Atlanta’s Fox Force 5 has an exclusive interview with a very credible woman who says she had a 13-year consensual affair with Herman Cain, and Herman manages to lie and deny without calling her a harlot. On its face, this seems like progress for Herman. The day is young, however, so we’ll see if he and his campaign can hold to this high standard for more than a few hours.
Archives for November 2011
Occupy OKC
ccupy OKC people at Kerr Park, OKC are reporting that eviction is imminent. I drove past the Bricktown police station earlier, and SWAT/SRT vehicles are staged forward there. Bricktown station is about a three minute drive from Kerr park.
I don’t know what to make of this because we hadn’t had any difficulties getting permits issued and renewed until yesterday.
I just got off the phone with a couple of the campers. The day shift captain from the Bricktown station addressed the GA a couple of days ago and told them that with the construction and demolition work going on across the street—this is true, one hi rise being renovated, one next to that being demolished—that those sites had reached a point where they had to have the whole area cleared. Then yesterday, the OCPD told them that they could stay in the lower park and clear out of the upper park and they’ed be OK. This morning, a Sergeant from Bricktown station told them they had to leave the park and that they would not be allowed to move to another park.
They set up a meeting with the Police Chief for 8:30 AM tomorrow morning, but they’ve noted that the Police, who normally have had two cars parked in the alley south of the park haven’t had a presence all day.
They’ve had good relations with the OCPD from the beginning, but it appears that a decision was made on high to remove them. Some campers have left, but through the day more and more people have been showing up as word got out, and a caravan from Norman had just got there at 9:30, raising their number to over 40.
The last thing they heard was that they would be evicted at 11:00 tonight. Since they heard that, they managed to arrange the meeting with the Chief for the morning, but apparently it’s about to happen—I just got a text that police are lining up on the south side of the park.
The livestream feed, http://www.occupyokc.com/index.php/media-and-resources/livestream is offline. They’ve been trying to conserve battery power all day, but they’ve said they would bring it up as soon as it appears something will happen.
Occupy OKC live stream at http://www.livestream.com/occupyspanol Update: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/occupy-okc
This was reported on News9 OKC, the lead story for the 10PM broadcast.
Not Uptight, Not Unattractive
This is insanely bad news:
Japan’s science ministry says 8 per cent of the country’s surface area has been contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
It says more than 30,000 square kilometres of the country has been blanketed by radioactive caesium.
The ministry says most of the contamination was caused by four large plumes of radiation spewed out by the Fukushima nuclear plant in the first two weeks after meltdowns.
The government says some of the radioactive material fell with rain and snow, leaving the affected areas with accumulations of more than 10,000 becquerels of caesium per square metre.
Thin-Skinned Bullies
I know we have talked about this before, but I am still stunned by the fact that Sam Brownback’s staff tried to get a kid in trouble for tweeting about him.
Don’t these people have anything more important to do than send kids to the principal’s office for disagreeing with them? What is wrong with these people? And what the hell is wrong with the Principal of this school that he followed through? If I were a school principal and some jackass approached me with this, I’d fire off a letter to the Brownback office letting them know that some idiot is out there pretending to be a member of his staff and doing really stupid things like trying to get a kid in trouble for what she said on twitter.
She’s not backing down, so I guess the ball is in the Principal’s court. As usual, all the adults in this have failed, but the kids are alright.
*** Update ***
The Worst Congress Ever Tries To Outdo Itself
Big Pharma and the recording and movie industries are on the verge of passing a bill that could very well destroy the social web, including Daily Kos.
This is no hyperbole. Watch the video above. It is literally an existentialist threat for Daily Kos and any other site with user-generated content, from Facebook, to Reddit, to tumblr, Sound Cloud or YouTube.
This is the holy grail of the entertainment industry—to destroy the internet, and thus, destroy the biggest danger to their business.
While the entertainment industry already has outsized tools to fight piracy, they don’t want to deal with the hassle of having to send takedown notices to individual infringing sites. It’s hard work, going after YouTubes of dancing babies and stuff! And, of course, they don’t have jurisdiction over many foreign-based sites. So, if they can’t stomp out all piracy, plan B is to destroy the internet.
Not content fiddling while America burns, they’ve now decided to ruin the internet.
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It’s time
I have a soft spot in my heart for Australia, and I have spent a lot of time there over the years.
Usually I was visiting to check on my mining investments. I got into uranium on the ground floor after a particularly drunken weekend with the Roosevelts in early 1939. Once Eleanor had a couple of my special gimlets under her belt, you could get anything out of her (and I mean anything). It was a very lucrative couple of days.
I’ve also visited in a more professional capacity. After I had assisted in resettling Harold Holt into his new life as a Thai ladyboy, I got a bit of a reputation in the service for being able to speak Australian, and so I was sent there several times for fieldwork. For a few years in the 60s, it felt like we were overthrowing a new Prime Minister every year or so.
In between, I fell in love with Australia a little bit. What can I tell you? It’s a nation of burly footballers in short shorts whose idea of a big weekend is to not stop from the weekend before, and whose idea of moderation is to have a bit of a spew so more beer fits in. It makes decent wine and you can have good e and an ounce of dope delivered to your hotel room within an hour of your plane landing. It has hopping rats and tree bears and more things to make fur coats out of than you can poke a dead dingo at. What’s not to love?
Happily, there is a sanity still to their political discourse that has long been missing in these United States – if indeed it ever existed. It even extends (on occasion) to their legislatures – a right that hasn’t gone full nutcase and which sometimes recalls the old meanings of the words “conservative” and “liberal”, a centre that is actually in the centre, and a left that even gets to have a say in running the country every now and then.
For A Good Time In Cambridge: TNC on Tuesday edition
Just to add to Ta-Nehisi Coates day at the blog, one last reminder: any Balloon Juicers in the greater Boston area are more than welcome at Ta-Nehisi’s reading/talk at MIT tomorrow night — Tuesday, 29 November. The festivities start at 7 in MIT’s building/room 6-120. (Interactive map here.)
Ta-Nehisi will be starting from his work-in-progress, a historical novel set before during and after the Civil War, told through multiple voices — of slaves and former slaves, slave-holders and more. Readers of this blog will remember Ta-Nehisi’s exceptional work on recovering some of the willed forgetting that marks so much Civil War history during “Confederate History Month” a year or so ago – DennisG highlighted that work as he added his own contributions to the effort. This latest work is the next iteration of that inquiry — and Ta-Nehisi will talk about some of the specific challenges he’s facing as he tries to write through facts into the sound and texture of the past.
Should be a great time. Come if you’ve the necessary proximity and the interest. (BTW: in response to a question on my earlier announcement of this event: it’s free and open to the public, no tickets required.)
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