I Have Solved the Curious Case of Mark Judge’s Missing Bike

Yesterday, I wrote about Daily Caller contributor Mark Judge and the beloved L.L. Bean bike which was so cruelly wrenched from his idyllic life by Some Black Dude.  Horrified that one of my people would mercilessly steal a white dude’s bike, I decided to make some inquiries, and it is my great pleasure to announce that I have solved the case.

I can say with absolute certainty that a black dude did not steal Mark Judge’s bike.  Why?  Because there has been a boycott of L.L. Bean by black folks for eighty years, and us black folks always stick together. (Just ask Breitbrat Leftenant Dan Riehl):

African-American Boycott of L.L. Bean Enters 80th Year

I grew up near Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. I went to junior high school smack dab in the middle of Chestnut Hill. Chestnut Hill, I’ll have you know, is listed in The Preppy Handbook as one of the preppiest places in America. (I own a copy of The Preppy Handbook, so I know this for a fact.) I spent a lot of time in Chestnut Hill, eating cheese fries at Fiesta Pizza and shopping at The Gap with my white friends, all of whom owned L.L. Bean clothing and regularly perused the L.L. Bean catalog. Never during my time on the mean cobbled streets of Chestnut Hill did I buy a single item from an L.L. Bean catalog. Why? Because of the damn boycott!!

So there you have it. My evidence that a black dude did not steal Mark Judge’s bike is as substantial—if not more so—than Mark’s evidence that a black dude did.  He didn’t see a black dude steal his L.L. bike.  I’ve never seen a black dude show any interest in anything L.L. Bean.

I win.

Ok, so maybe I didn’t actually solve the case, per se, but I did exculpate All Black Dudes from the crime, and really, that’s what I care about.  I don’t give a shit about Mark’s L.L. Bean bike.

(h/t @gnudd for the video)

RELATED POST: White Dude at The Daily Caller Sheds White Guilt Because Black Dude Probably Stole His Bike

[cross-posted at The Raw Story-ABLC]

▲

This, Too, Was Inevitable

No one could have predicted:

According to NBC News correspondent Mara Schiavocampo, George Zimmerman has launched a new website:

Zimmerman’s attorneys have confirmed the site is operated & authorized by him RT thinkprogress:maracamp How do you know this is authentic? 9 Apr 12

On the website — therealgeorgezimmerman.com — Zimmerman solicits donations to support his “living expenses and legal defense.” He writes: “I have created a Paypal account solely linked on this website as I would like to provide an avenue to thank my supporters personally and ensure that any funds provided are used only for living expenses and legal defense, in lieu of my forced inability to maintain employment. I will also personally, maintain accountability of all funds received.”

He also features a photo of a vandalized black cultural center at Ohio State University.

Might as well get in on the wingnut welfare gravy train, this time with the broad appeal to the Stormfront crowd. Although you will be pleased to know that Stormfront and Neo-Nazis are “civil rights groups” according to Fox.

▲

Hogwash

Here’s a pretty limp statement Rich Lowry:

Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here.

I don’t believe him. I think there are probably a few people who share his views, but just won’t say it out loud. And you can be damned sure that a large portion of the NRO readership absolutely believes in Derb’s views.

And why hasn’t he been fired? This isn’t something you need to debate or think about, it should automatically lead to his dismissal.

*** Update ***

And now he is gone.

▲

Fun for All the Girls and Boys

I missed this yesterday, and in case you did, too, don’t miss Ta-Nehisi Coates utter destruction of Juan Williams’ assertion that there are no marches protesting black-on-black violence. And TNC is right that the Interrupters, which is streaming on PBS, is well worth watching.

▲

Not Getting It At All

Rich “starbursts” Lowry opens up a can of silly in the National Review with a piece titled “The Murders That Don’t Count: In America, the lives of young black people are cheap, unless they happen to fit the right agenda.” Already groaning? Don’t stop now. It gets worse:

Delric Miller IV died in a hail of bullets a month ago. When someone fired 37 AK-47 rounds into his Detroit home at 4:30 a.m., he was mortally wounded while dozing on the couch. He was nine months old. No one made the multicolored teething ring he got for Christmas or his toy hammer into a national symbol of random violence.

Last year, Charinez Jefferson, 17, was shot and killed on a Chicago street. “She begged the shooter not to shoot her because she was pregnant,” a pastor explained. The alleged assailant, Timothy Jones, 18, shot her in the head, chest and back after seeing her walking with a rival gang member. New York Times columnist Charles Blow did not write a column about Jefferson’s killing as a symbol of the perils of being a young black woman in America.

Last June, a stray bullet from a confrontation on a Brighton Beach, N.Y., boardwalk killed 16-year-old Tysha Jones as she sat on a bench. A 19-year-old man, out for revenge after an earlier scuffle on the boardwalk, was charged in the shooting. Tysha’s heartbroken mother was not featured on all the national TV shows.

In January, 12-year-old Kade’jah Davis was shot and killed when, allegedly, 19-year-old Joshua Brown showed up at her Detroit house to demand the return of a cellphone from Davis’ mother. When Brown didn’t get the phone, he fired shots through the front door. No one held high-profile street protests to denounce gunplay over such trifles.

You have to work to be this obtuse. In each and every case listed above, the police and authorities have arrested and charged the murderer, or are working nonstop to discover who the murderers are and track them down and prosecute them.

That’s one reason why the Trayvon Martin case is different. We know precisely who killed him, yet he walks free and clear. That is why the outrage is so loud. Trayvon Martin was killed for the crime of walking while black, the cops did nothing to investigate his death and appear to be actively impeding any investigation, they basically gave his killer a pat on the back before sending him on his way, and then they slapped a John Doe tag on his corpse and threw him into the morgue’s lost and found pile.

Yes, each and everyone of the murders that halfwit Lowry mentioned is awful. Yes, black on black crime is awful. But in each case above, the victim’s family are receiving some semblance of justice.

And that is all anyone wants for Trayvon Martin. Justice.

Lowry just can’t be that stupid.

▲

Do the Wrong Thing

What a jackass:

An elderly couple have fled their Sanford, Fla., home—at least temporarily—after their address was wrongly spread on Twitter as belonging to George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, Orlando Sentinel reports.

The 70-year-old woman, a school cafeteria worker, and her 72-year-old husband have moved into a hotel after getting hate mail and unwanted visitors, their son, Chip Humble, tells the newspaper.

The Smoking Gun reports that the address was retweeted by director Spike Lee to his 240,000 followers. CNN reports that Lee has since taken it down from his Twitter site.

The logical reaction to the murder of Trayvon Martin is to work to scale back vigilante “justice,” not to encourage it and cause more harm to innocents. Asshole. This is the kind of stuff that Malkin and the wingnuts do.

▲

Provocative Questions That Must Be Asked

This is from the Facebook page of Tom Bauerle, a Buffalo conservative radio host (via, click to embiggen). The caption says “Hoodies: Do I look suspicious?”

He’s just asking questions, people. No need to get excited. One more after the break.

More » ▲

Divide and Conquer For Jesus

Stay classy, homophobes:

The leading opponents of same-sex marriage planned to defeat campaigns for gay marriage by “fanning the hostility” between black voters from gay voters and by casting President Obama as a radical foe of marriage, according to confidential documents made public in a Maine court today.

The documents, circulated by the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, are marked “confidential” and detail the internal strategy of the National Organization for Marriage.

“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies,” says an internal report on 2008 and 2009 campaigns, in a section titled the “Not A Civil Right Project.”

“Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots,” advises the document, which is a road map to the successful campaign against same-sex marriage in California.

The document also targets Hispanic voters, whom conservatives have long hoped would join the backlash against gay rights.

They literally will do everything they can, including having this entire country at each other’s throats, just to keep bigotry alive and to follow bizarre interpretations of a 2,000 year old piece of fiction.

▲

No Myth

Depending on who’s counting, either a thousand or almost two thousand people showed up yesterday in my fair city to march for justice for Trayvon Martin. The reason this is remarkable is that reporters can’t remember the last time anything like that number of people marched for any issue. Rochester is not a big protest town. When something gets this big here, it’s a big deal.

▲

Breitbrat Dan Riehl: Blacks are Being ‘Lead Down a Path Through a Cotton Field of Ignorance’

 

I read Dan Riehl’s latest ‘tiny violins’ post and laughed right out loud. It pairs nicely with this video (which you should play while you read the below excerpt):

More » ▲

#TrayvonMartin: Breitbrat Dan Riehl’s Racism Is Hanging Out All Over the Place

This rush to demonize Trayvon Martin is beyond ridiculous.

Leading the charge in the cavalcade of stupidity surrounding Trayvon Martin are the Breitbrats. In this case, Intrepid Blogger Dan Riehl, “found” a Facebook photo of “Trayvon Martin” which is supposed to lend credence to the wingnuts’ desperate efforts to cast Trayvon Martin as a thug.

In the photo, a young black kid is in a room somewhere throwing up middle fingers. This, of course, is damning evidence to the Breitbrats because the kid is black, he looks kind of black, and I’m pretty sure the kid is black.  Also, it’s the first time in history that any kid, black or otherwise has ever mugged for a camera, so he must be up to something.  He’s probably mugging the cameraman!

Sigh.

More » ▲

‘New’ Witness Claims Trayvon Martin Attacked Zimmerman

eyeroll

Apparently, now there’s a new witness who claims that Trayvon attacked Zimmerman:

The witness told FOX 35 in Orlando that he saw evidence of a fight between Martin and Zimmerman, which could lend credence to the gunman’s claim that he was acting in self-defence.

‘The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me: “Help, help… and I told him to stop and I was calling 911,’ he said.

Zimmerman was wearing a red sweater; Martin was in a grey hoodie.

He added: ‘When I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point.’

This account is drastically different from the portrait painted of Martin by his friends and acquaintances.

More » ▲

Not Sure This Changes Much

Here we go, as we enter the inevitable “Trayvon had it coming” stage of this story:

Trayvon Martin may have attacked a Neighborhood Watch captain before the man shot dead the unarmed teen in a gated community in Florida, an anonymous witness who spoke to police claimed yesterday.

The witness, known only as John, told Sanford police that he saw Martin on top of George Zimmerman shortly before the fatal shot that has led to a national outcry, including a huge ‘hoodie’ march in Philadelphia last night. He recounted the details to Fox 35 News in Florida.

I don’t know how this changes anything for me. Even if there was a fight and Zimmerman was losing, the entirety of the blame lies with Zimmerman. He was the wannabe cop cruising around acting like a tough guy. He was the one who saw a black guy and immediately thought “crook.” He was the one who called 911. He was the one who pursued Trayvon, ignoring the explicit instructions of the cops. He was the one who confronted Trayvon. And he was the one who shot him.

Even if Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman got into a scuffle, Trayvon is the one who gets to claim self-defense here. He wasn’t the predator following Zimmerman with a loaded gun, it was the other way around.

Trayvon Martin is dead, and one person is responsible for all of the series of actions that led to his death. That person is George Zimmerman.

▲

Symptoms Of A Syndrome

On a day where President Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin’s murder and said the following:

“All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” President Obama said Friday morning following a White House Rose Garden ceremony when asked about the 17-year-old’s death.

The president called the shooting a “tragedy” and says “every aspect” of the case should be investigated. Obama gave his condolences to the slain teenager’s parents and said if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

We have this going on at a Rick Santorum event...

At a shooting range in Louisiana on Friday, an onlooker encouraged Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to pretend the target he was firing at was President Barack Obama.

“Santorum is shooting a 1911 Colt,” Politico’s Juana Summers tweeted from the sheriff’s office shooting range in West Monroe. “Range master says ‘Well, it’s not your first rodeo.’ Someone here says ‘pretend its Obama.’”

...and this out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich....

In a radio interview on Thursday, Newt Gingrich returned to one of his favorite recent themes, what he calls the “elite media” and their conspiracy to aid and abet the Obama administration.

In an article at Huffington Post, the former Speaker of the House is quoted as saying to Sandy Rios of the American Family Association that the “elite media” are “in the tank for Obama” and will do everything they can to see him re-elected.

“It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are,” he said, “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church?”

...and I just shake my head.  I’m a black male who has survived to the ripe old age of 36 and is not incarcerated.  I’m an exception in this country, it seems.  I live in one of the 24 states that has a law that solely exists to justify the use of deadly force as the ultimate sanction against someone who is merely perceived to be a threat, without evidence, due process, or the right to face your accuser (because hey, you’re effing dead.)  The legislative need to create laws like this is a symptom of a much more awful syndrome, and in every case these laws were passed by “pro-life” Republicans led by the gun lobbyists.

These laws are designed to allow vigilantism, period.  It’s the worst impulse of the whole Glibertarian/Paulite/Somali Pirate anarcho-justice codified into “I get to decide who lives and who dies, and I reserve the right to exercise that impulse at any point.”  We’re all castles stomping around killing each other, and may the best, most heavily armed castle win.  And as far as Republicans are concerned, well that impulse extends to “We’ve decided that having a black President violates our right not to have one, so we’re going to do something about it from the ground up.”

Trayvon Martin’s awful, pointless murder is just a symptom of a much uglier sickness.

[UPDATE]  Newt doubles down.

“What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful,” Gingrich said on the Hannity Radio show. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.

“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”

Effing. Perfect.

▲

Scenes from Post-Racial America

Time to move the Ni-CLANG clock one minute closer to midnight:

John Hood, president of the conservative North Carolina-based John Locke Foundation, has apologized for a very special graphic that one of his bloggers, “Hot Talk WRNN co-host Tara Servatius,” included in her post for the think tank’s blog this week. What is the controversy? All it did was show “President Obama in chains and drag with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.” What is the controversy? Everyone loves Kentucky Fried Chicken! And look, Tara Servatius says she “didn’t think about the racial implications of the picture when I posted it. I simply don’t think in those terms.” She’s a fun one.

It’s really just absolutely killing them that Obama is black. They’ve all completely lost their minds in incoherent rage, and they are so filled with repressed hostility that every now and then they lose track of the plot and something like this slips out.

And how is it even remotely possible that you wouldn’t think of the racial implications of Obama in chains and drag with a bucket of fried chicken between his legs? How?

▲