November 9, 2011 archive

Occupy Wall St. Livestream: Day 54

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OccupyWallStreet

The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza 😉

“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author

Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly  with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.

NYC General Assembly #OccupyWallStreet

David Crosby and Graham Nash perform live on ‘Countdown,’ discuss the movement

Musicians David Crosby and Graham Nash discuss their impressions of the Occupy Wall Street movement with Keith. The duo also performs an original song a cappella.

Occupy Wall Street Gets Its Generators Back

Occupy Wall Street got its confiscated generators back on Tuesday after its legal team pressed the Fire Department of New York to release them.

The machines were picked up from the New York City Fire Academy at Randall’s Island by the Wikileaks truck, which has been stationed next to Zuccotti Park since the protest’s inception. The vehicle with the generator on board made its way back to Zuccotti Park hours before a planned concert by Graham Nash and David Crosby.

Yetta Kurland, a lawyer representing the protesters, said the generators did not violate any FDNY code.

NYC protesters erect military tents for winter

NEW YORK-The Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York City are preparing for the possibility of a punishing winter by erecting tents designed to withstand frigid temperatures.

Some of the military grade tents are as big as tiny cottages. They began popping up Monday, with the first planned for medics and another designated as a safe space for women.

‘Occupy’ takes over the airwaves

Salon.com’s Justin Eliot and film maker David Savage share their thoughts

on a new 30 second Occupy Wall Street commercial, which began airing Saturday on several major networks describing what the movement desires to accomplish.

Muffingate

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Muffingate

The Department of Justice releases a full-color, 151-page cost report proving no government money was wasted on muffins.

Ohio Voters Reject Senate Bill 5, Obamacare; Mississippi Defeats Anti-Abortion Amendment

Ohio voters last night voted overwhelmingly against both Republican and Democrat corporate-favoring policies in a referendum.  Senate Bill 5, passed by the Republican-dominated legislature and signed into law by Republican governor John Kasich, was shot down by sixty-one percent, too large a margin for the GOP to rig the vote count in its favor.

By a reportedly larger margin than Issue 2, Obamacare, the law passed in spring of 2010 in a huge giveaway to the health insurance industry, was voted down at sixty-six percent of the vote, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  However, the constitutional amendment as written would make it extremely difficult to pass meaningful regulations on insurance companies, and pretty much rules out all hope of single-payer health insurance in the Buckeye State.

In Mississippi, voters shot down the anti-abortion amendment proposed by right-wing extremists.  The bid to declare life as beginning at conception was defeated 58-42%.

The measure would have bestowed legal rights on fertilized eggs and cut off access to abortion by equating it with murder, making no exception for rape, incest or when a woman’s life is in danger. Medical groups warned it might have criminalized contraception and miscarriages while limiting access to treatments such as in-vitro fertilization.

The voters of Mississippi are smarter than the far right gives them credit for.  Cheers to them!

What, however, does the defeat of Issue 2 and the passage of Issue 3 in Ohio mean?  It is incredibly easy for Democrats and Republicans, and their spinmeisters in the corporate-owned media, to speculate as to what it means, and many are doing just that.  But what it all boils down to is that voters are fed up with far right policies that benefit no one but large business interests.  In Massachusetts, for example, according to Physicians for a National Health Program, Romneycare – the insurance giveaway on which Obamacare was modeled – nearly 400,000 people still find health insurance unaffordable, and those people are predominantly the working poor.  Given this realization, it is no wonder voters would rather opt out.

On a broader scale, Americans are increasingly hostile to far right policies, be they industry bailouts, invasive laws designed to take away women’s reproductive rights, or attempts to restrict voting rights, We the People are starting to fight back against the wave of fascist power grabs.  Only time, though, will tell if it’s not too little, too late.

Cross-posted from Progressive Independence.

Cartnoon

Terrier Stricken

On This Day In History November 9

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 9 is the 313th day of the year (314th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 52 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1872, fire rips through Boston. The Great Boston Fire was Boston’s largest urban fire and still one of the most costly fire-related property losses in American history. The conflagration began at 7:20 p.m. on November 9, 1872, in the basement of a commercial warehouse at 83-87 Summer Street in Boston, Massachusetts. The fire was finally contained twelve hours later, after it had consumed about 65 acres of Boston’s downtown, 776 buildings, and much of the financial district and caused $73.5 million in damage. At least twenty people are known to have died in the fire.

In the aftermath, the city established an entirely new system of firefighting and prevention. The fire also led to the creation of Boston’s financial district.

The fire began in the basement of a warehouse at the corner of Kingston and Summer streets. At the time, this area of the city contained a mix of residences and light industry. Its buildings and most area roofs were made mainly of wood, allowing the blaze to spread quickly as the wind blew red hot embers from rooftop to rooftop. In addition, as Boston streets were narrow, large flames from one structure could literally leap across them to nearby buildings.

Firefighting units from Maine to New Haven, Connecticut, arrived to help, but efforts to fight the fire were plagued by difficulties. There was not enough water on hand to get the fire under control; the hydrant system did not work well because much of the equipment was not standardized; and even when firefighters got their hands on an adequate supply of water, the height of the buildings and the narrowness of the streets made it difficult to direct the water at the blaze from the optimum angle. Because a local equine epidemic had struck the city fire department’s horses, it was difficult to get the fire engines to the correct locations at the right times. In addition, some of the efforts were counter-productive. Explosions were used to attempt fire breaks, but this high-risk strategy was not executed with enough precision and served only to further spread the fire.

The fire was finally stopped at the doors of Fanueil Hall the following morning, but it had already destroyed much of the downtown area. Boston’s officials realized that their fire-prevention efforts had been ineffective and, in the aftermath of the disaster, began to revise and strengthen all of the city’s fire laws and regulations. An inspection system was instituted and the local fire departments began to coordinate their efforts.

Rearranging the deck chairs

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Key Obama Aide Relinquishes Some Duties

By CAROL E. LEE, The Wall Street Journal

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

On Monday, Mr. Daley turned over day-to-day management of the West Wing to Pete Rouse, a veteran aide to President Obama, according to several people familiar with the matter. It is unusual for a White House chief of staff to relinquish part of the job.

A senior White House official who attended Monday’s staff meeting where Mr. Daley made the announcement said that his new role has not yet been fully defined. But in recent weeks, Mr. Daley has focused more on managing relations with influential outsiders.



A former executive at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and a Commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, Mr. Daley was widely hailed as a breath of fresh air for a White House seeking to cut deals with emboldened Republicans and repair the administration’s soured relations with business.

Mr. Daley made strides in his outreach to business, including leading a White House effort to ease government regulations and shepherding three free-trade deals through a divided Congress. But the relationship has fallen short of expectations. White House officials acknowledge even an emissary of Mr. Daley’s caliber could go only so far. Mr. Obama’s recent push to boost taxes on wealthy Americans has complicated that effort.

On the congressional front, one big problem has been a tense relationship between Mr. Daley and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), which soured during the budget negotiations this year, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Daley angered Democrats by trying to cut side budget deals with Republicans. He stoked the tension recently by telling a columnist for the website Politico that “both Democrats and Republicans” have made it difficult for Mr. Obama to govern.

Obama’s Chief of Staff Steps Down Amid Behind-the-Scenes Shitstorm

By Seth Abramovitch, Gawker

Nov 8, 2011 2:49 AM

The “recalibration of Mr. Daley’s portfolio” (the WSJ euphemisms are like poetry!) is designed to “smooth any kinks in the president’s team as it braces for the overlapping demands of governing while campaigning for re-election.”

Example of a “kink”: Remember when Obama announced he’d be unveiling his big jobs plan during a GOP presidential debate, and everyone was thrilled that he was finally showing a spine? And then John Boehner poked his head out of his irradiating clamshell to say, “No fucking way?” And then the president backed down and looked like a total wuss again? Well, Obama read the riot act to his staff, demanding to know how they could have failed to see that conflict coming. All bucks stopped at Daley’s desk – he was the one who said everyone had signed off on that first date.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

No one can give you better advice than yourself.

–Marcus Tullius Cicero



Exposed 3

Late Night Karaoke