† Protected class warfare: As the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin became widely reported in the national media, an unarmed black teenager The Washington Post noted that the 28-year-old Floridian who pulled the trigger was “once a Catholic altar boy – with a surname that could have been Jewish.” Only George Zimmerman’s father is white, mother is Peruvian and he has several black relatives:

There may be no box to check for, no tidy way to categorize, define and sort … forcing America to once again confront its fraught relationship with race and identity. …

Zimmerman’s father has sought to emphasize his family’s diversity in hopes of saving his son from condemnation as a racist. … George is “a Spanish-speaking minority,” the father wrote in a letter delivered to the Orlando Sentinel. “He would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever.” George, the father insisted, was more like the boy he killed than people thought. George was a minority – the other – too.

But the argument that the father is making feels hollow and self-serving to Michaela Angela Davis, an African American writer and activist who lives in New York. In her eyes, George Zimmerman’s Hispanic roots don’t give him cover.

“You being a minority doesn’t make you immune to racist beliefs,” she said in an interview Thursday. Davis sees a pervasive cultural imprint, reinforced by media and entertainment imagery: the black man as a symbol of “violence, fear and deviant behavior.”

The New Black Panther party agrees with Davis, and put out a “wanted dead or alive” poster for George Zimmerman and put a $10K bounty on his head.

As he is wont to do, President Barack Hussein Obama rashly jumped into the fray with both feet (related article, second item on the page) before all the facts have come out, declaring, “If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.” As witnesses are coming forward to corroborate Zimmerman’s contention that he acted in self-defense after Martin began beating on him viciously and publically vouching for Zimmerman’s character, the president raised the question whether his hypothetical son would also behave like Trayvon. After all, Obama would reflexively see a victim of racism when he looked at his son – dismissing any possibility that he might actually be a hoodlum.

† AZ becomes the epicenter of civility: The Stiletto is wondering just what those worthies who run the National Institute for Civil Discourse at University of Arizona will do about the rude and downright nasty tweets regarding former Vice President Dick Cheney’s heart transplant. Amongst the worst: “Whoever donated their heart to dick cheney: f*ck you” and “Rick Santorum asks to take Cheney’s old dead heart to show to his family.” Or thesetwitticisms offered by left-wing comedians like podcaster/comic Marc Maron (um, The Stiletto hasn’t heard of him, either): “Cheney’s heart transplant was the first done with a living donor. He watched as they cut it out, held it and placed it in his own chest.”

† Obama’s family values: In her biography of President Barack Hussein Obama’s mother, Anne Dunham, New York Times reporter Janny Scott discovered that during the 2008 campaign, Obama repeatedly lied about his cancer-stricken mother having to fight her health insurer to pay for treatment for what it classified as a pre-existing condition (related article, penultimate item on the page). As it turns out, the dispute was with the insurer providing her disability coverage, not her healthcare coverage – and Obama, who served as her attorney in the matter, was fully aware that her health insurer reimbursed most of her medical expenses.

Now, the lie is repeated in Obama’s re-election campaign infomercial, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” narrated by Tom Hanks. As Commentary notes:

Having won election and then rammed his ObamaCare bill through Congress in part on the strength of this false argument, he has doubled down on it with the lie now coming from the lips of American’s favorite everyman, actor Tom Hanks as well as in edited clips of interviews with the president and his wife. … [T]he story proves that Obama is willing to do and/or say anything, even lying about the death of his mother, in order to gain an advantage. That he thinks repeating the lie will help him get re-elected says a lot about what he thinks of the intelligence of the American people and the integrity of the press that failed to vet him the first time around.

† When environmental values collide: It's not just golden eagles being sacrificed for what bureaucrats deem a larger environmental goal (related article, third article on the page). A federal judge in Washington, D.C. refused to grant a temporary restraining order sought by the Humane Society to stop the National Marine Fisheries Service from proceeding with a plan to allow 92 sea lions in OR, WA and ID to be killed each year over a five-year period to facilitate the spawning of salmon and steelheads 146 miles up the Columbia River at the Washington-Oregon border, The Wall Street Journal reports:

Both the sea lions and the fish are protected species under federal law. …

[The judge] limited the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho to removing and killing 30 sea lions this year while the case is being heard. …

In court papers, the Humane Society had argued that sea lions eat up to 4.2% of the salmon and steelhead that spawn in the Columbia River, while fisherman are allowed to take up to 17% of the adults and another 17% a year are lost to hydroelectric dams.

The Obama administration routinely picks winners and losers in commerce and industry, and now bureaucrats are deliberately circumventing Darwinism and making decisions to kill one species to help ensure the perpetuation of another species. The other side of the coin is the ruthless application of Darwinism to healthcare treatment decisions so that bureaucrats pick who gets to live and who must die.