from newslite.tv
I stole that headline directly from New York Magazine which just published the results of a quiz of the Wall Street protesters on current — and basic — economic and political questions. I would love to comment more on the results, but I don’t want to skew your answers on the survey.
Besides, I’m too busy gloating.
What city in the United States produces nothing, is bereft of industrial infrastructure, has no natural resource other than untapped swamp gases, and is now the wealthiest city in America? Yep, it’s Washington, DC.
Our nation’s capital — the seat of centralized government — has just been declared the richest metropolitan area in the country, surpassing tech-center San Jose, CA for the top spot, according to the latest government data.
That’s both shocking and unsurprising, if that’s at all possible. How can a city that does nothing but hold committee meetings eclipse centers of commerce like New York, Chicago, Dallas, and San Franciso. Then again, how can a city where government workers average $126,000 in annual income not reap the top slot?
This could not possibly have been the plan of the Founding Fathers.
Washington, DC is now the richest the city in America. That says it all.
It was bound to happen. The so-called Wall Street “fat cats”, who have been giving far more money to Democrats than to Republicans in recent years — especially to President Obama — have had it with serving as a punching bag for the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party, which have married themselves to the Occupy Wall Street radicals.
Politico reports today that telephone lines between Wall Street and Capital Hill are beginning to burn up, with indignant financial industry executives calling out the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee leaders and others to warn them to stop talking out of both sides of their mouths.
Writes Politico: “You can’t have it both ways,” said one in-house financial services lobbyist. “It just makes it harder for people who are Democrats in New York, Boston, Chicago to on the one hand be demogagued and then be asked ‘Hey, you can get your picture with the president for $30,000.’ It doesn’t square.”
The rhetoric coming from the protesters has shifted from impolitic to borderline Bolshevik in the past week. And President Obama and the Democrats in Washington have walked uncomplainingly alongside it. But guess what’s going to change that? Money will. If the Wall Streeters really begin shutting off the spigot, all bets between the protesters and the Democratic Party will be off speedy quick.
Chalk it up as a teachable moment for the Scarsdale radicals. Money talks. All else walks. And walks. And walks.
President Obama is boarding a bus for a three-day visit to 2012 must-win swing-statesVirginia and North Carolina. And his handlers are insisting politics have nothing to do with the President’s visits this time, USA Today reports, so the trip can be 100% funded by taxpayers.
Is it me, or is this White House reaching the surreal?
The Occupy Wall Street protesters were busy deliberating throughout the weekend about what demands, if any, they should place on the world, lest, as one of them aptly put it, the movement becomes perceived as “a joke.” No decision, unsurprisingly, was arrived at, but the debate reportedly continues.
Pardon me for interjecting – I have no standing with the protest committee – but I have a patently unoriginal suggestion that I believe may help.
Here is the central demand: Men (and women) should do unto others as they would have others do unto them. That is, people and their businesses should begin treating one another kindly and fairly on an individual basis.
This is something we used to learn in churches and synagogues — those edifices across the Western world transformed by the hundreds into condominiums and night clubs. The values once learned therein are now painted on cardboard signs, in the hopes that one government or another will codify them. That doesn’t work. The law of man has always been used as a boundary around which the clever can shimmy. Indeed, the letter of that law can be as porous as a Wall Street barricade.
The spirit of the law is what these young protesters seem to be after, and that cannot be written in ink; that needs to be internalized. Greed and unscrupulousness have been around since the dawn of time. They will not be legislated away. Our baser instincts can only be quelled in the heart.
Most of what we are seeing in these protests is pure professional rabble-rousing now. The public employee unions have largely taken over, and they will have very specific demands. But I can’t help but see in some of the younger faces a yearning for the basic moral values that have been drummed out of us by the secular gods. If it wasn’t so frightening and maddening to watch, it could almost be heartening.
“the door to [the Occupy Wall Street protests] was opened by the Obama administration, going after the ‘millionaires and billionaires’ as if everybody is a millionaire and a billionaire and they didn’t earn it. . . . To fan that flame of populist anger I think is very divisive and very dangerous for this country.” — Daily News Publisher Mort Zuckerman, The Wall Street Journal
http://youtu.be/VrzQedHM6SY
The New York City Police Department sure trains its officers well. I was just watching footage from today’s demonstrations, where protesters repeatedly violated direct orders from the NYPD. It’s amazing more police batons weren’t used. Many of the police officers are the same age as the protesters and far harder working. It’s got to be tempting.
Above is footage of a National Lawyer’s Guild attorney pretending to have his leg run over by a police motorcycle so he could cry foul, make himself famous, and presumably sue the NYPD, i.e., New York City taxpayers. Multiple eye witnesses, including a Daily News photographer, attested to the left-wing attorney’s scam. That should chew up a good million taxpayer dollars in court time.
In one video, I saw a Manhattan Democratic District Leader — someone I have known for 25 years — marching down the middle of the street in violation of NYPD orders. I won’t name her out of courtesy.
What an absolute joke these demonstrations have become. Orchestrated chaos.
Charles Krauthammer writes thoughtfully this morning on a point I touched on last week to some criticism: In an attempt to fire up his base, President Obama has ginned up a dangerous climate of blame-the-other-guy in this country. Krauthammer calls it “The Scapegoat Strategy.”
He writes:
Obama’s new strategy: Don’t whine, blame. Attack. Indict. Accuse. Who? The rich — and their Republican protectors — for wrecking America.
In Obama’s telling, it’s the refusal of the rich to “pay their fair share” that jeopardizes Medicare. If millionaires don’t pony up, schools will crumble. Oil-drilling tax breaks are costing teachers their jobs. Corporate loopholes will gut medical research.
It’s crude. It’s Manichaean. And the left loves it. As a matter of math and logic, however, it’s ridiculous. Obama’s most coveted tax hike — an extra 3 to 4.6 percent for millionaires and billionaires (weirdly defined as individuals making more than $200,000) — would have reduced last year’s deficit (at the very most) from $1.29 trillion to $1.21 trillion. Nearly a rounding error. The oil-drilling breaks cover less than half a day’s federal spending. You could collectObama’s favorite tax loophole — depreciation for corporate jets — for 100 years and it wouldn’t cover one month of Medicare, whose insolvency is a function of increased longevity, expensive new technology and wasteful defensive medicine caused by an insane malpractice system.
The “post-partisan President” is playing with fire. “But so long as it gives him a shot at reelection,” Krauthammer writes, “he shows no sign of caring.” Indeed.
“There’s a lot of stuff we wouldn’t have to clean up if the city provided basic human rights [in privately-owned Zucotti Park], like a Port-A-Potty,” OWS protester Gene Wagner.
I somehow missed that one in the Bill of Rights.
Are we really not going to have a wider discussion about thwarted White House plans to apologize to Japan for using the atom bomb to end WWII? (A war that had already cost 50 millions lives and could be ended in an instant or two?)
Is it me, or would this not be the most striking indicator of how President Obama views American history, which is to say, how he views America itself? I’m not a gratuitous Obama-basher, but we need to get to the bottom of this one.
Word of the plan emerged in leaked State Department documents which reported Japan rejecting the American suggestion. The idea was called in the State memo “a non-starter” among the Japanese.
A reporter’s call to the White House press office elicited the response that there never was a “plan.” But was there a request? That’s the question. The WH is also saying the document didn’t make clear which American was suggesting presidential apology visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Get real. A visit of that magnitude starts from the top.
Maybe I’m missing something. But I can’t figure out what, and I’m happy to be educated. Drudge didn’t even play this up much, and none of the presidential candidates jumped on it. Isn’t a more thorough explanation of what this was about required?
World War II was a pretty big deal in U.S. History. If our own president was prepared to paint us as the bad guys, at least in how it ended, don’t the American people need to know that?
I need to know.
No comments to display
Latest Political News from The Associated Press