Quote of the Day

"By this point the baby wasn’t breathing and the queen’s royal physician didn’t know what to do without their socialist government telling him how to do his job. His tears became heavier as he looked out the window and regretted his country ever messing with America’s forefathers, the pain of that ass-whooping passed from generation to generation.

From a chair in the corner, George Zimmerman calmly stood up and unholstered his piece.

'Princess Kate Middleton,' he said. 'I’m going to need you to trust me. But know that it will be a cold day in hell before George Zimmerman lets a baby die on his watch.'

From there, George Zimmerman placed his gun next to the royal child’s ear as a heavenly light illuminated his every action. With an unwavering hand of justice that’s not afraid to fell those who dare prey on the innocent, George Zimmerman pulled the trigger and almost immediately the startled child woke and began breathing.

Later, George would only hold the baby for a few moments, so as not to deprive the boy the comfort of his mother. But he could be heard whispering two words and two words only into the babe’s ear: 'End apartheid. End apartheid.'"

-- The Superficial's description of the role newly minted "hero" George Zimmerman played in the birth of the royal baby

In discussing Zimmerman's rescue of a family from an overturned SUV, his lawyer, human dog turd Mark O'Mara, called the act "quintessential George."

Get ready for reality TV's newest hit, folks. That's So George -- coming soon to TLC.

No Country for Old Men

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen is the personification of the pompous windbag cliché. He always has been. And has he's gotten old, it's only gotten worse.

There was once a time when puffed-up jackasses like him strode across the media landscape like kings of the jungle, and to be honest it's difficult to describe to anyone below a certain age just how tedious this era was in journalism. But changing times and cultural shifts have taken a toll on the Richard Cohens of the world and now all you really hear from them is the forlorn cries off in the distance as they face down inevitable extinction. Sure, guys like Cohen, and Friedman, and Brooks still have jobs, but they're not the exalted voices from on-high they once were. The smart ones don't complain about it; they simply keep on keeping on, perfectly content in their gargantuan sense of self-importance and their continued big paychecks.

But Cohen can't do that. He needs the adulation of the masses. He needs things to be the way they were in the good old days, before independent women and a cultural distaste for people who believe that all black men should immediately be viewed as suspicious made things so confusing. That was the time when people actually cared what kind of wisdom an Interesting Man like Richard Cohen had to impart to the world. It's almost enough to make you cry.

Except that it shouldn't. Not ever. Because it's important to keep in mind that Richard Cohen is an asshole. A monumental asshole.

Only a monumental asshole could write an entire column on how it's not racism but "reality" to profile young black men immediately following the acquittal of the guy who profiled and ultimately killed Trayvon Martin. Only a monumental asshole would actually try to argue that it makes perfect sense that Zimmerman automatically assumed Martin was a threat just by the color of his skin and the clothes he wore.

Only a monumental asshole can write something like this:

"Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news...

There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy — the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason."

Richard Cohen is indeed a monumental asshole.

The Washington Post: "Racism vs. Reality" by Richard Cohen/7.16.13



In November of last year, I wrote a piece for Banter pegged off of something else shockingly ridiculous that Richard Cohen had written.

"The White Guy of a Certain Age's Lament" (Originally Published at the Daily Banter, 11.28.12)

I'm sure you probably already know this, but it's a really tough time to be a white guy of a certain age right now. Everything's just so upside-down and nothing's how it used to be, with white guys of a certain age lumbering across the face of the earth like mighty dinosaurs, perfectly, languorously content in their dominion over all creatures. There was the re-election of the weirdly named multi-cultural black man Barack Obama -- along with the denial of the whitest, most of-a-certain-age man alive, Mitt Romney -- and its heralding of the demographic shift that's wresting power from their hands and giving to welfare queens and leaf-blowers. At the same time, there was the backlash against the attempt by a popular and official collective of über-white men -- the GOP -- to restrict the reproductive freedom of women on the grounds that not having proper babies from white guys of a certain age constitutes indefensible promiscuity anyway.

But that's politics. The real battlefield for white guys of a certain age these days seems to be pop culture, which is telling them that they can't just "show up" and still be the subject of adoration, as they once were, while simultaneously reminding them at every turn that the various peoples of the globe have other interests besides their lengthy, fascinating tales of their own heroic exploits that involve the experience of just being white guys of a certain age.

Over the past 48-hours, we've been treated to two comically embarrassing screeds lamenting the changing face of American and world culture into one that devalues the traditional merits and interests of the white guy of a certain age. One is self-pitying and personally revelatory in ways I'm not sure the author fully intended; the other is bitter, pissy and amusingly detached from the times in a way that only a man who shouts at kids to get off his lawn can find civil.

The latter, of course, involves Bill O'Reilly, the recently self-knighted harbinger of doom for white-guys-of-a-certain-age culture and the official miserable, racist uncle to all of America. Last night, on his regular prime-time complaint box on Fox News, O'Reilly and hack shrink Keith Ablow attempted to dissect the immense popularity of Psy's Gangnam Style, which recently surpassed Baby, from the harmless and infinitely less confusing Justin Bieber, as YouTube's most-watched video ever and is on track to having over a billion hits. O'Reilly, as you might imagine, can't fathom the popularity of Gangnam Style, which he describes as "a little fat guy from Pyongyang or someplace... doing the pony."

His and Ablow's debate over the clip and desperate attempt to understand the viral phenomenon that's sprung from it -- which lasted more than five minutes -- truly has to be seen to be fully appreciated. Ablow decides to go all Kierkegaardian nihilism, saying that the song literally means and affirms nothing, which is why it's the perfect mirror for our current culture; he even argues that Psy is uttering gibberish instead of "intelligible words," which he believes confirms his theory. That the lyrics of the song are in Korean never even comes close to popping the provincial bubble Ablow, O'Reilly and Fox News's audience exist inside of; I guess they figure that if something is huge internationally it has to have come from America. Haven't those Asians heard how exceptional we are? Don't they watch The O'Reilly Factor? For his part, O'Reilly simply dismisses the whole thing as madness.

For the record, I couldn't care less about Psy or Gangnam Style -- like most internet fads, it's annoying as hell -- but I can appreciate that it was written by someone whose experience isn't mine and who was attempting to satirize a place I didn't even know existed and a lifestyle I've never seen for myself. K-Pop isn't my thing and neither is the often peculiar Asian appropriation of hip-hop, but I'd never argue that the song is about nothing just because I don't understand it. I'm also not an asshole to the nearly unsurpassable extent that O'Reilly and Ablow are.

But if you thought those two could turn a pop culture phenomenon into a full-on existential crisis, you haven't read Richard Cohen's recent and instantly legendary elegy to his fading place as an object of feminine desire. I wouldn't be surprised if Cohen really believed he was simply examining the changing face of masculinity during his write-up of the new James Bond movie in Monday's Washington Post, but let's be honest: He was lamenting the fact that he, 71-year-old Richard Cohen, can't score 20-something pussy anymore. In the column, Cohen mourns the death of what he calls the "sexual meritocracy" of years past, when guys like Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart could nail women much younger than themselves by virtue of little more than their "experience and savoir-faire" and their ability to, preposterously, "send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning." He compares these qualities, ones you can easily imagine him ascribing to himself, to those Daniel Craig displays in Skyfall. The result is a piece of intellectual resentment almost impossible to truly describe without hearing the voice of Family Guy's "Buzz Killington" in your head.

"Nothing about him looks natural, relaxed -- a man in the prime of his life and enjoying it. Instead, I see a man chasing youth on a treadmill, performing sets and reps, a clean and press, a weighted knee raise, an incline pushup and, finally, something called an incline pec fly (don't ask) ... Every rippling muscle is a book not read, a movie not seen or a conversation not held."

While I'm sure you can sympathize with the ways in which Daniel Craig is crushing Richard Cohen's self-esteem and taking all the women who would otherwise be gushing over his droll tales of hours spent painstakingly crafting didactic, faux-erudite columns for The Washington Post, it's ludicrous to make the assumption that because someone is physically fit, that person must be neglecting other parts of him or herself -- as if bettering your mind and body is a zero-sum game. It's basically Cohen bemoaning his loss of entitlement and being petty, jealous and essentially the real-life equivalent of William H. Macy's Quiz Kid Donnie character in Magnolia, sitting at the end of the bar pondering aloud why nobody wants to be with him anymore. On the plus side, he couldn't have written a column that's stronger catnip for the girls over at Jezebel if he'd tried.

Years ago, the late William F. Buckley wrote a series of novels about a character with the hilariously improbable name Blackford Oakes. Oakes is a rakish CIA agent and man of mystery who travels the globe foiling cold war-era plots and sleeping with beautiful women, despite having a pretty little liberal-arts lady back home in the land of the free who cares for him dearly but whom he must constantly condescend to lovingly and lecture about the true nature of the world. He's sexy, lethal, Ivy League-educated, and always a gentleman. In other words, he's exactly how a pompous bore like William F. Buckley imagined himself; he's Buckley's alter-egomaniac. Buckley's bombastically high opinion of himself didn't manifest in self-pitying public requiems, as Cohen's did -- it was turned into really crappy dime-store spy novels. Cohen should take up fiction. It would be less humiliating to him.

It's worth mentioning that both O'Reilly and Cohen have been accused in the past of inappropriate sexual conduct with women much younger than them. O'Reilly's target, infamously, was producer Andrea Mackris, whom he offered to "falafel" in the shower because she supposedly had "nice boobs"; Cohen's was a 23-year-old editorial aide named Devon Spurgeon (he also had an affair with Peter Jennings's wife back in the late 80s). See, there was a time when white guys of a certain age like them, as lords of the sexual meritocracy, could expect to exert their privilege and not only get away with it but have women fall willingly and effortlessly into their powerful, interesting arms. All they had to do was show up. They were the kings of all they surveyed and everything went their way and made complete sense to them at all times.

Those days, though, may be coming to an end.

We now live in a changing world, one where a pudgy Korean guy can be an American and global phenomenon and James Bond isn't just the coolest man in the world, he's also one of the hottest.

Yes, it's a tough time for white guys of a certain age. The good news is that they'll grow out of it. And besides, white guys still have it pretty great all the way around. Just ask anyone else.

Gone but Not Forgotten: The Reckoning

Really quickly because I'm just about finished with my project and am pretty much gun-to-head eager to get it wrapped.

Turns out the "Miami producer" who got fired by NBC for botching the Trayvon Martin 911 tape was a WTVJ reporter named Jeff Burnside -- that's according to a website that follows South Florida news closely. I did work with Burnside years ago, back when he was actually nothing more than a lowly pawn in the producer ranks; he's a decent enough guy, although I can't say that I've been a big fan of his reporting from what I've seen of it in my time back in Miami over the past few years. It's not that he does a bad job -- he's just a little dull, but in a market like South Florida there's an argument to be made that at least that's better than looking like he's planning to go directly from his live shot to the velvet rope of the Gansevoort at 1:30AM.

Apparently it was Burnside -- remember, a local news reporter -- who made the bad edit that ended up all the way in 30 Rock on the Today show. He and the actual NBC staffer who shepherded the clip to New York without checking it were both shown the door -- and I have to admit with good reason. They both screwed up big time.

Either way, just figured I'd satisfy all those who've written me over the past couple of weeks wondering if I knew who it was out of Miami who got canned over the Trayvon 911 tape debacle.

That internal investigation NBC ran to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again? Its first recommendation better have been: "Don't entrust your biggest, most delicate and potentially most inflammatory stories to some poor doof working in the ass end of the NBC TV-Stations Division."

Gone but Not Forgotten

My latest piece for the Daily Banter is up. It deals with NBC's decision to fire a producer in the wake of the George Zimmerman 911 call edit debacle.

Here's the opening:

"It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that somebody at NBC was going to lose a job over the galactic fuck-up that led to a severely edited 911 call from Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman making air. Well, late last week NBC — after undertaking what it called a painstaking internal investigation — canned a Miami-based producer, specifically the producer who edited the call. For those who haven’t been paying close attention, the Today show ran the clip, which featured George Zimmerman seeming to suggest, without prompting, that Trayvon Martin was suspicious because he was black: 'This guy looks like he’s up to no good; he looks black,' Zimmerman said in the recording. The problem is that the dispatcher asked Zimmerman for a description of Martin, leading to his statement that the teenager looked black — only that part inexplicably got cut from the tape. It took all of about ten seconds for the Breitbart empire of non-journalistic shit and pencil-neck twerp Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center to pounce on NBC for what they believed was a willful attempt by the network to inflame racial tension and further besmirch the good name of George Zimmerman."

Read the Rest at the Daily Banter

The Age of Outrage (Complete)

The Full Text of Yesterday's Piece at the Daily Banter

All it took was one retweet for the wrath of God to rain down on me.

Last Friday morning I did what a lot of hacky self-proclaimed online pundits were doing in the wake of Geraldo Rivera’s galactically stupid claim that the choice to wear a hoodie is what got Trayvon Martin killed: I penned a quickie column on it for my blog. Like a lot of other ostensible progressives, however, I apparently had the bad form to not heap what I would soon learn was the universally agreed upon level of scornful indignation in Geraldo’s direction. On the contrary, while I said that Geraldo’s idiotic no-hoodie plea to American parents of brown kids was just that, idiotic, I argued that he did manage to touch on a larger issue that deserved at least some consideration. That issue is the role that someone’s wardrobe or style choices play in how that person is perceived by a large portion of the public. My point was that while I’m pretty sure Geraldo was wrong about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie having anything to do with George Zimmerman’s decision to confront and ultimately kill him, it’s common sense to note that what a person chooses to wear or adorn him or herself with influences how he or she is viewed. It may be unfair that people create preconceptions based on personal style, but that doesn’t matter one bit because that’s the way it is — and what this means is that while someone is free to wear whatever the hell he or she wants, that person has to understand that there may be unintended consequences to choosing to dress or look a certain way.

Now obviously I wasn’t saying that a kid in a hoodie deserves to be shot at for looking a little like the people Geraldo sees in stick-up surveillance videos all the time. Nor was I saying that a woman in a short skirt and high heels at a bar is asking to be sexually assaulted. I was simply arguing that while in a perfect world no one would jump to conclusions based on the way we choose to present ourselves — the key word is choice, as I’m not talking about physical characteristics that one is born with and which can’t be changed and therefore shouldn’t be judged at all on -- we don’t live in a perfect world. Shouting about how a black or brown guy in a hoodie, low-slung pants and a ball cap should be able to walk the streets and not worry that people will look at him like he’s a thug and a threat is a ridiculous conceit because if you argue almost anything from the point of what should be, the whole argument becomes moot. I should be able to fly -- but that’s not going to provide much consolation when I hit the sidewalk at 200 miles-an-hour. Until someone comes along and changes the reality of the situation and allows me to soar over the city, I’m gonna fall. Until someone changes perception — and I’m all for that — that perception will likely remain, and it borders on irresponsible not to be cognizant of it. Wanna buck convention? Have at it. Just understand that convention exists.

So, yeah, I dared to enter the Hysterical Indignation Vortex in the wake of the tragic and very likely criminal shooting of Trayvon Martin without expressing enough indignation to make the liberal masses happy. I know this because about ten seconds after my piece got tweeted out — admittedly by me, so I know that I get what I deserve — it was retweeted again and again and suddenly every friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend or nobody-in-particular with a Twitter account and a somewhat justifiable sense of outrage at the death of Trayvon was pounding on my digital door, ready to publicly flog me for my impertinence while basically misunderstanding every goddamned thing I’d said. Some of those raking me over the coals, in fact, admitted that they found my entire premise so “repellant” that they didn’t even bother to read the piece all the way through -- not surprising given both our 140-character attention spans and blinded-by-passion discourse these days, but still a lousy way to come out on top in a debate.

And it was all of this that got me thinking about Bill Maher. Namely, that he’s right.

Last week, Maher penned an op-ed in the New York Times taking aim at how we as a culture have elevated controversy -- the creation of it, often by the media, and instantaneous public response to it -- to almost slapstick-comical levels. It feels like we now live to be pissed off and offended -- at something, at everything, at anything —- and to voice that outrage in whichever direction the perceived slight is coming from until the cause of our collective torment is beaten into submission. We don’t just disagree anymore — we want to make the thing we disagree with go away. The fury comes from both sides of the political aisle and from every stripe within our society. Maher’s assertion is that we need to learn how to get the hell over things and get on with our lives -- to not immediately demand an apology every time we feel that someone has publicly offended us and to not be so quick to be offended in the first place. To those accused of saying or doing something that draws a coordinated public tantrum, his advice is simple: stop apologizing.

It pretty much goes without saying that, in a wonderfully ironic meta twist befitting the current fucked-up state of our culture, Maher’s column was debated at length in the media and throughout the social networking universe in the days after it was published. In other words, it drew controversy.

In the end, though, Maher’s right. Yes, there are a few notable exceptions to the Law of Unintended Controversy. There are times when someone can violate the standards of so many people so egregiously that a proportional public backlash is understandable. The problem is that it’s threatening to get to the point where it’s impossible to discern what is and isn’t a truly heinous and unacceptable affront because the machinery of indignation seems to wind up to the same deafening level for every perceived insult. As Jon Stewart once said brilliantly, “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” If we react -- or some large swath of us reacts -- with the same fervor each time we feel like we’ve been offended, the truly offensive crap gets lost in the echo chamber.

And who decides what’s truly offensive, anyway? I get that the democratization of the media means, in theory, that only the people who are pissed off at a given slight will react and make their voices heard, but have you listened to what it’s like out there lately? After a while it all gets Cuisinarted into one dull roar -- and it’s exhausting.

I’m certainly not whining about the fact that a lot of those who seem to be perpetually aggrieved unleashed their fury on me on Twitter. I put myself out there so I’m, ironically, given the nature of the subject I was writing about, asking for it. I’m also certainly not decrying social media like some antediluvian royal dismissing change from on-high. Far from it.

The point is simply that, as Bill Maher writes, if we constantly attempt to crucify those who offend our sensibilities, what we’ll inevitably be left with is a truly PC-beholden culture where no one ever says or does anything interesting. Where no one pushes boundaries. Where no one challenges us. In other words, a place where none of us, I would hope, wants to live.

We have to be able to debate and discuss without trying to decimate those who oppose us -- or those who we immediately assume oppose us.

Quote of the Day

"But I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was."

-- Geraldo Rivera on Fox News

I don't need to tell you that this is, in classic Geraldo fashion, a shockingly dumb thing to say. It's cut-rate reductionism expressed in the most clumsy and artless way possible, and the Huffington Post, also as it's wont to do, is already tearing Geraldo apart for it through various headlines that feign outrage in the name of page hits.

But here's the thing: While putting the blame for the death of Trayvon Martin as much on his hoodie as on the bullet fired by George Zimmerman may be ridiculous at face value, the larger point that Geraldo is making is more sound than you might think. He's just making that point very, very badly.

It goes something like this: Like it or not, a book actually is judged by its cover. There's a calculated reason that the cover of a book looks the way it does -- it's designed to immediately impart a very specific sense of recognition in the potential reader and to be a fair advertisement for the book's contents. There are certain things about your personal "cover" that can't be changed: Your race, your age, your facial features (in theory anyway). Your physical characteristics generally are what they are and therefore it's thoroughly unfair and flat-out wrong for someone to judge you based solely on them.

But the way you choose to dress or otherwise adorn yourself is exactly that -- a choice. Your choice. And while in a perfect world no one would draw immediate conclusions about you based on your personal style, news flash: We don't live in a perfect world, and ignoring or defiantly thumbing your nose at the fact that there may be certain unintended consequences to the image you choose to project is both irresponsible and thick-headed.

Is it unfair that a lot of very dumb people immediately look at a kid in a hoodie, a ball cap and low-slung pants and think "thug?" Yes.

Is it unfair that a douchebag in a bar looks at a girl in a tiny skirt, a midriff-bearing top, minus a bra, with a pierced belly-button and a tramp stamp and thinks "she wants sex?" Yes.

But again -- life isn't fair.

I have tattoos. About 20 of them, at last count. At no point while I was inking the hell out of my body did I accept anything less than full responsibility for the image that I knew I might be projecting to the world. I understood what I was signing on for when I got the things and accepted the potential consequences.

Now before anyone shouts that I'm blaming the victims*, let me go ahead and shoot the hostage: I am -- to an extent. No, unlike Geraldo I don't think that wearing a hoodie is what got Trayvon Martin killed -- not by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of people wear hoodies besides the ones who, as Geraldo puts it, are seen on surveillance tapes sticking up 7-11s. But again, his larger point about "stylizing yourself as a gangster" and how it might very well lead people to "perceive you as a menace" makes a lot of sense. As he says, the "cover" that we present to the public is in fact what people will judge you on, at least at first.

And that first impression that George Zimmerman had of Trayvon Martin -- whether caused by the color of the kid's skin or some other factor -- wound up being his last. Because the conclusion that Zimmerman wrongly jumped to got Trayvon killed.

Adding: Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post feels quite a bit differently about this subject but articulates her points really well (and makes a pretty amusing argument for the idea that, by his logic, everyone Geraldo meets should automatically assume he's an aging 70s porn star). It's very much worth taking a look at what she has to say.

*Just wanted to say that I added an "s" to the end of "victim" because people are already assuming that when I said victim, I specifically meant that I was blaming Trayvon Martin. I wasn't and I'm not. I'm talking about in general -- that each of us bears some responsibility for how we choose to present ourselves to the general public.

"Listening Post"

I just wanted to take a quick second to throw this item up because I think it's important. There's a lot of conjecture going on right now -- and it's spreading with the usual viral speed through the social media world -- about whether George Zimmerman uttered a racial slur in the moments before he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Basically, a radio show host, Joe Madison, is claiming that Zimmerman can be heard huffing the words "fucking coons" as he's on the phone with the 911 dispatcher in Sanford, Florida; it happens while he's chasing down Martin, just before the dispatcher warns him to back off. The problem is that Zimmerman, as far as I can tell, doesn't say that at all. He says, "Fucking punks." It's pretty obvious, even to the untrained ear.

I bring this up because George Zimmerman very likely deserves to be prosecuted for killing Martin and he seems to have profiled the kid as dangerous or generally suspicious just because he happened to be black. That and the fact that Zimmerman was armed with a handgun while Martin was carrying nothing more than a bag of Skittles and an iced tea is reason enough to charge him with a crime, if not a few. You don't need to let your imagination run wild and start a psychotic torch-and-pitchfork frenzy by desperately seeking out details -- or creating details -- that confirm your suspicions about Zimmerman, in this case that he's a racist. You've already got the very clear-cut facts about the case: that he targeted, stalked and shot a black kid in a hoodie because he automatically assumed he was a threat.

The outrage over this thing is righteous and well-deserved. Let's not allow it to go off the rails into the realm of the sensational. It does a disservice to the memory of Trayvon Martin and to the fact that there may be, as ghoulish as this will sound, a truly teachable moment to come from his tragic death.

"Someone Was Screaming, 'Help! Help! Help!'"

I'm going to be a bit busy today on various projects -- for what it's worth, tomorrow and the rest of the week are looking better by the minute -- but I wanted to do my part to circulate this item because it really does deserve to be seen and heard by as many people as possible. If you haven't yet had a chance to listen to the 911 audio that was recorded as 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was being shot and killed by a 28-year-old self-appointed neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida, you really should. I generally think 911 tapes to be prurient and somewhat irrelevant to a news story, but these are exactly the opposite: they're illuminating as hell.

The question of exactly what happened to Martin -- who had simply been a black kid walking back from a 7-11 after buying something to snack on -- on the night of February 26th will likely never fully be answered. With that in mind, I don't know whether George Zimmerman, the guy who shot him, is guilty of murder or really was simply engaging in self-defense. But there are facts that are worth considering, the most pertinent of which is that Zimmerman was armed with a 9mm handgun -- Martin had nothing more than a bag of Skittles and an iced tea. It was never anything approaching a fair fight. Also, Zimmerman apparently has a history of making "concerned" 911 calls in his capacity as a supposed neighborhood watch captain and neighbors have complained that he takes the defense of his community to creepily obsessive levels.

The bottom line here is that the details of this shooting deserve serious consideration and Zimmerman may very well have committed murder. To their credit, many media outlets are beginning to focus attention on the story of Trayvon Martin and that's at least partially owed to the good work of people like Trymaine Lee, Charles Blow, Don Lemon and Melissa Harris-Perry. Not so good, although completely unsurprising, is that Al Sharpton is already planning the obligatory rally at a Baptist church near where the shooting happened.

George Zimmerman -- a white "neighborhood watch captain" -- wasn't arrested. He hasn't been charged with a thing.

Trayvon Martin -- an unarmed black kid -- is dead.

Something is wrong.

The Huffington Post: 911 Audio Released in Trayvon Martin Shooting/3.18.12