Jim Hoft reports that six people were charged in the St. Louis Town Hall disturbance and beating:
They were charged with “misdemeanor” violations for smashing a black man on the cement and calling him n*****.
The Post Dispatch just broke the news:
Six people arrested in August outside a raucous town hall meeting in south St. Louis County have been charged with misdemeanor ordinance violations.
The six, including a Post-Dispatch reporter, had attended a demonstration outside an Aug. 6 forum called by U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis, at Bernard Middle School in Mehlville to discuss health care reform.
The charges were filed Tuesday by the St. Louis County counselor’s office, which prosecutes misdemeanor ordinance violations in unincorporated areas. All are to appear in court Jan. 21.
The maximum penalty upon conviction would be one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Some bloggers have been writing for months about the lag between the arrests at the politically-charged event and the filing of charges.
County Counselor Patricia Redington insisted it had nothing to do with politics, influence or pressure from any official.
“These charges are like the 90,000 other charges we file each year,” she said.
Post-Dispatch reporter Jake Wagman, 30, of University City, was charged with interfering with a police officer. The charges allege that he failed to obey repeated commands “to leave the site of an ongoing disturbance.”
Elston McCowan, 47, of St. Louis, and Perry Molens, 50, of De Soto, each were charged with assaulting a person and interfering with police. They are accused of scuffling with and injuring Kenneth Gladney, a demonstrator with the Tea Party, a group generally opposed to Democrats’ universal health care proposals.
By the way… Gladney was not a protester. He was selling merchandise at the event.
In addition to violence perpetrated by the left at a conservative event in early August, the following month, there was the death of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman. Now that authorities have ruled the the case a suicide, Michael C. Moynihan of Reason flashes back to the initial kneejerk reaction of a variety of far left pundits who attempted to pin the blame on their counterparts on the right, including Andrew Sullivan’s “Send the body to Glenn Beck” screed, typical of the Atlantic pundit’s post-2003 tone. Moynihan adds:
Back in September, The Washington Post reported that in Kentucky “Residents of impoverished Clay County say most people harbor no resentment for agents of the federal government, and they’re baffled by Sparkman’s apparent killing.” What a bunch of hillbilly rubes! A week after the suicide, from his apartment in Washington, DC, Atlantic blogger and forensic investigator Andrew Sullivan had the case almost cracked, writing that “Suicide does not seem to me plausible, but motives for the murder are still under investigation.”
Allahpundit has more here, with a post that links to Jesse Walker’s terrific piece on the paranoid center.
Read the whole thing.
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