From CSN News:

A Florida advocacy group spearheading protests over the racially-charged Trayvon Martin shooting has welcomed the intervention of the United Nations’ human rights chief, who has called for the shooter to be put on trial and “reparations for the victims concerned.”

“We believe that the United Nations involvement can help prevent another Trayvon Martin situation in other counties across the world,” J. Willie David, president of the Florida Civil Rights Association, said in a statement provided to CNSNews.com on Monday.

“The shooting death of Trayvon Martin and Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law have created a worldwide movement that calls into question how justice is delivered to victims of color,” he said.

Cent 1: How is this the U.N.’s business? Between trying to get involved in monitoring our last election, attempting to enact a special U.N. payroll tax on all working Americans and let’s not forget their endeavors at becoming involved in efforts to take away our Second Amendment rights, the people in this corrupt, inept global organization most definitely became much too big for their britches some time ago and are very much in need of a slapping down.

If only we had a few politicians, naturally they’d have to be Republicans or perhaps Independents since Democrats are all for U.N. interference in our national business on every level, who had the cojones to smack the United Nations into its place…

Cent 2: It’s amazing how when a young black man beats down a non-black senior citizen and robs him/her and the victim is paralyzed or dies, it’s not a “racial incident” and in fact seems almost to be a non-incident, but when the same young black man, even one with a criminal record (narcotics, assault, robbery, gang-banging, CCW, whatever) is shot down in the process of assaulting or robbing someone, it’s automatically a racial incident and the same professional race activists are suddenly in the spotlight shouting “racism!!!!” and demanding justice.

I don’t know about you, but I believe that when a mugger or violent victimizing type gets shot, no matter what color he is, justice has already been done!

So what’s everybody getting so worked up about?

That is essentially what one could use to define the existences of the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, to name two unfine, downstanding examples of parasites whose careers require feeding by any incident they can translate into a racist event for their personal and professional exploitation.

The latest opportunity for these opportunists has been, of course, the Trayvon Martin affair, which has been well covered in article, links and comments by Always on Watch.

Well, even before the police had finished investigating, before anyone had the facts of the matter in hand, the Racism Professionals together with the liberal media and the President of the United States (you know, Barack Hussein) had already drawn and quartered the shooter, effectively ruining his life for all time.

While I have a number of black friends and acquaintances for whom I have nothing but respect, it forever irks me that collectively, blacks can be so politically naive as to believe that the Democrats are “championing their cause” when those rascals over on the left are repeatedly holding them back, blaming nonexistent Republican (white) racism for their every problem (the GOPers are the party that passed the Civil Rights Act while the KKK is exclusively staffed by Democrats, go figure). It is in the Democrats’ best interests to keep blacks both in the dark and as poor as possible, solely because losing the black vote would be a disaster to them.

That said, I have here a column by Thomas Sowell in which he defends, using pure reality based logic, the otherwise useless Geraldo Rivera’s famous (infamous in some quarters) remark about Martin wearing a hoodie.

It is not often that I agree with Geraldo Rivera, but recently he said something very practical and potentially life-saving, when he urged black and Hispanic parents not to let their children go around wearing hoodies.

There is no point in dressing like a hoodlum when you are not a hoodlum, even though that has become a fashion for some minority youths, including the teenager who was shot and killed in a confrontation in Florida. I don’t know the whole story of that tragedy, any more than those who are making loud noises in the media do, but that is something that we have trials for.

People have a right to dress any way they want to, but exercising that right is something that requires common sense, and common sense is something that parents should have, even if their children don’t always have it.

Many years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, there was a warning to all the students to avoid a nearby tough Irish neighborhood, where Harvard students had been attacked. It so happened that there was a black neighborhood on the other side of the Irish neighborhood that I had to pass through when I went to get my hair cut.

I never went through that Irish neighborhood dressed in the style of most Harvard students back then. I walked through that Irish neighborhood dressed like a black working man would be dressed — and I never had the slightest trouble the whole three years that I was at Harvard.

While I had a right to walk through that tough neighborhood dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, if I wanted to — and if I could have afforded one, which I couldn’t — it made no sense for me to court needless dangers.

Makes sense to me…

Later in the column:

Let the specific facts come out in the Florida case. That is why we have courts.

Have we forgotten the Jim Crow era, with courts making decisions based on the race of the defendants, rather than the facts of the case? That is part of the past that we need to leave in the past, not resurrect it under new racial management.

Who is really showing concern for the well-being of minority youngsters, Geraldo Rivera who is trying to save some lives, or Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and others who are hyping this tragic episode for their own benefit?

Race hustlers who hype paranoia and belligerence are doing no favor to minority youngsters. There is no way to know how many of these youngsters’ confrontations with the police or others in authority have been needlessly aggravated by the steady drumbeat of racial hype they have been bombarded with by race hustlers.

The entire column.

And also weighing in Ann Coulter is, as usual, spot on.

Even after the Duke lacrosse case, Texaco executives allegedly using the N-word in private meetings — which turned out to be “St. Nicholas” — the Tawana Brawley case, not to mention virtual hailstorms of racist graffiti and nooses materializing on college campuses, all of which invariably end up having been put there by the alleged victims, the Non-Fox Media (NFM) didn’t even pause before conjuring a racist plot in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida last month.

Like Captain Ahab searching for the Great White Whale, the NFM is constantly on the hunt for proof of America as “Mississippi Burning.”

Over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, the month after Martin was killed, gangs in Chicago shot 10 people dead, including a 6-year-old girl, Aliyah Shell, who was sitting with her mother on their front porch.

One imagines MSNBC hosts heaving a sign of relief that little Aliyah was not shot by a white man, and was thus spared the horror of being a victim of racism.

NFM, LOL!

Ann Coulter’s full column.

All this may give you an inkling of why we rely on the criminal justice system to determine guilt in criminal cases and not the fervid imaginations of the race-obsessed media.

You’ve got to wonder how much longer it’s going to be before so many Americans just plain stop being stupid and cease giving any kind of credibility to the Sharptons, Jacksons and the racism fixated elements of the media.

But of course.

After all, these organisms called liberals won’t have it any other way, especially, it seems, those in and around the education system whose PC contributions help revise history so as to raise the next generation(s) in their dubious “image”.

in discussing the 9/11 attacks, the textbooks typically fail to mention the perpetrators were Muslims or that they acted in the cause of Islamic jihad. In one book the terrorists are portrayed as people fighting for a cause.

Read on.

What a sad state of affairs!

Of course, mentioning Islam in the same breath as 9/11, despite the religion’s prominence in the attacks on WTC and the Pentagon using hijacked airplanes full of innocent passengers would be (shudder!) Racism!

This is the kind of thing you can expect when we (not us here at Hard Astarboard, no siree! We love America too much!) elect an administration like the one we are cursed with now.

In our “Red Tape Rising: Obama-Era Regulation at the Three Year Mark” report, James Gattuso and Diane Katz detail how the Obama Administration has imposed new regulations costing $46 billion annually, with nearly $11 billion more in one-time implementation costs. That is about five times the cost of regulations imposed during the first three years of President George W. Bush’s administration, but the burden is even higher. The red tape of the past three years helps explain why the economic recovery has been so slow and job creation so anemic.

Don’t take our word for it, but those of President Obama himself. In January 2011, he said that “rules have gotten out of balance” and “have a chilling effect on growth and jobs.” And he’s right. Where the President breaks with reality is his pledge for a get-tough policy on overregulation and a comprehensive review of regulations imposed by Washington. In fact, to hear President Obama tell the story, you would think he’s a champion of slashing red tape and that his Administration has set its sights on slashing overregulation.

Just two months ago, in his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama claimed that “I’ve approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his.” But looking at the sheer number of regulations doesn’t begin to tell the story. While it’s true that the Obama Administration approved 10,215 regulations in its first three years, just slightly less than Bush’s 10,674, it’s important to look at what those regulations are and their impact on the American people and industry — and how their costs have vastly overshadowed those of the prior administration.

Over just the last year, the Obama Administration has added 32 regulations that together impose more than $10 billion in annual costs and $6.6 billion in one-time implementation costs. Those regulations include mandates covering a broad range of activities and products, ranging from refrigerators and freezers to clothes driers to air conditioners, limits on automotive emissions, employer requirements for posting federal labor rules, product labeling, health plan eligibility under Obamacare, and higher minimum wages for foreign workers. The most expensive regulation came from the Environmental Protection Agency, which added five major rules at a cost of more than $4 billion annually.

Yes, the Obama Administration, the same people who have been so maudlin where using the Constitution for a floor mat is concerned.

In much the same way that high taxes hamper investment and innovation, escalating regulatory costs undermine the American economy. Small businesses in particular are under siege. When surveyed in December 2011 about their single biggest problem, 19 percent of respondents cited regulations and red tape, up from 15 percent a year ago, and more than any other category except for “poor sales.”

But regulations are not just a problem for entrepreneurs. American workers and their families have been hit hard by the persistent lack of job creation that results, in part, from regulatory excess. Meanwhile, regulatory costs are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and limited product choices.

We really need to get Obama and his retinue out of office, out of Washington and get America out of the “harm’s way” these people have us in before we are transformed, much to the delight of our political left, into a bona fide, gen-yoo-ine Third World country!

…the Saboteurs of Young Minds’ Teachers’ Unions, once again, at the behest of the political left.

At least, that’s what our leftist president wants as he tips his hat to the “progressive” supported American Federation of Teachers.

Valentine’s Day came early last week for the American Federation of Teachers.

Last Monday, President Barack Obama unveiled his budget for 2013 which contains $3.8 trillion in spending – but not a dime of support for the very successful D.C. voucher program.

The AFT has long opposed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (the voucher plan’s official name) because it allows low-income students in the District of Columbia to escape the union-controlled dropout factories known as D.C. Public Schools. Since 2004, thousands of students have been given vouchers ranging from $8,000 to $12,000 to attend the private school of their choice.

In the AFT’s view, not only do vouchers siphon off dollars that should be going to “their” schools, but the success many voucher students achieve through the program exposes the deficiencies of union-run schools. That’s why it wants to shut down the program.

It seems to me that anyone entitled to claim he or she is an American and/or anyone professing to have even the smallest amount of concern for the future of American youth would be outraged by the above.

However, there are those hypocrites over there on what Seth likes to call the Port Side who speak through both sides of their mouths, most of whom send their children to private schools because they can afford it, and because they know what short shrift their offspring will receive from the public school system.

Among these is one Barack Hussein Obama.

And Obama has been a willing accomplice. He tried to snuff out the Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2009 by announcing that no new students would be allowed to join. House Speaker John Boehner got it restored through 2016 as part of last year’s budget deal, but that is in jeopardy, as Obama’s budget makes clear.

According to the American Federation for Children, OSP students have a “91 percent graduation rate (which) is 21 percentage points higher than those who applied but couldn’t get a scholarship.”

“And according to the Institute of Education Sciences – the primary research arm of the U.S. Department of Education – the OSP has the second highest achievement impact of any of the programs it has studied so far,” the group writes in a press release.

WJLA.com interviewed one woman who has four children in the voucher program.

“I didn’t feel [my kids] were getting the proper education in public school and they get the best education here,” Antonia Coles said. “Without the scholarship, I don’t know what I would do.”

But none of that seems to matter to the president, who is facing a tough re-election campaign and needs the money and enthusiasm of his friends in the education establishment. He’s willing to compromise the futures of thousands of D.C.-area children just to keep Big Labor happy.
Meanwhile, the president’s two daughters are attending an expensive private school in D.C., because he can afford to send them there.

The AFT delivered its valentine to the president last week, when it officially endorsed his re-election bid. And now the president has delivered his valentine to the AFT, in the form of a voucher-free budget proposal.

Oh, the things we do for love … and the things politicians do for votes.

Amen!

You may recall this post on the Komen Fund deciding to discontinue their largesse to Infanticide Central Planned Parenthood, after which they rescinded that decision.

Well, from the Washington Times:

Susan G. Komen’s short-lived decision to drop grants to Planned Parenthood was met with fury from the left wing, and its outrage was immediately reported by the liberal news media. But it wasn’t the first time Komen had been attacked from the left. As a private charity, Komen was within its rights to not renew grants for breast health care for Planned Parenthood, a group that doesn’t even perform mammograms, but that wasn’t how the media covered it. CNN blamed the decision on conservatives, while MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell claimed that “the politics of stopping Planned Parenthood has now put more women at risk of dying from breast cancer.”

It didn’t take long for that uproar on the left to prompt a reversal of Komen’s decision, and for Komen Vice President Karen Handel to resign from the breast cancer charity. The controversy also renewed criticism of Komen over a completely different issue: whether or not the common chemical BPA (formally known as bisphenol A), is a risk factor for breast cancer.

Above emphasis mine.

Can you believe this?

Of course you can! After all, we’re talking liberals, here, particularly the liberal…um, “progressive” media, for whom truth plays second fiddle to political agendas.

Read the whole thing here.

So you might say the Komen Fund was mugged by Planned Parenthood, the left wing media and their weaselist infanticidal proponents.

From the NRA-ILA:

It is certainly no surprise for gun owners to see the New York Times run a story belittling the United States Constitution. After all, the Times has worked for decades to devalue our founding document.

“[I]ts influence is waning,” opines the Times. It is “terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights.” The paper faults the Constitution for being difficult to amend and reflective of the times in which it was written. While the Times does not go so far as to claim the U.S. Constitution has been bad for America, it does lament that it is of “little current use to, say, a new African nation.”

Hmmm. While the article focuses on the N.Y. Times, the next paragraph refers to one of the poster creatures of the “progressive” menagerie, their agent on the Supreme Court:

But it was a much bigger shock when the Times reported in the same story that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a sitting associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and grande dame of the Court’s liberal voting bloc, shares the Times’ dim view of the Constitution. Ginsburg said “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.” Her personal recommendations would instead include “the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

None of this should come as a surprise. One wonders, for example, if Justice Ginsburg even looks to the United States Constitution when interpreting it in 2012. Having had only limited success in getting the courts to creatively re-imagine the Constitution to suit their individual tastes, America’s legal, academic, and media elites are now determined to minimize what is left of the founding charter’s original meaning and intent by making unflattering comparisons to “sexier,” more expansive documents that empower state bureaucracies, undermine individual rights, and micromanage citizens’ day-to-day lives.

A good definition of a liberal (besides “someone who’s never been mugged”, LOL) is an individual who takes full advantage of the liberties that come with living in a free country while trying to destroy those freedoms at the same time.

Do these people have issues, or what?

Anyway, the entire NRA-ILA article is here.

Who?

Who dya’ think? Those enemies of every American morality, our every moral value, the very common sense that has made our nation a leader among nations.

Yes. Liberals…Excuse me, “progressives.” This time they’re popping up at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania is now selling the “morning-after” pill via a vending machine. A pro-family group in that state believes that sends the wrong message to students.

For $25, people with access to campus health services at Shippensburg can buy Plan B from a machine, just like they would a soda or a bag of chips. Diane Gramley of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania finds that appalling.

“To begin with, they’re approving the sexual activity of their students — and they’re not providing the young ladies with the correct information about Plan B, about the morning-after pill,” Gramley explains. “If they are pregnant, it actually does not allow the implantation of the fertilized egg — and that’s just killing their baby.”

Ah, thereby doing some of Planned Parenthood’s work for it. (above emphasis is mine)

What’s next? Providing bedrooms on campus specifically for students to use by the hour?

In The half grovel at the urinal, Wesley Pruden hit the proverbial nail right on its proverbial head regarding the infamous, nefarious, dreaded, um, whatever other adjectives might be applied now well known video of U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of newly killed Taliban terrorists.

Yes, I know, one (wo)man’s terrorist is another (wo)man’s freedom fighter, but when you stop to consider the kind of hell-on-earth oppression the Taliban represents for anyone unlucky to be governed by them, especially women, and the fact that they’ve enthusiastically provided a home, cover, protection and support for the monsters of al-Qaeda, these “people” hardly qualify as any kind of combatants for liberty. NO, they’re more like filthy, obscene, satanic animals.

That said, courtesy of Jewish World Review (same link as above), heeeere’s Mr. Pruden!

Where’s a Porta-Potty when a few good men need one?

This is the question Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, ought to concern himself with, instead of trying to top Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, with over-the-top “outrage” over a Marine patrol taking a leak on the bodies of several freshly killed terrorists in Afghanistan.

If Mr. Panetta had been doing his job, he might have found enough Porta-Potties to spell battlefield relief for the Marines. This should teach him a needed lesson. Battlefield rest rooms are important, and will become even more important when women are dispatched to the battlefield. Lady grunts will expect something more than toilet-seat etiquette or an inconvenient bush or tree stump to protect their modesty.

The defense secretary and the secretary of state were each eager to out-deplore, out-lament and out-bewail the other, playing for the cameras a ferocious game of “can you top this?” Mr. Panetta said what the Marines did was “utterly deplorable.” It’s hard to get beyond “utterly,” but Mrs. Clinton called in her crack linguistics team at the State Department — where plain speech is utterly frowned on — and she soon pronounced herself in “total dismay” on hearing the news, and was sure that the “vast, vast” majority of “American military personnel” would never, ever do what those awful Marines did.

Mrs. Clinton’s description of that “vast, vast” majority, and not merely a “vast” majority, was taken to be an indication that she thought the Marines’ offense must have been twice as bad as the offense of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” tormenting Bubba for indulging in inappropriate merriment with a regiment of big-haired ladies at the White House. A secretary of state must use language precisely, and carefully ration her vasts.

Nevertheless, urine is rarely a proper salute even to dead terrorists, and the four Marines who relieved themselves on Taliban corpses should be properly disciplined. Americans, instructed by a culture informed by the certitudes of Jewish and Christian faith, are better than that. Still, sending two senior Cabinet officers do what a second lieutenant could have done was just short of a full grovel. The Obama administration stopped just short of sending the president himself to deliver a deep bow and a fulsome apology to the Taliban terrorists.

Mr. Panetta, who served two years as an Army intelligence officer several decades ago, knows better. Mrs. Clinton, whose hands-on knowledge of warfare and weaponry is limited to the lamps she threw at Bubba in the White House, has no knowledge of what Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the infamous Civil War firebug, was talking about when he famously said “war is hell.”

Dehumanizing the enemy is the first task of the men who send boys to war, men who never have to learn that war is more than merely a policy option. “But of course [these Marines] have dehumanized the enemy,” Sebastian Junger, a documentary filmmaker who spent a year with an Army platoon in theKorengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, observes in The Washington Post. “Otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings. Rather than demonstrate a callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might reveal something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to convince themselves that they haven’t just committed their first murder — that they have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.”

Rick Perry got it right when he said the Obama administration’s rhetoric showed “a disdain for the military.” The incontinent Marines should be reprimanded, but filing criminal charges against them is unreasonable. “Kids, 18- and 19-year old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s what occurred here. To call it a criminal act is over the top.”

An anonymous veteran of the Vietnam war makes a similar point in an Internet blog. “I was on the line in the A Shau Valley with the 101st Airborne Division. At Camp Sally, not a Club Med place to be. Nor for the faint of heart. You must understand that those who live war are a different breed. Perhaps later, much later, maturity rearranges one’s focus.”

What we need now is the rearrangement of the focus of the old men who send young men to war. They don’t have youth and inexperience to excuse their sins, miscalculations and misjudgments. Old men should keep this in mind when deciding how to discipline the Marines they sent across the seas to defend and, if need be die, for the rest of us.

Having been married to a career warrior for going on four decades, I will say this: While my Wolf could not discuss most of his work with anyone not directly involved in it, we have had discussions on the psychological effects of combat on those young men sent to alien places to fight for our country; There is a mortal ferocity to war that I won’t pretend, even after hearing my husband’s first-hand observations on the experience, to understand from the viewpoint of a combatant who is essentially over there fighting not only to achieve victory for his country, but also trying to survive, to stay alive, and to look after his comrades as well.

Acording to the Wolf, different people react differently to combat, these reactions boiling down to “whatever helps the psyche cope with the killing, the fear and the inevitable massive adrenaline overdose that is crucial to staying alive in battle”.

The “utterly deplorable”, “total dismay” and other rhetoric employed by the usual suspects are nothing more than left wing politics by totally deplorable, vastly, vastly left wing liberals more concerned with trashing our country and our military at every opportunity rather than supporting a striving for the excellence of the former or the gallantry and patriotism of the latter.

The global warming con artists are still at it, trying to maintain their bread & butter “research” grants on the taxpayer’s dime.

From WesleyPruden via Jewish World Review:

“Climate research,” the New York Times confidently assures us, “stands at a crossroads.” This means that a lot of research scientists are standing at the crossroads, holding out paper bags like trick-or-treaters on Halloween night, standing in line for taxpayer largesse to fill ‘em up.

These specialists in shakedown “science,” who speak only in hyperbole, are calling the weather of 2011 the worst in history, or at least in memory, or maybe a decade, and say they could have found useful links between disasters and global-warming “science” by now if only they could shake down tightwad taxpayers for a few more millions.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made a little list of a dozen weather disasters of the year now swiftly passing into history — wildfires in Texas, floods on the Mississippi and tornadoes in Tornado Alley. Unfortunately for global-warming “scientists” ever on the scout for handouts, there were no bad hurricanes to report this year. Nevertheless, the speakers of hyperbole are making the best of the scant material at hand.

“I’ve been a meteorologist for 30 years and have never seen a year that comes close to matching 2011 for the number of astounding, extreme weather events,” the easily astounded Jeffrey Masters of the Weather Underground web site tells the newspaper, which is always alert for opportunities to beat this favorite drum. “Looking back in the historical record, which goes back to the late 1800s, I can’t find anything that compares, either.”

Maybe he should look a little harder. The disasters, calamities and other inconveniences blamed on changing weather include not only floods and fires in the United States but similar disasters in Australia, the Philippines and Southeast Asia, where calamity is part of something called “life.” Anyone spooked by “unprecedented flooding” in the Mississippi River Valley in the United States should check the precedents of the great floods of 1927 and 1937, when much of Arkansas, Misssissippi and Louisiana lay underwater for weeks, and mud even longer. The hyperbolic claims that man has never been so badly abused by the weather, and that man himself has asked for it with his wild and wicked ways abusing nature, are given the lie by the fact that the weather has been wild and wicked in many millennia before this one, when there were not nearly so many of us stalking the planet for opportunities to make mischief.

Pruden tells it soooooo well.

In these tough economic times when Congress is having deadlocked debates about taxation and government spending, the rip-offs “scientists” of the global warming cabal should be among the first casualties of the elimination of wasteful largesse.

After all, we have enough oily, soulless crooks sending us spam from Nigeria to support, so why pay people of the same ilk to run con jobs on the American taxpayer?