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Mark Steyn follows the Occupy Oakland group.
Way back in 1968, after the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Mayor Daley declared that his forces were there to “preserve disorder.” I believe that was one of Hizzoner’s famous malapropisms. Forty-three years later, Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, and the Oakland City Council have made “preserving disorder” the official municipal policy. On Wednesday, the “Occupy Oakland” occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation’s fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of “shopping,” destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation “F**k”, etc. And how did the Oakland City Council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for “Occupy Oakland” and to call on the city administration to “collaborate with protesters.”
That’s “collaborate” in the Nazi-occupied France sense: the city’s feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures. They’re not the only ones. When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the Regional President David Lannon took to Facebook: “We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today – rumors are false!” But, despite his “total support”, they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spray-painting walls. As The Oakland Tribune reported:
“A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived.”
There’s an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one.
“The experience was surreal, the man said. ‘They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.’”
No, it wasn’t. It was municipal policy. …
Debra Saunders lives down the road from Oakland.
… Oakland’s former Mayor (and now governor) Jerry Brown devoted his tenure to enticing 10,000 new residents to live downtown. Mayor Jean Quan has undone that good work: Who wants to buy a condo in the land of broken windows?
Oakland has thriving, top-rated restaurants. Who wants to dine out in a town littered with too much graffiti and too little police protection?
These demonstrations threaten to starve the goose that pays for precious city services.
Once people start believing that they’re part of an oppressed 99 percent, you never know where they’ll see the 1 percent. One parent told the Oakland Tribune that members of Oakland’s politically correct school board should consider themselves “on notice that they will be evicted from office in the next election for doing the dirty work of the 1 percent.”
Quan started last week with the apparent belief that if she could assure activists that she was as liberal as they are, Occupy Oaklanders might behave. Thus, as the general strike dawned, Quan issued assurances that the city would “maintain a minimal police presence.” …
Neal Boortz reminds us Obama owns the Occupy creeps.
I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of this, but just on the off chance that some Democrat libs or progs might stumble onto Nealz Nuze, let’s remind everyone that this whole increasingly absurd and violent “occupy” movement belongs lock, stock and barrel to Barack Obama.
Barack Obama has spend years excoriating corporations. Remember when he changed the standard term “business jet” to “corporate jet?” Just part of his effort to demonize corporate America and to assign to evil corporations the blame for our current fiscal situation. Now we have the occupiers bragging about their “anti-corporation” credentials.
Again, for years, Obama spoke of the evil of the 1% and the taxes they were paying (or not paying). In the beginning Obama would simply say that the top 1% “needed” to pay “their fair share” of taxes. Then, this year, he started flat-out stating that the top 1% “were not paying their fair share” of taxes. Now we have the occupiers with their “we are the 99%” signs and chants.
The more you listen the more you see that these useful idiots are merely repeating the very same things that Obama has been saying for much of his adult life. They are Barry’s Kids … Obama’s Children. He cannot escape them.
Toby Harnden opens a section here on Herman Cain.
… While decrying race-based politics, Cain has been happy to compare himself to Haagen Dazs black walnut ice cream, joke that he’s a “dark horse” or quip that his Secret Service codename should be “Cornbread” . By Friday, a Cain Super PAC had cut a television ad entitled: “High-tech lynching”.
Just as Barack Obama’s race was a key part of his appeal in 2008, Cain is a more attractive candidate for Republicans because he is black. Obama’s supporters responded with fury and lobbed accusations of racism when their candidate came under legitimate attack from the Clintons. Cain backers have been similarly vehement.
Sexual allegations against a black man are rightly treated with great suspicion by many Americans because they play on the kind of fears and taboos examined in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. With the case against him thin and the accusation so incendiary, Cain’s predicament is prompting more sympathy than opprobrium.
Those who leaked the details of the 1990s sexual harassment cases might have thought that they’d destroy Herman Cain and leave his campaign dangling from a tree. But, as befits this strange and unpredictable election campaign, a funny thing happened on the way to the lynching.
Norm Ornstein at AEI takes a negative view of Cain and the people around him.
The frenzy over allegations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain has obscured another scandal involving the candidate, what appears to be a blatantly illegal use of a non-profit organization to fund the initial stage of his campaign. Set up as a 501(c)3, the same kind of non-profit as charities, universities, and think tanks, Prosperity USA spent tens of thousands of dollars on campaign-related activities for Cain, according to investigative reporting by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Much of the money for Prosperity USA came from Americans for Prosperity, the activist conservative organization funded by the Koch Brothers. Prosperity USA was apparently the brainchild of Cain campaign impresario Mark Block, who had served as Wisconsin director of Americans for Prosperity. …
Ross Douthat has a thought about the reasons for the rise of someone like Herman Cain.
… In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)
Inevitably, pride goeth before a fall. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin thought that they had done the same to global economics. The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history; the architects of the European Union thought that a common currency could do the same for Europe. And Jon Corzine thought that his investment acumen equipped him to turn a second-tier brokerage firm into the next Goldman Sachs, by leveraging big, betting big and waiting for the payoff.
What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better instincts. …
Andrew Malcolm shares a story from his childhood.
In the days of my childhood, just before television, my father and I waited in a very long line on a very cold autumn Friday night outside an observatory in Cleveland. I grew up in the countryside, so black night skies full of countless twinkling pins of light were as much a part of life as trees and a family dog.
We had pilgrimaged into the city to shuffle slowly ahead in that line for a special occasion. The facility was opening its giant telescope to the public because one of the other planets called Saturn was unusually “close” to Earth.
It was a long shuffle though – my feet were very bored — down two sides of the block, along the sidewalk, up the steps, through the lobby, up more steps, around the giant telescope base and, one by one, up a few more metal steps to squit into the eyepiece.
Oh my God Almighty, there it was. …