State and National News

There was a 4 percent drop in the number of violent crimes reported in the U.S. last year vs. 2010, the FBI reports. It's the fifth straight year of declines, according to FBI records.

In its Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report, the FBI says that data collected from 14,009 law enforcement agencies indicate that:

Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.

Two political tried-and-truisms: Sitting presidents are hard to unseat, and history repeats itself.

To the first point: In the past 10 presidential elections with incumbent candidates, the incumbents have won seven times. The only incumbent losers were Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Occupy Wall Street's founding forum has declared that the movement's "first generation is succumbing to an insidious institutionalization and ossification that could be fatal to our young spiritual insurrection unless we leap over it right now."

And Canada's Adbusters website, which kicked off the Occupy idea last year, says that "putting our movement back on track will take nothing short of a revolution within Occupy."

Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- Commerce Secretary Suffered 'Seizure' Before Crashes, Dept. Says.

-- 'Relief Rally' Weakens As Markets Study Spanish Deal.

One of the nation's largest insurers said early Monday it would continue to follow some of the rules in the federal health law that are already in effect, including keeping young adults up to age 26 on their parents' plans and ending lifetime dollar limits, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.