New York's nanny Mayor Bloomberg makes Bill Maher want to "join the Tea Party and marry Ann Coulter"

Tea Party Protest Warriors Invade OCCUPY DC

h/t Blazing Car Fur

One of Jared Loughner's shooting victims arrested for death threat against Tea Party spokesman

From MSNBC:

TUCSON, Ariz. — A Tucson mass shooting victim was taken into custody Saturday after yelling "you're dead" at a Tea Party spokesman during the taping of an ABC-TV town hall event hosted by Christianne Amanpour. 

The Pima County Sheriff's Office said J. Eric Fuller, 63, was involuntarily committed to an undisclosed medical facility, NBC News reported. The Associated Press said he was undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. ...  

KGUN reported that Fuller took exception to comments by Republican state Rep. Terri Proud and Tucson Tea Party spokesman Trent Humphries.

Fuller was in the front row and apparently became upset when Humphries suggested that any conversations about gun control should be delayed until all the dead were buried, KGUN reported. 

Fuller took a picture of Humphries and shouted, “You’re dead.”

Why the Left lost it - from The Wall Street Journal

Dan Henninger wrote an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal explaining the left's particular reaction to the Arizona mass murder by Jared Loughner. It's a very insightful perspective.

Hillbuzz summarizes it as follows:

Henniger says two things:

 (1) Leftist writers like Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, Jonathan Alter, and the rest who have been shamelessly using this tragedy to score political points for Democrats do so because they don’t know how to write any other way: they are just programmed to turn anything that happens into something that they think will help Democrats and hurt Republicans. They are purely agenda driven in all their content.

(2) The Leftist writers, and the Left in general, genuinely believe the lies they tell. And they are terrified of the Left being banished to the political wilderness for another three decades or so, the way it was after Carter’s disastrous presidency. They must, thus, stop at nothing to destroy the things they know will bring the Left down…and that is personified in Governor Palin and the Tea Party movement.

Klaven on the Culture: The Extremists are coming!

More funny stuff from PJTV's comedic cultural observer.

Fidel Castro's Diary - October 20

Dear Diary:

Getting old sucks. Lenin had the right idea. He doesn't look like he's aged a day since 1924. Perhaps a few hours a day in formaldehyde could help me preserve my youth too.

But then there's also the lack of energy. It was only a few years ago when I could give seven, eight hour speeches to my adoring people and it would seem like no time went by at all. Now I can barely speak for two uninterrupted hours before I get winded. What's the point?

I wonder if anyone is ever going to realize that the reason for my lengthy speeches was to watch the crowds sit there, and after a few hours, see them need to have to urinate, but be afraid to walk out and risk the trip to the Combinado del Este by incurring my displeasure. Ha! That was such a laugh! I know they used to wonder how I could go so long without needing to pee. They'll all admire me the more for my fantastic sense of humor when they find out I wore diapers during my speeches. I'll save that bit of information for my memoirs which I'll have published posthumously.

I better call Raoul this afternoon and make sure he hasn't screwed up anything today.

Still no call from Obama. I don't understand it. The Tea Party keeps saying he's a socialist and I know he's interested in health care reform, so who better to ask for advice than me? Under my rule, Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other country on earth! We send doctors to Brazil for weapons, we export doctors to Venezuela for oil. During the last food shortage, we were able to use a few for emergency ration meat and no one noticed. If anyone knows about providing medical care to the poor, it's me. It's easy, you just make sure everybody in the whole country is poor, including the doctors!

Phone's ringing. Got to go.

Who is it? ..

Ahmadinejad? Shit. Him again? I better take it. I hate the bastard, but they have oil. Good thing the crazy Iranian maricon has a crush on me. I'll try to talk him into toning things down, like the crazy mother will listen. He's the kind of guy who gives totalitarian dictators a bad name.

That's all for now, dear Diary.

Fidel

Christine O'Donnell is me!

Or so she tells us in her new ad.





Okay, she's me in that we both hate taxes. But Christine O'Donnell,  the Republican Party nominee in Delaware's 2010 U.S. Senate special election, does dabble in witchcraft and doesn't believe in pre-marital sex, so in those regards, she's the opposite of me.

Scenes from a Protest

There was a protest yesterday afternoon at the north part of Queen's Park, in front of the Ontario Legislature, where a modest-sized crowd of about 1100 demanded an inquiry into police tactics during the G20 convention in Toronto.

The usual suspects were there, with the MC being Judy Rebick, who lead the crowd in inane chants that sounded like they were composed by an uncreative 8 year old.. (video uploaded through Blogger/click the play button):

One of the chants Judy taught the crowd was indicative of the aged activist's lost grip on relevance: "I've got a Vietnam-like chant I want to teach you: one, two, three, four, we won't take this shit no more!'

A few in the crowd muttered it a couple of times at Rebick's prompting from the microphone, but most seemed embarrassed by her juvenile composition and her pathetic attempt to invoke the dated single victory of her generation of activists. A victory that predated the birth of most of the crowd.

But not all. Four members of The Raging Grannies made an appearance. They weren't exactly raging, but they were very nice and grandmotherly. Now if they really want to be popular, they should bake some cookies and bring them to their next protest.

Some people let their freak flags fly..

There was a funny incident were I spoke with the guy carrying this classic American Revolutionary Flag:

I jokingly asked him why he was carrying a Tea Party flag, and he explained he was up from the US and

happy acknowledged that indeed the Tea Party uses the "Don't Tread on Me" flag as a symbol of opposition to excessive government control.

We were overheard by some aggressive young lesbians in their 20's who became agitated at the presence of a Tea Party symbol at their socialist action against the oppressive forces of capitalism. I explained to them that the flag was originally created during the American Revolution as a symbol of resistance to state tyranny, and then the whole notion of it being 'American' bothered them, but from that point, they confined their distaste to relatively muted grumblings.

The would-be rabble-rousers speaking on-stage spent a lot of time trying to inflame Gay passions against the police and "capitalist oppression" and there did appear to be an over-representation of the sort of crowd one would expect at a "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid" meeting.

Speaking of which, I for one am always impressed when a woman has thicker and darker leg hair than me. Quite a few women at the protest outdid me in that regard, such as the one with the white top in the picture to the left, whose calves you can see in the close up below. (Warning: I hope you're not eating while you look at this)

And as far as other familiar faces go, these people were here..

 As you can see, KAIROS was critically hurt by having their federal funding eliminated. Their sign really sucked.

But some people who haven't spent the last few years relying on government largesse were able to use their ingenuity and talent to come up with more imaginative efforts:

 

In fact, with the question tree (above), its creator tried so hard to get so many points across, it all became indiscernible and irrelevant. Perhaps a good metaphor for the entire protest.

I did really enjoy this group of three from the paper puppet theatre, who got more media attention with their side show on the lawn than most of the speakers on stage.  While I wouldn't presume to challenge their sincerity, they didn't seem to have a comprehensive grasp on the reason for the protest and I wouldn't be surprised if their appearance was more clever marketing than outrage at the police.

The police who were present at the Queen's Park portion of the protest I saw numbered all of seven. Three on bicycles and four on horseback. They were remarkably good-humoured, particularly considering they had to endure a hot afternoon of ferocious denouncements of their profession.

The grand finale to the event was when Syd Ryan took the stage. The Labor leader gave a performance of frantic demagoguery. Hysterically screaming into the microphone in a frenzy of fear-mongering, Ryan made ludicrous comparisons between the police in Toronto during the G20 and British military police killings in Northern Ireland in the 20th Century. Here are some of his shrill theatrics I caught on video

(video uploaded through Blogger/click the play button):

The numbers of the assembled group formed but a fraction of the numbers attending the upbeat Afrofest, occurring simultaneously on the other side of the Legislature Building, in North Queen's Park. This protest event was populated in about an even mix of two age groups, middle-aged verging on senior citizens and people of about student age in their late teens/early twenties. Looking out upon the inconsiderable gathering forming the anti-police protest, one thought struck me more than any other, and maybe you can guess what it was from looking at these last two pictures and the ones that preceded:

This event had speaker after speaker ferociously denounce "state and police oppression" and "capitalism" and a few other expected things with a religious fervor. In fact, at times the event took on the appearance of a bizarre parody of an evangelical church service with some of the audience passionately parroting the last words of the speakers' sentences.

Speaker: "We endure this oppression every day!"

Followers: "Every day!" 

But what really struck me, looking out at, as well as mingling with and listening to the crowd and the speakers who were denouncing class, race, sexual and political oppression, was that here, in the heart of the heart of the most multicultural city in the world, in one of the freest societies to have ever been, that virtually one hundred per cent of this gathering was comprised of white, middle-class socialists.

There are legitimate concerns about state abuse of power during the G20 convention in Toronto. They merit serious investigation. Unfortunately, the protesters most worked up about the issue are the ones most likely to undermine the credibility of these concerns.

And with that, I decided I'd had enough pontificating for one afternoon and went to the fun side of Queen's Park to enjoy Afrofest with real people. I'll put some of those pictures up later.

All photos and video in this post © 2010 Eye on a Crazy Planet