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.  read more »

If there’s an 80% chance President Michele Bachmann would repeal ObamaCare, enact entitlement reform, and prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, I’m sold.

Whatever trivial misstatements she’s made in her political career, this three-term Minnesota Representative is the strongest nominee the GOP has seen so far this campaign season.

Fox News host Chris Wallace recently demonstrated his journalistic integrity and respect for women in politics by asking Bachmann, “Are you a flake?”

There’s more evidence that Barack Obama isn’t a capitalist than that Bachmann isn’t a serious candidate, though I don’t recall any journalist asking candidate Obama, “Are you a socialist?”  If this is how Fox treats Bachmann, one can only imagine how the mainstream media will treat her.

Fortunately, Bachmann appears quite capable of defending her record.

Unlike candidate Obama, Bachmann has a real work history, with actual responsibilities, including five years’ tenure as a tax attorney, and experience running two mental health clinics, a charter school, and a family farm.

Unlike Senator Obama, Bachmann productively used her time in Congress, taking leadership roles on allowing drilling in ANWR, repealing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and replacing ObamaCare with free market reforms.

Bachmann has labeled herself a “constitutional conservative”—precisely the correct label to use in this bizarre era of pay czars, light bulb bans, and trillion-dollar deficits.  read more »

While the three witches from Macbeth and that troll Stephen Breyer are busy conjuring up ways to make our lives miserable, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been handing down a remarkable number of excellent decisions as it closes its current term.  Is there hope yet for finding ObamaCare unconstitutional in 2012?

On Monday, the court ruled in favor of Wal-Mart that 1.6 million female employees from all different experience levels, supervisory positions, managerial structures, work specialties, employment backgrounds, ages, races, geographical regions, and 3,400 different retail stores cannot collectively prove that they were paid less or denied promotions because of their genitalia.

The plaintiffs didn’t have a particular manager in common, or a particular store, or even a particular region of the country.

Ignore for the moment the fact that a much higher percentage of female employees work part-time or take extended leave to give birth to or care for children, have shorter work histories, or assume fewer responsibilities or work less overtime because they have more modest aspirations for reaching upper management.  Never mind that Wal-Mart was named one of the 35 best companies for promoting females in 2007 by the National Association for Female Executives.

The fact remains: The purpose of our court system is to dispense justice by punishing offenders for specific, provable acts of wrongdoing.  The purpose of a class action lawsuit is to allow numerous victims who have suffered an identical inconvenience from a specific, narrow, defective or faulty product, service, or contractor—a medicine with an unforeseen side effect, a car door handle that breaks off, a provision violated in the fine print of a banking contract—to pool their resources and force a corporation to address a systematic problem via a substantial monetary settlement.  read more »

John King: Welcome to our 2012 Republican primary debate.  On stage are all the candidates who felt like showing up tonight.  Let’s skip the boring opening statements and have candidates introduce themselves.

Rick Santorum: I’m a former senator who nonetheless has experience making tough executive governing managerial ruling leadership decisions.

Michele Bachmann: I’m a businesswoman with 5 children and 23 foster children.

Newt Gingrich: Obama sucks.

Mitt Romney: I lost in 2008, but that won’t happen again, because Republicans are the party of “it’s his turn.”

Ron Paul: I am a senator who used to deliver babies and now champions liberty and libertarianism.

Tim Pawlenty: I’m a husband, father, neighbor, and lover.  Of America.

Herman Cain: I am not a politician and have no political experience.  I know pizza.

King: What would you do to create jobs?

Cain: Uncertainty is stalling this train that is our economy.  We need to lower taxes, which is like greasing the caboose, and then decrease interest rates, which is like putting the fuel in the tank of the train that is our economy.

King: Is it possible for the economy to grow at 5% a year?

Pawlenty: Our president is an anemic declinist who thinks we can’t have 5% growth like China or Brazil.

King: What are your views on Dodd-Frank?

Bachmann: I’m looking forward to answering that question.  But first… Guess what: I’m running for president!

King: What three steps would you take to repeal ObamaCare?  read more »

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.

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.

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.  read more »

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at Congressional Democrats’ withering scorn for House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system, a plan to which their party has yet to offer an alternative.

This is the party that vituperatively opposed all GOP spending cuts for the past two years, yet unlawfully failed to pass a budget during that period.

The party that insists on calling Republicans the Party of No should be labeled the Party of No Ideas of Their Own.

Charles Blow, for example, filled a recent column with purple prose elucidating why voters find Ryan’s plan repugnant: “[T]he electorate is hurting—a pulsing mass of tender nerves, hypersensitive to things that portend pain, reflexively reacting to the thump of even the softest mallet.”  (And most of them don’t even read the New York Times!)  He continued: “This is not to say that Medicare isn’t in crisis.  It is.  But, we don’t have to gut it to save it.”  He then spent precisely zero space suggesting any alternative solutions.

Blow and other liberals have been crowing about the obscure special election Democrat Kathy Hochul won in NY-26 last week.  They claim that Republican Jane Corwin lost because of Ryan’s recently proposed Medicare plan, since seniors in the district were terrified that electing her would increase the chances of their Medicare payments being cut.  read more »

Unless Mitch Daniels has an unprecedented change of heart or Rudy Giuliani lives up to rumors he’s planning another run, I’m throwing my support for the 2012 Republican presidential nominee to a candidate who isn’t yet competing.  Here’s why:

1. Republican gubernatorial candidates in 2010 did spectacularly well, mostly by emulating New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s style and substance on the campaign trail.  Christie is on the cutting edge of the Republican Party: Other GOP governors are taking his lead by standing up to public sector unions, refusing to raise taxes, declining to fund unaffordable public works boondoggles, and slashing spending.  Even Democratic governors such as Andrew Cuomo are following Christie’s playbook.

2. Christie has a talent that Donald Trump supporters wrongly insisted would make the latter a uniquely formidable candidate: the ability to take the fight to the enemy.  In Trump’s case, they meant his confronting President Obama over the trivial birth certificate issue, whereas Christie has been battling teachers’ unions in New Jersey.  But Christie’s fearless propensity to confront his current opponents bodes well for his future capacity to face off with a certain big-eared neophyte who stumbles off track without his teleprompter, and always looks nasty and petty when he fights back.

3. Christie is wildly popular as a potential candidate among Republican voters, a fact that gets masked by the fact that his non-candidacy means he’s excluded from many straw polls.  But John Zogby regularly includes Christie as a choice, and Christie took first place in all four of the primary polls Zogby’s run since November 2010.  read more »

Now that Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee have been neutralized as 2012 Republican presidential primary candidates, it’s time to get to work discrediting the thoroughly inadequate and inappropriate front-runner wannabe, Newt Gingrich.

The former Speaker of the House, who initiated the groundbreaking Contract With America in 1994, then pissed away the Republican Congress’s momentum out of timidity after President Bill Clinton was reelected, had his chance to influence the course of national events.  With the notable exception of the successful Welfare Reform Act of 1996, he failed in his mission.

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” candidate Gingrich revealed that he had fallen for the trap of thinking that not raising the federal debt ceiling means that the U.S. will default on its debt, or that default is necessarily a bad thing.  He told host David Gregory that if Obama and the Democratic Senate don’t compromise with House Republicans, he would favor an endless, niggling series of tiny budget cuts and “a debt ceiling [increase] every three weeks” until a long-term solution was reached.

Gingrich thinks the individual mandate component of ObamaCare—the most contentious, despised, and constitutionally dubious element of the bill—is a dandy idea.  He’s quick to clarify that he thinks such an undue violation of our individual freedoms should be carried out on the state level, not the federal level—though that’s not what he said a few years ago.  read more »

Liberals have been howling over the media’s claim that Osama bin Laden’s killing has “renewed” the debate over enhanced interrogation techniques, when any sensible patriotic American surely recognizes these as unconscionable acts of barbarism (though shooting an unarmed man in the face is apparently still acceptable).

In fact, any sensible patriotic American understands that such techniques are justified, indispensable tools for intelligence gathering in a war against Islamist savages who don’t respect the Geneva Conventions or any other international law.

But liberals love trying to confuse us with the two controversies surrounding EITs: their humaneness and their efficacy.  So if they can’t convince normal Americans that splashing water on a terrorist’s face—a technique carried out on our own special forces as part of their training—is an unspeakable atrocity, then they simply switch subjects and claim that EITs aren’t effective.

Just how ineffective are EITs?  Well, Pakistani-born, al Qaeda devotee Hassan Ghul experienced them several years ago at a CIA “black site” prison in Poland, and pretty soon he was singing like a canary about the alias of a trusted courier to bin Laden at his Abbottabad compound.

Ghul wasn’t waterboarded, but al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was.

Liberals, who are naturally only concerned about our well-being, soberly inform us that waterboarding and other forms of “torture” do not lead to reliable information—that detainees simply lie in order to make the interrogation stop.  read more »

Obama doesn’t want to increase taxes on oil companies because it will bring down the price of gas.  He wants to increase them because it will raise the price of gas.

This week the House will vote on whether to expand offshore drilling and eliminate red tape needed to get drilling permits approved.  Democrats also hope to vote on whether to end billions of dollars in tax breaks to oil companies.

The media have been happy to do Obama’s bidding by referring to the tax breaks as “subsidies”—as though U.S. Treasury officials were riding around the country in an armored van handing out satchels of gold to Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhilips executives.

In fact, we’re talking about reducing the gargantuan taxes these companies pay for the sin of drilling for oil and making it widely available to a country that uses it in every daily setting and is dangerously dependent on Middle Eastern imports.

Since oil companies are likely to pass the cost of increased taxation on to consumers in the form of higher gas prices, the Democrats’ plan will, as usual, do nothing to solve the underlying problem, make things worse, and give greater influence to the federal government.  Mission accomplished!

Ending tax breaks for oil companies is the closest Democrats can get to imposing an outright gasoline tax, which they know is politically impossible during a recession.

To be fair, oil companies might not pass the entire added cost on to consumers—they might cut back on hiring, reduce wages, or otherwise trim their workforces.  Such actions will no doubt be wondrously helpful for the high unemployment rate.  read more »