Who's at fault?

Stolen in its entirety from NRO's The Corner is this gem from Mark Steyn:

A mentally disturbed man is wandering through traffic outside New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. Naturally, the NYPD open fire. They miss the guy. However, the sidewalks being full of people, they manage to hit two female pedestrians, one of them already using a walker, which comes in handy when the coppers shoot you in the leg.

 So the DA charges the guy with assaulting the women:

“The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.

Ah, yes: the “situation” injured the innocent bystanders. If you outlaw guns, only situations will have guns.

The defendant is looking at 25 years in jail for the crime of provoking law enforcement into shooting random citizens. If this flies in New York, then there is no law.

This is just the latest in the even growing trend whereby just about anything you do can be construed as a crime.  The rush to criminalize ordinary behavior is one more example of the ever-expanding reach of The State to control and punish the citizenry.

Follow the money

More crony capitalism, this time from New York City.  From the New York Post:

Here’s an inconvenient truth: New York is greening the wallet of Al Gore.

Embattled city Comptroller John Liu has delivered a $16.56 million contract to the former vice president’s environmentally friendly investment firm, Generation Investment Management, to help manage hundreds of millions of dollars in city pension funds, The Post has learned.

The Comptroller’s Office had previously awarded Gore’s firm $12.8 million in pension-fund business under Liu’s predecessor, Bill Thompson.

Since 2009, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has approved $6 million in contracts to the firm, co-founded and chaired by Gore. Generation now manages nearly a half-billion dollars of state pension-fund investments, records show.

In total, that’s more than $35 million in greenbacks to Gore’s firm.

Liu’s office proposes investment-management contracts to the board of trustees of the city’s five major pension funds. Generation is an investment manager for two of them: the New York City Employees Retirement System (NYCERS) and the Police Pension Fund.

But the Gore connection has been a closely held secret.

One NYCERS trustee said he didn’t even know Gore’s firm was a city investment manager.
“That’s been way under the radar. I was unaware of it,” said NYCERS trustee Gregory Floyd, head of Teamsters Local 237.

So not only does Algore get the management fees from the contract, he also gets to use those pension fund assets to prop up "green investments".  Moving the money around can make it seem as though the companies have genuine market interest.  I'll even bet there may be some "rob Peter to pay Paul" going on in pumping up "values".

All that matters is that you have the right friends.

Hat tip to I Own the World pointing to Michelle Malkin.

New York Nanny

The People's Cube provides this take on Michael Bloomberg's latest nanny proposal.

These people think they know more than you do, and they are the only ones who can protect you.