Looks like Newt has gotten the memo and is going all in on the sound-bite red-meat candidacy Hermain Cain failed so poorly at:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/newt-gingrich-tells-off-occupy-wall-street-at-gop-debate-go-get-a-job-after-you-take-a-bath/Speaking of OWS related stupidity,
Michael Moore continues to be really fucking dumb about it:
Dozens of Occupys across US raided this weekend-& now NYC- Planned & coordinated by the Dept. of Homeland Security? Did O give green light?
Boring ramble:
I always thought the "occupy" concept was self-defeating as people would inherently lose interest camping out and it'd invite in the dredges of society and hardliner nuts like this to be the core of the people left at some point:
http://www.dailycal.org/2011/11/18/man-throws-aluminum-water-bottle-at-uc-berkeley-students-face/Which is really why the powers that be decided they had to be "cleaned out" especially with all the health hazards and assaults popping up. (I mean the big ones where this was going on, not the numerous smaller encampments.) If they had maybe done rallies/protests and weekend long stuff for a while I doubt they would have lost anything in terms of political capital and gotten even more people turning out for each event. How do they escalate things come Spring now? They could have occupied for six months or more next year during the election season.
Although I suppose I'm not the biggest fan of "awareness"-only type protests in the first place. I knew this guy, another poli-sci faculty, who was gushing over how OWS was going to cause all the young people to rise up and get involved in the regulatory process (especially through
http://www.regulations.gov) and make sure the regulatory state worked for the people. And how this would transform America and the globe unlike the Tea Party.
I don't care for the Tea Party, and I know OWS was doing something well...different, but the Tea Party was similarly disorganized and aimless early on and I think to some extent resisted being co-opted to however a semi-splinter faction of an existing party can be. They had the nebulous dislike of the government and blah blah as well, but they also had two specific targets they could start to gel a unified focus around in hating PPACA/ObamaCare/Death Panels. And then after that sorta died out they turned their ire on the "RINOS" and went after Castle, Murkowski, McCain and co., put a lot of "their people" in the nominations even if they lost like Angle, O'Donnell, Lee, Miller, Rubio and in other cases the GOTV effort helped "outsiders" like Snyder in Michigan, Walker in Wisconsin, etc. and overall helped the GOP.
Back to OWS, I think the occupy aspect somewhat knee capped this as you had everyone at the ones I saw in DC, NYC, SF and Oakland. You had Ron Paul END THE FED types, general left-liberals, the standard Workers World types who turn out to everything under the sun, general "hippies" who do the same, people who just want to play the drums to be "the heartbeat of the movement" and everything else you would expect. Tea Party was probably more ideologically cohesive but you still had racists, libertarians, so-cons, small business people, gun nuts, etc.
You aren't going to win either way, I don't think the Tea Party nor OWS really got reasonable coverage (as if anyone does these days, one aspect I liked about FOX's love for the Tea Party was that they would put the various people on to talk at least), and there is time to be seen for OWS yet, the Tea Party hadn't won much of anything in 2009 either, but the whole occupy thing strikes me as what you do last.
I've seen conservatives calling them Obamavilles and when even your "allies" are running away from you because all the kids got bored and the criminals took advantage, it's not helping you out.
To put in one last obvious note, OWS is drastically younger that I can tell, the Tea Party somewhat instinctively knew they had to do something within the GOP since their political activism was limited to bumper stickers, shooting guns, hating them damn Mexicans on the teevee and voting. From the interviews and everything I've seen a lot of the OWS people still think they can change things by like totally drawing attention to the problems with the intrinsic paradigms man. Which is great and all, but doesn't get you much of anywhere if you don't have critical mass like with the Vietnam draft protests. And I know nobody is running against Obama but they could use some type of Sarah Palin sorta-related media-distracting type to run around to each of the Occupy sites and hype people up while not doing anything else to try and run the movement except for the publicity they can get out of it. Rosanne Barr and Michael Moore aren't really cutting it.
But then I also think some eccentric rich guy could come along complaining about bailouts, outsourcing/AMERICAN JOBS and one of those variations some of the GOP candidates are trying with the "end the bad war parts but fight the other war parts harder!" and put up Ross Perot type numbers. A couple Republican guys I know were suggesting they wouldn't mind my five-man scenario of Obama-Romney-Paul-Bloomberg/Trump-Dobbs. (Last one was the first anti-immigrant, protectionist guy I could think of and he had been pretending he wanted to run last year.)
They didn't like my suggestion that Hillary should resign and enter the Republican race even though they said they'd prefer that Obama lost in the end.
Sorry Bore, was waiting on a defrag to finish so I could get back to The Third, so I thought I'd vomit up some
off the cuff poorly reasoned political opinions expert punditry on you.
I'll stick this out here since it's glib. If there's something about OWS I could say I actually hated, it's the "we are the 99%" thing. It irks me in much the same way "we are the ones we are waiting for" did.