Isn’t it great when families get together for quality time? Take a break from TV and game consoles and go out together for a fun evening, like strolling through the park, going to the zoo, or … blocking doors at political events? Stephen Gutowski found the toddler shields deployed at Occupy DC, and wondered what idiot would put two small children in harm’s way.

Meet Mom and a few of her friends:

Stephen reports that only one protester even questioned the decision to put children near the door — and she told Stephen that she probably shouldn’t give an interview. Everyone else insisted in loud and nearly incoherent voices that the AFP conference that took place was victimizing the children, and not Mom and the rest of the protesters that put them in the middle of a security scuffle. According to a later e-mail I got from Stephen, one DC street also started victimizing these same children, so our candidate for Mother of the Year put them in the middle of a blockade of the street.

John Hinderaker and Stacy McCain have more video from the AFP “Defending the American Dream” conference that Occupy DC targeted yesterday that shows the scope of the danger in which these toddlers were placed — danger, it must be noted, that came entirely from the Occupiers themselves.  Ed Frank looks at it from a different perspective in an interview he did with a wheelchair-bound woman who could not exit the convention center because Occupiers were blocking the exit:

The protesters are yelling, “This is what democracy looks like!”, but that’s absurd. There is a very big difference between democracy and mob rule, as the interview subject tells Frank. This is an attempt by a small coterie of radicals to silence free speech and free association through intimidation and threats of violence. Occupiers had every right to picket on the sidewalks; they have no right to block ingress or egress to the building.

And one has to wonder where the fire marshal was when this took place. Blocking egress from a building is a fire hazard, and had the DC Convention Center left construction materials in front of that door even for a short period of time, the facility would have faced fines and no small amount of shaming from the FD.  That made this a matter for the city’s police and fire departments, not for security around the facility.  If a fire had started in the building, there would have been a whole lot of people injured at those exits, including the two toddlers that Mommy Dearest apparently hopes to martyr for the cause.