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*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month: WCSO-FM – Columbus, Mi
(including the cities of: Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Starkville, Mississippi.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
The final debate from Sioux City Iowa was one for the memories. Best and worst moments for the night and what it all means in our topic A section on the Kevin McCullough Show tonight. Why Ron Paul is DONE! Bachmann may be on her way back. Perry is positioning well, and Romney and Newt both lost ground! kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
Culturally speaking the death of Christopher Hitchens is the most important news story of the past 24 hours. Why it mattered so much. Why there is so much meaning in it. And what even Hitchens himself would be forced now to admit. A special look back at the man who claimed God was not great. Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“7 Ways to Apply the 7th Spiritual Law: 1. Certainty of Salvation” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

The majority of Americans do not view big business as the greatest threat to the country when asked to choose among big business, big government, and big labor. In fact, Americans’ concerns about big business have declined significantly since 2009.

Additionally, while Occupy Wall Street isn’t necessarily affiliated with a particular party, its anti-big business message may not be resonating with majorities in any party….

This does not mean that OWS doesn’t have something to smile about. The movement, which has been in search of a solution since its startup three months ago, will be the focus of a course, possibly two, at New York University next semester.

Julia Seymour of CNSNews quotes a free student paper as stating that the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA) will offer a course exploring the “history and politics of debt and take a deeper look at the economic crisis the movement is protesting.”

SCA Professor Lisa Duggan, who will be teaching the course, is quoted directly by the Washington Square News as saying:

Occupy Wall Street has done us all the service of illuminating [the fact] that the economy operates within the framework of political, social and cultural conflicts, and not outside them.

The only fly in the ointment, as Seymour notes, is that you would need to be in OWS’s hated 1 percent to pay the tuition bill at NYU, where course credits run $1,159 per, making the school the second most expensive college in America.

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Now the youngest members of society are under the gun again. This time the attack on childhood is subtler and coming from an august source. Sesame Street, the decades-old PBS show that once taught children to count and spell, is now raising the specter of hunger among its young and impressionable viewers. It is also explaining how when mommy and daddy run out of food, the nanny state can help restock the family larder. CNSNews reports:

A ‘food insecure’ Muppet is helping to promote a national ‘Food for Thought’ campaign that teaches poor families to seek out nutritious food and to eat on the taxpayers’ tab.

At the National Press Club on Thursday, Lily the Muppet—who worries about her family not having enough money to feed her properly—pitched free food at school:

‘Sometimes we can’t always afford to buy all the food that we need,’ Lily said. ‘I mean, but we’ve been finding lots of ways that we can get help.…Yeah, for example, at school I get a free breakfast and a lunch … part of the meal plan.”

The article goes on to quote Rev. Douglas Greenaway of the National WIC (Women, Infants and Children) Association, who not only praised ‘Food For Thought’ but allowed as how the campaign “is really a deficit reduction strategy, and we hope policymakers will take notice of that.”

The good reverend didn’t elaborate on how spending taxpayer money, never mind how beneficent the goal, reduces the deficit. Maybe he was channeling Obama Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who intriguingly proclaimed that food stamps create jobs.

Lily’s message, meanwhile, is being circulated in schools, hospitals, and food assistance programs via a multimedia campaign. Included among the instructional tools is this video, complete with a smarmy music track and testimonials by parents, many of them on the verge of tears.

That many American families are struggling to make ends meet right now is undeniable. So is the grim fact that poverty levels are at a record high across the nation. But if instilling fear in young children is part of the liberal solution to this problem, count me out.

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Don’t believe me? Maybe you’ll believe former Clinton labor secretary and current professor of public policy at the U. C. Berkeley Robert Reich, who wrote on Tuesday, “Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008.”

The occasion for Reich’s jubilation, which was shared by many on the left, all breathing a collective sigh of relief, was the now-legendary game-changing speech that the president gave in Kansas that same day. In the speech, Obama channeled Theodore Roosevelt, who gave a rousing speech of his own in 1910, in which the Republican leader carved out his vision of a new, more progressive America.

So there you have it: Game over. As James Taranto wrote sarcastically in a related context, “Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich might as well just go home and spare themselves the humiliation” in 2012.

Now that Democrats finally have the strong, committed leader they voted for in 2008, what more is there to say? One thing that might be said is that this meme of Obama’s second coming— reflected in headlines proclaiming “Finally, the Obama We Elected” and the like—sounds familiar. It’s a place we disbelievers have somehow been before.

Maybe it was in Detroit where Obama delivered a Labor Day jobs speech that prompted Zeke Miller of Business Insider to title his article “Finally, Obama Delivers the Fiery Jobs Speech Everyone’s Been Waiting For.”

Or maybe you read Andy Ostroy’s analysis of the new, less gentle Barack Obama at the Huffington Post titled “Obama Finally Gets Tough.” Here’s the lead paragraph in case your memory needs refreshing:

Finally there’s some tough love in the Oval Office. President Obama came out swinging on Monday, heeding the advice of his critics in taking a firm stand on his positions for fixing the economy and reducing unemployment in the face of intense, unyielding opposition from Republicans. He boldly declared that there would be no cuts on spending without an increase in taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations, and issued a veto threat to back up his new found mojo.

Maybe the familiar chord this refrain sounds harks back to July, when the editors of National Review opined in an article titled “The Debt Ceiling: Obama Is Finally Angry” that

Barack Obama has had enough. That’s all one can say after Friday’s press conference, where Obama was angry and energetic. He was unabashedly partisan and unapologetically annoyed.

In August, Obama was declared finally angry, in March finally passionate on health care.

I could go on in this vein, but I think you get the general idea. Obama has been reborn or reinvented more times than anyone can remember, but despite the proclamations he always ends up in the same place—far down in the polls, bereft of ideas, and fearful as ever of commitment to his party or his ideals.

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In January of 2010, following California’s example, he launched a campaign to reduce salt consumption citywide by 25% over five years’ time. In September of that year, a time when the city was faced with a $4.5 billion-and-growing deficit, he spent $25 million to install bike lanes that have since added immeasurably to the city’s traffic congestion and increased the risk of injury for pedestrians.

Now the mayor is at it again. On Tuesday, his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, announced that New York would be investing in a consciousness-raising traffic safety campaign that draws on the work of Atlanta artist John Morse. And how will the artist reach out to“distracted pedestrians, cyclists and drivers”? Why through haiku, of course. Poems that follow the 5-syllable, 7-syllable, 5-syllable Japanese verse form will appear on 8-inch square signs that also feature “eye-catching graphics.”

There will be 200 signs in all, posted at high-crash locations near cultural institutions and schools. Here are some examples of the haiku New Yorkers can expect to see in the coming months:

Too averse to risk

To chance the lottery, yet

Steps into traffic.

A sudden car door

Cyclist’s story rewritten.

Fractured narrative

The concept behind the project, which is called Curbside Haiku, was borrowed from Atlanta. That city commissioned Morse in 2010 to design 500 signs for its Roadside Haiku.

It is too early to gauge the success of Curbside Haiku (which in Morse’s view includes surprising motorists with “a commentary on the urban conditition”), but in light of Americans’ general love of poetry, I would be surprised if it weren’t a smash.

I don’t profess to be a poet, but I would like to close with a haiku of my own, dedicated to Mayor Bloomberg.

How much can one burg,

Strapped for cash, waste on trifles

Before it goes broke.

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As Mediaite observes:

Hey, all you people complaining that the Occupy protesters need to start protesting the White House in addition to the evil banks? You just got your day.

The chant—“Mr. President, over 4,000 peaceful protesters have been arrested”—begins at about the 1:07 cue in the video. It crescendos and continues until the president’s supporters shout down the protesters with the distressingly familiar “O-bam-AH” chant that was so prevalent in 2008 and shortly thereafter.

If nothing else, the noisy reception Obama received today reveals that the Occupiers are equal opportunity boors.

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• Obama campaign goes all in: casts its lot with Occupy movement

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Blow opens his column with a paragraph of questions:

Is America exceptional among nations? Are we, as a country and a people and a culture, set apart and better than others? Are we, indeed, the ‘shining city upon a hill’ that Ronald Reagan described? Are we ‘chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world’ as George W. Bush said?

Obviously some of these questions are more emotionally charged than others and will likely generate different responses, but Blow conveniently provides a single umbrella answer: “This year, for the first time, most Americans did not say yes.”

In support, he cites a finding in the Pew survey, to wit: 49% of respondents agreed with the statement “our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others,” as compared with 60% in 2002.

Observing that the language in that statement is loaded, Blow turns to a second poll, conducted last month by TIME Magazine/Abt SRBI, which found that 71% of Americans say they believe our position in the world has been declining in the past few years. Only 7% claim to view the nation’s position as growing, and 21% responded it is about the same.

It is interesting that Blow doesn’t devote a paragraph to possible explanations for the purported decline, that he doesn’t attempt to isolate variables that have changed in the last few years. The most conspicuous is the ascendency of a U.S. president who seems uncomfortable with the title “leader of the free world” and who early in his presidency traveled the world apologizing for America’s past arrogance.

Anyway, now that the stage has been set, it is time for prescriptions. Here are Blow’s:

We have to stop snuggling up to nostalgia, acknowledge that we have allowed a mighty country to be brought low and set a course to restitution. And that course is through hard work and tough choices. You choose greatness; it doesn’t choose you. [Emphasis added]

What comes next is a bunch of vague leftwing nostra that Blow might have lifted directly from one of Barack Obama’s speeches: invest in the future, invest in “a generation of foundering and forgotten children,” invest in education, yada yada yada.

But back to the last quoted paragraph and the highlighted word: restitution? It is an odd choice. Blow could have written restoration, but instead he chose a word meaning “payback”—more specifically, “compensation for loss, damage, or injury caused,” the “restoration of property or rights previously taken away.” Sounds a lot like reparations or whatever it is that the 99% is demanding on any given day. I wonder which segment of the population Blow thinks should be saddled with the responsibility of paying the nation back. (Selected graphs may be found here.)

A final point of interest is that the Pew survey presents about a dozen statements/questions in all, but Blow focuses on only one. Among the findings he ignores is the reaction to the statement “success in life is determined by forces outside our control.” Only 36% of Americans agreed, compared with 41% of Brits, 50% of Spaniards, 57% of Frenchmen, and 72% of Germans. Reactions to statements on the occasional necessity of military force, on isolation vs. engagement, and in support of the freedom to pursue life’s goals similarly show a well-defined split between Americans and their global neighbors.

Sounds to me like American exceptionalism is alive and well.

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The Brooklyn Museum is no stranger to controversy. It generated a firestorm in 1999, when its “Sensation” exhibit showcased English artist Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. The painting, which had a little something for everyone, depicted a black Madonna surrounded by images from “blaxploitation” movies and close-ups of female genitalia cut from porn magazines. For good measure, one of the media used in the work was elephant dung. The artist’s and museum’s First Amendment rights were challenged in a lawsuit brought by then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the City of New York.

But why reminisce about art past when art future beckons? Another of the pieces in the new exhibit titled Felix, June 5, 1994 is a painting of a man made a few hours after his death from AIDS.

Not all of the works featured (there are 105 in all) are so “challenging”—to borrow the characterization of Tricia Laughlin Bloom, the project’s curator. Some are by prominent twentieth-century artists including George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Alice Neel, and Berenice Abbott.

A helpful advisory on the Brooklyn Museum’s website page for the exhibit notes:

Some pieces in this exhibition are directed toward adult audiences. Parents and teachers are advised to preview the exhibition.

But that warning raises a trenchant question. As the ghost writer of some half dozen books on fine art, I would maintain that any true work of art, no matter how disquieting the subject, is fair game for virtually any viewer, provided the work is placed in an appropriate historical or aesthetic context. I would ask the curator behind the upcoming exhibit what precisely it is about selected pieces in the show that makes them inappropriate for “non-adult” audiences. It would be interesting to determine whether those distinctions are the same ones that segregate real art from crass visual exploitation.

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Yet on this, their “national day of disruption,” the demonstrators are acting in a manner that betrays a troubling lack of purpose. “The protesters are calling for a massive event aimed at disrupting major parts of the city,” Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson told the New York Post early Thursday, adding “we will be prepared.”

And the city was prepared. A group of protesters attempted to storm the New York Stock Exchange before the opening bell but was turned away by police in riot gear. The Occupiers failed in their mission—but what was their mission? If it was to increase New York’s already crippling deficit, they succeeded. The NYPD this morning added an extra thousand officers per shift in the Wall Street area. The cost of NYPD overtime—absorbed by taxpayers—was $2 million on October 7, so one can easily imagine a bill twice that amount and climbing at this juncture.

When asked, many members of the Occupy movement will tell you that their efforts to shut down the city are related to income disparity. Yet, the people most affected by their actions are among the so-called 99%, whose backs the protesters purport to have. Businesses in the vicinity of Zuccotti Park are showing losses totaling half a million dollars since the sit-in began.

The most compelling evidence of a disconnect between the actions and self-professed goals of the Occupy movement comes out of Occupy Harvard, which is open only to those with a Harvard ID. The Atlantic Wire writes:

With the acceptance rate having dropped to a record low of 6.2 percent this year, Harvard College is already a problematic place to represent the interests of the 99 Percent. This is not to say that all Harvard students are wealthy sons and daughters of the 1 percent. In fact, Harvard also holds the record for the most financial aid offered to students and has been aggressively promoting socioeconomic diversity on campus since Harvard president Larry Summers introduced the initiative in 2004. But Harvard’s generosity wouldn’t be possible without the help of the hedge fund-loving Harvard Corporation, who boosted the university’s endowment 21 percent in the past year. It now totals $32 billion, making Harvard the second wealthiest nonprofit institution in the world, right behind the Catholic church.

And to think that Harvard can lay claim to nurturing some of the brightest minds within all of liberaldom. Makes some sort of perverse sense, doesn’t it?

The Occupy movement’s enablers in the press will tell you that demonstrators have accomplished what they set out to do. One of them, Harold Myerson, writes at The American Prospect that “Occupy Wall Street has already been a stunning success in changing the nation’s public discourse.” As evidence, he cites a graph of a Nexis search that shows a dramatic rise in the number of stories that include the term income inequality. What Myerson doesn’t do is explain why this disparity is necessarily evil in a system of free entreprise or offer a remedy to the “problem.” Then again, the obvious solution is one that makes liberals so uncomfortable that even its staunchest advocate denies supporting it.

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The threat is just one of many issuing from the lips of the peaceful, law-abiding hordes, who were formally evicted from Zuccotti Park on Tuesday, when Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Michael Stallman ruled:

The [protesters] have not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators and other installations to the exclusion of the owner’s reasonable rights and duties to maintain Zuccotti Park, or to the rights to public access of others who might wish to use the space safely.

Neither have the applicants shown a right to a temporary restraining order that would restrict the city’s enforcement of law so as to promote public health and safety.

Lawyers for the protesters have vowed to appeal the decision, though it’s hard to imagine on what grounds they can effectively claim proprietorship over a public space that is privately owned by a third party.

In the meantime, Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway filed a motion on behalf of the city on Tuesday asserting that “people who have a known history of violent interaction with the police” have been gathering in the park, and “makeshift items” that could be used as weapons, “such as cardboard tubes with metal pipes inside, had been observed among the occupiers’ possessions.”

Holloway further noted that after the “occupation” of a traffic lane on the Brooklyn Bridge in October, “knives, mace and hypodermic needles were observed discarded on the roadway.”

The mainstream media’s continued whitewashing of the anti-Wall Street protests as non-violent or as somehow the “ideological counterpart” of “the Tea Party” potentially puts innocent lives in harm’s way.

At one point in the two-month-long farce, this column recommended that the protesters fold up their tents, literally, and return to their lives. Now that that decision has been made for them—and their response has been to threaten innocent civilians with firebombs—they need to be treated like any other terrorists. Your move, Secretary Napolitano.

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Well, not in so many words. Last Friday one of the self-described 99% flew into a rage at a McDonald’s where he was denied free food. The man ripped a credit-card reader from a counter and hurled it at workers.

Today comes word of another restaurant, this one directly across from Zuccotti Park, that claims its staff is being terrorized by the protesters. The New York Post reports that Stacey Tzortzatos, owner of Panini & Co. Breads

claims she has been repeatedly harassed and threatened with bodily harm by protesters after she and her employees refused to give in to their outlandish demands.

The difficulties began when Tzortzatos decreed that her sandwich shop’s restrooms were not a public bath. Tensions escalated when demonstrators broke a bathroom sink, flooding the shop, and clogged the toilet. After having to fork over $3,000 to cover the costs of repair, Tzortzatos hung a sign indicating that the restroom was out of order, but protesters tore the sign down.

She is quoted by the Post as saying:

I have the police in here 10 times a day, [and] I’m the bouncer. I’ve been called the spawn of the devil. It’s unbelievable what goes on in here every day.

When the restaurant is closed, protesters use the façade as a bathroom. When it is open, they demand electric power to run their laptops. Says Tzortzatos, “They unplugged my ATM machine and plugged in their computers.”

Some have threatened to boycott the store for refusing to acquiesce to their demands, which last Friday included filling a 10-gallon container with water. When an employee refused, the individual who had brought in the container (described as a “crazed squatter”) began banging the container on the ground and screaming.

After another downtown restaurant was forced to lay off 21 workers last week because business had dropped off 30 percent since the beginning of the “occupation,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the police to remove hundreds of metal barricades that shop owners claimed was a deterrent to customers. Instead, the removal of the barriers seemed to be an open invitation to protesters to step up their “business” at local establishments.

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That $9 million, in case you were wondering, is an approximate total expenditure on costs incurred by 18 major cities to date, all arising out of “Occupy” movement antics. New York’s cut, which is currently the largest, is estimated at $3.4 million—or at least it was as October 14.

But even when the amount was a paltry $2 million, Mayor Michael Bloomberg groused that theprotesters (whom he supported in the early days of the movement!) needed to “lay off the banks.” Bloomberg told Politico in early October that the protesters were

trying to … take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have. We’re not going to have money to pay our municipal employees or anything else.

Bloomie knows a thing or two about cutting essential jobs and services, having laid off thousands of teachers, firefighters, and police (while miraculously finding the funds to install “green,” high-risk-to-pedestrian bike lanes all along Manhattan’s major thoroughfares).

Ironically, much of the cost to New York and other cities is to cover overtime police         details, in spite of which some reports suggest that citywide violent crime is up.

Here is an alphabetical list of the 18 cities compiled by Verum Serum. Take a drink if your hometown is represented.

1. Occupy Asheville—$170,000
2. Occupy Atlanta—$451,691
3. Occupy Austin—$78,000
4. Occupy Boston—$150,000
5. Occupy Charlotte—$1,700 per day
6. Occupy Denver—$365,000
7. Occupy Los Angeles—$45,000 (plus estimated $400,000 to repair the lawn)
8. Occupy Minneapolis—$200,000
9. Occupy New York—$3,400,000
10. Occupy Oakland—$2,000,000 for police overtime alone
11. Occupy Philadelphia—$500,000
12. Occupy Phoenix—$200,000
13. Occupy Portland—$208, 796
14. Occupy Raleigh—$51, 000
15. Occupy Sacramento—$300,000
16. Occupy San Diego—$49,000
17. Occupy San Francisco—$100,000
18. Occupy Seattle—$426,000

Total: $9,111,487

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One inconvenient truth that Olbermann and Corn overlooked was that 17% of another demographic, a plurality for the poll, believed that violence against the government is justified. That group was comprised of voters between the ages of 18 and 29.

In the months since that survey was taken, there have been precious few incidents affirming the Tea Party’s willingness to act on their violent tendencies, whereas the under-30 crowd, which comprises at least a third of the Occupy movement, has been busy:

A day of demonstrations in Oakland that began as a significant step toward expanding the political and economic influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, ended with police in riot gear arresting dozens of protesters who had marched through downtown to break into a vacant building, shattering windows, spraying graffiti and setting fires along the way.

Other reports from the scene indicate that American flags were burned and ATMs were destroyed. One protester is quoted as saying, “We go from having a peaceful movement to now just chaos.” The report goes on to note that “the larger Occupy movement has yet to coalesce into an organized association.”

Amid the chaos comes evidence that the 99% may have posers within their ranks. Arrest records obtained by the Daily Caller reveal that the median value of the homes (beyond Zuccotti Park) of the 984 OWS protesters arrested in New York City between September 18 and October 15 is $305,000. At least 95 of the protesters’ residences are worth approximately $500,000 or more. The average age of protesters taken into custody, moreover, is 27 years.

You can do the math yourself, but if the answer you come up with does not include spoiled rich kid as the unit of measurement, you probably need to recheck your work.

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Oh, wait. It’s not The Onion but the New York Daily News that is reporting this development with a straight face. It is the latest chapter in a continuing saga that on Sunday found our noble protesters beset by hordes of the homeless who had descended on their neo-paradise and were helping themselves to the occupiers’ free “food, bedding, … clothing, … books and medical supplies” without giving anything back. Oh, the humanity!

The Daily News article quotes security team member Paul Isaac:

If you want to be part of our group, you have to be civilized. Unfortunately, some people come to disrupt the peace.

Careful there, Mr. Isaac. You’re beginning to sound a lot like the people who actually live in the community surrounding Zuccotti Park in their references to you and your fellow squatters:

The cowbells start at 4 a.m. and the drumming goes past 10 p.m. A lot of people are very frustrated. A lot of people are concerned about the safety of our kids.

It would seem as though the time has come for the protesters to fold up their tents and go back to their real lives, humdrum as that may seem. It doesn’t appear that the hopes liberal observers had for the movement—that it would evolve into a politically powerful Tea Party of the left—are likely to be realized. Public support has been dwindling. Even the staunchest of the movement’s allies in the mainstream media are beginning to wake and smell the stench emanating from Zuccotti Parks everywhere.

Here is Froma Harrop:

Occupiers, time to quit while you’re ahead—for you’re a little less ahead with every confrontation involving police or other civic authorities. The skirmishes provide unflattering visuals for the ordinary folks at home, even those sharing your angst and anger over the financial-industry takeover of our economy.

Harrop writes that in Oakland, where some of the most violent exchanges with police occurred, demonstrators were chanting à la Vietnam, “Now the whole world is watching.” She now advises the movement as a whole to embrace another line from the era of Vietnam: “Declare victory and leave.”

I’m not sure what the victory is in this instance unless the goal of the battle was to persuade the public of the impoverished state of thinking of present-day liberal activists, who act first and plan later.

As for slogans for the movement, another possibility is suggested in the Daily News article, which quotes 19-year-old Oregonian Kia Moyer-Sims, who is described as having camped out at Zuccotti Park since day one of the occupation:

The history books will say ‘They occupied Wall Street’ Not ‘Somebody stole somebody’s backpack.’

Are you sure this isn’t The Onion?

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The article quoted food committee member Megan Hayes:

No, no, no, we just need a chance to get organized…. Because we hit the ground running, we became a full-on restaurant in the park in under a month without having a chance to have any organization, any clear guidelines for volunteers. We need a chance to catch our breath, to say all right, winter’s coming, we’re not going anywhere, how can we maximize our output and get as many people as possible fed?

Another organizer Chris O’Donnell, was even more vehement in his denials that the occupiers are trying to force the bums out:

I can definitely tell you that none of us are concerned about ‘freeloaders.’ All of us have concerns about general camp security, but it wouldn’t be fair to say this is an attempt to get freeloaders or homeless people or anybody like that out of the park.

But another story that appeared Sunday in the New York Daily News suggests at the very least that Hayes and O’Donnell don’t speak for everyone at the park. Writer Harry Siegel reports:

The ‘model’ civilization that’s sprung up at Zuccotti is itself increasingly divided between the stakeholders in the nascent movement … and hangers-on, including a fast-growing contingent of lawbreakers and lowlifes, many of whom seem to have come to Zuccotti in the last week with the cynical encouragement of the NYPD.

But where the story gets interesting is about halfway down, where Siegel acknowledges that the protesters have asked New York City’s finest to “intervene with troublemakers inside the park.” [Emphasis added] Two paragraphs earlier, the Daily News reporter writes:

Even when organizers have requested their intervention, police enter to a mixed chorus of ‘brutality’ and ‘pig’ calls side by side with chanted reminders that ‘you are the 99%.’

Siegel also admits to being incredulous at the conventional police response to demands that they should evict the bums:

‘He’s got a right to express himself, you’ve got a right to express yourself,’ I heard three cops repeat in recent days, using nearly identical language, when asked to intervene….

For good measure, Siegel quotes one of the occupiers as quipping upon hearing this pat response from the pigs—I mean, police— “The first time I’ve heard cops mention our First Amendment rights.”

If the irony hasn’t sunk in, consider this observation by James Taranto:

The Obamavillians [protesters]—who, keep in mind, describe themselves as ‘occupying’ a publicly accessible plot of private land—are complaining that the cops aren’t tough enough with those they don’t want around.

So to summarize: The protesters consider the police enemies and hurl insults (and sometimes worse) at the men in blue. Yet, they demand that the cops take action to expel the unwanted element, who have precisely the same rights to the space as do the protesters themselves. If that scenario isn’t a microcosm of the Obama presidency, nothing is.

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At least that was the conventional wisdom until Herman Cain, who was born to two blacks parents (making him technically blacker than Obama), rose to the top of the polls of GOP candidates. Liberals scrambled to explain this seeming paradox.

One of their deepest thinkers, Janeane Garofalo, posited intriguingly during an appearance on Countdown with Keith Olbermann that Cain’s popularity somehow “hides the racist element” of the party. Black blogger Goldie Taylor advanced the narrative on Martin Bashir’s show on MSNBC, where she explained that Cain is himself just another racist conservative—that if he “could shed his ethnicity today, if he could become what I call the color of water, he would do it.” (Never mind how she knows this. Call it black women’s intuition.)

The latest analysis of the Cain mutiny comes from MSNBC’s Karen Finney. Also a guest on Martin Bashir’s show, she stated (h/t The Weekly Standard):

One of the things about Herman Cain is, I think that he makes that white Republican base of the party feel okay, feel like they are not racist because they can like this guy. I think he giving that base a free pass. And I think they like him because they think he’s a black man who knows his place. I know that’s harsh, but that’s how it sure seems to me. [Emphasis added]

It does seem to explain certain otherwise inexplicable details of the Cain candidacy, such as:

• On his campaign bus, he invariably “chooses” a seat in the back.
• There have been numerous references in the blogosphere to Herman Cain’s “baggage.” (Did someone call for a red cap?)
• Cain has been accused (by Martin Bashir, no less—Bashir does get around) of being a “chicken hawk.” I take that to be code for “lover of fried chicken.”

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If the 2012 election is about anything, it will be about how many voters have figured out that that isn’t the case.  The world has, metaphorically speaking, turned upside down – and not by accident but by agency.  The voters, and the ideologues making decisions in the US government, have two different sets of assumptions about truth and value.

A good illustration of this is the differing concepts of each party about “jobs.”  When the voters say they want jobs, they mean they want a resurgence of opportunity in the various fields in which they have worked: manufacturing, accounting, engineering, sales, construction. By “jobs,” the voters mean vocations, lines of work and expertise to build on, paths to fulfillment, accomplishment, greater responsibility: the means to a better life for themselves and their families.

Of course jobs should come with a paycheck, but what’s important about a “job,” as opposed to a welfare hand-out, is that it’s something that leverages your importance – your skills, your character – to merit that paycheck.  A person with a job has a lot of influence over how much he earns and what he can do with it.  A job is always a two-way street, in which the employee can shape his own destiny through how much he’s willing to put into it.  The market is quite marvelous about rewarding greater effort, when it comes to the goods and services customers prize.

That is not how the ideologues who now govern the United States see “jobs.”  For them, “jobs” are a systemic/economic given, to be treated most profitably as units of political influence and taxpaying value.  Jobs are a mechanical abstraction; what’s real is constituencies and dependencies.  Their view of jobs is not that America is stronger when she’s producing more of them, which she does with breathtaking power on her own.  It’s that jobs represent an opportunity to cultivate that most prized of political assets:  dependent constituencies.  If there are to be more jobs, what’s important to the Obama ideologues is that the jobs be something their government can tighten or loosen the valve on.

For many of them, this is because they see jobs in the abstract as something on which a hazy power structure already tightens or loosens the valve.  Many of them literally think a capitalist cabal – “big business,” “Wall Street” – decides to distribute jobs freely or dole them out parsimoniously.  That is not the experience of the average person who has ever held a private-sector job, but Obama’s team is not composed of such people. The fry-dropper at Burger King, who can see that her job is probably about to be cut because there’s hardly any customer traffic on her shift, knows more about the economics of employment than quite a few of Obama’s federal-agency managers.

This disconnect between each party’s understanding of truth and value is a major factor in the almost unparsable noise of the current political debate.  A week ago, on Fox News Sunday, center-left panelist Liz Marlantes declared that Rick Perry’s energy plan would fail to resonate with voters because what people care about is jobs, and Perry had said nothing about a plan for job creation.

But millions of voters understand that Perry’s energy plan is a jobs plan.  It would not only create jobs in the energy industry, it would make energy cheaper for everyone, households and businesses alike, and thus improve everything about our economic picture, including investment, business start-ups, and hiring.

What it would not do is leave job-creation in the hands of federal-government planners.

We have reached the point at which we can no longer pretend we are talking about the same things.  The Obama administration and its apologists in the media are not talking about economic improvement, opportunity, or even relief as the average voter understands them.  Another case illustrates that beautifully:  the case of the Mexican trucking industry.

I should state up front that I’m a friend of free trade in general, and not an advocate of special protections for US businesses.  The latter simply cost the American consumer more – and all attempts to prevent the market from rendering its judgments end by needing perpetual shoring up, mainly in the form of incessant public bail-outs and favoritism.

But what’s going on with the trucking industry has nothing to do with the market.  It has to do with a weird concatenation of ideological stances.  All things are no longer equal.  There is nothing in this situation that is happening because the market would demand it.  No “capitalist cabal” is making the relevant decisions.  The Obama ideologues are fully in charge.  They have produced the situation, lock, stock, and barrel.  Here it is.

NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – is a good idea and always has been.  I’m in favor of it.  I don’t think NAFTA and Interstate 35 are tools of the devil to undermine American integrity.  But it’s possible to cynically invoke NAFTA for the wrong reasons, and that’s precisely what the Obama administration has done.

The first Mexican-registered long-haul truck crossed the border into Texas, with full access to the US road network, on Friday, 21 October, under the aegis of NAFTA.  (A US law, you may remember, passed in 1994.  Yes, it took this long.)  If I had my druthers, Mexican trucks would have had full access to US highways by 2000, which is what was supposed to happen under the original provisions of NAFTA.  Canadian trucks already have such access.  Law enforcement and security precautions would have had to be somewhat different with Mexican trucks, given their origin and the crime problems from that particular US border, but it’s not the access to the US hauling market I object to.

The problem is what has led up to the triumphant ceremony on the 21st, and the comparatively disfavored position of the US trucking industry.  The first Mexican truck admitted with full access to US highways arrived 10 weeks after Obama imposed new fuel-efficiency regulations on big-rigs and other heavy transport trucks, along with new emission targets.  Officials of the trucking industry lined up shoulder to shoulder with Obama for a photo op in August, when the new regulations were issued, but a few journalists who still retain critical thinking capabilities reported that the industry officials’ complaisance was not replicated among independent owner-operators.

Large firms that retain fleets of trucks may be able to amortize the cost of buying new, compliant rigs relatively quickly, as promised by federal regulators.  (That promise in itself will, of course, depend on the future price of fuel.  Saving on higher-priced fuel may be current saving, but it doesn’t amortize a sunk cost in the manner predicted by the regulators.)

But independent truckers will be hit hard.  A number of them won’t be able to afford to buy compliant rigs, and will have to cease operation.  Others may be able to afford it, but will never realize the savings potentially available to large firms, because the life-cycle for a truck – how long it’s kept and operated – is typically shorter for independent owner-operators.  The increased cost, without off-setting savings, will eat into profits, expansion plans, and hiring.  Smaller operators handle less overall volume and have less discretion over loading as well, and loading is everything when it comes to fuel efficiency (and the need for harder-working, higher-emitting engines).  Since the purpose of trucking is to bear heavy loads over long distances, simple physics will price many independents out of the business.

But wait – there’s more.  Besides fuel-efficiency regulations, the US trucking industry has also been hit with a new set of safety regulations.  These regulations, however well-intentioned, are not only costing the industry more, they are in some ways actively defeating their own purpose.  But costing the industry more is bad enough.  Who feels the costs the most?  That would be independent owner-operators, of course.  One of the cost impositions an owner-operator is ill-positioned to overcome is the need to hire additional drivers in order to haul the same freight in the same time while complying with safety rules.

Here are a couple of examples of the level of debate producing the decisions on these regulations.  This one comes from the Jim Motavalli piece on fuel-efficiency regulations (at BNet):

In the absence of regulations, companies that led with new aerodynamics and engine technology often lost out because their prices were higher, the [American Trucking Associations] said. Regulations create a level playing field.

Well, no.  Regulations tilt the playing field on behalf of favored constituencies.  The market is a level playing field.  Regulations inherently create artificial advantages and disadvantages.

This priceless soundbite is from a Washington Times piece on the new safety regulations:

“Since fatigue is a national epidemic, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that 10 hours per day is safer than 11 hours a day,” said Edward C. Bassett Jr., an attorney with the APITLA, in a Wednesday letter to Mr. Obama.

So, the US trucking industry – already affected by California’s new emission regulations – is facing regulations that will force many smaller operators out of business, cost jobs, and make transportation costs more expensive for all commercial enterprises.  Under these conditions, new competition from Mexican truckers seems like it might not be the best idea.

But the Obama administration isn’t just admitting Mexican trucks to US highways.  As reported back in April by the Green Room’s Director Blue (Doug Ross), it’s using US taxpayer dollars to enable Mexican trucks to operate on our highways.  Mexican trucks will have to comply with EPA fuel-efficiency and emission standards too.  But what American truckers have to pay for themselves, Uncle Sam is funding with your tax dollars for their Mexican counterparts.

When it comes to safety regulations, meanwhile, the sheer logistics of enforcement will mean that Mexican truckers will be able to avoid much of the cost as well.  Just as US industry officials speak for large trucking operators, agreements with the Mexican government will act as an agent for Mexican haulers in terms of compliance bona fides.  Mexican truckers and large US firms will develop a modus vivendi with regulators; it’s the independent owner-operators who can neither absorb new costs nor make favorable arrangements with government agencies.

Just as Obama’s “jobs” plan is not a jobs plan as most voters would understand one, so his approach to Mexican trucking and NAFTA is not “free trade.”  It’s regulatory favoritism.  We are so heavily regulated now that it is no longer possible to speak in terms of level playing fields and markets.  There is little left in life in which we cannot be punished or incentivized by regulatory decisions.

Control over how ever-increasing regulation is wielded is the apparent objective of the Obama administration; we can speculate as to why Mexican trucking is to be favored, but the point is that it is being favored by conscious policy, just as large trucking firms are being relatively favored by conscious policy, and small truckers are being absolutely disfavored in every way by conscious policy.  There’s no “market” to it – except the iron reality that small businesses can’t compete when the playing field is artificially tilted against them.

More and more Americans are living that reality.  Do we understand that Barack Obama doesn’t see it the way we do?  Do we “get” that he and his advisers, for their ideological reasons, want the playing field tilted?  Have we internalized the truth that all things are not equal, we’re not singing off the same sheet of music, and we aren’t in Kansas anymore?  We’ll find out in 2012.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Representatives from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History are collecting signs and ephemera from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. for potential exhibitions about the movement. And they have plenty to choose from. New images of the already iconic Occupy signs come across the wires every day.

Wow. I haven’t been this excited since the National Portrait Gallery, also part of the Smithsonian, ran its exhibit of homoerotic art last December during the Christmas—whoops, I mean “winter”—school break. Among the masterpieces to which parents could expose their children was a portrait of a post-crucifixion Jesus covered with ants. (Maybe expose is the wrong verb when referring to an exhibit that featured the “art” of Robert Mapplethorpe.)

But let me not dwell on the past. The newly proposed exhibit could not be more timely. Literally: The Occupy movement is less than two months old. How lucky we are that someone had the vision to dedicate an exhibit to its artistry, in a world-class art museum no less.

I’ve compiled a slideshow of prospective “works,” the first three of which—along with the one appearing on this page—were highlighted by Post art critic Maura Judkis.

To the untrained eye, these signs appear hastily scrawled using crayon or grease pencil. But when you dig beneath the surface, when you focus on the artists’ Fauve-like use of color, the iconoclastic application of chiaroscuro… OK, maybe they are just ordinary hastily scrawled signs. But at least their messages are compelling, no? Take the artwork displayed on this page. Can you not feel the raw emotion? Can you not sense that the artist is very upset?

The Smithsonian is funded in large measure by taxpayer dollars. For fiscal 2011, the institution requested $797.6 million from Congress. To borrow a page from the president’s handbook, maybe it is time to “call and email and tweet and visit” your member of Congress.

UPDATE: You may want to cancel those cards and letters to Congress, at least until the Smithsonian features another exhibit that includes artistic “statements” like the one cited earlier. For now, the museum will not be staging an exhibition of Occupying Wall Street signs, as noted above.

Valeska M. Hilbig, Deputy Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s Office of Public Affairs, informs me that the staff has merely “collected a just a few pieces [of OWS memorabilia], as curators have collected from the Obama/McCain Presidential campaigns, the Tea Party rally in March 2010, Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ rally, Jon Stewart’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ and most recently from the American Conservative Union’s CPAC in February and from the protests at the Wisconsin state capitol in March.” She adds:

This is part of the Museum’s long tradition of documenting how Americans participate in the life of the nation. The Museum collects from contemporary events because many of these materials are ephemeral and if not collected immediately, are lost to the historical record.

Finally, she notes, “the piece by Maura Judkis your [sic] reference in your article, is solely a product of the Washington Post without consultation of the Museum. The Museum is not soliciting input from the public.”

Come to think of it, you may also want to cancel your subscription to the Washington Post.

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The time frame dovetails precisely with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement. So does this imply a cause-and-effect relationship between the two phenomena? Not necessarily. When you look at the small sample numbers available for comparison—56 shootings last week as compared with 22 for the same week in 2010—the finding may well be outside the realm of statistical significance.

Then again, the Post observes:

Four high-ranking cops point the finger at Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying their rallies pull special crime-fighting units away from the hot zones where they’re needed.

Since Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17, the NYPD has relied heavily on its borough task forces, the department’s go-to teams for rowdy crowds.

Verum Serum weighs in:

Of course the protesters have a right to protest, but there is a cost associated with it. Police have spent more than $3 million so far dealing with OWS. Pulling those cops from their high crime areas has also resulted in a spike in violent crime. At some point the city needs to say enough, limit the time and place these protests take place, and get back to work dealing with the real troublemakers.

The NYPD estimates that about 10% of the total force, or as many as 3,000 police officers a day, are diverted from their normal responsibilities when the OWS protesters march.

The drain on resources in high-crime neighborhoods was underscored dramatically last week when a pregnant Brooklyn mother was killed by a rooftop gunman after she selflessly threw herself in front of a group of schoolchildren.

In the meantime, the Occupiers, even if they lack a useful agenda, provide much-needed comic relief at a time when the public mood is dour. In this video clip (h/t Andrew Breitbart) from an Occupy San Francisco rally, a young woman engages in responsive reading with a crowd using both a “human megaphone” and an actual megaphone (which is the communications equivalent of wearing both a belt and suspenders). Notice the slight decrease in volume among her congregants when she calls for “a democracy in which the people have the right to print their own money.”

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“They’re defecating on our doorsteps,” Community Board 1 member Catherine Hughes told the New York Post. Hughes, who lives a block away from Zuccotti Park, was referring to the park’s “inhabitants” of the last five weeks, adding:

The cowbells start at 4 a.m. and the drumming goes past 10 p.m. A lot of people are very frustrated. A lot of people are concerned about the safety of our kids.

Other area residents told the Post they’ve been insulted and harassed as they walk to work each morning.

Bloomberg can’t run for the mayoralty again, and judging from his recent polls, it’s unlikely New Yorkers would have him. But he still has his legacy to preserve. That may explain why he announced this morning on local talk radio that more arrests are imminent. He spoke of enforcing rules, such as requirements of permits for marches and assemblies.

A separate column in the New York Post quotes OWS media coordinator (OWS has a media coordinator?) Thorin Caristo as essentially threatening Bloomberg back:

The mayor’s statements sound hardline and I have no doubt he may actually try to enforce those. But we all know that every time excessive police force is used in this situation the movement grows exponentially.

Caristo also said of Bloomberg:

His inability to create a clear and definitive opinion or position on OWS just shows he’s being tossed around like a bird in a storm.

In short, Caristo was calling Bloomberg a wimp—an insult he doesn’t need to take. After all, he’s been called a wimp by far better people than Thorin Caristo.

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Hundreds of grimy protesters laying siege to Wall Street … dine each night on gourmet meals prepared by a former hotel chef using only the finest organic ingredients.

The park’s chef de kyoozeen is Eric Smith, 38, formerly of the Sheraton New York. After losing his job last year, Smith began donating time at a soup kitchen in East New York, Brooklyn. Recently, he began manning the chuck wagon at the downtown Manhattan encampment, which is now in its fifth week. Says Smith of the meals he provides:

The other day, we made some wonderful salmon cakes with dill sauce and some quinoa salad and a wonderful tomato salad with fennel and red onion.

We use organic, grass-fed meats, and the other day, we made a wonderful fried rice and root vegetables and all kinds of soup.

Sounds wonderful.

Last night, the menu included chicken (organic, natch), spaghetti Bolognese, roasted beet and sheep’s milk-cheese salad, and wild heirloom potatoes. It is doubtful that the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street ate better.

The Post notes that the food is donated by farms upstate as well as in Connecticut and Vermont. When a fresh shipment of supplies is ready, a driver collects the goodies and trucks them back to the park.

Now if only someone would donate mattresses and plumbing, the protesters would really feel at home.

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One protester, a kitchen and legal-team volunteer from Fort Lauderdale, is quoted as saying:

Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment. I had my Mac stolen—that was like $5,500. Every night, something else is gone. Last night, our entire [kitchen] budget for the day was stolen, so the first thing I had to do was … get the message out to our supporters that we needed food!

And here I would thought Wall Street greed was the protesters’ biggest problem.

The cat burglars sneaked into the makeshift kitchen at the park overnight and made off with as much as $2,500 in donated cash from right under the noses of volunteers as they slept.

A security volunteer from Brooklyn told the Post he planned to get tough with the predatory perps:

I’m not getting paid, but I’m not gonna stand for it. Why people got to come here and do stupid stuff? All it does is make people not wanna come here anymore.

The volunteer, whose name is Harry Wyman, didn’t clarify what he considered “stupid stuff,” a term some might broadly apply to everything that has gone on in the park since the protests began five weeks ago.

At one point yesterday, Wyman and other volunteers briefly scuffled with a man standing near a park entrance with a pail shouting “Donations!” and pocketing the cash people tossed in the bucket.

Why that was frowned upon is not clear since no code of conduct or manifesto exists, detailing protesters’ rights and responsibilities.

In the meantime, you have to wonder why the protesters aren’t more forgiving of the crooks among them. It could be argued these people have been enterprising enough to find work on their own.

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The basic criticism is that the move repeats the worst error committed in past deployments of US troops:  sending task forces too small to achieve anything decisive, and giving them vague, open-ended missions.  The grand debacle of Vietnam started out in precisely this manner.  As the troop levels expanded the mission crept ever outward, but only briefly ceased being vague and open-ended – when Nixon implemented a strategy designed to get a negotiated bargain so US troops could leave.  South Vietnam fell less than three years later.

The other classic examples from recent years are the deployment of Marines to Lebanon, which resulted in the bombing of their barracks by Hezbollah in 1983 and the loss of 241 Marines, and the US deployment to Somalia in 1993, which ended with the bloody street battle in Mogadishu commemorated by Black Hawk Down, in which 19 Army soldiers were killed.  Both of these deployments were characterized by vague, open-ended missions, and, in consequence, poorly conceived force levels and operational postures.  Both ended with ignominious withdrawals.

But there are other reasons for concern.  The most fundamental one, in my view, is that there is no real operational mission for the US advisers, as advisers and trainers.  The State Department policy statement on the deployment is as non-specific as it’s possible to be while still using English nouns and adjectives.  But it’s not just the vagueness of the mission; it’s the fact that, based on a military analysis of the situation, there isn’t one.

The Lord’s Resistance Army has been plaguing Uganda, South Sudan, and other adjacent nations in Central Africa for nearly a quarter century.  The armed forces of the regional nations have been fighting it very nearly that long.  They know far more about its methods – and about their own terrain, populations, and other combat conditions – than US Special Forces do.  Combat skills training and orchestration of the battle plan are not what the regional armed forces need help with.

Certainly the 100 soldiers being deployed are too small a contingent to have a decisive tactical effect against a scattered, indigenous guerrilla force that roams over large swaths of territory.  To a fight like this one, the US force primarily brings sophisticated equipment.

Two aspects of the sophisticated-equipment advantage are obvious.  One is essentially political:  the communications suite back to the US theater commander and the US chain of command.  Uganda doesn’t need cell phones, GPS, or signal encryption technology; the Ugandans can buy those things from vendors in Uganda.  It’s the guarantee of US engagement, with the presence of a force that can raise Commander, US Africa Command in Germany 24/7, that makes a strategic difference to the leadership in Kampala.

The other equipment aspect is smart-targeting technology – principally drones, for reconnaissance and attack.  And that begs the question what the mission is.  Does the Uganda deployment represent an expansion of drone warfare to a new guerrilla problem, one unrelated to the global war on terror?  Has the GWOT been redefined to include the Lord’s Resistance Army?  What is the US strategic interest being served here?  What is the strategy?

Americans have generally tolerated the expansion of drone warfare to Yemen and Somalia, on the theory that Al Qaeda and its associates (e.g., the Al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia) have to be pursued into their bases of training, recruitment, and operational planning.  Al-Shabaab is on the very fringe of justification by the needs of the GWOT, but the group ticks two boxes:  the GWOT, and the pacification and unification of Somalia.  US policy has pursued the latter on a desultory basis for nearly 20 years; since midway through the Bush 43 tenure, our approach has focused on giving material support to the African Union’s mission in Somalia (AMISOM).

(Al-Shabaab also – indirectly – ticks the antipiracy box, in the sense that stabilizing Somalia is a general measure to quell piracy.)

The LRA, however, does not export terrorism.  Nor does it harbor or support international terrorists.  Locating a justification for a poorly defined US mission against the LRA is hard enough.  Seeking analogies by which to justify the use of the Obama administration’s favorite technology is equally hard.  What drone-reliant situation is the LRA’s similar to?

If you had to pick one, you’d probably suggest that of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Haqqani network in Pakistan.  The tactics of the AfPak predators are by no means identical to the LRA’s – the LRA roams territory on a somewhat migratory basis, slashing and burning with the methods of a raiding force – but the threat to rural populations and to the authority of central governments is similar.

It’s worth noting, at this point, that what the LRA is specifically not similar to is Al-Qaeda in Yemen (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP).  AQAP hides out in Yemen, training and planning attacks on the US; it does not make a practice of slaughtering the Yemeni population.  The LRA also has significant differences from Al-Shabaab in Somalia.  Al-Shabaab, unlike the LRA, seeks to establish a shari’a state, and makes itself strategically vulnerable by trying to enlarge its held territory (including overtures of political leadership in the capital) and attempting to rule the people on it.  Al-Shabaab makes itself a conventional target in a way the LRA does not.

The big, strategic picture is that we are apparently proposing to transport the AfPak head-hunting model to Central Africa.  The deployment envisioned would be suitable for using drones against the LRA leadership in the same way we have been using them against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Taliban/Al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.  It is not suited for anything else that would actually be of use, either to a well-defined mission or in the conditions on the ground.  That the Obama administration is wedded to the drone-warfare method is flashing-neon obvious.  But the question remains why we appear to be opening a new front with it in Central Africa.

The US troop footprint is reportedly intended to expand to South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  Putting small troop contingents in any of them is dicey; putting them in DRC borders on idiotic.  DRC has been wracked by civil war for years, and Uganda and Rwanda back warring factions in the country.  It is not possible to “fight the LRA” in DRC without taking sides in DRC’s internal conflict.  The US has effectively taken sides before, but not with US troops on the ground in DRC.  With troops in country, the cost of taking sides would be higher by an order of magnitude.

Without dismissing the horrors perpetrated by the LRA, it is still possible to see another option.  The Bush 43 administration put a great deal into Africa, building up the US engagement infrastructure there by beefing up diplomatic missions and creating Africa Command, along with service component commands; bolstering ties with African nations (including dramatic increases in our economic and military cooperation); and fostering and supporting African regional initiatives.

US support to the AMISOM effort in Somalia is one example to build on: the LRA problem is a natural fit for the African Union.  An AU-managed effort, or even an ad hoc coalition of the nations affected by the LRA, is a better approach than deploying US troops to a single nation, with vague plans for expansion and no clear political scope delineated for the campaign.

In 2001, the US had been attacked on 9/11 by a terrorist force that used Afghanistan as a base and was materially supported by the Taliban.  In 2011, the US is wholly unaffected by the LRA.  Countering the LRA is a worthwhile cause to support, but it is one the African nations should have the lead on, in terms of political commitments and a defined plan.  There is no evidence from the Obama administration’s announcement that they do.  There is no reference to a regional coalition, to the African Union, or to an African initiative.

Indeed, the US action is strategically disembodied – like the “responsibility to protect” justification used for the Libya operation in March – in every aspect.  The risk of mission-creep and situation-force mismatch is exceedingly high.  We are right to be gravely concerned about where this is leading.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Democrats are not the reason the Tea Party exists. But by ignoring the Tea Party—or in many cases, mocking it—until it was far too late, Democrats were ill-prepared to deal with the fallout that led to an unmerciful electoral defeat in the 2010 midterm elections.

As I wrote earlier, finding differences (which are legion) between the two movements has become almost a cottage industry among political writers in the past week or so. But one difference that has received less attention than it deserves is the depth of coverage of OWS in the so-called elite media and its largely positive tone.

Early indicators suggest the GOP has already begun to learn from its mistakes. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, appearing yesterday on FOX News Sunday, told host Chris Wallace that he agrees there is “too much income disparity” in the nation, adding:

We know in this country right now that there is a complaint about folks at the top end of the income scales, that they make too much and too many don’t make enough.

When asked about his characterization of the protesters as “mobs,” Cantor didn’t back down but did try to deflect criticism to Democratic leaders, whom he took to task for “joining in an effort to blame others rather than focusing on the policies that have brought about the current situation.”

Wilson is correct to sound a cautionary note. Republicans who continue to heap scorn on the protesters or make light of their lack of direction do so at their own—and our—peril.

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Among the game players is Big Journalism’s Jeff Dunetz, who serves up a lengthy list of distinctions, among them defecating on police cars and desecrating the American flag (both in the Occupiers column).

One of the unintentionally funniest comparisons is by psychoanalyst Todd Essig, who writes at Forbes.com that the chief difference between the two movements is exclusion versus inclusion:

From the start the Tea Party was about safety through exclusion, protecting oneself from outside influences—including a President seen as an un-American ‘other,’ perhaps for racial reasons, perhaps other reasons as well. What the Tea Party rejected was anything perceived by them as coming from outside the center of America. It’s not us, it’s never us; it’s them. Bad things were by definition ‘un-American’ or ‘against the Constitution.’

[…]

The start of OWS is radically different. Everyone is included, everyone gets to have a say. Rather than policy they have process. The ‘we’ of OWS is worldwide, a globalized, networked ‘we’ full of good and bad existing simultaneously and everywhere. The messier the better….

One would assume that as a student of mind, Essig is familiar with the figure-ground illusion, shown on this page. The notions of “outsider” versus “insider,” of “we” versus “they,” are similarly illusory and subjective, not bound to absolute judgments of the kind Essig is making.

One particularly interesting distinction that has been drawn is the police response to each of the protest movements. A blogger named Jeremy Bloom riffs on an article by Nate Silvers of the New York Times that addresses the increase in media coverage of the OWS movement as result of clashes with police. Bloom also falls victim to the figure-ground trap by imputing police brutality to these clashes, even though Silver never mentions the word brutality in his article.

As to the role of the police, filmmaker Michael Moore held out the olive branch to the men and women in blue on Friday, inviting them to join, rather than oppose, the new world order. Moore, whose own calls for jailing the rich anticipated the Occupy movement by eight months, is quoted by Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters as having said:

My last word here … is that the police need to join us. In the same way the Egyptian army joined the people in Freedom Square there in Cairo. This is my appeal to the New York Police Department, the police departments all over the country. You are working class people. You’re not paid enough. You have the most dangerous job in the country, and these rich bastards on Wall Street they have ruined your 401(k)s, your pension funds, your future, your children’s future. Money that should be going to having better law enforcement has gone to needless wars in other lands.

So, my appeal to the police is you are us and we are you, and join us. It’s fun. We’ll even let you beat on a bongo drum.

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But if it’s true that Romney consulted with Obama’s crazed ‘Science Czar’ John Holdren, he should step out of the GOP race today.

Barack Hussein Obama has clotted the executive branch with unaccountable “czars” — unsavory characters too extreme to be confirmed for cabinet positions even by a hyper-partisan, Democrat-controlled Senate. Among the most alarming of these malevolent lunatics is Science Czar John Holdren, a participant in ClimateGate who has advocated de-developing America and putting sterilants in the public water supply…

…Holdren has also spoken in favor of forced abortions, confiscation of babies, targeted as well as mass involuntary sterilization, bureaucratic regulation of family size, and global authoritarian government. If there is a line between ultra-left ideologue and evil maniac, Holdren clearly crosses it. No one to the right of Pol Pot would want John Holdren advising our leaders.

This brings us onto still more common ground between Barack Obama and Willard “Mitt” Romney. From an official memo released by Willard’s office when he was Governor of Taxachusetts, announcing “Strict New Clean Air Regulations“ [i.e., Cap and Trade]…

…Sound familiar? Obama wanted to impose Cap & Trade nationwide, but it would so obviously cripple the economy that he couldn’t get it through a Democrat Senate that was radical enough to pass ObamaCare — the national version of RomneyCare.

Now to the even scarier part: In the development of greenhouse gas policy, Romney Administration officials have elicited input from environmental and economic policy experts. These include John Holden [sic], professor of environmental policy at Harvard University…

Of course, that was back in 2005. By now everyone knows that global warming is a hoax, and CO2 is harmless. Everyone except Mittens, that is. He continues to proclaim that economic activity makes it be too hot out.

This comes on the heels of reports that President Obama met with Romney’s key advisers while designing Obamacare.

Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney’s landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney’s own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare.”

Romney’s shape-shifting positions are so flagrant that even Democrats are producing flip-flop videos of the sort that pulverized John Kerry in 2004.

Look, folks: I’ll support Mitt Romney against Barack Obama if he’s the nominee. But he’s not the nominee. Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are all vastly superior candidates — and vastly more electable in the general — than Mitt Romney.

We don’t need another John McCain or Bob Dole. We don’t need another mushy centrist with ill-defined principles. Too much is at stake this year. While there may not be a Reagan in the race, there are Constitutional conservatives to choose from. And choose from them we must if this Republic is to survive.
 
 
Related: Early glimpse at the official 2012 Obama bumper-sticker (if they accept my design proposal).
 

Before you answer that question, be mindful that no one attempted to evict anyone. Early this morning, the squatters in Zuccotti Park learned that Brookfield Properties, which owns the plot of land, had aborted its planned cleanup. The mayor’s office sent tidings at 6 a.m., informing the occupiers that they were once again free to camp out in the park indefinitely.

But the protesters, who apparently had girded themselves for a good fight, began “throwing bottles and bags of garbage at officers” anyway. Police retaliated. CBS New York reports on one particularly ugly skirmish:

First Precinct Commander Ed Winski checked a protester who refused to stay on the sidewalk. When the protester came back into the street, Winski hurled his megaphone down and wound up rolling around in the street with the protester, throwing punches. Other officers surrounded the two, throwing punches. The protester was arrested.

Shades of Chicago, 1968.

There were about a dozen arrests in all, all provoked by demonstrators who, channeling the president’s former chief of staff, decided not to let a crisis go to waste.

Today’s were not the first arrests since the sit-in began. That dubious distinction belongs to some 700 protesters who were taken into police custody after blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 2. Something, however, tells me this won’t be the last incidence of violence from the “party of peace.”

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Oh wait, that wasn’t the Tea Party. It was Occupy L.A., the West Coast affiliate of the Zuccotti Park live-in, now in its fourth unwashed week. In the clip, the speaker tells an unseen crowd in broken English:

One of the speakers said the solution is nonviolent movement. No, my friend. I’ll give you two examples: French Revolution, and Indian so-called Revolution.

Gandhi, Gandhi today is, with respect to all of you, Gandhi today is a tumor that the ruling class is using constantly to mislead us. French Revolution made fundamental transformation. But it was bloody.

India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty.

So, ultimately, the bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means. Revolution! Yes, revolution that is led by the working class.

Long live revolution! Long live socialism!

Quoth PJ Tatler:

Every single day, more videos emerge from the Occupy movement showing people saying things that, if they had been said by a Tea Partier, would have been front-page news for weeks and discredited the movement forever. But since it’s the Occupy Wall Street movement, darlings of the media and Democratic politicians, they get a pass.

I’m not attempting to play devil’s advocate, but I would argue the lack of response to this video is more a function of its obscurity than it is the left’s sanctioning of its own loony narrative. (Tracing the video to its YouTube source reveals that it’s had only 2,200 views.)

By the same token, the Occupy movement is still in search at this late date not only of a unifying message but of a believable one. When a hypocrite like Russell Simmons, who made millions exploiting the capitalist system, appears on television professing to speak for the Occupiers, they should be outraged. When he invokes a tired ’70s retread—”Power to the people”—to articulate their message, they should be sick.

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It is perhaps this second fact that prompted the unwashed masses at Zuccotti Park to accord Simmons a warmer welcome than they did FOX News Channel host Geraldo Rivera, also—nota bene—a man of color. (One glaring omission from the burgeoning protest movement is a sufficiency of black and brown faces, which complaint critics of the Tea Party have offered as evidence of its racism.)

In tacitly embracing Simmons (who made an appearance at protest central along with rapper Kanye West), the Occupiers overlooked several other inconvenient facts. One is Simmons’s statement to CNNMoney earlier this year that getting rich is a lot easier than people think (Simmons himself has an estimated net-worth of $340 million). Another is that one of the businesses he owns is UniRush Financial, Inc., which sells prepaid debit cards to low- and middle-income consumers.

In short, Russell Simmons is everything the Occupy Wall Street movement is dedicated to overthrowing. He is part of the 1 percent whose money the 99 percent feel entitled to a cut of. He is an embodiment of the financial industry at its most corrupt—selling people access to their own money at a premium. Perhaps most tellingly, he is living proof that anyone who works hard can make it, regardless of skin color.

When Simmons appears on TV as he did on Monday to declare that the protesters are camped out in New York’s financial district “because Wall Street runs our government and they’d like to,” he could just as easily substitute we rich guys for the phrase “Wall Street.”

The fact that OWS has no problem with someone like Simmons speaking for them and verbalizing their mission speaks volumes about the movement. It also suggests that Democrats endorsing the protests are essentially going all in on a losing hand.

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The human microphone idea is simple.  The crowd repeats each phrase uttered by a speaker, in order to amplify the sound and ensure the message gets across.  If you’re not alone in being reminded forcibly of kindergarten, wait, there’s more.  Check out the Chicago link above, and scroll down for the links to photos of “spirit fingers,” “peace guns,” and “point of process” triangle hands.  These methods of communication remind me of nothing so much as the cues used by grade school teachers with their young charges.

“OK, second grade.  We will walk single file to the lunch room.  If we need to stop for another class, I will raise my right hand.  The person behind me should raise their right hand and stop.  Everybody else raise their right hand and we all come to a stop.  Now, what do you see if we have to stop?”

“Your right hand!”

“That’s right.  And what do you do if you see my right hand?”

“Raise my right hand and stop!”

“That’s right.  Now, who has any questions?  Yes, Grayson?”

“Miz Smith, when do we put our right hand down?”

People used to get their buzz over responsive yelling by attending football games.  Communicating in code, with hand gestures, was something that was fun for a while if you were a Boy Scout or a Campfire Girl, earning badges and learning special, secret things.  Bird calls, writing in hieroglyphs, spelling out cuss words in American Sign Language – kids can have a lot of fun with codes.

But we have no tribal memory, as humans, of a time when it might have been a good idea to give a say over our lives or our government to people who adopt the communication modes of childhood.  That would just be stupid.  The kid-level communicating is cute when kids do it.  It’s creepy and weird when the people doing it have the bodies of adults – and aren’t in a comms-challenged combat situation like a SWAT Team, a SEAL team, or an infantry patrol.

The “creep” factor is the one that struck J. Christian Adams, who posted the video of the Atlanta human-microphone incident for Pajamas.  (Jazz Shaw today highlights the same mob’s ignorant dismissal of John Lewis.)  And there is definitely an element of mindless invigoration to it.  It’s one thing to listen to a demagogue (or even just someone giving administrative instructions), registering the message in your brain but not doing anything about it, at least for the moment.  It’s another kind of action altogether, to vigorously repeat everything a speaker is saying.  Doing so generates a powerful sense of noisy assent for everyone involved.  You’re not just there listening and thinking: you’ve sold out your critical thinking faculties, and agreed to convey automatically whatever the speaker wants to say.

It is, as Adams notes, the perfect incubator for a violent mob.  The reliance on coded cues – rather than on reasoned debate – is another proto-mob feature.  Ann Coulter’s latest book, Demonic, gives a number of examples of how mobs go into a frenzy over coded cues, interpreting them as pretexts for action in ways they would not if they were in a different, more measured – more explicit and articulate – communication environment.

When you’re five years old, there are a lot of circumstances in which the right thing to do is to ask you to suspend your reservations and critical thinking skills.  For one thing, you don’t have very much of the latter.  You don’t have much discrimination or judgment.

But in the adult world – the world of binding decisions, commitments, promises, ideology, political thought – the suspension of skepticism and rational, critical thought is fatal.  There is no realm of politics in which it is appropriate for crowds to act as a human microphone.  Politics is a tool, a method; it isn’t something that merits such a hold on us.  It’s not something we can trust and give ourselves over to.  A political movement, conducted with temperance and intelligent suasion, has its uses; a mob paroxysm is just an accident – and probably a violent and costly one – waiting to happen.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Westboro will picket his funeral. He had a huge platform; gave God no glory & taught sin.

A subsequent tweet, noted by the Huffington Post, reads, “No peace for man who served self, not God.”

One is tempted to ask whether these people know any shame, but the answer to that question is self-evident. As Phelps, an attorney and daughter of the cult’s founder, Fred Phelps, explained to Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday in March, he and just about everyone else in the country is going to hell.

In the remarkably distorted view of the church’s followers, just about the only people good enough to merit eternal salvation are the hundred odd (and I do mean “odd”) members of the church.

Having long made a spectacle of themselves at the memorial services of fallen members of the military, holding aloft signs reading “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and other charming sentiments, Westboro reached a new low in January, when they threatened to picket the funeral of 9-year-old Christina Greene. The child was the youngest of the six victims shot to death in Tucson by a crazed gunman whose primary target was Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Happily, the group begged off after counter-protesters in Tucson made it clear they would do everything in their power to insulate the memorial service from crazed interlopers.

In May, the church won a victory for its unique brand of lunacy when the Supreme Court upheld their appeal of a lawsuit that would have banned them from picketing at funerals. They were in the news again most recently in May when they expressed their intention to picket the funeral of former First Lady Betty Ford, calling her an adultress because she had been married previously.

And now this. I can understand that Phelps and company have no tears to shed for Steve Jobs, despite the critical and far-reaching ways in which his genius reshaped technology and communication. But out of respect for his children, the youngest of whom is 13, they could at least limit their hatred to print.

One hopes for Margie Phelps’s sake that members of the cult don’t communicate by means of iPhone, one of Steve Jobs’s gifts to current and future generations. Even the god they worship likely has no stomach for hypocrisy.

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Zuccotti Park, the plaza in downtown Manhattan where the movement got its start three-plus weeks ago and which remains the national epicenter, is overrun with refuse. Brookfield Office Properties, which owns the park, has released a statement that reads:

Normally the park is cleaned and inspected every weeknight.… Because the protestors refuse to cooperate … the park has not been cleaned since Friday, September 16th and as a result, sanitary conditions have reached unacceptable levels.

A catch-22 for both Brookfield and the city is that Zuccotti Park is a public space. It is privately owned but operates under a charter that gives anyone free access—even squatters in desperate need of a bath.

Filth is not the only way in which the movement is adversely affecting New York. The tendency toward violence among the protesters, 28 of whom were arrested on Wednesday for disorderly conduct, requires a constant police presence. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly reports that the protests have so far cost the city about $2 million in overtime for officers assigned to cover the demonstrations.

How serious a problem is the sit-in becoming for a city that is already in debt to the tune of $100 billion? So serious that even its socialist mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has told the protesters to “lay off the banks.” Bloomberg is quoted by Politico as saying:

The protests that are trying to destroy the jobs of working people in this city aren’t productive.

What they’re trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have. We’re not going to have money to pay our municipal employees or anything else.

I share Bloomberg’s concern, if for different reasons. His chief worry is not having enough warm bodies to place more traffic-choking bike lanes on city streets.

As for Commissioner Kelly, he warned the protesters, several of whom have been arrested for assaulting police officers, that “they’re going to be met with force when they do that—this is just common sense.” Kelly added:

These people wanted to have confrontation with the police for whatever reason. Somehow, I guess it works to their purposes.

Clearly, the commissioner has the OWS demonstrators confused with the Tea Party. Everyone knows that it’s conservatives who are violent. Liberals are the party of peace and tolerance.

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Now that the international Food Police have established a beachhead, concerns are being voiced elsewhere, including here at home. Could the U.S be next? During the U.N. General Assembly summit on non-communicable diseases—a discussion that included diet and eating habits—renowned medical researcher and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg opined that

governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option. That is ultimately government’s highest duty.

Well, there you have it—and from the man who claimed a few years ago that global warming is the biggest threat that humans face.

Bloomberg’s wish to make government the ultimate arbiter of what its “subjects” eat is nothing new. He has long been an advocate of taking the salt shaker out of the hands of American eaters. Nor is he alone in his effort to expand the reach of the nanny state. Under the watchful eye of First Lady Michelle Obama (who shares the mayor’s medical training), thegovernment has attempted to crack down on pernicious food advertising.

It has long been the position of this commentator that the American people need to take responsibility for their own health, a first step toward which is self-education. Yet, a story that appears in today’s New York Post suggests that perhaps Joe and Josephine Public are not quite up to that daunting task.

The story chronicles the rise in public fear of gluten, which appears to be on the verge of becoming the next MSG. (Briefly, for those who missed the MSG scare, a medical researcher from China working in the U.S. experienced a negative reaction to Chinese food prepared in American restaurants. In 1968, he wrote a letter The New England Journal of Medicine in which he theorized that monosodium glutamate, or MSG, might be the culprit. Despite research over the next several decades demonstrating that no statistical correlation could be drawn between MSG and “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” as the phenomenon came to be called, the myth endures to this day).

And now it has company. Meet the gluten hoax. As the Postreports, gluten-free diets are on the rise, and so are gluten-free menu options in restaurants all over the nation.

This is not to make light of celiac disease—an autoimmune disorder triggered by gluten, the protein found in grains—or of the roughly 1 percent of the population afflicted with it. But as the article notes:

[A]n increasing number of [consumers] who don’t have a medical excuse to ditch gluten are also declaring it public enemy No. 1. These days, you can’t throw a bread roll without hitting someone who has cut gluten out of their [sic] diet for health or diet reasons.

The writers quotes Zagat Survey co-chair Nina Zagat, who added a gluten-free category to the company’s guidebook because of consumer demand, as saying:

It’s a major issue. I’ve heard anecdotally that some people are eating gluten-free because they think it may be healthier in general.

It is not. Gluten is the “ingredient” that gives rustic breads their chewy quality. If you have not been officially diagnosed with celiac, there is no reason for you to deny yourself that simple pleasure. Unless of course you have convinced yourself that eating grain makes you sick.

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Police diverted from more important tasks to function as baby-sitters admonished demonstrators to stick to the pedestrian pathway. Needless to say, about 1,000 protesters interpreted the warning as their cue to move their act to the roadway, where they blocked traffic and clashed with cops for several hours, creating larger-than-normal traffic delays.

Some 700 protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct amid chants of “Let us go.” Change the slogan to “Off the pigs” and the theme to taking down “the Man,” and the scene could have been straight out of the ‘70s—except that the Man is currently black, which kind of spoils everything.

Some of those taken into custody claim they were tricked into being arrested by the NYPD, which they insist gave them misleading information about where on the bridge they could demonstrate.

Then again, the misinformation has been flowing for the duration of the sit-in, and those assembled have been willing dupes. At one point, for example, a rumor sprang up on Twitter that the police planned to use tear gas on the protesters—a crowd-control tactic the department doesn’t use. The claim was eventually rescinded.

As to what the protesters hope to accomplish, one of their own summed it up neatly in an email to The Associated Press. Erin Larkins, a Columbia University graduate student, wrote:

I don’t think we’re asking for much, just to wake up every morning not worrying whether we can pay the rent, or whether our next meal will be rice and beans again. No one is expecting immediate change. I think everyone is just hopeful that people will wake up a bit and realize that the more we speak up, the more the people that do have the authority to make changes in this world listen.

I’m pretty sure that most Americans at this point are on the same page as Larkins. The only question is how to bring about the change she is seeking. Somehow, I don’t think taking up residence on the streets of lower Manhattan and defiling the bathroom at a nearby McDonald’s is the answer.

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I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.

For good measure, the governor then hit herself in the face with a pie, which really elicited the guffaws.

The problem is not everyone got the “joke.” North Carolina GOP spokesman Rob Lockwood didn’t. He told The Daily Caller:

If it was a joke, what was the set-up? What was the punch-line? Where was the pause for laughter? It took them three hours to say it was a ‘joke,’ but when that flopped it became ‘hyperbole.’ We’ll just call it an unconstitutionally bad idea.

I submit that Lockwood lacks a sense of humor. Then again, maybe not. Yesterday Perdue attempted to walk back her characterization of the comments as hyperbole, instead claiming it was “sarcasm” and that her words taken out of context. One can only assume that she will next take a page out of Monty Python’s classic “Dead Parrot Sketch” and insist it was a palindrome.

Two footnotes to the story, one provided by Rush Limbaugh, who remarked, “The next time they tell you how stupid Sarah Palin is or Michele Bachmann, just think back to this day and North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue.”

The other is from Weasel Zippers, which reminds us that “only two months ago Obama ‘joked’ about having the same powers,” telling the National Council of La Raza:

The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you, not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.

On second thought, the president’s reputation is secure. He’s still the funniest guy around.

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Nevertheless, I tune in every now and then in the hopes of catching a “Weekdays with Bernie” segment, which features former CBS Newsman and liberal-turned-conservative Bernard Goldberg.

I caught last night’s segment, and so apparently did Noel Sheppard, who conveniently provided a video and transcript of the segment in a post at NewsBusters today.

The theme of the interview was the widespread distrust of the media by Americans, as recorded recently by the Gallup and Pew organizations. The data reveal:

• More than half of Americans—55%—do not trust the media.
• 47% believe the media tilt left, 13% right, and 36% not at all.

Goldberg’s explanation for these data—the media’s early adoration of Obama—is not an earth-shattering observation, but his take on it is pretty entertaining. At one point in the interview, he gives “an example that’s just too good to pass up.” He reads the following quote, which appeared in print on Christmas morning of 2008. For now, I will omit the attribution:

The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.

Goldberg states that the quote “sounds like the crap you read … in romance novels. Having in a previous life ghost-written one romance novel, I will respectfully disagree. If I had crafted language half that sappy, my editor would have thrown the manuscript back at me for rewrites.

More importantly, I believe that the mainstream media’s love affair with President Obama is the least of their sins. Far more egregious was their stubborn refusal to vet candidate Obama. When the story of his two-decades-long association with a hate-spewing black nationalist preacher surfaced, it was widely ignored by the “legitimate” press. Had it been any other candidate, the media would have had a field day with it.

Goldberg is also ignoring Part 2 of the story—the MSM’s falling out of love with Obama. No less liberal an organ than the San Francisco Chronicle became so incensed when the White House banished one of its reporters for during her job that Editor at Large Phil Bronstein vented his spleen in print. Other fits of moodiness have included bleepable quotes on TV by TIME’s Mark Halperin and Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. It was not hard to predict that their discontent with a dithering president would emerge once the scales fell from their eyes. At least it was not hard for anyone who refused to drink the Obama Kool-Aid in the first place.

If Americans don’t trust the media, it is because the media have become untrustworthy.

Oh, and the source of that smarmy quote about the glinting sun and the chiseled pectorals? It was the Washington Post, page 1.

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In its coverage yesterday of Obama’s speech at a Congressional Black Caucus awards dinner, the AP quoted the president thus:

Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.[Emphasis added]

Instead of “cleaning up” Obama’s present participles by restoring the final g, AP’s Mark S. Smith used what linguists call eye dialect. In one of the most famous literary example of this phenomenon, John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath mimicked the Okie dialect by transcribing the name of character Rose of Sharon as “Rosasharn” when spoken by members of the Joad family.

So, did AP show its racist colors? The Blaze reports that two journalism professors—one liberal, the other conservative, both black—were invited on to the new Chris Hayes show to hash it out.

The upshot of the debate is irrelevant because, on its face, the allegation of racism is preposterous. The president went out of his way last night to sound more “black.” At one point in his speech, he said, “It gets folks discouraged. I know. I listen to some of y’all.”Mark Smith quoted this construction as well. Should he have sanitized y’all into “you?”

The first job of a journalist is to report a story as accurately as possible. Part of the job of reporting Obama’s speech last night was to highlight his obvious pandering, which is borne of desperation.

The only element missing from the story is whether any of the listeners were offended by the president’s “blaccent.”

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Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

In 2010, Bloomberg decreed that the city’s 24,000 restaurants would all have “scarlet letter”grades emblazoned on their windows in a brazen show of their Health Department-certified cleanliness (or lack thereof). This past August, he declared theprogram a success—this despite an independent inspection revealing that New York branches of Starbucks that had received “A” grades were crawling with infestation ranging from vaginal yeast to fecal strep.

But at least the letter grading system has been good for business in a troubled economy, right? Er, maybe it’s best not to ask.

Another Bloombergian brainstorm that the mayor recently deemed an unqualified success was the installation of biker-friendly bicycle lanes on all of New York’s major thoroughfares. The cost of the project was a mere $25 million (at a time when the city was closing hospitals). The plan also eliminated an entire lane of motor-vehicular traffic, creating congestion nightmares on the city’s already traffic-choked avenues. Then again, this consequence was likely intended: Bloomie is a card-carrying environmentalist.

In the press conference where Bloomberg announced the success of the bike lanes, he noted that the number of bicyclists injured since the dedicated lanes were installed has declined. What he neglected to mention is that the number of pedestrians injured by reckless cyclists has not.

A study recently done by Hunter College professorsfound that 55% of all emergency-room visits in the state resulting from bikes hitting pedestrians occur in New York City. One of the study’s authors, Bill Milczarski, told the New York Post that the number of injured pedestrians could be even higher, adding, “We don’t know how many people are injured and just go home or see their family doctor.”

That the accidents were waiting to happen should have been evident to city planners from the get-go. Then again, Bloomberg travels everywhere in a bullet-proof limo. It is not likely, he has ventured out from behind a parked car (cars are now parked a lane’s width out from the curb to accommodate the bike lanes) only to be greeted by a speeding cyclist bearing down on him, shouting “Watch it!”

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The EPA will shut down an estimated 20% of the nation’s coal plants through the ground-level ozone rule (the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) ) through cap and trade that is about to be implemented in January 2012. Opponents of the Obama administration’s “over-reaching” EPA say these are costly regulations. Financial analysts estimate that the cost of this rule will be $130 billion by 2015. But if that figure is correct, that’s good news for the US economy.

…Because there is another way of looking at that $130 billion “expense”. One industry’s expense is another industry’s sales bonanza. For the coal industry’s balance sheet, it is an expense, but think about who is going to perform this $130 billion cleanup – fairies? Hardly. This is a job for real American industries…

Consider the raw idiocy behind this line of “reasoning”:

• America’s coal industry employs 126,000 workers directly and another 455,000 workers whose jobs are indirectly dependent upon the coal industry.

• Closing 20% of America’s coal factories will result in the immediate layoffs of about 116,000 workers, many of them union members in the mining, electrical, transportation and service industries.

• Blackouts and brownouts will become commonplace: there is no way to shutter roughly 10% of America’s electric generation capacity without causing shortages and rationing.

• And simple supply-and-demand will cause skyrocketing prices for electricity, which will be paid for directly by retail customers (you and I) as well as businesses, which will also pass those costs on to consumers like — yes — you and I.

The executive summary for you hard-working, dues-paying members of the AFL-CIO, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Teamsters and the United Mine Workers: the Democrat Party is now aligned with the hard-left Eco-Marxist movement and it is using your money to destroy your jobs.

Remember in 2012.

 
Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.

Ultimately, the courts rejected efforts to block construction of the center, which they said was protected by the Constitution. The courts got this one right. No one I know and respect ever denied the Cordoba Institute’s right to build a mosque on any site of its choosing. The issue was never one of rights but, rather, of whatis right, in the moral sense. It is hard to conceive in a city with an area of 305 square miles that Feisal Abdul Rauf, the contentious imam behind the project, could not find an alternate spot that was not in the now-spectral shadow of the twin towers.

It is equally hard to imagine that liberals, who claim to own the patent on tolerance and compassion, had so little of either for the families of 9/11 victims, who were among the project’s most vociferous opponents. What possible harm could have come from indulging their request that Cordoba find a different plot of real estate for its religious center? Oh, that’s right—I keep forgetting: Mention of the fact that the terrorist plot to kill 3,000 Americans was carried out in the name of Islam is not permitted according to the liberal handbook.

The Park51 center, as it will henceforth officially be known, opened with a photo exhibit of children’s art. How innocent! And the project’s usually bellicose developer and chief financier, Sharif El-Gamal, was all sweetness and light as he tut-tutted:

We made incredible mistakes. The biggest mistake we made was not to include 9/11 families. We didn’t understand that we had a responsibility to discuss our private project with family members that lost loved ones.

If only he had had a V-8!

One small blessing that Rauf and El-Gamal can be thankful for is that no harm is likely to come to their center now that it is built. America is still by and large a peaceful and law-abiding nation. The two men wouldn’t enjoy the same peace of mind had they built the structure in Rauf’s native Kuwait or its neighboring countries.

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