My fellow Americans–and, I suppose, Canadians:

I regret to inform you that you are not the “99 Percent.”

The 99 Percent dislikes big banks, but also dislikes big government–and big messes.

The 99 Percent does not occupy property it does not own, public or private.

The 99 Percent does not steal from local businesses, does not attack police officers, does not storm national museums, and does not defecate in public.

Flyer at #OccupyWallStreet - the address for donations is a small building in Washington, DC shared by Code Pink and other "progressive" organizations

The 99 Percent does not rank people’s views based on their skin color, gender, or socioeconomic status.

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The Occupy Wall Street movement has adopted racist rules for speech at its nightly “General Assembly” meetings, according to which white men cannot speak unless preceded by some other type of person.

State your race, gender & sexual orientation, then maybe we'll let you speak. Later.

According to Occupy Wall Street supporter/observer “Lori“:

Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly operates under a revolutionary “progressive stack.” A normal “stack” means those who wish to speak get in line. A progressive stack encourages women and traditionally marginalized groups speak before men, especially white men. This is something that has been in place since the beginning, it is necessary, and it is important.

“Step up, step back” was a common phrase of the first week, encouraging white men to acknowledge the privilege they have lived in their entire lives and to step back from continually speaking. This progressive stack has been inspiring and mind-boggling in its effectiveness.

[Hat tip: Matt Sledge at Huffington Post] (more…)

Fellow Friends of Barack:

I join all liberals and progressives in condemning the terrorism of the Tea Party, just as we condemn terrorism in all its forms. We need a Local War On Terror (LWOT) to replace the futile Global War on Terror (GWOT) of George W. Bush.

As we pursue this great LWOT, we will show conservatives that we know, better than they, how to defeat terror in a way that preserves human rights and American values.

We must address the root causes of Tea Party terrorism. There is nothing intrinsic in the beliefs of the Tea Party that promotes the kind of terrorism we saw on Capitol Hill for the past several weeks. Indeed, there are legitimate grievances that create the climate of frustration that Tea Party leaders exploit. These grievances include: growing national debt, government deficits, job-killing taxes, heavy regulation and economic stagnation.

The American flag is apparently sacred in Tea Party beliefs. Let's avoid offending their sensibilities. (Source: http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=24413)

We should acknowledge blame for Tea Party terrorism. The debt ceiling debate was simply America’s chickens coming home to roost. For decades, the federal government has behaved in an imperialist manner, imposing its mandates on states and individuals. The U.S. shoved the stimulus down the people’s throats–and called them un-American when they resisted. They don’t want to destroy us; they want us to leave them alone. (more…)

From The Financial Times:

George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund manager best known for defeating the Bank of England on “Black Wednesday” in 1992, is to close his Quantum fund to outside investors and hand back the remaining outside capital.

Blaming the requirement under new financial regulations to register next year with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the fund will continue to manage around $24.5bn of family money.

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On May 16th, 2011 we attended a MoveOn.org protest staged in Chicago outside a Paul Ryan luncheon. The protesters were unfriendly and hostile to our questions, as well as confused about their message. We also questioned MoveOn members and organizers about their opinion regarding racially offensive comments made by former progressive radio talk show host and radically liberal blogger Greg Morelli.

Morelli is known for consistently spewing violent and hateful rhetoric on his blog, Family Values with an Oy Vey. We were particularly interested to find out if MoveOn.org has any issue with his racially charged comments about President Obama, since they invited him to speak at their “Defending the Dream” rally in March. In a blog post titled “Harry Reid is My Nigga!” Morelli refers to President Obama as the “Negro-in-Chief.” He also claims former RNC Chairman Michael Steele and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are only black on the outside. MoveOn was silent in response to the questions.

Morelli: “Health Care will soon pass in America thanks in large part to the Top Cracker in the senate, the Top Bitch in the house and a signature from the Negro-In-Chief.”

“Michael Steel is black in the same way Clarence Thomas is black: on the outside only.”

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Like any good environmental science graduate, I take the bus to work. This morning, our driver dumped us out two miles before my usual stop. “The President,” he said, pointing to the police roadblock ahead.

As I contemplated the irony of having to walk the rest of the way while President Obama, fundraising cash in hand, took off in his fossil-fuel-powered helicopter, I remembered something he said yesterday.

Speaking in Nevada about the rising cost of gasoline, Obama put in a plug for the administration’s favorite flop, GM’s Chevy Volt: “I’ve been in one of these Chevy Volts. This is a nice car. It drives well.”

As I trudged along the sidewalk, it occurred to me that the President had probably fibbed. He had certainly “been in” the Chevy Volt, but he hadn’t ever driven one enough to know how it actually handles.

When he tried the Chevy Volt last summer, he drove it “10 feet, and probably not above 2 mph,” according to the Associated Press at the time.

So, yes–I suppose the Volt “drives well,” or at least as well as any other vehicle stuck in traffic while the President leaves a giant carbon footprint behind.

During last month’s Right Nation gathering just outside of Chicago, Andrew Breitbart found himself confronting a group of angry protesters who had been bussed in by the Democratic Party. Full coverage of that epic protest failure can be found here.

At one point a protester wearing an orange rain parka can be heard casting what she seemed to think was a homophobic aspersion about Breitbart, exclaiming,  “I think he’s gay!”

This person has now been identified by multiple sources as a local Democratic Party official named Sue Walton.

We spoke with Sue Walton by phone to tell her that she had been identified, and to offer her a chance to comment and/or deny that she attended the protest, and/or to deny the accuracy of the quote attributed to her. Walton declined our offer, twice.

So far, Democrat response to this very public outburst has been mute.

Democrat candidate for Congress Dan Seals proudly lists Sue Walton’s endorsement on his campaign website. Multiple requests for comment from the Dan Seals campaign went unanswered, and thus far, the Seals campaign has not removed her endorsement.

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This past July, in a formal request it filed with the prosecutors of Maryland state and the city of Baltimore, a left-leaning organization known as Velvet Revolution urged prosecutors to press criminal charges against James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles for what it says was a violation of Maryland’s Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act. But the letter also went a step further, naming Andrew Breitbart as a conspirator in masterminding the whole operation.

The accusation against Breitbart is of course patently false and baseless. No evidence exists to even suggest such an accusation, because it simply did not happen that way. Then again, this story’s not about Andrew Breitbart. It’s about Velvet Revolution, the source making the claim.

Progressives are also rallying behind Velvet Revolution for another of its most recent campaigns – AmericanCrossRoadsWatch, which, to the delight of familiar folks like Karoli at Crooks and Liars, has offered a $100,000 bounty “for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Karl Rove or any principal of American Crossroads for money laundering, election rigging, or felony campaign finance violations.” It features a WANTED poster:

Interesting, that the words “felony” and “Wanted” would be used. Again, considering the source.

You see, while Velvet Revolution has inspired quite a flurry of excitement from its progressive partners these days, who seem to be frolicking in their apparent muckraking efforts, their glaring omission and utter hypocrisy is absolutely astonishing. With so much dirt digging going on, one would be very hard pressed to believe that none of Velvet Revolution’s cheerleaders had any idea whatsoever that a convicted violent felon is one of its co-founders. In an environment today when the left has repeatedly falsely accused most opposition of being racist, hateful and violent, how convenient that progressives would fail to acknowledge the hypocrisy of their own implicit support of real violence and law-breaking.

The story behind Velvet Revolution begins with musician-activist turned immigrants’ rights defender turned voting rights activist, Brett Kimberlin, who also runs the “Justice Through Music Project (JTMP).” According to journalist Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, he and Kimberlin co-founded Velvet Revolution together, a detail Friedman has specifically noted in a number of posts such as this one from 5/31/2007.

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Another town hall meeting, another embarrassing gaffe by President Obama.  But this time, the President’s honesty revealed an arrogant defiance toward poor, mostly African-American parents trying to provide a better life for their children.

While President Obama was conducting a town hall meeting on MSNBC this morning with Matt Lauer, he was asked (by a parent in the crowd) if he thought his children could get the same education in a DC Public School vs. the elite private school he sends them to now.

His bombshell hypocritical answer caused no ripple and nary a peep from the national media. What a shock…

The following is an abbreviated transcript via the NBCWashington.com.

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There’s a wise old saying about “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” But perhaps we need a new saying along the lines of “don’t subsidize the foot that kicks you.” Here’s a good example: American taxpayers finance the biggest share of the budget for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is an international bureaucracy based in Paris. The OECD is not as costly as the United Nations, but it still soaks up about $100 million of American tax dollars each year. And what do we get in exchange for all this money? Sadly, the answer is lots of bad policy. The bureaucrats (who, by the way, get tax-free salaries) just released their “Economic Survey of the United States, 2010” and it contains a wide range of statist analysis and big-government recommendations.

The Survey endorses Obama’s failed Keynesian spending bill and the Fed’s easy-money policy, stating, “The substantial fiscal and monetary stimulus successfully turned the economy around.” If 9.6 percent unemployment and economic stagnation is the OECD’s idea of success, I’d hate to see what they consider a failure. Then again, the OECD is based in Paris, so even America’s anemic economy may seem vibrant from that perspective.

The Survey also targets some very prominent tax loopholes, asserting that, “The mortgage interest deduction should be reduced or eliminated” and “the government should reduce further this [health care exclusion] tax expenditure.” If the entire tax code was being ripped up and replaced with a simple and fair flat tax, these would be good policies. Unfortunately (but predictably), the OECD supports these policies as a means of increasing the overall tax burden and giving politicians more money to spend.

Speaking of tax increases, the OECD is in love with higher taxes. The Paris-based bureaucrats endorse Obama’s soak-the-rich tax agenda, including higher income tax rates, higher capital gains tax rates, more double taxation of dividends, and a reinstated death tax. Perhaps because they don’t pay tax and are clueless about how the real world operates, the bureaucrats state that “…the Administration’s fiscal plan is ambitious…and should therefore be implemented in full.”

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Price fixing is illegal in the private sector, but unfortunately there are no rules against schemes by politicians to create oligopolies in order to prop up bad government policy. The latest example comes from the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund, who are conspiring with national governments to impose higher taxes and regulations on the banking sector.

The pampered bureaucrats at the IMF (who get tax-free salaries while advocating higher taxes on the rest of us) say these policies are needed because of bailouts, yet such an approach would institutionalize moral hazard by exacerbating the government-created problem of “too big to fail.” But what is particularly disturbing about the latest IMF scheme is that the international bureaucracy wants to coerce all nations into imposing high taxes and excessive regulation. The bureaucrats realize that if some nations are allowed to have free markets, jobs and investment would flow to those countries and expose the foolishness of the bad policy being advocated elsewhere by the IMF. Here’s a brief excerpt from a report in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Strauss-Kahn said there was broad agreement on the need for consensus and coordination in the reform of the global financial sector. “Even if they don’t follow exactly the same rule, they have to follow rules which will not be in conflict,” he said. He said there were still major differences of opinion on how to proceed, saying that countries whose banking systems didn’t need taxpayer bailouts weren’t willing to impose extra taxation on their banks now, to create a cushion against further financial shocks. …Mr. Strauss-Kahn said the overriding goal was to prevent “regulatory arbitrage”—the migration of banks to places where the burden of tax and regulation is lightest. He said countries with tighter regulation of banks might be able to justify not imposing new taxes.

I’ve been annoyingly repetitious on the importance of making governments compete with each other, largely because the evidence showing that jurisdictional rivalry is a very effective force for good policy around the world. I’ve done videos showing the benefits of tax competition, videos making the economic and moral case for tax havens, and videos exposing the myths and demagoguery of those who want to undermine tax competition. I’ve traveled around the world to fight the international bureaucracies, and even been threatened with arrest for helping low-tax nations resist being bullied by high-tax nations. Simply stated, we need jurisdictional competition so that politicians know that taxpayers can escape fiscal oppression. In the absence of external competition, politicians are like fiscal alcoholics who are unable to resist the temptation to over-tax and over-spend.

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