Wednesday, November 9, 2011

LA Occupy spatters blood and urine; Occupy employs radical Allicance for Global Justice to process donations; Obama's AG Dept. imposes Christmas Tree Tax; 60 Minutes' expose on Nancy Pelosi's legislative actions; Occupy plans march to D,C,; Polling indicates anger against government; Need a reason to like Newt?; VA turns right; Ohio rejects union mandates, exempts Ohio from Obamacare;

CBS Los Angeles report on the peaceful Occupy participants: SoCal Street Cart Vendors Hurting After ‘Occupy’ Group Splatters Blood, Urine http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/11/07/socal-street-cart-vendors-hurting-after-occupy-group-splatters-blood-urine/

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Heritage’s Lachlan Markay reports that as the Occupy Wall Street begins taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, an organization known as the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ) has been retained to process the transactions. That group’s other activities and associations are cause for alarm:
The AFGJ provides ‘grassroots’ support for organizations that pursue ‘a socially, ecologically and economically just world,’ according to its website. Among its initiatives are efforts to encourage American soldiers to desert and an anti-George Bush organization founded by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The organization’s president, Katherine Hoyt, leads the Alliance’s Nicaragua Network program, which supports the country’s Marxist Sandinista political party — and was founded for the explicit purpose of overthrowing the country’s government. Hoyt previously worked for the Sandinista government, and has written numerous scholarly works lauding the group. The Sandinistas ruled from 1979 to 1990. Their leader, Daniel Ortega, was elected again in 2006.
Another of AFGJ’s affiliates: George Soros. His Open Society Institute has given the group $100,000. The Occupy Wall Street movement has other supporters, too, including Big Labor. The AFL-CIO took out advertisements supporting the protests and, according to The Washington Post, “Labor groups are mobilizing to provide office space, meeting rooms, photocopying services, legal help, food and other necessities to the protesters.” And despite the violence and radicalism, it’s a movement that President Barack Obama and others on the left have been quick to support, too.
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/11/08/morning-bell-occupy-wall-street-gets-more-violent/
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Heritage reports: President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—[but don't call it a tax] to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.  [And here I thought the program would be to discourage the sale of Christmas trees as being a destruction of protected trees. Will he also pay for research and development of artificial Christmas trees?  That would at least provide even more government jobs, for we don't want the actual producers running their own businesses, do we?]
In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board.  The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)).  And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).  http://blog.heritage.org/2011/11/08/obama-couldnt-wait-his-new-christmas-tree-tax/
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San Francisco Weekly writes: Indications from the Beltway media world are that 60 Minutes is preparing to air a segment exploring legislative actions House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi oversaw that might have benefited her husband's stock investments. http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/11/pelosi_visa_60_minutes.php
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As the Occupy Wall Street protest moves into its second month at Zuccotti Park, a small group of demonstrators has plans to up the ante -- departing from the Lower Manhattan park and heading toward the nation's capital on foot.

The group plans to kick off their two-week, 240-mile march at noon Wednesday when dozens will leave the park and make their way to Washington, D.C. http://www.wpix.com/news/wpix-epic-march-planned-for-ows-protesters,0,2966876.story
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The UK Telegraph writes: Three major polls this week will give a jittery White House cause for concern. The first, from ABC News/Washington Post shows a significant rise in public anger towards the federal government. The second, from The Wall Street Journal/ NBC, shows overwhelming disillusionment with President Obama’s handling of the economy. The third, from Gallup, has conservatives in America now outnumbering liberals by a two-to-one margin.
The surveys are representative of a sea of polls revealing a deep-seated and mounting opposition to the highly interventionist economic policies of the current US administration, with the latest RealClear Politics average of polls showing 73 per cent of Americans believing the country is moving down the “wrong track”.  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100116105/barack-obama-is-facing-an-anti-big-government-revolution/
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Wall St. Journal writes: Reporting on Newt Gingrich's speech to Iowa's Faith and Freedom Coalition Forum, The Wall St. Journal opines: He began with the declaration that Americans were confronting the most important election choice since 1860. America would have the chance in 2012, Mr. Gingrich said, to repudiate decisively decades of leftward drift in our universities and colleges, our newsrooms, our judicial system and bureaucracies.
He would go on to detail the key policies he would put in place if elected, something other Republican candidates have done regularly to little effect. The Gingrich list was interrupted by thunderous applause at every turn. The difference was, as always, in the details—in the informed, scathing descriptions of the Obama policies to be dispatched and replaced, the convincing tone that suggested such a transformation was likely—even imminent.
Mr. Gingrich predicted, too, that late on Election Night—after it was clear that President Obama had been defeated along with the Democrats in the Senate—the recovery would begin, at once. His audience roared with pleasure. No other Republican candidate could have made the promise so persuasive.
Finally, Mr. Gingrich announced that as the Republican nominee he would challenge President Obama to seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates. "I think I can represent American exceptionalism, free enterprise, the rights of private property and the Constitution, better than he can represent class warfare, bureaucratic socialism, weakness in foreign policy, and total confusion in the economy."
Mr. Gingrich launched into a lethal thumbnail description of the Obama administration's energy policy. The president, he said, had gone to Brazil and told the Brazilians he was really glad they were drilling offshore and that he would like America to be their best customer. "The job of the American president," Mr. Gingrich told the panel, "is not to be a purchasing agent for a foreign country—it's to be a salesman for the United States of America."
Whoever his competitors are in Iowa and beyond, Mr. Gingrich faces a hard fight for the nomination. His greatest asset lies in his capacity to speak to Americans as he has done, with such potency, during the Republican debates. No candidate in the field comes close to his talent for connection. There's no underestimating the importance of such a power in the presidential election ahead, or any other one.
His rise in the polls suggests that more and more Republicans are absorbing that fact, along with the possibility that Mr. Gingrich's qualifications all 'round could well make him the most formidable contender for the contest with Barack Obama. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204190704577026041280212400.html
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The Washington Post writes: Virginia appeared to have taken a sharp right turn Tuesday, as Republicans held a tenuous grip on the Senate and gained at least six seats in the House of Delegates. The GOP seemed to have picked up two seats in the Senate, which would evenly divide the 40-member chamber among Republicans and Democrats. Any tie votes would be broken by Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R).
If the results hold, Republicans will have complete control of state government for only the second time since the Civil War and, some say, a new mandate to push forward a strongly conservative agenda.
But many of those elected Tuesday are social conservatives eager to revive legislation — regulating abortion and eliminating environmental rules, for example — that has stalled or died in the purgatory of a Democratic-controlled Senate.
Even before the election, social conservatives were preparing to reintroduce hundreds of bills that had gone nowhere over the past two years, including measures that would require doctors to offer anesthesia to a fetus before an abortion; allow guns in parks, colleges and libraries; mandate drug screening for welfare recipients; and permit employers to fire workers for not speaking English.  [This seems to support recent polling indicating that America has twice as many conservatives as liberals.]  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/analysis-what-a-republican-win-means-for-va/2011/11/04/gIQAFjXo4M_story.html
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NY Times reports: But the day was not a wholesale victory for Democrats. Even as voters in Ohio delivered a blow to Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican, and rejected his attempt to weaken collective bargaining for public employees, they approved a symbolic measure to exempt Ohio residents from the individual mandate required in Mr. Obama’s health care law.
In Maine, where Republicans recently had ended same-day registration at polling places, voters decided to restore the practice, which Democrats support.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/us/politics/votes-across-the-nation-could-serve-as-a-political-barometer.html?_r=1&hp
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1 comment:

  1. old grizzled veteranNovember 10, 2011 at 8:09 AM

    Thanks for all the news...Newt would be great--he needs someone who is more of a "common man" to be his running mate for while he has great intellect and ideas, he is hard for most of the folks to understand...

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