Rules are here. Possible comment fodder follows. Other topics are also fair game.

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Obama-endorsed (proof here, here, and here) Occupy Update:

• From Washington — “Occupiers disrupt Chamber of Commerce meeting on health care.” Expect self-important Occupiers to spend the next year disrupting various events. Expect the press to erroneously characterize these disruptions as “just like” the vocal Tea Party presence at congressional town hall meetings in the summer of 2009.
• One such planned event disruption is Occupy Wall Street’s plan to “Shut Down Wall Street; Occupy the Subways; Take Times Square” on November 17.
• Here’s a disruption which happened Sunday which was nicely handled (“Ex-cop boots OWS heckler from congressman’s swearing-in”) — “Kevin Hiltunen, a former NYPD officer, yesterday grabbed an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator by the collar and dragged him out of a Queens school where he’d been heckling US Rep. Bob Turner at the congressman’s swearing-in ceremony.”
• Observations from Oakland (“OWS Supporters Confirm: Violence an Essential Component”) — “the Occupy Oakland events put the lie to the assertion that only a minor segment of the group is responsible for the violence and that the rest of the protesters do not condone that behavior. … when one of the protesters suggested nonviolence, he was roundly booed and mocked. The idea that the occupiers should be nonviolent was insulting to the movement’s core.”
• New York City — “Downtown residents and business owners angry that their neighborhood has been occupied for two months by the Wall Street demonstration staged a protest of the protest Monday, declaring that City Hall has let it get out of control.” The New York Post has published an estimate of the cost to local businesses of $479,400. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s performance during “Occupy” has been an absolute disgrace. Here’s an idea: Someone tell him that the Occupiers are frying with transfats. He’ll have the cops breaking it all up in no time.
• Portland — “Bob Downing, central services manager for the (Portland) parks bureau, said (that) … about 70 dump truck loads of trash and debris were hauled from the camps over the weekend. He said about 30 city employees worked Sunday to clear the parks.” Bill the Occupiers (fat chance).
• As of 10:30 PM Monday night, John Nolte’s incomplete but nevertheless useful Occupy incident count was up to 232. OWSexposed.com’s death toll is up to 7.

As I noted yesterday – Andrew Breitbart asks: “How many more rapes, how many more deaths, how many more acts of violence have to occur before President Obama and the Democratic Party withdraw their support and condemn these lawless protests?” My response: It’s too late for that, Andrew. They’ve had weeks to distance themselves from the disgusting criminal mayhem, and haven’t. They own it now and they always will. No amount of attempted distancing from this point on can change that.

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Given the Michael Lerner sighting in one of the “Occupy” entries above, I thought I would remind readers who are either too young or don’t have as much useless trivia in their heads as yours truly that in 1993, in the initial euphoria of their arrival at the White House, the Clintons embraced Lerner’s “Politics of Meaning,” some of the mushiest, most irrelevant crap ever foisted on the public. There’s a one-word answer to the supposedly challenging dilemmas Mrs. Clinton cited in the linked speech: Christianity.

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One reason why Newsweek (or “Newsweak,” as is my preference) has experienced yet another management shakeup as it continues its downward spiral into irrelevance is garbage like this item (HT to an emailer) about the supposed hypocrisy of conservative congresspersons asking for what is mostly already legally allocated money to be spent expeditiously and/or sent to constituent entities who are waiting for it. What a complete nothingburger of a story. Most of what it tries seems to reek of desperation.

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California Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown “will request billions for high-speed rail project.” Billions the state doesn’t have, the feds don’t have, and which the state’s residents will hardly ever use.

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A Comparison:

• A married mother of two girls who was already aggressively using coupons was feeding her family for $400 per month.
• Then she dove into once-a-month cooking and cut the monthly food bill down to $200 (she says she spent $170 but also went out a few times for “for butter, milk and eggs,” so I’m padding it a little). The approach also has some perhaps unexpected fringe benefits.
• The Maximum Monthly Allotment in the Food Stamp program for 2009-2010 was $668 — and this duplicates any free school breakfasts, lunches, and in some cases even dinners the kids may receive.

Don’t tell me we can’t significantly reduce federal spending without making people legitimately suffer.

From Knoxville (video at link; HT Daryn Kagan):

Tue Nov 08 07:20am EST

It was 6:10 p.m. when University of Tennessee student Derrick Brodus got the call.

He was lying on the couch in his frat house, waiting for the Tennessee-Middle Tennessee game to start at 7 p.m. when the football office rang and told him it was sending a police escort to get him to the stadium immediately.

“I thought it was a dream,” Brodus said. “I was just laying on my couch relaxing and I answer my phone and they just tell me that I need to come to the stadium as soon as possible.”

Minutes before that call, Tennessee had run out of kickers. Starter Michael Palardy had injured himself during Thursday’s practice, and backup Chip Rhome pulled a muscle during pregame warmups. That left Brodus, a freshman walk-on, as the Vols’ only option.

“[Rhome] went out there like the kickers do before pregame and they all come back in a panic,” coach Derek Dooley recounted after the game. “I said ‘let’s get an APB out on Brodus.’ It’s a good thing he wasn’t having too much fun on a Saturday afternoon. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

On Saturday, at a Q&A session at the APEC CEO Business Summit in Hawaii, President Barack Obama, when asked about impediments to foreign investment in the United States, responded in part: “… we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — well, people will want to come here and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America.”

As would be expected, this impolitic comment has generated quite a bit of discussion all over the place in the two days since. Well, almost all over the place, as you’ll after the jump in graphic captures of the results of searches on “Obama lazy” (not in quotes) at the main site of the Associated Press and at the New York Times (Times search is in order of newest first):

(more…)

In Hawaii today, according to an Associated Press dispatch filed by Ben Feller, President Barack Obama is reported to have told supporters that, in Feller’s words, “everything they worked for and that the country stands for is on the line in his 2012 re-election bid.”

Well, if what those donors have “worked” for is an inside track to government money, and if what the country stands for is crony capitalism, the President is right. The following excerpt from Peter Schweizer’s new book, “Throw The All Out,” provides the details in just one commercial arena (via The Daily Beast; HTs to Doug Ross, Conservatives4Palin, Victory Chronicles, and Heritage; bolds are mine; extra paragraph breaks added by me):

After he was sworn in as president, he proclaimed that taxpayer money would assuredly not be doled out to political friends. “Decisions about how Recovery Act dollars are spent will be based on the merits,” he said, referring to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. “Let me repeat that: decisions about how recovery money will be spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists.”

… an examination of grants and guaranteed loans offered by just one stimulus program run by the Department of Energy, for alternative-energy projects, is stunning. The so-called 1705 Loan Guarantee Program and the 1603 Grant Program channeled billions of dollars to all sorts of energy companies. The grants were earmarked for alternative-fuel and green-power projects, so it would not be a surprise to learn that those industries were led by liberals. Furthermore, these were highly competitive grant and loan programs—not usually a hallmark of cronyism. Often fewer than 10 percent of applicants were deemed worthy.

Nevertheless, a large proportion of the winners were companies with Obama-campaign connections. Indeed, at least 10 members of Obama’s finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting your money. At the same time, several politicians who supported Obama managed to strike gold by launching alternative-energy companies and obtaining grants. How much did they get?

According to the Department of Energy’s own numbers … a lot. In the 1705 government-backed-loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.

The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.

… One might think that the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, which has doled out billions in taxpayer-guaranteed loans, would be directed by a dedicated scientist or engineer. Or perhaps a civil servant with considerable financial knowledge. Instead, the department’s loan and grant programs are run by partisans who were responsible for raising money during the Obama campaign from the same people who later came to seek government loans and grants. Steve Spinner, who served on the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee and was a bundler himself, was the campaign’s “liaison to Silicon Valley.”

… Another Obama fundraiser positioned to lead the allocation of taxpayer money to Obama contributors was Sanjay Wagle, who served as the managing co-chairman of Cleantech & Green Business Leaders for Obama. Wagle’s day job was as a principal at VantagePoint Venture Partners. After the 2008 election, Wagle joined the Obama administration as a “renewable energy grants adviser” at the Department of Energy. VantagePoint owned firms that would later see federal loan guarantees roll in.

As one might expect, it goes on and on and on.

It’s bad enough that this is to some degree business as usual inside the Beltway. But two things make it unique. First, its scope. $16 billion in just one program is a lot of money, even in a world where we’re being conditioned to be unimpressed by anything which isn’t followed by 12 zeroes. Second, the brazen hypocrisy. Obama didn’t just make a point of claiming that he would run a clean and above board operation in Washington during the 2008 campaign — supposedly in stark contrast to his predecessor and the pre-2007 Republican majority in Congress — he hammered at the theme at seemingly every conceivable opportunity.

Jonathan Alter and Allan Lichtman, both of whom have claimed that the Obama administration has been free of scandal during its nearly three years controlling the White House thus far — call your offices.

Will the relatively disengaged majority of the electorate every hear about what Schweizer has detailed in the above segment from his book? It’s not looking good; a search on his last name at the main site of the Associated Press, which may as well call itself The Administration’s Press, at 7:00 p.m. ET came up empty. Ben Feller, you too need to call your office — and get a grip.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

According to Rick Hamspon in what is apparently an analysis piece in Monday’s USA Today, the Occupy movement has a violent “fringe,” which constitutes just a “fraction” of those involved.

Well, he’s right about it being a “fraction,” except that said fraction is a lot larger than he apparently believes. The USAT writer also attempts to perpetuate the Occupy Oakland myth that its November 2 “non-violent ‘general strike’” was absolutely peaceful until “some masked anarchists broke off from the main protest.” Here is some of Hampson’s harrumphing:

‘Occupy’ movement faces challenge from violent fringe

As winter closes in on its open-air encampments and public attention prepares to move on to the next big thing, the Occupy movement faces a dilemma: Conflict and confrontation, which have helped make it a national phenomenon, also can derail it. The scene this month in Oakland, where a fraction of protesters fought with riot police, trashed stores, built barricades and started fires, reminded activists and historians that a movement suffers if conflicts with authority turn violent.

… Political analysts and historians — and many Occupy adherents — agree that violence usually eclipses a movement’s message and alienates potential mainstream support. But they say that though public opinion condemns violence’s initiators, it sympathizes with its victims. And conflict that stops short of violence creates cohesion within a movement and attracts attention outside it.

The trick is to go only to the brink, according to Tom Juravich, a labor activist and historian. “If militancy stays within bounds, there’s mileage to be gained. But not if you hurt people or destroy property.”

Occupy Wall Street, the encampment that started it all on Sept. 17 in New York City, was ignored or derided by much of the news media until a police commander was videotaped pepper-spraying two female protesters, and about 700 protesters were arrested for allegedly trying to block the Brooklyn Bridge.

… “Conflict gets people’s attention,” says Caroline Pincus, a 53-year-old San Franciscan who marched in Occupy Oakland’s non-violent “general strike” that briefly closed the nation’s fifth-busiest port. “It’s put the story on the front page. It’s given permission for much more coverage of income disparity.”

In Oakland, a splinter group that included some masked anarchists broke off from the main protest Nov. 2 after a day of peaceful protests. Police made more than 80 arrests.

There’s only one problem with Hampson’s “violent fringe” contention: Democratic pollster Doug Schoen punctured that myth almost a month ago in a Wall Street Journal report:

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

There’s your “fraction,” Rick, and it’s almost one-third. That’s hardly a “fringe.” Given both the Occupiers’ failure to make any headway in moving public opinion toward their primarily redistributionist agenda and the personal violence we’ve seen in so many camps around the country, it’s more than a little likely that the street violence-supporting component of the Occupy movement is greater, perhaps far greater, than it was in mid-October.

As to Occupy Oakland:

• As seen here (picture caption: “Demonstrators from the ‘Occupy Oakland movement climb aboard trucks at the Port of Oakland in Oakland, November 2, 2011″) at least some so-called “peaceful” participants in the demonstrations at the Port of Oakland prevented workers there from doing their job. It seems that the Port didn’t shut down because it wanted to avoid a confrontation; it really shut down because of one.
• At BigJournalism.com on November 4, P.J. Salvatore showed “that violence began during, not after, the main “general strike” protest conducted by Occupy Oakland on Nov. 2. Masked activists, marching with the main parade, begin smashing windows as the Occupy chants (“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out”) are heard in the background.”

One commenter at Hampson’s piece wrote: “Violence is not the fringe, it is the mainstream with the OWS.” If not the mainstream, arguably darned near it — and certainly not a “fringe.”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Read it.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder follows. Other topics are also fair game.

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Obama-endorsed (proof here, here, and here) Occupy Update:

• Kyle-Anne Shiver at PJ Media — “The Five Most Infantile Beliefs on Display at the ‘Occupy’ Tantrums”
• P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters — “Artist Frank Miller Shocks Left With Harsh Criticism of OWS Protests”
• Portland (video at link; HT Gateway Pundit) — “Bail for a man inside the Occupy Portland camp Wednesday on accusations related to a Tuesday Molotov cocktail fire was raised to $1 million by a judge Thursday.”
• John at Powerline identifies a candidate for “the lamest Occupy protest anywhere.”
• Occupy Portland formally and openly adopts what was apparently the Penn State Athletic Department’s unspoken rule for over a decade — “If you witness a sexual assault, ‘nobody should contact the police.’”
• Philadelphia — “A woman protester at the Occupy Philadelphia encampment at City Hall was raped in a tent, allegedly by a man who had traveled from out of state to join the protest, police said.”
• Portland (“Police raze camps, drive protesters from 2 squares”; HT JWF) — “As protesters shouted, ‘The whole world is watching!’ onlooker Gene Gallun, 63, yelled back, ‘The whole world is laughing.’” For those who don’t remember or are too young, “The whole world is watching” was the self-absorbed, self-important chant of the violent crowd at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Andrew Breitbart asks: “How many more rapes, how many more deaths, how many more acts of violence have to occur before President Obama and the Democratic Party withdraw their support and condemn these lawless protests?” My response: It’s too late for that, Andrew. They’ve had weeks to distance themselves from the disgusting criminal mayhem, and haven’t. They own it now and they always will. No amount of attempted distancing from this point on can change that.

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From the “Too Many Great Blogs, Too Little Time” Dept. — On October 19, Pamela at Atlas Shrugs caught an important development the press outside of one small New York City publication totally ignored, namely that Park51 mosque (i.e., the infamous proposed Ground Zero Mosque) developer Sharif El-Gamal has gone AWOL (previous related BizzyBlog posts are here). He has six collection-related suits pending against, and the politically correct community board which approved his project has “been shut out.” And of course, the national press is ignoring the implosion.

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You can’t make this up (the news item or the book title) — as of Friday evening, “Jerry Sandusky’s autobiography, ‘Touched,’ is still available at The Penn State Bookstore”

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This one is painful — “Sold as newer, cleaner, more advanced energy technology, ethanol production has been a blistering disaster in the United States.” More: “A careful look into the ethanol question in the US leaves one wondering why this … industry even exists. Is it attributable to Crony Capitalism?” Uh, yes.

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Great question: “Who hired Gloria Allred? Knowing that might shed light on the matter at hand.” Not letting her get in a word during an interview until she answers that question should be mandatory, at least on the part of interviewers interested in the truth.

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Speaking of questions — In light of this item at NewsBusters (warning: barely concealed R-rated language), here’s one for anyone still subscribing to HBO: How can you possibly defend that choice?

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From the “If you like your plan, you can keep it … ha-ha, the joke’s on you!” Dept. — “Since Obamacare’s Passage, Millions Have Lost Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance” (related Gallup poll).

From Bedford, Ohio:

7:13 PM, Oct 24, 2011

An Oakwood man is being called a medical miracle after surviving a massive heart attack that stopped his heart four separate times. The police officers and emergency responders who helped save his life are being called heroes.

On September 30th, EMS crews were dispatched to Bedford Cemetery. Ernie Walker and his wife were driving down Broadway Avenue when he recognized the symptoms of a heart attack.

“I was pretty much dead when they picked me up at the cemetery and they brought me back from the reaper,” says Walker.

He doesn’t remember where he was going or what he was doing that day. All he remembers is waking up in the hospital days later.

A Bedford police officer started Ernie’s treatment just outside the cemetery gates. Once the ambulance arrived, a team of five took over his care.

EMT worker Vic DePasquale explained, the situation wasn’t good. His heart and breathing stopped. Ernie’s heart was “just shivering, not pumping any blood or taking in any blood,” DePasquale said.

Firefighters didn’t realize it at the time, but the man on the stretcher was the same Boy Scout leader who’d trained alongside them in times past.

Ernie oversees a troop of 12, all of whom have received some training in emergency medical response.

The seemingly healthy man, was taken down within the same week, at the same age as his father who died from a heart attack.

Ernie was brought back from the dead after his heart attack, with no injury. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

A story first broken by David Willman at the Los Angeles Times on Friday (the story is currently dated November 13, but the first comment appeared late Friday evening Pacific Time) is going almost nowhere in the rest of the establishment press. I wonder why?

No, I really don’t, and neither will most readers here once they see what it’s all about, namely Obama administration corruption and crony capitalism (bolds are mine):

Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug deal

A company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist.

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.

Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.

When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.

Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a “sole-source” procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation’s biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government’s specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.

… Perelman and others at Siga’s affiliate, MacAndrews & Forbes, have long been major political donors. They gave a total of $607,550 to federal campaigns for the 2008 and 2010 elections, according to records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. About 65% of that money went to Democrats. Perelman donated an additional $50,000 to President Obama’s inauguration.

… the federal contract required that the winning bidder be a small business, with no more than 500 employees. Chimerix Inc., a North Carolina company that had competed for the contract, protested, saying Siga was too big.

Officials at the Small Business Administration investigated and quickly agreed, finding that Siga’s affiliation with MacAndrews & Forbes disqualified it.

The excerpt hardly does the much longer story justice. The abuses and process-rigging just go on and on and on. Read the whole thing.

Yet we still have clowns like Jonathan Alter and Allan Lichtman running around claiming the administration is scandal-free. Zheesh.

You won’t be able to read about Siga at the Associated Press. Searches at the AP’s main site on “smallpox” and “Perelman” come up empty. A search at the New York Times on “smallpox” returns nothing relevant. A Google News search on “smallpox Perelman” (not in quotes, for the past week, sorted by date) returns a whopping five items. Two of them are versions of the LA Times story, one is from Fox News, and another is at a site called ThirdAge.com. The fifth item is from the AP’s sort-of competitor United Press International (UPI).

I guess being behind the dismally small UPI in covering (or potentially even not covering) a story of Washington corruption, rule-bending, rule-breaking, and campaign-contributions cronyism doesn’t bother the Essential Global News Network — as long as it’s the Obama administration and not that of a Republican or conservative. That why characterizing the wire service as The Administration’s Press is appropriate.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From a weekend Wall Street Journal editorial:

Train to Neverland
California’s railway gets more fantastic all the time.

California Governor Jerry Brown must have loved “The Little Engine That Could” as a kid. Last week his state’s high-speed rail authority released a new business plan that estimates its 500-mile bullet train from San Francisco to Anaheim will cost $98 billion. The state and federal governments are broke, and private capital won’t finance the project, but Mr. Brown still thinks the state can build the train.

Three years ago the rail authority sold a $9 billion bond measure to voters on the pretext that the bullet train would cost $33 billion and be financed mostly by private investors and Uncle Sam. They also claimed the train would draw 90 million riders per year—about 15 times what Amtrak’s Acela in the Northeast draws—and wouldn’t need a subsidy. Taxpayers were all aboard.

Then reality struck. A study last year by Stanford economist Alain Enthoven, former World Bank analyst William Grindley and financial consultant William Warren examined high-speed trains in Europe and Japan and concluded that the California train could cost upward of $100 billion and would be lucky to draw 10 million riders. The authors also reported that investors were refusing to finance the project without a subsidy, which the bond measure that voters approved had prohibited.

The White House has so far offered the state $3.2 billion in grant money—provided that it builds the train in a way that guarantees a taxpayer loss. …

Governor Moonbeam hasn’t changed a bit.

If there is anybody out there who still thinks John Kasich should have accepted $400 million from “Uncle Bam” and the Obama administration for the Cincinnati-Dayton-Columbus-Cleveland slow choo-choo, they are in the same Neverland as Jerry Brown.

Politifact, while criticizing Kasich for referring to the Ohio train’s average speed as being 39 mph (it might really be 50 mph if some curves are straightened — big whoop), noted supporters’ belief that the $400 million would be “enough to get the train up and running by late 2012.” Based on Cali’s experience, that’s sheer Neverland fantasy. As in California, the government would have had to come running back to taxpayers at either the federal or state level to finish the job.

If we’re at all lucky, Ohioans will never have to experience what California, which will hopefully change its mind about its disastrous project, is going through.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder follows. Other topics are also fair game.

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Obama-endorsed (proof here, here, and here) Occupy Update:

• Important perspective from Mark Steyn, for those in business who naively see potential benefit in aligning with the Occupy movement — “Standing with “the 99%” means supporting the destruction of civilized society.”
• From New York City (HT OWS Exposed) — “EMT Assaulted at Occupy Wall Street” — “A man has been arrested for allegedly assaulting a paramedic and breaking his leg at the Occupy Wall Street site overnight.”
• A pertinent question from Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web last Monday — “Should the liberal media be held responsible for left-wing violence?” By the Gabby Giffords standards unsuccessfully attempted on Tea Party sympathizers, “Yes,” because they apply to the press and the Occupy movement.
• From Salt Lake City (“Occupy Fight Results in 4 Arrests”) — “At least four people were arrested Thursday following a fight that reportedly involved an estimated 30 people in Pioneer Park near the Occupy Salt Lake base camp.” John at Powerline comments: “If you have ever wondered what would happen in a society consisting entirely of liberals, the Occupier movement is providing the answer: devolution.”
• At Ace’s place (my title) — “BlogCon 1, Occupy Denver 0″ (Breitbart video here)
• Denver (“Police clear out Occupy Denver”) — If you can stand it, read the article for the breathtaking childishness displayed therein.
• The Occupy Wall Street crowd in New York has its own disease — Zuccotti Lung. It has a two-word cure: Go home.
• As of 11 PM Saturday night, John Nolte’s incomplete but nevertheless useful Occupy incident count was up to 213.
• Update from Portland (HT Atlas Shrugs) — “Occupy Portland stocking up on gas masks, homemade weapons, police warn.” I don’t want to minimize the clear seriousness of the situation, but there is something unavoidably funny about the link’s opening sentence: “Gas masks, homemade weapons and potluck dinners are being gathered by demonstrators at the Occupy Portland site, police warned Friday.” There must be some really bad cooking going on.

Remind me: What was this “Occupy Movement” supposed to be about?

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At SmartMoney.com — “10 Things Baby Boomers Won’t Say”:

1. “Paws off, Junior, this cash is mine.”
2. “Make room kids, we’ll be living with you when we’re old.”
3. ” and we blame you for that.”
4. “We can’t face reality.”
5. “Until death do us part” doesn’t apply to us.
6. “We’re Unhappy …”
7. “… and we eat our feelings.”
8. “And we’re addicts.”
9. “We will bury you in debt.”
10. “We’re obsessed with (not) aging.”

#9 should probably be #1.

As the item’s subeadline indicates: “The aging Me Generation is still putting itself first.”

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At Heritage — “Leaked Emails Fuel Perception of Cronyism in Solyndra Loan.” Perception?

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Good Sunday Read: John Hawkins interviews Thomas Sowell, who makes great points about race relations, slavery, the A-bombs dropped on Japan, and much more.

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Larry Kotlikoff at the Fiscal Times (“Deficit Accounting Is a Generational Ponzi Scheme”) — “… we are now reaching the end of the chain letter with too few young workers earning far too little to buy into our politicians’ unaffordable promises.” His Purple Tax Plan (that color because it’s supposed to satisfy both red and blue) has many elements worth considering.

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Evidence that the fact that we are reaching the end of Kotlikoff’s aforementioned chain letter is not leading to adult conduct in Washington (video at link) — “Sen. Rand Paul told Sean Hannity … “I have news straight from sources close to the Supercommittee that the Democrats have walked away from the table and they’re refusing to talk to the Republicans about a deal and, they will not counter any offers and basically there’s an impasse and it’s starting to look like they don’t want any deal at all.”

Via Shawn Carney at Life News:

11/7/11 10:34 AM

Another 40 Days for Life campaign has come to an end — and we can look back now at lives forever changed. During these 40 days, there have been 508 lives saved — that we know of — because of God’s response to your prayer!

From past campaigns, we expect the number to KEEP GROWING, as our local campaign leaders get their final reports in.

… for today, let’s look at some of the ways lives have been changed during 40 Days for Life — and thank God for his abundant blessings during this time of prayer and fasting for an end to abortion.

AUSTIN, TEXAS

A volunteer spoke a teenaged couple approaching the abortion center and learned that the girl just found out she was pregnant. She was afraid of telling her parents and wanted to go behind their backs to get a judicial bypass — a court order — in order to have an abortion.

Her boyfriend was not in favor of the abortion, but reluctantly said he supported her because it was her decision.

“I showed them what her baby might look like, based on how far along she thought she was — six weeks,” said the vigil participant. “I also discussed alternatives and resources that I could connect her with.”

The couple walked into the abortion center, but soon left “with smiles of joy and satisfaction. They had decided to not to have an abortion,” said the volunteer.

“Praise God!”

OVERLAND PARK, KANSAS

The 40 Days for Life team in Overland Park had gotten a call from the 40 Days for Life leaders in Columbia, Missouri. Planned Parenthood’s Columbia abortionist had quit, so this office was sending women to Planned Parenthood in Overland Park for abortions.

A volunteer spoke to a couple who had shown up for an appointment in Overland Park. He asked the couple if they were from Columbia — they looked shocked — and said in fact they were. So he shared some pro-life information with them.

They never made it inside the building, however. It was closed! No one had shown up for work that day — there was no explanation.

Later, another couple showed up, knocked, tried the intercom — nothing. There was still no one there. They also took information from the volunteers and left. …

Go here for the rest of the column.