7thriv

Not to be outdone, local lefties in San Francisco have commenced their own "Occupy SF" movement. After a dramatic 800-man march, the .0000099%-ers set up camp outside the local Federal Reserve bank. After a couple of hours, the SFPD ordered them to take off. Vigorous "protest" commenced:   

San Francisco police and Public Works crews dismantled a Financial District encampment early today that had been occupied by activists protesting economic inequality.

About 80 officers wearing riot helmets confronted some 200 campers and their supporters at about 12:45 a.m. at the Occupy SF camp in front of the Federal Reserve Bank's building at 101 Market St. near Main Street. The officers guarded city workers who removed tents, sleeping bags and other belongings.

One protester was arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer.

The camp was taken down hours after several hundred people marched through the Financial District in an Occupy SF-organized protest. The group formed in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been staging protests in New York over the past month over what it calls corporate greed and the excessive concentration of wealth and power among 1 percent of the nation's population.

Here's a dramatic recounting of the events on Market Street:  

At around 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, police handed a notice to Occupy SF protesters that although the city and Police Department "celebrate and protect" free speech and the right to assemble, their encampment violated several city laws. They included a ban on having an open flame on a street or sidewalk, creating a public nuisance, disorderly conduct in lodging and serving food without a permit.

Protesters began taking down tents and removing belongings, activists said today, but also posted the police notice online. More than 100 supporters subsequently arrived at the encampment, some of whom sat in a meditation circle.

At 12:45 a.m., Department of Public Works employees arrived in trucks and began removing campers' possessions as police stood guard.

"They took everything," said one protester, who asked to be identified only as Leslie M. "They said if we showed an effort that we were removing our stuff and taking down our tents, it would be OK."

About 50 protesters stood in front of one truck to try to prevent it from leaving, activists said. The trucks took an alternate route and drove away via Main Street.

Leslie said she had seen officers scuffle with some protesters and that two men had been led away in handcuffs. Police spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield, however, said that only one protester had been arrested, for allegedly assaulting an officer. He did not have the man's name.

Give these clowns credit for agit-prop and media savvy. They are "occupying" San Francisco, even though their numbers are so small you wouldn't know an occupation was underway unless they were standing right in front of you. The Tea Parties had greater numbers, and were a truly spontaneous uprising, but they were also polite, well behaved, and respectful (not to mention focused in their message). These guys are literally professional protesters. A couple weeks ago they were disrupting service on BART. They represent nobody, yet they know their confrontational behavior will draw cameras and headlines in a way that Tea Parties can only envy. Not fair, but that's the way of the world. 


That doesn't mean the "Occupy" people will prevail. But, they are going to get louder, shriller, and smellier, and the media lens will become wider. The goal is chaos and destruction; it's to create an aura of instability that will frighten low-information types who just want to see bad news banished from their TV. Conservatives have to be prepared to fight these guys; not in the streets, but at the ballot box, at the dinner table, and in the media. Otherwise, they'll become the only "movement" in town. 

Chris Christie has decided that "now is not the time" to run for President. Sarah Palin has apparently made a similar decision. But, never mind. Have you seen what Herman Cain has been saying to the Occupy Wall Street folks? 

HH: All right, now Mr. Cain, I would like you to begin by addressing directly the Occupy Wall Street crowd. What do you want to say to them? If we play them a tape of Herman Cain over a loudspeaker down on Wall Street, what do you want this crowd to hear?

HC: I would want this crowd to hear first, your success is not dependent upon wishing that someone else is not successful. Blaming Wall Street and blaming big banks, and blaming those that have succeeded in America under our free market system is never going to make you happy, and it’s never going to make you rich. Secondly, if you really want to do something to create jobs in this country, why don’t you go and picket the White House. That’s why where we have failed economic policies. That’s where we have policies that have kept unemployment up over 9%. You’re picketing the wrong source. It’s not those that have produced in this country. It’s the failed policies of this administration. If you look in the mirror, you will realize that the only person that you can blame for what you don’t have is the person you’re looking at in the mirror.

That there is the voice of the Daddy Party. It is also the sound of the first GOP presidential candidate who has directly addressed the leftists who have done, and are doing, so much damage to this country, whether while strolling through the corridors of power, or yelling incoherently at the latest of their endless mob actions. Hope Cain survives his "vetting" because right now he's saying the same things I'm saying when I yell at the TV.

Dr. Housing Bubble looks at an underrated aspect of California's depressed housing market: the seller who is reluctant to plumb the depths of the housing market because he wants so badly to believe he can hold on to his inflated valuations.

One aspect that is largely left out of the California housing market dialogue is the reluctant and often delusional home seller.  The conversation has been dominated by distressed home sales because really this is where the action has occurred.  You also need to realize that most foreclosures, not all of course, but the vast majority of distressed sales occur because people simply do not have the economic means to continue supporting their home payment.  The shadow inventory is a very real indication of this troubling reality.  Yet you also have a cohort of home sellers that are enamored by the peak prices of 2005 and 2006 and somehow want to recapture that incredibly inflated sales price.  Many of these sellers are part of the cohort that bought pre-2000 and still actually carry some equity in their property even after the massive California correction.

This has some personal relevance over here at Free Will headquarters as we have begun to seriously look into buying a home (with the idea of making a buy within the next 2 years). Here in the Peninsula/Silicon Valley area, you can find plenty of homes selling for around $300,000 - so long as you don't mind living in East Palo Alto. You can also find plenty of homes priced to the north of $900,000 - and these are regular houses, not mansions. But - and I think this is part of what the Doctor is describing - there is very little in between, which is odd because (1) the Bay Area economy is not exactly booming and (2) there aren't a lot of people running around who can pay around $1M for a freakin' house. But, if you pay attention, you can see that homes stay on the market for weeks and that the price will drop quite a bit, although not so quickly that you can imagine someone with a normal middle class income committing to buy.


The housing bubble didn't just mess with people's finances. It also messed with their heads.

You may have heard that CA was ordered to release tens of thousands of prisoners to deal with a level of overcrowding that is, apparently, unconstitutional. Even Jerry Brown is not eager to have a re-run of the soft-on-crime Seventies; but, since the one practical solution - that would be building some new prisons - is impossible in CA's can't-do society, prison "reform" is taking the form of releasing prisoners to county sheriffs.     

Starting Monday, California will radically change the way it sentences criminals, sending the first of thousands to serve time behind bars in their local county jails instead of in state prisons.

Drug dealers, shoplifters and other felons deemed to be nonviolent or non-sex offenders will become wards of the counties in which they are convicted, under a plan signed in April by Gov. Jerry Brown to reduce the flow of inmates entering the overcrowded state prison system.

The plan also changes parole rules so that thousands of inmates who are released from state prisons will no longer be considered "parolees" nor be supervised by state parole officers. Instead those inmates who served time for nonviolent, non-sex offenses will be "probationers" who are monitored by county probation officers - and the supervision period will be shortened.

Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten recently called Brown's plan the most "significant reform of California sentencing law in a generation."
Critics, meanwhile, have warned that the plan, known as realignment, will overwhelm counties with offenders who should be locked up in state prisons.

What's really lame about this - besides the state's refusal to pay for more than 9 months worth of jail-level incarceration - is that the counties will be just as ham-strung as the state. Want to bet that if some So-Cal sheriff decides to put his charges into tents that there'll will be an ACLU lawsuit and permanent injunction in place before the sun goes down? Instead of the state releasing criminals, now it will be county sheriffs, as if that makes a big difference. 


What's especially galling (a lot of things have been galling me) is that this has become a back-door method of doing away with the three-strikes law, which is one of the few law & order initiatives that has bi-partisan appeal, at least among voters. Liberal politicians hate it, of course, and now they look to be on the verge of getting rid of it by refusing to build new prisons. Add this to the long list of CA woes that you can blame on liberals who seem electorally immune to the consequences of their lousy ideas. 

It's one of those days when I can't pick just one thing to write about, but don't have time to write about everything: 


If you were wondering how Michelle Obama's "secret" trip to Target (did she ever go to Target pre-2008? Does Chicago even have a Target within the city limits?) was memorialized on film, well it's because the White House tipped off the AP. Pretty pathetic. 


Chris Christie is the man of the hour. Some say that he is the only (GOP) man for the times: a tough talker who can appeal to Reagan Democrats, and face down the public employee unions. Could be, but unions are only a sliver of the left coalition, and Christie has a lot of political sympathy for virtually every other element of the Democrat base. Among other things, he is as dumb on the environment as Joe Biden (or any other green). We can do better. 


Paul Ryan reviews Jeffrey Sachs's new book, describing it as having "veneer of economic analysis cannot conceal what is essentially a crusade against the free enterprise ethic of our republic." Nice to see at least one GOP politician try to take on the intellectual heavies on the left. 


This guy wants to believe that the present Wall Street protests are "like Egypt." The protesters are more than just the usual hippies, communists, and nose-ringed college students, says he. There are unions and "grannies" there! Very middle class! (pictures at the link). Right, well any union presence is going to be bused-in astro-turf. As for the "grannies," I think we're all hip to the truth, which is that old leftists like to grasp the mantle of respectable seniors, knowing the media will treat them as cuddly old folks, rather than as socialists who hate their country. Anyway, these protests not "like" Egypt; they are like Greece. 


On the other hand, the apparently unprovoked pepper spraying of a couple protesters by a normally desk-bound "cop" is just the sort of thing the blame-America-first crowd loves. You'd think every police officer in NYC would be hip the way leftists use this sort of thing for their own propaganda. San Francisco cops sure do. But, as JFK used to say, there's always one dumb son of a bitch who never gets the word. 


The al-Awlaki drone strike was a just result. He may have been "American-born," in the words of media style-books, but he left the US as a small child and was not acting in America's best interests. Obama's been getting this 100% right, but his ambivalence has been undermining his strategy. 


An inside view of the intimidation of the health insurance industry during the passage of Obamacare. For all the talk of the "right wing noise machine," if a GOP president and his allies had tried something this heavy-handed, there would have been all sorts of "brave" dissidents rushing to the microphones. But, let Democrats do it, and everyone's all STFU. Has to be because they were worried about unflattering stories published by the White House's media allies - meaning the media - right?


Herman Cain's rise is due entirely to his being the only optimistic candidate. People clearly want to hear his message, yet Cain is held to be "unelectable." OK, assuming he's unelectable, that doesn't mean the "electable" candidates can't learn something from him and his methods.


Btw, I thought Cain (or Santorum) would "shock the world" by running strong in Iowa, but it seems Cain's moment is now, and not four months from now. That means the media will be "vetting" him. In other words, they'll be seeking damning quotes from every disgruntled employee, disappointed corporate rival, and bitter stripper ex-girlfriend (I kid, I kid) that they can find. These are never our republic's finest hours. In fact, they are some of our worst as the elites among us broadcast rumors and innuendos as if they were dispatches from the Somme. Hope Cain is ready for it. I also hope he is ready to fight back in the manner of Clarence Thomas, rather than flinch away in the manner of virtually every other GOP politico unfortunate to have gone through this process. 


Michael Wilbon asks a damn good question about a new Walter Payton biography:  "what is the exact purpose of writing a book, 12 years after Payton's depressing death at 45, that goes to agonizing lengths to tell us essentially that Payton was flawed?" Supposedly, it's because Payton's public persona was that of a solid citizen when in private he cheated on his wife and used, get this, pain killers. It's that darn hypocrisy, again! Really, a professional athlete who sleeps with women not his wife? That's news? What about a look at Mrs. Payton. Maybe she was a pain in the a**? And since when was pain killer use a scandal? What's really galling is knowing that journalists who love to flog this sort of information probably couldn't stand up to a similar level of scrutiny. 

There's been a disturbing story playing out in California's Emerald Triangle (that's the region in Northern California that produces the state's biggest cash crop: marijuana). A local politico and a land manager were killed in the woods while seeking out pot plantations hidden amid the redwoods. Now, the suspect in those killings, who has been on the lam for 5 weeks, has been engaged in running gun battles with the authorities, leading to the inevitable escalation:     

More than 100 law enforcement officers in camouflage uniforms and face paint descended on a 6-square-mile "hot zone" in the dense North Coast forest Friday, looking for a double-killing suspect believed to have opened fire on searchers the day before.

Officers have been summoned from around the state to hack through the woods and comb the steep hills east of Fort Bragg, looking for 35-year-old Aaron Bassler. It is believed to be one of the largest and most concentrated manhunts in Northern California history, said Michael McCloud, a supervisor with the U.S. marshal's office, who has worked in the agency's fugitive apprehension unit for 23 years.

"He brought the fight to us and it's raised the stakes," said Sgt. Greg Van Patten of the Mendocino County sheriff's office. "He showed he's capable and willing to fire upon anyone for any reason, and it's taken this to a whole new level."

Bassler is suspected in the shooting death of Fort Bragg City Councilman Jere Melo, 69, who was killed while investigating a marijuana farm as part of a security check for Campbell Timber Management on Aug. 27. Sixteen days earlier, authorities believe, Bassler shot and killed land manager Matthew Coleman in the hills north of Fort Bragg.

Both men were shot with high-powered rifles, and investigators said they found Bassler's DNA at the scene of Coleman's slaying.

On Thursday, Sheriff Tom Allman said, Bassler fired on three Alameda County sheriff's deputies as they walked along a dirt road in broad daylight, then flanked around them through thick brush and shot again.

The suspect's dad says his son is not violent, just crazy (well, that's a relief). But, someone trusted him enough to arm the guy with a high-powered rifle and guard their marijuana fields. And that's the thing that should be bothering people about this. The northern part of the state is famously overrun with marijuana fields, even as "regular" agriculture is enduring a depression brought on by the state's near-suicidal fealty to green ideology. Pot growers may cultivate (heh) an image of stoner innocence, but the truth is that they are criminals who are apparently willing to kill to protect their profits. 


Bassler apparently shot and killed a local politician and a land manager. He has shot at sheriff's deputies. Now he's running around, living off the land like freakin' John Rambo. Transpose this story to Colombia or Mexico, and everybody would know what was going on. But move it to Northern California, and everyone tries to pretend that Bassler is crazy rather than acknowledge what he is: a hired killer working for a drug cartel. 


This story really does deserve wider attention. 


UPDATE: well, that was quick. Bassler has been shot dead.