeted schools, synagogues, community centers, and cemeteries. And yet liberal American Jews seem barely aware of this grim roll call. Even if you put to one side the public school in Denmark that says it can no longer take Jewish children because of the security situation, and the five children of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam who've decided to emigrate, and the Swedish Jews fleeing the most famously tolerant nation in Europe because of its pervasive anti-Semitism; even if you put all that to the side and consider only the situation in France... No, wait, forget the Villiers-le-Bel schoolgirl brutally beaten by a gang jeering, "Jews must die"; and the Paris disc-jockey who had his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, "I have killed my Jew"; and the young Frenchman tortured to death over three weeks, while his family listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the Koran... No, put all that to one side, too, and consider only the city of Toulouse. In recent years, in this one city, a synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and "Dirty Jews" scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, a kosher butcher's strafed with gunfire, a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails...

I have had difficulty finding reliable figures but it seems that nearly 15,000 French Jews have emigrated to America and Israel in the past decade and a half. Who can blame them? With our past two presidents prostrate and feckless about Iran's plans for a sub-atomic Shoah, I'd come here rather than to Israel, but maybe that's just me.

Labels: 21st Century, Ethnic Cleansing; Europe

Oh no, even Hermione has a tramp stamp now.

Labels: Harry Potter; Tattoos

With others out of the frame, a German soldier (in Jodhpurs?) aims his Mauser K-98 at Jews ducking for non-existent cover as death advances on them. Particularly poignant is the mother vainly trying to shield her child. This was a scene repeated a million times during the early stage of the ever building, NAZI industrialized murder of the Jews (and Gypsies) during WWII. This particular one was in Kiev in 1942, sometime after the Wannsee Conference answered the Jewish Question negatively.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is tomorrow.

Labels: Holocaust by Bullets, WWII history; European theater

Obama 2012: Are you Better Off Now Than You Were 5 Trillion Dollars Ago?

(h/t Patterico)

Labels: President Obama; Campaign Slogans

Labels: Architecture: Denver

Let's talk about race for a second.

Here is Joan Walsh talking about, what else, how Republicans are racists, specifically the Republicans at the National Review:

Rich Lowry himself, though he has now distanced himself and his magazine from “Derb’s” crude racism, continued Buckley’s tradition last week, with a tendentious column accusing black leaders of “politicizing” Martin’s death while “ignoring” the problem of black teens murdered by other black teens. (This has become a big fake issue on the right.) Lowry ignores years of hard work to combat “black on black crime” by national and local black leaders.

OK, Ms. Walsh had before this paragraph accused Bill Buckley of being a racist "with finesse" for talking frankly about the over-representation of black defendants in the criminal justice system. She puts quotes around "politicize" and "ignoring" as if she were quoting Mr. Lowery, but he never used those words in his column. Indeed what he said is true: There is no doubt that a black on black murder generates very little national press while black on black murder is the norm, by a huge margin (so huge a margin, one has to wonder what's up with that?) The Trayvon Martin tragedy, however, is generating huge national press. Why?

To point out the facts about black on black crime, is for the left, as Ms. Walsh has shown us, supposedly to miss the point of the Trayvon Martin matter and engage on a "fake" issue. She chides Rich Lowery for ignoring the "years of hard work...by national and local black leaders" to combat the more common crime stats. Who'd been doing that? What leader? What work, hard or otherwise? I can think of no such efforts and, sadly, Ms. Walsh provides us no links to this difficult labor. (If anyone has really been addressing the more common problem, he or she certainly hasn't been very effective).

She continues:

The murders Lowry writes about indeed deserve more attention and more outrage than they inspire, but it’s preposterous to claim black leaders haven’t demanded society pay attention. They have, and sadly, they will again; it’s the larger society that refuses to listen.

OK, so she admits that the very common scenario, a black youth killed by another black youth, doesn't generate much press attention, just as Lowery and others have pointed out, but she accuses Lowery of saying something that he never said in his "tendentious column," namely, that black leaders have done little to nothing about black on black crime. Lowery accused them merely of seizing on the outlier for their selective outrage. Indeed they have. But more to the point: I'm listening. I'm in fact all ears about black on black crime and the causes and the solutions the black leaders are supposedly working so hard to identify and to propose respectively. I just don't know what they are, largely because, I suspect, there have been none. Black on black crime is just not discussed among polite, lefty society. To do so would be, dare I say it, racist.

She winds up:

Meanwhile, the right-wing outrage machine is more concerned that Zimmerman may be being wrongly accused of racism than that a boy died largely because he’s black. William F. Buckley’s magazine played a key role in building that outrage machine, and it continues to keep it going, whether or not John Derbyshire works there anymore.

The right wing outrage machine? I thought it was a "noise machine." I could have sworn I've heard that term before. What we on the right were concerned with was the press, and the black leadership, ignoring the lack of knowledge of complete (or nearly any) facts about the shooting while judging Mr. Zimmerman guilty of murder. That Zimmerman was called a racist was a lesser concern to us cogs in the Republican "outrage machine" (largely because that erstwhile potent epithet has been thoroughly debased lately). Of course, to Ms. Walsh and her ilk, Zimmerman's imagined racism is the paramount concern. I would venture to differ, to say that Mr. Martin's skin color had little to do with his being shot, rather it was his decision to approach Mr. Zimmerman and, likely, assault him which were the proximate causes of the shooting. Race, I believe, ultimately has very little to do with this case, the media's and the black leaders' selling points notwithstanding. Which is part of the reason we on the right have been covering the coverage and pointing out its lies by elipsis all the while wondering why this case, and not the 18 times more likely scenarios, were ginning up all the outrage.

Even ignoring the completely projected "outrage machine" meme, the truth is that Bill Buckley had nothing to do with anything Ms. Walsh is complaining of here. Her entire point to this piece, such as it is, is fiction, along the trusted "progressive" meme--"you're being racist for pointing out facts about race we choose to ignore."

Even deeper than that is the campaign season lefty talking point: "Whatever it is the Republicans are doing, it is wrong, and racist."

My ultimate response is a yawn.

Labels: Joan Walsh; Bill Buckley; Rich Lowery; Trayvon Martin; Republican racism

With all the talk about people paying their "fair share" of income taxes, why do nearly half the people in this country pay no income taxes at all? Is that their "fair share"? Or is creating more recipients of government handouts, at no cost to themselves, simply a strategy to gain more votes?

Thomas Sowell

Labels: Thomas Sowell quote

Io transits Jupiter. Fascinatingly beautiful.

The photo is from the robot space probe Cassini about 12 years ago.

Io is about as big as our moon and is about our moon's distance from the top of Jupiter's stormy atmosphere.

Labels: Io, Jupiter

Labels: Polar Bear Polulations

I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

Booker T. Washington

I don't hate nothing at all, except hatred.

Labels: Booker T. Washington quote

This iconic photo of Dr. King's entourage pointing in the direction of the shot which killed the great Republican civil rights leader does not show the whole picture.

Despite the conspiracy theories (more on that below), there is little real doubt that James Earl Ray shot and killed Martin Luther King on 4/4/68 with a single, soft point Remington Peters 30.06 round from his recently purchased Remington Game Master slide action rifle, Model 760. He shot him from a rooming house across Mulberry Street (located on Main Street), in fact, from a bathroom window right about where all the people in the photo are pointing. Here is the bigger current photo of the location.

The brown building on the left of the photo is the rooming house. The bathroom window is visible just under the banner on the light pole.


The big trees that used to be there (see photo) were removed and the front of the Lorraine motel has changed, but the distance and the line of sight are the same. It is less than 100 yards (200 feet according to Google Maps)--an easy shot for a scoped rifle, which Ray's was (a Redfield variable scope on Weaver mounts).

Now, there are some details of the story which have always caused me to say this murder was a conspiracy. How the heck did this unemployed prison escapee get a Canadian passport and over to England? I'm over that now that I've read more, but I am still troubled by one fact. Ray purchased the 30.06 rifle in Birmingham, but it was an exchange for the .243 calibre rifle he had bought the day before.

Why did he switch out rifles? Who told him to get a bigger calibre piece? This is something we will never know, I fear.

If it was a conspiracy, the most likely unindicted culprits were racist southern Democrats, which likelihood does not fit the current politically correct thinking regarding the South and so shadowy, right wing government entities are concocted out of clear air, just as with President Kennedy.

Labels: James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King

I think President Obama is a functional moron on several subjects, most subjects, in fact; and I will continue to believe that until I see his SATs and college transcripts. But I have some proof in the meantime.

Here and here. From the first speech:

Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would
be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by
a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.

Strong majority? Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote in the House 219-212. If four people who voted yes change to no, then it doesn't pass. Few votes in the House are any closer. It crept across the filibuster line in the Senate 60-39 again with no Republican votes. Has President Obama been living on our planet since his election?

But the real moronic statement is "unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law..." You mean like in Marbury v. Madison, 1803? And over 150 times since then? That sort of extraordinary step? This guy was Harvard Law Review Editor and is supposed to have taught Con Law in a decent Law School. Complete moron.

Then there's this from the same speech:

And I think it’s important, and I think the American people understand, and the I think the justices should understand, that in the absence of an individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with preexisting conditions can actually get health care.

"I think the justices should understand..."? Who does this guy think he is? King? The justices are members of a co-equal branch of the government. Since when does the President lecture the Court what it should or should not understand?

From today:

Well, first of all, let me be very specific. We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce — a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right? So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre New Deal.

Lochner v. New York was decided in 1905 and did not involve the interstate commerce clause. Just two and a half decades off, professor.

A.L.A. Schlecter v. United States (the sick chicken case) was in fact decided in the 30s and struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act 9-0 in 1935 stating that the act was beyond Congress' power under the interstate commerce clause.

How about United States v. Lopez (1995)--gun near school prohibition beyond commerce clause power--or United States v. Morrison (2000)--violence against women federalization had nothing to do with interstate commerce? I admit no rational person would think guns near schools or violence against women are interstate commerce (but then again, neither would anyone think homegrown wheat or pot, for personal use only, would be interstate commerce either--see Wickard v. Filburn and Gonzales v. Raich respectively).

(h/t James Taranto, who points out the uhs and long pauses you don't usually get in the transcript)

UPDATE: I said three Republicans in the Senate voted for Obamacare. No, that was the wasteful stiumlus. Corrected now.

Labels: President Obama; Constitutional Law