‘She Swears She’s Not Romantically Involved With Her New Friend’

Posted on Comments

Not the kind of sentence a Florida banker wants to read in a story about his wife’s trip to New York:

A married mother of four from Florida ditched her family to become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park — keeping the park clean by day and keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn.
“I’m not planning on going home,” an unapologetic Stacey Hessler, 38, told The Post yesterday.
“I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m here indefinitely. Forever,” said Hessler, whose home in DeLand sits 911 miles from the tarp she’s been sleeping under.
Hessler — who ironically is married to a banker — arrived 12 days ago and planned to stay for a week, but changed her plans after cozying up to some like-minded radicals, including Rami Shamir, 30, a waiter at a French bistro in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
She swears she’s not romantically involved with her new friend.

I say we take her word for it. Because bankers’ wives who display a personal hatred of capitalism are completely trustworthy.

Suggested Twitter hashtag:#OccupyMrsHessler … #IYKWIMAITYD.

Layover in Long Beach

Posted on Comments

LONG BEACH, Calif.
The airport terminal here is a low-tech, low-budget affair — a single-story building with two large, bare waiting areas and a sort of vestibule where the TSA has its security-screening operation. The restrooms are located in a couple of temporary-looking out buildings.

There are none of those covered gangways to or exit the planes. Instead, upon arrival at Long Beach, you descend down a stairway and walk across the tarmac to the terminal.

So far as I can tell, Jet Blue is the only “major” airline operating out of Long Beach, with departures to maybe a dozen destinations. This low-budget airport and its low-budget airline, then, seems to function mainly to provide low-budget transportation out of Southern California, and thus relieve pressure at eternally congested LAX.

Via Memeorandum, the news upon my arrival here was: “Protesters storm campus after Cantor cancels visit.” Evidently, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had been scheduled to give a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. A bunch of left-wing protesters — “Occupy [Fill in the Blank]” types — had planned a big disruption, so Cantor canceled the lecture and the mob ran amok.

The good news: No “Occupy Long Beach Airport” demonstrations have yet been announced, although the passengers here are clearly victims of social injustice.

Hit the freaking tip jar!


Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Final Boarding at McCarran International

Posted on Comments

The National Affairs Desk, 5:30 p.m., Friday, Oct. 21, 2011

McCARRAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, Las Vegas
By the time I got to the taxi stand in front of the fabulous Venetian Resort Hotel, it was 4:30 p.m. and I only had until 5 p.m. to get checked in at the Jet Blue counter for my flight to Long Beach en route to Dulles. The cab driver asked me which route I preferred to the airport, and I told him to take the fastest route possible.

Even the freeway isn’t too fast at that hour of the day, and there was some doubt as to whether I’d make it on time, but this guy was The Best Cab Driver in Vegas — aggressively cutting through traffic and zipping across lanes to make the McCarran Airport exit, so that he dropped me off with 10 minutes to spare. The fare was $30.80, and I gave him $35, because really sharp driving in an emergency situation deserves to be rewarded.

Check-in was quick and efficient, and the line at security wasn’t too long. My flight, originally scheduled for a 6 p.m. departure was delayed by half an hour and, while walking toward the D terminal, I placed a quick call to Smitty and discussed plans for future operations, beginning with him picking me up at Dulles in the morning, to save my wife the hassle. The bill for dinner in the airport lounge  — $9.19 turkey sandwich, $2.19 bag of chips, $6.49 Corona — came to $19.32 and a $3 tip seemed fair.

At this point, there is no time for the Final Wisdom. They’ll call final boarding in about 10 minutes, and I must be on the plane. Exactly what was learned during this five-day/four-night journalistic expedition to Vegas will therefore have to wait until I get back home. Maybe I can write it up on the red-eye transcontinental flight that will bring me to Dulles shortly after dawn Saturday.

Final boarding! Hit the freaking tip jar!


Drum-Sticking It To The Man

Posted on Comments

by Smitty via AoSHQ

Last night’s General Assembly meeting in Zuccotti Park was “one of most contentious ever,” in large part due to a heated debate over whether the drummers at Occupy Wall Street should be given $8,000 from the movement’s coffers to buy more drums and equipment. It seems some of the drums were stolen or vandalized, and the drummers asked the General Assembly to help them regroup. “We have worked for you! Appreciate us,” one drummer told the crowd, but the appeal was denied, and the Huff Post’s Craig Kanalley tweeted, “Drummer who didn’t get money from GA tonight now yelling, cursing at members of GA.” Meanwhile, another member of the drum corps was lashing out at the Community Board meeting.

This is not a video of the drummers in question:

The confetti guns at the end that the Blue Men fire into the crowd could be a metaphor for infinite public largesse that the #OWS twerps seem to want to vote themselves out of the public treasury.

Getting punked by an ungrateful crowd may be the best possible learning experience for these guys.

Meanwhile, the fruits of the “drummers working group” are unintentionally hilarious:

Notice, too, the blatant injustice on display at some #Occupy locations.

At the very least, the Capitol Police in Atlanta have definitely been treating these two groups unequally. These officers of the law have turned a blind eye to law breaking by the Occupy folks, allowing them to do anything they want, but did not extend that courtesy to those Tea Party groups that also protested at the Georgia Capitol House.

And why would the police treat everyone equally before the law? The #Occupy movement is an Administration-sanctioned outfit, and the police are an accessory to carrying out Administration wishes. Twisting the knife of un-equal treatment adds to the destabilization value.

I would like to be completely wrong in that previous assertion, and it would be extremely helpful if the Administration would start acting like one, and support legal protests only.

Money Problems for Rick Perry? Also: Thoughts on the Logic of Strategy

Posted on Comments

Call this the “former front-runner” problem:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry kicked off his presidential campaign with an aggressive fundraising schedule that quickly made him a front-runner for the Republican nomination. But reports his campaign filed with the Federal Election Commission show that his ability to attract big money fell off steeply in September — perhaps not coincidentally — at the same time a series of rocky debate performances threatened his early front-runner status.
As Perry arrives on Friday in Washington for a private meeting with K Street insiders, the question is whether he can convince the smart money that his campaign is worth an investment. After three torrid weeks in August when he raised more than twice as much as his nearest fundraising rival, Perry has now fallen back into a much more competitive fundraising race with Mitt Romney. That is not good news for a candidate who, because of his late entry into the race, has a lot of catching up to do. Romney has raised $32 million since the beginning of this campaign cycle.

If you think back to when the Perry bandwagon got rolling (less than 10 weeks ago, although it seems like ancient history now), the perception of inevitability was central to the argument: The Smilin’ Texan was it — The Man, the Real Deal — and everybody else was supposed to gaze in awe while Perry proceeded to dismantle Romney. Continue reading Money Problems for Rick Perry? Also: Thoughts on the Logic of Strategy →

Bachmann Pulls the Plug in N.H.?

Posted on Comments

John Pindell of WMUR-TV got the scoop:

All paid New Hampshire staff for Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign have quit over deep frustration with the campaign’s lack of commitment to New Hampshire. …

Because the rest of Pindell’s story is behind a paywall — charging 99 cents to read it online? really? why does that make sense for a TV station’s Web site? — we instead must rely on Politico:

They were going to [resign] even earlier, he reports, but didn’t because it would have harmed the candidate.
It certainly isn’t going to help her now – but they may have felt the hour was growing too late for things to change for her.

And Reuters has this:

“It certainly underscores the impression that New Hampshire isn’t a priority for her. She’s totally written us off,” said former Republican state legislator Fran Wendelboe. . . .
Bachmann has been on a slow fade since winning the Iowa straw poll of Republican voters in August. Bachmann has only been registering single digits in polls of New Hampshire Republican voters. In Iowa, she has been in fourth place in the polls behind Herman Cain, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

Thanks to frequent commenter Joe for the tip. I called Bachmann’s spokeswoman Alice Stewart to get her reaction and haven’t yet heard back from her.