The Boston bombers killed an 8 year old boy. The Weather Underground bombed an entire family, including a 9 year old boy.

The Boston bomber faces the death penalty. The ’60s terrorists got jobs at prestigious universities. That include Obama’s pal, Bill Ayers.

He writes this story:

…Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled.

She reappeared over a decade later driving the getaway car for the rag tag mix of Weathermen and Black Panthers who held up a Rockland County bank in 1981, murdering three in the process. Survivors of the ambush along the New York State Thruway recount how Boudin emerged from the driver’s door, arms raised in surrender, asking the police to lower their guns. When they did, her accomplices burst from the back of the van guns blazing.

As I said, people of a certain age remember this history. For those that don’t, Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin and her accomplices.

Perhaps to bring it full circle, Professor Boudin can soon guest-lecture at a film class at Columbia when the Redford movie is screened.

Other than the passage of time, one can find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s Boston murderer and the terror carried out by Boudin and her accomplices. Yet today we live in a country where our leading educational institutions see fit to trust our children’s education to murderers and Hollywood sees fit to celebrate terrorists.

Mark Steyn

I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the past couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E-L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.

I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration – no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news – the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaida’s critique of its enemies: as they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness.

…

Tnsofar as it relieves Washington of the need to think strategically about the nature of the enemy, the drone is part of the problem. But its technology is too convenient a gift for government to forswear at home. America takes an ever-more expansive view of police power, and, while the notion of unmanned drones patrolling the heartland may seem absurd, lots of things (more…)

We’ve seen this before.

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.

People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.

People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.

At least they didn’t explode anything, yet. Unlike Obama’s pal, Bill Ayers and his wife/fellow domestic terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn.

Son of a powerful Chicago mover and shaker, Ayers was able to avoid jail because of the sloppy and overzealous work of the FBI. But he was and is an unapologetic domestic terrorist.

In the upside down world we live in, instead of being scorned, Ayers became an influential college professor who infected thousands of teachers with his leftist ideas.

That’s Bill and Bernadine in the movie poster. It’s worth watching. Netflix has it on instant play.

PBS asked Obama to stop this ad, which is a shame.

Look at the criminals at the beginning: Bernie Madoff, the most notorious, was a huge supporter and fundraiser for Democrats.

Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski were both charged and convicted by the Bush administration.

So far Obama has not charged anyone for financial crimes relating to the 2008 meltdown.

Charles Gasparino

Among the many falsehoods pushed at last week’s Democratic Convention is that this is the party of the people, unafraid to hold Corporate America responsible for its many ills.

Judging by the records of the last two Democratic administrations, just the opposite appears to be true. Certainly, President Obama and, to some extent, Bill Clinton like to talk a good game in terms of class warfare, but under both men, real corporate crime-fighting has been at best a side issue — despite the immense amounts of white-collar fraud their administrations faced.

In fact, neither Obama nor Clinton can hold a candle to the corporate crime-fighting record of George W. Bush, that supposed lapdog for large corporate interests.

Consider: As we near the four-year anniversary of the financial crisis, not a single Wall Street fat cat has been charged with violations of securities laws in connection with the 2008 collapse.

Then we have the outlandish case of MF Global, the brokerage firm run into the ground nearly a year ago by Obama’s pal and campaign-cash bundler, Jon Corzine. It isn’t just that the former Goldman Sachs CEO and New Jersey governor took outsized trading risks that destroyed the firm; his firm appears to have misused and lost $1.6 billion in customer funds in the process.

Under securities laws, those customer funds were supposed to be kept sacrosanct — yet not a single MF Global employee, much less Corzine, has been charged in the matter by the Obama Justice Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

For obvious reasons, Clinton’s putrid record on corporate crime went unmentioned as he rewrote history during his speech.

(It wasn’t all that got left out as he tried to make people believe they’re doing just fine after four years of Obamanomics. He also skipped over the fact that the ’90s economy only got strong after he turned right by cutting deals with the Republicans to cut taxes and spending and to reform welfare.)

Simply put: The law-enforcement agencies under Clinton turned a blind eye to one of modern history’s biggest corporate crime waves.

Forget insider trading, where traders are basically ripping off each other. During the Clinton years, big Wall Street firms came up with new and imaginative ways to screw the average investor — who for the first time was turning to the stock market to save for retirement. Yet there wasn’t much of a peep from Bubba’s Justice Department or the corporate watchdogs at his Securities and Exchange Commission.

One such rip-off involved feeding small investors fraudulent research reports so they’d buy overvalued (and overhyped) Internet stocks — but there were many more, most of which came to light after the tech bubble burst in March 2000 and small investors lost countless billions in savings.

Those research scandals were initially uncovered by a Democrat — New York then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. But the Bush SEC shared in the enforcement of the cases.

The Bush Justice Department and SEC also started the investigations that have led to Obama’s one arguable area of success on Wall Street crime — insider-trading prosecutions. But the victims of insider trading are mostly other traders, not the average Joe — this isn’t the sort of corporate crime that ruins Main Street.

Anyway, lots else got prosecuted under Bush. The accounting fraud at Enron, a Houston-based energy company with ties to the Republican Party, brought immediate indictments against individuals like Bush friend Ken Lay. One major firm, accounting giant Arthur Andersen, was forced out of business.

The same thing with Worldcom, another accounting fraud prosecuted in the Bush era that landed its CEO in jail.

As it happens, the last major financial firm to be run out of business after being hit with criminal charges (prior to Arthur Andersen) was Drexel Burnham Lambert — and that was accomplished by President Ronald Reagan’s US attorney for Manhattan, a guy named Rudy Giuliani.

Of course, Bush’s record of corporate crime fighting was far from perfect. Much of the risk-taking that led to the 2008 collapse occurred under the nose of his regulators — but these practices started to explode during the Clinton years.

The bigger point here is that, if you’re really keeping a score card on who’s going after corporate America’s bad guys, the Democrats may talk a good game but have very little to show for it.

Keep that in mind the next time President Obama says how much he detests the Wall Street fat cats.

One reviled, imprisoned. The other celebrated, excused, coddled and Euro-protected.

A friend emailed this with a subject line, “Nice priorities…”

My reply included this:

…the basic assumption of the graphic is foolish – there is no logic in comparing the two. (You probably spend more on your mortgage than healthcare. Does that mean you value your house over your health?)

It’s the simpleminded kind of formulation I see coming out of the left on a daily basis.

Well, that got him annoyed.

But can one do when presented with such fuzzy thinking? Say, yup, that’s insightful?

We do agree on the size of America’s prison population. Because of drug laws, we have way too many people in prison, at absurd personal and social costs.

Adam Gopnik had a good article in the New Yorker in January, The Caging of America.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one.

Although flawed by his insistence on bringing race into the story, it’s a worthy piece.