Newsmax:

President Barack Obama on Friday called on Americans to respect the verdict handed down in the George Zimmerman trial and compared himself to slain black teenager Trayvon Martin.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Obama said during a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room.

“Damn!” a lot of Americans are thinking to themselves, hearing that one.

Fred Reed argues that establishment media, and the left generally, has entirely missed the most significant point to be drawn from looking on at George Zimmerman’s trial.

The crucial fact to come out of the whole adventure—crucial, and therefore utterly overlooked–was that Rachel Jeantel, a prosecution witness and black girl aged nineteen years, can´t read. The grim implication of this fact is confirmed by the illiteracy of tweets from blacks regarding the case. “Ima kill dat dumass cracker be racis.” Here we see as neatly displayed as if in a jewelry box why so many young blacks will go nowhere in the remaining fifty years of their lives. They can´t read, or barely can. In a fading techno-industrial civilization—I use the latter word frivolously—this consigns them to a life on charity. Is this not of more note than who started what?

No. The educational disaster that will leave Rachel and millions of her confreres in meaningless lives on welfare pales in importance compared to the question: Did Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman have the proper racial attitudes? This is what exercises the vast endocrine boobitry howling with empty-headed rage and self-righteousness.

Read the whole thing.

Via Push the Movement.

23. Despite your best efforts, you still think throwing on a blazer can solve all your problems.

—Buzzfeed.

I wouldn’t put it quite that way, but there is no doubt that nothing is more useful men’s-wardrobe-wise than one’s J. Press or Brooks Brothers three-button blue blazer. On the other hand, I’ve never actually seen anyone wear a blue blazer with a pocket patch crest.

I basically agree with 1 (“Where did you go to school?” “New Haven”), 2, 6, 8, 10 (definitely true), 12 (I’d think that if I had heard of him.), 14, 15, 16 (really!), 17, 20, 25, 27, 33, and 39. But, personally, I do not experience guilt over privilege at all.

Via Jim Geraghty.

The snake providing the venom is a Russell’s viper, Daboia russelii.

Drew in Wisconsin, at Ricochet, has a go at inferring the correct hierarchy of interest groups.

Recent events help illuminate a few things on the left.

The Keystone XL pipeline demonstrates that environmentalists slot in above unions
The Trayvon Martin case shows that it’s blacks over Hispanics.
Reaction to North Carolina’s gay marriage vote last year suggests that Democrats favor gays over blacks.
Women over men is too well-established to even be questioned.

Any examples where gays come in conflict with unions or environmentalists? That would help us figure out who really takes the #1 slot.

I think some of the left’s constituencies just naturally lack opportunities for conflict, but it should be obvious that left’s status hierarchy is founded upon specifically upon ressentiment, the inversion of values by which the loudest whiner and the leper with the most sores gets the top place.

If gays were more reflective, they might start thinking about exactly what their current very high position in the left’s roll call of constituencies says about what lefties really think of them.

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

Excess of Democracy ranks major law firms from most liberal to most conservative.

Hat tip to Richard Miniter.

New Yorker cover, November 8, 2004.

Elyse Moody offers a literary alternative to Missed Connections.

ve been asking myself some basic questions: What do I like? Reading. What am I looking for in a date? Someone who enjoys books and talking about them, and who can strike up good conversations with strangers. An idea started to gel. Maybe if I’m choosy about what I read on my longish interborough commute, the right guy—one with superlative taste who’s curious enough to make a move—will be drawn to me by the tractor beam the open book in my hands emits.

I ran this idea by my therapist, and she started nodding excitedly. “Books are such a great crutch,” she said. “I think of them like props.”

Exactly.

So this strategy’s been clinically endorsed. I’ve reviewed my journals, made a list of the most attractive qualities of potential soul mates past (setting aside their less desirable traits—e.g., substance addiction, monomaniacal narcissism, commitment phobia), and distilled it into archetypes of the charming men I hope to meet, if fate wills it, somewhere in the New York City public transit system.

Her choice of lures, however, struck me as far from the most interesting or effective, especially if you desire to strike up an acquaintance with “Ivy League smart” males. I think of Saul Bellow myself as an over-rated, excessively promoted ethnic writer. If I saw a girl reading Tom Robbins, I would shudder and walk quietly away. Eudora Welty is a representative of the grotesque-and-invariably-depressing school of Southern writing, and the sight of her dustjackets will probably work on most men in a decidedly anaphrodisaical manner.

Hat tip to Ratak Mondosico.