I’m not watching another GOP Debate

---

Especially not one that will star Newt Gingrinch. If you held a gun to my head and told me to choose Newt or Obama, I’d tell you to pull the trigger.

You can watch the debate if you want. This is an open thread.

---

---

Occupy Long March

---

Washington Post:

The protesters embarked on the 231-mile-trek with a $3,000 check from Occupy Wall Street. But the marchers soon found they didn’t need the money, as they received donations of food and cash, cigarettes and deodorant from local residents and passersby. Occupy movements also sprang up or grew larger in their wake in places such as New Brunswick and Trenton, N.J.

While some of the original 21 marchers dropped out because of missing toenails, shin splints or fevers, new marchers have since joined, so that more than twice as many protesters will arrive in Washington Tuesday.

On Wednesday, the Occupiers intend to hold a “day of action,” to shut down part of the city in protest of the failure by 12 lawmakers to reach a deal that would ease the tax burden on the “99 percent.”

---

How many dropped out, how many joined, and where did they join?

But wait! There’s more!

Oops..wrong time to Occupy the super committee

A group of Occupy Wall Street protesters have spent the last two weeks marching 230 miles from New York City to the nation’s capitol. A blast “action alert” emailed this morning describes their plans upon arrival in Washington, DC:

Together we will march to McPherson Square where they will hold a press conference at noon, followed by a General Assembly afterwards to discuss the planned actions. Shortly after, they will march to the Capitol to bring the message of the 99% directly to the Super Committee.

One small problem — the “super committee” has already declared failure and gone home. And the House and Senate adjourned last Friday.

---

For $3000 they could have chartered a bus, rode in comfort, and arrived in time to harass mic check the super committee.

All is not lost. They can spend Thanksgiving shining the batsignal on the Washington Monument. That’ll show Congress!

---

---

Missing person UPDATED – Rezko gets 10 1/2 years

---

Read this:

Ex-Blagojevich fundraiser Rezko to be sentenced, after 2008 trial exposed pay-to-play culture

More than three years after businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko was convicted of corruption in a trial that laid bare Illinois’ pay-to-play political culture and presaged notorious cases that battered the state’s reputation, a judge finally will mete out his punishment.

Rezko, 56, a former top fundraiser to disgraced ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, is to be sentenced in federal court Tuesday on his 2008 conviction for fraud, money laundering and plotting to squeeze $7 million in kickbacks from firms that wanted to do business with the state during Blagojevich’s tenure.

U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve must decide whether Rezko — whose sentencing was delayed after he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors investigating Blagojevich and others — has served enough time, as his attorneys have argued. They say he should be set free because he’s already served more time than others convicted as part of the investigation.

Prosecutors have asked for a sentence of 11 to 15 years, saying Rezko’s cooperation was too little, came too late and did not yield any useful information.

---

Notice a name missing from that piece?

To be fair it does show up farther down in the article:

Elected officials generally are considered most at fault in any corruption scheme, and Blagojevich is scheduled to be sentenced by another judge Dec. 6 on a host of corruption convictions that include trying to sell or trade an appointment to President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat.

---

That’s it. From the entire article you would think that is the only connection between Barack Obama and Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko.

Nothing about the fact that Obama’s old law firm represented Rezko. Nothing about the fact that some of Obama’s constituents were freezing in Rezko’s unheated tenement buildings. Nothing about how Rezko helped raise money for Obama’s campaigns.

Not a word about how Rezko helped Obama buy a house.

I hope the judge maxes him out. Maybe that will stimulate his memory.

UPDATE:

I must have missed this the first time I read it:

Rezko also raised money for Obama during his campaigns for Illinois senator, though not for Obama’s presidential campaign. Obama has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case, but his relationship with Rezko became an issue during the 2008 election.

---

I don’t know how I missed it, I was specifically looking for it. It’s still an understatement.

---

---

UPDATE II:

---

---

UPDATE III:

Tony Rezko sentenced to 10-1/2 years in kickback scheme

A federal judge sentenced Tony Rezko to 10 1/2 years in prison Tuesday, describing his actions under Rod Blagojevich’s tenure as “selfish and corrupt.”

Rezko, 56, has already served about 44 months. His daughter burst into tears at hearing the sentence.

U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve said she found it offensive that Rezko put at risk the Teachers’ Retirement System by scheming for kickbacks with a board member in 2004.

“You put their retirements at risk for your own greed and your own thirst for power,” St. Eve said.

---

They should make him serve the time in one of his old slum tenements.

---

Killing the Golden Goose

---

Occupy Oakland Calls for TOTAL WEST COAST PORT SHUTDOWN ON 12/12

Proposal for a Coordinated West Coast Port Shutdown, Passed With Unanimous Consensus by vote of the Occupy Oakland General Assembly 11/18/2012:

In response to coordinated attacks on the occupations and attacks on workers across the nation:

Occupy Oakland calls for the blockade and disruption of the economic apparatus of the 1% with a coordinated shutdown of ports on the entire West Coast on December 12th. The 1% has disrupted the lives of longshoremen and port truckers and the workers who create their wealth, just as coordinated nationwide police attacks have turned our cities into battlegrounds in an effort to disrupt our Occupy movement.

We call on each West Coast occupation to organize a mass mobilization to shut down its local port. Our eyes are on the continued union-busting and attacks on organized labor, in particular the rupture of Longshoremen jurisdiction in Longview Washington by the EGT. Already, Occupy Los Angeles has passed a resolution to carry out a port action on the Port Of Los Angeles on December 12th, to shut down SSA terminals, which are owned by Goldman Sachs.

Occupy Oakland expands this call to the entire West Coast, and calls for continuing solidarity with the Longshoremen in Longview Washington in their ongoing struggle against the EGT. The EGT is an international grain exporter led by Bunge LTD, a company constituted of 1% bankers whose practices have ruined the lives of the working class all over the world, from Argentina to the West Coast of the US. During the November 2nd General Strike, tens of thousands shutdown the Port Of Oakland as a warning shot to EGT to stop its attacks on Longview. Since the EGT has disregarded this message, and continues to attack the Longshoremen at Longview, we will now shut down ports along the entire West Coast.

---

Regarding Longview, EGT hired workers from a different union, enraging the longshoremen so much that a federal judge issued a restraining order:

A federal judge ordered union protesters to stop using illegal tactics Thursday as they battle for the right to work at a new grain terminal in Washington state.

U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton issued a preliminary injunction to restrict union activity, saying there was no defense for the aggressive tactics used in recent days. Protesters twice blocked the pathway of a train carrying grain to the terminal at the Port of Longview on Wednesday, and early Thursday morning hundreds of them stormed the facility, overwhelmed guards, dumped grain and broke windows, police said.

[...]

Six guards were trapped for a couple of hours after at least 500 Longshoremen broke down gates about 4:30 a.m. and smashed windows in the guard shack, Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha said. He initially referred to the guards as “hostages,” but later retracted that after the guards clarified no one had threatened them.

[...]

Most of the protesters returned to their union hall after cutting train brake lines and spilling grain from a car at the EGT terminal, Duscha said. They also pushed a private security vehicle into a ditch.

---

I understand the Longshoremen’s point of view, but which group of unionized workers are we supposed to support here? As for EGT and Bunge LTD., they export American grain – one of the few things we still sell to other countries.

Now let’s be clear here – this proposed shut-down is not a union strike. This is a group of outsiders trying to close all the ports on the west coast. If successful they will be interfering with the livelihoods of thousands of longshoremen, truck drivers, farmers, warehouse workers, railroad employees and members of the merchant marine.

Now some would argue that these ports are part of a capitalist system that exploits workers. But who would those workers be working for if it wasn’t for the capitalists? Do scab workers feel exploited or lucky to have jobs?

Now here is where we find a dichotomy in progressive thinking:

1. We should support unions because they enable workers to collectively bargain for maximum wages and working conditions.

2. We should support illegal immigration because they take low-paid jobs nobody else wants.

---

If we really want to help American workers, shouldn’t we oppose illegal immigration? Fewer workers would mean higher wages under the Law of Supply and Demand. Without illegal workers, how many of those jobs would remain low-paid? OTOH, how many of those jobs would remain?

BTW – Why don’t we just raise the minimum wage to $50 hour? Because if we raise wages so high it puts the capitalists out of business, nobody will have jobs.

---

A man and his wife owned a very special goose. Every day the goose would lay a golden egg, which made the couple very rich.

“Just think,” said the man’s wife, “If we could have all the golden eggs that are inside the goose, we could be richer much faster.”

“You’re right,” said her husband, “We wouldn’t have to wait for the goose to lay her egg every day.”

So, the couple killed the goose and cut her open, only to find that she was just like every other goose. She had no golden eggs inside of her at all, and they had no more golden eggs.

Palinews

---

Sarah Palin Got Scolded by Roger Ailes for Not Announcing Her Non-Candidacy on Fox News

Sarah Palin’s announcement that she wouldn’t run for president disappointed her legions of admirers — but it infuriated Roger Ailes. The Fox News chief wasn’t angry about the decision itself. Rather, he was livid that Palin made the October 5 announcement on Mark Levin’s conservative talk-radio program, robbing Fox News of an exclusive and a possible ratings bonanza. Fox was relegated to getting a follow-up interview with Palin on Greta Van Susteren’s 10 p.m. show, after the news of Palin’s decision had been drowned out by Steve Jobs’s death. Ailes was so mad, he considered pulling her off the air entirely until her $1 million annual contract expires in 2013.

After the announcement, he called Fox’s executive vice-president Bill Shine into a meeting. Shine is the network’s principal point of contact with Palin. Ailes told him she had made a big mistake. “I paid her for two years to make this announcement on my network,” Ailes pointedly told Shine. Sources described the episode on condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the relationships.

Palin is said to have made her announcement on Levin’s show because she’s been upset that Fox News has given a platform to Karl Rove, one of her principal critics. “She isn’t happy with Karl,” one Palin adviser told me. “From day one, he hasn’t been very nice.” Levin had become Palin’s biggest booster in the conservative commentariat, and Palin is known for rewarding loyalists, and punishing her detractors.

---

If that’s what he was paying her for he should have put it in the contract.

---

---

48 years ago

---

48 years ago today in Dallas John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered. If you believe the official version, JFK was shot by a lone gunman with communist leanings. If you believe Frank Rich then he was killed by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

What Killed JFK

The hate that ended his presidency is eerily familiar.

[...]

In the decades to come, America would be riveted by the Warren Commission report, whose finding that Oswald was the lone assassin has been challenged by all manner of conspiracy theorists, amateur historians, ideologues, nuts, novelists, and provocateurs. In 11/22/63, Stephen King writes that he consulted much of the assassination literature, “reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am” before putting the probability that Oswald acted alone “at ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine.” His fictional alter ego, the schoolteacher Jake Epping, is, mercifully, not on an Oliver Stone crusade to subvert that math.

But another controversy from the assassination—one that has never received remotely the attention generated by the endless “grassy knoll” and “second gunmen” debates—is forcefully revived by King: the role played in Oswald’s psyche by the torrid atmosphere of political rage in Dallas, where both Lady Bird Johnson and Adlai Stevenson had been spat upon by mobs of demonstrators in notorious incidents before Kennedy’s fateful 1963 trip. As the time-traveling Epping gets settled in that past, he describes an inferno of seething citizens, anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish storefronts, and angry billboards demanding the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and equating racial integration with communism. That last one, King’s protagonist observes, “had been paid for by something called The Tea Party Society.”

[...]

Immediately after the assassination and ever since, the right has tried to deflect any connection between its fevered Kennedy hatred and Oswald’s addled psyche with the fact that the assassin had briefly defected to the Soviet Union. But at the time even some Texans weren’t buying that defense. An editorial in the Dallas Times Herald chastised its own city for supplying “the seeds of hate” and “the atmosphere for tragedy.” The editor of the Austin American wrote that “hatred and fanaticism, the flabby spirit of complacency that has permitted the preachers of fanatical hatred to appear respectable, and the self-righteousness that labels all who disagree with us as traitors or dolts, provided the way for the vile deed that snuffed out John Kennedy’s life.”

---

I don’t know what really happened in Dallas that fateful day. I was three years old and lived a long way away. But if Oswald acted alone then he was a member of the fringe left, not the fringe right.

In order to place him on the right you have to believe that Oswald was not what he seemed but was really some kind of undercover agent working to infiltrate the left. But if you believe that then he was part of a conspiracy that was bigger than Dallas.

Theories like that are fun to discuss over beer and bong hits, but they aren’t proof of anything.

Frank Rich is correct that for nearly half a century the right has denied responsibility for the assassination of JFK. But for just as long some people on the left have been trying to pin it on them the same way some lefties spent the past year insisting that Sarah Palin shot Gabby Giffords.

---

---