WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE ETC. Veronique de Rugy is always solicitous of the rich, and at National Review today she again attempts to wring tears from their lot, this time in the matter of income mobility:

After the first year year, roughly half of those who were millionaires (reporting over a million dollars in adjusted gross income) at some point between 1999 and 2007 were still millionaires. After two years, 15 percent — roughly 102,000 millionaires — retained that status. This decreasing rate of remaining millionaires persists, and only about 6 percent — roughly 38,000 millionaires — were millionaires for all nine years.

At her companion piece she tells us the former millionaires "face substantial downward income mobility over time." Perhaps they're all sleeping under bridges; I wish I knew where; what stories they must have to tell!

Then de Rugy refers to Stephen Kaplan, who says that "when you only look at data that stops in 2007, it obscures the fact that the wealthiest 1 percent took a sizeable hit after the financial crisis — their share of income went down to 17 percent in the last two years." Neither he nor de Rugy tells us how much that is in actual dollars, but it must be awful; in fact it may be that the former millionaires who are sleeping under bridges look down on them. Want a Kleenex?

It's an interesting thing to talk about while people are being thrown out of parks nationwide. Or does she even notice things like that?

UPDATE. Several commenters smell a rat. "According to her train of thought," says Nylund, "someone who made 10 million a year for 10 years, then retired, ceased to be a millionaire." Shhh, you're spoiling the magic of millionairism! Once you get into that club, you are not like other people, and so must be separated from them, your traces kicked over, and your finances disguised with bullshit statistics.

MORAL DEGENERATE. Just last week Daniel Foster was pissed because some mean liberal implied that the Penn State pedophilia scandal had something to do with white male hegemony. I knew right then and there that Foster was not expressing moral outrage but jealousy, and that the only reason real rightwing craziness hadn't ensued on the subject was that the central committee had been caught off-guard and had yet to work out an angle.

And so it turned out. Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog has already torn up the idiotic Walter Russell Mead column about how the liberal 60s caused Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky, but there are other examples floating around, though none so ripe, to my mind, as the one at Bookworm Room:

Agrarian and frontier societies are, of necessity, self-reliant. (Yes, even Europeans once knew how to make do.) Right up until the 1960s, what separated America from other nations was that, until very recently in historic terms, it managed to be an amalgam of Western intellectualism and frontier self-reliance... And, by gosh, if self-reliance is the standard, those pioneers were virtuous.

You see where he's going: back in colonial times there weren't any child molesters! The usual villains are trotted out: Roosevelt, who "jump-started the notion of a comprehensive welfare system," and Obama, who because he disdained the Republican philosophy that "if you get sick, you’re on your own" shows "hostility to the classic American dream, one that believed it was a virtue for people to make it on their own."

But then it gets deep, brothers and sisters. Bookworm brings us "headlines in both England, where the dependency rot runs deep, and America," showing that in ObamaRoosevelt's America/England, "people abjure individual action," and that's how you get raped kids. These stories are about people failing to rescue distressed citizens, and this line from the peroration gives you a clear picture of Bookworm's reasoning:

That’s just two stories, right? What if I add a third, again from England?

Three! Holy shit, you're right, we're all moral degenerates! Eventually there's nothing for it but the Reich card:

Looking at these few examples, I can’t help but think of another culture that allowed itself to lapse into such a bureaucratic mindset that citizens either passively watched or actively engaged in the most heinous acts. I’m thinking, of course, of the Nazis.

By now Bookworm has worked himself into such a lather that he has to tell us how he'd have beat up Jerry Sandusky with judo or something ("I do martial arts because I really like it — but I also do it so that I can act").

Eventually he's all seethed out, and his mood swings skyward:

Fortunately, despite socialist government’s best efforts to mandate inaction (or, at least, to give people an excuse for failing to get involved), all is not lost. There will always be decent people who do get involved.

And then he starts telling us another kind of story -- tales of derring-do, heroism, moxie! You hope then that he'll realize that the ugly stories he repeated a few grafs back aren't an indictment of his fellow countrymen -- that ours is a big country with lots of different kinds of people in it, good and bad. We have no idea whether the heroes and villains were liberals or conservatives, only that all were tested and some found wanting -- surely that will remind him that not everything in this life is about his crappy little politics.

Alas:

Recently, a motorcyclist trapped under a car was lucky enough to find himself in the presence of proactive people, unconstrained by analysis paralysis, government regulations, or career worries.

For him, that's the significant thing -- not that men were brave, but that in being brave they rose above the welfare state. Oh, and also:

Barack Obama has stated clearly that his goal is to create precisely the bureaucratic, dependency culture that makes Penn State’s (and Nazi Germany) possible.

A million 60s-vintage Jerry Rubins gibbering in unison couldn't beat that.
UPDATE. Commenters sure had fun with this. "It's like No True Scotsmen," says Spaghetti Lee, "but the Scotsmen in question are the cast of Trainspotting." DKF notes that "Republicans have created their own culture of dependency on strawmen." Some of the commenters talk about what things were really like back in the early days of the Republic -- hint: it wasn't all virtuous self-reliance and knitting -- but this is overkill; the past, present, future, and any conceivable fantasy/parallel universes are bound by no rules of logical consistency when rightbloggers are in this sort of dudgeon -- so long as they get in two buzzwords per paragraph and at least one affirmation of moral superiority before the close, the means of conveyance is practically irrelevant.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the next President of the United States, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich doesn't seem like a fit candidate for rehabilitation to me, but what do I know -- look at Nixon.

Here's one that didn't make the cut, from NewsBusters:

Newt Gingrich Accused of Hating Mankind by 'Conservative' Kathleen Parker

Moments after being introduced by Face the Nation host Bob Schiiffer as a "conservative" columnist, the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker on Sunday referred to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich as a "misanthrope" - aka a mankind hater...

Reminds me of the Gore Vidal joke about the candidate who circulated a rumor that his opponent's sister was a thespian. And Gingrich, we are told, is the intellectual candidate.

I DON'T SEE ANY METHOD AT ALL, SIR. Regarding last night's GOP Presidential debate, I have not much to add to Charles P. Pierce's righteous commentary, except to marvel aloud at the hallucinatory quality that these events (what was this, the 32nd of them?) have achieved. My simple human interest in observing these cornpone con artists at work on their national profiles has not only waned, but evaporated; I could only spare about 20 minutes for this one; it was as mentally fatiguing as a bank of televisions simultaneously playing sermons by different evangelical preachers.

I will say that while Pierce is on the money regarding the principals' expressions of childlike faith in The Market, I do not see evidence that the magic of capitalism rises for any of them to the level of a theme that might define and animate a campaign, let alone the current Republican Party, as it did for Reagan. The idea, if we can call it such, that the market will fix everything is pretty comical in the midst of a worldwide depression, and I doubt even the candidates (with the possible exception of Paul) believe in it; they're only trotting it out because it's one of the concepts market-testing has shown will excite the GOP dead-enders from whom they are trying to cadge primary votes.

If the Free Market con was prominent in their stew of non-sequiturs last night, it's only because their other paternosters are almost exclusively negative -- hatred of Mexicans, hatred of hippies, hatred of the poor, hatred of sex, hatred of themselves -- and somewhere in their playbook it says Reagan had a sunny disposition because it's always morning in America. So every once in a while each these wretched, miserable people, sensing he or she was missing something important, would testify to the healing power of economic freedom, receive approving seal-barks, and then get back to the resentment-stirring that comprises the rest of his or her schtick.

Given all this, neither the latest confirmation of the magnitude of Rick Perry's ignorance, nor the parlor game of wondering when Herman Cain will just get it over with,  put his hand up Michele Bachmann's skirt, and offer her the Vice-Presidency, can make these debates interesting to me anymore. I'll just wait for the general, when one of these poor schmoes will have to talk to a human being.

WHY ARE YOU HITTING YOURSELF? The Washington Examiner crime section:

Occupy DC becoming increasingly violent, police say...

Citing injuries to five people outside the Washington Convention Center on Friday night, the mayor urged the demonstators to show restraint so that their protests are not discredited by violence. [italics mine]

If you're one of the few people who read several grafs further down, you'll see this:

Four of the injured people appear to be protesters themselves.

That's how the pros do, and by "pro" I mean propagandist.

SHORTER JOE SCARBOROUGH: Barack Obama has taken a lot of Wall Street money, and his policies have made Wall Street very rich. So it's an outrage that he called Wall Street bankers or somebody like that "fat cats." Now, you know me, I'm a free-market guy, so you'll understand that I'm not asking for a genuinely anti-bankster President -- I just want one who'll take their money and kiss their ass... What, I'm still short? I'll just make my description of that scene from Casablanca longer and harder to follow. I mean it's not like they haven't all seen it.

ALL THE GOOD THINGS HAVE BEEN TAKEN. Kia showed me this Megan McArdle column about the Occupy arrestees who spent a lot of money on rent and mortgages, and at first I couldn't see what was so awful about it, besides the usual awful McArdlisms, like compulsive goalpost moving -- you know, from some people having expensive homes to "a $795,000 one-bedroom apartment" to "the people at those protests-- [throatclearing]at least the ones who get arrested[/throatclearing]--really are, on average, unusually affluent." Like they moved to a park because the Hamptons were overcrowded.

But then I focused on this stuff:

Many New Yorkers believe that they should be given some sort of income tax abatement because of the expense of living there (with the lost revenue being made up from "really rich" people, natch). Slightly less affluent New Yorkers frequently believe that landlords should be forced to offer them "reasonably sized" apartments at a modest fraction of their income, because after all, otherwise they couldn't afford to live in New York...

...In fact, perhaps society should get busy making it up to you for all the hardships...

... After all, to state the obvious, that apartment costs so much because many, many people want to live in New York...

... Living in a blue state is a choice.

And then it hit me. She's not limiting herself to the simple point that some things are expensive and if you don't have the money you can't have it. She's talking about the desire to live in New York -- not just to move there, but to keep living there if you'd been there a while without getting rich -- as if it were the desire to live on Park Avenue -- no, better, to live in a fairy palace on a cloud, in fact, a palace and a cloud you wished to steal from your betters. It's not just that you can't afford New York -- it's that you're insolent to even think you should be tolerated there. You just don't deserve it.

If you've seen more than a few movies and heard more than a few songs and read more than a little history, you know New York's place in American culture. All kinds of people have lived there, cheek by jowl; not always comfortably, but enduringly. The poor haven't always had the best time of it, but they persist -- indeed, they still come by the boatloads to live there -- as do the middle-class and the rich. It's part of what even outlanders know and admire about it.

But over the past few decades, despite the legacies of an era when some more enlightened people ran the place, the city's been pushing the poor further out and giving them a harder time. And in recent years the middle class has been getting it, too -- by 2009, the Center for an Urban Future found, it took $123,322 to sustain a traditional "middle-class" life in the city. As the idea of raising a family in the city on a working-class job (with some comfort and occasional vacations, to boot) receded from living memory, those who would and should have been the backbone of the city learned to do with less, or to leave. And the rich, who had always had plenty, scooped up what they had to surrender.

To McArdle this isn't a tragic or even a negative development. It's the natural order of things, or maybe a course correction -- after years of everyone having at least a little something to live on, the Invisible Hand woke one day and realized that freeloaders and ne'er-do-wells were breathing some of the air He, in His wisdom, had reserved for the wealthy, and is righteously putting an end to it. After that He'll do something about their crazy idea that they're entitled to water -- once it's all been privatized, maybe they'll finally take the hint and just lay down and die, perhaps consoling themselves in their last hours with the Freedom of Religion, which the Invisible Hand is pleased to allow them, as it has no market value.

As someone who lived in New York for decades on the (relatively) cheap, I had a box seat for this turn of events. I knew what was happening was worse than unfortunate, but being in the middle of it, and very busy most of the time, and not wishing to be completely consumed by bitterness, I couldn't devote much time to thinking about the injustice of it. But some people have taken the time. Young as they are, they can see what's happening, because it's been accelerating so absurdly that you'd have to be blind -- or bought off -- to miss it. And that's why the worst people on earth are so mad to break them.

UPDATE. Amanda Marcotte rips it up.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger escalation of the Occupy movement from a bunch of stupid hippies to the Manson Family.

BTW sorry for the paucity of posting here lately. Been busy working, which is good because it pays and bad because it's work. More later.

BOO! In the midst of the Cain meltdown, what are the big rightbloggers thinking? Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

A JOURNOLIST REMINDER: There was this email group, called Journolist, where journalists got together and talked about how to bury stories that hurt Democrats and push stories that hurt Republicans. Here’s a list of the members.

UPDATE: Who, exactly, is the Cain story hurting?...

Good Christ. Journolist, run by that noted Bolshevik David Weigel* back in 'ought-ten! (I haven't bothered to check the current list, as these guys have made some hilarious misattributions to it in the past.)

Ann Althouse:

Journolist.
Who they were, where they worked.

(Via Instapundit.)

(If you don't remember what JournoList was, click the tag below for all my old posts on the subject.)

Flopping Aces:

Journolist Redux?….The Herman Cain Witchhunt

So, to recap: A joke candidate whom I have come to think of as Black Donald Trump has, after a string of buffooneries, had a previous buffoonery come back to haunt him. Because members of the press had the temerity to ask Black Trump questions about it, the brethren are darkly muttering about a defunct e-mail list which they had portrayed as the nexus of a liberal media conspiracy to protect Obama.

If Journolist still existed, of course, and its members really wanted to protect Obama, they'd be moving heaven and earth to elevate Black Trump to the Republican Presidential nomination. Obama might then get enough electoral votes in 2012 to save up for a third term.

The brethren haven't thought it through. But it's not about thinking. Journolist is a talisman to them, or more properly a trophy, because their squawking did manage to get it shut down and its libertarian founder fired from the Washington Post, which really showed those liberals. And yet the victory seems not to have brought them comfort; now that the night is dark and wolves howl outside the glow of the fire, they act as if the dead Journolist, or some progeny of it, yet lurks the woods, baying for their blood.

*UPDATE. Some of you have written to tell me that Ezra Klein ran Journolist, not Weigel. Sure, that's the cover story the big men tell saps like you. I can't say too much, but there's a reason Klein still sits pretty at the Post while Weigel is forced to forage at some content farm called Skate or something. (If you don't buy that, make it this: Klein, Weigel, what's the diff -- we collectivists don't acknowledge individual achievement.)

UPDATE 2. Commenters get into the retroactive-conspiracy frame of mind. "THE TIDES FOUNDATION IS BEHIND THIS!" (zuzu); "The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was responsible for credit default swaps" (gocart mozart); etc. I liked this from DocAmazing: "You can't win, Darth Wingnut. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." Maybe you have to be a follower of the Ole Perfesser to appreciate it.

UPDATE 3. Oh, Jesus, Dave:

[Ole Perfesser] Glenn's written another post about this, and he's pretty representative of the emergent defense of Cain: We can't trust the media, because they didn't cover or try to break other stories of sexual harassment when they reflected poorly on Democrats. How about this: The media should be tougher on all of these people?

Tougher on all these people -- yeah, look at the free pass the media gave Anthony Weiner! Why, if he were a Republican, he'd have been hounded from office.

Maybe they should get Weigel fired from Slake or whatever that thing is called. Then maybe he'll see how dangerous the liberal media really is!

UPDATE 4. At Balloon Juice, Tim F looks at the increasingly insane scandal spin and declares, "This is conspiracy building in the same way that making a 'house' with four Lego bricks counts as engineering."

COFFEE BREAK OVER, EVERYBODY BACK ON YOUR HEADS. A few weeks back we looked in on The Anchoress and Rod Dreher, two rightwing God-botherers who nonetheless seemed to have been slightly intoxicated by a whiff of American Autumn -- The Anchoress declaring "those who support capitalism and free markets have a responsibility to demand that manufacturers and suppliers do the right thing," like Jesse Jackson or something, and Dreher siding with Occupy Wall Street against Rand Paul.

Could it last? Are they distributing hand warmers at the encampments, or at least boycotting grapes for old times' sake? Let's see what they're up to now:

The Anchoress:

A lot of people on Twitter are swooning over [Herman Cain singing at the National Press Club]. Some are declaring that “Cain just won the election!”

Which is silly nonsense. He hasn’t even won the nomination, yet.

Having said that, though, Cain has just struck a note that will resonate for many in the country, particularly African Americans in the churches. Don’t minimize the effect his lovely basso profundo will have on people who are looking for something a little human, a little authentic and a little consoling. Do not underestimate the impact this stirring little ditty will have on some.

Fifty years from now, there'll be a giant statue in Washington of Cain emerging from a rock with "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan" chiseled on the side.

Later The Anchoress takes on liberal media bias. You'll find it in the most surprising places!

Former First Lady Laura Bush, and former first daughters Jenna and Barbara have been included in Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year issue.

That’s nice. Surprising. I can’t help wondering, though, why the magazine known for its photos has chosen such a cramped, graceless and uncomfortable-looking one to illustrate their story.

I mean, these are all-three beautiful, poised women. Glamour has them looking like they need to find a loo. Ah, well, what else would we expect, I guess? The other “Women of the Year” fare much better — their pictures are uniformly excellent, spacious, graceful and complimentary — but I guess Glamour couldn’t bring themselves to praise these three women without punishing them, as well, so they served up this unflattering pic.

Wait for it...

Small potatoes? Sure. But still, how petty.

In The Anchoress' world, self-awareness is a mortal sin. Now on to Dreher, who unsurprisingly has fallen hard for that David Brooks "Blue Inequality-Red Inequality" column with which Charles Pierce mopped the deck earlier. Brother Rod feels the spirit, especially the bit about the poor Red chillen suffering from their special Inequality because they have been prevented from getting married and Christening their babies by something or other:

It’s easy to scapegoat the one percent, in part because they really do deserve a lot more critical attention, but also because nobody loves them. It’s far, far more difficult to talk about the other things, because that involves making hard judgments about moral and cultural values, which, generally speaking, liberals don’t like to do (unless it’s against the white working class), and about facing how economic conditions can work against a building a culture of strong families and moral stability — something that most conservatives would prefer not to face. You could confiscate all the money of the top one percent and distribute among the bottom 99 percent, and that would do little to nothing to address this deeper culture of inequality Brooks identifies.

Well, if you also told them, "Get a marriage certificate and this 100 grand is yours," I think that might move the needle. Also, Dreher tells us that bastard Corzine is a Democrat. Fight the real enemy!

As an add-on, let us briefly treat (not successfully, I'm not a clinical psychologist) Megan McArdle, whose Occupy Wall Street post is more or less David Brooks', but stuffed with extra self-regarding prattle, and with a decent respect for your betters (I'm not being colloquial, she means your betters) standing in for God. Excerpt:

Similarly, in the 1990s, when I worked with a lot of mostly blue-collar and first-generation college grads (with a fair sprinkling of Ivy Leaguers, to be sure)...

Can't you just see them at the Blarney Stone, knocking back boilermakers and talking derivatives?

...I didn't hear nearly so much about the rich and how greedy they were--even though in the late 1990s, income inequality was almost certainly worse than it is right now.

Things were rough in the days of the Clinton boom, I tell ya. We didn't have iPods! But wait for it...

As IT consultants...

One is tempted to flip all the cards and call it a night, but let's upshoot this with a parting Shorter: All the OWS kids are just jealous, not like me, and my friend George Orwell agrees.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rise of Herman Cain. I think we have time for a few more surprise GOP frontrunners before the primaries. So whattaya think -- Bobby Jindal? He might as well make some evasive statements which the press will dutifully cover, remind people that he just got re-elected with a big majority, and then walk off with a public image bonanza he may someday parlay into a more promising new job, like a Nawlins-themed cooking show.

WEEKEND SHIFT AT THE BULLSHIT FACTORY. Earlier this week, James Pethokoukis and the AEI were telling us that there isn't any such thing as income equality, because lots of houses have air conditioners, etc. Rich Lowry, however, seems to acknowledge that, why yes, some chaps gets stuck at the bottom -- quite a lot of them, even.

This seems like progress, until Lowry tells us what his solution would be:

This stagnation is less a statement about the structure of America’s economy than about its culture. As Ronald Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, wrote in an essay for the publication National Affairs, “economic mobility is constrained above all by personal choices and behaviors.” He argues that society’s leaders “should herald the ‘success sequence’: finish schooling, get a job, get married, have babies.” If Americans finished high school, worked full time at a job that matched their skills and married at the rate they did in the 1970s, the poverty rate would be cut 70 percent.

That again! Too bad this wasn't announced during one of the top reality shows, so Lurleen could hear it, run to the other side of the double-wide, smack Jethro in the head and yell "We has to git hitched, cousin, and give these babies a name; then we's movin' up econonomical ladder, Mister Lowry says!"

Lowry's nonsense is pimped by Ole Perfesser Instapundit, who adds his traditional dark musings about The New Class, i.e., "people who, well, have state-supported managerial or intellectual jobs..." He says this New Class in America is made up of people in whom he detects "anti-Americanism, and the various manifestations of what some have called Transnational Progressivism." Ole Perfesser Instapundit is a tenured employee of the state of Tennessee. Whatever else you can say about him, you can't say that he doesn't have nerve.

YOU NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD. Jonathan Chait compares "inequality deniers" to global warming deniers. At AEI, James Pethokoukis gives his response:

In a way, Chait is correct that income inequality really resembled global warming. Both are issues that, to the extent they are even problems, could be be fixed though faster economic growth.

Don't huh-what yet -- Pethokoukis links to an AEI paper that proves, pinky-swear, that there's no real income inequality in America, either. Highlights:

...official measures... paint a bleak picture of the well-being of the middle class and the poor... This grim picture is inaccurate for several reasons. First, most analyses of economic wellbeing rely almost exclusively on narrow income measures that do not reflect the resources available to the household for consumption. These measures ignore taxes and in-kind transfers such as food stamps and often rely on underreported measures of income.

When you factor in the food stamps and the cash you make selling peeled oranges by the freeway on-ramp, you bums are swimming in wealth.

In addition, [between 1980 and 1999] the middle 20 percent of the income distribution experienced noticeable improvements in housing characteristics: living units became bigger and much more likely to have air conditioning and other features... The share of households with amenities such as a dishwasher or clothes dryer also rose noticeably.

Some of you layabouts even have refrigerators! Coming next: An AEI paper explaining that, when the authors pee down your leg, it's raining if you look at all the data.

Again I have to ask: Do these freaks even know any human beings?

TRY, TRY AGAIN. You may remember when Hot Air's Tina Korbe was snarling at the Occupy Wall Street hippies with their "bag sex, in drugged-out meltdowns, in litter-filled spaces. Even if the ends they aim for are just (arguable), they haven’t pursued them honorably... Then, too, it seems the protesters are looking less for work as they are for the material benefits of work," etc.

Well, as propaganda that wasn't working out too well, so Korbe has a new tack: the erstwhile hippies have gotten a metaphoric haircut, and become quite noble and determined:

It’s becoming increasingly clear: Cold won’t chase these protesters away — at least not immediately. Nor are the NYC protesters alone in their persistence. Across the country (and even around the world), countless others have joined the movement — and appear similarly committed to sticking to their spots as long as possible... Sure, most of the protesters aren’t homeless, but many are jobless — and that’s the point.

Bums no more! The punchline is these newly-ennobled souls are actually not the victims of Wall Street or the banks or any of those things they think they're mad at, but of Barack Obama.

Many of the policies President Barack Obama has championed — not least Obamacare — have contributed to the country’s joblessness. So, it seems neither unfair nor inappropriate to say, regardless of whether they realize it or call it by name and regardless of who else has contributed to the borderline corrupt culture of a federal government in bed with business, the protesters are, in fact, protesting the Obama economy. And that would make those Hoovervilles … Obamavilles.

It's not as if she'd go down there herself and tell the kids this. They're probably as pissed at Tim Geithner as they are at anyone else. But she's not trying to sway them -- they were set-dressing to her as hippies, and they're set-dressing to her as the pathetic residents of the new Hooverville. She's just dressed and lit them differently, and she's trying to get the Silent Majority, whom she just knows is out there waiting for her show, to react to them appropriately.

Rightwing propaganda is generally an easy racket, which is why it draws such weak employees, but they can be fun to watch when they are obliged to make a fast change.

THEIR WHOLE WORLD IS WANKING. The cops rousted Occupy Oakland last night with tear gas.  Normal people are appalled or at least dismayed at the violence; conservatives, expectedly, are jerking off to the footage. Allahpundit:

Video: “The Man” 1, Occupy Oakland 0.

Haw haw, got them hippies good! Verum Serum:

Both the reports I cited said the arrests were peaceful...

The many sources that reported and (in case he can't read) ran pictures of the gassing he somehow missed, or saw but failed to cite. But he'll refer to them with appropriate disdain:

So how is the Kremilin’s network reporting this? Brutal arrests at Occupy Oakland. This is backed up by the lovely folks at Think Progress who have been dutifully repeated anything the protesters said about the raid...

Apparently Verum Serum is not only unable to read, he can't see pictures  or video, either. Maybe he's actually blind, and they keep him in a basement,  periodically hitting him with a stick and yelling, "the tyrant Obama and his flash mobs just ran in and hit us all with sticks!" whereupon Verum Serum stumbles to his Braille laptop and cranks out another screed.

They aren't making hardhats like they used to.

UPDATE. Robert Stacy McCain:

UPDATE: The NY Times reports on the Oakland riot, including reports that some protesters sang “We Shall Overcome” — as if these mangy white hipsters are victims of injustice and the Oakland P.D. is commanded by Bull Connor.

Yeah -- look how nicely dressed those black folks were when the police turned the hoses on them! That makes all the difference.

When the cops are tear-gassing and shooting beanbag rounds at you for protesting obvious injustices, you may be said to have received the Bull Connor treatment. And I must say it's a little rich for McCain to be using the civil rights movements as a stick to beat anyone.

TALL BUILDINGS AND EVERYTHING. Don Surber and his fellow outlanders are convinced by a New York Post story that the hippies of Occupy Wall Street have pitched New York into a crime wave. Funny, their old story was that New York was already having a crime wave caused by black people. Make up your minds!

The recent gunplay has now pushed the number of shooting victims this year slightly above last year’s tragic tally -- to 1,484 from 1,451 -- through Oct. 16.

Four high-ranking cops point the finger at Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying their rallies pull special crime-fighting units away from the hot zones where they’re needed.

Steve M. of No More Mr. Nice Blog already called bullshit, but I must also tell the boys that New York is a very big city, with many precinct houses, and it's not like the citizens in high-crime areas go, "Hey, there's a protest downtown -- quick, let's all shoot at each other before the police can get uptown and stop us!"

I was going to say their idea of city life comes from The Warriors, but it's more like The Warriors as improvised by a troupe of paranoid schizophrenics.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Iraq withdrawal and the death of Gaddafi, neither of which has made the rightbloggers happy. In the Iraq case, it seems to be for them like the end of a beautiful dream in which the death of Saddam Hussein was the death of Darth Vader -- something they could stretch out in endless sequels and prequels and keep raking in money and respect. Now it's over and they're pissed. Obama fucked with their shit.

Regarding Gaddafi, there've been some grousings along the lines of Big Peace's "Democrats Cheer Gaddafi’s Death: Whatever Happened To ‘No Blood For Oil!’?":

Heck, even Hillary Clinton, who looks more haggard each time I see her, received no any major criticism for describing the Libya operation and the killing of Gaddafi thus: “We came, we saw, he died.”

The hypocrisy is more than palpable.

You too? More like fuck you. I wasn't a big fan of the Libya adventure, and I wouldn't cheer anyone's summary execution, but I must say I've never seen a single one of these guys worry seriously about the torture, imprisonment, or death of any foreign belligerent (or any American suspected of collusion with them) before Gaddafi. Well, maybe Pinochet.

That goes for Bin Laden, too; they said all kinds of crazy shit when he died, but I barely saw anything resembling a human rights demurrer from them. But now some of them are getting all weepy over the Libyan butcher. We have, for example, White House Dossier:

Can anyone imagine Henry Kissinger, George Schultz or Madeleine Albright having a good laugh after taking actions that resulted in someone’s death?

Mainly I imagine these horrible people having a good laugh as they collected the checks. Also, I remember Schultz saying of Gaddafi, "You've had it, pal" in 1986; if the old bastard is still sentient, he's probably marveling that his old client lasted so long.

We can talk about Obama's hypocrisy all day, but in the end his Middle East agenda at least makes some kind of sense. The American conservative approach has demonstrably been to invade a place, fuck the shit out of it, rack up a trillion dollar bill, and then bitch when someone else cleans up the mess.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE: Won't somebody please think of the 1%?

UPDATE. No, really --

I doubt Occupy Wall Street will be assuaged by learning that the top 0.1% now only receive 8% of the income earned in the US, even if that number is the lowest it's been since 2003.

I'm very upset with the liberal media -- they've obviously spiked my proposal, sent to all major networks, to give McArdle a Sunday morning show called Attend Your Betters, starring her and a bunch of dollies (whom she calls her "Board of Directors") having tea and telling each other how good it is to be away from the riff-raff. (I can tell you good people the secret of its inevitable success; once or twice an episode, we let assorted zoo animals loose on the set. No, she won't quit. It'll be just like the financial collapse: she'll never suspect things can go wrong again, so long as all the dolls have pretty dresses.)

NEW TO OUR PLANET. John Hood at National Review sees Obama hanging out in a small Southern town where nobody lynched him. Something must be wrong.

But put the president in an unscripted moment with “average” people, such as those who ran into him yesterday at a restaurant in Reidsville, N.C., and you get glimpses of a stiff, stilted scold.

Here's the news report Hood worked from:

To one man, Obama said: “Now, you ate all your vegetables before you had dessert,” noting his wife’s focus on healthy eating...

“You’ve got to work hard,” he said to one pair of community college students.

One woman handed Obama a phone, telling him that her grandmother was on the line. “Hey grandma — boy this is an old style phone … I appreciate you.”

John Hood re-tucks his shirt and interprets:

Called me old-fashioned — though I no longer own an “old style phone” — but I’m not greatly interested in running into politicians who might choose to critique my choice of lunch items and the order in which I eat them. A skillful politician, say a Reagan or a Clinton, might smile conspiratorially and make a joke about how good my dessert looks, or flatter me by asking for a menu recommendation. He wouldn’t thank me for following his wife’s dietary pronouncements, then instruct a passing college student to study hard, then make fun of a grandson’s phone to his grandma.

Along with fairness, equality, and humanity, these guys seem not to understand the concept of normal human behavior.

UPDATE. In comments, Nom de Plume: "I found it shocking and vulgar when he held a very young person (or 'baby'), and pressed his lips to its face, a custom that I am reliably informed is known as 'kissing'. No previous elected official of my recollection has engaged in such behavior publically. I shall register my displeasure with the proper authorities."

harrison is surprised Hood was allowed to implicitly praise Bill Clinton's political skills. Praise for retired Democratic politicians, and dead MLKs, is acceptable for use in National Review propaganda -- you know, like barricading the door with the corpses of the enemy.

It is left for Halloween Jack to spell it out: "If Obama weren't able to schmooze with folks from all over, he wouldn't have made it past the primaries... That whole arugula-and-grey-Poupon thing was invented out of whole cloth by GOP spinners who were deathly afraid of someone who had charisma to spare..." We have to remember that sometimes they're trying to convince others, and sometimes they're just trying to convince themselves.

ROLLING OUT THE BIG GUN. Occupy Wall Street has gotten so troublesome that the brain trust at Rightwing Central -- you know, Hitler, Dracula, Satan, the guy who invented reality TV, et alia -- has been forced to once again call in the man they call The Ano-Vaporizer to argue it down. Take it away, Jonah "This Poundcake Is Lo-Cal 'Cause I Injected It With Frozen Yogurt" Goldberg:

I grew up anti-Communist. I remain anti-Communist. I share with my National Review colleagues and forebears an abiding hatred of Communism. And that hatred extends to ill-conceived, poorly articulated, envy-driven jargon from street radicals.

Jonah Goldberg promises to reveal the secret connection between Josef Stalin and Maynard G. Krebs.

But at the same time I’ve got to say there’s something truly refreshing, even reassuring, about the all of the Marxist twaddle coming out of these protests. These Red goons, buffoons, ruffians and tatterdemalions didn’t spring forth ex nihilo. They’ve been living among us all of this time. All that is new is the opportunity for them to out themselves in YouTube videos and the rest.

None of you were actually expecting him to explain how Occupy Wall Street is communist, are you? It's Jonah Goldberg; lower your expectations.

I think we’ve all known that, but it’s useful to be reminded of it.

Farrrt, farrt farrt -- BTW, joy-poppers, this is where the whole Goldberg Gas thing comes from: the uncanny similarity between many of his rhetorical tropes and flatulence -- i.e., they're valueless, the merest residue of what was once substantial and nourishing; and they stink.

It’s also useful (as I argue in the current issue) to be reminded of the fact that given the flimsiest of excuses a great number of mainstream liberals will drop their apparently feigned resolve against leftwing radicalism and leap at the opportunity to express solidarity with the crazies.

Cut to grainy super-8 footage of Lucianne drilling young Jonah: "And who is this a picture of?" "Action Jackson. [sound of electrical charge] OWWWW! Fart." "Henry Jackson, Jonah! Or you may call him Scoop. And what is Scoop Jackson?" "[crying] C-c-cold war libr'l?" "Very good. Two more and you get a banana boat. Now, who's this a picture of?" "Hubert H. Humperdinck. [sound of electrical charge, sharts, dogs barking]"

So far, except for one honorable dissent from the editors of The New Republic, I haven’t seen any prominent liberals expressing any serious concern about what the occupiers are actually saying.

OK, let's tote it up: Goldberg hasn't made any case at all against the Occupy kids except to call them commies, which unsupported accusation he finds so convincing that he assumes liberals also accept it, and yet they go around acting like everybody doesn't know they're commies, which Jonah proved and I think we all know and farrt fartfart FA RAR R R R R RT. [Wow, that last one had undertones and overtones like the guitar in Teenage Lobotomy.]

The rest just goes on like that, but there's time for one Greatest Hit:

If the Occupy Wall Street mob swept the country, I’m sure some of these liberals would, eventually, find a backbone — particularly when it came time to redistribute their stock portfolios or seize their McMansions.

Yeah, that's when I was planning to get off the bandwagon myself. I mean, fun's fun, but this Olympic-size hot tub doesn't chlorinate itself.

Thank you, good evening, and farrt.