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Abigail Thernstrom nicely sums up the president’s Zimmerman actions.

Every American can make their own judgment about whether justice was served by the verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial but one thing we should all recognize: President Obama’s interference in a local law enforcement matter was unprecedented and inappropriate, and he comes away from the case looking badly tarnished by his poor judgment.

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the president said when asked about the case in the Rose Garden on March 23, 2012, after many had called for Zimmerman’s arrest but several weeks before he was charged. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”

In fact, if the president had a son, he would have been born to extraordinary privilege and raised with all the advantages of two very affluent and highly educated parents. He would have gone to tony private schools. His path in life would have been almost as dissimilar from Trayvon’s as one could imagine.

Yes, Obama’s hypothetical son and Trayvon would have shared the same brown skin color. Would that have made them interchangeable? Not unless all brown-skinned boys are the same. Does the president really believe that?

The president’s remarks created a clear impression that he was motivated by one of two factors, and we can only guess as to which, or what combination of the two, was at work here. One possibility is that this is merely another manifestation of the president’s well-known narcissism: No matter what the situation may be, it’s all about him. …

John Fund with more on the Zimmerman travesty. It’s worse than you thought.

The trial of George Zimmerman should be taught in law schools and elsewhere as a prime example of one of the most mishandled and politically motivated prosecutions in recent U.S. history. If we want to reserve the criminal-justice system for deciding guilt or innocence rather than for playing out social and racial grievances, it’s important to review the spectacle we just witnessed.

Recall that the investigation of Trayvon Martin’s shooting was taken out of the hands of local authorities and placed with an appointed special prosecutor named Angela Corey. She said her job was to rise above public pressure to indict Zimmerman, but within weeks she claimed her job was “to do justice for Trayvon Martin.” She quickly decided to charge Zimmerman with second-degree murder, a charge that may have satisfied public opinion but which required her to prove that the former Neighborhood Watch volunteer harbored ill will and spite against Trayvon Martin, whom he had never met until minutes before the shooting.

The Florida Bar’s rules state that the government’s attorneys shall “refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause . . . [and] make timely disclosure to the defense of all evidence or information known to the prosecutor that tends to negate the guilt of the accused or mitigates the offense.”

Angela Corey flagrantly violated those standards. Her prosecutors waited months before giving the defense photos showing the extent of George Zimmerman’s injuries the night of the shooting. Ben Kruidbos, the information-technology director for the state attorney’s office, was shocked when he learned that prosecutors hadn’t turned over to the defense evidence of photos and text messages that Kruidbos had recovered from Martin’s cell phone. The photos included images of a pile of jewelry on a bed, underage nude females, marijuana, and a hand menacingly holding a semiautomatic weapon. …

American Spectator writes about the cover-up of Trayvon Martin’s crimes in a Miami high school. Another fraud from this country’s educators.

The February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martion might never have happened if school officials in Miami-DadeCounty had not instituted an unofficial policy of treating crimes as school disciplinary infractions. Revelations that emerged from an internal affairs investigation explain why Martin was not arrested when caught at school with stolen jewelry in October 2011 or with marijuana in February 2012. Instead, the teenager was suspended from school, the last time just days before he was shot dead by George Zimmerman.

Trayvon Martin was not from Sanford, the town north of Orlando where he was shot in 2012 and where a jury acquitted Zimmerman of murder charges Saturday. Martin was from MiamiGardens, more than 200 miles away, and had come to Sanford to stay with his father’s girlfriend Brandy Green at her home in the townhouse community where Zimmerman was in charge of the neighborhood watch. Trayvon was staying with Green after he had been suspended for the second time in six months from KropHigh School in Miami-DadeCounty, where both his father, Tracy Martin, and mother, Sybrina Fulton, lived.

Both of Trayvon’s suspensions during his junior year at Krop High involved crimes that could have led to his prosecution as a juvenile offender. However, Chief Charles Hurley of the Miami-Dade School Police Department (MDSPD) in 2010 had implemented a policy that reduced the number of criminal reports, manipulating statistics to create the appearance of a reduction in crime within the school system. …

Pajamas Media posts on black kids in Baltimore beating up a Hispanic man yelling, “This is for Trayvon.” 

… A witness posted on Facebook that she saw the gang of young men chasing the victim before they caught up to him and started kicking and beating him. That witness wrote that the black males were shouting “This is for Trayvon!” as they beat the man.

If Eric Holder is still looking around for a hate crime to prosecute, Baltimore offers one. …

In case you have doubts The Economist has become an organ of the radical left, a post from the magazine’s Democracy in America Blog, is a good example of why reading The Economist on politics or economics is a waste of your time. Just in case their readers are thickheaded, the title was “Getting Away With It.”  Follow the link if you want to read it. We’re not going to soil Pickings with more of this.

… We know that Mr Zimmerman said Mr Martin knocked him down, punched him, slammed his head into the sidewalk, and that he shot Mr Martin in self-defence. (Mr Martin could not relate his side of the story, of course, and there were no other witnesses.) We also know that America is a country still divided by race and fond of guns, and that Mr Zimmerman cursed “punks” who “always get away”. …

… Now, I don’t know it, but I seriously doubt Mr Zimmerman needed to shoot Mr Martin, even if Mr Martin did attack him. And I seriously doubt Mr Martin would have been shot if he hadn’t been a black kid. In my heart of hearts, I too think Mr Zimmerman did something terribly wrong, and that this misdeed reflects a number of things that are terribly wrong in our culture. And I share the impulse to identify something in the criminal-justice system that, if fine-tuned, would have drilled down to the honest-to-god truth about the case and rendered perfect moral justice. …

… In Texas you can get away with shooting someone to death if they’re running away with your property. That’s insane, and it’s easy to see how a law like that rigs the system in favour of people with a lot of property—a class that remains disproportionately white and male. However, on the whole, our criminal-justice system is so frightfully racist because it’s too easy for prosecutors, not because it’s too hard. Of course, in a racist society, rules that help defendants are going to help the most privileged defendants the most, and that’s maddening. But that shouldn’t stop us from recognising that the least privileged, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, are far and away most likely to stand accused. That’s why I suspect that a legal system making it harder for the likes of Mr Zimmerman to get away with it would be a system of even more outrageous racial inequity.

For apple fans, Mother Jones has a very long piece on long forgotten apple varities. We have a taste of the article for you. Follow the link if you want more.

Every fall at Maine’s Common Ground Country Fair, the Lollapalooza of sustainable agriculture, John Bunker sets out a display of eccentric apples. Last September, once again, they covered every possible size, shape, and color in the wide world of appleness. There was a gnarled little yellow thing called a Westfield Seek-No-Further; a purplish plum impostor called a Black Oxford; a massive, red-streaked WolfRiver; and one of Thomas Jefferson’s go-to fruits, the Esopus Spitzenburg. Bunker is known in Maine as “The Apple Whisperer,” or simply “The Apple Guy,” and, after laboring for years in semi-obscurity, he has never been in more demand. Through the catalog of Fedco Trees [1], a mail-order company he founded in Maine 30 years ago, Bunker has sown the seeds of a grassroots apple revolution.

All weekend long, I watched people gravitate to what Bunker (“Bunk” to his friends, a category that seems to include half the population of Maine) calls “the vibrational pull” of a table laden with bright apples. “Baldwin!” said a tiny old man with white hair and intermittent teeth, pointing to a brick-red apple that was one of America’s most important until the frigid winter of 1933-34 knocked it into obscurity. “That’s the best!”

A leathery blonde from the coast held up a Blue Pearmain in wonder. “Blue Peahmain,” she marveled. “My ma had one in her yahd.” …

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David Stockman, former Michigan congressman and Reagan budget director, takes no prisoners as he contemplates the lastest jobs report. Remember when everybody was so pleased with 195,000 new jobs created in June? Turns out 120,000 of those jobs were part-time jobs in restaurants, bars, hotels, retail, and temp agencies. Now we can call him President Part-Time.

No, last week’s jobs report was not “strong”. It was just another edition of the “born again” jobs scam that has been fueling the illusion of recovery during the entire post-crisis Bernanke Bubble. In fact, 120,000 or 62 percent of the June payroll gain consisted of part-time jobs in restaurants, bars, hotels, retail and temp agencies. The average pay check in this segment amounts to barely $20,000 per year, which is a sub-poverty level income for a family of four, and compares to upwards of $50,000 per year for goods producing jobs in the BLS survey.

Altogether, the government has reported 2.8 million of these part-time job gains since the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, accounting for a predominant share of the ballyhooed pick-up of 5.3 million total jobs.  It goes without saying, however, that the principal of one-job-one-vote does not apply in economics. What matters are aggregate dollar earnings. On that front, the Commerce Department figures for total private wage and salary income are just plain punk. Nearly six years on from the December 2007 peak, real payroll disbursements are still down by nearly 1 percent. What kind of “recovery” is that about?

Measured on an income equivalent basis, then, a majority of the big rebound in the BLS headline number has consisted of “40 percent jobs”. Granted, these fractional jobs do provide a monthly feed to headline stalking HFT algos and the gist for the moronic jobs number guessing game conducted by unemployable Wall Street executives otherwise known as “street economists”. But not by a long shot do they prove that the Fed’s money printing spree is beginning to bear fruit, as claimed by the cheerleading section of the Wall Street Journal shortly after the BLS release.  

Indeed, once upon a time financial journalists actually worked for a living by digging for facts, rather than simply re-posting the spin issued by Washington’s various ministries of truth. In this instance, even a modicum of investigation by the WSJ would have revealed that the 2.8 million part-time jobs “created” since June 2009 reflect the rebirth of the very same 2.8 million jobs that were first generated between 2000 and 2007. That this obvious fact has been completely ignored is not surprising. After all,  the reigning doctrine in the Keynesian puzzle palace inhabited by officialdom and financial journalists alike, calls for digging and refilling economic holes as the national policy of first resort.

The BLS data exhibit this syndrome with uncanny exactitude. In early 2000 there were 34.7 million jobs in the part-time economy. In response to the dotcom crash, the Fed ignited the housing and credit bubbles via Greenspan’s 1% money experiment, causing a consumption boom fueled by home ATM withdrawals and other consumer borrowings.  Accordingly, activity rates in leisure and hospitality, retail and personal services (think yoga teachers and gardeners) temporarily soared, with the part-time job count climbing by the aforesaid 2.8 million by late 2007. But this peak of 37.2 million part time jobs was pure bubble economics— attested to by the fact that every single one of these new jobs vanished during the 18 months of bubble liquidation otherwise known as the Great Recession. Indeed, when the NBER declared the bottom in June 2009, the part-time job count stood at 34.5 million, a hair under where it started at the turn of the century. …

 

… In short, Fed policies are mangling the Main Street economy by disabling the pricing mechanism in all financial markets, diverting capital to unproductive speculation and rent-seeking and leaving genuine entrepreneurs and businessmen adrift in a fog of financial disorder. Needless to say, the result is tepid growth of incomes and jobs—-a lamentable condition that the Fed cannot fix with “moar” monetary stimulus because decades of the latter are what has caused the problem.

More importantly, the impossibility of fixing a structural problem with Keynesian cyclical medicine means that the monetary politburo will descend into an ever more incoherent babble as the “incoming data” fail to match its clueless forecasts. In this regard, not only were Wednesday’s minutes an embarrassing exercise in Washington pettifoggery, they were also self-evidently a fraud and lie—–spun well after the meeting in an attempt to undo Bernanke’s original message.  It is bad enough that the nation’s vast, infinitely complex $16 trillion economy is being run by an unelected 12-person monetary politburo. But now the commissars have completely lost both their bearings and their credibility.

Under these circumstances healthy capitalist financial markets would be afraid—very afraid.  But there are no honest markets left—-just a big romper room where the boys and girls and algos endeavor to extract windfalls from central bank word clouds. Still, the magnitude of the deformation that the Fed has wrought in the financial system cannot be under-estimated:  there remain even now tens of thousands of punters, fund managers and home gamers who do not see the Fed’s desperate incoherence, believing instead that “the market is cheap” and that buying the dips is a no loose proposition.

Let’s see. At the last bubble peak in early October 2007, the S&P 500 was only 100 points (or 5%) below today’s lofty peak, and it was deemed to be cheap by the 11th hour bulls at that moment because forward earnings were projected to be $110 per share, thereby trading at less than 16X.  As it happened, 2008 earnings ex-items came in more than a tad lower—- at $55 per share to be precise and actually at only $15 on the basis of honestly reported GAAP earnings.

In truth, at that moment in time financial bubbles—subprime, CDOs, monster LBOs, a raging Russell 2000— were evident everywhere in the financial system. So in late 2007 the market was not cheap even on a paint by the numbers basis.  At the end of the day, the only honest and reliable earnings number in today’s deformed capital markets is 12 month trailing GAAP EPS. The billions that Washington wastes on financial cops each year policing corporate SEC filings at least accomplish that much. At the 2007 peak, therefore, the market was actually trading at 19X earnings on an honestly accounted basis.

So here we are again, and the LTM earnings number on a GAAP basis for the S&P 500 is $87.50 per share. We are back at 19X trailing profits.  Too be sure, forward earnings ex-items are exactly as before—once again at $110 per share. So the market is purportedly “cheap” but here’s the skunk in the woodpile:  honest LTM GAAP earnings have been stuck at $87 per S&P 500 share for seven quarters—since Q3 2011.  In short, true earnings are not growing, China and the BRICs are rolling over, Europe is sinking into economic somnolence, Japan is a massive financial train-wreck waiting to happen, and based on the latest data it would appear that US GDP growth will average hardly 1%  during the three-quarters thru June. That’s stall speed, yet the gambling machines which occupy Wall Street rage on because they believe that Bernanke has their back, that this business cycle will never end and that this latest and greatest financial bubble will never be allowed to collapse. …

Peter Wehner on the “lawless” president.

Both Charles Krauthammer and Ramesh Ponnuru have spoken about the lawlessness of the Obama administration. Examples include (but are not limited to) unilaterally delaying implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, issuing health-care edicts that undermine the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, making unconstitutional “recess appointments” to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, refusing to enforce current immigration laws related to illegal immigrants who were brought to America as children, and waving welfare work requirements.

This is all part of a pattern in which Mr. Obama enforces laws he likes and refuses to enforce (or unilaterally alters) laws he disagrees with. I suppose the temptation to act as a potentate is understandable; but it also happens to be illegal. The president, after all, has the constitutional duty to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (see Article II, Section 3 for more). ..

Andy McCarthy has more in this vein.

Obama has never been clear on the distinction between sovereign and servant, between the American people and those, including himself, elected to do the people’s business. We saw that yet again this week with the president’s unilateral rewrite of the Bataan Death March known as the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. For this president, laws are not binding expressions of the popular will, but trifling recommendations to be ignored when expedient.

The collapse of law — not just Obamacare but law in general — is the Obama administration’s most egregious scandal. With the IRS here, Benghazi there, and Eric Holder’s institutionalized malevolence crowding the middle, it gets little direct attention. Perhaps it is so ubiquitous, so quotidian, that we’ve become inured to it.

Above all else, though, the office of the president was created to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. For this president, to the contrary, law is non-existent — and not merely law in the traditional sense of our aspiration to be “a nation of laws not men.” Obama has contorted the law into a weapon against our constitutional order of divided powers and equal protection for every American. …

… The faithful execution of laws is never partisan; under Obama, the execution of laws is intensely partisan. He purports to make “recess appointments” when Congress is not in recess. He skirts Congress’s constitutional war powers by pretending that attacking another country (Libya) is not making war. If his core supporters are damaged by the suffocating laws he champions — most prominently, Obamacare — he claims the power to “waive” their provisions selectively. Meanwhile, huge bureaucracies are encouraged, expressly or by nod-and-wink, to harass the president’s opponents and push forward his redistributionist, production-strangling, Islamist-empowering agenda. The executive order — formerly an intra-branch efficiency device designed to organize the exercise of the president’s constitutional powers and the enforcement of Congress’s laws — has effectively become legislation, the president substituting his edicts for our laws. …

Media Bistro has a screen shot of the Oakland TV station announcing the names of the pilots of the Asiana plane. The lead pilot was Capt. Sum Ting Wong. Co-pilot was Wi Tu Lo.

On today’s Noon newscast on KTVU, the station claimed it had “just learned the names of the 4 pilots on board” Asiana flight 214 which crashed last Saturday. But the station was given bad information that made it all the way into the newscast. If you read the names it becomes immediately clear this is a joke, which went unnoticed by the newsroom, producers and the anchor.

You’ll recall earlier this week, KTVU touted its coverage as being not only first, but “100% accurate.”