Spoke Jeff Bliss, Bliss Index, of the Occupy Oakland brouhaha of the last 24 hours that has now transformed into tear gas strew street theater reminding of the great Chicago riots of 1968 on a mini-me scale.  Mr. Bliss noted that Mayor Joan Quon is not at home, and that her police chief quit some months back, so it is unclear who is directing the opera.  This raw video from ABC local suggest the Oakland Police are retro in the age of IPhone4s video instantly available worldwide.  The Occupy Wall Street crowd just scored a huge leap forward in TV footage for the talking heads on the usual cables.  Even network morning shows, reliably for the 60s generation now in our dotage, will enjoy the sentimental celebration of the anti-war days.  Mr. Bliss explains that the Oakland encampment attracted street people, the homeless, anti-social behavior and the young from nearby Berkeley.  All we are saying, is give peace a blog.  This is box office.  The Oakland Police win the prize for knuckleheads up front.  Note that Governor Jerry Brown started his political comeback as mayor of Oakland.  Will he soon comment on what looks to be a police boo-boo?  Governor, your closeup is ready; and recall that Governor Ronald Reagan rose to the White House on the legend of closing down Berkeley's rowdies.

Speaking Larry Kudlow, Jon Hilsenrath, WSJ, and Patrick O'Connor, WSJ, re the POTUS camp gambit to offer discount mortgages to the sandy states needed for the Electoral College, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida. Clever and cynical. POTUS does not need to get the Congress to comply (it won't); but he does need to demonstrate that he cares and is ready to hand out (bail-out) the aggrieved "homeowners." A more cynical voice might observe that this is more bail-outs for the banks holding the mortgages that were then resold to the black holes of Fan and Fred. The politics of bail-out. McCain campaign tried a gambit like this is 2008 and was laugh at; but then John McCain wasn't POTUS with the power of patronage to back up the big talk.    The equation has not changed in three years.  Do you want to pay for your neighbor?  And if you do not own a home that is underwater, are you responsible for the fail?  And how does bailing out the failed mortgages move the underlying story of the housing start jobs crash?

There is no adequate rational explanation for this sequence, the manslaughter death of a two year-old girl in the PRC southern city of Fushan. Rationalization from the micro blogs mentions fear of legal harassment if bystanders get involved in tragedy. This video sequence destroys this rationalization and underlines that China lives in a kind of fear that does not exist in the US or Europe. Fear of disorder. The State apparatus stands condemned for abusing people's rights to the point that families cannot risk acting as common sensical neighborhoods or cities. Families fear other families, because you cannot know who has access to the state apparatus of punishment and terror.  Gordon Chang speaks routinely of the deterioration of order in the new China. Fear is the currency. The fear has now reached a level that it is possible to ignore a child in pain on a roadway. And what of the drivers of the two vans? Both guilty of manslaughter at the least, and certainly hit and run. Where there is no law, there is no order. China is lawless, terrorized, defeatist, despairing, the product of a slave state that has no leadership, just varying degrees of warlords, pirates, leechers and gamblers. Wang Yue was the future of China, and she perished because there is no hope.

Happy to consider that the California troubles -- and they are legion, starting with the inadequate and predictable Jerry Brown -- all move away when we push off a Torrey Pines cliffside and paraglide with magnificent predators called hawks. This does look plenty of thrills, and it is an antidote to fretting over the European pigheadedness this last decade.  (This YouTube sent to me by a French correspondent of discerning taste.)  What the Eurozone did with its banking and budget rules makes the housing bubble look dull-witted. Unwinding the sovereign debt of the beggar nations (PIIGS) requires creative destruction of many famous European banks and their usefully greedy bankers. The next wave of QE will likely come here. Time to paraglide and wait out more storms on the edge of the Pacific Rim.

Spoke David Weidner, WSJ, re the #Occupy WallStreet events in Lower Manhattan. and we agreed that there is no single focus, no special written demand.  There are youth and frustration with the Great Recession. The simple question from a 19-year-old community college graduate to Weidner was, "Where are the jobs?" The White House and the Democrats look to fashion a message that can welcome the protesters into supporting POTUS as well as the jobs act and the Congressional electioneering for '12. It is not certain yet that the Dems will be successful: it is a big twist to take the president and the Senate and turn them into college students sleeping out in pocket parks. Then again, the White House has decided to go Left to win in November -- to attract every Democratic vote they can find. Why? Because Axelrod has determined that POTUS Obama has lost the Independents: only a never-before assembled coalition of the Progressives, youth, the ethnic elite - in sum, everything that does fit the profile of the American white middle class - can deliver the votes needed to carry the Electoral College this time (goodbye OH, FL, and maybe PA?):

The #OccupyWallStreet posse looks to fit into this corral. Hollywood may join with its usual romance. David Weidner tells me that Michael Moore now turns up in Lower Manhattan. The demo can get much more glamorous. It may work. Sure.

My visit to Krakow and Warsaw Poland last May, to commemorate the annual "March for Life" to Auschwitz and Birkenau, also introduced me to the energy and youth of Poland as it reawakens from the 60 years long nightmare of the Hitlerites and the Stalinists, 1939-1989. The above video ad (from Politico via Political Wire) for a Lefty candidate for Parliament establishes that the young people of Poland know how to think outside the expected. Clever use of movie quote, performance style, wardrobe and an overall tongue in cheek about how some pols use the face to sell that brain. The aged Roger Ailes remark about Sarah Palin -- "hot" -- on the same day the celebrity governor exited the GOP field, is a candid glimpse (he added that she "got ratings," as in, used to, once upon a time) of how the candidates and their ops think of the craft of selling what is otherwise an ordinary pol in a vaguely fashionable and sometimes tawdry business.   On style points, Katarzyna Lenart of SLD gets attention and establishes a brand.  The red underwear is on message, "Want more?  Vote..."  And perhaps this video's success is a smooth, post-modern way to remind the GOP that the Palin boom, also the Bachmann and O'Donnell booms, were more cynical and less ideological than presented at the time.  The facts are that three young women (Bachmann appears youthful) gained a deal of attention by bing attractive and representing predictable and generally unoriginal remarks about current affairs; yet not one of them has produced a winning campaign, so far.  The show business, it's funny.  And maybe Katarzyna wins?

Rick Perry's collapse in the Florida poll followed by other visible signs of the GOP cognoscenti turning away from the Perry boom is not helped a guitar string by the mischief of Hank William's Jr.'s inane display of analogies. The "Like Hiter" syndrome is long understood to be a mind illness of Glenn Beck and his clown cronies, and now it seems to have spread like a virus to a sad sack  singer who evidences no great history reading list. FNC is staging these revelations just because it finds the characters capable of such inanities to be good for ratings. ESPN does not share the ratings excuse. Dropping Williams from Monday Night Football joins the decision many years avon when ABC dropped Limbaugh after one of his genius bon mots on race and sports.  When you play with fire, you get burned is the observation.  It's not the vulgarity or the effrontery that gets you, it's the TV fear of you as an advertiser killer.  Also, Perry must now deal with his edgy past remarks and actions with regard secession and the Confederacy and contesting the NAACP over the Confederate flag: the AP follows the Throckmorton rock story with a summary of what we already knew to be Perry's foggy attitude toward the Confederacy: 

Perry elaborated publically on the issue, saying, "I think you've got a slippery slope when you start saying we're going to start taking down every plaque or monument." 

Striking detail about this long Perry campaign video (1:45) is that the first act of what's wrong with America is generic, and this makes the second and third act of Perry acting decisively also generic. Substitute any candidate for the Perry performance and the ad is also effective condemnation of Obama without being a focused recommendation of Perry. We know what's wrong. What are you going to do about it specially, that the other guy can't do? For sakes, Gingrich could put himself in this ad (and a mashup of Scrooge McDuck or Yosemite Sam would also satisfy). What does Rick Perry bring to the table that only Mr. Texas can deliver?  Does Rick Perry truly have skills lacking in Romney or Huntsman or Pawlenty or Christie?  For a governor of a large state to say that he brings leadership to Washington is the same as a hotelier to say that he brings coffee to the room.  No news value, nothing to remember.  Try substituting Scrooge in your mind's eye.  It makes equal sense.