One of the problems with judging the infamous Rodney King video by the edited clip we always see is that we never see what led up to the incident. We know there was a high-speed pursuit, but we don't see the part where King fought the officers before they swarmed him.

The full video shows that King, a convicted robber, wasn't the innocent bystander the media portrayed him as. Here's a description of some of the events that you don't see on the news (from a Wikipedia entry):

Koon then ordered the four other LAPD officers at the scene -- Briseno, Powell, Solano, and Wind -- to subdue and handcuff King in a manner called a "swarm", a technique that involves multiple officers grabbing a suspect with empty hands. As the officers attempted to do so, King physically resisted. King rose up, tossing Officers Powell and Briseno off his back. King then struck Officer Briseno in the chest.[12] Seeing this, Koon ordered all of the officers to fall back. The officers later testified that they believed King was under the influence of the dissociative drug phencyclidine (PCP).

Tellingly, the Wikipedia entry mentions what happens to King's two passengers--that's right, there were three people in the car.

Officer Tim Singer ordered King and his two passengers to exit the vehicle and lie face down on the ground. The two passengers complied and were taken into custody without incident.

If the cops were racist and just wanted to beat on black people, why was there no incident with the ones that didn't attack the officers? King, on the other hand, was a physical threat to them:

King initially remained in the car. When he finally did emerge, he acted bizarrely: giggling; patting the ground; and waving to the police helicopter overhead.[9] King then grabbed his buttocks. Officer Melanie Singer momentarily thought he was reaching for a gun

It's one thing to give too much information on abortion, as a pro-life group recently did when it displayed four-foot-tall pictures of aborted fetuses at Moorpark College, and it's another to pretend like abortion is completely benign.

Sadly, we live at a time when such upsetting tactics make the news instead of the millions of deaths of children at the hands of their parents and doctors, but somewhere along the way people lost the ability to think critically.

A great example can be found in the comments section of the Star's coverage of the story. "Sunflowers" wrote:

I as a woman should have a right to make a decision as to whether an abortion is right for me. It is my body.. If my child is deformed, not developing right, has serious health issues, I should have a right to end that fetuses life. Also, in the event of a rape, I should be able to end a pregency.. That should be no one elses decision

That's a typical response from the pro-choice crowd, but it's a hollow argument that's easily destroyed. The writer concentrates on health issues and rape as a justification for abortion of a child--note that she admits it's a child and not merely tissue or a clump of cells as abortionists would have you believe.

The major problem with her argument is that the vast majority of abortions aren't for health reasons and aren't due to rape--more often, children 's lives are ended for the mother's convenience.

Let me say that again. Mothers are ending the lives of their children--her word--for convenience. By the millions. And that's not a big story for some reason, but it is when people show graphic images of the dead babies.

Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies end in abortion. "Sunflowers" must believe most of those are due to rape and catastrophic health reasons, but as I said, critical thinking skills aren't encountered all that often these days.

Common sense alone should tell you that something else is at play here, but here are the facts that just blow "Sunflowers" out of the water.

The facts show that 92% of women cite "social" or "other" reasons for having their abortions. The Alan Guttmacher Institute tells us that three-fourths of women terminate their unborn children because they can't afford it, three-fourths say it would interfere with work or school, and half don't want to be a single parent.

Well, I guess they should kill their child then, to use "Sunflowers" word again.

What all the facts tell us is that the phony heath/rape/incest argument conveniently ignores why 9 in 10 women have abortions.

Apparently, the role of the U.S. Congress is to churn out as many laws as it can, like a legislative assembly line. At least, that's what Washington Examiner columnist's assumption seems to be.

When Secretary of the Senate Nancy Erickson published statistics that showed senators passed only 90 bills, it's second lowest total in 20 years, the Examiner's Paul Bedard complained:

For those who need proof that the Senate was a do-nothing chamber in 2011 beyond the constant partisan bickering and failure to pass a federal budget, there is now hard evidence that it was among the laziest in 20 years.

Legislative production was so bad, Bedard complained, that the number of Senate bills proposed was down 30 percent compared to the Democrat-controlled 2009 Senate, and the number of amendments shrunk by over half.

Is that really a bad thing?

Laws are not very comparable to products, as Bedard assumes. A law, by definition, is a limitation. Laws  aren't meant to say what you can do--they tell you what you can no longer do.

Many laws are good--a law against murder means you aren't free to murder people.  You are deprived of that option, which is great.  You also don't have the freedom to steal, assault, or vandalize.

The problem is, legislators covered those easy laws a long time ago. Now, we're delving into what foods are available to you, what light bulbs you should use and how you should protect your family. That's why government grows and becomes more oppressive over time--because people like Bedard think it's the job of politicians to pass as many regulations as they can.

Thanks to that mindset, we get buried by thousands of new entries into the Federal Register and struggle with the 9 million word tax code on Tax Day.

Each new regulation is another limitation on freedom, and people like Bedard can't get enough.

It sounds harmless enough--under California law, hourly employers must provide employees a meal break after five hours of work. But like most things the government sticks its fingers into, it gets screwed up and ultimately works against its original purpose.

Liberals and labor groups liked this particular law because it prevents businesses from overworking employees. If only progressives could use some common sense when exercising their good intentions. Or maybe the law's flaws are only evident to people who have worked in the private sector for more than 10 minutes.

The main problem with the law is what happens when an employee wants to work through lunch.  The employee might want to make a little extra money or finish a project before a deadline.  The law was written too vaguely--it said an employer must provide a lunch. But does that mean they have to ensure a lunch is taken, or merely offer one even if it is not accepted.

Given the uncertainty, the safe approach for the employer was to for the employee to take the lunch or risk penalization.

The perverse effect of the law, which was meant to help the employee, is to make a law-abiding employer punish a hard-working employee.

Great job, Democrats.

They also screwed up other labor laws, such as requiring employers to pay overtime if an employee works more than eight hours in a day. Many employers responded by not allowing any workers to work overtime. My wallet is better off if I get regular wages for 9 hours than have the 9^th hour be worth time-and-a-half and never be able to work more than 8.

But back to the lunch law. Employees were in limbo for nearly a decade as multiple lawsuits wound their way through the courts. Eventually, the matter fell before the Supreme Court. Thursday, they ruled, fortunately, that employers don't need to babysit employees' lunches.

Even given the law's failure, I don't expect liberals to see the light anytime soon that free markets are self regulating. If a company didn't allow employees to take lunch breaks, it would lose good people to competitors that did, causing it to rethink its position.

At any rate, that's one silly liberal regulation out of the way, thousands more to go.

What do Vin Scully, Peter O'Malley, Tommy Lasorda, Mike Piazza, and Orel Hershiser have in common, other than being classy people associated with one of sports classiest franchises (until Frank McCourt, that is)?

Tuesday is a big day for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not only is the team's famous home turning fifty years old, but tomorrow's game will be the first one Magic Johnson sees at Dodger Stadium as a team owner.

Johnson's group, of course, bought the team from McCourt for over $2 billion. McCourt spent the last couple of years dragging the team's reputation through the mud thanks to his messy divorce and revelations that he and his wife raised ticket prices on fans to finance their lavish lifestyles.

Strange behavior for someone who unfailingly supports Democrats, who supposedly are against the excesses of the one percent.

McCourt contributed to Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000, John Kerry and Wesley Clark in 2004, and Hillary Clinton in 2008. It seems winning was hard for him in politics as well.

McCourt may have bled Democrat blue, but other people high up in the team's food chain do not.

Legendary sportscaster Vin Scully gave $500 to Friends of John Boehner during the Republican surge of 2010. He gave money to John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008. Voting against Obama automatically makes you a racist in the eyes of today's Democrats, but tell that to someone who befriended Jackie Robinson. George W. Bush in 2003, and Ronald Reagan in 1979. From what I've heard, even though he's an "evil Republican," he's a pretty nice guy out of the broadcasting booth.  The Christmas before last I took my son to a church function and heard him read a story about Jesus' birth. As he ended the reading he told the kids, in his unforgettable voice, "and that kids, is a true story."

Another man that's earned the respect of the community is former Dodger owner Peter O'Malley. Dodger employees I talked to respected him, local leaders respected him, and other owners respected him. The soft-spoken Peter was the opposite of his brash father Walter, who took the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. As the team was on its way to winning its last World Series in 1988, Peter donated $10,000 to the Republican National Committee.  According to public records, it seems he also donated to Bush-Cheney in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. In this election cycle he prefers Mitt Romney, and he also shelled out another $10,000 to John Boehner.

The Democrats can't even seem to convince Tommy Lasorda to join their team.  One source has Tommy telling Bill Clinton:

Former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda ran into Clinton at the Sons of Italy Foundation dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington.

Lasorda spoke first -- explaining that he never voted for Clinton.

"My father was a Republican, and his father was a Republican," Lasorda said. "So someone once asked me, 'If your father was a thief, and his father was a thief, would that make you a thief?' I said, 'That would make me a Democrat.'"

Lasorda was childhood friends with the father of Mike Piazza, another Dodger legend. Piazza, a 12-time All Star, is a big fan of Rush Limbaugh. According to the New York Times:

Mike Piazza, who was not in the starting lineup, spent his free time getting a baseball autographed by the radio commentator Rush Limbaugh. "It was like meeting George Washington," Piazza said.

As Piazza began his career with the Dodgers, he caught for a pitcher that was at the end of his tenure with them, at least for awhile. Orel Hershiser, who was known for being a devout Christian, would leave the Dodgers in 1994. Six years earlier, under O'Malley's ownership and Lasorda's management, Hershiser pitched the Dodgers to a World Series victory. Not surprisingly, the religious pitcher has a history of donating to the GOP.

The list of great baseball players who were also Republicans doesn't end there. Nor does it end with the Dodgers. Interestingly, many people connected to the sport that had a reputation for self-discipline and long stretches of employment with the same team ended up being connected to Republicans. O'Malley, Scully, Lasorda, Piazza, and Hershiser spent most if not all their careers with one team, and despite their high profiles rarely got into trouble off the field. The same is true for right-wing greats that played for other teams, like Nolan Ryan, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Curt Schilling, or the libertarian-leaning Tony LaRussa and Barry Zito.

That's not to say GOP players always have clean lives off the field. The Dodgers' Steve Garvey once harbored political ambitions as a Republican, but he had a rather messy personal situation.

When Magic Johnson settles into the stands behind home plate Tuesday afternoon, he'll be the second straight Democrat to plop down on the owner's seat. Hopefully Magic, who's had his own share of personal issues, will bring some conservative values back to the team despite what we may expect from him based on his party affiliation. 

What Jerry Seinfeld said of lawyers also applies to the Supreme Court:

"To me, a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box."

In the case of the highest court in the land, the set of rules inside the top of the box is the Constitution.

Conservatives complain about judicial activism, which is when judges make up their own rules about how the game should be played. Imagine being halfway through a game of Risk, and one of the players decides to start reading new rules into the game that greatly affect the outcome.

Or, in the middle of the game, four of the six losing players decide that some printed rules no longer apply, so they can catch up to the two leading players. They could just dismiss the rules as old, dusty words that no longer apply to 21^st century society. Or, they could rationalize that they are being democratic and more of them want the rules to change than want them to be the same.

The latter is the tactic the president is using to convince the public that his healthcare overhaul plan should stand.

"Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," Obama said at a news conference with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

In other words, yes, we sat down to play this game according to the written rules. Now we're changing it, and there are more than us than there are of you.

I remember learning in elementary school that the Supreme Court protected the minority from the tyranny of the majority. If the majority wanted to discriminate against people with black skin or people with red hair or people with green eyes, the Supreme Court wouldn't let it happen. So it's a little disconcerting to hear a constitutional scholar declare that majority rules and the Supreme Court shouldn't do anything about it.

Furthermore, he has the gall to say that the originalist Supreme Court justices are the judicial activists. Somehow these justices, who denied themselves wide latitude to rule on their whims by tethering every decision to the original language of the Constitution, are the activists.

Americans wouldn't let someone change the rules of a board game halfway through the game. They shouldn't let it happen in real life either.