Scott Spiegel

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The police warned that if protestors didn’t move, force would be used to remove them.  Protestors didn’t move.  Force was used to remove them.

What’s the big deal?

Liberals were aghast at last Friday’s video showing Police Lt. John Pike shooting pepper spray at a row of seated protestors blocking a walkway at the University of California at Davis.  The protestors were barricading the path against officers trying to arrest students who had violated the college’s order prohibiting pitching tents on the quad.

Curiously, the seated protestors had their heads down and eyes covered during the entire 10-second assault.  This may have had something to do with the fact that the sadistic monster Pike had raised his bright-red pepper spray can in the air and shaken it for about five minutes before spraying, in order to warn the protestors about what was coming.  In the video, onlookers can be heard calling out, “Keep your eyes closed!” “Cover your eyes!” and “Protect yourself!” Upon being sprayed, none of the seated protestors appeared to cry out in pain, though it was difficult to hear over the onlookers wailing, “You guys are supposed to protect us!”

One hysterical woman in the video can be heard yowling, “Why are you doing this?  These are children!”—which I guess is supposed to be aurally reminiscent of “It’s for the children!”

For those who don’t belong to the Young Democratic Socialists, pepper spray is a commonly used, non-lethal crowd control agent that is a chemical cousin of mace and other tear gases.  It induces watery eyes, runny nose, and coughing—which can’t be any worse than the symptoms of Zuccotti Lung.

Contrary to occupiers’ claims, the seated protestors were not willing to move out of the way if asked.  Officers can be seen trying to drag protestors away after the pepper spray cans had been pulled out, but the arm-linked protestors refused to move.

The police appear to have carried out their pepper spray raid, not to cruelly inflict distress on the protestors, but to soften them up to make it easier to remove them from the walkway.  As former Baltimore Police Chief Charles Kelly noted, “When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them.  Bodies don’t have handles on them.”  Even after being sprayed, the protestors remained limp, forcing multiple officers to drag them away.

The UC Davis protestors, despite the widespread impression of them as beleaguered innocents set upon by hordes of machine gun-toting Gestapo, far outnumbered the police patrolling them.  UC Davis reports that there were 35 police officers on the scene Friday, compared to 250 protestors and onlookers.

Overwhelming numbers of unhinged protestors in any setting have the potential to wreak havoc, as evidenced by violent Occupy-driven confrontations over the past two months in other U.S. cities.  Even small groups of committed protestors can inflict costly wreckage, as demonstrated by the handful of Occupy protestors in Rome several weeks ago who injured hundreds of people and caused millions of dollars in damage.

The Occupy protestors have no concern for the well-being or safety of police officers, i.e. individuals in a dangerous profession who otherwise protect protestors in their daily lives.  As one commenter at the website Boing Boing ordered, “[D]on’t pepper spray non-violent protester [sic] you intent [sic] to arrest.  Just arrest them and move on.  If you get hurt, so be it.  You are a police officer.  Your job is inherntly [sic] dangerous.”  Yes, their job is inherently dangerous, due to chaos-instigating criminals like Occupy protestors and the people who sympathize with them.

There are numerous ways of hindering police work besides pushing back against cops or throwing bottles, urine, and feces at them (though the Occupy protestors have tried all of those methods!).  Even passive forms of resistance such as building human chains or walls to prevent police from getting by, or sprawling out on the ground and refusing to move, can justify retaliatory force.

Perhaps the cops could have “stepped over” or “brushed past” the protestors, as some Occupy apologists have glibly suggested.  The protestors sob that they were seated and non-violent when they were sprayed.  Boo-hoo.  They aligned themselves with an anarchic, violent mob, and they telegraphed their intention not to comply with police.  Maybe they would have let themselves be peacefully pushed aside had it come to that.  But the police don’t have time to administer a psychological evaluation to each rally participant to determine his or her propensity for causing mayhem under stress.

When cops say move, you move—even if you’re curled in a fetal position on the ground with flowers in your hair listening to Cat Stevens and nursing orphaned kittens.

The UC Davis police could have acted a lot more brutally, including prodding or beating protestors with batons.  The occupiers should consider themselves warned: Trust fund brat refuses to move, trust fund brat gets spray tanned.

Protestors in the UC Davis videos can be heard chanting “Shame on you!” at police after the incident.  Actually, shame on patsy mayors like Michael Bloomberg and Jean Quan for not empowering police to clear out these animals ages ago.

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Last week a concerned reader took issue with my negative comparison of the Occupy Wall Street protests to the Tea Party rallies—in particular my statement that “Tea Party rallies have been amazingly peaceful, with not a single arrest… across hundreds of cities and thousands of events…”  The reader was correct—there were in fact Tea Party arrests I had overlooked.

In March of 2011, Jim Canelos was arrested in Mohave County, Arizona for wearing a flag hat at a county supervisors’ meeting that prohibited wearing hats.

In February of 2010, Mervin Fried was arrested in Kingman, Arizona for bringing a symbolic pitchfork to a protest in a county administration building.  Fried argued that the county already allowed citizens to carry guns—a more dangerous weapon—into government buildings, and was later acquitted.

Most notably, in November of 2009, ten protestors angry over ObamaCare were arrested for engaging in disorderly conduct outside Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington, D.C.  The ralliers were discovered to have been organized by rabid anti-abortion activist and Democrat Randall Terry of Operation Rescue.

That’s it!  A dozen Tea Party arrests in two-and-a-half years, most tied to anti-abortion protestors.  Given the media’s left-wing slant, you can be sure that every arrest ever made at a Tea Party rally in the tiniest hamlet in the country has been thoroughly documented.

Now that we’ve gotten that straight, let’s examine the arrest record of Occupy Wall Street, which just hit its one-month anniversary:

•    Several weeks ago in New York, over 700 protesters were arrested for marching into the vehicular lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge against police orders and cutting off traffic;

•    Last Tuesday 129 protestors were arrested in Boston and 6 in D.C. for trespassing and disorderly conduct;

•    On Saturday 92 protestors were arrested in New York for occupying a branch of Citibank, knocking down police barriers, and other offenses;

•    Also on Saturday, 53 protestors in Tucson, 24 in Denver, and 19 in Raleigh were arrested for occupying public parks after closing time;

•    On Sunday 175 protestors in Chicago were arrested for setting up a tent city and occupying Congress Plaza near Grant Park;

•    Also on Sunday, 46 protestors were arrested in Phoenix for refusing to evacuate a public park at closing time

This is just a partial list and includes only roundups at the most high-profile rallies in the biggest cities.

Let’s not forget the recent riots abroad, mostly in Western Europe, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests.  In Rome on Saturday, police arrested protestors for breaking windows, destroying statues, spraying graffiti on churches, vandalizing bank lobbies and ATM machines, smashing police cruisers, and setting dumpsters, cars, and military depots on fire; attacking police with batons, rocks, bottles, fire extinguishers, and bombs; injuring hundreds of innocents, mostly police officers; and causing millions in damage to public property and untold damage to private property.

(In one delicious footnote, Roman protestors expressed indignation that police hadn’t made more arrests of their most violent compatriots early on, so that the whole group wouldn’t be discredited.  Damned if you enforce the law, damned if you don’t.)

So let’s examine the totals: 12 arrests for the Tea Party rallies, which have been going on for 30 months; and 1200 arrests for the Occupy Wall Street mobs, which have been going on for 30 days.

It’s awfully close, but I’m going to have to suggest that Occupy Wall Street is less law-abiding than the Tea Party.  Yet to hear the mainstream media present it, Occupy Wall Street is every bit as peaceful and legitimate as the Tea Party.

The disparate treatment given to these wildly uneven tallies reflects the double standard set by the left-leaning media: One Tea Partier raising his fist in anger over intrusive government is as alarming as one thousand Occupy Wall Street protestors clashing with police.

Some commentators have noted that Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party both began out of anger over the nation’s largest banks being bailed out.  Though the sources of their grievances overlap, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have used vastly different tactics to get across their messages.  Ironically, the Tea Party, which is more suspicious of government, has been following the letter of the law.  Occupy Wall Street, which favors more government regulation, has been trampling all over the law.

This irony is easily explainable: The Tea Party believes the government has legitimate, limited functions, such as the power of the police and courts to protect people from the initiation of force and violation of property rights.  In contrast, Occupy Wall Street believes legitimate functions of government include providing universal healthcare, free college education, and a living wage; naturally, they see its policing functions as rather superfluous and heavy-handed, if not downright militaristic.

Thus, we have the spectacle of defense lawyers representing over 800 defendants in Manhattan’s criminal court system demanding that all charges be dropped for the protestors, and threatening individual trials for the miscreants, thus further clogging the system’s already overstuffed caseload.  (Prepare for agitators to crow that their struggle was victorious and their motives vindicated after overburdened prosecutors inevitably throw in the towel.)

Just before the fall 2008 bank bailout, which most Democrats supported and most Republicans opposed, President Bush infamously observed that he had “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

The members of a protest movement that claims to be concerned with justice have been wildly indiscriminate in their violation of the law.  Occupy Wall Street protestors apparently believe they must abandon our civilized system of government in order to save it.



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The only similarity Tea Party rallies and the Occupy Wall Street protests share is that both involve humans gathered in public spaces.  Other than that they have about as much in common as a Rolling Stones concert does with a public stoning.

The UK Daily Mail featured a story on the unsavory conditions at the OWS protestors’ home base in Manhattan, Zuccotti Park, including photos of one flannel-clad agitator squatting and defecating against a police car.  Hmm, I think the last time that happened at a Tea Party rally was… never.

Having destroyed the park over the past three weeks by filling it with patchouli ashes and feces, the protestors traipsed north on Saturday to turn another great New York gathering space, Washington Square Park, into a public urinal.

The glaring differences between OWS and the Tea Party rallies are obvious to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes (and nostrils).

The Tea Party movement, which began around the start of Barack Obama’s presidency and built momentum during the year-long national healthcare debate, was a grassroots uprising.  Across the country, people who had never been active in politics networked and gathered with concerned, like-minded citizens to demand a curb on the intrusion of federal government into our lives.

In contrast, OWS, which is a fraction of the size of the Tea Party, was instigated by an anti-consumerist Canadian magazine called Adbusters, and has seen its numbers swell via conspicuous throngs of bused-in union members, bored trust fund brats cruising for easy sex, disheveled homeless people looking for free food, and savvy criminals on the lam who understand that a crowd of ragtag bums is the perfect hiding spot for them.

Despite their heated rhetoric, Tea Party rallies have been amazingly peaceful, with hardly any arrests and not a single incidence of violence—except for those committed by union members against the ralliers—across hundreds of cities and thousands of events attended by millions of people over the past two-and-a-half years.

In contrast, OWS has rudely disrupted its host cities, with over 700 arrests in just one day in one city (New York) and tens of millions of dollars in policing costs only a few weeks into the movement.  Commuters and municipal officials have complained about the invaders’ lack of respect for residents just trying to go about their business.

Tea Party rallies have been antiseptically clean, to such a degree that public works employees have gushed about how attendees leave the protest areas cleaner than when they arrived.

In contrast, the OWS occupation has been sickeningly unsanitary, with widespread public urination and defecation, hordes of unwashed louts mating in filthy sleeping bags, mounting piles of rotting trash, and an omnipresent odor of raw sewage.

The Tea Party has been well-organized and influential, having achieved earth-shattering electoral results in special and off-year gubernatorial and senatorial elections, and a historic landslide in the Congressional midterms.

In contrast, OWS has been ineffectual and impotent, with no one—including the protestors—having any idea what they want, let alone how they hope to achieve it by playing hacky sack and painting their bodies like tribesmen.

Most Tea Partiers took time out of their busy days to attend the rallies, which were almost always held in the evenings, after work, or on weekends.

In contrast, most OWS protestors appear to have no jobs, homes, or responsibilities to attend to, and seem to be looking to the rallies to provide them with shelter, food, and a purpose in life.

And those are just the superficial differences!

On a deeper level, the Tea Partiers want government to leave them alone and allow them to be productive citizens and decide how to spend their money.  In contrast, OWS protestors wish to tear down the capitalist system while forcing society to give them free college, universal healthcare, and guaranteed home ownership.

The Tea Party’s heroes have included our nation’s Founding Fathers, and 20^th-century political and philosophical leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Friedrich Hayek, and Ayn Rand.  In contrast, OWS has thrown its support to the likes of cop-killer Troy Davis and al-Qaeda conspirator Tarek Mehanna.

Tea Partiers have been reading and debating the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.  OWS leaders have been teaching protestors how to pick open handcuffs with hairpins.

Tea Party organizers have been handing out miniature flags; OWS leaders have been distributing condoms.

As anyone who’s been watching knows, the Tea Party increased its influence the larger it grew and the more it pervaded our culture.  Given the public revulsion over the Wall Street protests, the longer these embarrassing displays continue, the bigger the anti-Democratic tsunami will be in 2012.

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What the hell are the Wall Street occupiers protesting?  Do they even know?

The “Occupy Wall Street” hoodlums have been occupying Zuccotti Park (formerly Liberty Plaza) near Manhattan’s financial district for almost three weeks, with no signs of leaving.  They have literally been occupying the park—demonstrating without a police permit and setting up living quarters, complete with their own sleeping area, kitchen, and “library.”  They have been clogging neighboring streets and bridges.  They have pledged to occupy the area through the coming winter.

Demonstrators are trying to boost the legitimacy of their operation by passing out hundreds of thousands of copies of their self-published, four-page diatribe, “The Occupied Wall Street Journal.”

The self-described occupiers are, of course, long-haired, hippie-ish, slovenly, litter-strewing, profanity-spewing, Marxism-spouting, law-and-order-despising, ill-informed, inarticulate, slack-jawed, and unfocused—in other words, your typical left-wing mob.

(You knew the mob just had to be leftist before you even heard what it was about.  From what other portion of the political spectrum could activists organize so many thousands of unemployed people to do nothing but sit around in the street and chant all day?  Contrast the Wall Street occupation with Tea Party rallies, which always take place in the evening or on weekends, outside of work hours.)

The highlight of the movement so far came when New York City police arrested 700 thugs who unlawfully marched into the traffic lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening, cutting off traffic for hours.

Not ashamed in the slightest at their disruptive, feral behavior, the picketers have been screaming “police brutality” over their supposedly shocking mistreatment.  Such brutality has included police telling marchers that they would be arrested if they blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, then arresting marchers when they blocked the Brooklyn Bridge.  Dissenters were lined up in neat, orderly rows in plastic handcuffs and then escorted away in vans—or, in protestors’ minds, tortured and abused by sadistic Gestapo officers.

Dreadlocked hooligans have set up tent cities in support of the Wall Street protestors in Boston, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, and Seattle.

On Monday the protestors held a “corporate zombie” march, with participants dressed like zombie bankers stuffing Monopoly money in their mouths.

Celebrity lefties such as Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Russell Simmons, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Roseanne “Robespierre” Barr have made guest appearances to support the protestors.

So what exactly are the protestors protesting?

The Associated Press characterizes the activists’ grievances as “corporate greed and other issues.”  That’s about as specific and succinct a description as you’re likely to find anywhere, including in the protestors’ own literature.

The “other issues” protestors have railed against include—and this is far from an exhaustive list: bank bailouts, home foreclosures, high unemployment, global warming, destruction of the ecosystem, poverty, food modification, excessive health care company profits, Islamophobia, Jewish control of the economy, social inequality, the execution of Troy Davis, and the inclusion of American Indian-abuser Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

One movement leader narrated a video in which he states that the marchers are protesting the following evils: “corporatism, fascism, crony capitalism, a police state, an American empire, [too many] military bases, dead bodies in Iraq, a ‘welfare warfare’ state, and ‘Republi-crats.’”  The site hosting the video explains that protestors’ strategy “was inspired by recent uprisings in Spain, Greece, Egypt, and Tunisia”—as though the causes of the austerity protests in Western Europe were remotely related to the causes of the democracy protests in the Middle East.

Perhaps this is a clue: The demonstrators have held many of their rallies in front of Federal Reserve buildings around the country.  Does that mean they’re protesting the existence of the Federal Reserve?  Are they opposed to its manipulation of the U.S. currency, including the Obama administration’s quantitative easing programs?  Are they calling for a return to the gold standard?

Why no, actually, those are demands being made by attendees at Tea Party rallies.  In fact, those are thoughtful demands I could actually get behind.

In contrast, the Occupy Wall Street protestors are less focused in their goals.

Thus, in one video, we get such contradictory statements as the following musings, separated by mere minutes:

“It’s about, like, people making things happen, rather than expecting, like, someone else to take care [of you].”

“It’s a process of educating people… that we have to be first and foremost altruistic, and care for the collective before caring for ourselves.”

Whereas the Tea Party’s message is razor sharp and crystal clear—limit the size and scope of the federal government and restore individual liberty—the occupiers’ message is fuzzy and incoherent, a miasma of unfocused, seething rage.

Even the über-liberal The Nation, which recently featured a helpful FAQ section on the movement, groaned, “Ugh—the zillion-dollar question” in response to an honest query on what the demands of the protestors are.  They elaborated: “The General Assembly [Occupy Wall Street’s organizing body] is currently in the midst of determining how it will come to consensus about unifying demands.  It’s a really messy and interesting discussion.  But don’t hold your breath.”

Riot first; self-reflect later.  The motto of the radical left.

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Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Casey Anthony is set to be released from jail on Sunday after being found not guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter, and aggravated child abuse, and guilty only of providing false information to police.

What was astonishing about the public reaction to the verdict last week was not that ordinary citizens were outraged, wondered whether prosecutors and jurors had done their jobs, or asked whether there were still some way to serve justice to the acquitted murderess.

What was astonishing was the instant, instinctive chorus of chronic felon-defenders everywhere that “the system worked.”

Harvard law professor and O.J. Simpson-defender Alan Dershowitz decided that this travesty of justice would be the perfect opportunity to lecture Americans, Janet Napolitano-style, that “the system worked.”  (Liberals’ sense of irony is even less developed than their sense of humor.)

Dershowitz wrote, “[A] criminal trial is not a search for truth.  Scientists search for truth…  A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”  I suppose the hours of scientific testimony by forensic experts at the Anthony trial were provided for mere entertainment value.

Commentators everywhere chided the masses for swelling in anger over the “not guilty” verdict and portrayed them as overemotional, unthinking rubes with no respect for our legal system and a hankering for the days of vigilante justice.

In fact, a truly open-minded, thoughtful person would at least consider whether the district attorneys had failed to live up to their responsibilities, whether the twelve Floridians saddled with the responsibility of life-or-death decisions had failed to do their jobs, and whether these jurors had any biases or ulterior motives for returning a “not guilty” decision the very morning after the Byzantine, two-month trial had ended.

This supposedly objective, death penalty-qualified jury included:

• Two jurors who opposed or were ambivalent about the death penalty
• A family man raised by a single mother “like Casey” (in his words) who admitted to attorneys that although he thought Casey was guilty, “[I]f I had to return a verdict right now, I would say not guilty”
• A dishwasher salesman who repeatedly fell asleep during the presentation of scientific evidence
• A fervently religious woman who didn’t want to be on the jury because “I don’t like to judge people,” and whom Anthony’s defense lawyers fought rabidly to keep over the prosecutors’ objections

In any other area of life, a reasonable person would say, “Well, wait—we’re 99% sure that x is true, yet this body of individuals decided the opposite.  Is there even a faint possibility that these individuals didn’t do their job properly?  Is it possible that there were any flaws in the decision-making process?”

A broadminded assessment of the case would consider alternative options for pursuing a satisfactory resolution, such as a civil defamation suit against the fictional maid whose real-life counterpart Anthony besmirched (already in the works), a civil suit by the private search agency that spent thousands of dollars helping conduct a futile search for Caylee Anthony (also in the works), a civil suit against Anthony by the estate of her daughter, a boycott of publishing houses and television studios that offer the defendant money for her story, and a general banishment of Anthony from decent society like the one Simpson experienced after his verdict.  Victims’ rights advocates have also proposed Casey’s Law, which would make it a felony for a parent to fail to report the disappearance of her child in a timely manner.

But no—by mindlessly, repetitively, robotically focusing on the glory of “the system,” leftist commentators unwittingly reveal that they are concerned, not with justice, but with procedure.

Most everyday citizens were quoted by the media saying things like, “This is a terrible injustice.  I guess we have to accept the verdict, but I hope this woman pays in some way for what she did.”

Most left-wing elitists were quoted saying things like, “The system worked.  It doesn’t matter whether she’s guilty.  The jurors did their job.”  Which group of commentators sees the big picture?

Repeating “The system worked” ad nauseam after the Casey Anthony verdict is like adding 2 and 2 on a calculator and getting 5 and repeating “The calculator worked.”

Dershowitz is wrong that the purpose of the legal system is not justice but procedure.  The purpose of the legal system is justice through procedure.  If procedure yields horrific injustice, people have a right to ask whether the procedure failed or should be reexamined.  If the calculator fails, the user has a right to ask whether the battery should be changed.

Dershowitz admits that jurors are “human” and may have made a mistake in this case—but because of his belief that the jury system is sacrosanct, he considers it tacky and unenlightened for us everyday folks to question the rules of the system or the actions of these particular jurors.  We’re not supposed to care, for example, that the jury reportedly was split 6-6 on the manslaughter charge as late as Tuesday morning, mere hours before the verdict was rendered, and that the 6 “not guilty” voters—who, in the words of Juror #2, “had decided not to convict Casey Anthony of any charge in the girl’s death”—shouted down the 6 “guilty” voters.

The jurors did their duty.  Move along—nothing to see here!

If those reflexively defending the system showed a smidgen of outrage over the verdict, contemplated the possibility that jurors might not have done their job, or expressed hope that Anthony would receive justice in some other way, their obsessive focus on the system might be understandable.

But no—in soft-on-crime leftists’ backwards view, a sociopath being found not guilty, despite overwhelming evidence against her, is ironclad proof that the system worked.

The reaction to the Anthony case reveals, not everyday citizens’ contempt for our legal system, but elitists’ callous, glib indifference to justice.

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Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

The Casey Anthony murder trial is the most depressing case currently working its way through the American court system, not just for the shocking and horrifying actions alleged, but for the way in which it embodies the prevalent left-wing worldview of phony victimhood.

All evidence suggests that 22-year-old Florida mother Casey Anthony killed her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee Marie Anthony, so she could resume the hard-partying lifestyle she enjoyed before she accidentally got pregnant with and gave birth to Caylee.

According to prosecutors, Anthony coldly, methodically drugged her daughter with chloroform, covered her mouth with duct tape to asphyxiate her, stuffed her dead body in a plastic bag, stowed it in the trunk of her car, concocted an elaborate series of lies to tell authorities and family regarding Caylee’s absence, and later dumped her daughter’s body in a swamp.

Anthony’s attorneys’ brilliant defense against the mass of forensic evidence the prosecutors presented to support their case was that Caylee actually fell in the family’s above-ground swimming pool and drowned—a claim for which they offered not a drop of physical evidence.  The accident happened due to neglect from Anthony which, they argued, was justified because she had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

In fact, the claim of sexual abuse was betrayed by such a complete lack of evidence during the trial that the judge refused to even let the defense utter it again in their closing arguments.

Defense attorneys couldn’t explain why Anthony would cover up an accidental death rather than call 911, why Anthony’s father would help cover up the death of his beloved granddaughter, why Anthony’s car’s trunk had traces of chloroform in it, or why Caylee’s skull had rotting strips of duct tape over its mouth and nose.

The defense called Caylee’s death an “accident that snowballed out of control”—you know, like when the hundreds of children who drown every year are whisked away by their conspiratorial mothers and grandfathers, wrapped in duct tape to make their deaths look like homicides, crammed in a car trunk for two weeks, and plunked in a nearby swamp.  Those sorts of everyday out-of-control accidents.

Anthony refused to take the stand, no doubt because she knew prosecutors would tear her testimony to shreds.  Even defense attorneys conceded that this congenital liar’s credibility was moot, due to the complicated, detailed fabrications she had fed investigators and her parents for a month after Caylee’s death.  These lies included nonexistent friends, a phony job at Universal Studios, a fake Mexican nanny scapegoat named “Zanny” who supposedly kidnapped Caylee, and an imaginary father for her daughter.

Inspection of Anthony’s computer’s hard drive revealed that in the months leading up to Caylee’s death, someone had done internet searches on phrases such as “how to make chloroform,” “neck-breaking,” and “ruptured spleen and death.”

There hasn’t been a case this open-and-shut since the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Naturally, where Simpson’s defense team argued that he was innocent because police who investigated the crime might have been racist, Anthony’s defense team argued that the outrageously suspicious actions Anthony performed after Caylee’s death were plausible because of the “abuse” Casey had experienced as a child.

Suppose even for a minute that you believed the defense’s crackpot theory about Anthony covering up an accidental death and making it look like a homicide because she “panicked.”  The victimhood excuse they offered for her actions reflects the trendy modern worldview that people are not responsible for their actions, but are rather the product of societal forces beyond their control that push them to and fro like trash on the beach.  Anthony’s defense attorneys argued that her elaborate lies were proof, not that she was a calculating liar who was responsible for the crime all evidence suggests she committed, but that she needed help and compassion because there was “something wrong with her.”  Is there any other era in American history in which attorneys would cast someone like Casey Anthony as the victim in this trial with a straight face?

Lead defense attorney Jose Baez argued that Anthony couldn’t help telling bald-faced lies about her daughter, because the sexual abuse from her father had “trained” her to lie about stressful events.  That’s funny—I don’t recall, say, concentration camp survivors becoming pathological liars who cover up every misstep in their lives because they were “trained” to lie about stressful events.

Even prosecutor Jeff Ashton succumbed to this passive, victim-oriented stance in the language of his closing arguments: “[T]he conflict between the life that she wanted and the life that was thrust upon her was simply irreconcilable.”

Thrust upon her?  There was only one act of thrusting in this sorry saga, and Casey Anthony was fully amenable to it.

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Democratic politicians believe that resigning after a scandal is more damning to their reputations than clinging to power and tarnishing their offices.

Based on the reaction of their voting base, apparently they’re right.

On Monday, New York Representative Anthony Weiner held a tearful press conference in which he admitted to having sent lewd photos of himself to half a dozen women and falsely claiming his Twitter account had been hacked.  In the same speech, he declared that he nonetheless had no intention of resigning.  His defenders in the press have been positively huffy at the mere suggestion of resignation.

Last year New York Representative Charles Rangel was found guilty of 11 ethics violations, including failure to pay taxes and non-disclosure of income.  The former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman remains proudly in office, after having abused reporters with multiple rounds of curse-laden scolding for daring to inquire about his wrongdoing.

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Senators Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Roland Burris were all under investigation, reprimanded, or indicted in connection with the pay-for-play scandal involving President-elect Obama’s Senate seat in 2008, yet all refused to give up their seats.  Blagojevich was forced to step down by the Illinois legislature, which barred him from public service for life.

New York Governor Elliot Spitzer was compelled to resign after a prostitution scandal in 2008, but shamelessly accepted an offer to host a highly-touted, prime time political talk show on CNN two years later.

Louisiana Representative William Jefferson was found guilty of 11 bribery and corruption charges in 2007 and sentenced to 13 years in jail, but did not resign.  He won reelection in 2006, a year after the FBI recovered $90,000 hidden in his freezer, but was voted out next election.

Ohio Representative Jim Traficant was sentenced to 8 years in jail for financial corruption in 2002, but did not resign and was expelled from the House.  Not deterred in the least in his political ambitions, Traficant ran a historic (losing) reelection campaign from his prison cell in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.  Around the same time, California Representative Gary Condit was revealed to have had an affair with intern Chandra Levy, but declined to resign and even ran for reelection (and lost).  Proving that sleazeballs stick up for one another, Condit was the sole ‘nay’ vote in the 420-1 resolution to expel Traficant.

President Bill Clinton lied under oath about his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky in 1998.  Clinton was a serial philanderer and sexual harasser and possible rapist.  His punishment: increased approval ratings, the chance to stay in office for the remainder of his term, and status since then as a highly sought-after speaker, political consultant, and international ambassador.

Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was caught on tape smoking crack with an FBI informant in 1990 and sent to jail on drug charges.  Nonetheless, Barry served out his full term as mayor while awaiting trial.  After fulfilling his six-month sentence, Barry shocked the nation by running for and winning the mayoralty in 1994 and serving another four-year term.

Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank spent the 1980s living with a paid escort and convicted felon who was running a prostitution ring out of Frank’s Washington townhouse.  Frank was reprimanded by the House, yet won reelection with 66% of the vote the year the scandal was uncovered.  He has never resigned, has been given plum political appointments, and has only become more popular among supporters over time.

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy drove a young woman off a bridge and left her to drown in 1969, yet received only a two-month suspended sentence.  Though the notoriety from the incident dampened his presidential aspirations, Kennedy never resigned and held office until his death four decades later.

In contrast to these Democratic sleazebags, Republican politicians are more likely to recognize that the honorable thing to do when found guilty of wrongdoing is to quit, even when they have carried out far less egregious acts than Democrats.

Senator John Ensign of Nevada resigned last month over an extramarital affair.

New York Representative Chris Lee resigned this year after it was discovered he had sent shirtless photos to a woman he met online.

Idaho Senator Larry Craig tapped his foot in a bathroom stall to solicit a sexual act, was charged with disorderly conduct, and subsequently announced his resignation in 2007, though the charges were so flimsy that he changed his mind and simply decided not to run for reelection.

Florida Representative Mark Foley sent flirty texts to postpubescent aides; he resigned in 2006.

George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove resigned over his role in the “Lawyergate” non-scandal and the trumped-up Valerie Plame affair.  Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales also resigned over Lawyergate.

Tom DeLay resigned in 2006 after being investigated but not indicted in connection with the Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Louisiana Senator and Speaker-elect Bob Livingston resigned in 1999 due to an extramarital affair.  Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich resigned after charges of financial impropriety in 1997.

President Richard Nixon was involved in activity that would have constituted a slow day at the office during the Clinton presidency, yet he resigned in 1974.  Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 after committing tax fraud.

There’s clearly ample wrongdoing on both sides.  Why do Democratic politicians feel they have the sacred right to stay in office even after they’ve disgraced themselves and embarrassed the constituents who voted for them?

Simple: Liberals see themselves as sagacious, visionary elites who wield power because they have been sanctioned to control the lives of the ignorant masses.

In contrast, Republican politicians understand that, just as government should be limited in size and scope, so should their powers, which means that if they prove themselves unfit for the job, they are easily replaceable.

Anthony Weiner is a sleazeball, a liar, and a fraud—but hey, he can’t leave, because there’s important work to be done, like nationalizing the country’s health care system.

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Every time a gun crime happens in this country, the mainstream media give it sensationalistic coverage, and liberals cover their mouths with their hands like little girls and then remove them and start howling about the necessity of even more gun control legislation than the historically high levels we have now.

As the just published third edition of John Lott’s classic More Guns, Less Crime exhaustively demonstrates, liberals are moving in exactly the wrong direction in their zeal to stop gun crime.

Lott’s central criminology thesis is that (1) criminals are less likely to commit violent crimes if they know there are significant numbers of concealed carry permit holders with weapons, (2) gun restrictions make it harder for law-abiding citizens to obtain guns for self-defense, (3) gun restrictions have no effect on criminals’ intent or ability to obtain weapons, and (4) gun restrictions thus disarm only potential crime victims, whereas reduced gun restrictions arm citizens and frighten off criminals.

Lott supports his hypothesis via mountains of data analyzed at the national, state, and county level, looking at both overall rates of crimes and the more relevant changes in trends before and after permissive nondiscretionary laws are passed.  He examines multiple categories of crime including murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery.  He shows that his results hold, both controlling and not controlling for every demographic variable under the sun, as well as unrelated but important crime rate indicators such as arrest rates, policing strategies, and national trends.

Lott shows that the number of accidental deaths from increased possession of licensed weapons is so minor that it is dwarfed by the number of additional lives saved via increased citizen defense against would-be criminals.

Lott notes the astonishing fact that loosening gun restrictions has had such a positive impact on reducing states’ crime rates over the last two decades that not a single state legislature has even scheduled a debate on repealing nondiscretionary gun laws once they have been passed.

In her semiweekly snarkfest in The New York Times, Gail Collins frequently mocks pro-gun legislators for opposing the slightest, most seemingly inconsequential gun control restrictions, such as not recognizing permits across state lines, banning guns in national parks, and instituting gun show sales regulations.

In fact, Lott’s book just about literally shows that having as many law-abiding citizens with permits as possible, with as few restrictions on obtaining and keeping permits as possible, and the carrying of concealed weapons allowed in as many places as possible, reduces crime to the greatest degree.

For example, Lott finds that murder, robbery, and aggravated assault all increase in states that adopt “one-gun-a-month” rules, and that rape increases after the imposition of a mandatory waiting period.  Rape, robbery, and burglary rates increase in states that pass “safe-storage” rules, and rape increased significantly after the adoption of the 1994 anti-gun Brady law.  The number of permits in a state significantly predicts reduced crime rates for murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and violent crime overall.

Lott’s findings are instructive in light of the recent University of Texas-Austin shooting, in which college sophomore Colton Tooley unleashed a hail of bullets from his semiautomatic weapon onto students in the street, then headed to the library and shot himself.  The shooting echoed the infamous 1966 shooting on the university’s campus, in which student Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the UT clock tower and fired into the crowd, killing 13 people and injuring 2.

UT Austin, like most college campuses, doesn’t allow concealed carry gun permits for students or even security guards.  The state legislature introduced a bill to allow such permits in 2009, but Democrats defeated it.  Republican state senators plan to reintroduce the bill in the 2011 session.  The recent UT Austin shooting could have been prevented or mitigated by the widespread knowledge on campus that guards and possibly students were carrying concealed weapons.

But the Associated Press reported anti-gun nut John Woods, genius graduate student (and major in a field other than logic), saying, “I can’t think of any way that the situation yesterday would have been improved by additional guns.”  Hmm… maybe one of the additional gun holders could have threatened or shot the attacker before he sprayed more bullets into the crowd?  Or maybe the gunman wouldn’t have pulled his crazy stunt if he had known there were numerous law-abiding permit holders on campus with concealed weapons ready to stop him?

Woods should know better, given that he was attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute during its 2007 mass shooting—another bloody massacre that could have been prevented or mitigated if the school had allowed guns on campus and one in which several of Woods’ friends were among the 32 killed.

Lott’s book, whose foundational empirical study was comprehensive and prescient enough to be capable of answering virtually every possible objection when it first came out in 1998 (in a chapter containing detailed responses to two dozen hypothetical counterarguments to his work), responded to critics’ actual arguments in the second edition in 2000, and to additional arguments in the third edition released this year.  Lott did so via references to his original analyses, new analyses done on the original data, new analyses done on new data, and new analyses done on critics’ data.  Thus, the most recent More Guns bears the distinction of featuring Lott’s defense against critics of his defense against critics of his defense against critics of his original study.  I think he’s pretty well answered any fair and reasonable person’s concerns by now.

Lott concludes More Guns, 3^rd edition thusly: “The gun-control debate has changed dramatically over the last decade.  In the past the question was how much guns caused crime.  The debate now is over whether there are benefits from gun ownership and how large those benefits are” (emphasis added).

He’s wrong about the debate over whether there are benefits from gun ownership—Lott’s work has conclusively settled the matter.



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Image by Getty Images via @daylife

In 2006 Congressional Democrats campaigned on the conceit that Republicans were corrupt up to their coke-filled noses and incapable of governing so much as a taco stand, and that the country was yearning for a breath of fresh air from the party that brought us Gary Condit, William Jefferson, Cynthia McKinney, Jim McGreevey, John Murtha, Eliot Spitzer, and Eric Massa.

After her historic transition to the position of House Speaker-elect, Nancy Pelosi promised, “This leadership team will create the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.”

Pelosi pledged to “drain the swamp” of slimy Republicans who tapped their feet in bathroom stalls, sent flirty texts to post-pubescent pages, and… what else was it Congressional Republicans were supposedly up to in 2006?

Ignoring all the scandals associated with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards in their race for the presidency and focusing only on Congressional misdeeds, and starting only with Obama’s November 2008 election, the past 21 months have brought a flurry of Democratic indiscretions:

•    Illinois Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. is under investigation by the Justice Department regarding a taped conversation in which impeached Governor Rod Blagojevich told a staffer that a fundraiser for Jackson would donate $1.5 million to Blagojevich’s reelection campaign if President-elect Obama’s Senate seat went to Jackson

•    Senator Roland Burris was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for providing misleading and incomplete information to the Senate in advance of his confirmation to Obama’s Senate seat

•    Congressional Democrats rushed the $787 billion stimulus spending bill to a vote before it could be edited and violated their pledge to post it online for five days before signing it

•    Congressional Democrats self-righteously pushed for PAYGO regulations mandating that money be found in the budget for new entitlements, then ignored their own law to push through unfunded, extended rounds of unemployment benefits

•    Congressional leadership tailored the health care reform bill to include payoffs such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, and Gator-Aid, and removed these only after they were publicized

•    Congressional leadership attempted such tricks to get health care legislation passed as introducing the Slaughter Rule (aka “deem and “pass”), using budget reconciliation for something it wasn’t meant for, making the bill “budget neutral” by pairing six years of benefits with ten years of taxes, and deceiving on-the-fence pro-life Democrats with an unenforceable executive order banning health care funding for abortions

Last Thursday Democratic Representative Charles Rangel, former Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was charged with 13 House ethics violations, including failure to disclose income, failure to pay taxes on his condo in the Dominican Republic, possession of four city-subsidized rent-controlled luxury apartments, use of the apartments for campaign committee operations, improper acceptance of corporate-sponsored trips to Caribbean islands, and intervention to award a tax break worth tens of millions of dollars to a major corporate donor to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service.

Rangel has responded to the charges, for which he has been under investigation for two years, by offering reporters such open and informative replies as “Where I live and how I live? It’s nobody’s damn business where I live,” “Common sense dictates that members of Congress should not be held responsible for wrongdoing,” and “Why don’t you mind your own goddamned business?”

Rangel stepped down from his chairman post, which was taken over by Representative Pete Stark—who subsequently resigned over his own tax scandal.

Over the weekend Pelosi told Christiane Amanpour that Rangel’s role in her “most ethical Congress” was invisible to her: she referred Amanpour to the Office of Congressional Ethics, which Pelosi herself set up in 2009, saying, “I’m totally out of the loop. It is independent. It is confidential, classified, secret, whatever. We don’t know what it is.”

2010 Pelosi campaign commercial: “I can’t see rule-breaking from my House!”

This week Democratic Representative Maxine Waters, who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, was charged with three ethics violations related to the claim that she secured bailout money for OneUnited Bank, for which her husband had served on the board and whose stock he owned, and which received $12 million in funds. Like Rangel, Waters is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and chose to face a trial in the fall rather than plead guilty to the allegations.

Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, who helped allocate bank bailout funds, told Waters at the time that her involvement in the OneUnited bailout was a conflict of interest and that “You should stay out of it.”

Naturally, the mainstream media is blaming the eruption of Democratic corruption on the same cause to which they attributed the Tea Party uprising… racism!

In a story on the racial angle to the recent allegations, the L.A. Times suggested this howler of a defense: “Ethics advocates maintain that lax enforcement of House ethics rules encouraged Rangel and Waters to take defiant stands.” Next on the MSM’s apologia schedule: “Obama’s terrorism experts maintain that Bush’s lax enforcement of airline security encouraged Saudi hijackers to take defiant stands.”

Camille Paglia recently praised Pelosi’s ability to corral House troops to support the health care reform bill, even though the bill is a rotting corpse of bureaucratic sleaze and fraud: “Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism… [She] demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her… As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors!… [T]his rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare.”

Apparently it’s come to this: feminists are now praising women for their ability to be as corrupt as men.

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