The national conversation this week was still being dominated by the reaction to the Zimmerman verdict that came out a week ago Saturday. On Friday, President Obama made a surprise appearance at the daily White House press briefing to comment about what the Trayvon Martin case means to the black community and to him personally. So then we had another round of commentary on what the President had said.
I still haven’t decided whether some part of the Zimmerman/Martin commentary comes together into a theme that belongs in a separate article, or if I just have a lot of short notes for the weekly summary.
Race is one of those issues that is always present in America but is seldom news, so everybody has a lot of pent-up things to say about it. Those things came out this week. Some are very insightful and others amazingly clueless. I’ll link to examples of both. Stand Your Ground laws and racial profiling also got a lot of discussion.
Some other important things were also happening. Detroit tried to go bankrupt and a court stopped it. The Senate reached a compromise that maintained the filibuster but broke the logjam on presidential appointments.
And a particularly clumsy bit of marketing by Fox pundit Erick Erickson gave me a hook to look at a continuing issue: the porous boundary between right-wing advocacy and money-making cons. There’s nothing like it on the left, and it’s interesting to consider why.
Probably posts will come out a little later than usual today, but I’ll try to have everything up by noon.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
The Rabid Right HATES it when anyone on the left mentions race.
They must feel that that is THEIR domain.
I think you should really talk about this
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/08/jackson-sharpton-stay-silent-on-school-bus-beating/
Perhaps the double standard?
It’s similar to the cases I comment on in “Sadly, the national conversation about race has to start here” https://weeklysift.com/2013/07/29/sadly-the-national-conversation-on-race-has-to-start-here/
Specifically, the Fox News article says that the three black kids “were arrested a short time later. All three were charged with aggravated battery and have since been released. Reddin is also charged with unarmed robbery.”
So the system worked fine. What’s to protest? If police had seemed uninterested in the white kid who was attacked, as they seemed uninterested in Trayvon Martin, then some kind of community organizing might have been necessary.
So, in short, I’m not seeing a double standard on the part of Jackson and Sharpton. Fox is trying to invent an issue out of nothing.