Handcuffed, taken in and interrogated, Zimmerman told police Trayvon had been acting suspiciously that dark and rainy night, that he had followed Trayvon, been knocked down and battered on the ground, and, fearing for his life, pulled a concealed handgun and shot him.

Sanford police and prosecutors concluded that Zimmerman acted in self-defense and had not committed a provable felony. They let him go.

A racial firestorm followed. "Blacks are under attack," railed Jesse Jackson. "Killing us is big business." Arriving in Sanford, the reverend dialed it up. Trayvon was "shot down in cold blood by a vigilante ... murdered and martyred."

Rep. Maxine Waters' charge of "hate crime" was echoed by radio talker Joe Madison. Rep. Hank Johnson said Trayvon had been "executed." The Grio compared his killing to the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.

The New Black Panther Party put Zimmerman's face on a "Wanted Dead or Alive" poster, called for 5,000 black men to run him down and said Trayvon had been "murdered in cold blood."

Spike Lee tweeted Zimmerman's home address.

Zimmerman and his family have been in hiding for months in fear for their lives after the death threats.

President Obama expressed his empathy with the parents.

"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. And I think (the parents) are right to expect that all of us as Americans are gonna take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we're going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened."

Obama said not a word to cool the lynch-mob atmosphere created by some of his major allies in a nation where he is the chief law enforcement officer. And so the campaign to convict Zimmerman of racist murder in the public mind, before he ever got to trial, proceeded on.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky called Trayvon's killing a "modern-day lynching." CNN claimed to have picked up the phrase "(bleeping) coons" on the tape of Zimmerman's call to police, but had to retract when an enhanced version of the tape revealed no such slur.

Three times NBC used a version of Zimmerman's call to the police edited to make it appear he racially profiled Trayvon.

The actual version:

Zimmerman: "This guy looks like he's up to no good, or he's on drugs or something. It's raining, and he's just walking around, looking about."

Dispatcher: "OK, and this guy, is he white, black or Hispanic?"

Zimmerman: "He looks black."

The transcript was spliced to have Zimmerman say: "This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black."

CNN media critic Howard Kurtz called it "blatant distortion."

Caught and called out, three NBC employees were cashiered.

With this wind at her back, Florida State Attorney Angela Corey charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. Translation: Zimmerman murdered Trayvon in a "depraved" state of mind.

If convicted, he could get life.

Last week came a more ominous report. Federal investigators are looking into hate crime charges that could bring the death penalty. The feds would have to prove Zimmerman stalked and murdered Trayvon because he was black.

Yet, last week also, evidence from the investigation spilled out into the national media and seemed to contradict and swamp the prosecution's case.

A medical report the day after the shooting revealed that Zimmerman had suffered a broken nose, two black eyes and lacerations on the back of his head. Photographs from the night of the shooting confirmed it.

A police report that same night said Zimmerman's sweatshirt had "grass stains and was wet on the back," consistent with his being flat on his back.

The lead investigator on the scene, Officer Christopher Serino, wrote that Zimmerman could be heard "yelling for help as he was being battered by Trayvon Martin." One witness said he heard 14 separate cries for help. Trayvon's father initially told police the cries were not those of his son, then recanted.

One responder at the scene said he saw wounds on the knuckles of one of Trayvon's hands, suggesting he had connected with a punch. The coroner found both the knuckle wounds and traces of the drug found in marijuana in Trayvon's blood and urine.

Trayvon's hoodie had powder stains indicating he was shot in the chest from 1 to 18 inches away, consistent again with what Zimmerman said.

Another eyewitness said the guy in the hoodie was on top beating the guy on the bottom "MMA style"—mixed martial arts style.

With this evidence, how can a jury convict Zimmerman of murder?

Yet the public mind has been so poisoned that an acquittal of George Zimmerman could ignite a reaction similar to that, 20 years ago, when the Simi Valley jury acquitted the LAPD cops in the Rodney King beating case.

Should that happen, those who fanned the flames, and those who did nothing to douse them, should themselves go on trial in the public arena.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

It dealt with the demographic decline of the white majority and what it portends for education, the U.S. economy, politics and national unity.

That book and chapter proved the proximate cause of my departure from MSNBC, where the network president declared that subjects such as these are inappropriate for "the national dialogue."

Apparently, the mainstream media are reassessing that.

For, in rare unanimity, The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today all led yesterday with the same story.

"Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.," blared the Times headline. "Minority Babies Majority in U.S.," echoed the Post. "Minorities Are Now a Majority of Births," proclaimed USA Today.

The USA Today story continued, "The nation's growing diversity has huge implications for education, economics and politics."

Huge is right.

Not only are whites declining as a share of the population, they are declining in real terms. Between 2010 and 2011, the number of births to white women fell 10 percent. The median age of white Americans, now 43 and rising, means that half of all white women have moved past the age that they are ever likely to bear more children.

White America is a dying tribe.

What do these statistics mean politically? Almost surely the end of the Republican Party as a national governing institution.

Republicans now depend on the vanishing majority for fully 90 percent of their votes in presidential elections, while the Democratic Party wins 60 to 70 percent of the Asian and Hispanic vote and 90 to 95 percent of the black vote.

The Democratic base is growing inexorably, while the Republican base is shriveling.

Already, California, Illinois and New York are lost. The GOP has not carried any of the three in five presidential elections. When Texas—where whites are a minority and a declining share of the population—tips, how does the GOP put together an electoral majority?

Western states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona, which Republican nominees like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swept almost every time they ran, are becoming problematic for the party.

Thus the GOP refrain: We must work harder to win over Hispanics.

Undeniably true. But how does the GOP appeal to them?

Fifty-three percent of all Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, with no father in the home and many of the moms themselves high school dropouts. Most Hispanic kids thus start school far behind.

In tests of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders, their scores are closer to those of African-American kids than whites and Asians. Their dropout rate matches that of black kids. Absent affirmative action, not only are America's colleges and universities but her professions are going to look far more Asian and white than the national population.

Not a formula for social peace.

Comes the reply: We must spend more to close the racial gap in test scores. Yet, according to The Washington Examiner, in the District of Columbia, the community where we have spent perhaps the most per capita to close the racial gap in test scores, the racial gap is by far the largest in the nation.

Not only do we seem not to know how to close it after four decades of plunging trillions into public schools, the country is tapped out. We are in the fourth consecutive year of trillion-dollar deficits, and our largest and richest state, California, just discovered its deficit has exploded to $16 billion.

And why should Hispanics vote Republican?

The majority of Hispanics are among that half of the population that pays no income tax. Why should they vote for a party whose major plank is that it will cut income taxes?

Hispanics benefit disproportionately from government programs.

Government puts their kids in Head Start before public school and provides them with Pell grants and student loans after public school.

From kindergarten through 12th grade, government educates their kids for free. Government provides them with free or subsidized health care through Medicaid and clinics. Government provides their families with public housing and rent supplements. Government provides the food stamps that feed the family. Government provides them with an annual earned income tax credit, a check just for working.

Government provides all these things, and what are Republicans going to do? They promise to cut government.

Again, why should Hispanics vote Republican?

Establishment Republicans say the party should support amnesty for illegal aliens. Yet this would make millions more eligible for federal programs in a country sinking in debt and mean millions more Hispanics going to the polls, and millions more coming to America in anticipation of the next amnesty.

How would that help the GOP?

By endlessly expanding Great Society programs, by lopping taxpayers off tax rolls, by supporting open borders and endless immigration from the Third World, the Republican Party, out of sheer nobility of character, has probably ensured its impending departure from history.

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While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market.

Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in the labor force, the lowest level since December 1981.

During the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, participation in the labor force rose steadily to a record 67 percent. The plunge since has been almost uninterrupted.

Here is a major cause of the economic malaise of the 21st century, a condition over which a president has little control. A shrinking share of our population is carrying an ever-expanding army of dependents.

If this were a result of American women going home to have kids, that would be, as it was after World War II, a manifestation of national vigor and health.

But that is not the case here.

The number of Americans of working age not in the labor force grew in April from 87,897,000 to 88,419,000—by an astonishing 522,000. This is an immense army for the rest of society to carry.

Why are Americans dropping out?

Some have given up looking for jobs in towns they grew up in, because the jobs are gone and not coming back, and they don't want to leave. Some are rejecting the low-wage unskilled work being offered, because the alternative—unemployment checks and federal and state welfare—is not all that torturous.

With some, the work incentive was never implanted. With others, the option of moving back in with the parents is not all that terrible.

America, it seems, is becoming less like the country we grew up in, in its attitudes about work and idleness, and more like Europe.

Whatever its causes, this social and economic torpor that seems beyond the capacity of presidents to correct or cure is a dark cloud over the hopes of Barack Obama for a second term.

And yet another ominous cloud, no longer on the far horizon, is now directly above: the impending departure from the labor force of 70 million baby boomers in the next two decades.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, from Jan. 1, 1930, to Dec. 31, 1935, there were 13 million births in the U.S. From January 1940 through December 1945, there were 16 million.

This was the Silent Generation, born in Depression and war. It never produced a president, and never will, unless Ron Paul catches fire pretty quickly. The Greatest Generation gave us six presidents, starting with JFK and ending with Bush I. Our three most recent presidents—Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama—are all baby boomers

And here we come to the heart of our next economic crisis.

If one adds up all the children born between Jan. 1, 1946 and Jan. 1, 1965, the era of the great American baby boom, the total comes to 77 million babies born in the United States.

Why is this so significant now?

Because this year, 2012, the first wave of baby boomers, all those born in 1946, like Clinton and George W. Bush, will reach 66, and eligibility for full Social Security and Medicare benefits. The boomers, en masse, will start moving off payrolls onto pension rolls.

Let us assume the 77 million boomers are down to 72 million. This means that over the next 20 years, boomers will be retiring and reaching eligibility for Social Security and Medicare at a rate of 3.6 million a year, or 300,000 a month, or 10,000 every day.

Three hundred thousand a month leaving the labor force may help to explain its shrinkage. And as the boomers are the best-paid, best-educated generation we produced, the loss of their collective skills, abilities and tax contributions will be as heavy a blow to the nation as the funding of their Medicare and Social Security will be a burden to the taxpayers they leave behind in the labor force.

Since Roe v. Wade, abortions have carried off 53 million of the generations that were to replace the boomers. While those 53 million lost have been partially replaced by 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, our recent immigrants have not exhibited the same income- or tax-producing capacity as boomers.

In 1965, LBJ announced his plan to convert our ordinary society into a Great Society. Since then, trillions have been spent.

The fruits of that immense investment? The illegitimacy rate, dropout rate, crime rate and incarceration rate have set new records, as the test scores of high school students have plummeted to new lows.

Our labor force is shrinking, the number of dependent U.S. adults is growing, our social programs are failing, and our best educated and most productive generation is retiring.

To borrow from Merle Haggard, "Are the good times really over for good?"

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But after Joe told David Gregory of Meet the Press he was "absolutely comfortable" with homosexuals marrying, Barack Obama could not maintain his credibility with the cultural elite if he stuck with the biblical view that God ordained marriage as solely between a man and woman. The biblical view had to go.

Obama had to move, or look like a malingerer in secularism's next great moral advance into post-Christian America.

Consider. Obama had an appearance coming up on The View, where Whoopi Goldberg would have demanded to know why he lacked the courage of Biden's convictions. He has a $40,000-a-plate fundraiser at George Clooney's, where the Hollywood crowd would want to know why he does not end discrimination against homosexuals.

He has appearances lined up before gay activists raising millions for his campaign. Monday, his press secretary was pilloried for his feeble defense of Obama's now-abandoned position.

His hand was forced. Yet the stand Obama took could cost him his presidency. Same-sex marriage may yet be a bridge too far, even for a dying Christian America.

On the plus side for Obama, his decision is producing hosannas from the elites and an infusion of cash from those who see same-sex marriage as the great moral and civil rights issue of our time.

But Obama may also have just solved Mitt Romney's big problem: How does Mitt get all those evangelical Christians and cultural conservatives not only to vote for him but to work for him?

Obama, by declaring that homosexual marriages should be on the same legal and moral plane as traditional marriage, just took command of the forces of anti-Christian secularism in America's Kulturkampf. And Nov. 6, 2012, is shaping up as the Antietam of the culture war.

Obama's second problem is that he may soon be seen as America's champion of same-sex marriage, but an ineffectual advocate. For Obama can do nothing, as of now, to impose homosexual marriage on the American people.

Thirty-one states have voted to outlaw it. A constitutional amendment supporting same-sex marriage could not win a majority of either house of Congress, let alone the necessary two-thirds of both.

Hence, Obama is going to spend six months winning cheers by calling for same-sex marriage. But the price of those cheers will be the rallying of millions of opponents of homosexual marriage, who will fight this battle where they are winning it, at the state level.

Only six states have approved homosexual marriage, while 30 have imposed a constitutional ban. In North Carolina, a ban not only on same-sex marriage but also civil unions, though opposed by Obama and Bill Clinton, carried on Tuesday with 61 percent of the vote.

Republican turnout in North Carolina's primary was up half a million, the highest in history. And this is a state Obama carried in 2008, a state whose largest city, Charlotte, will host Obama's convention.

Even in liberal California in 2008, while John McCain was getting a smaller share of the vote than Barry Goldwater in 1964, Proposition 8, restricting marriage to men and women, won.

How does Obama propose to win this battle?

He has one path to victory—the Supreme Court.

The New York Times, declaring that homosexuals' right to marry is "too precious and too fragile to be left up to the whim of states and the tearing winds of modern partisan politics," is looking to the court as the last, best hope to impose same-sex marriage on the nation.

Can't trust voters, can't trust elected legislators, can't trust Congress. Homosexual marriage, says the Times, is too important to be left to democratic decision. The republic must be commanded to accept it by unelected judges who serve for life and against whom the people have no political recourse.

That process of judicial tyranny has begun. A California judge has overturned the decision of California's voters to ban gay marriage, and his ruling is headed for the high court.

The Supreme Court thus will tell us whether this issue is to be decided democratically by voters and their elected state and federal legislators, or dictatorially by themselves.

Four liberal activists on the Supreme Court—Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor—are probably ready to declare that homosexual marriage is a constitutional right, as their predecessors declared abortion to be a constitutional right.

But Obama needs one more justice. If elected, he will get it, and same-sex marriage will be forced on all of America. If Romney wins, the Supreme Court will likely leave the issue of same-sex marriage to be decided by the people and their elected representatives.

Thus everything is up for grabs this November: the House, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court and whether we still call the United States of America God's country.

Game on!

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

No one can take pleasure in seeing Secret Service agents—whose deserved reputation is that they will "take a bullet" for the president, his family and all whom they protect—shamed and disgraced.

Yet one would have to be naive to believe this was some isolated incident. No sooner was the first day's work done in Cartagena than 20 hookers were trooping into the hotel rooms of SS agents, supervisors and members of the military advance team.

And Sen. Charles Grassley asks a relevant question.

As the Secret Service travel and work in close contact with the White House Advance Office and White House Communications Agency, was the Obama staff oblivious to this misconduct? If they were aware of it, did no one report it to the White House chief of staff?

Hostile intelligence services often use "honey traps" to ensnare U.S. diplomats and journalists. Thus this hookers-and-agents scandal is no laughing matter.

And it hit just as we learned that the General Services Administration, purchasing agent for the U.S. government, shelled out $823,000 on a party for 300 employees at a casino-spa in Las Vegas, where the hired entertainment included a mind reader, a clown and a $75,000 bicycle-building exercise.

Jeff Neeley, the GSA western regional commissioner, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify to Congress about what is now being investigated as criminal misconduct.

President Obama's appointee to head GSA, Martha Johnson, has resigned.

Infinitely larger in terms of the tax dollars looted or lost is the Solyndra scandal, where a green technology company favored by the White House went belly up after receiving an endorsement visit from Obama and an astonishing half-billion dollars in federal loan guarantees.

These events all point to a culture of entitlement born of a belief that now that the Democratic Party, the Party of Government, is again running the government, we can "let the good times roll" once more.

And so we see President Obama for six months literally campaigning on the public dime. Not a day seems to pass that he is not helicoptering off the White House lawn on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base to board Air Force One to fly to some swing state, while his staff finds an official cover event so the White House can charge most of the trip to taxpayers.

Has any other president spent so many days campaigning, half a year and a year before the traditional Labor Day start of the election season, or used tax dollars so flagrantly to buy re-election?

The sense of entitlement appears to extend to the Obama family.

In 2010, at the bottom of the Great Recession, Michelle Obama, accompanied by daughter Sasha and friends, took Air force Two to Spain for a lavish vacation. The first lady paid for her stay at a five-star hotel in Marbella, but the cost of flying her there and moving her about, with scores of Secret Service agents, had to run into the millions.

And the trip came at a time when President Obama was instructing the nation on the need to sacrifice and the number of Americans on food stamps was setting a new record every month.

How many so-called "1 percenters" project a lifestyle as lavish?

Last December, flying out of the District of Columbia in separate planes, the first couple took a two-week Christmas vacation at a resort in Hawaii, the taxpayers' cost of which has been estimated at $4 million. Winters in Hawaii, summers in the Vineyard, and with it all subsidized by taxpayers?

What kind of example is this? Where is the spirit of sacrifice here?

Is this the same president who talks about having inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s?

Lately, we learned that Leon Panetta, in the 10 months he has been secretary of defense, has spent $860,000 of taxpayers' money on 27 separate trips to his home in Monterey, Calif.

Curing Leon of his homesickness is getting expensive.

What all of the above reveals is how the Party of Government views the government. They see its perks, privileges and power as their entitlements, their inheritance, their patrimony.

And there is some truth to that.

After all, the bureaucracy was built up in the New Deal and Great Society, and remains dyed-in-the-wool Democratic.

Even when the GOP wins the White House, the conservatives are outsiders in this city. Even when Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan won their 49-state landslides, neither came even close to carrying Washington, D.C., the sole Electoral College precinct that has never gone Republican.

While John McCain lost the nation by eight points to Obama, he lost Washington, D.C., by 86 points. This is Obama's town. He owns it.

But if a noxious aroma of self-indulgence and corruption is arising from it, it is Obama's problem, and it is no longer a small one.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

"My initial reaction is that Iran has gotten a freebie. It has got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation."

The Israeli prime minister was referring to Saturday's meeting in Istanbul of the P5-plus-1—the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany—with representatives from Iran.

Subject: Iran's nuclear program. After a "constructive" meeting of one day, all agreed to meet again in Baghdad, May 23, and departed.

For Bibi, it was a strategic defeat.

For Israel's goal is a halt to Iran's enrichment of uranium and the removal of enriched uranium from that country.

But Catherine Ashton, the foreign minister for the European Union who is leading the P5-plus-1, stated that the West accepts Iran's position that, as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, she has a right to a peaceful nuclear program and nuclear power.

"Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear power" must be fully respected, Ashton said. No one dissented.

If the United States assents to Iran's enrichment of uranium, and Iran gives assurances that the Ayatollah's fatwa against the acquisition of nuclear weapons is being observed, a Washington-Tehran deal may be in the offing.

What would be the elements?

An end to Iran's enrichment of uranium to 20 percent, once Iran has a sufficient stock for its program of nuclear medicine.

Transfer of any excess 20 percent uranium outside the country to prevent further enrichment to weapons grade.

Regular intrusive inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities to ensure there is no diversion of uranium to bomb-making.

What would Iran demand?

Step-by-step lifting of sanctions, as it demonstrates it is telling the truth about not seeking nuclear weapons.

Such a deal would end the U.S.-Iran confrontation, yet allow Iran to continue to gain the knowledge, experience, and technical capacity to break out, should it ever decide to take the risk and build the weapons.

Netanyahu believes Israel's security and survival mandate the nuclear castration of Iran. Sunday, in a detailed report cleared by military censors, Israeli TV showed how an attack would be mounted.

Yet reporter Alon Ben David conceded that the Israeli Air Force "does not have the capacity to destroy the entire Iranian program."

Unlike the Iraqi nuclear reactor and the Syrian reactor Israel bombed in 1981 and 2007, Iran has many more nuclear facilities, spread over a far larger country, farther away and better defended.

And given the public threats by Israel and test runs by the IAF as far as Gibraltar, no attack on Iran will come as a total surprise. There would be losses of planes and pilots.

What would be the results?

While it would destroy some of Iran's nuclear facilities, it would not end the program but rally Iranians behind the regime. And it might trigger retaliation by Iran and Hezbollah, by missile, against Israel itself.

An Israeli attack on Iran, which President Obama and the U.S. military strongly oppose, would also put the issue of a U.S. war with Iran front and center in the presidential election.

What would America do; what would Obama do?

The election of 2012 could turn on that decision.

Should Iran retaliate against Israel, the Israeli lobby and the neocons would demand that America come to Israel's defense. Mitt Romney, the GOP hawks, evangelical Christians, conservative commentators and many Democrats would echo the demand, no matter who started the shooting.

A clamor would arise for us to finish the job of smashing Iran's nuclear facilities.

As Israel is admired and Iran's regime is detested, Obama could never declare neutrality. And should he order the U.S. military to go to Israel's aid, his re-election might well be assured.

As commander in chief and first diplomat, Obama holds all the cards.

If Iran is accommodating, the sanctions he has imposed will be seen as successful. If Iran balks in negotiations, he can impose new sanctions.

If Iran walks out of the talks, he can issue ultimata.

If Israel attacks Iran, he can come to Israel's defense and finish the job of destroying Iran's nuclear facilities. If done close to the election, this would assure Obama's re-election. The "October surprise" of 2012.

What are Iran's interests and options?

Tehran cannot want war with the United States. For whatever the damage done to U.S. interests, the destruction of Iran's air, naval and missile forces and nuclear program would be total.

The smartest course for Iran to pursue is to demonstrate to the West that she is reasonable and anxious to prove she has no present or future intention of building atomic weapons.

Which is what Iran was doing in Istanbul.

No wonder Bibi is frustrated. If there is no U.S. attack on Iran by November, and Obama wins, there may never be a U.S. attack on Iran.

Israel cannot do to Iran what Bibi wants done to Iran. Only Obama can.

But how does Bibi get Obama to do it, before November?

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

But it fell far short of what was needed: a presidential call for a halt to the rhetoric that is stirring up racial rage and inflaming the nation. The incendiary language being deployed is both divisive and dangerous.

Addressing the Sanford, Fla., incident, Black Muslim Minister Louis Farrakhan tweeted: "Where there is no justice, there will be no peace. Soon, and very soon, the law of retaliation may ... be applied."

The New Black Panther Party has issued a "Wanted Dead or Alive" poster featuring the face of George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin, and printed up a flier saying Martin was "murdered in cold blood."

When Panther leader Mikhail Muhammad was asked if this could ignite an explosive situation that has already seen death threats drive Zimmerman and his father from their homes, Muhammad cursed and said Zimmerman "should be fearful for his life."

Demanding "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," the Black Panther leader offered $10,000 for Zimmerman's capture and called for 5,000 black men to run him down.

"If the government won't do the job, we'll do it," he warned.

Spike Lee helpfully tweeted Zimmerman's home address.

Friends say Zimmerman fears for his life. One man has already been arrested for threatening to kill Bill Lee, the Sanford police chief who has stepped down and turned the investigation over to the state, the Justice Department, the FBI and a special prosecutor.

Returning from Geneva, Jesse Jackson, too, headed for Sanford, saying: "Blacks are under attack. ... Targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business." On arrival, Jackson said Trayvon Martin was a "kid shot down in cold blood by a vigilante."

Talk show host Joe Madison charged Zimmerman with a "hate crime." The Grio, a black news and opinion website, compares the killing of Trayvon Martin to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi.

Till, 14, had flirted with a white woman. Her husband and brother kidnapped, mutilated and murdered the boy and dumped his body into the Tallahatchie River. Emmett Till was lynched.

Trayvon Martin was shot by an overzealous Neighborhood Watch volunteer who grew suspicious of an unfamiliar black man or youth in a hoodie walking at night in the rain in a gated community he patrolled.

What appears to have happened is that, after alerting police to Martin's presence, Zimmerman followed him in his SUV—against the advice of the cops. Where the street ended, Zimmerman got out.

A fight ensued. According to two witnesses, Zimmerman was losing, flat on his back, screaming for help. It seems unlikely a 17-year-old football player like Martin, angry and in a fistfight, would be screaming for help.

Police say that when they got there, they found Martin dead and Zimmerman with a bloody nose, a cut on the back of his head and grass stains on the back of his shirt.

Did Zimmerman, on his back, losing the fight, fearing this black kid was a criminal who might beat him to death or grab his gun, fire in presumed self defense? Did Martin, who had a right to be enraged with this character following and hassling him, start the fight?

Would Zimmerman, who carried a legal firearm, start a fistfight with an athletic black youth who was reportedly 6 inches taller?

The scenario above appears to be the one upon which Sanford police relied when they declined to arrest Zimmerman. That Trayvon's body was taken to the morgue and identified as "John Doe" suggests that the police, too, concluded he was an intruder.

They were terribly wrong, as was Zimmerman. But to call this cold-blooded murder or an Emmett Till-type lynching appears, from the existing evidence, to be both demagogic and inflammatory.

Yet, there are questions that need answers.

Why, with a dead teenager, did the Sanford police not bring in Zimmerman and get his story on paper? Some journalists contend there are racial slurs on the tapes of Zimmerman talking to the cops. Others hear no such thing.

Zimmerman's father calls the media portrayal of his son as a racist an injustice, and says his son has a Peruvian mother, is Spanish-speaking, grew up in a multiracial family and has many black friends.

And the clamor of the crowd—"Arrest him!"—raises a question.

Arrest him—for what?

If the Sanford police believe they have no case for murder or manslaughter or any felony, what do they charge him with, after they arrest him?

More critically, where is President Obama?

When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot during a rampage by a crazed gunmen, Obama stepped in with a splendid address to cool the passions and call a halt to the false and fevered accusations of moral complicity in the monstrous crime of a lone killer.

Where is the Obama of Tucson now?

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Twenty thousand perished. Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes when a nuclear plant swept by the tsunami exploded, spewing radiation for miles.

Only two of Japan's 54 nuclear plants are now operating. The rest have shut down for inspections. Many may never start up again.

In loss of life, that earthquake-tsunami was seven times as lethal as 9/11. But recovery from that greatest disaster in decades is not the gravest problem facing Japan.

The gravest problem facing the Land of the Rising Sun is that it is dying. The sun that set on the Japanese Empire in 1945 has begun to set on the Japanese nation.

A week before the anniversary of 3/11, buried in a story about Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's effort to rally support for a doubling of the 5 percent consumption tax, to preserve Japan's social security system, was this startling statement:

"We're faced with an aging society and a declining birth rate unprecedented in the history of mankind."

What makes this admission remarkable is that the Japanese are not given to hyperbole, and the prime minister's statement is rooted in numbers that may fairly be called a demography of death.

Deep inside the story on the Noda tax proposal was this item: "By 2055, according to government data, 40 percent of the country's population will be 65 or older. Just 8 percent will be younger than 15."

If accurate, these numbers reveal a deepening of the crisis of demography facing Japan since the population projections of the United Nations came out in 2008.

According to those U.N. figures, where Japan's population would reach 127 million in 2010, the number of Japanese will shrink to just above 101 million by 2050. Every year between now and 2050, the number of deaths over births in Japan will average two-thirds of a million, with the population shrinkage accelerating each decade.

The median age of a Japanese, 22 years old in 1950, reached 45 in 2010 and will exceed 55 by midcentury. The oldest people on the planet are getting older.

What kind of future can there be for a nation, even one with the high quality human capital of Japan, when there are two Japanese 65 years old or older for every Japanese 24 years of age or younger?

When Japan became the world's No. 2 economy in 1960, seizing the crown from Germany to hold for 40 years, Japanese 24 years old and younger outnumbered the population 65 or older eight to one.

Japan's fertility rate, the number of births per woman, has been below zero population growth for 40 years and has plunged to where Japanese woman are having only two-thirds of the children needed to replace the present population.

Not only has the birth rate per woman fallen, the percentage of Japanese women aged 15-49—56 percent in the 1960s—is expected to plunge to 31 by midcentury.

Every new Japanese generation is one-third to one-half smaller than the one that came before. Japan's high school graduation class has fallen by more than one-third in just 30 years.

Nippon seems to be collectively committing national hara-kiri.

How did this come about? The means are not in dispute.

When millions of Japanese soldiers returned from their dead empire to start families, there was a population explosion. Under the U.S. occupation, Tokyo swiftly legalized abortion, and the nation embraced birth control. Japan did so before Europe, but Europe followed. Now all face demographic death, with Japan leading the way.

This has already begun to affect her national economy.

Japan's growth rate in the 1960s was 10 percent a year. In the 1970s, it was 5 percent a year. In the 1980s, it was 4 percent—still a healthy growth rate for a mature economy.

But in the 1990s, the "lost decade," Japan's growth fell to 1.8 percent a year, and that anemic rate has continued into this century.

Japan's expenditures during the lost decade to reignite the fire sent the national debt soaring above 200 percent of gross domestic product, eclipsing the debt-to-GDP ratios of Greece and Italy today.

In 2011, for the first time in 30 years, Japan ran a trade deficit. January's figure, $19 billion for the month, was a record.

The abandonment of nuclear power has forced Japan to substitute imported coal and liquified natural gas to produce her energy.

During the decade of "Japan, Inc.," in 1988, Nippon boasted of being home to eight of the world's top 20 corporations in terms of capital investment. Now she is home to none, and only six of the top 100.

Yet when Prime Minister Noda said what was happening in Japan was "unprecedented in the history of mankind," he was mistaken.

This also happened to the greatest empire of them all long ago.

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"Those who are ... beating the drums of war should explain clearly to the American people what they think the costs and benefits would be."

The president had in mind such remarks as those Newt Gingrich delivered to the Israeli lobby AIPAC that same day: "The red line is now ... because the Iranians are deepening their commitment to nuclear weapons"—an assertion the Joint Chiefs and U.S. intelligence agencies say is blatantly false.

They insist: Iran has not made the decision to build a bomb.

Perhaps the president was referring to Mitt Romney's pledge to that same cheering throng to "station multiple carriers and warships at Iran's door" and deny Tehran even "the capacity to make a bomb."

But if "the capacity to make a bomb" means knowledge of how to build one and an ability to enrich uranium to bomb-grade, should they decide to do so, Iran already has that.

Does Mitt want war now?

Perhaps the president had in mind John McCain's call for U.S. air strikes on Syria, an act of war rejected even by GOP Speaker John Boehner as "premature," since the "situation in Syria is pretty complicated."

Have the Republican uber-hawks learned nothing from the war for which they beat the drums 10 years ago?

Then they told us Saddam Hussein was implicated in 9/11, that he had chemical weapons, that if we didn't invade his country we could expect anthrax attacks by Iraqi crop-dusters up and down our East Coast.

Those who asked for proof Saddam was a mortal threat were dismissed by Condi Rice: "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Saddam can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The price of our heeding that bluster? Some 4,500 American dead, 35,000 wounded, $1 trillion sunk, 100,000 Iraqi dead, half a million widows and orphans.

The fruits of our victory? A Shia-dominated Iraq descending into sectarian and civil war.

The GOP's political reward for marching us up to Baghdad?

Loss of both houses of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, when the antiwar Obama crushed the war hawk McCain.

Today's GOP front-runners—Newt, Mitt and Rick Santorum—all clearly believe that a warlike stance toward Iran will appeal to the evangelical base and to Jewish voters who went for Obama by 57 points in 2008.

But they are rolling the dice with a war-weary America.

Ron Paul, whose youth vote the party needs and who receives the largest number of contributions from the military, has split with them on Iran.

The president, says Paul, is "closer to my position than the other candidates, because what the other Republicans are saying is reckless."

Most Republicans seem to be lining up with Newt, Mitt and Rick on a more hawkish stance. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants Congress to vote the president a blank check for war now. And the president is aware of and alarmed by the Republican stampede to war:

"The notion that the way to solve every one of these problems is to deploy our military—that hasn't been true in the past and it won't be true now. ... Sometimes, it's necessary, but we don't do it casually. ... We think it through. We don't play politics with it."

When rash decisions are made about war, said the president, mistakes are made, and "typically it's not the folks who are popping off who pay the price."

What to do about Iran—and whom to trust to deal with Iran—seems fated to be the foreign policy issue of 2012.

And the battle lines are drawn.

Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli lobby and its allies in Congress will be demanding ever harsher sanctions and military action before November. For they assume, rightly, that the president does not want war and, if he wins, there will be no war with Iran.

The Republicans will portray Obama as dithering, vacillating and weak, no true friend of Israel, though the U.S. military and intelligence community are behind Obama in his belief that a war now on Iran would be unnecessary, unwise and potentially calamitous.

Nervous Democrats, facing Sheldon Adelson super PAC ads in the Jewish communities of every swing state, all accusing Obama of "throwing Israel under the bus," will be pressuring the president to get tougher.

And Obama surely knows that an October confrontation with Iran, with war a possibility, or a reality, will mean the nation rallies around him and he wins a second term.

Will Iranian intransigence provide him a casus belli? Or will Iran negotiate seriously and agree to more intrusive inspections to prove its nuclear program is not aimed at a bomb?

Whether there is a U.S. war on Iran seems up to the ayatollah now. Will he play into the hands of Israeli and American hawks who are salivating over a war with his regime and his country?

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"Bibi" Netanyahu had his anger on display at a meeting in Israel with Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

McCain emerged saying he had never seen an Israeli prime minister "that unhappy." "He was angry," said McCain. "I've never seen U.S.-Israel relations at this point."

"The Israelis are unnerved," said Graham. "They think the administration is sending the wrong signal, and so do I."

What has so enraged Netanyahu? The Obama policy of tightening sanctions on Iran while holding out the opportunity for Tehran to negotiate and provide guarantees that its nuclear program is not aimed at an atomic bomb.

The U.S. intelligence community unanimously believes that Iran is some time away, perhaps years, from being able to produce a nuclear weapon and has not made the command decision to build one.

Israel retorts that Iran is entering a "zone of immunity," when Israel will lack the ability to attack and abort Iran's nuclear program, as new nuclear sites are being moved underground. Netanyahu's government is also angry at what it sees as U.S. leaders' distancing themselves from Israel.

When that fifth Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated and Tehran accused America and Israel of complicity, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the murder, leaving Israel as prime suspect.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta leaked to columnist David Ignatius that Israel might strike Iran in April, May or June, leaving no doubt as to who wants a war, while ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden openly disparages Israel's capacity to cripple Iran's nuclear sites: "They only have the ability to make this worse."

Adm. William Fallon, who headed U.S. Central Command, has been categorical: "No one I am aware of thinks that there is a positive outcome from a military strike" on Iran.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey has called Iran a "rational actor" and told the Israelis that for them to attack Iran now would be "premature," "destabilizing" and imprudent.

Netanyahu said that Dempsey's remarks "served Iran" and the general was "unwilling to aid Israel."

Like Panetta, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said he does not believe that Iran has decided to build a bomb, while National Security Adviser Tom Donilon spent three days in Israel, reportedly arguing against an Israeli attack.

"The Israelis are fuming over what they perceive as deliberate attempts by the Obama administration to undermine the deterrent effect of the Jewish state's threat to use force against Iran by publicly questioning the timing and utility of such strikes." So write Jay Solomon and Carol Lee of The Wall Street Journal.

Netanyahu is coming to Washington, the Journal writers add, to demand that Obama spell out the "red lines" Iran will not be allowed to cross without triggering a U.S. attack.

What Netanyahu wants is a U.S. ultimatum to Iran.

White House sources say that when Obama meets Netanyahu Tuesday, he will reject the prime minister's demands.

But the pressure to shorten the timetable for war is intense and growing.

Obama will speak Sunday to the annual assembly of the Israeli lobby AIPAC. Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, all more hawkish than the president, have also been invited to address the conclave.

Three dozen senators have signed on to a resolution declaring it a U.S. "vital national interest" that Iran not possess even a "nuclear weapons capability."

S.R. 380 reads like a resolution crafted as a casus belli, a cause for war. For South Korea, Brazil and Japan all have a "nuclear weapons capability," as all have the industrial proficiency and technical know-how to build an atomic bomb, should they chose to do so.

The resolution demands that Iran halt all uranium production and end its ballistic missile program, and declares "unacceptable" any U.S. policy of containment of an Iran that is capable of building a bomb, even if Iran has decided not to build a bomb.

Containment succeeded with a Soviet Empire with 10,000 nuclear weapons, but is apparently inadequate for dealing with an Iran that has no atom bombs, only the potential to build one.

S.R. 380 points directly toward a U.S. war on Iran.

Who wants that war? Netanyahu, his government, and his allies in U.S. politics and the press, and in a Congress that gave him 29 standing ovations the last time he spoke there.

Who does not want a war?

The White House, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs, the intelligence community, the antiwar left and Old Right, and millions of Americans who believe a U.S. war on Iran could ignite a sectarian and regional war that could prove catastrophic for the Middle East, the world economy and the United States of America.

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