George Zimmerman Gloats Over a Teenager's Death

George Zimmerman (center) next to Florida gun shop owner Andy Hallinan

It's hard to tell who's more sick in the head.

A Twitter user who goes by the name "Grand Moff Alexander" who posted a gruesome crime scene photo of teenager Trayvon Martin's dead body with a message glorifying his killer George Zimmerman as a "one man Army".

Or Zimmerman re-posting the picture on his own Twitter account; where he calls himself "TheRealGeoregeZ".

Regardless, his choice has ignited a firestorm on Twitter and other social media sites.

There are a lot of people outraged that the man who stalked, confronted and then initiated a physical confrontation with an unarmed Trayvon Martin before killing him back in 2012 continues to take a demented pride in the fact that he got away with murdering an innocent teenager who was on his way home with a drink and a bag of Skittles.

It wasn't enough that a Florida jury found Zimmerman not guilty based on his claims that he was just defending himself from a teenager he'd followed after a police dispatcher specifically told him not to.

Zimmerman shakes the hand of a fan

Since his acquittal, Zimmerman has been arrested for threatening his girlfriend with a loaded shotgun, assaulting his ex-wife and been stopped by police with a loaded gun in his vehicle.

He's also reveled in making money off of public appearances by posing for photos with "fans" at gun shows (pictured left) and other events where an assortment of conservatives, right wing extremists, "patriots", 2nd Amendment advocates and white nationalists regard him as a celebrity.

But profiteering off murdering a black teenager isn't his only source of income.

Prior to the grassroots media backlash against his posting a photo of Martin's body (which he quickly deleted), most recently Zimmerman made headlines by teaming up with Florida resident Andy Hallinan to sell copies of a painting of the Confederate flag that Martin painted.

Hallinan is the high school dropout from Massachusetts who sparked outrage back in July when he publicly declared his Florida gun store a "Muslim-free zone" in the wake of 24-year old Kuwaiti-born U.S. citizen Muhammad Youssef Adbulazeez killing four U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy Petty Officer in a violent mass shooting in Tennessee before he himself was killed.

Hallinan (pictured left) posted a video of himself on Youtube (standing in front of a Confederate flag) in which he blamed President Obama for causing the rise of racial polarization in America and announced that he was banning Muslims from his gun store; and urged people to "get armed, get trained and carry-daily".

In response, according to an article on Newsweek.com by Michelle Richinik, Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations announced that the organization would file a lawsuit against Hallian and said:  

"These bigoted declarations are no different than whites-only signs posted in businesses during a period of our history that we had hoped was over."

There's something depraved about a man whose documented propensity for violence, love of guns and racist views led to the death of an innocent teenager, then shows absolutely no remorse for it.

There's something morally reprehensible about someone who not only remains unapologetic about causing the death of another human being, he aligns himself with those who treat him as if he was some kind of American hero for getting away with it.

As if he'd fended off an attacker who'd broken into his house or stopped a bank robbery instead of stalking and killing a innocent 17 year-old high school student with no police record.

But we are talking about the state of Florida after all folks.

The same state where Congresswoman Janet Adkins (pictured left) recently told a group of Florida Republican activists that the key to defeating Democratic Congresswoman Corrine Brown (pictured left), an African-American who served as a state representative for 10 years before being elected to Congress in 2013, was to simply increase the number of black prison inmates in Brown's district.


As Evan Hurst of Wonkette.com reported earlier today, Adkins strategy is to follow the Republican playbook and use illegal Gerrymandering to, "draw [Brown’s seat] in such a fashion so perhaps, a majority, or maybe not a majority, but a number of them will live in the prisons, thereby not being able to vote,” said Adkins, a Nassau County Republican, referring to black residents."

Now obviously it wouldn't be fair to lump every single resident of the ironically nicknamed "Sunshine State" into one barrel with all the bad oranges.

But it is a state where a judge and jury did elevate the warped principle of "Stand Your Ground" laws over the life of an innocent teenager.

And it's also the place where an elected member of Congress is on record as openly suggesting that districts with high concentrations of incarcerated people of color is in line with the Republican strategy to suppress the votes of non-white Americans to create majorities that are illusory.

I'm not sure what the members of the jury who found Trayvon Martin's killer not guilty felt when they heard the news that the man they absolved of murder posted photo's of his victim's body on his Twitter page like some kind of trophy from a hunt.

But I do know that there are a lot of people around the world wondering how justice and politics can be so openly twisted along racial lines in a state that's part of a nation the loves to see itself as the greatest Democracy in the world.

Liberty and justice for all?

I'd imagine the family of Trayvon Martin, being forced to hear news about photos of their son's body being posted on a social media account by his killer, might think otherwise.  

Carson Goes Rogue, Trump Shrugs & 'Saint Scott' Helps "Clear the Field"

Ben Carson points to where he's going: way off the ranch

Is the word 'ironic' sufficient enough to describe the fact that the lone African-American Republican presidential candidate for the 2016 race, a former pediatric neurosurgeon and devout Christian, is being publicly accused of religious bigotry and intolerance?

During an interview on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday, Dr. Ben Carson declared that a U.S. President who was a practicing Muslim was not "consistent with the Constitution", and that he could not agree with America having a Muslim President.

No doubt Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a practicing Muslim and respected Democratic leader, found Carson's comments interesting.

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, promptly called for the soft-spoken GOP candidate to resign on the grounds that he was not fit to hold office.

Now I'm not really sure what Carson was thinking when he said that.

The good doctor was coming off a pretty decent performance in the latest GOP presidential debate in California.

Maybe he felt he had to do or say something to put some space between him and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina after she stood up to both Russian President Vladamir Putin and Donald Trump during the debate and boosted her standing in the polls up into the top three.

Or maybe Carson was simply following in the footsteps of other GOP candidates and trying to "out-Trump" Donald Trump after the Republican front-runner made headlines last Thursday for refusing to correct the comments of a right-wing "Birther" who stood up in front of an audience of about 3,000 Trump supporters and said:  

“We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one — you know he’s not even an American. But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question, when can we get rid of them?”

The idea that there are people in this country who want to "get rid" of Muslims is obviously disturbing on a number of levels, but hardly surprising given the right wing media's role in actively promoting anti-Muslim hatred since the 911 attacks.

So far Trump has refused to disavow or clarify the statements made by his supporter in New Hampshire last week; how can he? Especially given his own role in actively spreading discredited fringe "Birther" theories.  

A stunning 52% of Trump supporters incorrectly believe President Obama is a Muslim.

Republican town hall meeting in Maryland, 2013

Some of the folks still riding around in the 2016 Republican Clown Car are so intent on pleasing the amorphous living mass called the "Republican Base" that they seem to have lost sight of the fact that the much larger American middle is far more moderate in its views.

The Republican Base may be strong, and God knows it's opinionated, but as Mitt Romney learned in 2012, it's simply not big enough on it's own to get someone elected to the White House - Gerrymandering and voter suppression of Democratic votes are only going to take you so far. 

The backlash against two of the leading Republican presidential candidates over the tone of intolerance so prevalent in the GOP message is proof positive that the Republican's post-2012 presidential election self analysis mea-culpa exists only in a distant past that is unrecognizable.

The racial, ethnic and religious divisiveness that GOP leaders vowed to steer the party away from just three years ago in an effort to make the party more inclusive, is now a legitimate plank in the current Republican platform.

A platform that's so out of step with the current demographic makeup of the United States in terms of the ethnic diversity of its population, that it's very close to rendering the Republican party irrelevant.

The number of seats they hold in Congress is in part, an illusion that helps to disguise the total lack of optimism in their outlook for the nation and the non-existence of any meaningful or substantive policy proposals or broad initiatives to move the country forward.

Wisconsin Gov Scott Walker drops out

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's announcement earlier this evening that he's dropping out of the 2016 GOP race was about as anti-climatic as it was unsurprising given his anemic Presidential campaign message and the fact that he's polling at zero %.

According to multiple sources, the press conference to announce his dropping out of the race was hastily planned.

Based on his comments earlier this evening and his lackluster performances at both GOP presidential debates, maybe his entering the 2016 race in the first place was hastily planned too.

Frankly it's laughable that the same candidate who just recently was touting the same kind of "Trump-ian" anti-immigrant hysteria as planks of his own campaign (erecting walls on the border of Canada, saying only a "handful" of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world are moderate...) is now trying to spin his dropping out of the 2016 presidential race as some kind of half-ass pseudo-religious epiphany.

In his farewell statement, Walker said,  “The Bible is full of stories of people being called to lead in unusual ways, I believe I am being called to lead by helping clear the field.” 

Like former Texas Governor Rick Perry before him, Walker seemed to try and use his exit as some kind of clarion call for the Republican party to wake up and "smell the Donald" before it's too late.

But that ship has already sailed for the Wisconsin Governor with a 40% approval rating in his own state. But hey, that's 10 points better than the 30% home-state approval rating of another Republican presidential hopeful in the 2016 race. (We see you Chris Christie)

Walker had plenty of opportunities to stake out a position across the ideological field from Trump to try and force the GOP to distance itself from Trump's unabashed courting of right-wing extremists, anti-immigrant hate mongers, fringe loonies and white nationalists.

But he didn't. Instead Walker went for the same low-hanging fruit Trump revels in feasting on;
and he reaped exactly what he sowed.

In another display of Republican irony, it was only in his final statement as a 2016 presidential candidate earlier this evening that Walker said something that actually made sense:

“Sadly, the debate taking place in the party today is not focused on an optimistic view of America. Instead, it has drifted into personal attacks. In the end, I believe that the voters want to be for something and not against someone.”
  
You got that one right Governor, but no one is going to consider you "Saint Scott" for saying it; if you'd said it on stage during one of the two prime-time Republican debates in front of millions of people on television it might have meant something.

It might have changed the scope of the race and your own campaign.

Instead you waited until you were on your way out of the race to mention the truth as an afterthought on a Monday evening when most people's focus is on Monday night football, the humanitarian crisis in Europe, the vilification of a Muslim kid in Texas who built a clock that some people saw as a bomb, or their own problems.  

The kinds of problems a real honest to God presidential candidate with vision and guts might offer some solutions to.

But you weren't that candidate.

Instead you were just an unpopular Governor propped up by millions in Koch brothers dark money who stripped hard-working union workers of their right to collective bargaining, stripped your state's college system of critical funding even though you never graduated from college yourself, and contradicted your own "government is too big and intrusive" philosophy by signing a ban on abortions after 20 weeks into law.

You said it best yourself earlier tonight Governor Walker, "... the debate taking place in the party today is not focused on an optimistic view of America." 

You yourself were part of that lack of optimism; and clearly you were not part of the solution.