The Many Faces of US Politics...

[heganboy]

no tear gas has ever been needed to contain those terrorist

Tear gas has ever been needed? Jaysus man that's an awful point of view.

[Declan]

Oakland Police and Mayor Face Fresh Protest Over Critical Wounding Veteran
Occupy movement returns to streets demanding answers after teargas canister hit Iraq serviceman Scott Olsen in the head
by Andrew Gumbel
Protesters have returned to downtown Oakland, California, to demand the resignation of the city's mayor and an investigation to explain how an Iraq war veteran, Scott Olsen, was hit in the head by a teargas canister at close range, leaving him critically injured.

Many of Wednesday night's protesters expressed anger. "When the rich steal from the poor it's called business. When the poor fight back it's called violence," a 25-year-old solar energy company executive, Cory Rae Shaw, wrote on a banner.  About 2,000 people – half as many as Tuesday night – massed in front of City Hall on Wednesday, tearing down a steel barricade intended to keep them off the grass in Frank Ogawa Plaza.

When the city closed down a nearby underground station, preventing dispersing protesters going home, they organised a spontaneous march through the centre of the city, chanting: "Whose streets? Our streets!"

Police had been under orders to let them have the run of the plaza until 10pm. Officers stood guard at junctions in patrol cars and motorbikes to deter people from jumping up on to an overhead freeway. The police were more lowkey than on Tuesday, when they manned barricades around the plaza and fired volley after volley of teargas that filled the surrounding streets and smoked out businesses.

As the protest continued late into the night both sides appeared afraid of engaging the other. Many marchers wore scarves over their noses and mouths in anticipation of teargas. Some had gas masks.

When officers wanted the crowd to move out of a traffic intersection they sent an ambulance in with its siren blaring, not a police vehicle.

One sign taped to a lamppost delivered this message to the police: "You've fuelled our fire."

Speaker after speaker demanded the resignation or recall of the city's mayor, Jean Quan, who had initially voiced her support of the protesters. "Mayor Quan you did more damage to Oakland in one evening than Occupy Oakland did in two weeks," said one slogan scrawled near the entrance to her offices.

In an afternoon news conference Quan had struggled to explain the decision to clear the square in the early hours of Tuesday morning and again when protesters returned that evening.

She gave the impression she had been as blindsided as anyone by the decision to close down Occupy Oakland. She had been in Washington at the time and said that although she knew there were hygiene and public safety issues that needed to be addressed, she did not expect that to happen while she was on the other side of the country.

"I only asked the chief to do one thing: to do it when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators," she said, pinning responsibility for the decision on her police chief and the top city administrator. When pressed for more details, Quan said: "I don't know everything."

Scott Olsen, 24 – a former US marine who friends said served two tours of duty in Iraq – has become a figurehead among Occupy Wall Street supporters in Oakland and elsewhere. Organisers took to Twitter and other social media urging protesters back into the streets.

Acting Oakland police chief Howard Jordan told a news conference his department was investigating the injury to Olsen as a "level one" incident, the highest for an internal police inquiry.

In Portland, Oregon, a crowd estimated to number at least 1,000 joined in a march organised by the AFL-CIO labour federation in support of the anti-Wall Street movement.

Hundreds of protesters also gathered in New York to march in solidarity, leaving the Occupy Wall Street base in Zuccotti Park and marching around the financial district and city hall. Protesters in New York voted to send $20,000 and 100 tents to their peers in Oakland, according to a Twitter message from a protester identified as JA Myerson and retweeted by the Occupy Wall Street group.

The Oakland crowd was a mixture of eco-activists, families with young children, nurses and teachers, as well as a handful of young men with bandanas or Palestinian keffiyehs covering part of their faces. Many said they were shocked by what happened on Tuesday and were bracing themselves for further confrontations with the police.

"Quan let the [county] sheriffs in to do her dirty work and then said she didn't know who was responsible for the decision. She's got to go," said Robijn Vangiesen, a local activist and organiser.

Vangiesen was in the plaza when Olsen was knocked down by a teargas canister. "He was out, man. Totally non-responsive. He had blood pouring out of his nose," Vangiesen said. The initial teargas volley was followed by another projectile from the police straight into the small crowd trying to help Olsen. His friends said it was a flash-bang grenade, pointing to a video distributed on the internet as evidence, but police have denied this.

Many of Wednesday night's protesters expressed anger. "When the rich steal from the poor it's called business. When the poor fight back it's called violence," a 25-year-old solar energy company executive, Cory Rae Shaw, wrote on a banner.

"Who's really the bandits here?" said Demarion English, a 23-year-old security guard. "I called them bitches. I call the police bitches to their face. We're all fighting for a real cause... and we got teargassed."

[muppet]

no tear gas has ever been needed to contain those terrorist

Tear gas has ever been needed? Jaysus man that's an awful point of view.

[Eamonnca1]

If the notoriously trigger-happy Oakland PD were firing tear gas at me I'd consider it a compliment.

[Tyrones own]

no tear gas has ever been needed to contain those terrorist

Tear gas has ever been needed? Jaysus man that's an awful point of view.

Never met a mirror you didn't like... eh muppet

[muppet]

Never met a mirror you didn't like... eh muppet
[/quote]

From self-loathing to narcissist in 48 hours?

[J70]

A very funny piece from Jon Stewart's show on Republican views on science. Some Fox News/Republican talking head named Noelle Nikpour comes across as a complete moron.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-26-2011/weathering-fights---science---what-s-it-up-to-

[Tyrones own]

Never met a mirror you didn't like... eh muppet

From self-loathing to narcissist in 48 hours?
[/quote]
Fcuk no... Self loathing of your Country, Don't think there's anyone on here that isn't
fully aware of the Doting admiration you have for yourself 

[muppet]

So the self-loathing was actually loathing of others now? A double flip-flop.

[Tyrones own]

So the self-loathing was actually loathing of others now? A double flip-flop.

Get out to hell out of that hole will you ffs

[heganboy]

Good piece in the WSJ:


The Divider vs. the Thinker
While Obama readies an ugly campaign, Paul Ryan gives a serious account of what ails America.
By PEGGY NOONAN

People are increasingly fearing the divisions within, even the potential coming apart of, our country. Rich/poor, black/white, young/old, red/blue: The things that divide us are not new, yet there's a sense now that the glue that held us together for more than two centuries has thinned and cracked with age. That it was allowed to thin and crack, that the modern era wore it out.

What was the glue? A love of country based on a shared knowledge of how and why it began; a broad feeling among our citizens that there was something providential in our beginnings; a gratitude that left us with a sense that we should comport ourselves in a way unlike the other nations of the world, that more was expected of us, and not unjustly—
"To whom much is given much is expected"; a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations—liberty, equality—and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved. That's from "The Killer Angels," a historical novel about the Civil War fought to right a wrong the Founders didn't right. We did in time, and at great cost. What a country.


But there is a broad fear out there that we are coming apart, or rather living through the moment we'll look back on as the beginning of the Great Coming Apart. Economic crisis, cultural stresses: "Half the country isn't speaking to the other half," a moderate Democrat said the other day. She was referring to liberals of her acquaintance who know little of the South and who don't wish to know of it, who write it off as apart from them, maybe beneath them.

To add to the unease, in New York at least, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance. If you are a New Yorker, chances are pretty high you hate what the great investment firms did the past 15 years or so to upend the economy. Yet you feel on some level like you have to be protective of them, because Wall Street pays the bills of the City of New York. Wall Street tax receipts and Wall Street business—restaurants, stores—keep the city afloat. So you want them up and operating and vital, you don't want them to leave—that would only make things worse for people in trouble, people just getting by, and young people starting out. You know you have to preserve them just when you'd most like to deck them.

***
Where is the president in all this? He doesn't seem to be as worried about his country's continuance as his own. He's out campaigning and talking of our problems, but he seems oddly oblivious to or detached from America's deeper fears. And so he feels free to exploit divisions. It's all the rich versus the rest, and there are a lot more of the latter.

Twenty twelve won't be "as sexy" as 2008, he said this week. It will be all brute force. Which will only add to the feeling of unease.

Occupy Wall Street makes an economic critique that echoes the president's, though more bluntly: the rich are bad, down with the elites. It's all ad hoc, more poetry slam than platform. Too bad it's not serious in its substance.

There's a lot to rebel against, to want to throw off. If they want to make a serious economic and political critique, they should make the one Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make in "Reckless Endangerment": that real elites in Washington rigged the system for themselves and their friends, became rich and powerful, caused the great cratering, and then "slipped quietly from the scene."


It is a blow-by-blow recounting of how politicians—Democrats and Republicans—passed the laws that encouraged the banks to make the loans that would never be repaid, and that would result in your lost job. Specifically it is the story of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers, and how their politically connected CEOs, especially Fannie's Franklin Raines and James Johnson, took actions that tanked the American economy and walked away rich. It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.

The story is a scandal, and the book should be the bible of Occupy Wall Street. But they seem as incapable of seeing government as part of the problem as Republicans seem of seeing business as part of the problem.

Which gets us to Rep. Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don't think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them. Conservatives naturally like him—they agree with him—but liberals and journalists inclined to disagree with him take him seriously and treat him with respect.

This week he spoke on "The American Idea" at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. He scored the president as too small for the moment, as "petty" in his arguments and avoidant of the decisions entailed in leadership. At times like this, he said, "the temptation to exploit fear and envy returns." Politicians divide in order to "evade responsibility for their failures" and to advance their interests.

The president, he said, has made a shift in his appeal to the electorate. "Instead of appealing to the hope and optimism that were hallmarks of his first campaign, he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy and resentment."

But Republicans, in their desire to defend free economic activity, shouldn't be snookered by unthinking fealty to big business. They should never defend—they should actively oppose—the kind of economic activity that has contributed so heavily to the crisis. Here Mr. Ryan slammed "corporate welfare and crony capitalism."

"Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?" Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? "Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?"

Rather than raise taxes on individuals, we should "lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive." The "true sources of inequity in this country," he continued, are "corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless." The real class warfare that threatens us is "a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society."

If more Republicans thought—and spoke—like this, the party would flourish. People would be less fearful for the future. And Mr. Obama wouldn't be seeing his numbers go up.

[seafoid]

Paul Ryan is a luadraman . He doesn't belive in raising taxes. The US has no other choice.


Occupy Wall Street makes an economic critique that echoes the president's, though more bluntly: the rich are bad, down with the elites. It's all ad hoc, more poetry slam than platform. Too bad it's not serious in its substance.

The top 1% own 33% of all wealth in the US. It's very hard to defend.

[Declan]

http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/

Some of the 1%

[Declan]

Interesting piece in the New Yorker from Frank Rich
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/class-war-2011-10/

[The Iceman]

Not sure where else to post this. Hopefully you find it as amusing as me.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/4ecfd3a85f/herman-cains-campaign-promises-with-mike-tyson?playlist=featured_videos