The #OccupyWallStreet movement that been embraced by Democratic politicians, liberal pundits, progressive groups, Big Labor and celebrities was actually created and is being led behind the scenes by far-left anarchists whose goal isn’t reform, but the total annihilation of the American economic and political system.

“Occupy Everything” is the culmination of a decades-long effort by militant radicals to create and fund a mass movement that has broad popular appeal. With the enthusiastic help of the institutional left, that effort finally seems to be working.

Case in point: Lisa Fithian. Fithian is a career “community organizer” and anarchist who specializes in “direct action” protests, and who has close ties to labor unions. She has been on the ground at the #OccupyWallStreet demonstration since its inception.

Local television station NY1 interviewed her as an ordinary “woman on the street,” presenting her as just another well-intentioned New Yorker who’s worried about the big, mean banks.

NY1 did not mention that Fithian lives in Austin, Texas, and failed to inform its audience about Fithian’s true motivations or her lengthy activist resume.

“Wall Street is certainly the heart of why we’re here. It’s the corporations — the big banks in this country have been destroying this country.”

Lisa Fithian says she’s not part of any official group–that this event is the work of many people coming together with the same message.

“Overfees or high mortgages, student loans–the banks are touching every aspect of our lives.”

She says banks and the wealthy have taken money for their own interests and their own survival.

“And the people here are saying enough of that.”

Inspired by events around the world, she drew the analogy to Tahrir Square in Egypt, and says the power of the people is leading to change.

It doesn’t take much digging to discover the real Lisa Fithian. (more…)

From the Associated Press:

Deputies warned people Sunday to get out as Mississippi River water gushing from a floodgate for the first time in four decades crept ever closer to communities in Louisiana Cajun country, slowly filling a river basin like a giant bathtub.

Most residents heeded the warnings and headed for higher ground, even in places where there hasn’t been so much as a trickle, hopeful that the flooding engineered to protect New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be merciful to their way of life.

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From The Hill:

President Obama should use the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina to inject new energy into the unfinished task of repairing New Orleans, according to officials from the region.

Obama will deliver a speech here Sunday to mark five years to the day that Katrina made landfall, devastating the city and tarnishing the presidency of George W. Bush.

Showcasing the progress in New Orleans under his administration could also help boost the president’s sagging approval ratings, and with it the fortunes of his party in November. His speech, officials say, should offer a way to find balance between further oil exploration and protecting the region’s sensitive coastline.

“We’re also going to impress upon him how difficult this recovery is going to be,” Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told The Hill. “We’re going to remind him about the importance of coastal restoration and accelerating revenue sharing.”

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Before hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, New Orleans had one of the worst performing public school districts in the nation. Katrina forced nearly a million people to leave their homes and caused almost $100 billion in damages. To an already failing public school system, the storm seemed to provide the final deathblow. But then something amazing happened. In the wake of Katrina, education reformers decided to seize the opportunity and start fresh with a system based on choice.

Today, New Orleans has the most market-based school system in the US. 60% of New Orleans students currently attend charter schools, test scores are up, and talented and passionate educators from around the country are flocking to New Orleans to be a part of the education revolution. It’s too early to tell if the New Orleans experiment in school choice will succeed over the long term, but for the first time in decades people are optimistic about the future of New Orleans schools.

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It is Day 79 of the BP oil spill, and just this weekend tar balls from the spill washed up on Texas beaches.  Over a hundred million gallons of oil have been released into our waters.  And yet where is our President?  He spent the 4^th of July playing golf and hosting a barbeque on the White House lawn.  Apparently some people want the new “normal” to be an oil-ridden Gulf.

But we at The Heritage Foundation are not satisfied with this new norm.  So this week we are sending a team of respected energy, environment, homeland security and response experts to the Gulf region to investigate what is and is not working and what more needs to be done (or in many cases, where the federal government should simply step out of the way) to get the Gulf cleaned up.

Since the explosion on April 20, the outflow of oil has gotten worse, goals have been missed, and attention has waned on this horrible situation.  When the president last took questions from the press at the G20, not a single reporter asked him an oil spill related question.  It seems the mainstream media is more concerned with blaming BP for the spill than actually cleaning it up.  And while BP should not escape blame for the spill or their less-than-promised skimming abilities, the federal government should also be held to task for their less-than-efficient clean up operation.

Five years ago, the bureaucracy of state, local, and federal governments made the disaster after Hurricane Katrina worse.  And that bureaucracy is at work again, hindering the clean up efforts of the oil spill.

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t looks like President George W. Bush may have a pretty good birthday today. After all, this time last year the liberal media was terming him as “the worst president in American history.”

But a lot has changed since then.

History has proven that the challenges he faced during his presidency were much more daunting that anyone realized. In fact, shortly after the 2008 presidential election, Gallup ranked Bush’s popularity at only 27 percent and Obama’s at 70 percent.

Most of the country thought Obama would prove Bush totally incompetent, but since then a lot has happened, and Obama’s popularity, according to Gallup, has dropped 24 points to only 46 percent.

One of his lead generals has publicly criticized his handling of the war in Afghanistan and even former Bush senior adviser Karl Rove has equated the current administration’s handling of the BP disaster to of the BP disaster to what happened with Katrina. Some people have even suggested Obama’s handling of the BP disaster is much worse than the way the Bush administration handled Katrina. (more…)

I sat chuckling all through Obama’s immigration speech Thursday. Forgive me, but that has been my recent response whenever I listen to Obama’s speechifying. I am somewhat surprised at my recent response to his outlandish rhetoric, but he makes such a mockery of his very words, of America, and of capitalism, that he is, invariably, comical.

He recited Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” which is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, yet he has disparaged American exceptionalism and prides himself on being post-American. How can you not bust a gut?

So I listened to his speech on immigration and chuckled as he lectured us, yet again, on what America is — as if he had a clue about what America is. His contempt for us is so palpable. As if he had any respect for what makes America great – free speech, individual rights, entrepreneurship, and privacy rights. As if he had a clue as to why legal immigrants come here — to escape tyrants and would-be tyrants like him.

I understand why he must ram immigration through now. And why he is taking this issue on now after destroying the American healthcare system. He has no shot of re-election without a base of amnestied illegal immigrants voting for Democrats. It is his only motive — but I digress.

What about the Gulf? This is a catastrophe of unfathomable proportions, the decades-long repercussions of which have not yet begun to be understood or calculated. What about those people, those communities? Whole swaths of coastline, entire towns, even entire counties may face evacuation.

Why isn’t the President of the United States working on the problem 24/7? I want to know why the nation’s Chief Executive has not been holed up in a war room, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the past 72 days, working with the world’s finest scientific minds and oceanographic and energy experts to solve the oil spill crisis.

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On his first day in office, January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama issued a statement on the White House Web site promising Gulf Coast residents that his administration would not fail them like he accused his predecessor President George W. Bush.

Eighteen months later, those arrogant words are coming back to haunt Obama as the Gulf Coast is facing the third month of failure by Obama to marshall sufficient resources to protect the region from the massive BP oil spill.

“President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.”

Politico reported the statement the day it was posted to a White House page titled “Additional Issues.”

Since then, the White House has edited the comment to remove the personal insult to President Bush so that it now reads:

“President Obama will keep the broken promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur. Within weeks of his inauguration, he made a renewed commitment to partner with the people of the Gulf Coast to rebuild now, stronger than ever.”

Based on the Politico report, the White House also edited out verbiage bragging about Obama’s post-Katrina trips to the region:

The site also points out that Obama “visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region” and worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to help rebuild in the aftermath of Katrina.

The Obama administration has left a destructive trail of catastrophic failures in its wake over the BP oil spill, beginning with its failure to ensure that an adequate disaster plan was in place for BP’s Deepwater Horizon well to its failure to secure enough skimmers and booms to prevent the spill from reaching the shores of the Gulf states.

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From today’s Politico:

As the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history has played out on Obama’s watch, the environmental movement has essentially given him a pass — all but refusing to unleash any vocal criticism against the president even as the public has grown more frustrated by Obama’s performance.

About a dozen environmental groups took out a full page ad in the Washington Post Tuesday – not to fault Obama over the ecological catastrophe but to thank him for putting on hold an Alaska drilling project. “We deeply appreciate your decision. . .,” the ad says to Obama.

“President Obama is the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope told the Bangor Daily News last week. “He obviously did not take the crisis in the Minerals Management Service adequately seriously, that’s clear. But his agencies have done a phenomenally good job.”

Some say there’s little doubt that if a spill like the one in the Gulf took place on former President George W. Bush’s watch, environmental groups would have unleashed an unsparing fury on the Republican in the White House. For their liberal ally, Obama, they seem willing to hold their tongues.

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The President of the United States is looking for an ass to kick.

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar,” he said Monday, “we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

He is so embarrassing. What president talks with such false braggadocio? Would a Republican dog catcher get away with such vulgar invective? He is a disaster, and he lashes out when he is called out on any of his too-numerous-to-recount-here failures.

Bush was eviscerated, crucified for showing more competence in his pinky toenail during Katrina than Obama has demonstrated in the whole of this short, painful presidency. The media’s silence on his fumbling and stumbling is absolutely corrupt. If anyone should be impeached, it ought to be those useful idiots and fellow travelers. It is now a 24-hour bash BP news cycle.

Sarah Palin said:

50 days in, and we’ve just learned another shocking revelation concerning the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill. In an interview aired this morning, President Obama admitted that he hasn’t met with or spoken directly to BP’s CEO Tony Hayward. His reasoning: “Because my experience is, when you talk to a guy like a BP CEO, he’s gonna say all the right things to me. I’m not interested in words. I’m interested in actions.”

Sounds as if Obama doesn’t have much confidence in BP. He is right about that, since BP has been responsible for a large number of accidents in the last few years. The Washington Post reports this: “BP has had more high-profile accidents than any other company in recent years. And now, with the disaster in the gulf, independent experts say the pervasiveness of the company’s problems, in multiple locales and different types of facilities, is striking.”

(more…)

If you’ve been watching the fiasco surrounding the oil spill in the gulf, you already know the mainstream media meme that has cropped up around it. “Yes, President Obama has failed to stop the spill thus far,” the press tell us. “Yes, he’s demonstrated that his promises of supreme competence were overblown. Yes, his leadership has become so questionable that even James Carville has attacked him for it. Yes, some of the alternatives being offered in spite of all of this are being ignored, and yes, President Obama has failed to inspire confidence among everyday Americans about his ability to handle this crisis. But one thing we will not deny is that President Obama cares. He is a man of deep humanity, and deep empathy (and where have we heard that word before) for the suffering of those affected by the spill, and he cares.”

What I am about to ask will require readers to engage in a supreme act of charity: Despite all the evidence to the contrary, all the evisceration which Rush Limbaugh and every other conservative commentator have piled on this administration, all the evidence that the media will never believe anything but the very best about this President even as he takes this country down the road to serfdom at a speed that would make Dale Earnhardt Jr feel queasy, and despite all the emotionless, meaningless, platitude-laden babble that the President has been spewing since the spill began, I want the readers to assume, just for the sake of argument, that the media is telling the truth. Despite what appear to be severe rhetorical and emotional shortcomings in his speeches and his own bearing, imagine that underneath the hyper-rational mask, President Obama really does care.

So what?

Has that “caring” done anything to stop the spill? Has it given President Obama one single, solitary constructive idea about how to solve the problem (other than “Plug the Hole,” that is)? Does President Obama have the ability to fly out to the Gulf Coast and, like Ma-Ti in Captain Planet, dissolve the oil with nothing but the magically empathic effusions of his beating heart? And if not, then even if we concede that President Obama cares about those affected by this crisis,  how is that remotely relevant to his ability to solve it? As per the usual liberal tag line, we are expected to believe that President Obama’s good intentions alone should assuage us of his competence, but have they done anything at all? The answer is as devastating as it is obvious: No.

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Now that we are well into the 6th week (Day 43) of the catastrophe in the Gulf, furiously gushing oil continues to destroy one of the world’s most gorgeous and valuable estuaries: it’s lapping up in and around New Orleans and the rest of the Louisiana coast, as well as the coastlines of Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. The destruction to the Gulf region is now reaching—and some say even surpassing—the levels of damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina.

Here’s a question:  I wonder when Spike Lee is going to make a film about the oil spill like the one he did about Katrina, with the underlying theme being that New Orleans was abandoned by the essentially racist federal government led by President Bush.  I also wonder when we’ll hear from Kanye West, who raged on national television that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

The oil spill is destroying the exact same areas in the Gulf region.  Hey, Spike: Does Obama’s lethargic and passionless response to the oil disaster make him a racist?  Hey, Kanye: Does Obama’s lack of any kind of coordinated and effective federal response make him a hater of black people?

(more…)

With oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico for weeks, we’ve known about efforts to stop the flow. We’ve heard details about 75 ton concrete domes, freezing methane gas, catheter piping siphoning off 20% of the flow, top kill. So it at least seems, that round-the-clock efforts were underway from the beginning.

What about the containment side of the problem? We originally heard about oil containment booms and the challenges with deploying them in choppy Gulf waters. However, it then went quiet. We’ve not heard much lately. We’ve held our breath, assuming – or at least hoping – that these challenges have been overcome or worked around. We’ve hoped that critically sensitive areas were being closely monitored and guarded, that contingencies (to utilize booms or naturally or commercially available oil-adherent or oil-absorbent products) had been identified and were ready to be deployed as a last line of defense.

Now we learn that oil is upon us, that beaches are slicked over, that marshes are impacted, that some critical estuaries are lethally inundated. It seems now that our hopes and assumptions have been wrong. Where is the federal government? Is this just BP’s problem? Is this just Louisiana’s problem? Is just another localized economy in shambles, not a problem to the rest of the country, not a concern to the federal government? Is destruction acceptable if it furthers an agenda?

What happened to the last line of defense?

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The BP oil rig explosion will be President Obama’s ‘Katrina’ — in fact, it will potentially be much worse in terms of long term effect. While President Bush took a matter of a few days to mobilize federal assistance to flooded New Orleans, Obama has demonstrated near-complete incompetence and inaction over a month and counting. Still, there is no leadership or clear-cut solution to answer one of the worst environmental disasters in modern time. Eleven people are dead, fisheries and scores of fragile ecosystems dying day-by-day. President Obama finds himself deservedly being attacked from the left and the right.

Environmental activist Robert Redford is demanding action from the administration. When Barack Obama starts losing the Robert Redfords of the world — something is terribly wrong. Redford has even taken to the airwaves with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a liberal special interest group, to call the President out on the lackluster response to the spill and feet-dragging on energy legislation. Robert Redford has every right to be angry, along with boaters, fishermen, Governors, Mayors and the millions who live, vacation and work on the Gulf. I suspect there will be more than a few NRA members who will dearly miss duck hunting along Lousiana’s once-pristine marshlands.

The White House answer to the disaster in the Gulf: ‘let BP handle it.’ Put the oil company in charge of the epic disaster they created. Every day, the tendrils of the slick reach further into currents that will carry the sludge to new shores, killing everything in its path. To disperse the oil, BP is dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the Gulf — to the alarm of the EPA. Increasingly, independent scientific estimates place the amount of oil at 14 times the amount stated by BP. So, what is President Obama’s position on all this? He doesn’t have one. What is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) official assessment of the magnitude of this mess? There isn’t one. And that’s the problem.

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From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Suddenly, everything changed.

For days, as an oil spill spread in the Gulf of Mexico, BP assured the government the plume was manageable, not catastrophic. Federal authorities were content to let the company handle the mess while keeping an eye on the operation.

But then government scientists realized the leak was five times larger than they had been led to believe, and days of lulling statistics and reassuring words gave way Thursday to an all-hands-on-deck emergency response. Now questions are sure to be raised about a self-policing system that trusted a commercial operator to take care of its own mishap even as it grew into a menace imperiling Gulf Coast nature and livelihoods from Florida to Texas.

The pivot point had come Wednesday night, at a news conference at an oil research center in the tiny community of Robert, La. That’s when the nation learned the earlier estimates were way off, and an additional leak had been found. (more…)

What would be the result if someone walked into a psychiatrist’s office and disclosed their belief that the weather is out to get them? Should the doctor be compelled by the state to initiate a competency hearing, or would a prescription for a fist-full of Prozac do?

What if the patient were a cop? Should they lose their badge?

What if the patient were a teacher? Should they lose their classroom?

What if the patient were an entire political movement? Should they lose their credibility and status as an authority on any and all subjects, at least those related to the weather?

At first glance, this 2007 report pulled from the internet archives of the Tides Foundation would appear to be making the claim described above; however, the cause is not so much driven by delusion as it is pathologically fraudulent.

The basic thrust of the publication (a conversation between the Tides Foundation’s Catherine Lerza and Redefining Progress’ Michel Gelobter) is that the effects of “global warming” are disproportionately felt by disadvantaged minorities.

[Catherine]Lerza: The impacts of global warming highlight social and racial inequalities around the world. It certainly affects poor communities differently. We saw that clearly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Could you talk about these different impacts of climate change depending on geography, race, and class?

[Michel]Gelobter: Communities of color and low income communities in this country clearly feel the impact of climate change and have been feeling that impact for over 20 years.

My organization, Redefining Progress, has conducted a number of studies on Latinos and climate change and African-Americans and climate change. Different communities bear quite a different vulnerability to the risks of global warming. Six years ago, we already had figured out that the greatest victims of climate change were the lower-income communities and communities of color. You can see it in the disparity in heat deaths in St. Louis. You can see there’s an impact on agricultural communities and on border communities and indigenous communities, particularly in the Arctic.

We have to address issues of justice: people have a right to health and to a secure place to live. They have this right whether they’re black, or white, or whatever.

This excerpt clears up at least one major misconception: that the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina was the result of nature mixed with systemic governmental failure at all levels.

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When we read about the firing of Louisiana ACORN head Beth Butler, wife (“longtime companion”?) of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, we knew ACORN was still girding its loins.

It all came about when a local ACORN volunteer, Vanessa Gueringer, remarked to the Times-Picayune that President Obama should spend more time in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans when he was going to visit there last week.  The Lower 9th, of course, was hardest hit during Hurricane Katrina 4 years ago.

It seemed like a fairly harmless request, and one that would certainly expect to read from ACORN in a newspaper.

Well, it appears Bertha Lewis and ACORN national still are a bit touchy (and powerhungry?).  Lewis was supposedly coincidentally flying down to New Orleans the very next day.

Lo and behold, Lewis cited “a lack of accountability to process” in figuratively lopping off Butler’s head, who apparently failed in her duty to keep her minions quiet.  From the Times-Picayune:

On Sunday,  ACORN Chief Executive Bertha Lewis said the remarks,  which were not uttered by Butler,  were “without authority and do not reflect the position of the national leadership.” Lewis said she would “be personally going to New Orleans to deal with the individual involved.”

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The investigative journalism of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles has opened yet another chapter in the corruption-tinged history of ACORN. For most Americans, ACORN is a political organization, running voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts at election-time. With a rather alarming regularity, the pop into the news cycle with allegations of fraudulent voter registrations and, even, voter fraud.

No doubt, the recent undercover videos from ACORN Housing offices in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and, now, New York, are shocking. I’m a long-time observer of ACORNapalooza, and I found myself in stunned, silent disbelief as the interviews unfolded. It wasn’t just the subject-matter. No, it was the fact that not one ACORN employee seemed to even flinch when presented with the ridiculous scenario of a pimp and a prostitute trying to get a mortgage to house a dozen or so underage El Salvadoran child-prostitutes. They just oozed seamlessly into conjecture about whether or not a child prostitute could be considered a “dependent” for tax purposes. What do these employees hear on a daily basis that this scenario was just another problem that needed fixing?

But even these videos, no matter how disturbing, are just part of the ACORN story. As, too, is the pattern of problems with the voter registration system. This past weekend, Brandon Darby discussed his experience with ACORN when he was coordinating relief in post-Katrina New Orleans. ACORN saw New Orleans as their “turf” and targeted Brandon and his colleagues, trying to intimidate them to either submit to their “leadership” or leave. This is a pattern readers of Big Government will soon hear more about.

In fact, in the coming days, you’ll learn a lot about the full ACORN story. It is an amazing story, in its own way. After waiting years for the mainstream media to finally peel back the ACORN layers, Big Government will have to take it upon itself to do so.

To start this, we are publishing an internal quasi-employee manual Big Government has obtained. Given to all ACORN employees, it isn’t your normal manual. It doesn’t discuss things like sick leave or vacation time, but, rather, as the title states, the “Principles and Foundations of ACORN.” How an organization communicates with the public is important. How it communicates to its own employees, however, provides a richer understanding of an organization’s nature.

The whole thing is worth a read. I draw your attention to just one sentence (ACORN emphasizes it with italics):

ACORN’s lifeblood is conflicts with targets outside the organization.

Think about that. ACORN’s lifeblood isn’t empowering disadvantaged communities nor lifting people out of poverty. It isn’t concerned about increasing economic growth to improve the lives of its members. It’s lifeblood is conflict. Conflict with targets. It actually thinks of the world outside itself as targets.

It explains a lot:

Principles and Foundations of Acorn –

I first experienced ACORN in post-Katrina New Orleans. I was part of a relief organization, Common Ground Relief, which  had been delivering much needed aid to the 9^th Ward, an area that had been hit especially hard by the flood waters and by neglect. Rumors immediately began surfacing, questioning our motives and intentions. I was very confused by these rumors. Who was behind them? How could anyone question the vital work we were doing in the community?  We lived and worked in the 9^th Ward. We suspended our regular lives and, in many cases, left our families to travel to New Orleans to help those affected by Katrina and poverty. We slept on dirty plywood floors and shared everything we had with the residents.  Most of us were white. Was our skin color the issue? I knew from personal experience that the majority of the Black 9^th ward residents didn’t care what color our skin was. It took me awhile to get over the hurt I felt at such allegations and to find out where they were coming from.

In the following weeks, I was made aware of the fact that ACORN had reopened its New Orleans office (several months after the storm). Various groups from around the city informed me that Acorn was upset with us because we were in “their” community and had not sought approval from ACORN to operate there. I was told that ACORN said that we were “privileged white people who had come to a Black community as saviors and we refused to work with local Black leadership.”

The more I pondered the matter, the more I realized what was happening. As usual in marginalized and impoverished communities, a small group of radical self-proclaimed leaders was insisting that all local aid and relief came through them—even if they were AWOL for several months. Though the majority of residents either hadn’t heard of ACORN or simply disagreed with their politics- ACORN insisted that they were THE Black leaders. This was upsetting to me. Sure, the local pastor we worked most closely with was Black; but that didn’t matter to ACORN. It was as if Pastor Johnson didn’t count because he didn’t evoke the name of Elijah Mohammed or Malcolm X. It was as if Pastor Johnson didn’t count because he didn’t submit to ACORN’s mandate that ACORN was the sole leadership of Black New Orleanians.

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