Alfred Woody's Kewl Blog [ 椼森 ]

Saturday, October 29, 2011

"Occupy" demonstrators rally around injured vet

More than 1,000 people attended candlelight vigil for Scott Olsen Ghursday in Oakland (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

(CBS/AP)
OAKLAND, Calif. -- At least 1,000 people gathered in Oakland in honor of the Iraq war veteran who was seriously injured in a confrontation between police and anti-Wall Street demonstrators.
Many in the crowd held candles during last night's vigil for 24-year-old Scott Olsen, who's in the hospital with a fractured skull. His condition has been upgraded to fair.
Olsen was hurt Tuesday night as police in riot gear met protesters who were trying to return to the area near Oakland's City Hall where they had been camping out.
Fellow veterans say Olsen was struck in the head by a projectile fired by police, but that hasn't been confirmed. Officials are investigating exactly where the projectile came from.
The Marine veteran, who won medals in Iraq, has become a rallying cry for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators across the country.
Complete Coverage: Occupy Wall Street
Protesters also held a vigil in Las Vegas that drew a handful of police officers.
Afterward, protesters invited the officers for a potluck dinner. "We renewed our vow of nonviolence," organizer Sebring Frehner said.
Elsewhere across the United States, officials took steps to close some of the protest camps that have sprung up in opposition to growing economic inequality.
Authorities in Tennessee made about 30 arrests early Friday at the site where a few dozen Wall Street protesters had been encamped for about three weeks in Nashville, protesters said.
Authorities began moving in a little after 3 a.m. using a newly enacted state policy that set a curfew for the grounds near the state Capitol, including Legislative Plaza where the protesters had been staying in tents.
The state's new rules specifically ban "overnight occupancy" at the public space and require permits and use fees for rallies.
Katy Savage, one of the protesters, said she peeked out of her tent around 3 a.m. saw that the camp was surrounded by state troopers.
"I was grabbing our stuff to try to get it off the area," she said.
Savage said people who had already decided they would get arrested sat down together and began singing "We Shall Overcome" as troopers dragged some of them to waiting buses.
About 20 protesters, who remained on a sidewalk, were not arrested and were still there later in the morning.
Asked about the arrests, Savage said she was "disgusted and disappointed."
"This was a group of brilliant, wonderful people that I had come to know as family, practicing democratic decision-making on public space. And for that they were dragged away in handcuffs," Savage said.
Even as the vigil was held in Oakland, protest organizers prepared to defy Oakland's prohibition on overnight camping at a plaza near City Hall.
Shake Anderson, an organizer with Occupy Oakland, said half a dozen tents were erected on the plaza Thursday evening where police armed with tear gas and bean bag rounds disbanded a 15-day-old encampment Tuesday. More tents, food and supplies arrived during the meeting and vigil for Scott Olsen, with about 25 tents erected late Thursday.
"We believe in what we're doing," Anderson said. "No one is afraid. If anything, we're going to show there's strength in numbers."
Few police were seen in the area during late Thursday night, though Oakland Mayor Jean Quan issued a statement asking protesters not to camp at the plaza.
In the statement, she also "apologized for the outcome of Tuesday night's demonstration, in which a heavy police presence kept protesters out of the plaza with tear gas, smoke grenades and rubber bullets," reports CBS station KPIX-TV in San Francisco.
"It was not what anyone hoped for, ultimately it was my responsibility, and I apologize for what happened," the statement read.
She said city officials have started an investigation into the use of force by police Tuesday night.
Protesters at San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza braced for a police raid early Thursday that never came. Still, police have warned the protesters that they could be arrested on a variety of sanitation or illegal camping violations.
Officials told protesters in Providence, R.I., that they were violating multiple city laws by camping overnight at a park.
Anti-Wall Street protesters camped out in downtown Los Angeles said they're planning to continue their demonstration indefinitely, although both they and the mayor's office were eyeing alternate sites.
Meanwhile, Olsen has been improving. Doctors transferred him from the emergency room to an intensive care unit and upgrading his condition to fair.
Dr. Alden Harken, chief surgeon at Alameda County Medical Center, said Olsen was still unable to speak but had improved dramatically since he was hospitalized unconscious with a fractured skull and bruised brain that caused seizures.
By Thursday afternoon, Harken said, Olsen was interacting with his parents, who flew in from Wisconsin in the morning, doing math equations and otherwise showing signs of "high-level cognitive functioning." The doctor said he may require surgery, but that's unlikely.

Occupy Oakland: Mayor Jean Quan in Big Trouble After Riot

Occupy Oakland explodes (photo by The Black Hour)! If there’s any gauge of the saying “The Whole World’s Watching!” It’s Google Trends, which, again, has Oakland, California among the top two for something negative: the last time was for the Oscar Grant Riots.
Only the Oakland Raiders have enjoyed trend ranks, and for good news related to the football business – trading for Carson Palmer.
Occupy Oakland is now forever marked by a decision that could cost Oakland Mayor Jean Quan her job. Calling for the use of 500 police officers in a pre-dawn raid Tuesday morning, followed by more tear gas bombs Tuesday night, has thousands of Oaklanders upset with Quan.
A mayoral recall effort led by long-time Oaklander Gene Hazzard, which already picked up steam before Occupy Oakland, gaining more than the requisite number of signatures to be “on,” is was talk around Downtown Oakland as the police action against Occupy Oakland resumed last night.
While Occupy Oakland could have made better efforts to negotiate with the Mayor, this is not only not Mayor Quan’s finest moment, by stark contrast to Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums during the Oscar Grant riots, she’s no where to be seen. Jean didn’t even show up to a press conference set last night; Oakland Councilmembers Larry Reid and Ignacio De La Fuente represented Oakland.
As I talked with Ignacio for a video coming later today, Occupy Oakland has placed liberals against liberals. Sanjiv Handa, also in a video coming later today, said it best: “This (the Occupy Oakland people) is Jean’s constituency: single mothers with kids, teachers, educators, all out there..”
And Jean’s arranged for them, veterans too, to be gassed and shot in the face with rubber bullets:
Handa reports that the Mayor and Councilmembers received “thousands of calls in protest of the police action.”
As Don Macleay (Oakland Mayor’s Race Green Party Candidate in 2010) wrote in a letter that deserves its’ own blog post:

I stuck my neck out in person, in public and on line telling the protestors to engage, to accept dialog, to back away from any confrontation and to carry ourselves with dignity out of respect for our fellow citizens and out of respect for the righteousness of our cause.
It seems that the same message was needed inside our city government this week. No wonder that they never returned calls. And in the end, the police wracked more violence in a couple hours, destroyed more property and hurt more people that Occupy Oakland did in two weeks. Keep in mind, there was no riot, no emergency, no move made by the protestors other than to refuse to leave. It was the city of Oakland and the police that initiated the violence and chose its time.
Many things could have been done instead, especially since there was no urgent problem.
For one they could have given our offer to act as a go between a try. No calls returned.
How was that any different from the folk at the General Assembly refusing to speak with the city?

All I can says is unless a better way is developed, and soon, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy Atlanta, and all the Occupies in America could result in the destruction of (or perhaps the transformation of) the liberal base in this country.
It’s hard to vote for politicians that gas and shoot your friends.
Stay tuned.

Pernicious Attempt To Brand Protest as Anti-Semitic

GOP Tries To Raise Campaign Bucks by Tarring Occupy Wall Street

Is the Jewish congressional representative from heavily Jewish Long Island, Steve Israel, “standing with those calling for the killing of Jews”? Does the Jewish representative from heavily Jewish Florida, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, “agree with various calls for Jews to be ‘run out of the country’ and to oppose and ‘destroy’ the State of Israel”?
Sean Spicer, who holds the title of communications director of the Republican National Committee, apparently thinks these are reasonable questions. Or perhaps he merely thinks that some Jews are sufficiently stupid to think that they might be. But most likely, he thinks that if he can tar the protesters at Occupy Wall Street with the taint of these anti-Semitic statements, and condemn certain Democrats as guilty by association, he can gin up contributions to the Republican Party as he simultaneously weakens Jews’ instinctive identification with the Democratic Party.
Spicer is joined in this effort by something called the Emergency Committee for Israel, a group co-founded by neoconservative William Kristol, conservative Christian agitator Gary Bauer and Rachel Abrams, wife of disgraced neoconservative politico Elliott Abrams (convicted of lying to Congress during the Reagan administration), daughter of neoconservative activist Midge Decter and stepdaughter of Decter’s husband, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz. They have produced and distributed a video that asks, “What is happening at the Occupy Wall Street protests?” only to cut to a gentleman who is holding a “Hitler’s Bankers” sign and can be seen screaming, “Jews control Wall Street.” This is followed by a shot of a nasty kid shouting at a Jewish man, “You’re a bum, Jew,” with another protester explaining that “the small ethnic Jewish population in this country, they have a firm grip on America’s media.
Interestingly, none of the above comments pertains to any Israeli emergencies, but let’s leave that aside for the moment. Clearly, conservatives both in and outside the Republican Party believe they see an opportunity to score political points with Jews by pretending that the Occupy Wall Street protests are shot through with anti-Semitism.
This is obviously false, and one suspects that the Jews are not so thick as to fail to notice it. When neoconservative (and former managing editor of the Forward) Ira Stoll took a stroll through the march after attending Occupy Simchat Torah services across the street with a yarmulke on, he was greeted by nothing but friendly responses. I enjoyed much the same experience after my family and I attended an extremely moving Occupy Kol Nidre service. In order to try to tar OWS as his comrades had, Stoll was forced to turn completely to the conditional tense, as in, “If the Occupy Wall Street movement does turn against the Jews…” it would resemble, in his opinion, America’s civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and perhaps even the Bolshevik Revolution. (I swear I am not making this up: “In the Soviet example, there were communists with Jewish backgrounds, but they eventually turned violently on the Jews in the Soviet Union,” Stoll writes on his blog, Future of Capitalism. “Here in New York, there are Jews both among the bankers and among the protesters against the bankers….”)
That the anti-Semitism charge against OWS is errant nonsense is evidenced by the fact that not even Abraham Foxman and his organization, the Anti-Defamation League, will sign on. Evidencing again the intellectual confusion that lies at the center of this misguided effort, Commentary’s Matthew Ackerman is worried that the movement is too Jewish. Rarely, he wrote, “has a movement so radical in its aims been tied so explicitly to a religious tradition….” And I suppose this, too, will somehow provide aid and comfort to the anti-Semites.
Conservatives, whether neo or otherwise, obviously believe they have cleverly seized a political opportunity with their neo-McCarthyite tactics, tactics that served them well when they sought to smear the opposition to George W. Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq with the insistence that its opponents were somehow responsible for the views of every nutty organization that joined its protest marches. Given OWS’s purposefully inchoate organizational structure — to say nothing of the heavy participation of proud and committed Jews — this latest effort takes on some of the absurdity of a Monty Python sketch. The fact that a few anti-Semites have congregated among the protesters is no more significant than the fact that they also tend to congregate in Times Square or Grand Central Station, often operating on orders from space aliens who send them messages through the fillings in their teeth. Should Jewish Democrats condemn them, as well? You can find anti-Semitism in a lot of places: on Fox News, in National Review, at Mel Gibson’s house. And conservatives seem to get on pretty well with those folk. The question to ask about anti-Semitism is not whether it exists, but whether its existence has any significant political or cultural implications.
Regarding OWS, much less the Democratic Party, the crazies with the silly signs are easily ignorable. Despite the worries of those like Stoll, this movement is not going to turn on Jews any more than it is going to storm the Tsar’s Winter Palace. But the recklessness of these conservative agitators to agitate against an obviously nonexistent threat can only backfire. It’s not that I worry that genuine anti-Semites will be let off the hook; I don’t think anti-Semitism has any significant following in the United States or enjoys any cache whatsoever, save in certain swamps where all forms of prejudice and xenophobia — like, for instance, Michele Bachmann/Rick Perry-style “birtherism” — also thrive. Rather the problem is that these Jews give gentiles the impression that everything has to be about them. The vast majority of Americans support the goals of OWS, according to all recent polling. The problems of “the 99% ”are clearly occupying the minds of millions of Americans, even if these people chose not to occupy Wall Street or their local bank plaza. If conservatives insist that these groups should be shunned because they can pick out a few possibly anti-Semitic crazies in the group, then wouldn’t it be fair for the rest of America to conclude that these people are willing to put their own narrow political agenda ahead of the good of the entire country?
And would they be entirely wrong?
Eric Alterman is a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and at the City of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. He also writes a column for The Nation.

Boehner: No More Defense Cuts

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top congressional Republicans, Democrats and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta are united in a single message to the special bipartisan committee looking for ways to cut the deficit: Leave military spending alone.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters Thursday that the Pentagon budget was cut more than enough in the debt accord this past summer by President Barack Obama and Republicans.
That deal calls for cuts of $350 billion in projected spending over 10 years. The Pentagon is planning on reductions of about $450 billion.
"I would argue that they've taken more than their fair share of the hits," Boehner said.
His comments echo the argument made by others lawmakers as well as Panetta, who in recent speeches and congressional testimony insisted that the Pentagon be spared further cuts.
Rising deficits and deep debt have forced the federal government to slash spending, even at the Pentagon.
The Department of Defense's budget has nearly doubled to $700 billion in the 10 years since the Sept. 11 attacks. Those numbers do not include the trillion-plus spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 12-member supercommittee has a mandate to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in overall spending cuts over 10 years. If it fails to do so by Nov. 23 or if Congress rejects its plan, then automatic, across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion kick in, with half coming from defense.
Panetta has called that the "doomsday mechanism" and lawmakers have warned of the dire consequences of such reductions that would mean about $1 trillion over 10 years.
In a speech Thursday, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said simply insisting on no more cuts is insufficient. He said lawmakers not only need to offer alternatives to the supercommittee, including raising revenue, but also be open to other options.
Otherwise, "defense is going to be crucified," he said.
Speaking to the American Enterprise Institute, Smith said, "If we don't step up and confront the problem with either revenue or spending outside the defense budget, give the supercommittee somewhere to go, give people who want to control the deficit, including our bond raters, somewhere to go, inevitably defense is going to be crushed."
© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Boehner: No More Defense Cuts
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young - Ohio (Studio Version)

Buffalo Springfield - For What Its Worth (good sound quality!)

Friday, October 28, 2011

Protestors Arrested at Yale Park, Central Ave

UNMPD, APD, and state police removed Occupy Albuquerque protesters after UNM refused to grant a new permit

State police arrested at least 40 Occupy Albuquerque protesters late Tuesday night after UNM administrators refused to renew the protesters’ permit to occupy Yale Park.
Protesters who wanted to risk arrest in an act of civil disobedience sat in a circle holding hands in the middle of Yale Park, while nearly 200 supporters stood around them and on the sidewalk across Central Avenue.
Protesters sang and chanted, “We are the 99 percent,” “This is what democracy looks like” and “Whose park? Our park.” UNM administrators told protester they must leave campus by 10 p.m. Tuesday. Police blocked traffic on Central from Yale Boulevard to Cornell Drive at 11:20 p.m. Those arrested included former Daily Lobo reporter and current Alibi reporter Andrew Beale, student Brittany Arneson and Henry Edwards. One protester resisted arrest.
Protester James Roach said he blames UNM President David Schmidly for the arrests.
“This is a complete infringement on our First Amendment, which is the first right our founding fathers gave us, so to me what’s happening right now is not necessarily the city, but president Schmidly,” he said.
Protesters who didn’t want to risk arrest acted as a “support group” to help and encourage those arrested, protester and support group member Sean Miyaki said.
“We’re kind of like backup, so they’re not going in alone,” he said. More than 20 police cars, prisoner transport vehicles and riot trucks parked behind Rasoi Indian Cuisine on Yale before descending on the protest.
At least 50 State Police, Albuquerque Police Department and UNM Police Department officers wielding zip-cuffs and riot gear formed a police line to force protesters onto the sidewalk.
State officer R. Vigil told protesters he’s “just like you” and he hoped they would leave peacefully.
“We don’t want to be out here,” he said. “A lot of us sympathize with them. We’re just doing our jobs.”
Protesters in the arrest group were arrested without resistance.
Officers touched each protester’s back, on at a time, and the
protester stood to be led away in zip cuffs. The last member of the 22 people voluntarily arrested, Carolyn Hues, an elderly woman, also left without resistance.
Protesters asked police to “join us in peace” and one protester thanked the police force for protecting the state’s residents.
At 12:30 UNMPD and state police asked the remaining protesters to leave Yale Park, which the protesters did without issue.
From there the group sprawled across westbound Central Avenue.
Protester Howard Lackey urged protesters, via a megaphone, to remain peaceful.
“Let’s keep this movement going,” he said. “Let’s keep the streets moving. It’s not our job to block them.”
APD drove through the street occasionally, asking all protesters on the street to move to the sidewalk or the median.
The situation escalated when protester Stephen Williams sat in the streets., and then was drug off by police. He escaped from the officers, and attempted to run away, but he was quickly tackled, maced and zip cuffed.
At the same time, a crowd surrounded him as he was being arrested, and the police responded by threatening to mace and or taser anyone who didn’t move back immediately.
From this point on, the protest calmed down.
At 1:23 a.m. fireworks started going off in the neighborhood near University.
UNM representatives could not be reached for comment late Tuesday night.