Spoke David Drucker, John Avlon, Taegan Goddard, re the GOP arranging itself for the push to the 2012 election, and we touched upon the prospect of a wave election that may push across Republicans to control of the Senate to match the control of the House after the 2010 wave election. The GOP looks strong for pickup in the Senate races in Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri; and the GOP has strong chances in Virginia, Ohio and Montana. The lone race that looks strong for a flip for the Democrats is Massachusetts, which is why this will become a centerpiece for both parties. Scott Brown's surprising win of 2010 set off the healthcare fiasco for the Democrats. Elizabeth Warren represents the aggressive thinking of the Democratic liberal base.
1 AM ET Bloomberg Raid on #OWS.
The contest looks to turn on small events. Will Occupy Wall Street be such an event? Word late tonight from Tweetdeck that the Mayor has ordered NYPD to sweep out Zuccotti Park. Reports of batons, pepper spray, force and rough play, with additional police requested. This is the sort of incident, when combined with a similar sweep in Oakland (spoke earlier with Jeff Bliss, Ying Ma) that makes for a national grievance for Election Day. The 2012 contest presents a case for melodrama. Puzzle is how POTUS Obama can arrange his campaign to look like a Washington outsider who's challenging the power of Wall Street. It will be a strange construction to have the president, a Harvard Law professor, representing the aggrieved and anarchic. Right now, the NYPD may be overplaying its hand; and the mayor has now risked the enmity of the young and focused. Strange to have a multi-billionaire mayor, lord of the .00000001%, deciding to abuse the young with the longest memories and social media skills to make Bloomberg into a class joker.
The occupiers are all about that very strange concept of "awareness". I never understood that. I do not change my behavior because I am aware of breast cancer or head injuries or bankers. I find the bombardment of endless advocacy wearing. I tune it out.
The occupiers will go away if we simply stop paying attention. They are attention/media whores. If no one buys, they'll stop selling. And we can all go back to what we were doing before this silliness started (commuting 4 hours a day to work 9 hours a day to pay the 3.5% Philly wage tax so these awareness whores can cr@p on public property).
Maybe the fetid stink will clear up for a while.
The list of demands on their website is unthinkable to anyone with a working brain.
vsk
I hereby Nominate Elizabeth Warren for the Neville Chamberlain "Peace in our Time" prize.
Iran does not respond to "Nuance"
I wonder what she thinks about Ronald Reagan?
"Overplaying their hand"? For doing something they should have done a week after the protests started?
Come on, John, you can't really believe that.
Tiananman Square was overplaying a hand. Kent State was arguably overplaying a hand, but not by all that much. This sweep by Bloomberg was long, long overdue. What is the purpose of having laws if we don't enforce them?
I don't have a real clear idea of the geography of NYC, so I don't know whether John has to pick his way through traffic jams or around protestors to get to his job. For that matter, maybe John rarely leaves his offices. What I do know is that if one of these protest encampments set up right outside my office, or even close enough to it that my ability to get in and out of work was impaired, I'd be on my City Councilman like stink on a monkey insisting that the protestors be cleared out ASAP.
The freedom of speech does not extend to unlimited Wifi, Gourmet meals, and overnight accommodations.
They are now letting the occupiers into Zuccotti park 538pm EDT, everyone getting searched and no sleeping bags/tents/generators.
NYers 45/45 split of the occupiers for/against.
"The freedom of speech does not extend to unlimited Wifi, Gourmet meals, and overnight accommodations."
Or limos to take the rabble from one OWS site to another. That sort of placating, along with the curiously consoling tones from the authorities, is spoken of as courtesy to keep the demonstrators from turning violent. Excuse me? Under no modern concept of 1st Amendment right is a demonstration allowed to threaten pulbic health and safety, esp. of the uninvolved, or interfere with businesses. Where's Bull Connor when you really need him? This pandering to the 60s wannabees is ridiculous.
OWS just got the workd they are supposed to get their tent city out and stay out of Zucotti park altogether after 10PM. However, police told CNBC that they would not bother demonstrators in Zucotti if they stayed after 10 PM.
Where's Alexander Hamilton when you need him?
So true.
We Boomers know that our favorite personal item is a mirror, so every Boomer here ought to take a gander at this mirror.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/11/13/listen-up-boomers-the-backlash-has-begun/
Interesting article, Corlyss, but I agree with most of the people who left comments more than I do with the author. Specifically loved this comment (proving that we can think critically, at least?):
-------------------------------
DW says:
November 14, 2011 at 10:56 am
The Boomer Generation is precisely why “The Greatest Generation” tag is woefully inaccurate. How could the be the Greatest Generation when they failed so thoroughly to raise their kids? Did the man who stormed Normandy to defeat the Nazis really do it for…for this? Today? What we have today?
The other thought that came to my mind was that my parent's generation is responsible for Social Security. Talk about not flushing before you leave the room!
No, if there's one defining quality of this generation, it's the love of self-flagellation. If you want any more proof of that look at the sorry excuse for a leader we have in the White House at the moment. Obama is something we've done to punish ourselves collectively for misdeeds unspecified. In fact, it might even be something we did in a prior lifetime, because I don't believe I've done anything bad enough in the present lifetime to deserve that clown as my POTUS.
Lou, what we have today (Bozo in the White House) is the result of getting what we measure... and we collectively measure what we value, and that is... smartness. (Biden said "clean and articulate" but that got tossed). Think about it: we as a society claim to value education, so we spend all kinds of dough subsidising it, what else do you expect? People want to be subjects of a regime run by people like themselves: college-degreed, effete, urban, urbane, and... smart!
Notice the list doesn't include experienced or common-sensical.
So we have what the MSM (populated by degreed and indebted people who were so smart that they invested $150k on an education to get a job which might pay them $25k/annum) values most: a really smart guy with a degree they all respect who has never run a damn thing and who probably doesn't know how a nail and a hammer work together.
It's easy to think in those terms, but we've all known good college-educated people and worthless high-school dropouts, alongside worthless college grads and overachieving self-starters who never attended a day of post-secondary. It takes all kinds.
Here's lack of common sense for you: The OWS people claim to be "the 99%", yet a poll shows that New Yorkers were roughly split 50/50 on their support for the protestors. Somehow I suspect that deep in their heart of hearts, they know that the claim of 99% is completely untenable.
He's really more of an Oliver O. Oliver than a Bozo.
"How could the be the Greatest Generation when they failed so thoroughly to raise their kids?"
Sociological changes during and immediately after the war opened up almost boundless opportunties for the gratification of impulses that in early generations would have been modified by family, neighborhood, and town, not to mention all the programs that were thrown at returning vets to keep them off the streets - housing ("a dollar down and the rest when you catch 'em" as the saying went), creation of suburbs with their looser personal connections, the GI Bill (a product of certain rational analyses of what happened when demob hit at the end of the Civil War and WW1), women working during the war resenting being returned to housework at the stroke of midnight in 1946, unprecedented mobility that separated parents from their parents by vast distances, television, etc. We who live with all these phenomena and have done so for 60 years find it difficult to understand the kind of world our parents lived in before the war and how much it changed during and after. I gained a modest appreciation for that vanished world when running down the American Guides series produced by the WPA/FWP 1936-1942. The guides captured a snapshot of America as it was before the war. By the time the war was over, that world had been largely blown away by the - you'll excuse the cliche - the winds of change blowing from the war itself.
"Did the man who stormed Normandy to defeat the Nazis really do it for…for this? Today? What we have today?"
Not directly. They fought and died for the world they left in order to fight the war. When they returned, everything was changing rapidly, seemingly for the better. Today is the result of those changes. Not all bad, but certainly mixed. "All this is civilization. All this I give you and you must take it all with no argument. And once taken, you cannot give it back." Such was the warning given by the god of wisdom in ancient Sumerian legend when he offered civilization to humanity. From this side of change, we can't control it, take some, give others back. It's all of a piece.
"No, if there's one defining quality of this generation, it's the love of self-flagellation."
Hardly. Self-flagellation is indulged in only if it's covered by the media. Otherwise, we are remarkably unselfcritical lot. What was dominant themes of the student demonstrations in the 60s? The whole world is watching. We bend the world to our will, we don't conform, we're all individuals (even when we dress the same and do the same brainless things). We're the bow wave. We change the world. With that kind of mantra, we don't necessarily even look at what is and whether it has any value before we upend it. Anything is better than what is as we find it.
But we rely on shrinks much more than our parents' generation did. How can we be better people? Sensitivity training. Learning to let go of the past. Spending quality time with our kids. Learning how to "parent" (ugh, I hate that word as a verb).
No, I stand by my statement. We are introspective to a fault.
Gone are the days when a man can say, "Here's what I think, here's what I say, take it or leave it." Now you have to kiss everyone's ass and worry whether you fit in with the zeitgeist.
You left out the part about how they had to walk 10 miles in the driving snow every morning to get to a job, and sometimes there'd be work, and sometimes there wouldn't, and then they'd have to walk 10 miles back in the snow drifts, and sometimes there'd be coal for the fire, and sometimes there wouldn't ....
Corlyss, you are romanticizing the past in a way I thought only I could do, but you've out-Lou'd Lou here.
"Corlyss, you are romanticizing the past"
LOL I don't romanticize a past I lived thru. I romanticize the Middle Ages . . . Things got too complicated after that.
Constantinople's fall to Mehmet II in 1452 was the beginning of the end for western society.
A reminder. George Soros. Van Jones. Union thugs. Useful idiot student fodder.
http://www.redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/11/19/ows-hijacked-occupycongress-next-steps-on-unions-agenda/
When Pelosi tossed out the word "astro turf" in describing the first Tea Party events, most normal people had no clue what she was talking about. Projection. Accuse others of what you do. It is their playbook, bible.