[guest post by Dana]

Darren Wilson was interviewed today at a secret location by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos:

Wilson said that Brown reached into his police car and grabbed for his gun, causing Wilson to fear for his life.

“All I wanted to do was live,” said Wilson, who the grand jury declined to indict in connection with the fatal shooting in August.

About his struggle with Brown:

“I didn’t know if I’d be able to withstand another hit like that,” Wilson said.

“I had reached out my window with my right hand to grab onto his forearm ’cause I was gonna try and move him back and get out of the car to where I’m no longer trapped,” Wilson said.

“I just felt the immense power that he had. And then the way I’ve described it is it was like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big this man was,” Wilson said.

Further:

When asked if he would be haunted by the incident, Wilson said, “I don’t think it’s a haunting; it’s always going to be something that happened.”

“The reason I have a clean conscience is I know I did my job right,” he said.

Wilson said he asked himself if he could legally shoot Brown. “I thought, ‘I have to. If I don’t, he will kill me if he gets to me.’ “

Today hundreds more National Guard troops have been deployed to Ferguson. Although 700 National Guard troops were deployed Monday, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles is questioning the delay last night, stating the National Guard “was not deployed in enough time to save all of our businesses.” (The damage count after last night’s rioting: a dozen Ferguson buildings burned and 61 people were arrested on charges including burglary, illegal weapons possession and unlawful assembly.)

“The decision to delay the deployment of the National Guard is deeply concerning,” Knowles told a news conference. “We are asking that the governor make available and deploy all necessary resources to prevent the further destruction of property and the preservation of life in the city of Ferguson.”

The mayor is not the only one questioning the delay:

“Here’s my question that the governor must answer,” Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder said today. “Is the reason that the national guard was not in there is because the Obama administration and the Holder Justice Department leaned on you to keep them out?”

Kinder noted that the Guard had been sent to other locations in the region. “I cannot imagine any other reason why the governor who mobilized the National Guard would not have them in (to Ferguson) to stop this, before it started,” he said.

It is no secret that the president was caught off guard and less than happy when Gov. Nixon deployed Guard troops in August at the time of Brown’s death, and last week, Eric Holder voiced his criticism of Gov. Nixon’s decision to call up the National Guard. Perhaps after seeing the night of violence, Holder, who was “disappointed” by the actions of some, might see the increased and immediate need for Guard troops:

“It is clear, I think, that acts of violence threaten to drown out those who have legitimate voices, legitimate demonstrators,” Holder told reporters. “Those acts of violence cannot and will not be condoned.”

Gov. Nixon said that more 2,200 National Guardsmen will be in the Ferguson area tonight.

–Dana

Added: From commenter seeRpea comes this letter from Ronald T. Hasko, President of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and Former Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to President Obama entreating him to reengage with the law enforcement community in light of the chasm between the administration and the men and women who serve and protect, including in Ferguson. In part:

…The growing divide between the police and the people – perhaps best characterized by protesters in Ferguson, Mo., who angrily chanted, “It’s not black or white. It’s blue!” – only benefits of members of a political class seeking to vilify law enforcement for other societal failures. This puts our communities at greater risk, especially the most vulnerable among us.

Your attorney general, Eric Holder, is chief among the antagonists. During his tenure as the head of the Department of Justice, Mr. Holder claims to have investigated twice as many police and police departments as any of his predecessors. Of course, this includes his ill-timed decision to launch a full investigation into the Ferguson Police Department at the height of racial tensions in that community, throwing gasoline on a fire that was already burning. Many officers were disgusted by such a transparent political maneuver at a time when presidential and attorney general leadership could have calmed a truly chaotic situation.

It won’t be long before the American people turn their attention to other matters. Long after Ferguson is forgotten, police officers across America will still remember the way their senior federal executives turned their back on them with oft-repeated suggestions that race-based policing drives a biased, broken law enforcement agenda.

[guest post by Dana]

That Jonathan Gruber is so smart! Just like he knows the American people are stupid, he also knows that abortion is worth its weight in economic benefit and societal gain. Life? What life?

We find evidence of sizeable positive selection: the average living circumstances of cohorts of children born immediately after abortion became legalized improved substantially relative to preceding cohorts, and relative to places where the legal status of abortion was not changing. Our results suggest that the marginal children who were not born as a result of abortion legalization would have systematically been born into worse circumstances had the pregnancies not been terminated: they would have been 70% more likely to live in a single parent household, 40% more likely to live in poverty, 35% more likely to die during the first year of life, and 50% more likely to be in a household collecting welfare. The last of these finding implies that the selection effects operating through the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare payments through the year 1994.

No wonder this infamous architect had the president’s ear and no wonder Obamacare is laden with abortion subsidies.

In a smart column today, Thomas Sowell questions the whole lot of our “betters”. You know who they are: the Grubers of the world, the complicit media and “professional” journalists, and the Democrats and legal experts who spew their mumbo-jumbo legalese in an attempt to defend president’s outrageous disregard for the Constitution. In other words, those who know better than us. And sadly, if Americans weren’t so stupid, everyone would understand that we are talking about something that, in the long run, negatively impacts both sides of the aisle. It’s not what we’ve gained, but rather it’s what we’ve lost.

No one can know for sure what motivated Professor Gruber to do what he did, or what motivated the media to stonewall as if he had never spilled the beans, or the liberal law professors to give Obama cover while he violated the Constitution.

But running through all of their actions seems to be a vision of the world, and a vision of themselves, that is a continuing danger to the fundamental basis of this country, whatever the specific issue might be.

Probably few people on the political left are opposed to the Constitution of the United States, much less actively plotting to undermine it. But, on issue after issue, what they want to do requires them to circumvent the three words with which the Constitution begins: “We, the people…”

Many on the left may want to help “the people.” But once you start from the premise that you know what is best for the people, better than they know themselves, you have to figure ways around a Constitution based on the idea that the people not only have a right to choose their government and control government policy with their votes, but also that there are vast areas of the people’s lives that are none of the government’s business.

Jonathan Gruber’s notion that the people are “stupid” is not fundamentally different from what Barack Obama said to his fellow elite leftists in San Francisco, when he derided ordinary Americans as petty people who want to cling to their guns and their religion. We need to see through such arrogant elitists if we want to cling to our freedom.

In the meantime, responding to a letter from Rep. Darrell Issa requesting Gruber to answer questions about the lack of transparency and deception regarding the Affordable Care Act, Gruber agreed to testify next month.

“From the outset, the health law has been the poster child for this administration’s broken transparency promises,” Issa said in a written statement.

“Jonathan Gruber, one of ObamaCare’s chief architects, publicly lauded the ‘lack of transparency’ that was necessary to pass the law and credited ‘the stupidity of the American voter’ that allowed the administration to mislead the public,” Issa said.

–Dana