It’s Tuesday, July 16th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!

At the top of today’s order, two video clips which celebrate the uninformed opinions of those whose only goal is the continuation of racial divisions in America.  First, a gross misstatement born of absolute ignorance; we hope the “Reverend” knows more about the Gospel than he does the facts surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin and trial of George Zimmerman:

Second, we present a sterling example of the type of “healing” Der Obafuhrer has in mind for America:

For more on Team Tick-Tock’s concerted effort to shift attention away from their flailing foreign policy and disastrous domestic doings, we turn to Commentary Magazine, where Jonathan Tobin relates how the Left is calling the only play they can still run:

Back to Full-Time Racial Incitement

 

One of the remarkable elements of the coverage of the George Zimmerman murder trial is the way things have come full circle in the last month. Prior to the televised legal proceedings, there was only one narrative about the case that came through in most of the mainstream media: George Zimmerman, a racist bully, shot down an innocent black teenager in cold blood who came to symbolize every young member of a minority group. But once the country started to watch the trial as ratings-obsessed cable networks prioritized the case above all other news stories, a different story began to impinge on that simple morality tale of good and evil.

Televised trials sensationalize the judicial system and turn lawyers, judges and other assorted courthouse kibitzers into the legal equivalent of sports talk radio. But the one thing that we must acknowledge about the broadcasting of the proceedings is that it made it clear that this was a complicated case that bore little resemblance to the invective and cant about it that was so common among those who spoke about it in the mainstream press prior to the trial. Thus, when the jury acquitted Zimmerman of all charges against him, no one who actually watched much of the trial could have been surprised. Though no one other than Zimmerman knows for sure what happened, the evidence seemed to support his claim of self-defense and established clear reasonable doubt about any of the prosecution’s accusations.

Yet now that the trial is over, much of the media seems to have reverted to its previous pattern of treating Zimmerman’s racism and guilt as givens. In much of the mainstream media today, but especially on MSNBC, the verdict has been treated as a green light not only for recriminations about the verdict but an excuse for an all-out, nonstop stream of racial incitement. Where last week it seemed most Americans were rightly trying to assess the virtues of the two sides’ arguments in a hard-fought case, today many liberals among the chattering classes in the media, pop culture and politics have regressed to stereotypes and mindless assumptions that tell us more about their own prejudices than about the supposedly racist state of American justice.

It must be re-stated that the death of Martin was a tragedy. Zimmerman is no hero for having killed an unarmed youth, even if the truth about Martin (that was not heard in court) is that he was not a choir boy. (Two statements with which we couldn’t agree more!) Even though the evidence made a not-guilty verdict inevitable, his behavior was at best questionable and at worst irresponsible. But the problem here was always that the facts of what was a confusing case, in which a Hispanic man who had been beat up killed his assailant in what both police and prosecutors saw as a case of self-defense, simply didn’t fit into the narrative about racism that so many on the left insisted must be the only possible way to interpret the incident.

Yet now that they are freed from the necessity of having to react to the defense’s case and the almost comical weakness of the prosecution’s argument, the liberal media has thrown off all constraints and reverted to the narrative about racial profiling and a martyred victim.

Today on MSNBC, numerous commentators have insisted that the prosecution pulled its punches instead of actually doing all in its power to convict Zimmerman even to the point of tricks in which they sought to withhold evidence. The jury is now denounced as an “all-white” southern panel that is no different from those of the Jim Crow past that tilted the justice system against blacks. Worst of all, professional racial hucksters like MSNBC’s Al Sharpton have been unleashed to treat weeks of evidence and argument about the truth of the accusations against Zimmerman as if they never happened and to gin up protests that will do nothing but enhance the profile of “activists” such as himself. Since the only verdict the left would have accepted is a guilty one, the failure of the prosecution, the behavior of the judge and the judgment of the jury are now being treated as an extension of American’s history of racism. The result is a wave of incitement about race that is painting the same country that just reelected an African-American to the presidency as if it were the segregated and intolerant nation of a century ago. (When racism was the almost exclusive province of Dimocrats!)

This is slander, but if much of the media (especially MSNBC, a network that faces a lawsuit for editing of the tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call that made him appear a racist and whose in-house token conservative Joe Scarborough called Zimmerman a “murderer”) really thinks the problem with the trial is that there wasn’t enough race baiting, it is a sign we are in for a new wave of hateful and dangerous invective streaming forth from these outlets that could have incalculable costs.

The reaction of most of the public to the case in the past few weeks while the trial was being televised was testimony to a new maturity about the discussion of race.

The viewers understood that the tragic death of Martin was the product of a complex set of circumstances and not a morality play. Yet what some in the liberal media—and virtually everyone blathering on MSNBC today—are desperate to do is to ignore the evidence and try to transform it into a discussion of white supremacy or their politicized efforts to ban guns or amend laws that enable people to defend themselves against assailants.

Should President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder heed these voices of incitement and plunge the country into more months or even years of racial arguments by pursuing a foolish effort to charge Zimmerman with civil rights violations, the big loser isn’t so much the man who was acquitted on Saturday night as it is the country. America has come a long way since the days of Jim Crow and made too much progress to allow the likes of Sharpton and the rest of the MSNBC crew to emphasize and exploit racial divisions in order to advance their own radical political agenda at the expense of building understanding between groups and individuals.

Unfortunately, division, be it on the basis of race, religion or socioeconomic status…

…is what this lying hypocrite is all about.

Since we’re on the subject of The Great Divider, Hope ‘n Change reads between the lines of his reaction to the Zimmerman acquittal:

Circle Jerk

 

In the wake of the George Zimmerman “not guilty” verdict, Barack Hussein Obama – the man who helped kickstart the racial antagonism of the case – has made an official statement about what all Americans should now do to honor Trayvon Martin. Specifically, the president says we should go outside on a dark night and smash our heads repeatedly on the sidewalk until we feel consciousness, if not life itself, slipping away.

Just kidding! What he actually said makes way less sense than that, though has much the same effect on the contents of your skull.

But before we get into actual analysis of the president’s dunderheaded and potentially inflammatory political posturing, let’s take a moment to reflect on the Trayvon Martin case. It is entirely possible that Trayvon was a scared kid who believed he had to attack Zimmerman in order to protect himself – which would certainly add to the tragedy of his death. But it is also true that, after being attacked, Zimmerman felt the need to defend himself – and, according to a jury, did so within the confines of the law.

So, what did the president have to say? That the death of Trayvon Martin was a “tragedy for America” (ergo, Zimmerman can’t possibly have been in the right) and that “we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities.” Because asking ourselves meaningless questions about how wide our “compassion circles” are will really, really help bring down the number of bullet-riddled Black Americans turning up in Chicago’s morgues.

The president also hinted rather unconvincingly that post-trial violence isn’t a good idea, saying that “we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken” – which pretty clearly says “I don’t agree with the jury, but hey – what the hell can you do?” Sadly, the answer is – he can do a lot, because there are reports that the Department of Alleged Justice is now considering filing new charges against Zimmerman because the administration doesn’t think enough damage has been done to the nation’s race relations yet.

And can any of us actually take Barry seriously when he says this is “a nation of laws,” considering he doesn’t bother to honor or uphold those laws if they relate to Obamacare, immigration, gun trafficking, budgets or, like his late not-quite-son, recreational drug use?

Obama also said that “we should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, how we can prevent future tragedies like this. As citizens, that’s a job for all of us.” And, we should point out, the first job actually created under this reprehensible boob in the past 5 years.

But why is he even telling us what we should ask ourselves? Are we, the American people, now universally guilty of some deep moral failing that Barry sees in us, but we’ve failed to address? Hope n’ Change thinks not – and deeply resents the implication. Better that we should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, why we tolerate a race-baiting president who offers meaningless rhetorical pap when what our nation really needs is healing and leadership.

Speaking of colossal jerks…

Reid on Zimmerman: ‘This Isn’t Over With’

 

On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) asked for the Justice Department to prosecute George Zimmerman, who was acquitted Saturday night in the killing of Trayvon Martin. “I think the Justice Department is going to take a look at this,” Reid told NBC’s Meet the Press. “This isn’t over with and I think that’s good. That’s our system, it’s gotten better, not worse.”

Reid did acknowledge the verdict, stating, “I am a trial lawyer and have [brought] over 100 cases to a jury. I don’t always agree with what the jury does but that’s the system and I support the system.”

Yeah…about as much as does The Dear Misleader.  Hey, Harry…

Even the no-longer-relevant are trying to use Zimmerman’s acquittal to get back in the spotlight:

Eliot Spitzer: George Zimmerman verdict a ‘failure of justice’

 

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, D-N.Y., believes that the jury reached the wrong verdict in the George Zimmerman trial.

“This is a failure of justice, I don’t think there’s any other way to view it,” he said flatly on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “The judicial system is not perfect. And in this case it has failed and before we get into a conversation of whether the prosecution was flawed, that they should have handled it in a different way, there is a simple reality here.”

Spitzer said that Trayvon Martin was “innocent.”

Funny; we didn’t know Trayvon was on trial!  As for Spitzer’s claim “the prosecution was flawed”, we’ll concede his point; like the former New York Attorney General’s prosecution of Hank Greenberg, this case never should have gone to court in the first place.

Then there’s this curious sentiment from an unusual source; Conservative Erick Erickson of RedState.com…

I understand why so many in the black community feel there was an injustice. The original injustice was that George Zimmerman was not arrested for the crime.

Really?!?  When the police and DA found no basis whatsoever on which to charge him?!?  Why…as a peace offering to the keep the natives from growing restless?!?  As we said; curious.

Meanwhile, the repercussions from America’s rampant racism as evidenced by the Zimmerman verdict continue to reverberate across the country:

Woman files complaint after doctor diagnoses back pain as ‘ghetto booty’

 

A woman in Tennessee filed a complaint with the Tennessee Department of Health after she said a doctor told her that her back pain was caused by her ‘ghetto booty.’ “I think I blacked out after he said ‘ghetto booty.’ (She “blacked out”?  No, seriously, she “blacked out“?!?) I think my mind was just stuck on the phrase because I couldn’t believe he said that,” Terry Ragland, 55, said.

Ragland said she had been to the doctor’s office several times before, but this was the first time she had seen this particular doctor. The doctor ordered x-rays for her, then returned with the diagnosis. Ragland said she complained to the office manager, who apologized. Then, a few weeks later she received a letter from Dr. Timothy Sweo himself.

In the letter, Sweo said, “I was trying to take technical conversation regarding your lower back and make it less technical.”

The letter offended Ragland, though, because she felt he didn’t believe she had enough intellect to understand his more technical explanation of her lower back pain. Sweo said Ragland has lumbar lordosis, which is a fancy name for the curve of the lower spine that makes the buttocks protrude more.

Sooo…in other words, baby got back!  In our experience, all such an insult should have called for was finding a different physician.  But in the era of the race-baiting professionally-sensitive, it constitutes a news-worthy event.

Shifting gears to ObamaScare, courtesy of the WSJ, David Rivkin and Lee Casey analyze…

Why the President’s ObamaCare Maneuver May Backfire

By postponing the employer mandate, Obama has given millions of Americans the legal standing to sue.

 

President Obama’s announcement on July 2 that he is suspending the Affordable Care Act’s employer health-insurance mandate may well have exposed his actions to judicial review—even though that is clearly what he sought to avoid.

The health-care reform law’s employer mandate requires businesses with more than 50 employees to provide a congressionally prescribed set of health-insurance benefits or pay a penalty calculated at about $2,000 per employee. The law was to take effect on Jan. 1, 2014, but Mr. Obama has “postponed” its application until 2015. His aim, the administration said, was to give employers more time to comply with the new rules. But it was also seen as a way to avoid paying at least part of ObamaCare’s mounting political price in the 2014 congressional elections.

Whatever the reason, the president does not have the power to stop the implementation of a law. If there is one bedrock constitutional legal principle, it is that the president must “faithfully execute” federal statutes. He cannot suspend laws he dislikes on policy grounds or because he fears their political consequences.

Mr. Obama, however, has made a habit of exercising an unlawful suspending power, refusing to enforce selected federal laws, including various provisions of the immigration laws against young, undocumented aliens; work requirements enacted as part of the 1996 federal welfare reform law; and the testing accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind education law.

One key problem with suspension power—aside from the fact that it destroys the balance of power between the two political branches—is that, when skillfully exercised, it sidelines the judiciary. The Constitution requires that a party commencing litigation must have what is commonly called “standing,” i.e., the party must have suffered or will suffer a legal injury that a court can redress. A determined president can head off litigation by effectively rewriting federal statutes in ways that do not create individual injuries so no party has standing.

By suspending the Affordable Care Act’s employer insurance mandate, however, the president has potentially given millions of Americans the necessary standing to challenge his conduct. This is because the Affordable Care Act is a highly integrated law, with many of its key provisions dependent on each other. In addition to the employer mandate, the law also contains an “individual mandate,” requiring most Americans to sign up for a required level of health-insurance coverage or pay a penalty.

The individual mandate was one of the core parts of the Affordable Care Act considered by the Supreme Court in the 2012 case of NFIB v. Sebelius, where the court upheld the statute against constitutional attack. Throughout that litigation, the Obama administration portrayed the individual mandate as an “integral part of a comprehensive scheme of economic regulation” that included the employer insurance mandate, which was intended to give millions of Americans a way of meeting their new obligation to have health insurance. In other words, suspending the employer insurance mandate prevents the individual insurance mandate from working the way Congress intended.

Like the employer mandate, the individual mandate by law will take effect in January 2014 (unless the president postpones that as well). Individuals who will then have to buy their own health insurance will arguably have suffered an injury sufficient to give them standing to sue.

Once in court, these litigants can argue that the very integrated nature of the Affordable Care Act would make it unlawful to apply one part against them, while suspending another section. They can also argue that only Congress can determine whether, once a statute is fundamentally changed post-enactment, it should survive or fall.

This inquiry usually arises when courts, having invalidated on constitutional grounds part of a statute, must determine whether or not Congress would have wanted the valid remaining parts of the law to remain in effect. The relevant constitutional doctrine is called “severability.”

As the Supreme Court noted in the leading severability case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (2006), the ultimate fate of the revised statute is decided based on the “legislative intent.” In the case of the Affordable Care Act, if the courts were, for example, to determine that the employer insurance mandate is unconstitutional, the well-established severability analysis would lead them to conclude that the individual mandate (and likely the entire law) must also fall because Congress did not intend those provisions to operate in the absence of the employer insurance mandate. The president’s suspension of that part of the law, therefore, should also produce the same result, rendering the remainder of the statute unenforceable.

This argument should find favor with judges who are weary of the use of suspension power that improperly aggrandizes presidential authority, diminishes congressional power, and denies the judiciary an opportunity to have its say. Courts would have to conclude that the whole statute must fall while the president’s suspension is in effect. While reaching this conclusion, they might also declare the suspension itself unconstitutional. Both results would mark a significant win for the American people.

Rivkin and Casey made the case against Obamacare before the SCOTUS; which means, John Roberts inexcusable sell-out notwithstanding, they know the law.  We hope and pray they’re right.

Next up, the latest on the Asiana Airlines accident:

Airline: Bogus pilot report damaged our reputation

 

Asiana Airlines said Sunday its reputation was damaged by a report on a San Francisco TV station that used bogus names and racially offensive names for four pilots on its plane that crashed earlier this month and is considering legal action. An anchor for KTVU-TV read the names on the air Friday and then apologized after a break. The report was accompanied by a graphic with the phony names listed alongside a photo of the burned out plane. Video of the report has spread widely across the Internet since it was broadcast.

The National Transportation Safety Board has also apologized, saying a summer intern erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew. (Meet the next Chairman of either the NTSB or FAA!)

An Asiana statement said it’s mulling legal measures against both KTVU-TV and the NTSB because the report “badly damaged” the reputation of the airline and its pilots.

No, Asiana; this…

…is what badly damaged the reputation of your airline and its pilots.  Sorry, Charlie; but in a pinch, WE could have landed that bird.

On the Lighter Side…

Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…

..John Berry…

…G. Trevor, who provides us a sneak peak at the first photo of the Zimmerman jury:

And in The Wide, Wild World of Sports…

Diamondbacks First MLB Team to Broadcast Games in Navajo

 

Nearly 92 years after a major league game was first broadcast on radio, the Arizona Diamondbacks became the first big-league team to have its game broadcast in Navajo.  Dan Arnold and George LaFrance had the play-by-play call of Saturday night’s game against the Brewers on KTNN, a Navajo-language AM station from Window Rock in northern Arizona.

After all, given the Navajo’s 42% unemployment rate, 43% poverty rate and 56% high school graduation rate, learning English surrounded by America is the last thing they’d want to do!

Well, at least the Japanese won’t be able to listen in on the broadcasts!

Finally, courtesy of James Taranto, we’ll call it a wrap with further evidence that, at least for Liberals,…

Math Is Hard

 

It looks as though New York’s New School for Social Research needs to institute remedial math courses–for the faculty. Teresa Ghilarducci, the Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz Chair of Economic Policy Analysis at the school describes a trip to North Carolina, which left a colleague “shell shocked.” The colleague asked: “How can it be legal to have so much poverty in such a wealthy state?”

Expanding on the theme, Ghilarducci purports to “judge a state’s finances by its capacity to reduce child deprivation”:

According to Kids Count, New Hampshire has the lowest rate of child poverty, at 11 percent. Ranked worst is Mississippi, where a third of children are poor. But Mississippi is poor over all; it has the lowest median income in the nation. And New Hampshire is rich; its median income is the third highest. I get that. So the child poverty numbers may say more about income than about the management of the state budgets.

But let’s look at North Carolina. It is the 39th richest state, and yet it ranks 12th for the percentage of children living in poverty–only 11 states fare worse.

As blogger Mike Munger notes, the 39th-richest state is the same thing as the 12th-poorest state.

Math: particularly problematic for Progressives promoting a purely political purpose.

Magoo