A potentially huge Democratic scandal is brewing in upstate New York, regarding a trophy-keeping abortion practitioner who had a collection of 17 frozen fetuses confiscated from a clinic in Albany back in 1996.  An assistant to the Attorney General’s office is now claiming that the doctor, Dr. Steven Chase Brigham, was never thoroughly investigated due to political pressure from the Albany Democratic machine.  Now, sixteen years after the fact, that same doctor has been charged with murder.

Dr. Steven Bringham

Could hindering an investigation of Dr. Brigham make Democrats in Albany an accessory to murder?

Last week, LifeNews reported on a pair of abortion practitioners who were charged with murder across two states:

Operation Rescue has learned that abortionists Steven Chase Brigham and Nicola Irene Riley have been charged with murder related to the deaths of viable babies at an illegal secret abortion clinic that the pair operated in Elkton, Maryland.

Brigham is currently in the custody at the Camden County Jail in New Jersey and Riley was arrested and is currently in the custody of the Salt Lake County Jail in Utah. Both are awaiting extradition to Maryland.

Brigham was charged with five counts of first-degree murder and five counts of second-degree murder. Riley was charged with one count of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder. The charges are the result of a Grand Jury investigation.

This is the same Dr. Brigham who had once been profiled in a New York Times article with sympathetic leanings to the cause of abortion doctors, even citing his record as “proof of the shortage of abortion providers” and demonstrating that “the small number of people still performing abortions are working in a war zone.”

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UPDATE (11/16 8:42 am EST): Savannah police have now clarified this morning to Big Government via telephone that the shooting of Occupy Savannah activist Jonathan Brazell is being investigated as an ordinary robbery, due partly to the fact that it occurred at a significant distance from the protest site itself.

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Social media has been the principal vehicle of communication for the #Occupy movement. Through Facebook and Twitter, the loosely-knit band of anarchists, communists and leftist agitators have coordinated their actions and disseminated news to supporters around the world. There has also been a very dark side, but we’ll leave that aside for now. This afternoon, #OccupySavannah, through its Facebook page, announced the murder of an activist at the #Occupy camp:

The posting raises many obvious questions.

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From the Associated Press:

American Amanda Knox was acquitted of murder and sexual assault by an Italian appeal court on Monday after four years in custody over the killing of her British housemate Meredith Kercher.

The dramatic ruling overturns a 26-year sentence handed down to Knox in the original trial in which she had been found guilty of murdering Kercher together with her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and local drifter Rudy Guede.

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We’ve begun a battle of enormous consequence to our entire nation here in the great state of Mississippi.  Abortion is on the November 8 ballot in Mississippi, in the form of an initiative to change the state constitution by defining “person” as any human from the moment of fertilization.  The amendment is based on statements made by the judges who voted in favor of abortion during the Roe v. Wade oral re-arguments.

Unlike some other states, it is very difficult to get a voter initiative on the ballot in Mississippi; this year, we have three initiatives that would amend our state constitution, a truly remarkable feat.  All three are key conservative issues in an overwhelmingly conservative state:  abortion, voter identification, and eminent domain abuse.Personally, I’m hoping for a triple play, and voting “YES!” on all three.  The issue that I am working on, however, is abortion.

When this battle is won in Mississippi, it doesn’t just set up a challenge to Roe v. Wade, it eviscerates that case and all of its unholy progeny.  It gives a method by which every state in the nation can extend the most basic civil rights to the most innocent and deserving members of the human race — our unborn children.

When is a person a “person”?

All humans deserve equal protection of the laws and the right to due process, but the law only extends these rights to every “person.”  Thanks to the outstanding work of Personhood Mississippi, we in Mississippi will have the chance to be the first state in the history of our union to define a “person” to include all unborn humans.  Initiative 26 will define the term person as follows:

SECTION 33.  Person defined.  As used in this Article III of the state constitution, “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.

If Mississippians vote Yes on Amendment 26, all human beings would be ensured equal rights in our state and protection under law, regardless of their size, location or developmental stage.  Calling abortion “murder” will no longer be merely a moral judgment, but an established legal determination.  In other words, abortion will be illegal.

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Just one week ago on Sunday, June 19^th, we were reminded once again that our God given right to life, as declared in the Declaration of Independence, is meaningless without the right to self-defense.  That day, Father’s Day, a terrible tragedy took place in a Medford, New York pharmacy when an armed robber shot and murdered four innocent people.

Imagine yourself in that pharmacy.  You are facing an obvious threat from a man with a gun.  You cannot retreat because the gunman is too close.  You have no weapon, because the State of New York has made it extremely difficult to posses any sort of a weapon, and certainly not a gun.  Hence, your only means of self-defense is to plead for compassion from a soulless thug.  At that point, with your right to life materially impaired by the government restricting your right to self-defense, you simply die.

Gun law advocates are undoubtedly ready to demand more control of firearms, and argue that citizens should rely on the police.  They are missing the point.  Had those innocent victims in the Medford Pharmacy managed to call the police and had the police responded within minutes, all four would still have been killed because the robber acted within seconds.  The painful meaning of the phrase, “when seconds count, the police are minutes away” was all too clear on June 19^th.

For decades the National Rifle Association, gun rights advocates in general and especially hunters have worked hard to prevent gun laws from becoming too restrictive.  Their argument is the Second Amendment and its words proclaiming, “…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  For all their fine work, these groups are also missing the point.  Guns, knives, batons and other tools of defense are only tools.  It is the right to self-defense that has been under attack all this time.

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The District of Columbia’s murder rate plummeted by an astounding 25 percent last year, much faster than for the US as a whole or for similarly sized cities. If you had asked Chicago’s Mayor Daley, that wasn’t supposed to happen. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision to strike down DC’s handgun ban and gunlock requirements should have lead to a surge in murders, with Wild West shootouts. The Supreme Court might keep Daley’s predictions in mind today as they hear the oral arguments on Tuesday in the Chicago handgun ban case.

Everyone in DC now knows that murder rates rose after the handgun ban and fell after they were removed. Unfortunately, Chicago never learned that lesson. The forthcoming third edition of More Guns, Less Crime shows that in the 17 years after its ban on new handguns went into effect, there are only two years where Chicago’s murder rate was as low as it was in 1982. Chicago’s murder rate fell relative to other largest 50 largest cities prior to the ban and rose relative to them afterwards. For example, Chicago’s murder rate went from equalling the average for those other cities in 1982, to exceeding their average murder rate by 32 percent in 1992 and by 68 percent in 2002. There is no year after the ban that Chicago’s murder rate fared as well relative to other cities as it did in 1982.

Similar comparisons exist for the top ten largest cities, the US as a whole, or the counties that boarder Chicago. The accompanying figure shows how Chicago’s murder rates changed relative to the rates in the adjacent counties. In the five years before the ban, Chicago’s murder rate fell by 28 percent relative to those counties. (County level crime data only goes back to 1977.) in the five years after the ban, Chicago’s murder rate doubled relative to those other counties.

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