| « | November 2011 | » | ||||
 |
||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
Best wishes to my readers and all Americans on this, the most American of holidays
And a salute to men and woment of the armed forces, especially those who are serving in posts of danger this Thanksgiving
It's a beautiful late-autumn morning here in the Ocean State. Jackie and I are having a fine time and looking forward to a Gregg family Thanksgiving.
Posting may be sporatic over the next few days: My wife and I are heading east for a Thanksgiving visit to the family in Massachusetts. Ten hours in the Highlander together should make for a stern test of our relationship…
Say, do you remember Stacey Hessler? She’s the Occupy Wall Street zealot who abandoned her family in Florida to join the Vanguard of the Revolution in Zuccotti Park. During her sojourn under a tarp in the park, she developed a deep, meaningful relationship with a male fellow protester. But now it looks as though she’s going to have to change her Facebook status from “in a relationship” to “busted." From the New York Post:
The hippie Florida mother of four who ditched her children and banker husband to sleep in Zuccotti Park’s squalor hit rock bottom yesterday when she was hauled off in handcuffs, her dreadlocks flying wildly in every direction, for blocking a street near the New York Stock Exchange.
Stacey Hessler, 38, was lifted off the pavement in the center of Broad Street by three cops who slapped plastic bracelets on her wrists and dragged her away kicking and screaming.
“What did I do? What did I do?” she kept shouting.
She was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct after she blocked “vehicular and pedestrian traffic” and refused orders to move, cops said.
Check out the photo accompanying the story—it’s truly priceless. Way to change the world, Stacey!
Just noticed this warning on the door of our toaster oven, incidentally the most hated appliance in the Gregg kitchen: “If contents ignite, keep door closed and unplug oven.”
If contents ignite? What is that? Am I supposed to stand by with an extinguisher while my English muffin is toasting?
The funny thing about leftie protesters in countries like America is that they wish they lived in a fascist state. Because if they did, their protest would be a heroic act of resistance, not an adolescent temper tantrum. So now that various cities around the country have moved to close down and clean up the Occupy Wall Street campouts, their action are being represented as part of a sinister plot hatched by the federal government to repress dissent. Seriously:
The ugly hand of the federal government is becoming increasingly suspected behind what appears to be a nationwide attempt to repress and evict the Occupation Movement.
Across the country in recent days, ultimatums have been issues to groups occupying Portland, OR, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, Dallas, TX, Atlanta, GA, and most recently New York, NY, where the Occupation Movement began on September 17. The two most recent eviction efforts, in Oakland and New York, have been the worst.
>snip<
One indication of that coordination may have been a conference call among 18 city mayors which was confirmed by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan in a radio interview on San Francisco station KALW. Dan Siegel, an Oakland attorney who worked as an advisor to Quan, but who resigned in disgust after Oakland police and law enforcement personnel from a number of surrounding jurisdictions brutally drove occupiers there out of their park using tear gas, supposedly non-lethal ammunition (bean bags and rubber bullets) and flash-bang grenades in a night-time raid in the early hours of November 14, says that phone conference call took place, significantly, while Quan was in Washington, DC.
This from an op-ed piece on the left-wing Nation of Change website.
Now the idea that the progressive mayor of Oakland is colluding with the Obama Justice Department to put down a left-wing protest is beyond ridiculous. And, indeed, despite much heavy breathing, the writer, one Dave Lindorff, doesn’t actually present a speck of evidence that the Justice Department, FBI, Homeland Security, etc. is coordinating the cities’ actions. Eventually, he has to admit this:
Mara Veheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild’s National Mass Defense Committee, based in Washington, [said]: "These crackdowns on the occupation movement certainly appear to be part of a national strategy to crush them," she says. "We haven’t yet found overt evidence of federal involvement, but the fact that in rapid succession local authorities have taken action raises the specter of coordination." (Emphasis added.)
Ah, but Mr. Lindorff, Ms. Mara Veheyden-Hilliard and the rest of them want it to be true. They pretend to the world—probably to themselves as well—that a bunch of discontented college grads who don’t want to repay their student loans are morally equivalent to the Polish Solidarity movement or the martyrs of Tiananmen Square. Theirs is a willful species of paranoia that not only helps to keep the troops motivated but feeds the self-esteem of people who’d cave in a nanosecond if faced with the forces of a real tyranny—Hitler’s, say, or Mao’s.
…and here it is:
WE ARE THE 99%!
Hat tip for the photo: Dr. F., corresponding from the People's Republic of California. I take full and well-deserved credit for the photo caption.
The collapse of the government-mandated “green energy” revolution hasn’t fazed some of its starry-eyed fans—leftie pundette Froma Harrop, for instance. Here she is, still going gaga over green, post-Solyndra:
Did we hear the word "Solyndra"? Solyndra is the California solar-panel maker that declared bankruptcy after receiving over $500 million in federal loan guarantees. A scandal brews over reports of Solyndra's alleged political favor-seeking. One concern centers on a high Energy Department official who pushed for the loan while his lawyer-wife represented the company.
House Republicans are investigating the Solyndra deal, as they should. But again, while the public financing process may not have been spotless, the company's innovative technology was the real deal. Solyndra had developed panels that didn't use silicon, then an expensive substance. A later glut of solar panels—with China possibly selling them here below cost—ended Solyndra's price advantage and put it out of business.
Translating this verbiage into standard English yields the information that Chinese-produced solar panels are cheaper than US-produced solar panels, thanks (1) to much lower labor costs in China and (2) massive government subsidization of the Chinese solar-panel industry. As for Solyndra’s “innovative technology,” the “real deal” is that it couldn’t prevent the company from going belly up at a cost to the US taxpayer of over $500 million. Because of solar power’s low efficiency and unreliability, it will never be more than a niche product in the energy market—a fact that escaped green-besotted Obama Administration.
The mania for all things “green” is a useful pointer to the intellectual corruption of contemporary progressivism. Rigorous analysis? Economic realities? Plain common sense? Invisible through those green-tinted glasses!
“Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.” Also sprach the great Napoleon, and he knew what he was talking about. So perhaps we should just sit back and enjoy the show as the Occupy Wall Street movement vomits all over itself. Could there possibly be, from the conservative point of view, a better poster child for the progressive cause than an OWS demonstrator assaulting a police officer or defecating in public?
Kudos to NYC Mayor Bloomberg for permitting these unlovely protests to go on for as long as they have. Though with no intention of doing do, he has rendered a sterling service to the conservative cause.
If you’re one of those poor, deluded souls who still believes Barack Obama when he swears up and down that he’s working like a helot to create jobs, consider this:
To those who claim that the Obama administration’s regulatory policies don’t have any effect on jobs, we now have conclusive evidence to the contrary from—you guessed it — the Obama administration. In case you missed it, the administration announced Thursday it is delaying a decision on the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil from Canada’s oil-sands deposits to American refineries on the Gulf Coast. Although there’s some disagreement over the number of jobs involved, no one disputes that the project would be a sizable net employer. The Obama administration estimated 5,000 to 6,000 construction jobs. Some other estimates are higher.
That’s Robert J. Samuelson, writing in the Washington Post. See, Barry’s in for some tough sledding in 2012. He needs all the support he can scrape up to improve his none-too-brilliant chances of being reelected—including the support of the environmental lobby. So as not to anger the Greenshirts, he punted on a final decision concerning the pipeline. If he does manage to win a second term, the XL pipeline will probably never be built. And all the jobs associated with it, direct and indirect, will never materialize. Meanwhile, I suppose, the unemployed can pass the time by trying to predict which “green jobs” initiative will prove to be the next Solyndra.
You know what? If you’re a working stiff and you support Obama—you’re a chump.
