Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.) in Cole’s Open Thread of Milky Goodness:
I’ve been reading a little about the Martin-Zimmerman case that’s gearing up, and after a whole year, Zimmerman’s lawyer is saying he isn’t ready yet and he needs more time.
This whole case just angers me and saddens me beyond belief. I see that picture of Martin they always show in any story about the case and I think, “Who knows what that guy might have done of he’d had the chance?” Who knows? Maybe he’d have become a musician, maybe a writer, maybe an artist, and, who knows, maybe he might have been great. Maybe he might have gone on to be a doctor and healed people who needed help. Maybe a lawyer representing people hurt by big, powerful interests. We don’t know what we’ve lost as a society each time some kid gets cut down needlessly (and almost always by guns! Freedoooooom!!!!1!!!!!11!!!!!one!!!!!1!!1!!!!eleven!!!!).
And who knows, maybe he might not have done any of that. The odds are that he would not have gone on to cure cancer. He might have gone on to lead a fairly mundane life, doing nothing more noteworthy than selling insurance for a living. But whatever he might have gone on to do, he had a right to grow up and try to fulfill his dreams, whatever they might have been, but some dumb thug came along and stole his life from him.
He never got to meet somebody and fall in love and raise children. He never got to go abroad and see other countries. He never got to go to college and learn about history or philosophy, poetry or trigonometry or whatever he would have wanted to learn about. Shit, maybe all he wanted to do was go to some trade school and learn how to work on cars or dishwashers or something. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Not that it matters any now, as Zimmerman helpfully saved Martin the trouble of choosing which path he most would have liked to go down in life.
He never got to do any of that because some frustrated would-be tough guy got a hard on playing at being a cop and shot him dead. Every time anybody brings up Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman, we should mull that over a little. Every time some shitbag tells us how guns make us safer, we ought to give a little thought to all the children shot to death by guns, and the lives they never got to lead and the dreams they never got to follow, and how we all lose, too, when some child gets cheated out of living up to his potential or her potential.
This is your Open Thread.
pokeyblow
Fuck George Zimmerman and all his racist teabagger friends.
lamh36
This is the one REAL news story I plan to follow this week. Cause its the one story that literally could have happened to any of the young guys in my family. I know for sure it will be thw no 1 story in Black media this week.
The other stories im done with the sides have already been chosen by most people & the debate that is/was supposed to be started aint happening.
This is ddf the trial of the year
Higgs Boson's Mate
We often accuse the anti-choice crowd of having motives other than reverence for life. The fact that so many of them seem to come from the same cadre as the Second Amendment absolutists seems to bear this out.
eric
But he was………….black.
Defense rests, your honor.
BGinCHI
I’m glad Cole’s spilled milk led to some good in the world.
He’s like a Zen master that way.
Elizabelle
Loved Mumphrey’s post last night. Well said.
Thank you for spotlighting it, Mrs. Sarah. (And welcome back!)
c u n d gulag
I really hate to say this, but if we want gun control, we’d better revive the old Black Panthers.
Because it was only when black people started to protest, and later on, arm themselves, back in the 60’s, that our gun fetishists had any problems with any and every one having access to guns.
It’s only when the Zimmerman’s are the black guys, and the Martin’s, white, that we may sway some of those gun fetishists.
Alexandra
Since this is an open thread:
Heh.
Todd
Yeah, I loved that one, too.
eric
@c u n d gulag: i think you misread this iteration of fetishist. they believe (i) most black males are criminals and (ii) criminals all have guns (See Chicago, City of). The big difference today is that the Birch-type conspiracists that turned everything back upon itself as a freedom ending ploy are now accepted and flourish, whereas, the old “moderate” GOP banished the crazy uncle to the attic. I dont see the toothpaste going into the bottle. Newtown is a wisp of a memory now. poof.
Violet
@c u n d gulag: NRA: “The only person who can stop a
blackbad guy with a gun is awhitegood guy with a gun.rb
So I heard Ethan Hawke did a reddit AMA and that he was really thoughtful and interesting. And I thought – oh, come on. First off: reddit. And second: Ethan Hawke.
But wonder of wonders, it’s true. His discussion of his new movie “The Purge” – which the ads make look like garden-variety torture p0rn – said this:
It’s set in the “future” when rich people don’t care about the violence done to poor people.
His quotes. And I thought: ok, it may or may not be torture p0rn, but apparently this guy has more of a clue than many non-celebrities I know.
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle:
Concur. Mumph’s thoughtful comment nearly brought me to tears last night. Now that you’ve refocussed on it, SP&T (thanks! and welcome home!), I’m getting angry. Indeed, I seem to be in a condition of simmering rage much of the time, and it’s largely because of the way Trayvon Martin died, and moviegoers in Aurora, and happy little kids and their teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the curious four-year-old who shot and killed his father because the dad’s friend hadn’t bothered to put the gun in a safe place, and the dozens of others we’ve heard about, and the hundreds we haven’t. God DAMN.
Betty Cracker
I think Zimmerman is going to walk. The “Stand Your Ground” law turns situations that used to amount to a scuffle or ass-whupping into deadly encounters, and it will continue to do so until it is overturned, which will probably be never.
cleek
@eric:
but some are working to keep the memory alive…
Bobby Thomson
@rb: Science fiction is never really about the future.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Betty Cracker: Of course he will. He should have never been charged in the first place. Not because what he did isn’t murder – I think you could not find a better example if you tried – but because the law is very clear. What he did is legal in Florida. The only way he sees jail is a federal civil-rights violation.
BGinCHI
@rb: I’m not a huge fan of his acting, but he’s definitely not stupid. This doesn’t surprise me.
gene108
@c u n d gulag:
Racial enimety isn’t what it used to be. Some of the guys who showed up to an Obama event, in AZ, with guns (to demonstrate their Second Amendment rights) back in the 2008 campaign were black.
askew
So, I am reading Johnathan Atler’s new Obama book about the 2012 election and I am not sure who his sources are in the Clinton circle, but Bill’s contempt for Obama is pretty much dripping off the page every time Bill is mentioned. Apparently, Bill reached out to Huntsman in the GOP primary to offer assistance in getting the GOP nomination, because he was hoping for a more moderate GOP and was indifferent to Obama losing in 2012.
If Atler’s sources are telling the truth, that is pretty damning stuff that Bill apparently has little loyalty to the Democratic Party. I knew that it has always been about him over his family and the party, but I never thought he’d try to help out the GOP to beat Obama. Bill is a petty man.
SiubhanDuinne
Not to go all Anne Laurie here, but this column by Charlie Pierce is a work of art. One of the best things he’s ever written, IMO. I always read him, generally enjoy him, don’t always agree with him — but this is a keeper.
MomSense
@lamh36:
Yes! Gun violence is just so out of control and tragic and we have the ability and the public support to do something about it and instead will obsess about news that broke seven years ago and for which there is no real public support to do anything about.
Redshirt
@rb: Reddit is a strange place. You’ve got big name folks like Hawke, and oh, say, Barack Hussein Obama commenting on it. Then you have dedicated forums for child pornography and beating women.
The Internet in a nutshell, I guess.
Violet
@askew: Is Bill still bitter about Obama beating Hillary in 2008?
Mark S.
Shorter Jeffrey Toobin:
Higgs Boson's Mate
You want to know how much impact Newtown had? The shooter in last Thursday’s shooting rampage is reported to have been previously hospitalized for mental health treatment. Neighbors and acquaintances described him as being troubled about his parents’ divorce, prone to angry outbursts and fascinated with guns. Despite all that he had access to a .223 semi-automatic rifle and over a thousand rounds of ammunition.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne:
We need to get the focus off NSA — which is bad enough — and back onto gun violence, the NRA, and our bought and paid for Congress.
That would be the same bought and paid for Congress that is fine with our military-industrial-data mining complex. Job creation, bitchez!
Amir Khalid
Over the past few days, I’ve been following the Yahoo! News coverage, in particular the comments under the stories. The racism shown there towards a dead boy, the untruths being peddled about him, are shocking.
I remember OJ Simpson’s murder trial. Back then, it seemed from the American media coverage that whether you were pulling for Simpson’s acquittal, or for his conviction, depended on whether you were black like he is, or white like his ex-wife and her friend. (Me, I figured he was probably guilty, since his defence never managed to establish that there was anyone else to suspect.)
Now, it’s the victim who is black and the killer who is white (or, at any rate, whiter). The guilty/not guilty opinions don’t appear to break down by race as much as they did in Simpson’s case, so that’s progress. Yet i still get the sense that many over there still see this as a race-related case. I remember, for instance, Bruce Springsteen playing American Skin last year as a comment on Trayvon’s death. What else is different, and what’s the same, between that case and this one?
Elizabelle
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Yeah, but for the NSA story sucking all the oxygen out of the room (and WHY is that?), we could have had a lot more focus on a mentally disturbed and violent young man showing up at a community college with 1300 rounds of ammunition and an assault rifle.
Cause that is news, even in these US of A.
askew
@Violet:
Judging from this book, I’d say so. I am just not sure if it is believable or not. Bill can’t be that immature can he?
He also seems to have his nose out of joint because Obama isn’t calling him asking for advice all the time. There are lots of comments from someone on the Clinton team about how Bill thinks Obama is in over his head, etc.
Betty Cracker
@SiubhanDuinne: Wow, that is a good column.
Cacti
With all the musical references at BJ, I’m surprised no one thought of this re: Trayvon Martin and all of the other young people cut down by gun violence:
Higgs Boson's Mate
@SiubhanDuinne:
Damn, that is a good piece of writing.
rb
@Bobby Thomson: Is “The Purge” SF? Wouldn’t have thought of it that way, but fair enough.
feebog
@ Betty Cracker:
Wait, did I miss something here? Because I thought the “Stand Your Ground” defense was subject to a separate hearing that Zimmerman’s lawyer waived. I guess I could be wrong, since I’m about as far away from Florida as possible without being in Hawaii’, but I thought I read about this several months ago.
Redshirt
@Amir Khalid: It’s shocking, isn’t it? When you finally gaze directly into the minds of these hateful racists – or, as we call them, The Wingnuts. The depths of their depravity, their pure hate, their lack of logic, their blind devotion to whatever BS they’re being fed, it’s all shocking, and that’s for the good.
We need to know these people are out there, and then do everything we can to trump them.
askew
Immigration bill is getting its first vote in the Senate today. Curious whether it has 60 votes yet and which Dem Senators will vote against it. Pryor and Landrieu?
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@Elizabelle:
Really? Because I don’t think the hacks in DC would have taken a whole week on the guy for at least two reasons: 1) he didn’t have the numbers. Sadly, mass shootings only get significant airplay with larger casualty numbers (Va. Tech, Aurora, and Newtown); and 2) It’s on the left coast. Nobody in the media industry (not the entertainment industry, but the journalism-industrial complex) gives a shit about what happens on the left coast.
Violet
@Amir Khalid:
OJ was famous. Zimmerman was not. OJ was accused of killing his wife. Zimmerman is accused of killing a kid on the street. OJ had a lot of money available to use for his defense. Zimmerman doesn’t have a lot of his own money, although he may have raised some (not sure) or be getting donations for his defense (again, not sure).
The cases themselves seem like very different cases. The only similarity seems to be one of the parties is black and one is white in each case.
Cacti
@feebog:
IAAL but don’t practice in Florida. My understanding of SYG was that it is an affirmative defense, and that it is waived if not timely raised. He waived his SYG immunity from prosecution hearing, so I would think it is off the table at trial, and that he is asserting the more general theory of self-defense.
gene108
The NSA stories miss the point. The real actors in all of this are our friendly neighborhood Congresscritters.
Of course there is strong bipartisan support in Congress for Snowden to be tried for treason.
There are also many Americans who’d rather have a strong security state, than risk more acts of terrorism.
If the civil libertarian types want to change public opinion, they are poorly using what little public sentiment exists with regards to opposition to the security state.
Whatever shock value exists, post Watergate, about government corruption was used up during the Clinton and Bush, Jr years.
Betty Cracker
@feebog: He waived SYG at the pre-trial hearing. My understanding is it will be part of his self defense claim at trial.
Flying Squirrel Girl
@Betty Cracker: I believe Zimmerman waived SYG because to invoke SYG would have begged the question of why Trayvon was not afforded the right to stand his own ground, since it seems that he was initially threatened.
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: I think the only similarity between the two is the racial polarization angle.
Interestingly, there was a somewhat similar case in the Tampa Bay area awhile back in which the racial roles were reversed. I say it was similar because both occurred recently in Florida and raised issues around the absurd Stand Your Ground law.
In this case, the defendant was an elderly black man who was the neighborhood crank/busybody, and he initiated a confrontation with a middle-aged, much larger man, which developed into a scuffle, according to witnesses. The defendant then shot and killed the man in front of his young daughter.
The shooter was convicted of manslaughter, and he’s attributing it to racism. That may have been a factor, but the man does seem to have been a gun-flashing crank, and sympathy for the girl who witnessed the whole thing played a role too, I’m sure.
The common thread here is this stupid law, which turns less serious incidents into homicides.
Ben Cisco
@Amir Khalid:
For you, perhaps. I’ve got 50 years time in service on this rock.
Nauseating? Yes. Infuriating? Damned skippy. Shocking? Not. A. Chance.
Betty Cracker
@Flying Squirrel Girl: You may be right. I’m no expert. I also read somewhere that the Zimmerman defense team thought that if the pre-trial motion was denied, it would undermine their self-defense case. They plan to invoke the “Stand Your Ground” principle in the trial, if not in letter, in spirit, from what I understand.
aimai
@Forum Transmitted Disease: There is nothing clear about the law in florida since women who avail themselves of their right to “stand their ground” and merely fire in the direction of their abuser get jailed, while men who actively return to a public place and kill their personal enemies, who are not attacking them, get off.
aimai
But to get back to what I really wanted to say in connection to this post–something which comes out of KagroX’s roundup of people being shot every day is the sheer number of children who are killed playing with guns in the homes of their guardians and protectors, their parents and their grandparents. And as of today the rather large number of children who become accidental murderers of their own fathers–there was another case this week, and a case a few weeks back, so very similar that I thought I was misreading. But no: today a four year old shot his father with a gun he picked up at a friend’s house–the friend had no children and was not expecting the visit so of course had a loaded gun sitting out ready to fire. A few weeks ago it was a father who went in to see the guns owned by a friend and I believe the toddler who followed him into the room ended up shooting his own mother to death. You can’t make this up because its so horrifyingly stupid and wrong that you can’t comprehend it, except that people are very good at not understanding the odds of an accident and overvalueing their control over their environment. Its a paradox: the people who are most afraid of everything and of the random chance of being attacked by an armed stranger and the people least in control of their own fate and most likely to end up killing themselves with their own guns. While the rest of the people in this country, the calm people, neither own guns nor end up being shot accidentally by them.
Ben Cisco
@c u n d gulag:
Sadly, this is what will actually happen. These people learn NOTHING, and in the rare exception that they do, it’s almost always the WRONG lesson.
Stand Your Ground has already been proven to be of little use (at least wrt it’s stated purpose) if your melanin count is too high. Indeed, it seems to have been useful in excusing the executions of melanin-enhanced Floridians:
Anyone surmising that flipping the script would result in anything other than the mother of all shitfits courtesy of the NeoConfederate fascists is, at best, overly optimistic.
They want the 1800’s back. If it can be done quietly, they’ll be good with it. If it can’t, they will start their shooting war.
cmorenc
@Betty Cracker:
No, Zimmerman will be convicted, but of some lesser degree of manslaughter rather than second-degree murder. He’ll also wind up doing prison time, but only two to four years actual time. IMHO although a Florida jury will be influenced by the “stand your ground” law to refuse to convict Zimmerman of second-degree murder, they’ll nevertheless balk at applying it to permit the sort of cowboy vigilanteism Zimmerman was engaged in when he confronted and shot a teenager, even a black teenager in a predominately white neighborhood, who was not guilty of any sort of criminal activity beyond perhaps speculatively being a bit uppity toward Zimmerman. A crucial fact that will cause the jury to identify more strongly with Trevon Martin than you might expect is that he was in the neighborhood with his father as a bona fide guest at one of the houses in the neighborhood, shot while on a mundane trip back from a convenience store, rather than merely some black teen hoodlum who had no legitimate business being where he was other than surveying for potential burglaries.
Even in Florida, even with a “stand your ground” law, even with a black teenager walking in a neighborhood that had experienced occasional break-ins, Zimmerman’s recklessly lethal misjudgment of Martin will be too much for a jury to give Zimmerman a pass, even while they’ll cut him enough slack to beat second-degree murder. THEREFORE, a conviction on some lesser-included form of manslaughter the jury thinks likely to force Zimmerman to do time for, just not an excessively much amount.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker:
Maybe the rest of us cannot afford to visit Florida if Stand Your Ground remains law.
Would be great if international visitors stayed away too.
Mammon is the only god that talks.
Lurking Canadian
I am absolutely certain that, no matter what the physical evidence might or might not prove, and no matter what the Stand Your Groud law might or might not say, if it had been a paranoid middle-aged black man who shot a white kid armed with Skittles for the crime of being in the wrong neighbourhood, the shooter would already be convicted.
Cacti
@Lurking Canadian:
Probably would have been shot dead on the scene by the responding officers.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@c u n d gulag: Sadly too true. As long as the heavily armed melanin enhanced are shooting one another, the gun fetishists tut tut about how uncivilized it is.
Should those with higher melanin content – any shade darker than mid-to-north European (or Asian) will do – go about openly well armed where there are white folks… Well, then something will have to be done about gun regulation.
Fuckers. 20 dead school kids don’t faze them. But a few dark dudes with guns wandering among them, now there’s a reason to get on with controlling firearms access.
I’ll happily pay some folks to do it, being far to melanin deficient to to have any effect myself.
Betty Cracker
@cmorenc: You might be right, but I think the defense will be able to convince the jury that Martin physically attacked Zimmerman, opening up the possibility that Zimmerman had reason to believe he was in danger and thus the option, under the stupid SYG law, to use lethal force.
Now, Martin had every reason on earth to confront the creepy stranger who was stalking him for no good reason, but that just points to what is wrong with the law: It turns misunderstandings and quarrels that used to end with a bloody nose into a trip to the morgue. But here we are.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@aimai: My meaning was unclear if you haven’t lived in the South. The law merely codifies what has always been the case in the South, which is that black men can be slaughtered by anyone who they have the misfortune to piss off.
Federal civil-rights laws were enacted because Southern juries WOULD NOT convict whites who killed blacks, no matter the circumstances.
That uppity bitches who dare to fight back against an abuser still get jail in spite of the law is merely the system working as it was intended by the people who passed “Stand Your Ground”.
Cassidy
@Ben Cisco: This kind of dovetails interestingly into the NSA/ Libertarian threads we’re having. My Libertarian acquaitances are exclusively white. Not a peep about stand your ground. Nothing. The NSA may know they’re looking at porn after the wife goes to bed? End of the fuckin’ world.
Cassidy
Don’t forget, martin dipped back into the 90’s and [supposedly] called Z-man a “homie”. That proves he was being
blackity-black-blacka thuggish hoodlum gangbangerin’ around.aimai
@Betty Cracker: That’s not the problem with SYG. The problem with SYG is that the guy who is left standing is found innocent, while the one who is murdered is found guilty regardless of the origins of the situation. SYG didn’t “turn” anything into anything in this case. Zimmerman was spoiling for a fight and was armed to the teeth relative to an innocent teen. He got into a struggle with Trayvon, who he had been stalking, because it was inconceivable to him that he, Zimmerman, would ever be questioned or held accountable for stalking and attacking a black kid. I can well believe that he fired by accident, not really intending anything by it or having the presence of mind to think of SYG at all. SYG comes into it secondarily, to my mind, because it clearly influences a certain kind of Floridian man to imagine that he has been deputized by the State of Florida to act as judge, police, detective and executioner all in one.
But the real culprit here is the Zimmerman’s imaginary status as a “block captain” maintaining order. If the police and the local community had lockd Zimmerman up for being an interfereing police wannabe looking for trouble this never would hvae happened.
Seanly
That was a great post. ‘Nuf said.
Ben Cisco
@Cassidy: It’s the Daffy Duck theory of politics.
Betty Cracker
@aimai: Good points — in this case, status, Zimmerman’s Rambo fantasies, etc., certainly came into play.
But only a fraction of SYG cases get a national platform. In dozens of others, the law is invoked when a clash between neighbors escalates or a pair assholes screeching at each other over a traffic incident erupts into a shootout.
You could make the argument that people would have been killing each other in those incidents even without cover of law, and you don’t need a special permit to carry a gun in your car or maintain an arsenal in your home down here, so maybe that’s true.
But I think when the state officials made the decision to explicitly tell people that they don’t have to try to retreat, just fire at will, it had an effect on people’s willingness to resort to violence and think they’ll get away with it. Like you said, if only one party is left alive, only one side of the story gets heard.
aimai
@Betty Cracker: The SYG laws have a lot in common with the Texas law that just let that asshole kill a prostitute for trying to “steal 150 dollars” of his money “at night.” Both laws assume that there is in effect no viable police presence and that there is no civil legal system at all available to one or both parties–that the armed party and specifically the homeowner is entitled to excercise supreme authority within his sphere. I really attribute these laws to years of fantasy legislating for morally crippled and paranoid individuals who imagine they are living on a frontier, or in an urban wasteland, in which every man’s hand is against them and there is no law or justice other than what the individual can gain for himself.
These people have returned to what anthropologist’s would call an earlier form of stateless society in which “self help” is used rather than modern law or police power. The end result is a legalization of the craziest, most selfish, and most hysterical overreactions. As people noted inthe threads below discussions of the man who shot the prostitute the same logic–that money he gave her was ‘stolen’ because she failed to complete a contract to his satisfaction–applies equally to a woman who lets a guy buy her a coke and then doesn’t have sex with him. Can he shoot her too? She “defrauded” him. Under Texas’s law its far from clear that he can’t. But these are, in other places, civil crimes not punishiable by death or violence. Something terribly wrong has happened in this country, to a whole lot of people, that these laws get passed in the first place putting lethal authority in the hands of kooks and assholes and immunizing them when they violently assault the rest of us under color of their newfound authority.
I’m really disgusted that the fantasy fears and rages of a small subset of the population got written into law without any check–and with predictably disasterous consequences.
Trollhattan
Are they going through voir dire now? Would be interested to know what questions are being asked of prospective jurors. In Florida, how many preemptory challenges do the prosecution and defense get? I’d ask how much ammo they’re allowed, but have more self-discipline than that.
Ringside, from 3,000 miles distant, I have a bad feeling about the likelihood of conviction. Am very willing to be wrong about this.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
I’ll have to look it up again but, believe it or not, there are several cases that are even more horrifying than the Trayvon Martin case where the killer was able to invoke SYG.
I think my “favorite” was the guy who took a gun to his ex-wife’s house, confronted her new boyfriend, shot the boyfriend dead, and was able to claim a SYG defense because he felt “threatened” by the boyfriend.
Cassidy
SYG is a fucking hunting license with no limits and no season.
Ted & Hellen
Poor, sweet, innocent Trayvon.
So sad that we was bashing a man’s head into a concrete sidewalk…
Persia
@Betty Cracker: After hearing about the guy who shot the prostitute over a hundred bucks or whatever, I’ve lost all hope.
Persia
@Ted & Hellen: You mean the armed guy who was following him around in the middle of the night?
cmorenc
@Betty Cracker:
Actually, odds are stronger than you think that a jury will be (collectively) smart enough to see through the dynamics of how the confrontation likely developed. Again, the fact that Trevon Martin was in the neighborhood as an invited guest of another resident thereof, accompanied by his father, will be crucially helpful in steering the jury to the correct starting point for evaluating the overall incident, whereas they would likely be far more acceptingly inclined to focus more tightly on Martin’s possible contribution to escalating the confrontation if he had been a black kid with no arguable business being in the neighborhood except to potentially be up to no good. What Martin’s being an invited guest of a neighborhood resident up to nothing more sinister than a trip to a convenience store will do is to create the platform for most of the members to identify with Martin’s situation in the confrontation, rather than Zimmerman’s as a supposed protector against outside burglars.
I would certainly never claim that juries are comprised mostly of wise, smart, unprejudiced people, but having been a member of a jury myself in a troubling (but not quite this serious) criminal case, I came away with more faith in the collective wisdom of juries than I had before the experience. The jury I was on (a 12-person jury on a felony case) was comprised of a quite diverse set of people from all walks of life, including humble folks of modest education of the sort you’d ordinarily not turn to for any sort of advice, but what was surprising during our jury room discussions was how EACH and every single member caught some important factual nuances that had escaped most of the rest of us, including me with four college degrees (one of which is a law degree! Both sides had run out of peremptory challenges by the time I was seated). I think it’s highly likely there will be enough jurors realizing how lethally troubling it is to readily accept a framing of a case like this that effectively permits a person to aggressively provoke another into a physical confrontation and then claim they killed them in self-defense, even under a “stand your ground” law, and steer the group toward the bigger picture. What most ordinary people want out of a “stand your ground” type law is if they are genuinely confronted with unprovoked serious physical aggression, to not have to worry about legal vulnerability to second-guessing when they defend themselves with firearms. However, even in Florida, most people likely don’t like the idea of applying a law like this to excuse a reckless vigilante who unnecessarily initiates a confrontation that kills an innocent victim, even one who put ups some physical resistance before he was shot.
Trollhattan
@Ted & Hellen:
Poor poor sidewalk, having to endure that bloated head. Oh, wait, who had the gun, again? Who was told to stay in the fucking car, again? Hmmm, reality is light and fluffy with this one.
Mnemosyne
@Ted & Hellen:
Ah, yes, I forgot that in Timmy’s world, only white men have a right to self-defense.
Maude
@Violet:
In 2008, after Hillary lost, the Clintons had the entire state of Iowa on their enemies list. They were serious.
They also hate John Kerry.
Joseph Nobles
“We don’t need you to do that.”
James E. Powell
@askew:
The story that Bill Clinton disdains and disrespects Barack Obama never seems to go away. The Villagers like it because it gives them an excuse to cast both men in a negative light.
I would first ask if anyone can recall a former president who did more to assist the campaign than Bill Clinton did for the candidate in 2008 and the incumbent in 2012. Former presidents usually stand above the fray – they are expected to endorse and voice support for their party’s candidate, but Bill Clinton did far more than that.
I would then ask if anyone can reasonably argue that Bill Clinton did more to advance and enact Democratic legislation than Barack Obama. The Clinton years were characterized by serial surrenders, some of which led to disasters. See, e.g., repeal Glass-Steagall.
Finally, there can be no argument that Barack Obama is Clinton’s superior is personal conduct. As much as he may be admired for his political skills, Clinton’s clumsy handling of the faux-scandals and his inability to control his rather juvenile sexual conduct was the main reason we ended up with the Bush-Cheney Junta and all the evil that resulted therefrom.
So first, I don’t believe that Clinton really despises Obama and, if I’m wrong and he does, shame on him.
Trollhattan
@James E. Powell:
The Big Dog’s speech at the DNC was a barn-burner, very important in refocusing the national and party narrative, and I don’t believe for a minute he makes it had he not sincerely supported Obama. Whatever occurred in 2008 was long, long over by 2012.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Ted & Hellen:
Who the fuck are you, anyway? What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you for the love of God just fuck off?
Mnemosyne
@askew:
Yeah, I think I’m with James E. Powell and Trollhattan here — it’s hard to look at how much campaigning Bill Clinton did in 2012 and the speech he gave at the Democratic convention and think that he wanted Obama to lose. I wouldn’t be surprised if he encourage Jon Huntsman to run, because Huntsman vs. Obama would have been like Mondale vs. Reagan: an even bigger blowout than the one we got.
Ted & Hellen
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Who the fuck are you, anyway? What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you for the love of God just fuck off?
I am legion. And you are obviously a disturbed and very, very delicate flower.
Blow me.
Original Lee
@Ted & Hellen: Exorcism in Aisle 11, please. My pie is infested.
Jebediah
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
He won’t. He’s the only entry in my pie filter.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Jebediah:
How does the pie filter work?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): It replaces whatever the troll says with something else, usually a brief paean to pie. Requires Greasemonkey. Get the pie filter here.
Jebediah
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
It gives you stuff like that instead of the obnoxiousness. And I see Sister Rail Gun has provided the link. It is great and wonderful and I think I am not the only person who will treat Cleek to a drink or a meal if we ever meet IRL.