Knee deep on a Friday night open thread

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I’m watch Lake Placid. Betty White Rules!

What are you up to this evening?

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OWS has more Republicans than Blacks

(Click to enlarge)

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2.4% vs. 1.6%:

The infographic in question depicts the results of an internal online survey conducted by Occupy Wall Street supporters at occupywallst.org.

The data, compiled by advertising analyst Harrison Schultz and Ford Foundation sociologist Dr. Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán, were intended to promote the idea, as Dr. Cordero-Guzmán put it, that “the 99% movement comes from and looks like the 99%.”

Some activists were outraged, however, that the survey results and the infographic show Occupy Wall Street to be 81.2 percent white, and only 1.6 percent black.

By comparison, the U.S. population is 77.1 percent white and 12.9 percent black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau–making the Occupy Wall Street movement disproportionately white.

The infographic, depicted below, caused instant controversy when it was shared among Occupy Wall Street organizers. One activist reacted: “81% white protestors–and you actually made a flyer proudly advertising this lie, in a multicultural city like NYC? You must be crazy and blind.”

She later accused Schultz of “insidious racism” and “white supremacy,” and demanded “serious mediation” from organizers on the Safer Spaces working group, the internal security apparatus of Occupy Wall Street.

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Remember those all-white Tea Partiers?

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Cancel Christmas

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Stalin Claus is coming to town.

(h/t Verum Serum)

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The Obama-Corzine connection

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Hot Air:

In other words, Corzine looks an awful lot like the so-called 1% that the Occupy Movement despises.  Democrats, especially Barack Obama, had hoped to ride that class-warfare populism to electoral victory in 2012, or at least ride it long enough to avoid electoral disaster.  However, as the Washington Post reported earlier this week, they’re going to have to ride a very long way to distance themselves from MF Global, and especially Jon Corzine himself (via Newsalert):

The bankrupt financial company MF Global, now under federal investigation for possibly misusing clients’ money, is one of the top sources of contributions for President Obama’s reelection, complicating the campaign’s effort to turn public anger at Wall Street into a political advantage.

Employees of the company have given $108,650 to Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to federal records. MF Global’s chairman and chief executive, former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, has raised at least $500,000 for the campaign and the DNC as a “bundler,” or volunteer fundraiser.

Rumors at one point had Corzine under consideration as a potential member of Obama’s administration, especially after the midterm debacle:

MF Global recently made a bond sale with an unusual clause, saying the interest rate on the bonds would rise 1 percent if Corzine ended up being appointed to a post in the Obama administration. There has been speculation that he could be in line for Treasury secretary if the president is reelected.

If MF Global raided customer accounts to float its own trades, that will likely result in a very public, and very messy, fraud trial for company executives — including Corzine.  That will prove very, very embarrassing for Obama himself, who personally campaigned on Corzine’s behalf in 2009 when the then-governor tried fending off a challenge from Chris Christie.  Seth Mandel reminds us at Commentary how much Obama personally vouched for Corzine’s integrity:

Like many of us in public life today, Jon is a leader who’s been called to govern in some extraordinary times. He’s been tested by the worst recession in half a century — a recession that was caused by years of recklessness and irresponsibility and a do-nothing attitude. It was caused by the same small thinking that has plagued our politics for decades — the kind of thinking that says we can afford to just tinker around with our problems, we can put off the tough decisions, defer the big challenges. We can just tell people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

Well that’s not the kind of leader that Jon Corzine is.

Recklessness?  Irresponsibility?  Gee, that sounds like the best-possible case for MF Global.

And let’s not forget that Obama recruited Corzine as his unofficial liaison to Wall Street donors:

President Obama is desperately putting his Wall Street stock in an unlikely old buddy.

The beleaguered president has recruited former Goldman Sachs head honcho Jon Corzine to shore up re-election funds from the banking industry, which is furious over Obama’s financial regulations.

Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey who was blasted out of office by Republican Chris Christie in 2009, has attended secret meetings with the president and has been working on Obama’s 2012 campaign for months, The Post has learned.

The Democrat, who now leads Manhattan-based brokerage MF Global, has been tasked with scraping up the very little banking-industry support Obama can still get.

If the money doesn’t turn up, Corzine could sink Obama’s entire class-warfare strategy.  He’s going to have to explain how he endorsed someone who could become nearly as toxic as Charles Keating or even Bernie Madoff, and most of that explaining will have to go to the very Occupiers he has encouraged for most of the last few weeks.

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As OWS forms circle-jerks drum circles Obama has been double-crossing criss-crossing the nation, talking like a born-again populist while raking in big money from the 1%ers.

Imagine if OWS had spent the past two months trying to find and support a primary challenger to Obama, or “occupying” 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the goal of convincing Obama to not run for reelection.

Instead of accomplishing something the left has been occupied with chasing their tails.

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Palin: OWS has drawn the wrong conclusions

Sarah Palin weighs in on Occupy protesters, posted with vodpod

 

Sarah Palin at the Florida GOP fundraiser dinner had this to say about Occupy Wall Street:

Speaking before a crowd at the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) Victory Dinner at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort in Florida, Gov. Palin said she wanted a federal government that understood the difference between empowerment and entitlement.

“To see this struggle in action, look no further than the Occupy Wall Street movement,” she said. “When it first kind of got off the ground… I looked at it as thinking, well these folks, they feel legitimate indignation about the Wall Street bailouts – financial institutions behaving recklessly, and then we get stuck with the bill… many of us still quite ticked off about it all, because we don’t have assurances that those who caused the financial collapse in the first place… are being held accountable and that it won’t happen again.”

She said though the movement may have begun in earnest, positions have evolved, and its organizers have drawn the wrong conclusions.  Of the protesters, she said,  “They say, ‘Wall Street ‘fat cats’ got a bailout, so now I want one too,’ and the correct answer is, ‘No one is entitled to a bailout.’”

Palin spoke to Republicans gathered for the state party fundraiser on Thursday and spent much of her time talking about the protesters.

“The American dream, our foundation, is about work ethic and empowerment, not entitlement,” she said.  ” In fact, the nation’s dividing line today is how you answer this question: Are you entitled to other people’s money? The Wall Street crony capitalists, the Obama Administration, the leftist politicos, big union bosses and the occupiers, they all say, ‘Yes!’ The rest of America says, ‘No!’”

From the AP:

“Barack Obama is owned by Wall Street. The fat cats, as he calls them, they’re his friends. They’re his pals. That’s where he gets his campaign donations. And he’s very generous about giving these cats their cat nip — bigger returns on their investments in bailouts…My question to the Occupy Wall street crowd is, “Where have you been the last three years?” I suggest if they want to vent and want to change the situation, then they vent in the right direction. They need to hop on a bus and travel south — 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where there’s plenty of space to occupy.
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More of the speech:

C4P has more coverage here.

Oh no he didn’t! (again)

Hot Air:

Nicolas Sarkozy isn’t quite ready to pose in this picture, and Angela Merkel and the president of the UAE are not looking at the camera, but the rest of the leaders are waiting patiently for the photographer — including the unfortunate Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, who now knows how the president of Mongolia felt last September.

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This time it was the G-20. Here is a reminder of previous group photos:

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No wonder he won’t release his school records. He probably waved in all his class photos too.

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The media hath spoken

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I said the other day that I’m not going to say anything more on the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain until the case develops further and I’m sticking by that. But I found this post by Dana Milbank to be revealing:

The Herman Cain crack-up

The Hermanator is now the hunted.

Herman Cain, the long-shot Republican presidential candidate turned frontrunner, has done just about everything wrong since news broke Sunday night that his former employer had paid two women to settle sexual harassment complaints against him.

[...]

His campaign’s fisticuffs with Washington journalists probably won’t do Cain any harm among his supporters in Iowa; in fact, it will probably help. But Cain’s loss of control is a reminder of why he’s never going to be president, no matter how high he rises in GOP primary polls.

His presidential bid was meant to be a lark, likely a gambit to increase speaking fees and book sales, perhaps to gain him a gig on cable news. At first, he was in on the joke, gaming the primary process and making up policies as he went along. He drank alcohol during public appearances, even in the morning. He allowed the release of a bizarre ad showing his chief of staff blowing smoke. He greeted female interviewers as “sweetheart” and occasionally gave them hugs. His staff celebrated his quirks in a don’t-feed-the-animals memo to those aides traveling in a car with the candidate: “Do not speak to him unless you are spoken to.”

It was, at its very core, a preposterous premise: That a man who, as the former head of a big Washington trade group, was at the very heart of this town’s lobbying culture, would run a campaign as the ultimate political outsider. He would claim that running for president “didn’t start as a consideration until after President Obama took office” – even though Cain ran for president once before, in 2000.

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I would trust Bernie Madoff and Joe Isuzu before I would believe anything Dana Milbank has to say. But he’s a Village Idiot, which means he is wired into the groupthink of the Beltway media and the Washington establishment.

The media hath spoken:

But Cain’s loss of control is a reminder of why he’s never going to be president, no matter how high he rises in GOP primary polls.

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This is not a sentence of death for the Cain campaign, but it’s not a good sign. Every four years the media decides which candidates are “serious” and which are “unserious.”

Serious candidates are fluffed and covered for, unserious candidates are ignored or if need be swarmed upon and taken down by the savage chihuahuas of the media. But these efforts don’t always work.

The media did a pretty good job fluffing Obama, but they failed with Jon Huntsman and Fred Thompson. They kept Dennis Kucinich out of the 2008 race but failed to take down Sarah Palin.

Regardless of how the sexual harassment story plays out, the media hath decreed that Herman Cain is an unserious candidate. Sequere pecuniam

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