The Last Word:
O'Donnell challenges
Sentinel report
<p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 420px;">Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy</p>
>via: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45755883/vp/46863458#46863458
_________________________
Trayvon Martin shooting:
New details emerge
from Twitter account,
witness testimony
Senior Media Reporter
Mon, Mar 26, 2012
Martin, Zimmerman (AP/File, Miami Herald)
As George Zimmerman's supporters work to stem the rising tide of public outrage aimed at the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin last month, a new picture of the victim—culled from the 17-year-old's Twitter account and witness testimony leaked from local law enforcement—has emerged.
"With a single punch," the Orlando Sentinel, citing police sources, reported Monday, "Trayvon Martin decked the Neighborhood Watch volunteer ... climbed on top of [him] and slammed his head into the sidewalk several times, leaving him bloody and battered."
"That is the account Zimmerman gave police," the paper said, "and much of it has been corroborated by witnesses, authorities say."
Zimmerman's attorney, Craig Sonner, says that Zimmerman acted in self-defense and is not a racist as some have portrayed him.
"I think we need to let the investigation come forward and let all the facts in this case come out," Sonner said on the "Today" show. "I think it's going to tell a different story than the way it's been related and portrayed in the media."
According to a CNN poll released Monday, 73 percent of Americans think police should arrest Zimmerman.
Meanwhile, the difference between the typical teenager Martin's family and supporters say he was and the way he presented himself on social media is the subject of increasing debate.
AP/David Goldman
As Dan Linehan, a blogger at Wagist.com, pointed out, correspondence with Martin on Twitter before he died alludes to an incident with a bus driver. "Yu ain't tell me you swung on a bus driver," Martin's cousin wrote to him on Feb. 21.
The same week, Martin was suspended for 10 days from Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in North Miami-Dade. "He was not suspended for something dealing with violence or anything like that," his father said. "It wasn't a crime he committed, but he was in an unauthorized area [on school property]," declining to offer more details.
But a family spokesman told the Associated Press on Monday that Martin was suspended because marijuana residue was found in his book bag.
More than 25,000 were expected to attend an afternoon rally in Sanford, Fla., on Monday for Martin, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders.
"The media is getting the Trayvon Martin story wrong," Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote on BusinessInsider.com, comparing it to the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, in which three members of the lacrosse team were accused of rape, resulting in a media firestorm and public outcry. The accuser's case unraveled, and the charges were eventually dropped.
"Oh how little we have learned," David Shane wrote on PolicyMic.com. The media has rushed to judgment yet again. Now, it's quite possible that Zimmerman is guilty of everything his worst foes accuse him of. There is plenty about this case that troubles me. But that's exactly the point—I don't know. Neither does anyone else, and both the scope and tone of the media coverage ought to reflect that fact."
__________________________
__________________________
Why Conservatives Are Smearing Trayvon Martin’s Reputation
Mar 27, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
First, there was the discussion of what Trayvon Martin was wearing. “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmermanwas,” Geraldo Rivera said on Fox & Friends last week, later suggesting that the sweatshirt made him look like a “wannabe gangster.” Then conservative bloggers started digging through Martin’s Facebook page for information that might raise doubts about his character. It turns out that one of Martin’s friends had written, under a happy birthday message, “damn were you at nigga needa plant;” according to Dan Riehl at Riehl World View, “Some may interpret that as Martin having somehow been involved in selling [marijuana].”
Conservatives are focusing on Trayvon’s tweets, appearance, school suspension over marijuana traces, and the hoodie he was wearing to blame him for his own death—and to show that his killing had nothing to do with racism. Plus watch The Daily Beast's John Avlon, Lloyd Grove and Harry Siegel discuss the right-wing smear campaign against Trayvon.
Trayvon Martin’s past is being excavated for evidence that he might have provoked the harm done to him, writes Michelle Goldberg.
On Monday, The Daily Caller published a list of Martin’s tweets—his handle was @NO_LIMIT_NIGGA—that reveal him as a posturing teenager rather than a choirboy. (“Lol so daisha think she a boss caus she walked in class late 2day…I do dat everyday,” says one.) The story notes that the photograph attached to the account depicts Martin “smiling, gold-toothed, into a camera in front of an electronic dartboard.” Meanwhile the media was flooded with the news, if one could call it that, that Martin was once suspended from school for possession of a plastic baggie with marijuana residue on it.
“They've killed my son, and now they're trying to kill his reputation,” Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, said after the suspension story broke.
I’m far from the first to notice the similarities between the way people talk about Martin and the way they talk about rape victims, whose clothes and histories are often subject to scrutiny no matter how cut-and-dried the case seems. Like a rape victim, Martin’s past is being excavated for evidence that he might have provoked the harm done to him. It hardly matters that even if Martin had gotten high every day, it would have had zero relevance; it’s not as if marijuana use is linked to violence. Nor that it’s not unusual for a teenager to come across as obnoxious on Twitter. People were looking for some tenuous justification for treating him as complicit in his own death, and now they’ve found it. (For the record, I was also suspended from high school, though in my case for smoking cigarettes. I trust that should a stranger shoot me in the street, no one will treat this as a mitigating factor.)
On the surface, it’s odd that Martin’s image would become so politicized. No ideological capitulation would be required for conservatives to mourn his death—one can believe in gun rights and still believe that he shouldn’t have been killed. A real NRA fanatic, after all, might make a case that Martin himself should have been armed, so that he could stand his ground against the paranoid man who was stalking him.
Certainly, it’s possible that some unknown evidence will emerge to complicate the current narrative of what happened between Zimmerman and Martin. Zimmerman claims that after he’d been following Martin, the young man attacked him, and according to the Orlando Sentinel, police found him “bleeding from the nose, [with] a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head.” No matter how things unfolded, there’s no excuse for those like Spike Lee who have tweeted Zimmeran’s home address; if nothing else, this case should make clear the horror of vigilantism.
The Trayvon Martin Smear Campaign
But as of right now, some things are not in dispute. Martin was unarmed save for a pack of Skittles and an ice tea. Zimmerman, who repeatedly called the cops when he saw young black men in his gated community, trailed Martin after the police advised him not to. He called Martin either a “coon” or a “goon.” Martin had no documented history of violence. Zimmerman, on the other hand, was previously accused of hitting his ex-fiancé; in response, he said that she was the aggressor, which means he doesn’t deny that there was a physical fight.
So why this desire to paint Martin, rather than the man who shot him, as the guilty party? Partly, of course, it’s just a reaction to his death becoming a cause célèbre on the left—it’s the same sort of impulse that leads some conservatives to delight in “Fry Mumia” T-shirts. Beyond that, though, some on the right are deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the United States, and certainly not a problem on the scale of false accusations of racism. You might call these people anti-anti-racists. They are determined to push back against any narrative that would suggest that a black man has been targeted for the color of his skin.
Some conservatives are deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the U.S., and certainly not on the scale of false accusations of racism.
Riehl does us the great favor of making such views explicit. “In the past when race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton started their usual schtick over some alleged racial issue, they and the media were mostly allowed to run wild with it … But I don't have to tolerate it, now,” he writes, continuing, “[L]ast time I looked, there's a black guy in the White House. You want me to cry and feel sorry for you because America is such a racist country, or I need to explore some hidden racism deep within myself?”
Other anti-anti-racists are equally determined to deny that Martin’s blackness had anything to do with his death. When President Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Newt Gingrich reacted with the apoplexy he often shows in the face of anti-racism, saying, “Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period…. Is the president suggesting that, if it had been a white who'd been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn't look like him?” Rick Santorum echoed, “What the president of the United States should do is try to bring people together, not use these types of horrible and tragic individual cases to try to drive a wedge in America.”
But if race has nothing to do with this case, then it makes no sense that Zimmerman was able to kill Martin without consequences—unless, of course, Martin did something to provoke him. If you don’t want to believe that racism is a problem in the United States, it helps to believe that Martin had it coming. Even if the only evidence is a school suspension, a tiny trace of pot, and the juvenile tweets of a kid trying to be cool.
__________________________
George Zimmerman,
Son of a Retired Judge,
Has 3 Closed Arrests
3/27/2012 by Danielle Canada
Did George Zimmerman have help from his father, a retired judge, in clearing his name in three separate arrests?
That’s the question that’s being asked now that more information on Trayvon Martin’s 28-year-old killer is being revealed. Robert Zimmerman, a former Orange County magistrate judge, recently wrote a letter to The Orlando Sentinel defending his son, who’s been dragged through the mud for shooting the unarmed 17-year-old last month. In the letter, the senior Zimmerman asks people not to jump to conclusions and insists that his son didn’t follow the young boy home as he walked through their gated community.
“He would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever. The media portrayal of George as a racist could not be further from the truth. At no time did George follow or confront Mr. Martin. When the true details of the event became public, and I hope that will be soon, everyone should be outraged by the treatment of George Zimmerman in the media,” wrote Robert Zimmerman.
Now more info is being dug up on his “victimized” son through public records and revealing his checkered past.
According to a records search on George, he was previously arrested for domestic violence, resisting an officer without violence and most shockingly, resisting an officer with violence — a felony charge that surely could have landed him in prison.
All three of those arrests, however, were mysteriously closed with no semblance of charges for the Florida resident. So how was someone with a violent past including that of battery against an officer able to carry a 9 mm handgun? Maybe that’s a question Robert Zimmerman should answer …
George Zimmerman had felony assault on police officer charge in ’05 & 2 domestic assaults
Last edited Sat Mar 24, 2012, 09:48 AM USA/ET – Edit history (2)
From the Orange County, FL Circuit Court Clerk of the Court Records page: [link to myclerk.myorangeclerk.com]
Record Count: 4
Search By: Party Exact Name: on Party Search Mode: Name Last Name: Zimmerman First Name: George Case Status: Closed Date Filed On or After: 01/01/2005 Date Filed On or Before: 01/01/2006 Sort By: Filed Date
Case Number Citation Number Style/Defendant Info Filed/Location/Judicial Officer Type/Status Charge(s)
2005-CF-009525-A-O
ZIMMERMAN, GEORGE MICHAEL
10/05/1983
07/18/2005
Div 10
OKane, Julie H
Criminal Felony
Closed
CR-RESISTING OFFICER WITH VIOLENCE
BATTERY ON LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER
2005-MM-010436-A-O
ZIMMERMAN, GEORGE MICHAEL
10/05/1983
07/18/2005
Orlando
Miller, W Michael
Misdemeanor
Closed
CR-RESISTING OFFICER WITHOUT VIOLENCE
2005-DR-012980-O
ZUAZO, VERONICA vs. ZIMMERMAN, GEORGE M
08/09/2005
Div 44
44, TBA
Domestic Violence
Closed – SRS
2005-DR-013069-O
ZIMMERMAN, GEORGE M vs. ZUAZO, VERONICA A
08/10/2005
Div 46
White, Keith F
Domestic Violence
Closed – SRS
>via: http://rollingout.com/culture/george-zimmerman-son-of-a-retired-judge-has-3-c...
They're circling the wagons down in Sanford these days. The defenders of George Zimmerman, the trigger-happy wannabe who clipped Trayvon Martin for the crime of being a black kid in a hoodie with snack foods in the wrong neighborhood, is now being cocooned by his lawyer — who scarpered on an appearence on Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night — by some alleged friends, and by the local police department, which has screwed this case up to a faretheewell since the night the shooting happened, but which is now leaking like a sieve. Ask yourself how we suddenly know that the dead kid had been suspended from high school because he got caught with a bag that might once have contained marijuana. Ask yourself why we know that. We know that because this case is Not About Race.
It is Not About Race because It Is Never About Race. Race is the past. Black people can vote. One of them is president. Nothing Is About Race anymore. Just ask Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum — and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick that guy is? — and they'll tell you that the president "injected" race into the tragedy. It wasn't there before the president — who is (shhh!) black, you know — put it there. Ask Joe Oliver, this "friend" of the gunman who insists that Zimmerman might have said "fucking goons" and not "fucking coons," because the latter is an obsolete racial slur and the former is a "term of endearment," according to Oliver's daughter. This is enormously believable because, if you're an armed 28-year old gunslinger in pursuit of what you believe is a dangerous burglar, the first descriptive that would leap to anyone's mind is a term of endearment used by high-school girls. Yeah, sure. Whatever. As if. And it is enormously believable because This Is Not About Race.
It Is Never About Race. All those people arguing down through the years that the Civil War was about dueling conceptions of nationhood, or a clash of incompatible economic systems, or the ramifications of the 10th Amendment were all arguing, after all, that It Was Not About Race. Massive Resistance in the South in the 1960's was about resistance to overweening federal power because It Was Not About Race. The Wallace campaigns, and the politically profitable adoption by modern conservatism of the leftover tropes and trappings of American apartheid was about the embattled white middle-class in the North and not About Race because It Is Never About Race. Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign talking about states rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, not far from where they dug three civil rights workers out of a dam, because he wanted to show that a new paradigm had been established in American constitutional history, and it was not About Race because It Is Never About Race. Amadou Diallo was Not About Race. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, which tracks such things, dozens of children are currently serving sentences of life without parole, of whom two-thirds of them are children of color, as a result of laws passed by legislators wanting to look tough on crime, and those statistics are not skewed because of race because It Is Never About Race. George Zimmerman saw a black kid with a hoodie and gave chase with his gun in his hand. But that was not about race, because Joe Oliver and the Sanford police and the oh-so-very fair-minded media are telling us, hell, don't worry, It Is Never About Race.
I despair now of there ever being justice for this dead boy. (Joe Oliver, the enthusiastically televised friend of the accused, is peddling the line that, during the fight, "the gun went off." Pity.) The wagons are circling and the mainstream media are settling into their two-sides-to-this-terrible-tragedy mode, as though losing a fistfight, if that's what actually happened, is an excuse for blowing away an unarmed teenager. This Cannot Be About Race. It's about a terrible misunderstanding, not dissimilar to the tragic mistakes made by the NYPD when it shredded Diallo, or when it ventilated Sean Bell on Bell's wedding day in 2006. It's just another one of those awful events in which nobody's really to blame because we're all human and to err is human, even with a gun, and even when you have no earthly reason but your own fear and poisonous assumptions to stalk a black kid for the crime of possession of snack foods with intent to eat them in the wrong neighborhood. It must be difficult to be a black person in America. You live in a universe replete with unfortunate coincidental events.
PLUS: Complete Coverage of the Trayvon Martin Case from Charles P. Pierce >>
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/trayvon-martin-backlash-7650171#ixzz1qNOnErxo
>via: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/trayvon-martin-backlash-7650171?src=rss