Then today this happened, as reported by Caroline May:
A shooting occurred Wednesday morning at the headquarters of the conservative Family Research Council in Washington, D.C….
WJLA-TV7 initially reported that two people were shot: a security guard and the suspect. Later reports, however, have been unclear about whether the shooter sustained any injuries…
A source told Fox News Channel that the suspect “made statements regarding their policies, and then opened fire with a gun striking a security guard.” The FBI is treating the shooting as a case of domestic terrorism.
An organization that’s been vilified by the left gets shot up by somebody yelling about their policies. Ho-hum. Politically motivated shootings are only news when they can be twisted around to make conservatives look bad. Not much chance of that here.
On Wednesday, Arby's inflamed the conservative blogosphere with the announcement on Twitter that it will no longer advertise on Rush Limbaugh's show. Big mistake. The statement probably would've blown over, like all the rest of them, but Arby's moves following the announcement have awakened a sleeping giant. Shortly after its statement, the Arby's Twitter account went on a rampage blocking users who disagreed with the franchise...
Arby's! Not a smart move. Maybe you think you're serving a lot liberals with your delicious Jamocha shakes but you're first and foremost a fast food chain, and if you knew anything about fast food customers, you'd be careful not to anger conservative America. As we speak, the blogging foot soldiers of the right (Michelle Malkin, Instapundit, iOwn the World, etc) are raising hell and the sandwich peddler better hope it doesn't catch on. As studies have shown, conservatives are more likely to consume fast food than liberals. The latest of these was gathered by a collective intelligence decision-making system at Hunch.com last year, which found that "liberals are 92 percent more likely to eat fast food rarely or never." Meanwhile: "Conservatives are 64 percent more likely to eat fast food a few times per week."
Is the individual mandate at the heart of "ObamaCare" a conservative idea? Is it constitutional? And was it invented at The Heritage Foundation? In a word, no.
The U.S. Supreme Court will put the middle issue to rest. The answers to the first and last can come from me. After all, I headed Heritage's health work for 30 years. And make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, the myth persists. ObamaCare "adopts the 'individual mandate' concept from the conservative Heritage Foundation," Jonathan Alter wrote recently in The Washington Post. MSNBC's Chris Matthews makes the same claim, asserting that Republican support of a mandate "has its roots in a proposal by the conservative Heritage Foundation." Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and others have made similar claims.
The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through "adverse selection" (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.
My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid "with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy."
My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.
But the version of the health insurance mandate Heritage and I supported in the 1990s had three critical features. First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on "catastrophic" costs — so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.
Second, we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage, rather than by a stick.
And third, in the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the "mandate" was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement.
So why the change in this position in the past 20 years?
First, health research and advances in economic analysis have convinced people like me that an insurance mandate isn't needed to achieve stable, near-universal coverage. For example, the new field of behavioral economics taught me that default auto-enrollment in employer or nonemployer insurance plans can lead many people to buy coverage without a requirement.
Also, advances in "risk adjustment" tools are improving the stability of voluntary insurance. And Heritage-funded research on federal employees' coverage — which has no mandate — caused me to conclude we had made a mistake in the 1990s. That's why we believe that President Obama and others are dead wrong about the need for a mandate.
Additionally, the meaning of the individual mandate we are said to have "invented" has changed over time. Today it means the government makes people buy comprehensive benefits for their own good, rather than our original emphasis on protecting society from the heavy medical costs of free riders.
Moreover, I agree with my legal colleagues at Heritage that today's version of a mandate exceeds the constitutional powers granted to the federal government. Forcing those Americans not in the insurance market to purchase comprehensive insurance for themselves goes beyond even the most expansive precedents of the courts.
And there's another thing. Changing one's mind about the best policy to pursue — but not one's principles — is part of being a researcher at a major think tank such as Heritage or the Brookings Institution. Serious professional analysts actually take part in a continuous bipartisan and collegial discussion about major policy questions. We read each other's research. We look at the facts. We talk through ideas with those who agree or disagree with us. And we change our policy views over time based on new facts, new research or good counterarguments.
Thanks to this good process, I've altered my views on many things. The individual mandate in health care is one of them.
Political activism has drawn the University of California into an academic death spiral. Too many professors believe their job is to "advance social justice" rather than teach the subject they were hired to teach. Groupthink has replaced lively debate. Institutions that were designed to stir intellectual curiosity aren't challenging young minds. They're churning out "ignorance." So argues a new report, "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," from the conservative California Association of Scholars.
The report cites a number of studies that document academia's political imbalance. In 2004, for example, researchers examined the voter registration of UC Berkeley faculty. They found a ratio of 8 Democrats for each Republican. While the ratio was 4:1 in the professional schools, in more political disciplines, the ratio rose to 17:1 in the humanities and 21:1 in social sciences.
Over the last few decades, the imbalance has grown. The report (found at sfg.ly/HjXiyV) noted, "The most plausible explanation for this clear and consistent pattern is surely that it is the result of discrimination in the hiring process."
UC Berkeley political science Professor Wendy Brown rejected that argument. (Yes, she hails from the left, she said, but she doesn't teach left.) The reason behind the unbalance, she told me, is that conservatives don't go to grad school to study political science. When conservatives go to graduate school, she added, they tend to study business or law.
"If the argument is that what is going on is some kind of systematic exclusion," then critics have to target "where the discouragement happens."
OK. Freshmen sign up for courses that push an agenda of "social justice." Most professors may try to expose students to views other than their own, but others don't even try. The message could not be clearer: In the universe where politics and academia converge, conservatives are freaks.
That's how ideologues self-replicate.
The fallout isn't simply political. The association scolds argue, "This hiring pattern has occurred just as the quality of a college education has sharply declined."
Campus reading lists require trendy books instead of challenging authors, like Shakespeare, who can draw students deeper into the English language. Teach-ins are notoriously one-sided. College graduates today are less proficient as readers than past graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics found that only 31 percent of college graduates could read and explain a complex book. In 1961, students spent an average of 24 hours per week on homework; today's students study for 14 hours per week.
At the same time, grades have risen. "Students often report that all they must do to get a good grade is regurgitate what their activist professors believe," quoth the report.
While she had not read the report, Brown doesn't dispute that today's students have trouble writing a "deep, thoughtful essay" about a passage from Hobbes or Milton Friedman.
"If Shakespeare were required, I would be thrilled," Brown stressed. But: "Don't pick on liberals for this." Universities have cut back on core requirements because students, parents and alumni revolt.
That may be, but in ideologically lopsided academia, there aren't enough voices to stand up for educating students about, say, the U.S. Constitution. Besides - this is me, not the report - in pushing protests, faculty essentially have assured students that they already know enough to occupy Sacramento. Only a third of them can read and explain complex material, but students already know better than lawmakers and voters how best to pay for education. Why study?
The proof is in academia's acceptance of this imbalance. The old, discredited excuse about why women didn't work in management that I heard when I was young - because they didn't want to - now somehow works for the left when it comes to conservatives and academia.
As for UC administrators, "A Crisis in Competence" concludes, "far from performing their role as the university's quality control mechanism, (they) now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards."
Like so many other ailing institutions, they don't know how to change to save themselves.
Moral and legal considerations show how the politicization of the classroom damages democratic government and the integrity of public life, but what is lost important for the purposes of this report is that politicization has devastating effects on the quality of teaching and research. Put simply, a college education influenced to any significant degree by political activism will inevitably be a greatly inferior education, and the same holds for academic research. Political activism will tend to promote shallow, superficial thinking that falls short of the analytical depth that we expect of the college-educated mind.The habits of thought that it promotes are in every respect the exact opposite of those we expect a college education to develop. There are many reasons why this must be so.
Results Over Process
First, political activism values politically desirable results more than the process by which conclusions are reached. In education, those priorities must be reversed. The core of a college education is disciplined thinking – thinking that responds to evidence and argument while resisting the lure of what we might wish were the conclusion. Disciplined thinking draws conclusions only after it has weighed the facts against all the plausible explanations of those facts. Strong political beliefs will always threaten to break down that discipline and bend the analysis in a direction that political considerations urgently want it to go.
Stunted Intellectual Curiosity
Second, the fixed quality of a political belief system will stifle intellectual curiosity and freedom ofthought when it dominates a classroom. In any worthwhile college education, a student’s mind musthave the freedom to think afresh and to follow wherever facts or arguments lead. But this freedom of
movement is constrained when the end process of thought has already been fixed in advance by apolitical agenda. Students will never learn to think for themselves if their thought processes must alwaysconclude by fitting into a particular set of beliefs. Intellectual curiosity is the indispensable prerequisitefor analytical power and depth: you cannot reach the latter unless you have the former. Strong political
commitments that dominate the classroom will stunt intellectual curiosity, and that can only mean that
they will also stunt the analytical power that is a crucial goal of college education.
But political activists tend to have a very different attitude to alternatives to their own convictions: they must be defeated. They do not deserve sympathetic consideration, for they are at best wrong, at worst evil. A genuinely academic thinker must be able to believe for a moment that his own preferred explanation is wrong, so that he can look very hard at the case for other explanations, but that is almost a psychological impossibility for the political or social activist.
We are here to educate, to nurture, to inspire, not to engage in character assassination." Where's the character assassination? Landsburg disagreed with the policy Sandra Fluke promoted. In Congress. Professors have the obligation to "nurture" and "inspire" her from afar by refraining from taking on her ideas? Is that some special kid-gloves treatment for women? Ironically, that would be sexist. Should we be patting the female political activist on the head and murmuring good for you for speaking up? That is dismissive. It's better feminism to react to what a woman in politics says and to respond to her with full force the way you would to a man. And that's what Landsburg did:
[W]hile Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position — which is what’s at issue here — deserves none whatseover. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered. To treat it with respect would be a travesty....
To his credit, Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery. To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.
Now, Landsburg's an economist. Note the references to externalities or other market failures. He goes on to say a little something about prostitution. He goes on find the the analogy to prostitution flawed. Fluke is, he says, more of an "extortionist" — an "extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement." For some reason Seligman thought he needed to throw in his position on prostitution:
I totally disagree with Landsburg that there is nothing wrong with being paid for sex.
Proving that few people can be as disgusting as the self-righteous lefty, here are the paladins of love and tolerance on the Left celebrating the death of Andrew Breitbart.
Slate’s Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias), who tweeted: “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead.”
AlmightyBob @AlmightyBoob : @AndrewBreitbart haha youre dead and in hell being a gay with hitler
Jeff Glasse @jeffglasse : Andrew Breitbart now enjoying afternoon tea with Hitler #goodriddanceyouhack
Kellie Allen @thirtyseven : Breitbart helped destroy the career of someone I know. Good riddance, scumraker.
Scott On Da Rox @ridinchillwaves : RT GOOD RIDDANCE..fascist prick @Gawker: Andrew Breitbart Dead? gawker.com/5889586/
Josh M @TheSocialest : Good riddance Breitbart. Hopefully they put James O’Keefe in your casket
There’s a lot more where that came from. There’s a peculiar sort of hatred and rejoicing at the death of ideological enemies on the Left (think of Christopher Hitchens habit of kicking corpses) that, for whatever reason, seems to me less common on the Right. Oh sure, the Right will delectate over the corpse of a bin Laden. But as a general rule, I don’t see outpourings of glee when, say, a Christopher Hitchens dies. You have the normal period of prayers, respectful words and “do not speak ill of the dead” that is part of the culture. But on the Left, the white hot gust of hatred hits you in the face. It’s not a healthy sign. When you regard death as simply the most effective way to get rid of political enemies, it’s just a matter of time before you start deploying it as a tool.
| The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvior is a surprisingly entertaining book... ... particularly if you despise Communists and Communism. de Beauvoir stripped away the facade of nobility and concern for the poor that Communists like to put on and revealed that French leftists were - surprise! - spoiled, narcissistic fools. In my review of The Mandarins, I wrote: Similarly, the only explanation given for the pro-Communist/pro-Soviet attitude is a salve on a guilty conscience, specifically guilt because Henri and his class of intellectuals are rather well-off. We know that they are well-off because they are drinking champagne, going out on the town, living in houses, and not going hungry. When Henri contemplates supporting the Soviet Union - or when he feels guilt or doubt about pointing out that the Soviets have death camps - he explains to himself that only the Soviet Union is likely to feed millions of starving Chinese. According to Henri, "American domination meant the perpetual oppression and undernourishment of all Oriental countries." (p. 242.) Of course, the Communists did have a pesky habit of treating people as things. (p. 241 - 242), Henri ratiocinates his way to supporting Communism by asking "but what does that mean compared to feeding the hungry?" (p. 242.) Nadine, likewise, explains her brief foray into the Communist Party by explaining that if she had been a member of the Communist Party she would not have had to feel guilty about the hungry kids she saw in Portugal during her trip there with Henri. (p. 171.) Likewise, there is a revealing scene where Anne is talking to some Americans about American support for Henry Wallace - FDR's former vice president until he was dumped in favor Harry S Truman because of Wallace's Leftist/Communist sympathies. Anne receives the explanation that "[t]hat man will never create a real leftist party. He's just an alibi for people who want to buy themselves a clear conscience cheaply." (p. 553.) A few pages later, Anne is shocked at finding Americans who don't agree that America will become fascist, and she drops the conversation because she realized that they "wanted to continue leading their comfortable, carefree, esthetes' life; no argument would dent their genteel egotism" (p. 563), which seems like a strange critique coming from a woman flits over to America at whim to have an affair and seems to want nothing more than to continue her comfortable, carefree, esthete's life. | |
| Of course, there are American Mandarins. A case in point is found in two on-line articles by and concerning American writer Michael Thomas. In this essay for Newsweek, Michael Thomas writes: But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go! Hey, enough with that "New Civility" nonsense. Thomas means business! But when you read this "inside baseball" puff-piece you find out that Thomas is the kind of wealthy, spoiled, self-indulgent narcissist that Simone de Beauvoir was writing about in the 1940s. A few excerpts will show this: We were all out by the pool,” Michael’s son William—from his first marriage, to Brooke Hayward—was telling me over the phone from his home in Sag Harbor. It was one of those Southampton summers in the late ’60s/early ’70s; dad was with his second wife, Wendell Adams, then. Her attractive younger sister Jane was always around, looking for a wealthy husband. Ha! Ha! Dad sexually assaulted and humiliated a woman in front of his sons. What a cut-up. Then, there's this: It’s a habit that, coupled with his abundant talent and ambition, might explain why he ended up “living my life backward.” By age 31, he was made general partner at Lehman Brothers, making $300,000 a year, which was a lot in those days. After the world of high finance had had enough of him, and he of it, he turned his hand to writing novels. And -
Because what kid isn't able to flush his first job and go to work for a top line banking business because he's dealing with "some asshole"? And - Distance prevailed even during his tenure at Lehman, when father and son worked in the same building. In those days, the Lehman brothers ate lunch at the round table: “Let’s say there were 35 partners, and some would be out of town, and some would be in the smaller rooms with clients, and there’d be maybe 15 or 25 of us. But, by ’71 or early—yeah, ’71, when Joe Thomas sat down for lunch, he would have two or three martinis. So I’m sitting there, and I don’t drink during the daytime, and so I’m sitting there, and, you know, your father’s at the end of the table, and everybody can see he’s half in the bag. And it’s tough.” Ah, yes, three martini lunches...the common touch. And - And, much like his father, he found the work pretty uncompelling. He compensated for that by enjoying himself a little too much and boasting a little too loudly about the wonderful talents of Madame Claude. Because who among us isn't on a first name basis with a pimp or doesn't find enjoyable the idea of a "dinner party" with a hooker and eight men? And - |
“We used to say if a girl is in a room and she’s better-looking and has good manners and that her conversation is better than any of the other women in the room, the chances are she’s from Madame Claude.”
Mr. Niven recalled a party thrown by Jan Cushing for Arthur Schlesinger to celebrate his book about the Kennedys. Needing to fill a last-minute chair, she called up Michael, who drank three Johnnie Walkers straight up before crashing in.
“When he got there, he saw this girl with enormous tits and immediately went over and started talking to her, and soon enough she was giggling a lot because, as I’m sure you know, Michael can be quite funny.”
The girl with the enormous tits was still giggling when Ms. Cushing tried to get everyone to focus up. She asked Michael to ask Mr. Schlesinger a question. “What’s the capital of South Dakota,” he said. The girl next to him giggled, as did George Plimpton and Mr. Niven.
Rabbi Joshua Hammerman’s Tim Tebow is making the rounds today–and not in a good way. The disturbing article, a vicious diatribe against American Christians, has offended not only its Christian targets but also American Jews who have worked hard to produce the gains in Jewish-Christian relations that such attacks threaten to undermine. Here is the most offensive paragraph (which the editors, since this post went up, finally deleted, though the rest of the offensive column remains):
If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants. While America has become more inclusive since Jerry Falwell’s first political forays, a Tebow triumph could set those efforts back considerably.
Hammerman, a member of J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet, says he is rooting against Tebow as a New England Patriots fan and as a concerned citizen. He gives the impression he believes that fervently hoping for the public failure of an athlete is appropriate if that athlete is overtly Christian. (While there is nothing wrong with being a Patriots fan, Hammerman does call head coach Bill Belichick a “moral exemplar,” which is a bit much considering Belichick was caught cheating to win games and carried on an affair with a married woman, resulting in the couple’s divorce just after his own. One wonders about Hammerman’s moral judgment.)
But more importantly, Hammerman surely knows that what he writes here is plainspoken bigotry, an affront to a nation of civilized people, insulting to Christians for all the obvious reasons, and is a chillul Hashem as well–a blight on Judaism’s reputation and one of Judaism’s most serious sins.
“I have spent my entire career engaged in dialogue with people of all faiths while speaking out passionately against intolerance and extremism. I have the deepest respect for those who are committed to their faith, including Mr. Tebow. I realize the way in which I attempted to make my points was clumsy and inappropriate, calling to mind the kind of intolerance and extremism my article was intended to disparage. I sincerely apologize to Mr. Tebow, his family, the Broncos and Patriots and all those whom I may have offended.”
So the offense was not against Tebow or his family, much less the Broncos and Patriots. Hammerman made a bigoted statement about Christians, or at least an ill-defined subset of Christians--a statement that belies his claim to "have the deepest respect for those who are committed to their faith." Although he apologizes to "all those whom I may have offended," he gives no indication of understanding why his statement was offensive.Too true.
Today the Gallup Organization has a new poll out that helps explain why leftie populism always looks like a good strategy but never seems to get anybody into the White House. By a significant margin, voters continue — even in the midst of tough economic times and rising economic inequality — to think it is more important to pursue pro-growth policies for the economy than to reduce inequality. According to the poll, 82 percent of those asked said it was either extremely important or very important to “grow and expand the economy”, compared to 46 percent who thought it was extremely or very important to “reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor.” 32 percent think growing the economy is extremely important; only 17 percent feel that way about reducing the income and wealth gap.
This means that even among many liberal or left leaning voters, a pro-growth message will work better than a pro-equality one. But it also means that there is enough pro-equality sentiment out there that in some congressional districts and even states, that message can win. At the national level, however, left populism looks like a loser compared to pro-growth.
Moreover, it appears that hard times may strengthen pro-growth rather than pro-equality sentiment. For the left, it is axiomatic that bad economic times are a period of political opportunity. That’s why the Obama White House saw the economic crisis as a historic, not to be missed opportunity for sweeping back in 2009.
But that perception looks wrong. It may be that equality is like the environment: it is perceived as a luxury good by much of the electorate, something you pursue when you think you can afford it, but something you ditch when you worry about the basics.
In any case, it looks as if 2012 is not going to be the year of Huey Long in American politics. Most voters want jobs and they want growth that will raise the value of their homes and their retirement portfolios more than they want to punish the rich. It will be interesting to see whether the White House, once it reassures the base, will swing back away from equality rhetoric towards the politics of growth. If its own polling agrees with Gallup, we are likely to see the left populists pushed back under the bus well before next November.
Rampaging Occupiers Attack 78-Year-Old Woman
We posted video last night in which degenerates from Occupy D.C. stormed the Washington Convention Center where Americans For Prosperity was holding a dinner. In the course of their riot, the Occupiers attacked a 78-year-old woman who had been attending the dinner, and pushed her down a flight of stairs. You see her at around the 3:20 mark of this video, shot by the Daily Caller:
The woman’s name is Dolores Broderson. Small Dead Animals got this email:
Ray Patnaude emails: “My wife and I were at the AFP dinner. Some info on the AFP member who was pushed down the stairs by the protestors… she is the second woman the police are helping up in the Daily Caller video. Her name is Dolores Broderson, age 78. She rode on a bus for 11 hours from Detroit to get there. She went to the emergency room with a bloody nose and bruises on her hand and leg.”She rode from Detroit for 11 hours because AFP is a genuine grass-roots movement, unlike the Occupiers and their sugar daddies. But that is a relatively minor point. The Occupier movement stands for riot, assault, rape, vandalism, sexual harassment, public urination, public defecation and public masturbation. And Barack Obama owns it lock, stock and barrel. He has endorsed the Occupiers and never uttered a single word to distance himself from them. Their disgusting behavior should be hung around his neck like an anvil when he runs for reelection next year.
Ten points to the person who can correctly guess the location of this photo:Larry Kelley, a Townhall.com/Townhall Magazine contributor, was on the ground in Oakland yesterday and sent a few shots of the "peaceful" protesters in action.
No, it's not Libya, or Palestine, or Syria.
It's Oakland, California.
Occupy Oakland, to be more specific. Because, as we all know, a violent riot is the most effective way of creating jobs and reducing corporate political influence.
Yesterday, "Occupiers" marched through the streets of Oakland, shut down the city's harbor--the fifth busiest in the US--and provided cover for violent anarchists to commit acts of vandalism, such as spray-painting a Whole Foods and breaking the windows of a Wells Fargo. By nightfall, the protesters themselves devolved into a violent mob, setting fires in the streets and breaking into abandoned buildings:
Occupy protesters voicing anger over a budget trim that forced the closure of a homeless aid program converged on the empty building where it had been housed. They blocked off city streets with Dumpsters and other large trash bins, starting bonfires that leapt 15-feet in the air.A clip from a live UStream feed in the streets of Oakland feels more like it came from Iraq than California, as flash grenades explode and people run through the streets with weapons:
City officials released a statement describing the spasm of unrest.
"Oakland Police responded to a late night call that protesters had broken into and occupied a downtown building and set several simultaneous fires," the statement read. "The protesters began hurling rocks, explosives, bottles, and flaming objects at responding officers. Several private and municipal buildings sustained heavy vandalism. Dozens of protesters wielding shields were surrounded and arrested."
Protesters reported running from several rounds of tear gas and bright flashes and deafening pops that some thought were caused by "flash bang" grenades. Fire crews arrived and suppressed the flames.
Meanwhile, protesters and police faced off for the rest of the night in an uneasy standoff.
The lesson in this story, besides that irony is often delicious? Redistributionism always looks better when you don’t own anything yourself (via JWF):
Occupy Wall Street protesters said yesterday that packs of brazen crooks within their ranks have been robbing their fellow demonstrators blind, making off with pricey cameras, phones and laptops — and even a hefty bundle of donated cash and food.Who’d have thought that a crowd of people demanding the seizure of wealth from banks, corporations, and the wealthy might also have a few thieves? I’m shocked, shocked to find theft occurring in a group that has hijacked private property it refuses to leave. I can’t imagine that a crowd that demands free higher education and the forgiveness of tens of thousands in student debt would also think of someone’s Mac or an iPhone as equally as communal as a college education.
“Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment,” said Nan Terrie, 18, a kitchen and legal-team volunteer from Fort Lauderdale.
“I had my Mac stolen — that was like $5,500. Every night, something else is gone. Last night, our entire [kitchen] budget for the day was stolen, so the first thing I had to do was . . . get the message out to our supporters that we needed food!”
Crafty cat burglars sneaked into the makeshift kitchen at Zuccotti Park overnight and swiped as much as $2,500 in donated greenbacks from right under the noses of volunteers who’d fallen asleep after a long day whipping up meals for the hundreds of hungry protesters, the volunteers said.
Posts
All Comments
