“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” –John Adams (1770)

Barack Hussein Obama and black leaders from across the nation gathered in Obama’s hometown of Chicago this week to protest the violence that occurred over the weekend of March 17-18. (Or at least they should have!)

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, in just 48 hours, 10 people were murdered and at least 40 others were seriously injured. Most of the victims were 15-30 years of age and the assailants were black or Latino. One victim was six-year-old Aliyah Shell, who was shot to death while playing on the front porch of her home in the Little Village neighborhood.

“The violence this weekend underscores that Chicago has a unique gang problem,” claimed Obama’s former chief of staff and current Windy City Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

You may recall that a year ago, the Chicago Sun-Times won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting on violence in Chicago, most notably for a similar story about a weekend of mayhem in 2008 when seven people were killed and 33 wounded. (There were 60 percent more murders in Chicago that year – 509 – than combat deaths in Iraq, but neither Cindy Sheehan nor Code Pink were anywhere to be found.)

Of that award, Sun-Times Publisher John Barron proudly exclaimed, “It’s not every day that I hear multiple squeals of joy. That’s what happened when we found out. What a great sound. There are so many smiling faces around here now.” The Pulitzer citation was for “documentation of violence in Chicago neighborhoods … as a widespread code of silence impedes solutions.” (Nothing like reporting on deadly violence to evoke “multiple squeals of joy.”)

Of course, Obama and black leaders across the nation haven’t said a single word about all of the violence in Chicago, opting instead to maintain the “code of silence which impedes solutions.”

However, Barack and his cadres of race-hustling “useful idiots” are luring black voters with fresh Florida race bait, specifically using the death of Trayvon Martin, age 17, as political fodder to keep their most loyal constituency confined to the Democrat Party Plantation. Indeed, the “black vote” is key to the Left’s divide-and-conquer strategy given that more than 90 percent of black voters support Democrats. Indeed, were it not for this monolithic support, the Democrat Party would be hard-pressed to win a single statewide election – much less a presidential election.

Martin was shot and killed after an altercation with a Neighborhood Watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, a registered Democrat. Zimmerman has been identified as “white-Hispanic,” the “white” part giving rise to the race-bait claims of a hate crime. (Apparently the black vote is more important to the administration that the Hispanic vote.) The details of the incident have not been fully disclosed, though the Sanford Police department has released an incident report and ABC News has compiled a timeline of events. According to Zimmerman’s attorney and witnesses, “George was attacked by Trayvon Martin on that evening.” However, nobody on either side of the public debate about this incident has enough information to draw any conclusions.

The herd of useful idiots are growing louder because, under Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense laws, Zimmerman has not been arrested – and the protesters presume him guilty until proven innocent. And as Rahm Emanuel said back when he was still Obama’s left-hand man, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

Predictably, Obama, the consummate “white-black” community agitator, nationalized attention on this incident in the same week he refrained from any comment on all the Chicago violence: “This is a tragedy, uh…uh and when I think about this boy, uh, I think about my own kids, uh…I think that all of us need to do some soul searching to figure out how something like this happened. … If I had a son he would look like Trayvon, and, uh, you know, I think [his parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans, uh, are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves…”

Obama’s comments took the incident from a simmering local conflict to a boiling national brawl. (For the record, after Islamist radical Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 soldiers and wounded 29 others at Ft. Hood Texas, yelling “Allahu Akbar!” as he shot his unarmed victims, Obama was quick to counsel the nation, “We don’t know all the answers yet. And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.”)

Obama’s First Lady, Oprah Winfrey, followed with, “It is a tragedy and a shame…that there hasn’t been an arrest or questioning of actually what happened. Justice needs to be served.” No “questioning”? I guess if the answers are not what Okra wants, then the questioning is irrelevant.

The “most reverend” Jesse Jackson aptly framed the Florida race bait as “martyrdom”: “Blacks are under attack. How do we turn pain into power? How do we go from a moment to a movement that creates fundamental change? The blood of the innocent has power. Martyrs have power. [Martin] represents all of us. If it’s a moment, we go home. If it’s a movement, we go to war. There is power in the blood of the innocent.”

Members of the House Congressional Black Caucus joined in the charade.

Florida DemoRep Frederica Wilson protested, “Trayvon Martin’s murderer is still at large. I want America to see this sweet young boy who was hunted down like a dog, shot in the street, and his killer is still at large.” Wilson displayed a photo of an 11-year old Martin being circulated by the media, looking less menacing than the more current picture of Martin associated with his Twitter account, as reported by The Daily Caller. (Under the handle “NO_LIMIT_NIGGA,” Martin tweeted such messages as “Plzz shoot da #mf dat lied 2 u!.”)

According to reports about Martin’s school suspensions and juvenile record, it turns out he wasn’t such a “sweet young boy,” but a too-typical product of the now-generational inner-city cultural entropy that turns young children from great futures to sociopathic behavior.

Bobby Rush (D-Chicago), a former Black Panther himself, was escorted off the floor of the House of Representatives for protesting Martin’s death by wearing a hoodie, now symbolic of “justice for Martin,” but, nonetheless, a violation of House rules on decorum.

Georgia DemoRep Hank Johnson said of Martin, “He was executed for ‘WWB’ in a ‘GC.’ Walking While Black in a Gated Community.” Isn’t that clever? Of course, dumb doesn’t get much dumber than Johnson, who, as you may recall, expressed concern during House Defense Appropriations hearings that the weight of our naval installation in Guam might cause the island to “tip over and capsize.”

You know things aren’t going well for the once-noble Democrat Party when its titular head resorts to the lowest form of DemoGoguery – race baiting.

Obama and his histrionic sycophants are taking a page from his community-agitating political prophet, Saul Alinsky, author of “Rules for Radicals.” Dedicated to Lucifer, it is a book on how to use tragedy for political gain: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. The opposition must be singled out as the target and ‘frozen.’ … One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.” As a community agitator, Obama practices Alinsky’s maxim to “first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.”

Post Your Opinion: What impact will this have on Obama’s campaign?

The Obama campaign did its part to “stir up dissatisfaction and discontent” by announcing a sale on their “Obama 2012” hoodies!

Other race hustlers were doing their part to “rub raw the resentments of the people of the community.”

Mikhail Muhammad, leader of the New Black Panther Party (the same thugs that the Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute in an open-and-shut felony voter intimidation case in Philadelphia in 2008) sounded as if he’d received his marching orders from Obama’s spiritual mentor, Jeremiah “GD America” Wright. Muhammad insisted, “It’s time for us as black men to take justice in our own hands. If the government won’t do the job, we’ll do it.”

Muhammad and his followers actually placed a $10,000 reward for the capture of Zimmerman, claiming, “According to the street people’s law he has been charged with murder. … I don’t follow the white man’s law. … They have killed millions of black men and women. … We represent millions of black people … not white people and ‘Uncle Tom’ Negroes.” We live in troubling times, indeed.

Nation of Islam radical Louis Farrakhan chimed in: “Where there is no justice, there will be no peace. Soon the law of retaliation may very well be applied. Let us see what kind of justice will come for his bereaved family and our bereaved community.”

Of course, no race-bait banquet would be complete without Al Sharpton on hand with Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, proclaiming with all the simulated sincerity he could muster, “Trayvon could have been any one of our sons. Trayvon could have been any one of us. We are tired of going to jail for nothing and others going home for something. Zimmerman should have been arrested that night. Don’t talk to us like we’re stupid! Don’t talk to us like we’re ignorant! Lock him up! We cannot allow a legal precedent to be established in this city that tells us it is legal for a man to kill us, tell any story he wants, and walk out with the murder weapon.”

As you recall, Sharpton was the author of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, and on the subject of “talking to us like we are stupid,” in a previous nationally televised event, Sharpton let go this erudite observation: “White folks was [sic] in the caves while we was [sic] building empires… We taught philosophy and astrology [sic] and mathematics before Socrates and them [sic] Greek homos ever got around to it.”

(Not to be outdone by Sharpton’s antics, Fulton’s attorney reported that she has filed trademark applications for the words “Justice For Trayvon” and “I Am Trayvon.” Presumably, those slogans may get some profitable traction.)

As a result of threats, George Zimmerman and his family have had to abandon their home and go into hiding. And other Zimmermans are taking cover as a result of all careless accusations in this case. One example: Hollywonk producer Spike Lee, who recently raised $1.6 million for Obama at a fundraiser in his home, tweeted, “reach out and touch Zimmerman,” to his 240,000 followers. Unfortunately, he posted the address of an elderly couple who have a son named George Zimmerman, unrelated to the Zimmerman/Martin case. Lawyers for that couple say Lee has “settled.”

There is no evidence from anyone who knew Zimmerman well that he had any racist predilection. In fact, just the opposite – Zimmerman and his wife mentored several young black children. Zimmerman’s attorney noted, “When I asked this mother [of those children], and she’s an African-American, if she trusted George Zimmerman, she said she did, and I asked her if there was anything that caused her to believe that he was a racist, and she said, ‘Absolutely not.’”

Further, Joe Oliver, a family friend of Zimmerman’s and an island of reason amid a sea of racist turmoil, said, “I’m a black male and all that I know is that George has never given me any reason whatsoever to believe he has anything against people of color. All these people who are threatening George, what makes them any better than the person they think he is? You’ve got all these people wanting to lynch the man and they don’t know the whole story. There are huge gaps that are being filled in and interpreted without evidence. George had no intention of taking anyone’s life, and cried for days after [this incident].”

Oliver continued, “There are people who have accused George of profiling,” and he went on to explain that “as a watch commander” that was an appropriate thing to do, “keeping an eye out for people” who don’t look like they belong in your neighborhood.

To that end, my colleague Walter E. Williams, in an essay entitled “Profiling,” notes, “The former Charleston, S.C., black chief of police, Reuben Greenberg, said the problem facing black America is not racial profiling. He said, ‘The greatest problem in the black community is the tolerance for high levels of criminality.’ Former Los Angeles black police Chief Bernard Parks, defending racial profiling, said: ‘It’s not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail. It’s the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind, it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they’re going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.’ Are former police Chiefs Greenberg and Parks racist?”

On the institutionalization of crime, Williams notes further, “Crime is one of the results of the liberal agenda. Blacks are 13 percent of the population but are more than 50 percent of murder victims. About 95 percent of black homicide victims had a black person as their murderer.”

Regarding the Democrat’s government welfare plantations, Williams writes, “During the 1960s, academic liberals and hustling politicians told us that to deal with crime, we had to deal with its ‘root causes,’ poverty and discrimination. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that in 1960, the total number of murders in the United States was lower than in 1950, 1940 and 1930, even though our population had grown and two new states had been added. The liberal agenda, coupled with courts granting criminals new rights, later caused the murder rate to double, and the rates of other violent crimes also began to skyrocket. Crime imposes a hefty tax on law-abiding residents of black neighborhoods. Residents bear costs of having to shop outside of their neighborhoods; criminals have driven many businesses out. Children can’t play safely in front of their homes. Fearing robberies, taxi drivers, including black drivers, often refuse to accept telephone calls for home pickups and frequently pass black customers by on the street. Neighborhood property values are lower as a result of crime. Plus, there’s the insult associated with not being able to receive pizza or other deliveries on the same terms as people in other neighborhoods.”

Indeed, in “Race and Rhetoric,” Sowell also notes, “The poverty rate among blacks was nearly cut in half in the 20 years prior to the 1960s, a record unmatched since then, despite the expansion of welfare state policies in the 1960s. Not only was unemployment among blacks in general lower before the liberal welfare state policies expanded in the 1960s, rates of imprisonment of blacks were also lower then, and most black children were raised in two-parent families. At one time, a higher percentage of blacks than whites were married and working. None of these facts fits liberal social dogmas.”

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute sheds more light on the statistical color of crime: “Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 were seven times more likely to die of homicide in 2007 than white and Hispanic males of the same age group combined. But the danger they face comes overwhelmingly from other black males, whose homicide offending rate in the 14 to 24 age category was nearly ten times higher than that of young white and Hispanic males combined. Most homicides are intraracial, but the chance of a black being killed by a white or Hispanic is much lower than the chance that a white or Hispanic will be killed by a black.”

Moreover, because the FBI categorizes Hispanics as “white,” MacDonald notes, “If Hispanics were removed from the category of ‘white’ killers of blacks, the percentage of blacks killed by Anglo whites would plummet, since a significant percentage of what the FBI calls ‘white’-on-black killings represent gang warfare between Hispanic and black gangs.”

The real crime, according to former Garland, Texas, NAACP leader C.L. Bryant, is “exploiting” the Trayvon Martin tragedy to “racially divide this country. His family should be outraged at the fact that they’re using this child as the bait to inflame racial passions.”

(For a more candid treatise on “black America,” read Bill Cosby’s remarks on the NAACP’s Gala Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.)

Post Your Opinion: Is there hope for American inner cities?

What black men and women – in fact men and women of any race and ethnic background – should be protesting is the race-bait rhetoric of Obama and his poverty pimps, who promote the Democratic doctrines that perpetuate institutionalization of poverty and its resulting violent subcultures. As a friend said to me recently, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Give a man a welfare check, free food, transportation and housing, and he will vote Democrat for a lifetime.”

George Zimmerman is scheduled to appear before a grand jury on 10 April, to determine if he will face charges in the death of Trayvon Martin. Black community agitators, with a little help from their Leftmedia friends, will use the next two weeks to whip their minions into full frenzy protest mode. (For example, NBC altered the 911 transcript to make Zimmerman appear racist.). If Zimmerman is not charged with murder, as already convicted by hoards of protestors, it may take a lot more than an “Obama beer summit” to restore order in several inner cities in Florida, and across the nation. (Miami, take note.) Additionally, regardless of the court’s verdict, expect Obama to renew calls for “gun control.”

Of course, for Obama’s lemmings, facts are not “stubborn things” as John Adams suggested. They are irrelevant things. Agenda is all that matters.

Meanwhile, there’s a long and heartbreaking backlog of horrendous black-on-white hate crimes that continue to receive no national attention. For example, in neighboring Sarasota Florida this week, the trial of a black 17-year old, who brutally murdered two young white British tourists last April, ended with a guilty verdict. Letters to Obama from the victims’ parents have gone unanswered, prompting a family member at the trial to conclude, “Obama sees no political value” in taking the time to respond. Another recent case in point would be the brutal “rape and murder of an elderly woman” in Tulsa, OK, by a young black male, who left her 90-year old husband for dead. Or consider the torture, mutilation and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom by four black men in Knoxville, Tennessee – a crime that has been subject to a near-complete “media blackout”

(Editor’s Note: Do not be surprised if the Pulitzer Prize Board refuses to bestow any awards for this First Amendment exercise!)