With the big Tea Party protests scheduled to happen this coming Tax Day, the leftys (driven by a group called A New Way Forward) decide to try and get ahead of the curve, and hold some protests this weekend.
As we showed yesterday with photos, those protests were fairly lame. (Find even more links to photos over at Instapundit).
However, a good lefty will never let reality get in the way of a bit of good, self-serving propaganda. Check out the reviews that ANWF gives themselves on their blog.....
We made it happen! What do you get when you have no organization, are three weeks old, have the rain pouring down on you and out your nose, and care deeply about our political system and economy being hijacked by fancy rhetoric and bank CEO’s? In just three weeks, we got thousands of people out across the country on an obscure, wonkish financial-policy issue. Pretty amazing, and totally unprecedented. This was a national demonstration like no other because we are informed, intelligent and want to have an honest conversation about where tax dollars are going and what can better be done.
Heh... Sounds like Stuart Smalley is blogging for these guys..."we are smart, handsome, and people like us!"
But honestly..."thousands"? Based on ground level reports (the mos observed thus far was ~100 in San Fran, which is a city ready to protest anything), if they had 1001 people at their protests nationwide, I would be mildly surprised. But I guess if you have 1001, you can say you had "thousands"....
And "totally unprecedented"? C'mon, there are single Tea Party protests that outdrew your entire national effort on this same subject. Except they just want a different type of solution. So ANWF is mildly delusional if they think that they are "unprecedented" for working "three weeks" on somethning that has been growing for 3 months.
OF course the party wouldn't be complete without a little media exageration as well. The Golden Gate X Press (OK, it is a bunch of journalism students at SFSU, but they will be "journalists" soon enough...) pumps up the AWNF effort with some tried and true leftist boilerplate:
"San Francisco and 46 other cities in the United States and Canada took part in mass protests to break up the power of the banks that caused the current financial crisis. The mass protests were organized by a group called A New Way Forward."
Apparently these protests were so massive that they had to call them "mass protests" twice. Either that or the reporter is trying to help them compensate for their lack of participation. I wonder what the Golden Gate X Press will call the Tea Party protests next week...
Some interesting pictures out there today of both 'Tea Party' protests and 'A New Way Forward' protests.
First a Tea Party in Pittsburgh (via Instapundit):
Second, a 'New Way Forward' protest in Boulder, Co:
Notice any difference?
Just to make sure I am not cherry picking photos to fit my meme, lets try that again....this time, same city!
Tea Party protest, Chicago:
Pro-Bigger Govt protest, Chicago:
Hmm...still looks the same to me. Let's see which ones get more media coverage. Perhaps the scales will tip this weekend on that front.
Lastly, no post about political rallies is complete without looking at some of the great signs that people make and carry around.
Anti-Govt solution:
Pro-Govt solution:
OK, perhaps I am biased , but even despite the lack of punctuation, I have to give it to the Anti-Govt solution guy. But you do have to give that lefty protester some credit...he wants to Nationalize *and* Decentralize the banks at the same time. I might be willing to let him have his way, just to see how they would pull that off...
We laugh because it is true....
Apparently, President Obama thinks 'Austrian' is a language.Perhaps that is why we have always had issues understanding what Arnold Schwarzenegger has been saying....we all thought he was butchering English as a German-speaker. Silly us...he was just speaking his mother tongue, Austrian....I guess the Austrians had better work fast and invent a language, so that Obama doesn't look bad or uninformed. Ooops, too late....
Update: Apparently the State Department has just put in for a rush delivery on this new product from Rosetta Stone....
A great write up from the irascible Penn Gillette....
I trusted my Dad that turning into a skid would work. I trusted my carny mentor, Doc Swan, that closing my mouth around a burning torch would put it out. They were right. Maybe the United States borrowing more money than I could imagine in a billion years with a billion computers and a billion monkeys typing on them, will get us out of financial trouble. I really don't know. It's certainly true that many counterintuitive things are true, and when you have the guts to do something counterintuitive that works, it's really cool. It's a superpower under our yellow sun.
But there are some things that are just intuitive. Did you know, that if you're going 100 mph, directly at a very, very thick, reinforced concrete wall, and you speed up, so you're accelerating right when you hit the wall that the accident you have is going to be much worse than if you'd jammed on the brakes as soon as you saw the wall at the end of the street? Did you know that? It's exactly what everything you know and feel would tell you, and it's exactly true. Most times when you're driving, or playing with fire, or handling money, the thing that makes sense to you is also true.
I way hope we're turning into a skid and not accelerating into a concrete wall.
Indeed.
(Hat Tip: Instapundit)
I saw Instapundit's lede "I, Me, Mine, I, Me, Mine, I, Me, Mine.", and thought that he must have posted a link to article about the stage my 2-year old is currently going though....
Alas it is only a link to a prescient observation by Victor Davis Hanson about the narcissistic language in the President's speeches.
Apparently they are being written by toddlers who haven't been taught about sharing yet....
I am usually a modest man, but it is good for one's soul to give yourself the occasional pat on the back....
A little over 2 months ago, I wrote this:
The Coming Obama Bubble
...this whole giant group salivation over Obama reminds me of when a fad sweeps through a high school, and the peer pressure takes over. Or the herd mentality, when people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and/or purchase items. Soon the fad or fashion will be will move onto the next cool thing. Especially when the the herd discovers that they hadn't gotten everything they were expecting out of the current craze.
Today we find that many of the intelligentsia at the NYT have decided to sell their shares in Obama Inc.
Friendly fire: NYT hits Obama
It's not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it's perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd—and in the paper's lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail.
The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.
There is still time to sell any shares you have, and get your Obama memorabilia on eBay before the coming crash in values...
And a little over a month ago, I also wrote this:
First They Came For the Executives...
...if this is the road that Obama wants to go down, the real question needs to be...how far is he prepared to go??
Will he be prepared to call for a limit on the salaries of professional athletes? Much of their exorbitant paychecks are due to ticket sales. Tickets to seats in many stadiums around the country that are subsidized by taxpayer funding. If they had to play in stadiums actually affordable to their team's owner's wallets, there would be no glut of money to pay them millions. New, shiny, tax-payer funded stadia/arena permit the owners to shower manna upon these athletes. And by definition, most of these players are failures, but still accept millions without shame. Thus I would expect Obama to call on the NFL, NBA and MLB to cap their salaries...or else they could feel some pain...Janet Reno style!
Today, the indespensible Scrappleface hops on the bandwagon...
Obama to Limit Pay for Wall Street, NFL, NBA, MLB
With the debate over AIG executive bonuses nearly bringing official Washington to a standstill in the past three weeks, the Obama administration today expanded its plan to control Wall Street executive pay, adding provisions to limit compensation for star performers in the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA) and Major League Baseball (MLB).
“Some of these sports stars, like AIG execs, have negotiated sweetheart deals paying them millions of dollars, and yet they lose games,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. “The president shares the outrage of the American people at these obscene salaries and bonuses. There’s nothing that makes the little people feel littler than the thought of these fat cats getting fatter just because that have specialized skills that are in high demand in a free-market economy.”
Unfortunately he forgets the Hollywood angle...but hey.
Were these wholly original thoughts on my part? Of course not. As the title suggests, it wasn't that hard to foresee. But I would like to think I am a little prescient, now & again! ;-)
Thoughts from the Atlanta airport, where I am forced to listen the CNN's non-stop Obamafornia coverage.
I think the President is setting a very bad precedent for himself, and his administration. The President says he is choked with anger about AIG, and wants us to be choked with the same anger over the mid-use of government bailout monies.
So if that is the new precedent, has he just legitimized and validated the burgeoning 'tea-party' movement??
If you ask me he is setting himself up to be the recipient of the same choking anger that will grow when people learn of all the useless places the bailout money is going...
So if you are having any guilt about feeling a kinship with the Tea Party movement, take the President's advice....don't. If he can be choked by anger at the actions of the government he leads....then so can you!
