Although Canada’s taxpayers were forced to spend one billion dollars for security at the G-20 Summit in Toronto last weekend, more than 600 people were arrested after a roving bands of protesters shattered shop windows for blocks.  At that point, as Mark Steyn points out, the “insecure dweebs of the Toronto police” started threatening law-abiding passers-by.

Meanwhile, on substance the G-20 ended up being the flop many predicted.  That didn’t stop President Obama, who talked on and on from the beginning of the confab through his wrap-up press conference trying to convince other nations to follow his flawed strategy of stimulus spending, which everyone agrees has failed to jumpstart the U.S. economy despite the President’s repeated assurances that it would.

Instead, European leaders got a green light to pursue austerity measures in their efforts to restore market confidence in the post-Greek fiscal crisis Euro.  Unlike Americans under Obama, many Europeans are being better served by leaders who (rightly) are much more concerned about high sovereign debt than they are about putting their political parties’ interests first through taxpayer-funded vote buying.  So in the end Obama was forced to go along with a G-20 timetable for cutting deficits and halting the growth of their debt.