Recording confirms that the sexiest thing in Don Sterling’s pants is…

… his wallet.

 

Meanwhile his takers, er, his team, has signaled their disapprobation by wearing their red shirts inside out.

Sounds like a plan.

 

OWS: What’s it all about??

I had a comment in a previous thread from Kay who doesn’t like the OWS crowd because she thinks they’ve taken away from their message by trying to stay in their tents.  She thinks they’ve put too much emphasis on maintaining an encampment and that this has taken the power out of their message.

This is my response:

Wow, you have completely missed the point of OWS. Completely and utterly.
Here’s the point:
1.) The people in charge gave gobs and gobs of YOUR money to the jerks who got us into this mess.
2.) Time and time again, those gobs and gobs of YOUR money have been used to buy lawmakers.
3.) No matter who you elect, they seem not to be beholden to YOU. So, you get mad and you try voting for a new crew. They don’t listen to you either.
4.) You have legitimate grievances and the government continues to ignore you.
5.) The First Amendment does give you the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government about your grievances.
except
6.) You’re not allowed to peaceably assemble anywhere. The writers of the constitution surely knew that for a protest to be effective, it had to be visible and irritable, otherwise, it’s not a protest. it’s just a bunch of bloggers that no one reads.
For a protest to be successful and for your petitioning of grievances to be annoying enough to be taken seriously, it has to have a *place* to happen, ie, a place where you can assemble and get the attention of the authorities and of other like minded people.  When the authorities have unaccountable influence on other forms of media, your body in a public place becomes the assembly point for a protest.  If you can’t stand anywhere and protest because the police don’t like it when you try to keep the elements off of yourself while you stand or sit or recline in a public space to protest, what does that mean, Kay?
Where is that place, Kay? In city after city, the mayors have said that YOU don’t have a place to protest. I guess you’re supposed to confine your protests to signing pointless online petitions.
Let’s say you have a grievance that you consider important enough that you think the government should do something about it. Let’s say you think women should keep their legs together and if they get pregnant, they should be miserable for the rest of their lives caring for children they don’t love or want because that’s the way God wants it. So, you and your posse of obnoxious and fanatical crazy religious “christians” get together and decide to occupy the place where abortions happen. And time after time, the court gives you the right to get up to a woman’s face and scream at her and tell her she’s going to hell and be a general nuisance and invade the privacy of citizens whose business is none of yours. That’s a protest and the government apparently has no problem with it.
BUT, if you want to occupy a public space and stay there until your grievances about economic injustice are at least recognized, never mind addressed, you can’t do it. The guys on Wall Street have no problem with you harrassing abortion clinics and blowing them up and shooting doctors. You’re still allowed to do it. But if you challenge their authority to take whatever they want from the public treasury and screw you and take your house without a good faith attempt at mortgage modification, well, then they will call up their army that they let you the taxpayer pay for and they will suppress you in as brutal a fashion as they can get away with. And they will have their paid mouthpieces go on TV and manipulate the minds of people who watch cable news and make them believe that these average Americans are somehow the most filthy miscreants on the face of the earth. Those miscreants are YOU. You don’t have to be there. This is just a message to YOU about what will happen to YOU if you get mad enough to get in their grill. The police and the mayors and homeland security will come down on you. And these protestors are non-violent. They will do nothing to stop you from carting them away to jail, over and over and over again. All they want is for their grievances to be heard.
I’ve been there, Kay and I am not a dirty, lice-ridden anarchist. I’m a capitalist and I have worked for corporations. In fact, I rather like working for corporations because of the nature of my work. All I want is for capitalism to work for ALL of us and for corporations to play fair so that we return to some semblence of economic justice and prosperity for everyone.
It’s hard to see how that message is so threatening that it must be brutally suppressed.
This is the way Jesus did it, Kay. He lead an unpermitted march in Jerusalem and committed an act of civil disobedience in the Temple to protest economic injustice and collaboration between the Jewish aristocracy and the Romans.  He expressed his grievances in a way that was a direct threat to the Romans and the state. The authorities arrested him when he and his followers were camping out in a public space.  And the results were roughly the same as what happened to OWS except that it has taken a lesson from history and doesn’t have a leader.  Do you get it, Kay?  This is the same damn movement, 2000 years later.
And let’s make this clear, there have been no riots. Oakland was an exception but Oakland has home grown problems that are independent of the occupation. In fact, the city of Oakland should be grateful to the occupy movement since the people who have been impoverished for decades had a place to go where the protestors were very insistent on non-violent methods. They didn’t like violent protestors any more than Oakland’s mayor did. There’s a good chance that really nasty riots will follow once the occupiers are gone.
So, Kay, I don’t agree with you at all. Not one little bit. I’m a middle class person previously employed in a high tech field who joined the ranks of the unemployed in my industry through no fault of my own. And I *will* petition the government over our grievances. That is my right. And your right. And if someone tries to force us into obscurity so that we can’t effectively assemble and protest, it is those persons who are violating the constitution and not us.
That is the point, Kay. We are on the verge of losing our rights and all you think about is how those meddling kids won’t get off of your public lawn. When you start thinking like that, the bad guys have won. The next time they do something that pisses YOU off enough that you would be willing to take to the street in protest, you won’t be able to. You should be grateful the occupiers are out there.

The lack of a place to assemble and petition IS the point, Kay.  Because if you have no right to complain, the bad guys can do whatever they want and you can’t stop them.

Wake up and smell the Starbucks.

Speaking of Starbucks, I’m going to go workout and then come back for coffee.  Later taters.

*********************************

And here’s something I picked up from Suburban Guerilla (nice interface update, btw).  It looks like Anonymous has decided to protest the imprisonment of Julian Assange.  It’s attacking sites of the major credit card companies.

And I have to say, it’s about time, as long as they aren’t costing average Joe the Plumber types any money or preventing them from charging their emergency room visits to their Visas.  There has been a report that anonymous has leaked the Mastercard account numbers of 10,000 individuals.  Now, that presents more of a moral dilema for me.  If it’s 10,000 average people, that’s bad.  But if it’s the mastercard number of someone like Jamie Dimon or some Wall Street asshole who sold a faulty financial “instrument” to the pension fund of a bunch of innocent carpenters?  I’m suprisingly OK with that.  I guess you could blame Stieg Larsson for developing an appreciation in me for the use of the internet to wreck financial vengeance on evil people who always seem to be escaping legal justice.

So, if you happen to come across one of those mastercard numbers, remember, Stealing is WRONG.  It should be punished.

Scratching Post DNC Tuesday – Hillary speaks! 10 pm EST (estimated time) Plus DNC “Caption this moment”

RISE, HILLARY, RISE!!!

WE LOVE YOU HILLARY!!!!

Conflucians, Senator Hillary Clinton will speak tonight at the Democratic National Convention at 8pm EST.  Our first viable female candidate who won more votes than any candidate in our nation’s history, is being forced to relinquish her votes on the 88th anniversary for Women’s Suffrage.  We know that she’s going to ask us to unite, to come together as she’s graciously asked us to do since suspending her campaign on June 7th, 2008, but everyone who reads the Confluence knows that we cannot unite as we have in the past when the DNC stole votes and delegates, thrwarting the DNA of Democracy itself: our right to have our votes counted and cast as they were intended.   

Esteemed Senator Clinton, we acknowledge you are between a Mt. Everest of rocks and a hard place.  But we will march and fight until every vote is counted and reported, and when Democracy comes back to the Democratic Party, so will we.  Until then, PUMA!

While Riverdaughter, Mawm and Gary go with their PUMA packs to PUMA headquarters in downtown Denver or prowl in the PUMAmobile, Rico’s got his Pink PUMA & Mountain Lion Martini glasses chilling in ice, while Flo’s got her catcher’s mitt ready for unwelcome words.  If you didn’t have any dinner, we have Denver Bison (or Tofu) mini-burgers and fresh popcorn for all the action that’s going down in Denver.

Speaking of action, just like RiverDaughter said here, and BostonBoomer said below, PUMAs are the news story!  Here’s this little nugget from Rebecca Traister from Salon.com:  Rebecca’s not exactly a PUMA-friendly reporter, but at last she gives Tweety a good slap: 

Aug. 26, 2008 | DENVER — “This is where you see the civil war!” burbled Chris Matthews, experiencing near-asphyxiatory pleasure on an outdoor stage in the sweltering Denver heat, while behind him two competing groups, Obama supporters and the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) backers of Hillary Clinton, chanted “Obama! Obama!” and “Hillary! Hillary!” at each other. Matthews looked as though he might wet himself as a camera panned the crowd, and he declared, “We’re at ground zero!”

…

Talking to these women, I began to believe that the threat of PUMAs, or aggressive Hillary supporters who planned to take over the convention, was a full-blown myth. I couldn’t find any; I hadn’t seen any. I half suspected that they were the creation of a media anxious to gin up a story in which the villains were a bunch of grumpy old white chicks.

But that was before I left the confines of the official indoor events and stepped out into the wide world of public protest and freedom of expression. And before the news of Monday’s shifting policies on the roll call vote began to leak out, and before Hillary supporters lining the streets of downtown Denver heard convoluted versions of what was likely to happen.

…

“You mean Reverend Wrong,” Mar interrupted. “Look, I know about the race card. I know about race. I’m African-American. And it was Obama who played the race card, and it’s going to come back and bite Obama in the butt.” African-American supporters of Obama, in Mar’s view, “are proud. Yes, I understand that. But you want someone who can lead America, not because he’s African-American, or because she’s a certain gender, but because she can lead.” But what about the woman they wanted as America’s leader? Clinton has been leading her supporters, or trying to lead them, to vote for Obama. “We want Hillary,” said Novacek, with the fingers-in-her-ears insistence of an implacable toddler. “She can stand on her head and plead with us, and I still will not vote for him. I want her. She is best for the country.”  

Caption this DNC moment!  Add your Conflucian Savoire-Snark to these photos:

PHOTO 1:

PHOTO 2

RISE, HILLARY, RISE!!!

¡QUE VIVA LOS PUMAS!

(Long live PUMAs!)