This is an especially smarmy outing for Jesse Watters, and it ironically drips with the patronization that Burton was correctly chastising them for.

First we get a bunch of silly Watters interviews with nerdy people dressed in the most outlandish manner possible – clearly intended to portray Trekkies as a bunch of, for lack of a better word, dweebs. Not a bit of footage of anyone NOT wearing a crazy costume and makeup. Not a bit of footage of say, a science fiction author or someone demonstrating any depth to their thinking. Just a bunch of opportunities for Watters, O’Reilly and their viewers to ridicule and laugh at Star Trek fans. The nastiest part of this is that Watters chose to go to a Star Trek convention, which has been viewed as a safe place for sci-fi fans to dress up and enjoy their show. And Watters used that moment, when these people thought they were in a safe place, to ridicule and deride them. I suppose MSNBC could return the favor by showing up at CPAC or at a Rush Limbaugh event, or at a WWE event. But what would that accomplish – just the same cheap shots Watters was enjoying taking here.

And O’Reilly’s feigned ignorance of LeVar Burton’s career was another smarmy touch. O’Reilly is certainly aware that Burton was an actor on Star Trek in the 80s and 90s, appearing in 7 years of one program and then 4 feature films. He knows that Burton wasn’t on the show in the 1960s, so his claim of “I don’t know anything about the show” is nonsense. And it was clearly intended to demean Burton again – here’s the befuddled O’Reilly who just doesn’t understand why this unknown actor is offended by O’Reilly’s crass comments. There’s a point where you wonder if the issue is crossing from being smarmy to being sinister.

But the hardest moment was the key to the whole segment. Watters clearly went to that convention to confront Burton – there was no other reason for him to make this his focus – he was only going to get so far by making fun of Trekkies and William Shatner. But the chance to try to catch Burton off guard on camera? Priceless for Watters. Except that Watters didn’t catch Burton off guard – which is why Watters showed only two quick moments of what was clearly a longer exchange. And even in those two moments, Burton cleaned Watters clock. Burton made very clear to Watters that he was more than offended by O’Reilly’s behavior, and that he wasn’t falling for Watters’ shtick. Burton wasn’t kidding when he said “I’m 56 years old – I know what patronizing is”. He was genuinely angry, and that’s one of the few times I’ve seen him provoked like that. Which was of course the entire reason Watters did this. One has to wonder what justifications Watters provides himself for his behavior. In what book is any of this acceptable?

DN, I understand what you were addressing. But it’s still a sidestreet. It doesn’t change that the attack on the Benghazi consulate was not a matter of a President and his administration committing criminal acts. And all the raging by Fox News pundits will not change that fact.

Jane, are you able to figure out what Dan is saying in that last post? He seems to be very angry but I can’t make more out than that. It honestly reads like the written equivalent of jumping up and down.

Wow. Two sock puppets at once. If we can get a third identity going within the same thread, can we refer to the poster as “Kukla, Fran and Ollie”?

This is great popcorn material. Here you have three guys whose hatred of President Obama and the Democrats is enough for them to once again raise the spectre of shutting down the entire government just so they can have a public tantrum about losing an election. Last year, they were all hoping the ACA would be thrown out by the Supreme Court. When that didn’t happen, they had a series of public tantrums and displays. And now this year, they expect everyone to forget the other 40 times they’ve held meaningless votes to defund or repeal the ACA. Because this time is different? How? This is the same sore loser mentality they’ve been using since January 2009. I had hoped that these guys would learn from their defeats and maybe try to work together to get something done. But it appears that they simply want to continue folding their arms and stomping their feet for the rest of Obama’s time in the White House. One has to wonder if they intend to do this during every Democrat Presidency for the rest of their lives.

Jason, I just wonder if you could name the Obama Administration policies you were supporting up to 9/11/2012. Are you saying that you support the ACA? Do you support the Dream Act? Were you opposed to the GOP obstruction before 9/11/2012? Since, as you said, you were supporting Obama before that time, this shouldn’t be a problem, correct? Please be specific with your answers.

Had the Obama Administration done nothing, Fox News and AM Radio would be trumpeting anything they could find on this and accusing him of leaving people unprotected. If the Obama Administration acts cautiously and closes embassies under the scenario we’ve seen, Fox News and AM Radio attacks him for appearing to be “weak”.

Which means no matter what he does, they’re going to attack him. The reasoning becomes almost irrelevant after a while.

Hannity, like all full-time Fox News employees, has full health coverage for himself and his dependents. He is also covered under his UNION membership with AFTRA, which provides for both a health plan and a pension plan.

For Hannity to tell his viewers and listeners that they should just try to save a few extra pennies to somehow cover a catastrophic injury or illness is beyond hypocrisy – it’s actually offensive.

And it goes beyond just the cheap shots at the ACA. What the GOP won’t tell you is that they would have been fine to support this plan, particularly after President Obama caved and took out the most important component, the public option. But they didn’t want to support it under this President. As former President Carter noted when he tried this and was blocked by Senator Kennedy, they didn’t want him to have that achievement. When it passed anyway, the GOP went into full tantrum mode. Now they just keep playing this game of trying to pass repeal or defunding votes, none of which will pass the Congress. It’s childish, and it’s the sort of thing that causes most Americans to throw up their hands when they see what people are doing in Congress. Or just throw up, one supposes…

O’Reilly wasn’t “pointing out some basic facts” and his argument has already been extensively debunked.

Powers, in a rare show of temerity given her unfortunate statements of late, pointed out the obvious here.

The reality of this situation is that right wing media has no idea how to answer the difficult issues that the Trayvon Martin case raised – the fact that a black teenager could be profiled, stalked and killed simply for the act of “walking home while black in a hoodie”. George Zimmerman may say that he really didn’t think about Trayvon Martin’s race, but the reality is that he profiled Martin. The understandable outrage has come from not only the black community but from people across all ethnicities. Because people are shocked to see that even today, you have racial intolerance at a level that could result in someone being killed. People had hoped that this kind of thing was long behind us, but the case, and the right wing reaction to it, demonstrate that we still have a long way to go.

The right wing media of AM radio and Fox News further exacerbated this situation by enthusiastically cheerleading the George Zimmerman side of the case, and then trying to fan white paranoia about potential black riots in response to the verdict. (And that doesn’t even get into the fact that right wing media was campaigning for Zimmerman’s defense fund, and likely doing more to keep it going. I’d be very curious to see what the numbers were of monies coming in for that month of trial, when the attorney costs would have exploded beyond all reckoning.)

In the aftermath of the case, how did Bill O’Reilly present himself? Did he acknowledge the hateful rhetoric he had participated in? Did he castigate right wingers for trying to gin up fears of rioting? No, he tried to change the subject. Suddenly, he’s trying to lecture the black community on what he perceives as its moral lapses and its own responsibility for violence.

Now, he might have had a point if he’d actually taken the time to do the research that Richard Deitering is trying to present as somehow convincing. But he didn’t. He cherry picked a few polls and stats to fit his preset conclusion. O’Reilly’s whole meme was that unmarried Black parents were the whole source of the problem, which he sees as a matter of a wave of violence from young black males.

It’s not just offensive that O’Reilly thinks he can make statements like this with impunity, particularly when he’s way off on his assumptions. It’s offensive that he tries to pillory community organizers and public speakers like Jesse Jackson, saying that they haven’t been speaking out about issues within the black community. On what planet is O’Reilly living? Jesse Jackson has been talking about these issues for over 40 years, as have multiple community leaders and organizers. People have been discussing the issues of crime and violence in black communities as well as all ethnic communities for decades. Where was O’Reilly when these discussions were happening, and who does he think he is to lecture these communities at this time?

O’Reilly seems to think that the solution to crime and violence is for the parents of children in black neighborhoods to all get married and to send their kids to strict schools with uniforms, or at least that seems to be the solution he proposed. This would be ridiculous on its face, if it weren’t clear that O’Reilly seems to really think that this is the answer. Meaning – let’s go back to O’Reilly’s fantasy version of the 1950s, where nobody misbehaved and kids knew their place.

The reality of increasing violence among all communities, including black, white and everyone else, is that we’ve had multiple factors contributing to the problem. The biggest one is that you have a growing number of people living on lower and lower wages, and they’re constantly shown the greatest levels of excess from all the various TV shows and commercial material around them. You have a growing number of people in crumbling public schools, where teachers are being laid off due to lack of funds and where teenagers get the idea that there’s no point to staying in school. You have communities where people struggle to find work beyond the local fast food place, and where hope becomes a much rarer commodity than it should be. Couple that with the complete intransigence of our politicians, particularly the GOP congresspeople who lecture these communities without knowing anything about them. Couple that with pundits like O’Reilly, who continue the lectures without showing any understanding for who he’s insulting. And you’d think that O’Reilly would understand, given that he always touts his experience in 1971 as a teacher – but we should remember he was teaching at a private Catholic high school, not an inner city school as he regularly tries to allege.

The fact is that communities around this country have been trying to wrestle with the issues of crime and violence and racism for decades. Community leaders have addressed it more times than anyone can count. And yet we still have increasing violence, and we still have racism, regardless of what Bill O’Reilly thinks a quick-fix solution might be.

But telling the black community that it’s their fault that kids are dying, and saying that it’s due to children being born out of wedlock, is flat-out offensive and unacceptable. O’Reilly is being properly criticized, and if he truly cared about these issues, he would humbly accept the criticisms and apologize for his behavior. Instead, he’s doubling down.

And, frankly, his attempt at creating a distraction from the disturbing issues of the Trayvon Martin case only reinforces those issues. He may be working hard not to answer the hard questions here, but his desperate attempt to do so is only adding more of them.

I’m greatly appreciative that Ellen has spotlit this unfortunate moment for Greta van Susteren. I’ve had moments of being rendered speechless by her choice to just let Rush Limbaugh vent out some of the angriest and most hateful comments I’ve heard – and he’s very consistent about doing it. Where are the hard questions about Limbaugh’s enthusiastic discussion of possible rioting in Florida? Where are the questions about his sinister comments about Sandra Fluke? Where are the challenges to the ridiculous assumptions he regularly makes about the motivations of President Obama and his staff?

Interviews like this must be pointed out, for all those who would consider van Susteren anything other than a right wing host who’s comfortable with even the most extreme rhetoric that Fox News can muster.

David, we can absolutely agree that the public school system in the United States is facing some significant challenges. And it’s been facing those challenges for decades now. I don’t agree that it’s in a state of abject failure, but I do think that the constant attempts to defund it and chip away at it have been extremely destructive.

You’ve now reverted back to the idea of not compromising. I’m honestly confused. Either you believe compromise is necessary for governance between rational people or you believe that compromise is a problem to be avoided. I believe the former – I believe that governance is impossible when people refuse to talk to each other. Politicians folding their arms and just saying “NO!” does not constitute governance. It constitutes exactly what it’s been called – obstruction.

The left in the United States has enunciated its principles on more occasions than I could possibly enumerate here. If you are unclear on what those principles are, I recommend you spend some time listening to a radio program called Democracy Now. You can find it on the internet at democracynow.org. If you want to understand a progressive view of the U.S. school system, I highly recommend the writings of Jonathan Kozol, particularly a book called Savage Inequalities. If you were to ask the left, they would tell you that programs they wanted to see have never really been implemented in the United States. For example, the left wanted single payer health care, and the Obama Administration removed the public option from the ACA in an attempt to placate GOP congresspeople who continued their efforts to obstruct it anyway.

It’s strange that the right wing has decided that the Great Society programs from the 1960s were failures. I’ve heard this meme usually coming from Bill O’Reilly as a way of attacking the ability of government to do anything. But there are plenty of success stories from the Great Society. How about Medicare and Medicaid? How about the Voting Rights Act? How about the various Civil Rights Acts?
I appreciate that you’ve acknowledged that Head Start worked. How about the creation of the NEA and the NEH. These are not small things, and it’s really a shame that the right wing seems to think that all of this was a waste of time.

I also find it interesting that the right wing tries to cherry pick the quotations of the earliest national figures of this country as though there is some kind of right wing claim on the birth of the nation. As we’ve discussed, scholars from the left and the right have endlessly debated the intentions of the people who started this country. Scholars from the left and the right continue to debate the meaning of various sections of the constitution, as well as the meanings of various laws and case law findings. Nobody has an exclusive claim on the intentions or wishes of the founders of this country, and it belittles an argument for any pundit to claim that they do.

The notion that the right wing wants “a restoration of American values and principles” is false on its face. The right wing was perfectly happy to trample on American citizens’ rights and values throughout the Presidency of George W. Bush. The idea that the entire country went out the window the moment that Barack Obama became President is silly on its face. The fact is that the policies inflicted under the Bush Presidency (and abetted by Democrats in Congress who did not engage in the obstructionism we’ve seen over the past few years from the GOP) resulted in the inflation of possibly the worst financial bubble I’ve seen in my lifetime. While the Bush people clearly wanted to get out of town before the bubble burst, the whole thing came crashing down on them. So yes, we’ve seen a transformation over the past few years, as the country has struggled to get itself out of a pretty deep mess. I would agree that the Bush Administration policies (and Clinton policies before them) that led to this mess absolutely failed. No question about that. But I wouldn’t blame President Obama for taking actions to try to stem the disaster. I do have an issue with GOP politicians and pundits who chose that moment to try to obstruct solutions – particularly those who were clearly trying to use such a position as a campaign plank.

I find it interesting that the right wing tries to fan a concern about “the growing tyranny of government”. They must be kidding. Is this the same right wing that acted as cheerleaders for the Patriot Act, that supported warrantless wiretapping, that supported a Bush Justice Department that got itself into more trouble than it knew what to do with? Is this the same right wing that wants to tell women what medical choices they are allowed to make regarding a pregnancy and their own bodies? The idea that these people want to preach to the rest of us about the “tyranny of government” is so absurd that it nearly provokes laughter.

I absolutely agree that more bankruptcies like what happened in Detroit are not something most people want to see. But I should note that there are plenty of right wing AM radio hosts who’ve been saying just the opposite. For years now, these people have been advocating for state bankruptcies and city bankruptcies, specifically so that they could throw out all the public employee union contracts and cancel the union pensions. There are people I’ve heard repeatedly call with great enthusiasm for major statewide bankruptcies. Part of this is the libertarian approach of “Why should I pay for public employee pensions?” and part of it is a tactical approach – if you kill the public employee unions, you might do some damage to the Dems and thus help GOP candidates win more races.

I also agree that the world could at any time choose to stop using the US dollar as a basis for international trade. We’ve been hearing for years that everything could go to the Chinese Yuan or something like that. And if that happens, I believe the path toward it will have been greatly accelerated by the GOP politicians who chose that “lock step no” approach in dealing with the financial obligations of the U.S. and triggered that credit downgrade a couple of years back. If ever there was a case of obstructionism, that was it. So yes, we could be looking at a disaster there. But the right wing will not be able to stand back and claim innocence. They will need to step up and take some personal responsibility for their behavior.

Personally, I hope that such a moment does not happen. I hope that GOP congresspeople will decide to do the right thing for the country and not keep putting their partisan ideology ahead of the necessary end result of governance.

Not sure what that complaint is about. People are completely free to post positive comments if they wish about Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. It’s clear that they are not choosing to do so. That doesn’t mean they don’t have freedom of speech. It means they are exercising it in a manner that pat ange doesn’t agree with.

BTW Limbaugh’s desperate announcement last week about his new deal with Cumulus is revealing in a way he did not intend. Limbaugh was trying to spin his situation as yet another victory lap for himself, in that his agent has negotiated a new 3 year deal for himself with almost all of his stations. Although he admitted he’s being taken off the air on his key New York station and is being forced to retreat to WOR. Here’s the thing. Back in his heyday, Limbaugh would not have needed this extra time to negotiate what would have been a slam-dunk deal. They simply would have re-upped him and given him his usual raises, etc. This time, Cumulus dumped Hannity and played a lot harder against Limbaugh’s agent. So our point here stands – the bloom is off the rose for Limbaugh. He’s not going away this year or next, but he’s slowly spinning downward.

The simple fact is that the President made some thoughtful and heartfelt observations about the case, to speak to the millions of people in this country who have concerns about the issues it raises. The President did address black-on-black violence during his comments, and it was refreshing to hear him speak simply and frankly to these matters.

Of course, the Fox News “Line of the Day” afterward was to immediately attack him. Now, if he had said nothing, the Fox News Line would have been to attack him for NOT saying anything. (“Where’s Obama? Why doesn’t he act like a leader?”) It’s nice to know that Fox News is at least consistent in this regard.

By the way, President Obama DID address black-on-black crime in his statements. He included that as a serious issue that needs to be faced and dealt with. But acknowledging that he did so doesn’t seem to fit within the Fox News perspective.

My post is still up, although I suppose it’s possible they could delete it. I’ve had two of the regulars there respond with angry posts that either ignored my points or acted as though the facts were the reverse of reality. I’ve addressed both of those, and we’ll see what happens.

I’m frankly a bit concerned that these guys are openly musing about violent riots as though such a thing is a foregone conclusion, even after we’re a week out from the verdict and nothing of the sort has been seen. That whole perspective is the worst kind of smearing I kind think of, to be frank.

I agree with what Ellen has posted here, and I’ll amplify it.

The right wing narrative on this case from the beginning has been to try to turn it back on itself. The basics of the story, of course, don’t lend themselves easily to the effort: 17 year old black high school student is profiled while walking home from the store, unarmed and committing no crime, and in the ensuing confrontation with an enthusiastic Neighborhood Watch volunteer, winds up shot to death. So how does Fox News and the right wing media handle such an explosive matter?

First, they attempt to dismiss the entire story out of hand. “There’s nothing to see here. What about (fill in various typical and distracting crime blotter stories) rather than this story? Why doesn’t everyone look at (fill in typical outrageous shooting story from crime blotters)? Why aren’t we talking about black on black crime?” Now, the attempt to do this is outrageous and offensive in the first place anyway. This story is noteworthy because it’s an example of an unarmed 17 year old, profiled based on his race and clothing, who wound up dead because a Neighborhood Watch volunteer assumed he must be up to no good. Sorry, but that’s an explosive story, and it’s not the same thing at all as a typical case of a drug dealer being shot, or a robber shooting someone while committing their crime. Newspapers are filled with the latter kinds of stories every day. A story like this becomes a national headline because it’s emblematic. It crystallizes problems we know exist in the society (racial profiling, lax gun permitting) and gives them a face and a name.

Having failed to dismiss the story in general, the right wing press then went to the next level – they attacked the victim. Trayvon Martin went from being portrayed as an unarmed teen to being played on the right as an uppity punk and a vicious street thug who deserved to be shot to death. Commenters on Fox News said at various points, “The person responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death is Trayvon Martin”. Relying solely on George Zimmerman’s version of events, the right wing painted a picture of Martin as a sinister figure, attacking gentle George Zimmerman without warning and attempting to viciously kill him before the good man was forced to defend himself with his handgun. Adding to the fun was citations of Trayvon Martin’s spotty school record and selected quotations from his texts and social media entries, all intended to paint him as gangster or a drug dealer or just an all-around thug who everyone could imagine as a potentially fatal menace to Zimmerman. (Interesting to note that the right wing media went out of their way to dismiss the various accounts of Zimmerman’s own spotty past and the nastier portions of his social media entries, but no matter…)

With that approach in hand, the right wing media proceeded to the trial with an attitude of “Why is this case even being brought? It’s obvious that Zimmerman was defending himself! He was right to shoot the thug!” This attitude permeated the Fox News coverage from even before jury selection began.

And we should note about the jury: the comments by jurors since the verdict have at least established one major factor in how the matter was decided. Race really was a factor for this jury. As it turns out, the defense team did a much better job with their work on jury selection than the prosecution did. The prosecution clearly didn’t want to play up the racial angle of the case – their thought on the jury was that if they had an all-female panel, and if they had several mothers in there, they would get the attention of people who would react badly if their own child was killed while walking home from the store. But the prosecution didn’t factor in that if they had a nearly all-white jury with not a single black member, you could have a situation where the jury couldn’t relate to the victim of the crime. As the interviewed juror revealed, she couldn’t understand Rachel Jenteal and just assumed that black people in general just use phrases like “creepy ass cracka” as normal speech. This would be humorous if we weren’t discussing a murder case. The defense team, of course, knew that if they had a nearly all-white jury with a conservative lean to their thinking, there would be a considerable barrier to the prosecution making their case. And what happened here? The seated jury was unable to understand or relate to key witnesses, leaving them in a place where they wound up with more doubt than certainty. And that’s how they wound up unable to agree on manslaughter, even after multiple jurors indicated they wanted to rule that way.

To add insult to the injury of the coverage, we then were treated to the spectacle of “They’re gonna riot!!”, which was a shorthand for saying that “Black people can’t handle a verdict they don’t like, and they’re gonna burn your city down!” There were two pieces to this – part of it was the snide condescension that the case would immediately lead to acquittal after five minutes in the jury chamber. And to this was added the insult that black communities would immediately lose their minds after that happened. Frankly, this was the lowest point in the coverage for me. And what happened? The jury struggled with their instructions for two days, before finally turning in a verdict that they admitted they didn’t think they had much choice about based on their instructions. Further, the jurors admitted, again, that they didn’t understand and couldn’t relate to key witnesses.

But what happened next? Martin’s parents, community leaders and the President called for calm reflection and positive work after the verdict. And overwhelmingly around the country, that’s exactly what happened. People gathered peacefully (albeit unhappily) and expressed their disagreement with this result. Undaunted, the right wing media then seized on the tiny number of isolated situations where lawbreakers took advantage of the protests to try to cause trouble. I would consider this to be the final poke in the eye for the matter. Having been denied the visuals of mass rioting and cities on fire, the right wing frantically grasped at any little embers they could to prove their foregone conclusion.

It’s going to be important to remember what happened here for the future. In years to come, Bill O’Reilly and the rest will be telling a very different narrative about this matter – in the same way that they tell different stories about O.J. or about Ramos & Compean. It’s important that someone remember the truth. And I would argue it’s the very reason that a site like this one needs to exist.

Ellen’s point is correct. And the only thing that would stop the Martin family from taking action is Zimmerman’s claim of being penniless. If that is shown to be false and Zimmerman is flaunting how he can profit from the death of their son, you can bet that the Martin family will immediately take action to stop him in his tracks.

As a Los Angeles resident, I can attest to the idiocy of what Starnes and right wing media outlets are trying to pull here.

Their meme is “Massive riots! Look at all this lawbreaking! Toldya!” Except that this isn’t what’ happening. Not by a long shot. Over the past several days, there have literally been hundreds of protests around the country by people unhappy about the outcome of the Zimmerman trial. I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were up to at least 500 protests by now, given that we have 50 states, and in just about all of them, there have been multiple gatherings for people to speak out. In states like California and New York, there have been many more than in other states, obviously. And of that number of protests and gatherings, we know of a small handful where some people have acted badly – and in each case, the police have been able to quickly deal with the problem. I believe what we’re seeing in several of those cases is that there are always some people who want to take advantage of a situation to go out and break the law. We see this when a soccer team wins or loses the championship. We’ve seen this in Los Angeles when the Lakers won their first championship in 2000. It’s a phenomena that isn’t about race – it’s just about some people, frankly, being jerks and/or criminals.

Los Angeles has been almost completely peaceful, in spite of right wing attempts to spin up paranoia about wild black people rioting. Now, when the Rodney King verdict happened in 1992, THAT was a riot. That was a situation where part of the city was literally on fire. That was a time when it really wasn’t safe to go outside in parts of Los Angeles and there was a very real sense of danger. And that’s the fear that these outlets are trying to drum up today. Except that we’re not seeing riots or anything like that today.

Given that they don’t have the huge riots they predicted, right wing AM station KFI in Los Angeles has now taken the approach that the protests are distracting “hundreds of police officers from doing their jobs”. They’ve tried to blow up any incident of a protest where someone gets arrested and then pair it with a robbery or a murder somewhere else in the city. The silliest notion of this came this morning, when they tried to say that some burglars in Hollywood were supposedly taking advantage of the police not being present. Which is total nonsense. We have a massive police force in Los Angeles, and there’s plenty of police on duty in Hollywood. There certainly have been some cutbacks in recent years, but not because some people are protesting in different areas. The cutbacks were due to California and Los Angeles having budgetary problems – hence layoffs of teachers, and furloughs of various state and local government employees. If there’s a reason we haven’t expanded our police presence further, it’s budgetary. On any given day in Los Angeles, there are ALWAYS protests happening somewhere over something. There are a few more lately due to this trial, but nothing that would cause everyone to suddenly lose their focus. So the entire premise of this right wing meme is false from the beginning.

I would further add that this notion that President Obama is being divisive is ridiculous on its face. The President expressed sympathy for grieving parents last year in a tasteful and humane manner. After the verdict was announced, the President clearly stated that people should calmly reflect on what had happened and work to try to limit gun violence in the future. How in the world is such a statement divisive? I would argue that the President has been trying to bring the country together, and that various media outlets like KFI and Fox News are the ones trying to divide it. And sneers like the ones I’m hearing on the radio or on Fox News feel like a much more divisive force than a President asking for calm reflection.

Not sure what Mark Meyer is referring to. Assuming he’s referring to the interview, the clip is embedded above.

Obviously, these statements by Zimmerman’s brother are shocking and designed to continue the narrative of portraying Trayvon Martin as a criminal punk who deserved to be shot to death. He’s also clearly trying to head off a potential civil suit by continuing to repeat the notion that Zimmerman had no choice.

Now, to be fair, Zimmerman’s parents gave an interview as well, and they gave a sincere apology from what I heard of it. I’ll wait to see a full playback to know for certain, but the clip that I saw included what looked to me to be a heartfelt sentiment. Sadly, the brother is doing nothing of the kind.

I would think he would be a little more careful in tempting the Martin family toward litigation. While I don’t know that the DOJ will actually bring civil rights charges against Zimmerman, I do know that the Martin family has every right to sue Zimmerman in civil court for his behavior. And civil litigation operates under very different rules than criminal cases – they don’t have to prove Zimmerman’s fallacies beyond a reasonable doubt. A jury in a civil trial could assign him a proportionate amount of responsibility or even a complete amount of responsibility, given that he chose to leave his vehicle, chase, stalk and confront Trayvon Martin even after being expressly told not to do so. Now, I had thought that the Martin family might avoid such a suit, mostly due to the fact that Zimmerman doesn’t have any money to hand over. They’d be winning a judgment against a person who is likely to declare bankruptcy and never pay it. But if Zimmerman and his brother were to be making provocative, condescending and even gleeful comments like this in public about the matter, the Martin family may well decide to take up the lawsuit anyway.