What’s Next for Occupy Wall Street?

17 November 2011 |permalink | email article

Possibly encouraged by similar actions in Oakland and Portland Mayor Michael Bloomberg finally accomplished what he had long wanted to do: clearing the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park. The larger question is where at the O.W.S movement will go from here, and won’t be answered this week. But, as John Cassidy captures in The New Yorker, if the Mayor and the editorial page of the New York Post think the protests will fade away, they are deluded. “In its short life O.W.S.has gone from a sideshow to a national movement, with offshoots in hundreds of towns and cities. Whatever happens, it has already changed the terms of the national debate.”

Question for Cain

The former Godfather’s Pizza chief, still running strong in the polls, was asked by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s editorial board for his views on Libya. He stumbled for over a minute in trying to respond. Leaving the building, and surrounded by reporters, he laughingly repeated his “9.9.9” jobs plan. Was he aware that his slogan, Nein in German, means No,No, No?

Capitol Issues

The Sacramento Bee wrote that California was running $1.3 billion revenue projections behind for the four months of the fiscal year from July to October, while State Controller John Chiang had the revenue shortfall at $1.5 billion. If Finance issues a projection in December similar to the analyst’s, the state mist cut K-12 funding by $1.4 billion. Worse, it must slash the University of California and California State University systems by $100 million each.

Quotable

“The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute, and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems, no matter how local—or seemingly passive—their individual origins.”—Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Court, and a Republican, wrote last week in upholding the health care law.

(Gingrich’s) problem is that he’s entirely too moderate in this field—and therefore, in no position to establish himself as the conservative anti-Mitt Romney. The ideas that made him a conservative revolutionary in 1994 make him squishy in 2012. The real danger to his candidacy in that Tea Party voters will discover just how moderate he has been,”—Dana Milbank, The Washington Post.

“You should resign.” Keith Olbermann, in a special comment on his Tuesday show, calls Bloomberg a “smaller, more embarrassing version of the tin-pot tyrants who have fallen around the word and condemning the mayor for his raid on the Occupy Wall Street encampment.

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