For college football fans, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA is sacred ground. “The Granddady” of the college football tournament games, it has been played every year since 1902.

The accompanying parade, the Rose Parade, predates the game, dating way back to 1890. It’s a tradition that normally goes off without a hitch–that is, until this year, when “Occupy the Rose Parade” has decided to disrupt the festivities.

Peter Thottam, right

Led by Peter Thottam, who we will return to in a moment, the Occupy the Rose Parade activists will follow the long parade with their own demonstration. It won’t be the first time that Thottam has tried to disrupt the parade.

In 2008, he–along with supporters from the Los Angeles National Impeachment Center–worked with Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, and Iraq Veterans Against the War to try to make a statement about impeaching Bush and Cheney.

But this year, Thottam obtained approval for a protest to follow the parade. At the parade’s conclusion, his group plans to pilot an “Octupy Octupus,” a puppet made from recycled plastic bags and bamboo that takes 40 people to operate. The organizers say that the puppet symbolizes Wall Street’s tentacles, strangling American politics.

To prepare for the Occupiers, who will include Sheehan and filmmaker Michael Moore, the City of Pasadena had to double its police presence to deal with the supposedly peaceful protestors.

Thottam makes clear that his beef is with the parade, not the game. “A total of nine floats are underwritten by banks. We believe the parade has not only been corporatized but militarized,” Thottam told the local press. (more…)

Two weeks ago, Andrew Breitbart called me and laughingly told me that he had just boarded a plane and wanted me to guess who he had passed in first class as he made his way to his coach seat.

I immediately guessed that it was someone who publicly stands in “solidarity” with “the 99%” as he or she sips chardonnay in seats only the 1% can typically afford. It turned out to be Jodie Evans, co-founder of Code Pink, enjoying the good life.

Andrew and I shared a laugh as we agreed that the ironic pattern of wealthy liberals critiquing “the rich” while simultaneously living high on the hog was just too rich in itself.

And Andrew wondered aloud how someone who flies coach, as he travels multiple times a week, gets attacked as a rich and uncaring capitalist, while someone like Jodie Evans can fly first class and still relish her undying support from lefties.

Sadly, I both comprehend the answer and have experienced such moments of clear contradiction–with Jodie Evans herself.

Years ago, I was asked by anarchist Lisa Fithian to help her shut down the 2004 Halliburton shareholders’ meeting. She dispatched me and another young activist to go to the intended site of the meeting, specifically the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston. We followed our directions and scoped out the entrances and exits. We mapped out every possible way to shut the program down and to prevent access to the building or meeting room.

(more…)

Many on the Right have tried to classify the ideology of the Wall Street Protests. Glenn Beck has sounded an alarmist note, describing the ideas behind the movement as Leninist and even fascist.  It’s true there is much in the rhetoric that recalls the Bolshevik leader’s love of violence and brown-shirt style anti-semitic comments (this doesn’t necessarily separate Wall Street yellers from Leninism). However, my own experience while at ground zero of the protests gave me a different impression.

Leninists and fascists revealed some knowledge (albeit cherry picked) of history and they had read books or even a pamphlet. Lenin quoted Adam Smith, Hitler; Frederick the Great. The protestors, however, don’t even know who is being quoted (they aren’t sure whether to clap or not when Eugene Debs is cited) or who they are even wearing. I asked one masked protestor why he was wearing a Guy Fawkes’ mask and was corrected in the condescending tones of the hip that it was “V For Vendetta.”

Far from being the products of any studied ideology, they are instead the products of youtube and Comedy Central. Silence greets any invocation of Tom Mooney or Tom Joad and applause rises to a roar when Micheal Moore and Susan Sarandon do a drop-by. They do show a low animal cunning about the alternative media. Aware that the Left no longer owns it, they evince a media savviness that would make Obama envious. Asked by a reporter what system they want to replace capitalism with, a protestor was advised by a comrade not to say it. Image conscious, they know to try to block the limos that bore Sarandon and Moore to the event from camera-view. They know that slogans have consequences, so very few of them wave placards describing Wall Street as crony capitalists, which reveal an awareness that such a slogan might track pedestrians back to the president who bailed out Wall Street.

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January 23, 2013

White House, Cabinet Room

First meeting of President Obama’s new team

OBAMA: Listen up, people. I got myself across the finish line but couldn’t bring Congress along.  That’s why you’re here.  Except for Defense, you represent the first entirely recessed Cabinet in American history.  Do me proud.  Michelle?

MICHELLE: I’m the new Chief of Staff. You want to see him, you gotta get past me. Waste my time, I’ll cut your budget 10%.

OBAMA: So, let’s hear some fresh ideas.  HHS?

MICHAEL MOORE: Now that the World Court has overturned the Supremes and ruled the PPACA [ObamaCare] constitutional, sir, amend the program to cover all humanity.  Eventually, include lesser beings, as well.  Innumerable uninsured creatures are suffering out there.

OBAMA: Easy, big guy; we’ll do it in stages.  After people, we insure the remaining mammalians; then, things with legs; finally, air breathers.  Treasury?

PAUL KRUGMAN: I’ve run the numbers, sir: Stimulus IV should tip the worldwide economy into depression within a year.

OBAMA: Good.  That gets us closer to the one-world government mankind will demand I lead to left the—I mean, to right the ship.  I’m getting bored with the Presidency, anyway. OMB? (more…)

In the beginning, I was willing to accept that a group of unhappy citizens utilized their First Amendment rights to protest what they believe to be an injustice (as I have written here and here):  the picking of winners and losers by government with a weak coverup attempt via cronyism.  I accepted, at first, their claims of being a “non-violent” group wanting to have their grievances heard.

Yet, as the “movement” began to grow, it became obvious that being “non-violent” is “non-correct.” Quickly, the OWS protesters were co-opted by those who believe in violence as a legitimate means of achieving their objectives:  Van Jones, who wants to see an “American Autumn” emulating the Arab Spring (which was, and still is, very violent), Michael Moore — who has stated publicly that the “rich” can give up their money now, peacefully, or later (though he doesn’t elaborate on what happens to get the money later, one can imagine), and even Roseanne Barr got into the mix. Barr actually said she longed for the return of the guillotine and re-education camps for those who don’t give up their wealth willingly.

In my appearance on CrossTalk, I was joined by Jason Del Gandio – assistant professor of rhetoric at Temple University and author of “Rhetoric for Radicals,” (a handbook for 21st century activists) and Kevin Zeese, organizer of October 2011.org and activist.  In that program a few things came to the surface:

Both Del Gandio and Zeese pushed the meme that the organizations across the nation were non-violent. Zeese made it clear that they were not allowing themselves to be co-opted by Jones, Moore, the Democrat party or anyone else, claiming:

Van Jones is not part of the Occupy movement…he’s a Democrat…if Obama and the Democrats embrace us, they gonna be very sad to see that we will be protesting them as well…we see them as part of the crony capitalist corrupt economy that has resulted in 400 people having as much wealth as 154 million, not because they are smarter or work harder, but because they are politically connected and essentially bribing through campaign donations…

(more…)

It hasn’t taken long for the socialist-organized “occupation” of Wall Street to jump the shark.

In a surreal news conference at the United Nations, anti-American radical and rogue financier George Soros (net worth: $22 billion) threw in his lot with the thousands of Communists, anarchists, eco-feminists, malingerers, and professional protesters who have been baiting and taunting police in lower Manhattan as part of a mass demonstration that began September 17.

The protests, which have spread to other large cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.” Not surprisingly, the remnants of the ACORN network are deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New York ACORN’s new front group, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), led by veteran ACORN enforcer Jon Kest, is one of the major protest groups leading the effort to turn America into one big socialist armpit.

Kest explained why NYCC is involved by using what has become the standard Marxist boilerplate about the financial collapse. “When the big banks tanked our economy they took away millions of people’s shot at achieving the American Dream,” he blogged. “It’s about time all these people come together and hold Wall Street accountable for what they’ve done to our futures and the future of this country.” Of course Kest didn’t bother to mention the role that ACORN played in creating the mortgage bubble by strong-arming Fannie Mae, pushing the financial affirmative action scheme known as the Community Reinvestment Act, and blackmailing banks that didn’t want to lend money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back.

SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has vowed to do his part to drive a stake through the heart of capitalism and drag the populace into economic misery. Lerner says he wants to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. Last year George Goehl, executive director of Chicago-based National People’s Action, said that “the banking crisis” was “the next big thing,” and “the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country.”

Soros said he sympathizes with the rabble. “Actually I can understand [the protesters’] sentiment, frankly,” said the preeminent funder of the American activist Left in remarks to reporters.

But anyone who has followed Soros’s life wouldn’t dare to describe him as a working class hero.

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In June we attended the Printer’s Row Literature Festival in Chicago. City blocks were closed off for tents and booths full of all types of literature. We presented a board with a selection of well known book covers and asked visitors of the event if they could choose to ban any of the books on the board, which if any, they would in fact ban. They were allowed to choose any three of the eleven choices.

The authors of the books we offered to ban were Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, Ayn Rand, Michael Savage, Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama. While there were in fact less than two handfuls of individuals who did tell us they don’t think any books should be banned, unfortunately there were a shocking amount of guests at this book fair who were quite open to the idea, and in fact lined up quite excited for the opportunity to voice their opinion.

Participants overwhelming chose Sarah Palin who received 53 votes putting her at 36% overall, Glenn Beck at 23% and Ann Coulter at 22%.

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**UPDATED

President Barack Obama has won praise from the media — and from himself — for putting the White House visitor logs online. Yet the visitor logs may hide more than they reveal.

The White House is still holding back “tens of thousands” of visitor logs, according to congressional testimony last week by Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, who also added that “the Obama administration is less transparent than the Bush administration.”

We also know that some of the most important presidential visitors don’t even walk into the White House. The administration meets K Street lobbyists at Caribou Coffee, and holds secret meetings in Jackson Place townhouses where there are no visitor logs.

The visitor logs that have been released are problematic, because they are simply lists of names, with no way to verify whether a specific name belongs to a particular person.

When the first names were released on Oct. 30, 2009, late on a Friday afternoon, then-White House “ethics czar” Norm Eisen noted the lists included “false positives” — “names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else.” According to Eisen, these included ordinary visitors named “Michael Jordan, William Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright, Robert Kelly (“R. Kelly”), and Malik Shabazz.” (more…)

Disingenuous filmmaker Michael Moore is using the Wisconsin public labor dispute as a tool to get his bulbous head back in front of the TV cameras.

He held up handcuffs during Rachel Maddow’s nightly left-wing rant on MSNBC.  He wants to use them to arrest very wealthy people – presumably including himself. The last time we checked, he lived in a very big mansion in northern Michigan and has an estimated personal fortune of about $50 million. Has anybody noticed Moore redistributing his own wealth to the poor, working masses?

He’s also called for a student walk-out in Wisconsin High Schools. He’s may be on to something here. The instruction in some of these schools is so bad, students may actually experience less harm by leaving and stay away for awhile.

But I have a great idea for my fellow Michigander. Mike should go on a hunger strike. If he really believes in his liberal causes as much as he says he does, he should be willing to sacrifice something near and dear to his heart, like those midnight triple cheeseburger runs.

Setting aside the obvious personal benefits, think of the headlines!  He could turn into a novelty like John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their “Bed-Ins for Peace,” or magician David Blane, who was suspended in a glass box over the River Thames for 44 days.

Moore could refuse to eat until all the “rights” are restored for government employees and they again have the power to demand free $27,000 health insurance policies from cash-strapped schools, demand full coverage for their Viagra prescriptions, and enjoy job security, regardless of performance, through union-created policies like tenure and “last in, first out.”

That’s the American Way, isn’t it?

(more…)

“The nation is not broke, my friends,” opines guerilla filmmaker and amateur accountant Michael Moore. “Wisconsin is not broke. Saying that the country is broke is repeating a Big Lie.”

Relax, America, it turns out that all that talk about local, state, and federal government being broke is just total B.S. or, as The New York Times puts it, “obfuscating nonsense…a scare tactic employed for political ends.”

Moore is a bit skimpy on evidence, simply asserting that all we need to do to make things right is to shake down rich people who “have diverted…wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates.” The Times’ case isn’t much more compelling. “A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more ‘broke’ than a family with a mortgage or a college loan,” says the paper of record. “And states have to balance their budgets.”

OK, but what should you call a family or a country that spent about 20 percent of GDP for each of the past 60 years while raising less than 18 percent of GDP each year? And that is facing a massive balloon payment (let’s call it entitlement spending on Medicare and Social Security) in the not-too-distant future? And has to keep borrowing money just to pay today’s bills? And has no chance of increasing its take-home pay to cover its expenses?

It’s a pretty safe bet that most of us would call that family or country broke. Or something along those lines.

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore urged Wisconsin residents Saturday to fight Republican-backed efforts to strip most public workers of their collective bargaining rights, telling thousands of protesters that “Madison is only the beginning.”

The crowd roared in approval as Moore implored demonstrators to keep up their struggle against Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation, comparing their fight to Egypt’s revolt. He also thanked the 14 state Democratic senators who fled Wisconsin to block a vote on the bill, saying they’ll go down in history books.

“We’re going to do this together. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up,” Moore told the protesters, who have held steady at the Capitol for nearly three weeks. Police have said a crowd of about 70,000 showed up on Feb. 19, and an even larger crowd rallied Feb. 26.

Moore said the wealthy have overreached, first taking the working class’ money and then taking their souls by shutting them up at the bargaining table. The crowd yelled “thank you” before Moore began to speak, and he responded: “All of America thanks you, Wisconsin.”

(more…)

Yes, this is in regards to the Arizona shootings but, to be fair to Michael Moore, he’s basically been saying this same thing his entire career. You can check out his full line of reasoning, if you can call it that, here. But basically he starts off his brilliant diatribe by claiming that most guns in the US are in areas with very little gun violence. This is, of course, true. However, Moore takes no time to stop and consider exactly why this is true.

You see, to Moore this is true simply because these areas are suburban or rural or something. I guess. He can’t fathom a connection between gun ownership by law abiding Americans and reduced crime rates. It’s astounding.

Anyway, pointing to the low crime rates Moore then asks why people in areas like Tucson want guns? After all these places with all these guns are super safe so why would you want to own such an incredibly dangerous thing like a gun in any of these completely safe areas with lots of guns since, you know, guns are crazy dangerous and stuff.

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Los Angeles City Controller Wendy Gruel has done it again — exposing enormous waste in yet another city department.  However, in a Reverse Kafka-esque twist, this time it is motorists who are finally getting the upper hand when it comes to the insidious $446 red light camera citations.

Not only did Ms. Gruel say there was insufficient evidence that the cameras reduced accidents, but she questioned whether they had even been placed at the most dangerous intersections.  Having seen many of these cameras peppered about the city, I have more than once wondered why certain intersections were chosen since they do not appear to be ones where accidents might understandably occur often.

However, the real lunacy of this program is that Los Angeles Superior Court judges have ruled that the citations are unenforceable.  The successful legal argument was that because a human being did not actually hand the citation to the offender that the citation was not properly served.

If the citation is not legally served, then there is no crime to enforce.  So people in Los Angeles County can ignore the citations with no repercussions.  That’s right — drivers actually do get off scot-free.  Yeah, you get sent to a collections agency, but even then there is no civil suit possible because no crime has been committed because no service was performed.  Nor can the agency report your lack of payment to a credit agency or the DMV.  Meanwhile, dozens of other court cases have made the camera enforcement a farce statewide.

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There’s nothing wrong with the fact Debra Blessman kept secret from her students the name of the film she would require them to watch and analyze during finals week at Francis Howell High School. Today, however, the teacher might be wishing she had not kept her superiors in the St. Charles, Mo., school district in the dark about it. She planned to base final exams on the Michael Moore film, “Sicko“.

Judging by the unedited plot summary below which Blessman distributed to students in her Senior Literature and Composition class, one might assume Blessman kept school district administrators in the dark about the controversial 2007 documentary on health care because she knew they might find the film objectionable:

In this documentary, the director/writer Michael Moore exposes the dysfunctional North American health care system, oriented to huge profits and not for their mission of saving lives. Further, he shows the corruption in the political system, with members of government and congress “bought” by the corporations and the situation of the average American citizens, including those that volunteered to work in the rescue mission of the September 11th. Then he travels to Canada, Great Britain and France to compare their systems showing their hospital, doctors, staffs and patients. Last but not least, he shows that the prisoners in Guantanamo have better medical treatment than the common people in USA, and he ends getting free treatment to the Americans that participate along the documentary in Cuba.

Apparently, however, Blessman did not expect any of her students to raise objections about the film. But one did.

(more…)

President Obama signed the renewal of the Patriot Act in the quiet of a slow-news Saturday–the Act was set to expire Sunday, February 28–as reported by The Hill.

Photo Credit: AP Photo

The reauthorization did NOT include any reforms to the current Patriot Act–an odd display of agreement and submission to Bush-era policy–even though the Democrats had the numbers to reform the Act. The continuance of the current Patriot Act signals that Democrats are fearful of further controversary in light of American’s distrust and poor approval ratings of the Democrat-controlled Congress. From the Hill:

The House approved the bill 315-97 on Thursday, a day after the extension passed the Senate.

The provisions, including roving wiretaps, records access and tracking terror suspects not affiliated with any group, were set to expire on Sunday. Democrats opposing the extension were unable to add desired civil-liberties protections.

The Patriot Act was first passed by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a defense mechanism against terrorists.

The House and the Senate, behind the scenes of the healthcare fervor, quietly passed this bill with little oppostion and outrage. Democrats could have modified the Patriot Act, but didn’t.

(more…)

It’s almost hard to believe but Wednesday, January 20 marks exactly one year since President Bush left the White House.

During his last public ceremony as commander in chief, he was booed by thousands of Americans who simutaneously cheered for Barack Obama as he was sworn into office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Except for a June 17 speech in Erie, Pennsylvania in which Bush defended his policies and criticized Obama’s, the former president has been remarkably silent about his successor. He has not fired back at Obama despite the new administration inappropriately blaming Bush for all of their failures.

One year after taking office however, Obama has done a total reversal on his isolationist, non-interventionist foreign policy, and is now pushing President Bush’s neo-conservative philosophy as a justification for starting a new war in Afghanistan. What the Democratic Party once criticized as an over-simplified good vs. evil argument has become the cornerstone of Obama’s reasoning.

(more…)

Michael Moore discussed his new film on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann last week, which excoriates the 2008 financial bailouts, corporate welfare and various other flaws in a system in which the government gives favor to corporations that can afford lobbyists in Washington DC. Moore also calls capitalism “evil,” even when you strip away all the sweetheart deals with the government.

While his initial frustration with crony capitalism may be justified, while on Olbermann’s show, Moore completely failed to mention that General Electric, the company that keeps Olbermann on the air, received billions in bailout money last year. He also neglected to point out that Olbermann received a  $3.5 million pay raise around the same time that taxpayers paid to keep General Electric afloat. (Olbermann regularly scolds corporate employees who receive bonuses from bailed out companies.)

Despite calls to put his money where his mouth is and return his own bonus, Olbermann has remained silent. And while Moore is usually so quick to attack anyone benefiting from government-backed corporate profits,  he didn’t even mention his host’s own hypocrisy.

You see, to guys like Moore and Olbermann, it’s perfectly okay to make millions from taxpayers and capitalism, so long as it’s their bank account getting filled with the cash.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to show the press corps the way.
By Jack Shafer

Among the many glorious things about American journalism is that no credentialing organization or regulatory body stands between an individual who wants to break a story and his public reporting of it.

In the old days, one significant barrier did deter aspiring reporters: If they couldn’t find a publisher for their piece or afford to self-publish, they were SOL. But now, thanks to the free-for-all environment created by the Web, those publication and distribution worries have evaporated. Anybody can be a journalist in the new regime, we’re told, and on some days, it seems as if everybody is.

Last week, thanks to the sponsorship of Andrew Breitbart’s new site BigGovernment.com, self-described activist filmmaker James O’Keefe, 25, and his colleague Hannah Giles, 20, brought national scrutiny to the progressive Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, with a series of guerilla videos that are one part 60 Minutes, two parts Punk’d, three parts Ali G, and four parts Michael Moore, all bubbling under a whipped topping of yellow journalism. (more…)