After the OccupyLA protesters refused an offer from LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that included an alternative protest encampment location, office space, and financial assistance from the City, the Mayor announced a 12:01am deadline this morning for the OccupyLA protesters. Now, about 8 hours later, the OccupyLA encampment remains - and the only action ordered by the LAPD was to arrest a handful of protesters who sought to block traffic on the streets adjacent to their encampment. Basically, the liberal LA Mayor gave an ultimatum to OccupyLA and they called his bluff - exposing the empty threat and empty suit that occupies the Mayor's office.
One of the goals of the OccupyWallStreet movement is to invoke Cloward-Piven or what many call 'fundamental change'. This strategy calls for overloading the US public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would result in the replacement of the present system with one that is based on socialism / marxism. One of the namesakes of this strategy, Francis Fox Piven, was confronted by conservative economist Thomas Sowell, who took issue with the concepts that Piven was advocating. Powerline has the video in addition to some additional commentary that focuses on one of the core questions and differences between conservatives and the progressives like Piven / OccupyWallStreet who are demanding 'equality'...
Equality is the great theme of American politics, but is equality rightly understood as equality of rights or results? Equality of rights is deeply rooted in the foundational documents of the United States. It is, you might say, the American way. Equality of results is the great error that continues to exert its powerful attractions.Yesterday, the GOP Presidential candidacy of former Speaker Newt Gingrich received a major boost when New Hampshire's largest newspaper, the Union Leader, endorsed his candidacy over that of Mitt Romney. Romney had been chasing this endorsement for months - and the surging former Speaker has to be seen as a real challenge for Romney in NH after this endorsement. While no 'official' votes have yet been cast for the GOP nomination, the race looks as if it will be a Romney vs Gingrich battle at least into the Spring. I suspect that a lot of uncommitted GOP voters and contributors will remain on the sidelines until then -waiting to see what happens.
In the Federalist Papers, Publius recognizes “the diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate,” and asserts that “[t]he protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results…” Publius ascribes the possibility that men might “be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions” to destructive and erroneous theory.
BREAKING NEWS - Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) has announced that he will not be seeking re-election in 2012 citing that Massachusetts redistricting as being a major factor in his decision. Frank has been a very controversial figure on Capital Hill - and one of the leading progressives. He played a very prominent role in creating the conditions which led to the Housing / Fannie-Freddie collapse which precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. In addition, he was, along with former Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, the co-author of the massive banking clusterfuck known as the Dodd / Frank bill which was rammed through Congress in 2009. This bill is doing to the financial services industry what Obamacare is trying to do to the Healthcare Industry. Frank had a harder than expected 2010 re-election campaign and is likely seeking to retire to avoid a possible defeat in 2012.
The increasingly irrelevant former Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared yesterday on ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour to blame the Tea Party for the divisive tone in Washington today - and the media for giving the Tea Party any coverage...President Obama's contributions or those of OccupyWallStreet were not mentioned.
In the same broadcast, the Washington Post's Michael Gerson raised questions about the leadership, more accurately, the lack thereof, demonstrated by President Obama during the Supercommittee negotiations. ABC News journalists Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson immediately lept to the defense of the President. Roberts said that the President had other priorities - 'some of it was out of the country, to be fair, dealing with foreign leaders and preset meetings'. Donaldson spun even harder disingenuously saying, 'This was different. This committee was set up by Congress, and expressly - you won't find it in the legislation - all of them said, 'We want the President to butt out'....'
Supposedly objective journalists are defending the President against a question raised by another journalist...and doing so in a manner that defies any common sense. If the President wanted to ensure that the Supercommittee reached a deal - he could have done so. He had no interest in success...as Senator Pat Toomey, a member of the Supercommittee notes here which highlights that despite the repeated accusations from the President that the GOP is putting partisan politics ahead of the best interests of the country, the truth of the matter is that the President and his fellow Democrats are the one's that are doing that. Once again, the accusations from the President and Democrats reflect on their own motives - and are efforts to deflect attention from their failures and project them onto the GOP.
From JammieWearingFool, we have a link that President Obama's Campaign 2012 strategy is to shift direction based on the falling poll numbers the President is experiencing...
No, the President is not abandoning the Unions...he needs their contributions and support - but the centrist Democrats? They are being tossed under the bus.
All pretence of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
Related to the 2012 election, PJ Media brings this report that strongly suggests this election will see unprecedented levels of voter fraud - with the organization formerly known as ACORN being at the root of the efforts. ACORN, by the way, has been repeatedly convicted of voter fraud in the past - in 2008, over 400,000 of the new voter registrations (1.3 million) submitted by ACORN in their Project Vote were disqualified as being fraudulent.
Bloomberg Markets is reporting that the Federal Reserve, acting entirely in secrecy and without any disclosure, provided loans to banking institutions which generated $13B in income for those banks.
Secret Fed Reserve loans gave banks an undisclosed $13B - The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.These levels of undisclosed assistance / bailouts to banks does little to provide confidence in the actions of the Federal Reserve or it's Chairman.
Stay tuned for more updates on this busy Cyber Monday....
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